The view from a row in front of where Joe was sitting: I, too, was struck by the quiet power of Obama’s speech. Quiet, literally. He didn’t have any of the hokey theme music the others did. His supporters didn’t even have any signs to wave. At some points during his speech, the crowd got [...]
Well, this is pretty interesting. Six Democratic candidates for president making, in effect, their Washington debuts…I want to take a look at the texts before I comment in much depth on this, but I’ve got to say that Obama, Edwards and Clinton–in chronological order–made the biggest impression on the crowd, and on me. (Dodd, Clark [...]
The court spent all much of the day dealing with evidentiary issues. When we broke for lunch at 12:30, a reporter sitting next to me estimated that the jury had heard actually testimony for a grand total of seven minutes so far. There’s a tendency to assume testimony is more exciting than the legal minutiae [...]
Uh-oh. Clinton’s interview with Karen raises several red flags. 1. NAFTA–”We inherited it.” Oh, come on. Now, if I remember correctly, Hillary was opposed to the President spending political capital on NAFTA passage in September of 1993–she wanted him to devote all his energy to her health insurance plan. So an argument can be made [...]
From all the references to getting thrown under a bus, putting one’s “neck in a meat grinder,” and, today, having one’s “feet planted in cement,” you’d think U.S. v Libby was a mob trial. This White House does have a certain wise guy aspect (you’re either with us or against us), and the defense’s case [...]
Several readers were wondering what I was doing at the National Review’s conservative summit last week. Here’s the answer.
I interviewed Hillary Clinton yesterday for a story that appears in the latest issue of TIME (fuller transcript here). Two things stood out to me. First, that Senator Clinton has distanced herself significantly from her husband on the issue of free trade. Here, for instance, is what she had to say about NAFTA, one of [...]
I just heard that General Petraeus has asked the very well respected Colonel H.R. McMaster to be part of his Iraq team. McMaster wrote a terrific book about Vietnam and successfully attempted to use counterinsurgency tactics in Tal Afar last year (although as with Petraeus in Mosul, the success diminished after McMaster’s team left). With [...]
I was airborne this morning and missed the first part of General George Casey’s testimony before the Armed Services Committee, but apparently John McCain gave Casey a tough time. I know there’s belated sympathy for Casey. He’s obviously uncomfortable with Bush’s new strategy in Iraq. But that doesn’t mean Casey wasn’t an utter failure when [...]
