The Washington Times

President Bush’s job-approval ratings have taken a dip since November, and this has mainly had the effect of cheering up two distinct but to a degree overlapping sets of people. First, there are the anti-Bush partisans as such, who have mainly interpreted the decline as a sign that Mr. Bush is not, after all, wrapped in a cloak of invincibility because of Americans’ concerns with national security. And second, there are the opponents of war in Iraq, who are inclined to see Mr. Bush’s falloff as an indication of increasing public opposition to his war plans.

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The Washington Times

It seems quite clear that by the end of this year, if not in fact by spring, the Bush administration is going to “own” the economy. When something based on the new tax legislation the president has proposed actually clears Congress, which I think is almost certain, the American economy’s success or failure in the future will have a presumed author, the president himself, whom voters will hold accountable accordingly.

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The Washington Times

How about this as the latest manifestation of the political legacy of Bill Clinton: a robust and growing field of aspirants for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003?

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The Washington Times

A common refrain at year’s end from the nyah-nyah school of criticism of the Bush administration is that here they are all set to go to war over Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, and then along comes North Korea announcing it has a nuclear-weapons program and the administration does nothing. Isn’t this hypocrisy of the rankest sort? What happened to the president who talked about the “axis of evil”? And doesn’t the downplaying of North Korea lend credence to skepticism about military adventures against Iraq?

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The Washington Times

I was traveling in the early part of last week and accordingly decided to file my column early; I therefore wasn’t able to call for Trent Lott to step aside as Senate majority leader before he actually did so. Evidently, I was not missed. Good job, everybody.

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The Washington Times

OK, small investor, here’s the question you should be asking: Where’s my dividend? In good times, well-run corporations rack up substantial profits. You, the shareholder, are a part owner. Yet, if you’re expecting to see your proportionate share of the earnings from year to year, you are very likely to be disappointed.

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The Washington Times

Ah, nothing like a blast from the late days of the Cold War to get the blood flowing on a cold December morning. If you picked up the Outlook section of The Washington Post Sunday, it was 1988 all over again.

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The Washington Times

Last week in this space, in trying to account for Sen. Tom Daschle’s strange outburst against the nation’s most popular radio talk-show host and by extension, his audience, I referred in passing to Rush Limbaugh as “the last, best villain of the Democratic Party.” Yes, I’d be happy to elaborate.

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The Washington Times

Leaders of NATO’s 19 member countries meet in Prague this week, the main purpose of which is to extend invitations to join the trans-Atlantic alliance to seven Central and Eastern European nations: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria. I have long been an enthusiast for this project, as readers of this column already know. I also understand that enthusiasm of this sort is and has been baffling to many people, including some foreign affairs specialists who, from the beginning, have feared that enlargement was far richer in the potential for harm to the United States than in the potential for good.

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The Washington Times

Last week’s election, the midterm of a first presidential term, was “supposed” to produce gains for the party opposing the White House. That was also “supposed” to happen in 1998, but didn’t. In 2000, Al Gore was “supposed” to win big thanks to the strength of the economy, according to every political science model on the market. Maybe the time has come to throw out all of the popular generalizations about elections.

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