Politics Archives

Wednesday

July 1, 2020

Amy McGrath, the Forty-Million-Dollar Nominee

Lexington, KentuckyIt wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not that Amy McGrath wasn’t supposed to win Kentucky’s delayed primary for the US Senate seat held by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The problem was she was supposed to win in a cakewalk. Instead, she eked out a victory over State Representative Charles Booker, who made a late charge from the impoverished West Side of Louisville during a wave of racial unrest and deadly protests that have wracked Kentucky’s largest city for weeks.McGrath is a former Marine bomber pilot who lost a high profile bid to unseat Rep. Andy Barr two years ago. It wasn’t long before Chuck Schumer tapped her to run against his Republican counterpart in the Senate.

Matt Mayer

Trump’s African American ‘silent minority’ could swing the election

Donald Trump’s efforts to broaden his appeal to the African American community are bearing fruit. Rasmussen polling noted in early June that Trump’s approval rating among African Americans stood at 41 percent, far above the 8 percent of votes he received from that community in 2016. While approval ratings don’t necessarily translate to votes on Election Day, it mathematically would be very hard for Joe Biden to win in the key battleground states should Trump double his vote to 16 percent of African American voters. Trump’s opponents are convinced that his record as president and his response to the Black Lives Matter protests mean his popularity with black voters will go down. But the truth may well be the opposite.

Amber Duke

The Kushner conundrum

After a string of broken promises, policy disappointments and sinking poll numbers, the populist wing of the Republican party knows who is to blame. It’s the President’s son-in-law, the prince of the administration, Jared Kushner. ‘Trump has a Jared problem,’ is how one conservative activist who works with the White House on immigration puts it. ‘Jared is a total fuck-up. Everything he touches turns to lead.’ Others groan about ‘four more years of Jared’ should the President be re-elected in November. Various sources in, or connected to, the administration are stunned by the amount of power Kushner wields.

Tuesday

June 30, 2020

Josh Hammer

Abort stare decisis

The conservative legal movement has again been bludgeoned. The culprit, as has far too often been the case, is once more the Supreme Court’s most mercurial chief justice, John Roberts. In June Medical Services LLC v. Russo, a 5-4 Court majority enjoined Louisiana’s enforcement of its law that would require abortionists to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a prenatal abattoir. The Court’s four liberals, ever-reliable in their outcome-oriented efforts to further the progressive political agenda, wrote for a pro-abortion plurality. Roberts, for his part, wrote a separate opinion concurring in the judgment — notwithstanding the fact he dissented in a virtually analogous Texas case, Whole Women’s Health v.

Peter Wood

The poison of reparations

Reparations are a recipe for rancor. Under the guise of settling a grievance, they intensify and often eternalize it. They almost inevitably plant seeds of enmity that last for generations. However large the cost, the victorious side eventually feels it settled too cheap. And the side that humbly paid comes to recognize it paid too dearly and gained nothing more than a pause in the demands. Reparations don’t repair. They turn the original grievance into institutionalized animosity. The topic comes up because today’s doyen of racial resentment, the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, says that monetary reparations are ‘What Is Owed’ to black Americans for centuries of slavery and ‘slavocracy’.

Patrick Hauf

Fashion designer vs former rapper: the 2020 election you need to follow

Ola Hawatmeh, the apparent Republican nominee for New York’s 19th congressional district, doesn't bring many surprises to the table policy-wise. She’s an adamant supporter of the President, wants to build a wall on the southern border, opposes Obamacare, and is endorsed by the National Rifle Association. Her personal story, however, is unlike that of any candidate in history.Hawatmeh, 43, is the daughter of Catholic Jordanian immigrants, a domestic abuse survivor, and she's beaten cancer twice. Oh, and her job? A fashion designer.‘I’m a people’s person,’ she told The Spectator. ‘And I’ve always been a philanthropist.

Dominic Green

Jared and the Jews

For most Jewish Americans, Jared Kushner is the son-in-law and counselor of a president they didn’t vote for in 2016. He prays with a punctiliousness they romanticize but prefer not to emulate. Jared’s grandparents learned about history the hard way: they survived the Holocaust and immigrated with no money and little English. The typical Jewish American grandparents are boomers who vote Democratic all the way down the card. They believe America is different for the Jews, even if they were raised to believe that difference was un-American and bad for their careers. And here comes Jared, a frum Jew who married the boss’s blonde daughter. It could be a romance from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Less romantically, it is a tale from history.

Titus Techera

Welcome to the age of Lib Pharma

We are told we should Defund the Police. Some say it in anger, but for others it’s an opportunity to partake in the great American grift as activists, journalists, or further varieties of opportunist. Politically, it mostly benefits the Democrats. While Biden is hiding, they’re riding a wave of outrage, avoiding questions about their historic liability and their present competence to govern. Most of America’s metropolises are liberal. They are run like liberal fantasy lands. Behold the herds of young, aspiring liberals, unmarried and clueless about life. They’re supposedly happy, but they take out their unaccountable anger through radical politics.

Monday

June 29, 2020

Matt McDonald

Don’t hold your breath for Joe Biden’s Sister Souljah moment

'While Biden was in his basement, @realDonaldTrump had 5.3 MILLION+ viewers tune in to his rally,' wrote GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last week. It's a variation on a theme for the Republican party of late: take the vacant airwaves left by a subdued Biden campaign and fill them with spurious claims about the whereabouts of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Sure, Biden has been quiet, relative to Trump — who isn't? — but he hasn't been totally basement-bound. The former vice president has been venturing out for socially distanced local speeches. He gave one on healthcare in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Thursday, stopped off in the Pennsylvania towns of Yeadon and Darby the week before, and hosted an economic round table in Philadelphia on June 11.

Karol Markowicz

How conservatives sustain CNN

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is on a publicity tour to cover up his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 crisis in New York and point the finger at red state governors for managing it differently. Puff pieces on his administration have appeared in People magazine and on the website for the governor’s favorite television station, CNN. Chris Cillizza’s interview with Cuomo did not include any mention of the fact that the New York death rate was not just the highest in the country but one of the highest in the world. That a significant portion of New York’s population dying from the virus can be considered a win for the governor is a true liberal privilege. Cillizza let Cuomo say absurd things like ‘We tested both theories. We have the evidence. It's numbers. It's irrefutable.

Andrew Bacevich

End of empire

The end of World War Two inaugurated the era of American dominion, with the United States politically, economically and militarily the most powerful nation on the planet. Yet throughout the subsequent period of American global ascendency, the American people endured a seemingly endless sequence of domestic crises, upheavals and disasters. Primacy abroad did not insulate them, convinced of their unique place in human history, from the trials and tribulations routinely befalling other, more ‘ordinary’ nations. Yet neither did trials at home undermine the deep-seated belief that history had summoned the United States — and no one else — to lead the world.

Sunday

June 28, 2020

Roger Kimball

Is this the end of history?

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters: ‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’ The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous.

Paul Wood

The trouble with Brad Parscale

What Donald Trump hates more than anything is someone making money from his name without cutting him in for a share of the profits. Roger Stone told me that once and he should know, having spent decades advising Trump. With this in mind, the anti-Trump Republicans of the Lincoln Project made a video perfectly designed to needle Trump and damage his 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale. It shows some of the things Parscale has bought since he joined the campaign back in 2016: a ‘gorgeous’ red Ferrari, a ‘sleek’ black Range Rover, a $2.3 million home in Fort Lauderdale, two more Florida condos worth $1 million each, and a yacht, one seemingly packed with jiggling, bikini clad flesh, though that might be the Lincoln Project’s artistic license.

Ben Zeisloft

What’s Bill de Blasio’s problem with Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jews?

New York City was the center of the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with equally severe lockdown policies to match it. However, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio drew international attention for what seemed to be exceptionally strict enforcement of social distancing measures upon Orthodox Jewish communities.As the Mayor walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Black Lives Matter protesters and turned a blind eye to unfettered looting, his police officers patrolled Brooklyn, threatening Hasidic communities with arrest for attending evening prayers.De Blasio’s uneven enforcement of lockdown policies earned him a rebuke from Eric Dreiband, the US Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

Friday

June 26, 2020

Kira Davis

Do we erase black history when we take down statues?

The Summer Of Our Discontent is in full swing and the social guillotines — at first applied to legitimate injustice and prejudice — have now come for history itself.We watch as mobs tear down statues and monuments to the past. The destruction is supposedly performed in the name of justice, but can we seize true justice by destroying the past?American history is a fascinating and sometimes tragic tale of oppression and rebellion, injustice and progress. There is a push and a pull to it all that has led us to be the most successful and prosperous society in human history.Undoubtedly there has been much pain: but how can we know how far we’ve come if we’re not allowed to see where we’ve been?The history of black America is an exhaustive tale of overcoming.

Leonard Toboroff

J’Accuse Barack Obama!

When President Obama was in his 75-day transition to the Presidency, he initiated correspondence with Supreme Leader Khamenei of Iran to explore, at the least, some form of what French diplomats call détente, or even entente. But Iran remained an adversary to the United States. Instead of rapprochement, the Shia theocracy was sanctioned by UN Security Council resolution 1803 on March 3, 2008. As it happens, this was prologue to l’affaire Flynn, a scandal whose events resemble those of that affaire to remember, the notorious Affaire Dreyfus. That’s Alfred Dreyfus the army officer, not Richard Dreyfuss the actor.

Heather Mac Donald

Where are the deaths?

The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts.

Luke Thompson

Don’t write off Donald Trump yet

New polling this week spells more bad news for President Trump. Nationally, and in battleground states, former Vice President Joe Biden has caught Trump or expanded his lead. Certain pundits are beginning to talk as if November's election is a fait accompli. That's a mistake. This election has a long way to go. From the beginning of his presidency, Trump’s ballot performance has lagged his job approval. Some voters, though satisfied with Trump’s presidency, will not commit to supporting his reelection. If these approvers turn into supporters as Election Day nears, Trump’s position will strengthen. Yes, his job approval numbers have dipped in recent months, but they remain above 40 percent, just below where he started his presidency.

Thursday

June 25, 2020

Amber Duke

Nigel Farage: Trump is taking us back to more traditional alliances

Our Washington editor Amber Athey interviewed Nigel Farage, founder of the UK Brexit party, for a Steamboat Institute livestream. We've published the transcript below.Amber Athey: Welcome everyone to the Steamboat Institute's live broadcast. I'm Amber Athey, the Washington editor for Spectator USA. And I am joined by Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Brexit party, who will also be a keynote speaker at the Steamboat Institute's annual Freedom Conference this year from August 28 to 29. Nigel, thank you so much for joining us again.Nigel Farage: Thank you. No problem at all.AA: So I want to go ahead and get started by giving you a chance to respond to a little bit of a controversy. People are very upset with you for attending Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Chadwick Moore

Bright lights, abandoned city

Joan Didion wrote that New York is a city only for the very rich, the very poor and the very young. That was in her cult classic 1967 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, in which she created the farewell-to-New York genre. It’s a quote I carried with me through my twenties, from one grim apartment to the next, each smaller, farther out and more expensive than the last. This is simply the nature of the place, I told myself. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else. Many of us emerged from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s luxury dictatorship in the aughts with a sense of battle fatigue.