Columns, pieces and posts
We are in the midst of announce-o-rama, in which the candidates for president who are not Ted Cruz are lining up to make their announcements. Here’s a piece by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker in the Washington Post on the importance of getting it right. Announcements are now apparently so important they even have trailers, […]
Barack Obama, six years into his presidency, does not have a foreign-policy legacy—or, rather, he does and it’s bad. He has a visceral and understandable reluctance to extend and overextend U.S. power, but where that power has been absent, violence and instability have filled the void. When he overcomes his reluctance to get involved, he […]
And so it begins. Ted Cruz announced Monday, the first major Republican to declare for the presidency. More will soon follow. I am happy because I suffer from a deep, bizarre and pretty American aberration: I love politics. Politics is serious, earnest, crucial, necessary—the venue in which we decide much of our country’s future. Beyond […]
The 2016 presidential campaign is here, pushed up prematurely by the Hillary Clinton email controversy. When a major candidate of a major party has major trouble, the election moves more sharply into focus. Apart from Mrs. Clinton, small stories have begun to shoot up like flares. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker shied away from the accomplished […]
Maybe we’re not stuck in Scandal Land. For a while I’ve assumed Hillary Clinton would run for her party’s nomination and be a formidable candidate in the general election. After Tuesday’s news conference I’m not so sure. Did she seem to you a happy, hungry warrior? She couldn’t make eye contact with her questioners, and […]
This is fascinating, via the Drudge Report. Look at the kind of questions being asked. It’s pretty clear what some political professionals see, or hope to see, as the potential weak points of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. Who might be behind this polling? What use is being made of the data gathered? Every year political […]
Doesn’t the latest Hillary Clinton scandal make you want to throw up your hands and say: Do we really have to do this again? Do we have to go back there? People assume she is our next president. We are defining political deviancy down. The scandal this week is that we have belatedly found out, […]
On Friday at the winter meeting of the Club for Growth, in Palm Beach, Fla., Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a possible contender for the GOP presidential nomination, was pressed for specifics of his foreign-policy views. Walker referred to policy professionals with whom he’d recently met, and then suggested that what is most important in foreign […]
Thoughts on the 2016 primaries: No one expects anything from the Democrats. They will back, accept or acquiesce in a coronation. This will not be called passive but disciplined. But when you think about it—one of our two major parties, in a time of considerable national peril, will settle its presidential nomination without vigorous debate—it […]
Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in next month’s Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to the Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS. “What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.) Mr. Wood describes a dynamic, […]