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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The Washington Times

Five days, 15 states, 17 campaign rallies: George W. Bush’s near-frenetic schedule in the run-up to the midterm election offers a portrait of a politician who understands that a legacy has two elements: the substantive policy achievements, of course, but also the purely political achievements. Is the president’s party better off for his time at the helm?

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The Washington Times

The prospect of a 108th Congress with Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Sen. Walter Mondale in it is really too delicious to contemplate. We will have reached a new stage, I think, in the phenomenon of political branding.

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The Washington Times

John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira have written a book that is certain to galvanize and energize their fellow Democrats. In “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” they argue that the cycle of Republican electoral dominance first announced by Kevin Phillips in 1969 in “The Emerging Republican Majority” is at an end. If Democrats play the demographic and ideological hand they have been dealt with sufficient skill, the authors argue, the party should have little difficulty regaining and keeping the upper hand through the next long cycle of American politics.

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The Washington Times

At a conference here on trans-Atlantic relations jointly sponsored by the Potomac Foundation and the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, when the subject turns to Iraq, the question quickly becomes broader: How much faith is it possible to place in the idea of deterrence, the proposition that states, including Iraq, will refrain from the use [if not the acquisition] of weapons of mass destruction because they know that if they do resort to them, they will meet with massive retaliation that their current political leadership will not survive?

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The Washington Times

The top question Democrats are asking these days would seem to be this: Where are the Democrats? A couple weeks, ago, the New Republic wanted to know how come Democrats opposed to going to war with Iraq didn’t have the nerve to say so. I heard a presentation on Democrats’ future prospects at the National Education Association shortly thereafter, at which several of the members of a panel consisting largely of Democratic activists decried what they took to be the spinelessness of their political leaders – their unwillingness despite ample opportunity to offer a robust alternative to the Bush administration.

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The Washington Times

One could not say that the anti-globalization protesters in Washington for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings last week were any more coherent in their objectives than they were on previous occasions here and elsewhere, going back to Seattle in 1999. Nevertheless, there has been a net reduction in incoherence for the simple reason that the protests are getting smaller. This is progress.

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The Washington Times

In order for Democrats to have a decent chance of knocking off George W. Bush in 2004, they are going to need two things: an underperforming economy and a candidate who is credible on the national security issues that will continue even past a war on Iraq.

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