Politics Archives

Thursday

September 3, 2020

Nancy Pelosi’s bad hair day

Does Nancy Pelosi’s unfortunate trip to a hair salon have any news value? Or is it much a hairdo about nothing? Compared to the big stories of the day, it hardly matters. The country faces violent disorder, we’re unsure who will become our next president and millions of people are trying to get back to work and school. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, 'It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one person getting a shampoo and blow-out don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' But even in this crazy world, Pelosi’s misstep deserves some attention because it so perfectly encapsulates a larger, more troubling problem. Insiders like Pelosi are allowed to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us.

Wednesday

September 2, 2020

Paul du Quenoy

The dead Kennedys: Joe blows it in Massachusetts

The unthinkable happened on Tuesday night: a Kennedy lost an election in Massachusetts for the very first time. Thirty-nine-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy, III, the only prominent member of his storied family’s fifth generation, lost his primary bid for his state’s Senate seat. He was bested by incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, 74, who has held it since John Kerry resigned to become Secretary of State in 2012. Together with his 36 previous years in the House of Representatives, Markey has served in Washington longer than his freckled opponent has been alive. Given Massachusetts’s solidly blue politics, Markey will certainly win reelection in November, leaving him in the Senate until he is an octogenarian, while young Joe will be consigned to political oblivion as of January.

Tuesday

September 1, 2020

Amber Duke

Blaming Trump for the riots is a Democratic disaster

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

Christopher Sandford

Delivering the goods?

Seattle My local post office in suburban Seattle seems to be rigged to obstruct customers these days. After standing motionless for half an hour awaiting my turn, I find that I've lost the will to live even before the inevitable altercation with the masked clerk squinting back at me through a sheet of plastic. When you ask for the slightest bit of 'consumer assistance' — as their cheerful mission statement on the wall promises they’re only too happy to provide — they seem to get ferociously cross. Not long ago I was read the Riot Act by a young USPS employee because I politely asked if I might be allowed an inch or two of Scotch tape from one of the dozen or so open rolls of it I could see on the shelf behind her.

Alex Perez

Swing states are the best states

Swing state season, that three- to four-month stretch of peak American crazy, is upon us. The big three states — New York, California and Texas — are often considered representative of the American experience, due to their larger-than life branding and enduring economic heft. But, small outlier communities aside, the big three are politically homogeneous and ultimately predictable in their beliefs and voting patterns. That makes them utterly boring and, dare I say, un-American in sensibility come election time. America is a bipolar land of infinite complexity and chaos.

Anik Joshi

Kamala Harris’s Indian summer

The Indian vote in American politics has been a lock for the Democrats in recent years. President Obama won the group in 2008 and many of them preferred him to Mitt Romney in 2012. Likewise, Hillary Clinton won the Indian vote in something of a landslide in 2016 against President Trump. Early polling indicates that Asian Americans in general still lean Democrat. But might Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris put a meaningful portion of the Indian vote up for grabs? Kamala Harris represents something historic for the Indian-American community — she is the first person with Indian ancestry to run on either party’s presidential ticket. The Biden campaign have been quick to capitalize on this, forming an 'Indians for Biden' National Council.

Monday

August 31, 2020

Melissa Chen

The China election

Bill Clinton, in a speech heralding China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, remarked that ‘by joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.’It is by now glaringly obvious that this vision didn’t come to pass. For far too long, ‘End of History’ hubris dominated western engagement with China, and hubris led to nemesis.

Sunday

August 30, 2020

Solveig Lucia Gold

American Athens

I never understood why Plato wrote so harshly about democracy. Was he simply bitter over the death of his beloved mentor Socrates? And could his criticism of direct democracy in ancient Athens apply to a representative democracy like ours? Right now, the United States is looking increasingly Athenian. Plato characterized the birth of Athenian democracy as a rejection of expertise. The masses, previously content to defer to experts who knew what was good for the city, were led to believe that they could determine the good for themselves — and that the ‘good’ was whatever they subjectively found pleasurable.

Saturday

August 29, 2020

Stephen L. Miller

2016 all over again

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.

Pedro L. Gonzalez

If anything, America has an under-incarceration problem

John Marvin Weed stood his ground as his assailants encircled him. He had already been pummeled and was bracing himself for more. Weed was with family that day, enjoying Maryland's Great Frederick Fair when a young man asked him for a dollar. When Weed refused, the young man and his brother attacked. In a video of the incident, Weed appears calm, hands low at his sides, as the brothers taunt him. Mild-mannered and middle-aged, Weed was a builder; he helped with his hands. 'He gave so much love to his young niece and nephew, four-wheeler rides, playing in the pool, reading bedtime stories, and so much more,’ said Weed's sister, Lori Hawkins.

Friday

August 28, 2020

Amber Duke

Rand Paul, BLM and DC’s street harassment laws

Over the past week, Washington, DC has turned into a truly dystopian nightmare. Diners at several area restaurants, including the famous Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, were accosted by a Black Lives Matter mob that bullied them into raising their fists in solidarity with the movement. Restaurant patrons who refused to comply faced further verbal abuse and harassment. The trend continued outside the White House on Thursday night. Attendees of President Trump’s acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention were thrown to the wolves as they left the event, and were chased and screamed at as they made their way back to their hotels. Kentucky senator Rand Paul and his wife Kelley received some of the most aggressive harassment.

Roger Kimball

After the RNC, I am confident Trump will triumph

In most cases, prediction in politics is a mug’s game. Maybe that is why it is such a popular game. I forbear to speculate. But if you step back from the fray and ponder, I think you’ll agree that politics (like most human things) is so fraught with uncertainties that accurate prediction is well nigh impossible. Of course, you might be right in any given case. And if you make more than a couple of correct guesses, you can look forward to being hailed as a genius. But deep down you know that your predictions, whatever elaborate models you deployed to lend them an air of inevitability, remain but guesses. Luck, not rational probability, is the primary motor of your success.

Daniel McCarthy

Trump redefines the race

Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome COVID-19 and an even more all-pervasive racial guilt without the right man in the White House — the nation is weak, and truth be told its would-be savior, Joe Biden, is not strong. But he is nice. The convention emphasized not Biden’s 47-year record in government, but his family and the tragedies it has suffered. Even in building up the nominee, suffering was the dominant trope. Americans must huddle together, and somehow by huddling around Joe Biden everything will be all right.This passivity was perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the rationale behind the Biden candidacy. Is he the best Democrat around?

Bridget Phetasy

Why I won’t vote

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece titled ‘The battle cry of the politically homeless’ in which I lamented the toxic tribalism that’s infecting our politics and pitting neighbor against neighbor, sister against brother, parent against child. ‘Democracy doesn’t die in the darkness; it dies when politics become team sports, in full view of a bloodthirsty, cheering electorate.’ At the end I wondered, ‘We will return to the Dark Ages or we will evolve. Is that likely? I dunno. Have we evolved that much from the Roman Colosseum? Barreling into 2020 — it doesn’t seem like it.’ In the last year, the globe has been ravaged by a pandemic that put the ineptitude of American institutions and leaders on display for the world.

The Spectator

Full transcript of President Trump’s RNC 2020 speech

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.Friends, delegates and distinguished guests, please. I stand before you tonight honored by your support, proud of the extraordinary progress we have made together over the last four incredible years and blooming with confidence in the bright future we will build for America over the next four years.We begin this evening — our thoughts are with the wonderful people who have just come through the wrath of hurricane Laura. We are working closely with state and local officials in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi. Sparing no effort to save lives while the hurricane was fierce, one of the strongest to make landfall in 150 years. The casualties and damage were far less than thought possible only 24 hours ago.

Wednesday

August 26, 2020

Amber Duke

Kristi Noem, first female president?

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley effectively launched her 2024 presidential campaign during her Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention to much media fanfare. Less noticed was an equally qualified and camera-ready Republican woman that is arguably much better positioned to carry the party torch post-Trump: South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. The media was split on reactions to Haley's audition: some mocked her declaration that America isn't a racist country, but others applauded her as the GOP's own 'return to normalcy' and 'compassionate' candidate. Voters who support the Trump agenda ought to be wary of this praise.

Dominic Green

Where is Biden’s post-convention bounce?

Convention season ain’t over till the dead cat bounces. A dead cat bounce, as followers of the animal spirits of the market know, is a small recovery in the value of a declining asset. As the wisdom of those who work in tall buildings has it, even a dead cat bounces if you drop it from a high window.The week before the Democratic convention, the polls showed Donald Trump trimming Biden’s double-digit lead into single figures. The numbers varied, but they averaged out to suggest that Biden was 7 or 8 percent ahead — not yet within the margin of error, but trending toward it.The Democrats’ non-conference that was nearly in Milwaukee was meant to arrest that decline.

Will Lloyd

We are all Rachel Dolezal now

As late as 2014, most Americans felt there was no need for the country to make any changes to address black-white inequality. 2015 was the year the future arrived. Donald Trump rode down the escalator. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me was a publishing sensation. Freddie Gray died in Baltimore. The ‘Great Awokening’ — the journey of white liberals to the left of every other group in American society on racial issues — began. And in Spokane, Washington, there was the case of Rachel Dolezal. Like the Trump campaign, or Coates’s writing, or Gray’s death, the inglorious circus that surrounded Dolezal, a white woman caught pretending to be black, X-rayed American race relations. Dolezal was not sui generis.

Karol Markowicz

The most memorable RNC speakers are not the stars

Let’s be real, the warm-up acts are never the draw. For every Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees (true story) there’s, well, every other opening act you’ve ever sat through to get to the main event. But the Republican National Convention has, for better or worse, managed to flip that on its head. The most memorable speakers, so far, have not been the stars. On Monday, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott did great. But Monday night’s most important moments came from Rep. Vernon Jones and Mark and Patricia McCloskey. Jones talked about supporting Donald Trump and what kind of havoc that wreaked in his own life. The McCloskeys spoke of being ordinary people who had been threatened at their home by the mob we see on our TVs.

Tuesday

August 25, 2020

Jacob Heilbrunn

Melania’s moment

Free Melania? She made her jailbreak tonight. Whether or not President Trump wins re-election, she was out to save, as far as possible, her own reputation. The voice was soothing, the sentiments compassionate and the delivery emollient. She found her voice. Her good fortune was to be preceded by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who blabbered from the roof of Jerusalem's King David Hotel about Trump’s great foreign policy victories. The media complained about Pompeo breaking norms, but the only thing he really helped break were his own presidential ambitions by coming across as a dullard. His eminently forgettable speech set Melania up perfectly. The mainstream media could barely constrain its enthusiasm for her.