The Washington Times

Last week, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced the moderators for the 2004 election face-offs, and once again, I have been passed over in favor of the likes of Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer. In the brilliant Paddy Chayefsky-Sidney Lumet satire “Network,” Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a network anchorman who has gone around the bend and become the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” mad as hell and not going to take it any more, vowing to speak the truth that no one else dares to.

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The Washington Times

The left is back. I don’t say this in relation to the Democratic convention in Boston, where, of course, in their heart of hearts, many of the delegates do indeed wish that their party could be more explicitly progressive in its appeal to American voters. The point of the Democratic convention will be to inject as much progressivism into the debate as the party’s wise men and women think is prudent in relation to appealing to an electorate that is not especially left-wing in outlook.

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The Washington Times

Where is the John Edwards surge in the polls for John Kerry? Democrats want to know. What happened? With a choice for veep as brilliant as Mr. Edwards, shouldn’t Mr. Kerry have gotten a bigger bump than the small-to-nil effect the announcement actually produced?

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The Washington Times

John Edwards may be the best politician of his generation. Never mind what he brings to John Kerry’s campaign for president in 2004. In an astonishingly small number of extraordinarily acute political moves, Mr. Edwards has established himself as the single most likely American to occupy the Oval Office one day [and here I include Mr. Kerry].

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The Washington Times

Does politics still have a slow season? If so, the Fourth of July weekend marks its official beginning. According to conventional wisdom, even in an election year, summer is no time to try to drive a political message. People aren’t interested. But does that old conventional wisdom adequately take into account the intensity of feeling this year? That’s the proposition we are likely to test this summer.

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The Washington Times

Because of Iraq, 2004 has been a very edgy year. The absence of bad news is excellent news, minimal bad news on any given day is good news, and as for good news, there isn’t enough to take the edge off for long. At least the nature of the challenge has clarified itself over the past couple months: on one side, Abu Musad Zarqawi’s world of barbarity, mayhem and beheadings; on the other, the United States, its allies, the new Iraqi government and what would seem to be the vast majority of Iraqis themselves.

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The Washington Times

The main reason for going to war in Iraq, in my view then and now, was the danger posed by Saddam Hussein going forward. This is a view I came to only after starting to think about the nexus of rogue states [such as Saddam’s Iraq], terrorist organizations [such as al Qaeda] and weapons of mass destruction [WMD] that might be produced using the resources of states but transferred to terrorist organizations for release.

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The Washington Times

There is nothing wrong with George W. Bush’s re-election prospects that a little conspicuous success wouldn’t cure. The economy is now delivering the goods – and the jobs – and it is probably only a matter of time before Mr. Bush gets credit for basic competence in its management. The most recent Associated Press/Ipsos poll shows that a solid majority of Americans, 57 percent, think the economy has lost jobs in the past six months, when in fact employment has grown by 1.2 million. Perception eventually will move more into line with reality.

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The Washington Times

The legacy of an American politician has two main components. One of them relates to policy, the way in which the country’s affairs, its position in the world and world order itself changed as a result of the politician’s guiding hand. On this score, Ronald Reagan looms larger with each passing year. The second component is only slightly less consequential: It is a politician’s political legacy. If politics is the art of the possible, then a great politician has an effect on what is possible not only during his own term in office but also in the years that follow. By now, the imprint that Mr. Reagan left has been visible for fully a generation and shows few signs of fading anytime soon.

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