Barack obama

Last week Barack Obama, grayer, wearier and older in every way, was in Berlin at one of his foundation’s conferences for ‘emerging leaders’ in Berlin. After wheeling out a few cringe-inducing platitudes like ‘I don’t have a regular meditation practice’ Obama did say something genuinely interesting about where the Democrats are heading going into 2020. He warned that elements of the party were becoming a ‘circular firing squad’ who targeted those ‘straying from purity’ on a variety of issues.

Joe Biden seems on the verge of announcing he will run for president. He begins in a strong position, leading his primary opponent in the polls. His numbers, which are just shy of 30 percent, reflect his high name-ID and years as a party stalwart. When he does jump in, the first question is whether his lead will grow or shrink as competitors begin attacking his record and garner name recognition of their own. Biden must smack his head every time he thinks about 2016. He would have been a stronger candidate than Hillary — not a very high bar — which means he might well have won the presidency. That’s far less likely this time around, and not only because Donald Trump has the advantages of incumbency and smooth sailing through the primaries.

If Kamala Harris, who announced her candidacy on Martin Luther King Day, wins the presidency, she would not only be the first black woman to ascend to the Oval Office but also the first Democrat from California to accomplish that feat. The last two politicians to emerge from the Golden State and prove that they had the right stuff were both Republicans, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Reagan personified the optimism of California Dreamin’; Nixon, a kind of grapes of wrath resentment that he reverse engineered to condemn liberal elites. Like Nixon, a red hunter par excellence, Harris has tried to play the Russia card to rise to prominence. Today it is Democrats who decry Moscow gold, while Republicans play kissy face with the Kremlin.

What makes a good liar? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think, partly because it’s a harder and more complex thing to accomplish than you might think. Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not have a satisfactory answer to the question. Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the sport, I admire from afar expert practitioners. And I was reminded just a few days ago that we have in our midst a grand master of mendacity. In his speech in Milwaukee on Friday, Barack Obama demonstrated once again his effortless, masterly deployment of deceit. Again, I do not say that we groundlings have been vouchsafed all the inner workings of the mechanism. But one thing is clear from Obama’s performance: brazenness is key.

Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review Online a couple of days ago, was certainly correct that it would have been outrageous and irresponsible to have suggested, at that early juncture of this still-unfolding episode, that the pipe ‘bombs’ were hoaxes devised by leftist activists to make it appear that nebulous right wing activists are targeting famous critics of Donald Trump, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, all the way down the food chain to Senator ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Mad Maxine Waters. But the fact that McCarthy’s column is titled ‘Why No One Trusts the Media’ tells you that his prudent restraint is redolent of that device rhetoricians denominate apophasis or praeteritio.

Donald Trump, only a few hours ago seen as a master manipulator in the run-up to the midterm elections, has lost the narrative, at least for now. ‘This egregious conduct is abhorrent to everything we hold dear and sacred as Americans,’ he said today. ‘I just want to tell you that in these times we have to unify, we have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.’ When Trump is reduced to issuing such emollient statements, he is decidedly on the backfoot.Tonight Trump is scheduled to attend a rally in Wisconsin. Media scrutiny will be more intense than ever.

This week marks 15 years since the start of America’s war in Iraq. Regime change was George W. Bush’s objective, and Saddam Hussein was duly removed, tried, and executed. But Bush could not have counted on how much regime change would also come to Washington as a result of the war. It contributed to the Republicans’ loss of Congress in 2006 and to the failure of Bush’s party to keep control of the White House in 2008. Yet it did even more: it helped to give Barack Obama, an antiwar candidate—and premature winner of a Nobel Peace Prize as president—an edge against Hillary Clinton among the activist left in the 2008 Democratic primaries. As a senator, Mrs. Clinton had, after all, voted for the war. And then there is Donald Trump.