Columnist.
"One can't believe impossible things," Alice objected. "I daresay you haven't had much practice," the Red Queen replied. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." You may be reading this sometime after breakfast, and six is a pretty large number of impossible things. But looking at developments in the 2016 campaign, I can see two impossible things — impossible in the sense that almost every pundit (including me) ruled them out — that might happen in the weeks and months ahead.
Reporters and voters have so far gotten few glimpses of Hillary Clinton speaking candidly. One of the few examples available is in the videotape and transcript of her meeting with Black Lives Matter protesters in New Hampshire last week. Clinton handled herself adeptly, but her effort to propitiate the protesters spotlights a problem Democrats face — appeasing a movement whose premises are factually questionable and whose tactics are off-putting to many voters. The candidate was attacked for her husband's acceptance of welfare reform ("disasters in impoverished communities of color") and "the domestic and international War on Drugs." Clinton said that these policies were adopted in a period of high crime and were responses to concerns of "communities of color and poor people." As she put it: "There was a different set of concerns back in the '80s and early '90s."
Donald Trump's six-page platform on immigration may not be, as Ann Coulter wrote, "the greatest political document since the Magna Carta." But given the issue's role in elevating the candidate to leading Republican polls, it merits serious attention. And at least some of the platform's planks are serious. Trump calls for nationwide use, presumably mandatory, of E-Verify, the government system that is supposed to enable prospective employers to verify a job applicant's immigration status.
In 1935 George Dangerfield published "The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914," a vivid account of how Britain's center-left Liberal Party, dominant for a century, collapsed amid conflicts it could not resolve. The Liberal Party had appeared impregnable. Its cabinet in 1910 included Herbert Asquith (in the midst of the longest consecutive prime ministership since the Duke of Liverpool's and until Margaret Thatcher's), and the future wartime leaders David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. But after 1910 the party never won an election again.
August is traditionally a vacation month, and East Coast elites, following European tradition, are thick on the ground in the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard (the Obamas' choice) and Nantucket. But news — in some cases, shattering news — keeps breaking out all over, at home and abroad this August. Actually that's not unusual. Saddam Hussein overran Kuwait in August 1990; Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland in August 1939; the great powers of Europe went to war in August 1914.
Thursday was the biggest night of the political year so far, for what happened on the stage at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena and for what happened offstage as well. The stage was the scene of the first two Republican presidential debates, hosted by Fox News, which together lasted some 200 minutes between 5 and 11 p.m. EDT. What happened there did not go unnoticed. According to overnight Nielsen ratings, the two-hour prime-time debate got a rating as high as the national basketball finals — almost triple the highest rating of a Republican debate in the 2012 cycle and more than half that of the first Obama-Romney debate that fall. It was apparently the most watched primary debate in history.
Democrats Then, Republicans Now
"Faute de mieux." That means "for want of something better" in Secretary of State John Kerry's second language. It's also the best case made by its journalistic defenders for approval of the nuclear weapons deal Kerry negotiated with Iran. Or to be more exact, for rallying 34 votes in the Senate or 146 votes in the House to uphold a presidential veto of a congressional vote to disapprove. It's a measure of the weakness of the deal that such a grudging argument is needed to rally such an unimpressive proportion of members of Congress. New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman, generally a supporter of Barack Obama's policies, makes the "faute de mieux" argument explicitly. But he also adds some conditions — er, recommendations — to his endorsement, which aren't likely to be congenial to the president.
Republicans Act Like an Unruly Mob, Democrats Like a Regimented Army
Forty-seven years ago, the musical "Hair" opened on Broadway. Elderly mavens — the core theater audience then, unlike the throngs of tourists flocking to cheap movie adaptations today — were instructed that America was entering an "Age of Aquarius." The old moral rules were extinct: we were entering a new era of freedom, experimentation and self-expression. In some ways, the prediction came true. Rates of divorce, cohabitation before marriage and illegitimate births rose sharply in the years after 1968. The percentages of children living with two parents fell sharply. The "Hair" version of history — hundreds of years of oppression followed by a sudden trend toward evermore liberation — seemed plausible, even persuasive. But history is not unidirectional. Trends get reversed or arrested sooner or later. Behaviors that at first seem modern and refreshing come to seem antique and old-fashioned. People adjust to new experiences just as they adjusted to old.
America's two major political parties have a difficult task: amassing a 51 percent coalition in a nation that has always been -- not just now, but from the beginning -- regionally, religiously, racially and ethnically diverse.
Disparate impact. It's a legal doctrine that may be coming soon to your suburb (if you're part of the national majority living in suburbs).
Like it or not, Hillary Clinton is the single individual most likely to be elected the next president. So it's worthwhile looking closely at and behind her words when she deigns to speak on public policy, as she did in her July 14 speech on economics. It contained quite a bit of chaff as well as some wheat. There were laments about the nation's current economic woes, without mention that they come in the seventh year of a Democratic administration; a few policies first advocated by Republicans (Jack Kemp's enterprise zones); and proposals that she admits are "time-tested and more than a little battle-scarred." But laced throughout the sterile verbiage is an assumption that was more widely shared by policy elites and ordinary American voters in 1947, the year Hillary Clinton was born, than it is today, 68 years later. That is the assumption that government is capable of solving just about every problem.
"My sole focus is to run as a Republican," Donald Trump told my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York last week, "because of the fact that I believe that this is the best way we can defeat the Democrats." He went on, "Having a two-party race gives us a much better chance of beating Hillary and bringing our country back than having a third-party candidate." But when York asked if he would definitively rule out running as a third-party candidate, Trump said, "It's not something I'm thinking about right now." And as John Fund pointed out in National Review, it is something Trump has thought about in the past. He made a feint at getting Ross Perot's Reform Party nomination back in 1999. And while Trump recently called Clinton "the worst secretary of state in the history of our nation," somehow overlooking James Buchanan's feckless stint in the Polk administration, he also contributed to her Senate campaigns and has called her "a terrific woman."
It says something about Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign that it was big news that she submitted herself to an interview with a cable news journalist. It also says something that the journalist selected for this honor, Brianna Keilar of CNN, was recently a guest at the wedding of the director of grassroots engagement for the Clinton campaign. Makes sense to hedge your risk. To her credit, Keilar did ask some reasonably tough questions and even some follow-ups, before concluding the interview with questions about earth-shaking issues such as who should be on the $10 bill and who is Saturday Night Live's best Hillary Clinton imitatrix. But, oddly for a former secretary of state, there was nothing on foreign policy, despite the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East, the nuclear negotiations with Iran, the failed reset with Russia and the Greek Euro crisis. Nothing on the Trans-Pacific trade deal, which Clinton advocated in the first Obama term and is waffling on now.
"Words mean what they say," I wrote in my Washington Examiner column one week ago. But, as I added, not necessarily to a majority of justices of the Supreme Court. The targets of my column were the majority opinions in King v. Burwell and Texas Department of Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project. In King v. Burwell, Chief Justice Roberts interpreted the words "established by the state" in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) as meaning "established by the state or the federal government," even though the law itself defines "state" as the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The Fourth of July is a time to remember Americans who have contributed much to their country, and this Fourth weekend is a good time to remember two such Americans who died in recent weeks — and whom I'd had the good fortune to know and joust with intellectually since the 1970s — Allen Weinstein and Ben Wattenberg. Both were sons of Jewish immigrants, born in the 1930s and raised in the Bronx, which then had the highest Jewish percentage of any American county and also large Irish, Italian and black communities. The Bronx was one of the heartlands of American liberalism — the big argument in 1948 was whether to support Harry Truman or the anti-anti-Soviet, Henry Wallace — and Weinstein and Wattenberg as young adults were proud liberal Democrats. But while both remained liberals in many respects, they were willing to challenge leftist orthodoxy.
For most people, words mean what they say. But not necessarily for a majority of Supreme Court justices in two important decisions handed down Thursday. In the most prominent, King v. Burwell, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 6-3 majority, ruled that the words "established by the state" mean "established by the state or the federal government." In a second decision, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a 5-4 majority, ruled that the omission in the 1968 Fair Housing Act of words banning acts that have a disparate impact on people of different races didn't matter. The plaintiff could bring a lawsuit anyway.
Is the world back to where it was around the year 1800? One could come to that conclusion after reading British historian John Darwin's recent book "After Tamerlane," which assesses the rises and falls of empires after the death in 1405 of the famously bloodthirsty Muslim Mongol monarch. From his Central Asian base, Tamerlane conquered Persia and lands from Egypt to India, destroying captured cities and piling up enormous piles of skulls. His fame has endured, from Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play to the first name of the slain Boston Marathon bomber. Darwin's perspective is worldwide, with as much emphasis on East Asia, South Asia, the Islamic world and Russia as on Western Europe and its American offshoots. He argues that from the 1400s to about 1800, China, India and the Islamic world were about as economically and technologically advanced and culturally sophisticated as that little set of peninsulas at the western edge of the Eurasian land mass called Europe.
Hillary Clinton has relaunched her campaign on Roosevelt Island with a 4,687-word speech. But it's not clear whether she and her husband, Bill Clinton, can win four presidential elections as Franklin D. Roosevelt did. Negative news for Clinton's prospects comes in the latest Quinnipiac polls in the key mega-states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In each of them, she leads or ties Republican opponents, though in many cases not by statistically significant margins. But she also is running under 50 percent of the vote in every pairing, averaging 47 percent against six different Republicans in Florida, 44 percent against seven Republicans in Ohio and 46 percent against four Republicans in Pennsylvania. That's a danger zone for a candidate with universal recognition.
