It is now a two-man race, with an asterisk. Everyone seems to agree that last night’s Republican debate devolved into a spitting contest between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Those who live on Planet Earth will believe that Romney won the debate; those who live on Planet Tea Party will favor Perry, with a slight hitch–did he actually order …
Viewpoint
Obama’s New Semester
The political year is sort of like the school year, only longer and more depressing. Both begin–after a summer recess–in September. Barack Obama will begin his new semester tonight, with his jobs speech. This is a curious …
Forget Solyndra: Obama’s Green Loan Program Is Still Worth It
Nobody’s going to notice this, because nobody’s going bankrupt, but the Obama administration just approved a conditional commitment for the largest residential solar project in history, an effort to install photovoltaic panels on up to 160,000 rooftops at 124 military bases in 33 states. With its $344 million federal loan guarantee, …
Obama’s Ozone Flip-Flop: Bad Policy and Bad Politics
My lefty friends have been asking me: If I think President Obama has been so great for the earth, and I think his enviro critics are ungrateful whiners, then how do I defend his capitulation to industry on new smog regulations? And the answer is…I don’t. He ignored the science, threw the EPA under the bus, and double-crossed green …
Lessons of the Post-9/11 Military
Earlier this week, I attended the retirement ceremony of General David Petraeus at Fort Meyer. It was a landmark moment, the closing of a chapter–the decade after 9/11. I’ve written about the transformation of the U.S. Military at length, including a column about Petraeus’ intellectual impact on the Army and a cover story about how …
Ben Bernanke Embraces Obama’s Reality-Based Presidency
Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry still knows about as much about monetary policy as Sarah Palin knows about American history—or, for that matter, about monetary policy—but maybe there was a glimmer of …
We Have Big Noses, Too
I interrupt my personal boycott of the artist formerly known as Glenn Beck because…I just can’t resist this. Here is what Beck said about his recent sojourns in the Holy Land:
“I love the Israelis, he said. “I love the Jewish people. But they drive me out of my mind when they talk over each other. They’re constantly talking!”
Beck
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Spending Cuts Are Great When the Spending Is Stupid
There’s a tired fight raging in Washington between anti-government people who want spending cuts and pro-government people who don’t. Here’s a crazy thought: Maybe we should spend more on good things and less on dumb things. I’m in the pro-government camp, but I’d be thrilled to eliminate almost all of the $380 billion worth of …
A Counterpoint: Democrats Must Restore Faith In Government
Michael Cohen, the author of Live From the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America, pens this response to Rick Perlstein’s Swampland column, “How …
How Democrats Win: Defending the Social Safety Net
I was flattered to learn from Joe Klein’s Aug. 15 column in TIME that Barack Obama is reading my book Nixonland. The book is about the “separate and irreconcilable fears” over the past 50 years that have come to define …
Don’t You Dare Try to Juice the Economy. That’s Treason!
As the resident Fed bore, what interested me about Rick Perry’s attack on Ben Bernanke, aside from the additional evidence that the guy seems a few books short of a library, was his implicit acknowledgment that printing more money could help juice the economy. Presumably that’s why it would be so treasonous to do it before the …
Notes on an Elephant in Despair
O.K. The nonsense of the Iowa straw poll is behind us. We’ve had another GOP debate. We have one more candidate (Rick Perry) and one fewer (Tim Pawlenty). Here are some thoughts as the nomination contest gets going:
Tim …
Pawlenty Had That Not-So-Special Something Republicans Need in 2012
As Adam mentioned, on paper, Tim Pawlenty fit the profile of the perfect Republican presidential candidate: A blue-state governor with blue-collar roots, a conservative evangelical with potential appeal to the Tea Party and establishment wings of the GOP. (Was his staff really that savvy? I’ll have to take Adam’s word for it.) But …