We Americans tend to take the great strengths of our country for granted. In the hubbub of political debate, we concentrate on things that are allegedly wrong with America and lose sight of our great achievements.
A teachable moment last Thursday night -- no, I'm not referring to the beer-in-the-garden session featuring Professor Henry Gates and Sgt. James Crowley and the shirtsleeved president and vice president. We didn't learn anything more about the Gatesgate controversy except that only the least experienced of these four men -- Sgt. Crowley -- was the only one willing to speak at length before the cameras.
Aura dazzles, but argument gets things done. Consider the debate on the Democrats' health care bill and the increasingly negative response to Barack Obama's performance.
With polls showing a drop in Barack Obama's job rating and sinking support for the Democrats' health care plans, there is evidence of collateral damage where you might not expect to find it: in the standing of Democratic governors. Pennsylvania's Ed Rendell suddenly is getting negative job ratings in both the Quinnipiac University and the Franklin & Marshall College polls -- his lowest marks in seven years as governor.
Thursday is the day things tend to come to a boil on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress have been in town for three or four days; they're planning their exits on Friday to meet other commitments; they've had a chance to talk and meet with one another and sample the moods of their colleagues.
Once upon a time, British and American politics seemed to operate in tandem. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to office, both supposedly little experienced and out of the mainstream, at about the same time.
"Never let a crisis go to waste," Barack Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said last November. The crisis he referred to was economic: the financial collapse and the rapidly deepening recession. The opportunity it presented, for Obama and Emanuel, was to vastly expand the size and scope of the federal government through cap-and-trade and health-care legislation.
Disarray. That's one word to describe the status of the Obama administration's legislative program as Congress heads into its final four weeks of work before the August recess. A watered-down cap-and-trade bill passed the House narrowly last month, but Sen. Barbara Boxer has decided not to bring up her version in the upper chamber until September.
The financial system collapsed. Housing prices cratered. Unemployment is at a record high for the last quarter-century. The Democratic president has a solidly positive job rating.
One policy of the Obama administration that has understandably attracted little public attention is its proposal to make the Federal Reserve a "systemic risk regulator."
The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the case of the New Haven firefighters, was a ringing endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's ban on racial discrimination and a repudiation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's decision in the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Democrats' plans to pass major health care legislation have been stymied, at least for the moment, by the Congressional Budget Office's cost estimates. To the consternation and apparent surprise of leading Democrats, the CBO scored Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus' latest offering at $1.6 trillion over 10 years, while it scored the completed sections of Sen. Christopher Dodd's bill at $1 trillion. Presumably, the incomplete sections would cost more.
There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so.
Many psephologists -- derived from the word for pebbles, which the ancient Greeks used as ballots -- study who wins and loses elections. Lately, I've been looking more closely at turnout. For we live, though most psephologists haven't stopped to notice it lately, in a decade of vastly increased voter turnout.
It shouldn't come as a complete surprise that, as Stephen Hayes reported in The Weekly Standard, detainees in Afghanistan are now being advised of their Miranda rights by American interrogators -- that they have a right to be silent, a right to a lawyer, a right to have that lawyer paid for, etc.
Barack Obama has said he wants to pass a national health care bill this year, with a government insurance policy option. Democratic congressional leaders have called for passage of such a bill before the beginning of the August congressional recess.
For a man of his impressive educational credentials, Barack Obama has sometimes shown a surprising ignorance of history.
Two cases likely to be decided this month by the Supreme Court -- one of them an appeal in a Connecticut case decided by a panel including Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor -- could result in significant changes in our civil rights laws.
Move to the center. That's the advice Republicans are getting from quarters friendly and otherwise. It seems to make a certain amount of sense. If opinion is arrayed along a single-dimension, left-to-right spectrum and clustered in the middle in a bell-curve pattern, then a party on the right needs only to move a few steps toward the center or just beyond to convert itself from minority to majority status.
Barack Obama has named his nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. What's the likely fallout, politically and judicially?
