Columnist.
In his final State of the Union speech Barack Obama made at least a few bows toward the idea that America is an exceptional nation, an idea he once derided by saying, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks" — this was before their fiscal crisis — "believe in Greek exceptionalism." We remain exceptional, he said in Tuesday's speech, as the world's strongest nation militarily and because we're doing better economically than most other large nations.
The Census Bureau has delivered its annual Christmas gift to demographic junkies: its estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for mid-2015. They show where the nation has been growing since the April 2010 Census headcount, a period that follows the end of the 2007-2009 recession and includes three-fourths of the Obama presidency. They show what states Americans have been moving in and out of, and what states have attracted the most immigrants.
Rough and tumble. Hammer and tongs. In the race for this year's Republican nomination, Donald Trump has not hesitated to attack and ridicule many of his opponents, and some of them have teed up attacks on him, only to hold back when they seemed to help rather than hurt him. Ted Cruz is the one candidate who has conspicuously refrained from attacking the national frontrunner, gliding along in his wake. "As others have thrown rocks and others have tossed insults, I haven't reciprocated," Cruz said Jan. 5.
Battening down the hatches. That's what America and much of the rest of the world seem to be doing today, in an eerie re-enactment, though to much less of a degree, of what America and the world did in the 1930s. The result then wasn't very pretty. The result now is unknown. One way the hatches are being battened down is that the volume of world trade has been declining, and not just temporarily, in response to the financial crisis of fall 2008.
One thing that's striking about the presidential race, which, finally, officially begins soon, is how much the race has been shaped by Barack Obama. The course of the contests for both the Republican and Democratic nominations would be inconceivable absent the course of the Obama presidency.
Fifty-one years ago the Supreme Court handed down its one-person-one-vote decision, requiring that within each state congressional and legislative districts must have equal populations. That gave redistricters a relatively easy standard to meet. Census data provides block-by-block population counts every 10 years, and it's possible now to draw lines for districts so that their populations are identical or vary by just one person. But redistricting cases keep making their way to the Court nonetheless.
Biography is one way — often the most vivid way — in which people understand history. The beautifully written biographies of Franklin Roosevelt that rolled off the presses and rose in the bestseller lists in the 1950s and 1960s created a template in which the New Deal was central to American history. It was the culmination of what happened before the 1930s and the model for what should and would happen next.
Some observations on the 2016 presidential race as we head into the dark period, i.e., the two weeks of Christmas and New Year's holidays in which no one has ever dared, at least in the past, to conduct any polls. Those of us who pick over poll results will have to fly blind until the week starting Jan. 4.
All around the political blogosphere you can find folks smacking their lips over the prospect of a "brokered" Republican national convention. They look forward to the spectacle of delegates assembling in Cleveland with no candidate having a majority, of multiple ballots with governors, floor demonstrations after nominating speeches, congressmen running as favorite sons and delegates demanding that state delegations be polled. Political junkies relish the idea of watching hours of convention proceedings with the same frisson of ignorance about the outcome that makes sports broadcasts the only live television still commanding a large audience.
On Sept. 14, 2012, three days after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi, Libya, Hillary Clinton appeared at Andrews air force base, where she spoke with family members of those slain. Shortly afterward, Tyrone Woods' father reported that she told him, "We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son." Sean Smith's mother recently repeated this, saying, "She said it was because of the video." Glen Doherty's sister said she chose "in that moment to basically perpetuate what she knew was untrue."
As the week began, I planned to write this column about some implications of Barack Obama's Sunday night Oval Office address. I noted that he devoted about one-fifth of this 13-minute speech to pleas that Americans not discriminate against Muslims. "It is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination," he said. "It's our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently." At one level, this is an anodyne statement. As a general proposition, discrimination by religion is against the best in American tradition and the letter of American law. George W. Bush, you might recall, made similar statements in the days after Sept. 11, 2001.
The Republican Party certainly has its problems: a chaotic presidential race; a despised congressional party; unpopularity among the rapidly growing number of non-whites. But the Democratic Party has its problems as well. One of them is the fact that the two signature policies of Barack Obama — the Affordable Care Act and the nuclear agreement with Iran — are unpopular with most voters. You heard little from the president about Obamacare or his approach to Iran during his 2012 re-election campaign. You've heard little about them from Democratic candidates for Congress in 2010, 2012 and 2014 or those running for next year.
There are just eight-and-a-half weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, with two of those weeks devoted to holidays during which polling is ordinarily not conducted, and the race for the Republican presidential nomination seems to be taking perceptible shape. And it continues to defy conventional wisdom. Since mid-July Donald Trump has been leading in the national polls, except for a moment early last month when he was effectively tied with Ben Carson. His numbers have moved up and down a bit but have stayed between 22 and 30 percent since early August.
Sometimes you can learn something about today's world from a history book — even a book about obscure characters in a long-ago time in a far-away corner of the planet, featuring conflicts between regimes that ceased existing at least a century ago. For me, one such book has been "Agents of Empire," by the Oxford historian Noel Malcolm, gaudily subtitled "Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World."
Sure, that sounds counterintuitive. Thanksgiving Thursday is the first day of a (for most of us) four-day weekend, a time devoted to gorging on comfort food and nonstop viewing of college and professional football games. It's a time as well for contemplation, already primed by overfamiliar songs in shopping malls, of an even longer holiday season. I grew up in Detroit, where the auto assembly lines shut down entirely for last two weeks of the calendar year. Who needs work?
Each of our two political parties, ancient by world standards, seems to be facing a gathering storm. Part of the gathering storm for Republicans is Donald Trump's candidacy and his persistent lead in most primary polls. He is given to outlandish proposals and lacks the temperamental ballast and government experience that general election voters usually seek in a president.
Three days after the Islamic State terrorist attacks in Paris, Americans were primed to hear their president express heartfelt anger, which he did in his press conference in Antalya, Turkey, at the end of the G-20 summit. And they did hear him describe ISIS as "this barbaric terrorist organization" and acknowledge that the "terrible events in Paris were a terrible and sickening setback."
Riots in black neighborhoods. Rebellions on campus. The news these past few months and particularly in the past week has been full of stories that remind us, as William Faulkner wrote a little more than half a century after the Civil War, "the past is never dead. It's not even past." We're seeing something that looks eerily like the recurrence of events that led, half a century ago, to the destruction of much of our cities and much of our campuses.
Tuesday night's Fox Business/Wall Street Journal debate in Milwaukee provided clues as to why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have been climbing, not by wide margins but perceptibly, into the top-polling positions of the candidates behind the two poll leaders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The widespread assumption among political insiders is that in the crunch time when things really matter Republican voters will abandon the frontrunners for candidates with experience in public office. That hasn't happened yet. But if it does, Rubio and Cruz are clearly better positioned than anyone else.
You don't have to wander long in the liberal commentariat to find projections that the Republican Party is in a death spiral, doomed by demographics, discredited by the dissension among House Republicans, disenchanted with its experienced presidential candidates and despised by the great mass of voters. There is something to be said for each of these propositions — and yet Republican candidates keep winning elections, as in recent contests in Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia.
