No Reagan mystery

The Washington Times

Shortly after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, People magazine (in an uncharacteristic nod to highbrow culture) ran a profile of the neoconservative intellectual couple Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz. She, a former editor at Basic Books, had founded the Committee for the Free World, whose purpose was to make the intellectual case for the institutions of freedom and against communism. He was the editor of Commentary magazine and had been mentioned as a possible head of the United States Information Agency (USIA).

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Guilty as charged

The Washington Times

There is already a lot to say about the 43rd president of the United States, and I am looking forward to getting started on the chronicles of an administration that looks to have embarked on the ambitious project of defining a conservative mainstream politics that supersedes (while incorporating many elements of) the ideological conservatism of the Reagan-Gingrich era. This is a big deal, folks, and the future of the GOP is riding on the outcome.

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Bubba’s back

The Washington Times

President Clinton has been a truly polarizing figure in American politics, and lots of people (including me) were indulging the hope that after he left Washington this month, the partisan temperature of Washington would decline. During his tenure in office, the amount of energy consumed in attacking him and defending him on cable chat shows alone would have been sufficient to fuel the politics of a mid-sized European country for generations. Surely, this level of animosity could not be sustained indefinitely. Surely, a flame burning this bright eventually consumes itself.

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Al Gore’s Legal Doomsday Machine

All those lawyers on Team Gore ended up litigating their way to defeat.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

AN ENDLESSLY FASCINATING topic of conversation about the 2000 presidential election has been why Al Gore wasn’t winning big as the nominee of the incumbent party in times of unprecedented peace and prosperity. He had four aces, and he still couldn’t rake in the pot. An equally fascinating question, it turns out, is how he lost the postelection legal maneuvering. Although the thought will be an awful one for Bush supporters to contemplate, there, too, Gore might have had a winning hand — and certainly had a better hand than he played.

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