Some 40 of us had gathered around a long rectangular dinner table in Britain’s House of Commons, exchanging ideas from a day-long conference on Iran that had just ended down the street, when columnist Melanie Phillips bemoaned the West’s failure to forcefully confront Tehran over its nuclear program. The West will keep dithering, she predicted, …
With Washington focused on health care, and political activists of the right and left doing their best to tear the nation apart, the chickens of what was once called the “War on Terror” are coming home to roost. The administration and Congress face important decisions about Afghanistan, not the least of which is whether to …
The recent flap over President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren this week is a disheartening reflection of political discourse in today’s America, replete with the artificiality, paranoia and coarseness that have become all-too-familiar staples of our national, televised, on-line, roundthe-clock “yeller-ama.” The September 8 speech, scheduled to air on the White House web site and C-SPAN …
It was 1998, and President Clinton and Vice President Gore were working with Senate and House Democratic leaders to stage party “unity” events around the country, hoping to build the grassroots enthusiasm that would help elect as many Democrats to Congress that year as possible. At an event in Boston, Clinton and Gore were joined …
Continue reading “Remembering Kennedy, and Cooling the Rhetoric”
Upon hearing George H.W. Bush utter his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge at the 1988 Republican National Convention, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee phoned Bush’s campaign manager. “What are you doing?” an exasperated Dan Rostenkowski, the burly tax writer, asked campaign manager James A. Baker III. For years, Rostenkowski …
Whoever first said that “no good deed goes unpunished” must have been thinking of the Middle East. I’m doing exactly what I promised during the campaign. I’m pressing for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and the Arab states. I’m trying to convince the Iranians to scrap their nuclear programs in exchange for …
Continue reading “Reading Obama’s Mind (Optimistically): Middle East Game Plans”
A half-year into their tenure, leaders of our all-Democratic federal government should take a moment to reflect on the nation they seek to change and the lessons to learn from recent U.S. political history. President Obama and the Democrat-led Congress have reached a defining moment. As lawmakers prepare to begin their month-long summer recess, the …
Continue reading “For Democrats, Raging Incrementalism May Be the Answer”