1. I saw Paul Ryan on today’s Fox News Sunday . Ryan did a pretty good job making his proposed spending cuts and premium support Medicare policies seem like nonideological common sense He did about as well as could reasonably have been expected given the subject matter. I was really impressed . . . . Continue Reading »
1. Don’t cry for the Obama administration. If Bush-appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had made the same mistake as Eric Holder, and left the door open to the assassination of American citizen noncombatants on American soil in areas where the courts were still operating, the Democrats . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ve had my differences of emphasis with Ross Douthat on the subject of Republican donors, but he nailed it today when he wrote: a party that seems out of touch and out of date on basic pocketbook issues probably isn’t going to rebuild its support just by converging with the Democrats on . . . . Continue Reading »
I think my main problem with this Arthur Brooks article is that it gets the emphasis backwards. The main Republican problem isn’t that they seem uncaring. More skilled campaigning would be nice, but better emoting about the plight of the poor with the same message of tax cuts for . . . . Continue Reading »
Kate is right that the Arthur Brooks article is interesting, but I would come at it from a different direction. I think that the economic challenge conservatives (to the extent they were embodied in the 2008 Republican field) face is not that they seem to be uninterested in the poor. It is that . . . . Continue Reading »
Arthur Brooks argues that conservatives have Faulty Moral Arithmetic . He is complaining about Republicans and conservatives, though perhaps more about the perception about Republicans and conservatives than about their essence. There have been many reports and studies over the years about the . . . . Continue Reading »
Today, on Fox News Sunday , Mitt Romney complained about the “long and blistering” primary that created an “unfavorable impression” of him. This outbreak of narcissism and self-pity has a chance to distort our perception of what actually happened during the Republican . . . . Continue Reading »
Maybe the most underreported political story is that President Obama just is not that popular. He has a 50.3% percent job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. Obama only barely gets the approval of the median American. It isn’t like the Republicans have to work against . . . . Continue Reading »
It is too bad that this Phillip Klein article hasn’t gotten a lot more play. Klein points out that out that there isn’t even one panel on health care policy at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I remember seeing a speech by Chris DeMuth in the late-1990s where he said that . . . . Continue Reading »
I can’t do enough to recommend this Ross Douthat blog post about the David Frum-William Voegeli exchange over at the Claremont Review of Books. Douthat agrees with Voegeli that it is a good (and necessary) thing that Republicans followed Paul Ryan in embracing premium support Medicare because . . . . Continue Reading »
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