The Washington Times

Opposition to the Iraq war has understandably led to a more generally anti-interventionist climate in Washington. There has long been such a strain in American public opinion: Walter Russell Mead identified it as the Jeffersonian strain, more interested in cultivating the American garden than in going abroad to slay dragons.

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The Washington Times

The Politico, the new Web site specializing in Washington political coverage, may or may not be the wave of the future. But it is trying to crack through an odd wall that has spontaneously sprung up between media new and old.

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The Washington Times

Several strands of conventional wisdom are gathering into an early narrative line on the 2008 presidential race. That being the case, it’s not too early to start picking them apart. 

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The Washington Times

No surprise, but Democrats on Capitol Hill and most everywhere else have checked out on Iraq, and they’re taking a few Republicans with them. Some people like to say that we can succeed in Iraq only if we have broad bipartisan agreement on the way forward. But the only way to obtain broad bipartisan agreement now would be for the Bush administration to acquiesce in the majority Democratic view that Iraq has been such a disaster that success is now impossible and the thing to do is get out as soon as practical.     

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The Washington Times

President Bush has apparently decided that he wants one more chance to win this war. Likely, he will get it, but there will be a price: The sole proprietor of Iraq policy starting tomorrow will be the president himself.  

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The Washington Times

It’s not every politician who gets to write the headline for his own obituary. Usually, the sense of self required for the pursuit and attainment of high public office leads to an irresistible tendency to overstate, even if this occasionally expresses itself as transparently phony humility. Yet Gerald R. Ford was someone whom history has judged to have got himself exactly right with the title of his autobiography, “A Time to Heal.”    

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The Washington Times

This has been a good year for taking stock of the state of the political system. The reason is that this has been a year of major political change, as drastic as our politics gets, with the Democrats taking charge of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

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The Washington Times 

Not that they are in any other respect comparable, but Iraq and the Clinton health care reform effort of 1993-94 are politically comparable in that each precipitated the loss of control of Congress by the party of the president. Politically speaking, they were both the product of great ambition, the repository of the fondest hopes of each administration for fundamental policy change that would remake their respective policy areas in a fundamental way, and thus provide a lasting legacy for the administration.

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The Washington Times 

A literary agent once told me that when you are trying to sell a book to a publisher, you should always keep in mind that it’s not really the book you’re selling; it’s the idea of the book. Your objective is to get people excited about what’s to come. The finished book, even if it’s a very good book, ought to be almost anti-climactic. Otherwise, you haven’t managed to get people as excited as you should have in the first place.    

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