Weekly Standard

Whether he wins the nomination or not, Rick Perry’s August charge into the top echelon of GOP presidential hopefuls marks at least this turning point: In national Republican politics, Texas is the new California.

Back in the day—say, the 1960s through the 1990s—California was the jumping-off point par excellence in making a bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

The reasons were both obvious and subtle: With a population topping 37 million, the state is the nation’s largest. Since the 1970s, California’s huge economy has ranked no lower than eighth and as high as fourth against the nations of the world. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Let’s assume that it was not President Obama’s intention for the final section of his big Mideast speech, in which he took up the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to entirely overwhelm everything he had just said in support of democratization and the “universal rights” of those living in the region.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened when the fateful words “1967 lines” passed his lips. Nor is it inconceivable that Obama​—​after taking a large (if unacknowledged) step in the direction of the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush in the rest of the speech​—​wanted to end on a somewhat emphatic note of vive la différence.

But the more likely explanation is simply that Obama sees the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in the context of the full panoply of repression in the Middle East—that is, as contrary to “the broader aspirations of ordinary people” throughout the region. In this light, one can’t really talk about what has been happening in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere without also mentioning the plight of the Palestinians, who have been “suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own.” Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

There’s a truism of budgeting that goes: The player who makes the first move always loses. That’s because the player with the second move has the opportunity to focus on the drawbacks of what the first player proposed. It’s one reason why some Republicans were nervous about House GOP budget chairman Paul Ryan’s determination to release a detailed, long-range proposal to curb spending, including cost-cutting reforms to major entitlement programs. Here was an opening for Obama to counter—as he did last week, to the evident delight of his liberal base.

In this case, however, budgetary game theory is being wrongly applied. The Ryan proposal was not, in fact, the first move. The first move was Obama’s February budget submission—the one that portrayed trillion-dollar deficits dancing toward an infinite horizon to the tune of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

For those who care about “international legitimacy,” the gold standard is a United Nations Security Council resolution. The Obama foreign policy team as a whole has been obsessed with legitimacy since the White House was merely a gleam in the eye of the junior senator from Illinois. Indeed, the administration’s sense of amour propre is grounded in no small measure in feelings of superiority about its care for and cultivation of legitimacy, especially in contrast with its cowboy-unilateralist predecessor. So it is that Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 form the backdrop for our current adventures in Libya. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Much of the loyal opposition’s response to President Obama’s new position in favor of gay marriage centered on the back-and-forth in which he has indulged over the years getting to it. He was for it; he was against it; now he’s for it again (not that he apparently proposes to do anything to advance the cause beyond his “historic” expression of personal support). In short, the “evolved” presidential view is of the genus “political cynicism”: On the eve of a major Hollywood fundraiser (and, hmm, a Washington Post exposé on Mitt Romney’s prep school bully-boy days), Obama chose to pander to a group that was feeling under-pandered-to.

One reason for this line of attack on Obama was surely a level of GOP discomfort with the issue. In politics, if you can tag somebody for hypocrisy or flip-flopping, you are relieved of the responsibility of taking a substantive stand. On this issue, it’s mainly only religious conservatives who are willing to give voice to the viewpoint underlying, for example, the North Carolina ballot proposition defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which was approved 61-39 the day before the president’s announcement. Others are wary, and increasingly so, of implying that gay or lesbian coupledom is deficient. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

In his underdog bid to retain the presidency in 1948, Harry Truman ran hard against the “Do-Nothing Congress,” so much so that his put-down of the Republicans who controlled Capitol Hill became a permanent part of the political lexicon, far more resonant today than anything Truman ever said about his Republican opponent for the White House, Thomas Dewey.

Since a Democrat is once again in the Oval Office facing down a GOP-controlled House, some have broached the possibility of Barack Obama’s doing a reprise of Truman’s theme in 2012 and taking on, once again, a do-nothing Congress. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

The United States and Iran have been on a collision course since the Iranian revolution in 1979, when elements of the newly proclaimed Islamic Republic took U.S. diplomats and Tehran embassy personnel hostage. U.S. relations with Iran have been bad ever since. The focus in recent years has been the Iranian program to develop a nuclear weapon, but the backdrop is Iran as a growing regional threat, not only to Israel and to U.S. and allied interests in the Persian Gulf region, but also to the many Sunni governments of the Gulf, which fear an increasingly powerful Shiite government in Tehran.

Meanwhile, Iran props up the Assad dictatorship in Syria, meddles in Lebanon through the Hezbollah militia, supports the radical Hamas regime in Gaza, and seeks to expand its divisive clout in neighboring Iraq, a task made easier by the decision of the Obama administration to end the deployment of U.S. combat forces there. The picture that emerges is of an Iran that is not so much aproblem but the problem of the broader Middle East, eclipsing even the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Continue reading →