The Washington Times

When Karl Rove relinquished the position of deputy White House chief of staff earlier this year, supposedly in order to concentrate full-time on retaining the Republican majority in this year’s congressional elections, the most prevalent Washington reaction was that the move constituted a demotion. Mr. Rove, at the time, was barely (or perhaps not entirely) out of the woods from the independent counsel investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and those who had been clamoring for (or at least eagerly anticipating) his comeuppance couldn’t resist imposing their narrative on this White House personnel move.

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The Washington Times

Every so often I retreat to the privacy of my cerebrum to debate the following proposition: Resolved, that the sole reason the United States remains democratic in character at the national level is the election of its president every four years, the Congress of the United States having become a dysfunctional and decadent institution. The majority of my neurons always vote to defeat the resolution, but it’s amazing how close the “ayes” have come.     

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The Washington Times

Just about a year ago at the United Nations, leaders at the world summit embraced a principle that amounts to a revolution in moral consciousness, the “responsibility to protect.” Briefly, the doctrine holds that states have a responsibility to protect the persons living on their territory. In the event they are unable to fulfill this obligation, or in the event they themselves choose to violate it through such practices as genocide or ethnic cleansing, then the responsibility to protect devolves to the international community as a whole, which may take appropriate action, up to and including the use of military force, to protect the at-risk population.   

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The Washington Times

We are all Americans, “Nous sommestous Americains,” was the headline in France’s Le Monde five years ago today, as the world began to take stock of the shocking attack the day before. The sense of solidarity, with scores of thousands of people turning up at U.S. embassies around the world to express sympathy, was undeniably a comfort in a time of great distress.  It was also short-lived and in fact fully dissipated by the halfway point between then and now, over Iraq. Some have suggested that the solidarity expressed then was something the United States could have sustained over the long haul and therefore should have worked overtime to achieve, for the benefit of an international environment more trusting of U.S. actions and motives.    

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The Washington Times

Suppose, five years after September 11, 2001, you had to assign yourself a single adjective to describe how you feel and what you think in relation to the events of that day. I think I would pick “astonished.”

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The Washington Times

Do you need to know who a party’s presidential nominee will be before you can say anything about who its nominee for vice president will be? Yes and no. That’s because far from being an expression of personal choice on the part of the nominee, the considerations involved in selecting a veep tend not to change over time.

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The Washington Times

Some of the key considerations in selecting a vice presidential running mate, as followers of our summer seminar in this space know, are part unity, ticket balancing, electoral advantage and plausibility as an eventual successor to the Oval Office. Most all of those tapped for veep meet one or more of these criteria.     

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The Washington Times

Nobody, as we discussed here last week, ever decreased his chance of getting elected president by running for vice president. (Well, maybe Dan Quayle, whom George H.W. Bush did the huge disservice of selecting for the veep slot before Mr. Quayle was ready for the spotlight.) But what kind of criteria should a presidential nominee and those in his inner circle of advisors adopt in picking a veep? It seems to me that there are four main considerations (which can overlap, of course).

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The Washington Times

There are two kinds of presidential candidates: those who actually aspire to the nation’s highest office and those who are running to elevate their profile or push an ideological agenda. As examples of the latter on the Republican side, we have televangelist Pat Robertson in 1988 and America-first conservative commentator Pat Buchanan in 1992 (when he demonstrated incumbent president George H.W. Bush’s vulnerability with a surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire before fading). On the Democratic side, for example, there was civil rights activist Al Sharpton in 2004.     

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The Washington Times

The 2008 presidential election is a wide-open contest, and Democrats, as we saw here last week, have responded with a broad field. What could have been an early consensus in favor of Hillary Rodham Clinton is so far anything but, as Democrats fight over how they want to position themselves. The Republican field, by contrast, seems surprisingly underpopulated, again given the givens.     

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