Mitt Romney is clearly a candidate terrified by his own mouth. What other explanation for his campaign’s extreme efforts to prevent reporters from asking him questions? I know that there isn’t much public sympathy for journalistic whining–including my own occasional, stupid laments–about the lack of access. But Romney’s staff has clearly taken this to a [...]
Over at the conservative American Enterprise Institute blog, James Pethokoukis has an idea that could be a total game-changer for Mitt Romney: he should come out for breaking up the five biggest banks, which control about 70% of all U.S. assets. This would be a move supported by discerning liberals and conservatives–as I wrote yesterday, [...]
Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase once was Barack Obama’s favorite banker, a big backer of the President’s 2008 campaign. But he’s been blowing hard and often when it turned out that Obama was attempting to–gasp!–regulate the banking industry after its wanton recklessness caused the stock market, and the economy, to crash. Dimon has gone on to [...]
I fear that I went too easy on Mitt Romney with regard to his high school bullying escapades. It’s not the incident itself that troubles me — though it was, obviously, outrageous and disgraceful — so much as his current response: He doesn’t remember it. This is patent nonsense. How could he not remember it? Obviously [...]
Sometimes you feel an otherworldly–perhaps even divine–presence in the affairs of humankind. Today we have the astonishing juxtaposition of President Obama’s awkward, belated embrace of gay marriage, and the painful Washington Post story about Mitt Romney’s days as a bully at the ritzy Cranbrook School in Detroit. In the end, I suspect, neither of these [...]
The campaign is in a lull. The wars overseas are winding down. Washington is paralyzed. I’ve loaded up my iPod with some new songs. There’s nothing to do but….hit the road! And so, my third annual election road trip will commence on May 31–for three weeks through presidential battleground states, from North Carolina to, well, [...]
The illustrious patriots over at the Commentary blog have, predictably, taken me to task for defending Peter Beinart’s fine book about the crisis in Israel. They have done so in a predictably specious way. So I’d like to make my position, and theirs, perfectly clear: the argument against West Bank settlements is not merely a demographic [...]
The neoconservative assault on Peter Beinart’s fine book, The Crisis of Zionism, continues. It has taken many forms–ad hominem attacks usually and now, mocking his sales figures. Indeed, it has taken many forms but one: there still is no coherent response to Beinart’s argument that the West Bank settlement policy is a long-term demographic threat to [...]
My latest print piece–longer than a column this week–is about the revival of what used to be called vocational education, but is now called Career and Technical Education. It’s probably the best way to train young people for skilled jobs that actually exist, especially when done in partnership with local businesses–but more than that, it [...]
The estimable Elizabeth Warren is running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts against the incumbent Scott Brown. It turns out that Warren used to list herself as “Native American” in law school directories when she was teaching at Georgetown, Penn and Harvard. This has now become a campaign issue, the implication being that Warren, who [...]
