Columnist.
Obama's in! In truly unshocking news, Barack Obama e-mailed supporters Monday to let them know he was running for president again. "We're doing this now because the politics we believe in does not start with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, but with you -- with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers and friends. And that kind of campaign takes time to build." Don't get him wrong. There will be expensive TV ads and extravaganzas. Oh, yes. After all, what would an Obama campaign be without its outsized, world-historic, bread and circus spectacles?
In 2008 supporters of Barack Obama subscribed to the view that his election would, not to put too fine a point on it, "change everything." Maybe they were right. For the last two years, the old ways of Washington have been crashing down like pillars of Mordor at the end of "The Lord of the Rings." Then-candidate Obama was himself fond of noting that the conventional wisdom -- or "CW" -- was that a black guy with a funny name could never be elected president. His chief opponent, he explained, wasn't any candidate but "cynicism" itself. It was a clever bit of messaging, not least because it worked. Obama not only won, he captured such "impossible" states as Indiana and Virginia.
Feminism as a "movement" in America is largely played out. The work here is mostly done. At a time when education matters more than ever, more American women attend college than men. More women graduate, with better grades and get more advanced degrees. As Kay Hymowitz writes in her new book, "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys": "For the first time ever, and I do mean ever, young women are reaching their twenties with more achievements, more education, more property, and, arguably, more ambition than their male counterparts."
What do Yasser Arafat, Jon Stewart and Joe Biden have in common? Well, let's see. Yasser Arafat, the carbuncle who used to run the Palestinian Authority, had a gift for saying what Americans wanted to hear in English and what his own murderous constituents wanted to hear in Arabic. The Western press played along for the most part, pretending that translations weren't available.
As someone who supported a Libyan no-fly zone from the earliest days of what once seemed like a revolution but now looks like a civil war, I have to admit that Operation Odyssey Dawn may be a perfect example of being careful about what you wish for. To use a metaphor suitable for March Madness, Obama blew the fast break. The president, an avid hoopster, should understand the reference.
I've figured out Obama. He's not a Muslim, he's a golfer! That's a reference to Russell Kirk's semi-famous retort to the conspiratorial nuts who insisted that Dwight Eisenhower was a secret Commie. The revered conservative intellectual responded disdainfully, "Ike's not a Communist, he's a golfer." For the record, while I think the media's special standard for Democratic presidents' recreation is outrageous, I really don't care that Obama plays a lot of golf.
When a loved one dies (as my brother did last month), one of the standard pieces of advice is to not make any big decisions. Don't reorganize your life in a moment of existential panic or remorse. Take your time. Cope. But when thousands die, or when some sudden calamity befalls us, the tendency of politicians, journalists, policymakers and experts is to seize on the moment to advocate some radical changes. "A crisis," Rahm Emanuel famously declared in the early days of the Obama administration, "is a terrible thing to waste."
According to earth-logic, if you got a raise of 10 percent last year, but this year you're only getting a raise of 8 percent, you're still getting a raise. On Planet Washington, that qualifies as an indefensible slashing. So when the GOP actually cut $4 billion from the budget last week, the Democrats acted as if it was an involuntary amputation. Now the GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary non-defense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.
And so now we enter the mopey phase of the GOP presidential contest. The gloom takes many forms, but foremost is the fear that the field taking shape might be the one we're stuck with. It's like that feeling you get when you're starving and you go into a restaurant. At first everything on the menu looks great, until you have to make your choice and you realize there's nothing you actually want to eat. There isn't a German word for this sensation, but one that comes close is futterneid -- the envy one feels when somebody orders a better meal than yours. That's not perfectly apt, but it does capture the despair that the best dishes aren't on the menu.
Fred Phelps, the deranged pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church -- which is more like a family entourage of psychos -- has devised a scheme for getting attention: He desecrates military funerals. His group shows up chanting hateful slogans and carrying signs reading "God Hates Fags," "Thank God for IEDs" and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers." They claim that these tragic deaths are divine punishment for social acceptance of homosexuality. Albert Snyder, the father of a fallen Marine, sued Phelps for protesting his son's funeral. He won millions. The Supreme Court overturned that verdict Wednesday.
"Pawlenty's attacks get more pointed," announced a headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "He's betting sharper rhetoric will spring him from GOP pack," clarified the subhead. Did the former Minnesota Republican governor call the president a Muslim? A socialist? Nope. He declared that the country's mounting debt was a "pile of poo." Clearly, the guy running the bleep button for the GOP primary debates isn't worried about Tim Pawlenty.
Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution requires that each new president take the following oath: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." President Obama announced this week that he will violate that oath.
The protesting public school teachers with fake doctor's notes swarming the Capitol building in Madison, Wis., insist that Gov. Scott Walker is hell-bent on "union busting." Walker denies that his effort to reform public-sector unions in Wisconsin is anything more than an honest attempt at balancing the state's books. I hope the protesters are right. Public unions have been a 50-year mistake. A crucial distinction has been lost in the debate over Walker's proposals: Government unions are not the same thing as private-sector unions.
Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing. That skepticism was hard earned. The last decade provided painful lessons for everyone, on both sides of the ideological aisle. Liberals, who were once naively optimistic about democracy promotion, turned dour when President Bush became naively optimistic about it. And then supporters of Bush's freedom agenda learned a tough lesson from, among other things, the disastrous-but-democratic elections that put a terrorist junta in charge of the Gaza Strip.
HERZLIYA, Israel -- Finally, I can put the rumors to rest: the land of Zion isn't merely an abstraction, it's an actual country. I am in Israel -- my first time -- to cover the Herzliya Conference, the country's premier national security forum. (Full disclosure: My trip, as well as that of several other journalists, was underwritten by the Emergency Committee for Israel, which seeks "to educate the public about the serious challenges to Israel's security." The views here are my own.)
The only good conservative is a dead conservative. That, in a nutshell, describes the age-old tradition of liberals suddenly discovering that once-reviled conservatives were OK after all. It's just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes and moperers.
It's a sign of how tinny and uninspiring President Obama's State of the Union address was that a week later it all seems so forgettable. Let's see, there was something about high-speed rail and a lot more spending ("investing," in Washington-speak). There was the theme, "Winning the Future," a term that apparently focus-grouped so well that nobody in the White House bothered to look up the fact that Newt Gingrich has written a book by the same title and all but copyrighted the buzz-phrase. And then there was all that stuff about Sputnik. The president insisted, as he has done before, that this is "our generation's Sputnik moment" where we must galvanize the whole society with common purpose. (He left unclear what this means for those still-living Americans whose generation's "Sputnik moment" was, well, Sputnik. Maybe they can sit this one out.)
History is lurching in the Middle East, perhaps forward, possibly backward. Consequently, some see the newly minted revolution in Tunisia and the unfolding one in Egypt (and possibly Yemen, Jordan and elsewhere) as hopeful news, and others as worrisome. Color me hopeful.
If professional writing were the guild it often appears to be, Atul Gawande would be a scab. A surgeon and professor, Gawande also writes beautifully for the New Yorker about health care. His latest article, "The Hot Spotters," focuses on what Gawande claims is a revolutionary approach to health care. In Camden, N.J. -- hardly a garden spot in the Garden State -- just 1 percent of the people who used the city's medical facilities accounted for 30 percent of the costs. One patient had 324 hospital admissions in five years, costing insurers $3.5 million.
On Tuesday, the president will deliver his State of the Union message. The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama will continue his "move to the center." The quotation marks are necessary because some people think he really is moving to the center, while others think he just wants to appear like he is. Either way, this undoubtedly means Obama will try to seem as if he's meeting Republicans halfway on their "reasonable" demands (quotation marks for the same reason as before) while drawing a stark line against their "unreasonable" ones.
