Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- Given the state of the economy, by any historical standard, Barack Obama should be 15 points behind Mitt Romney. Why is he tied? The empathy gap. On "caring about average people," Obama wins by 22 points. Maintaining that gap was a principal goal of the Democratic convention. It's the party's only hope of winning in November. George H.W. Bush, Romney-like in aloofness, was once famously handed a staff cue card that read: "Message: I care." That was supposed to be speech guidance. Bush read the card. Out loud. Not surprisingly, he lost to Bill Clinton, a man who lives to care, who feels your pain better than you do -- or at least makes you think so. In politics, that's a trivial distinction.
WASHINGTON -- There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that "deterrence works." It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn't work over North Vietnam. It's like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn't in the London blitz. The idea that some military technique "works" is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks.
WASHINGTON -- Either Israel is engaged in the most elaborate ruse since the Trojan Horse or it is on the cusp of a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. What's alarming is not just Iran's increasing store of uranium or the growing sophistication of its rocketry. It's also the increasingly menacing annihilationist threats emanating from Iran's leaders. Israel's existence is "an insult to all humanity," says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime." Explains the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israel is "a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off." Everyone wants to avoid military action, surely the Israelis above all. They can expect a massive counterattack from Iran, 50,000 rockets launched from Lebanon, Islamic Jihad firing from Gaza and worldwide terror against Jewish and Israeli targets, as happened last month in Bulgaria.
WASHINGTON -- Vice presidential picks are always judged by their effect on the coming election. They rarely have any. This time could be different. The Democrats' Mediscare barrage is already in full swing. Paul Ryan, it seems, is determined to dispossess grandma, then toss her over a cliff. If the charge is not successfully countered, goodbye Florida. Republicans have a twofold answer. First, hammer home that their plan affects no one over 55, let alone 65. Second, go on offense. Point out that President Obama cuts Medicare by $700 billion to finance Obamacare.
WASHINGTON -- There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas. The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth -- all achieved at a price of another $5 trillion of accumulated debt. The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama's Roanoke riff telling small business owners: "You didn't build that." Real credit for your success belongs not to you -- you think you did well because of your smarts and sweat? he asked mockingly -- but to government that built the infrastructure without which you would have nothing.
WASHINGTON -- At the outset of his recent foreign trip, Mitt Romney committed a gaffe. In answer to a question about the Olympics, he expressed skepticism about London's preparations. The response confounded and agitated Romney supporters because it was such an unforced error. The question invited a simple paean to Olympic spirit and British grit, not the critical analysis of a former Olympic organizer. Soon that initial stumble was transmuted into a metaphor for everything that followed. The mainstream media decided with near unanimity that the rest of the trip amounted to a gaffe-prone disaster.
WASHINGTON -- Shortly after 9/11, President George W. Bush received from Prime Minister Tony Blair a bust of Winston Churchill as an expression of British-American solidarity. Bush gave it pride of place in the Oval Office. In my Friday column about Mitt Romney's trip abroad and U.S. foreign policy, I wrote that Barack Obama "started his presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office." Within hours, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer had created something of a bonfire.
WASHINGTON -- A generation ago, it was the three I's. A presidential challenger's obligatory foreign trip meant Ireland, Italy and Israel. Mitt Romney's itinerary is slightly different: Britain, Poland and Israel. Not quite the naked ethnic appeal of yore. Each destination suggests a somewhat more subtle affinity: Britain, playing to our cultural connectedness with the Downton Abbey folks who've been at our side in practically every fight for the last hundred years; Poland, representing the "new Europe," the Central Europeans so unashamedly pro-American; Israel, appealing to most American Jews but also to an infinitely greater number of passionately sympathetic evangelical Christians.
"If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." -- Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13 WASHINGTON -- And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It "created the Internet." It represents the embodiment of "we're in this together" social solidarity that, in Obama's view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.
WASHINGTON -- Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate pro-Western government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes. Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception. Consider: Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still. Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn't just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25 percent. Combined, they command more than 70 percent of parliament -- enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).
WASHINGTON -- Though overshadowed by the shocking Supreme Court decision on health care, the court's Arizona immigration decision, issued three days earlier, remains far more significant than appreciated. It was generally viewed as mixed or ambiguous because the Justice Department succeeded in striking down three of the law's provisions. However, regarding the law's central and most controversial element -- requiring officers to inquire into the immigration status of anyone picked up for some other violation -- the ruling was definitive, indeed unanimous. No liberal-conservative divide here. Not a single justice found merit in the administration's claim that this "show me your papers" provision constituted an impermissible pre-emption of federal authority. On what grounds unconstitutional? Presumably because state officials would be asking about the immigration status of all, rather than adhering to the federal enforcement priorities regarding which illegal aliens would not be subject to deportation.
WASHINGTON -- It's the judiciary's Nixon-to-China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of Obamacare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time. He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against Obamacare, while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law -- and thus prevented the court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration. Why did he do it? Because he carries two identities. Jurisprudentially, he is a constitutional conservative. Institutionally, he is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the court’s legitimacy, reputation and stature. As a conservative, he is as appalled as his conservative colleagues by the administration's central argument that Obamacare's individual mandate is a proper exercise of its authority to regulate commerce. That makes congressional power effectively unlimited. Mr. Jones is not a purchaser of health insurance. Mr. Jones has therefore manifestly not entered into any commerce. Yet Congress tells him he must buy health insurance -- on the grounds that it is *regulating* commerce. If government can do that under the Commerce Clause, what can it not do?
WASHINGTON -- Those laws remain on the books. They have not changed. Yet Obama last week suspended these very deportations -- granting infinitely renewable "deferred action" with attendant work permits -- thereby unilaterally rewriting the law. And doing precisely what he himself admits he is barred from doing. Obama had tried to change the law. In late 2010, he asked Congress to pass the DREAM Act, which offered a path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants. Congress refused. When subsequently pressed by Hispanic groups to simply implement the law by executive action, Obama explained that it would be illegal. "Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own. ... But that's not how our system works. That's not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is written."
WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama is not exactly Jefferson-Adams or Lincoln-Douglas. No Harry Truman or Bill Clinton here, let alone FDR or Reagan. Indeed, it's arguable that neither party is fielding its strongest candidate. Hillary Clinton would run far better than Obama. True, her secretaryship of state may not remotely qualify as Kissingerian or Achesonian, but she's not Obama. She carries none of his economic baggage. She's unsullied by the last three and a half years. Similarly, the Republican bench had several candidates stronger than Romney, but they chose not to run. Indeed, one measure of the weakness of the two finalists is this: The more each disappears from view, the better he fares. Obama prospered when he was below radar during the Republican primaries. Now that they're over and he's back out front, his fortunes have receded. He is constantly on the campaign trail. His frantic fundraising -- 160 events to date -- alternates with swing-state rallies where the long-gone charisma of 2008 has been replaced by systematic special-interest pandering, from cut-rate loans for indentured students to free contraceptives for women (the denial of which constitutes a "war" on same).
WASHINGTON -- Tuesday, June 5, 2012, will be remembered as the beginning of the long decline of the public-sector union. It will follow, and parallel, the shrinking of private-sector unions, now down to less than 7 percent of American workers. The abject failure of the unions to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker -- the first such failure in U.S. history -- marks the Icarus moment of government-union power. Wax wings melted, there's nowhere to go but down. The ultimate significance of Walker's union reforms has been largely misunderstood. At first, the issue was curtailing outrageous union benefits, far beyond those of the ordinary Wisconsin taxpayer. That became a nonissue when the unions quickly realized that trying to defend the indefensible would render them toxic for the real fight to come.
WASHINGTON -- A very strange story, a 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles "baseball cards" with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant. The article could have been titled "Barack Obama: Drone Warrior." Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release. Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. And why now? Because in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter's G-8 and NATO summits.
WASHINGTON -- It was our much-anticipated quarterly lunch with Tim Kurkjian, baseball analyst extraordinaire, wherein George Will and I bathe in a constant flow of obscure statistics, Kurkjian oddities and ribald anecdotes, like the one about the Red Sox beat writer who accidentally walked in on a players' prayer meeting and was greeted by the burly right fielder, newly born-again and not yet practiced in the language of Christian fellowship, bellowing "Hey! Can't you see we're having f------ chapel here?"
WASHINGTON -- There are two ways to defend gay marriage. Argument A is empathy: One is influenced by gay friends in committed relationships yearning for the fulfillment and acceptance that marriage conveys upon heterosexuals. That's essentially the case President Obama made when he first announced his change of views.
WASHINGTON -- In May 1967, in brazen violation of previous truce agreements, Egypt ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai, marched 120,000 troops to the Israeli border, blockaded Eilat (Israel's southern outlet to the world's oceans), abruptly signed a military pact with Jordan and, together with Syria, pledged war for the final destruction of Israel. May '67 was Israel's most fearful, desperate month. The country was surrounded and alone. Previous great-power guarantees proved worthless. A plan to test the blockade with a Western flotilla failed for lack of participants. Time was running out. Forced to protect against invasion by mass mobilization -- and with a military consisting overwhelmingly of civilian reservists -- life ground to a halt. The country was dying.
WASHINGTON -- Poor Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Once again he's been pilloried for fumbling a historic Supreme Court case. First shredded for his "train wreck" defense of Obamacare's individual mandate, he is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of Obama's challenge to the Arizona immigration law. The law allows police to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons. Verrilli claimed that constitutes an intrusion on the federal monopoly on immigration enforcement. He was pummeled. Why shouldn't a state help the federal government enforce the law? "You can see it's not selling very well," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
