Columnist.
GREENWICH, Conn. -- It has been said that American politics and professional wrestling share a paucity of honest emotions. But Linda McMahon, who as CEO built World Wrestling Entertainment into a billion-dollar company, might think comparing wrestling to politics insults wrestling. As she seeks the Senate seat being vacated by Chris Dodd, she says the honesty deficit concerns not emotions but facts.
MINNEAPOLIS -- Northern Iowans are Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings fans. This fact could be portentous 16 months from now when the Iowa caucuses occur and Minnesota's two-term governor, Tim Pawlenty, probably will be seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
WHEELING, W. Va. -- In 1863, West Virginia became the 35th state by seceding from some secessionists: 50 counties, with few slaves, left Virginia, almost all of which have seams of coal. Barack Obama has a remarkable hostility to coal. For example, in 2008 he said: "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."
WASHINGTON -- With Barack Obama restoring solar panels to the White House roof -- the first were put there by Jimmy Carter -- will Carter's cardigan sweater be reprised? The panels -- environmentalism as a didactic gesture -- are evidence of a Seventies revival. "Energy we have to deal with today," said Obama during a debate with John McCain. "Health care is priority No. 2." Instead, Obama decided that having priorities -- doing this but not that -- is for people less Promethean than he. The cap-and-trade centerpiece of his agenda for turning down the planet's thermostat (as Carter turned down the White House's) has foundered.
WASHINGTON -- Voters seem to think Congress is like a weedy lot -- that anything done to it will improve it -- so they seem poised to produce something not seen since 1981-82. Then, for the first time since 1952, a majority of senators were in their first terms. This was the result of three consecutive churning elections -- 1976, 1978 and 1980.
WASHINGTON -- Promoting his new book, Jimmy Carter, whose version of Christianity allows ample scope for what some Christians consider the sin of pride, has been doing something at which he has had long practice -- praising himself. He is, he says, "probably superior" to all other ex-presidents, and would have enacted comprehensive health care if a selfish Ted Kennedy had not sabotaged his plan.
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the four-term Texas Republican, hopes it is true that, as has been said, Americans invariably do the right thing -- after exhausting all the alternatives. Regarding the fiscal imbalance that is driving the national debt toward 90 percent of GDP, Americans are running out of alternatives.
WASHINGTON -- On Jan. 9, 1969, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo to President-elect Richard Nixon, on whose White House staff Moynihan was to serve. Moynihan wondered whether the disintegration of "private sub-systems of authority" presaged "the ultimate, destructive working out of the telos of liberal thought," in which case "we are moving from Locke to Hobbes." Imagine, if you can, Nixon's furrowed brow.
WASHINGTON -- It is a lawyers' adage: If you have the law on your side, argue the law; if you have the facts, argue the facts; if you have neither, pound the table. Forgive the Democrats for their current table-pounding.
WASHINGTON -- Although a Niagara of vitriol is drenching politics, the two parties are acting sensibly and in tandem about something once considered a matter of constitutional significance -- the process by which presidential nominations are won.
LANGHORNE, Pa. -- From the 1930s through the 1950s, Bucks County northeast of Philadelphia acquired a glamorous reputation as a retreat for Manhattan celebrities, including Oscar Hammerstein, who, according to local legend, was inspired by the view from his Doylestown front porch to write "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," the opening song of "Oklahoma!" Today the county, which is 93 percent of Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, figures in Republicans' plans to sing that song on the morning of Nov. 3.
WASHINGTON -- Fidel Castro, 84, may have failing eyesight but he has noticed something: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore." So, the secret is out. And there is no joy among the alumni, if any still live, of the golden days of Les Deux Magots.
JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- The crime scene at 138 Griffith St. has changed in 76 years. Today it is a barber shop. In 1934, it was a tailoring and cleaning establishment owned and run by Jacob Maged, 49.
WASHINGTON -- Looking back with pride, the British are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when Churchill said of the pilots fighting the Luftwaffe: Never "was so much owed by so many to so few." Looking ahead with trepidation, Americas are thinking: Never have so many of us owed so much.
KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. -- The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party's supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina's Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.
WASHINGTON -- The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages? Its implosion has continued since "the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held." So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.
DENVER -- Put away the pitchfork metaphors that are prevalent in this season of populist ferment: Colorado's Senate contest is a duel of distinguished diplomas. Tea partiers toiled mightily to nominate Ken Buck as the Republican candidate to run against Sen. Michael Bennet, who is a direct descendant of a Mayflower passenger, grandson of an economic adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and son of an official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. He attended tony St. Alban's school in Washington, D.C., and Yale Law School. Buck is a Princetonian.
WASHINGTON -- Various figures denote vexing social problems. They include 10,000 (the number of new baby boomers eligible for Social Security and Medicare every day), 10.2 percent (what the unemployment rate would be if 1.2 million discouraged workers had not recently stopped looking for jobs), $9.9 trillion (the Government Accountability Office calculation of the gap between the expected revenues and outlays for state and local governments during the next 50 years), $76.4 trillion (the GAO's similar estimate of the federal government's 75-year fiscal shortfall).
JERUSALEM -- Immersion in this region's politics can convince those immersed that history is cyclical rather than linear -- that it is not one thing after another but the same thing over and over. This passes for good news because things that do change, such as weapons, often make matters worse.
JERUSALEM -- 'Twas a famous victory for diplomacy when, in 1991 in Madrid, Israelis and Palestinians, orchestrated by the United States, at last engaged in direct negotiations. Almost a generation later, U.S. policy has succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their recent insistence on "proximity talks" -- in which they have talked to the Israelis through American intermediaries -- and to direct negotiations. But negotiations about what?
