30 Tuesday Jan 2007
Posted in Washington Times
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.
23 Tuesday Jan 2007
Posted in Washington Times
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.
16 Tuesday Jan 2007
Posted in Washington Times
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.
09 Tuesday Jan 2007
Posted in Washington Times
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.
02 Tuesday Jan 2007
Posted in Washington Times
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.”
26 Tuesday Dec 2006
Posted in Washington Times
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.
19 Tuesday Dec 2006
Posted in Washington Times
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.
12 Tuesday Dec 2006
Posted in Washington Times
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.
05 Tuesday Dec 2006
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
RIGA, Latvia. –At the Riga airport on the way to a German Marshall Fund-sponsored conference running parallel to the biannual NATO summit, a German friend asked me what I thought George W. Bush would say in the speech he was scheduled to give. I said I thought he had better give a “values” speech. My interlocutor replied, “then we’re in big trouble.”
28 Tuesday Nov 2006
Posted in Washington Times
≈ Comments Off on Baseline or high-water mark?
The Washington Times
When people look back on the 2006 elections 10 years later, what will they see? A turning point ushering in a new era of Democratic congressional dominance? Or an Iraq-induced bump in the otherwise smooth road of Republican dominance that reflects the center-right character of the American electorate?
Tod Lindberg 