Columnist.
The weakest part of our political system is the presidential nomination process. And it's not coincidental that it's the part of the federal system that finds least guidance in the Constitution. There is no provision in the Constitution that says that Iowa and New Hampshire vote first. The idea of giving any two states a preferred position in the process of choosing a president would surely have struck the Framers as unfair. But we are stuck with Iowa and New Hampshire voting first because no politician who contemplates ever running for president -- i.e., most politicians -- wants to arouse the ire of the political and journalistic establishments of Des Moines and Manchester.
In the Illinois legislature, state Sen. Barack Obama voted "present" 129 times. Today, he seems to be voting present on two major issues, Libya and the budget. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon told reporters Thursday that the United States and other nations have "taken a range of steps ... to squeeze (Moammar) Gadhafi, isolate him, really turn him into a pariah." But the steps the United States has taken may well have bolstered Gadhafi's determination to crush the rebellion against his regime.
What do they put in the water cooler over at NPR? First, they fire Juan Williams in October for comments he made on Fox News Channel -- and Vivian Schiller, the CEO of public radio, smilingly suggests he needs to have his head examined. This week, a sting video shows NPR Foundation President Ron Schiller (no relation) saying that tea party activists were "seriously racist" and telling two purported Muslim program underwriters that there aren't enough "non-Zionist" news organizations.
The labor union movement is in deep trouble. Only 6 percent of private-sector employees are union members. Voters are beginning to realize, thanks to governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, that public-sector unions have negotiated unsustainable levels of pensions and benefits -- and that public-sector unions are a mechanism for involuntary transfers of money from taxpayers to the Democratic Party. Who's to blame for the unions' plight? I blame Frederick W. Taylor.
Sometimes you get an idea of the way opinion is headed by the phrases you don't hear. Case in point: In all the discussion and debate these past weeks about a possible government shutdown if Congress and President Obama fail to agree on funding bills, I don't recall having heard the phrase "train wreck." I think that's significant, because back in the 1990s, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republicans and President Clinton failed to reach agreement and the government actually did shut down, "train wreck" was a common term.
It's a question that puzzles most liberals and bothers some conservatives. Why are so many modest-income white voters rejecting the Obama Democrats' policies of economic redistribution and embracing the small-government policies of the tea party movement? It's not supposed to work out that way, say the political scientists and New Deal historians. Politics is supposed to be about who gets how much when, and people with modest incomes should be eager to take as much from the rich as they can get.
Everyone has priorities. During the past week, Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has launched on the Libyan people. But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state's public employee unions. Walker was staging "an assault on unions," he said, and added that "public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens."
As congressional Republicans mull whether to address the government's long-term fiscal problems -- House Republican leaders are being pushed by the 87 freshmen to do so, while some Senate Republicans are seeking some bipartisan accords with Democratic colleagues -- two Republican governors barreled into Washington with the message that the lawmakers better get moving. And that congressional Republicans might do just fine politically if they do. The two Republican governors are Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who spoke to a Conservative Political Action Committee dinner Feb. 11, and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spoke at American Enterprise Institute (where I am a resident fellow) on Feb. 16.
One way to judge the merits of the budget Barack Obama unveiled this week is by the comments of his political allies. "It's not enough to focus primarily on the non-security discretionary part of the budget," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad. Erskine Bowles, the Democrat whom Obama appointed as co-chairman of his fiscal commission, said the budget goes "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare." "The president punted," began the editorial of The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama in 2008. The paper noted tartly that he "chose to duck" the fiscal commision's recommendations.
It looks like 2/11/11 will go down in history with 11/9/89, not 6/4/89. 6/4/89 is when the Chinese military obeyed orders to massacre protesters in Tiananmen Square; 11/9/89 is when East German leaders announced the opening of the Berlin Wall and declined to order border guards to shoot the Berliners who began dismantling the barrier that had stood for 28 years. On 2/11/11, last Friday, as the Egyptian military remained unwilling to fire on the crowds jamming Tahrir Square, Hosni Mubarak resigned after nearly 30 years as president. When people take to the streets in great numbers, authoritarian and dictatorial regimes can only survive if the police or military are willing to shoot.
Political pundits of a certain stripe have been lamenting the disappearance of Republican moderates for years. It's time now to lament the disappearance of moderate Democrats. Last month, Sen. Joseph Lieberman announced he wouldn't seek re-election. He lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut in 2006 because of his support of the Iraq war, but won in November as an independent.
Most campaign rhetoric and political punditry is underpinned by an assumption that perfect solutions are possible, if only people would have the good sense to adopt the candidate's or the pundit's course of action. Alas, that is not always so.
Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.
Numbers can tell a story. Looking back on Barack Obama's second State of the Union message, and looking forward to the congressional session and the 2012 elections, they tell a story that should leave Democrats uneasy. Start off with the audience in the House chamber. Not all members of Congress attended; Obama briefly and Paul Ryan at greater length in his otherwise brief rebuttal both appropriately noted the absence of Gabrielle Giffords.
The weakest part of our political system, by a considerable margin, is the presidential nominating process. It tends to exclude from consideration those with the greatest experience in what is uniquely the president's responsibility, foreign policy and military strategy. It tends less strongly to exclude members of Congress, particularly House members but also senators, whose extensive voting records inevitably contain material that is politically damaging at some point in the process. The process has become so lengthy that candidates often come up with strategies and programs that are rendered obsolete by the time of the next presidential inauguration.
Last Thursday was the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, and while the anniversary did not go unmentioned, it got less attention than I expected. I suspect that those of us who can remember that snowy day -- why do we schedule our great national outdoor ceremony for a day that is as likely as any to be the coldest of the year? -- are inclined to overestimate the hold that Kennedy has on Americans five decades after he took the oath of office. Two events just before that anniversary fortify that conclusion and snap the links between us and President Kennedy. On Tuesday, Sargent Shriver died at age 95. This Kennedy in-law never attained elective office as the three Kennedy brothers and assorted offspring did, but he achieved something as important, or more so.
Where can the new Congress start cutting spending? Here's one obvious answer: high-speed rail. The Obama administration is sending billions of stimulus dollars around the country for rail projects that make no sense and that, if they are ever built, will be a drag on taxpayers indefinitely. When incoming Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio cancelled high-speed rail projects, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood refused to let them spend the dollars on other forms of transportation and sent the funds instead to California and other states.
In his superb speech in Tucson, Ariz., Wednesday evening, Barack Obama did great service to the nation. He put to rest the libel that political incivility is responsible for the Tucson shootings. He did so with three words that he added to the written text: "It did not." And he lifted the spirits not only of the inappropriately boisterous audience in the McKale Center, but of people across America, when he reported, after paying moving tribute to those who died, that "Gabby opened her eyes for the first time."
The steam seems to be going out of the move to "deftly pin this" -- the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others -- "on the tea partiers," as one unidentified senior Democratic operative put it to Politico. It has become obvious that the murderer was crazy, the follower of no political movement, motivated only by the bizarre ideas ricocheting through his head.
"He possesses a deep understanding of how jobs are created and how to grow our economy." That's what Barack Obama said as he announced the appointment of his new chief of staff, William Daley, before a crowd of admiring White House staffers. It's not hard to understand Obama's reasons for choosing Daley. Businesses are sitting on $1 trillion in cash and refusing to make job-creating investments. They are spooked by the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of the size and scope of government and the prospects of ever more intrusive and expensive regulations being churned out by various federal agencies every day.
