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Vision Thing
Tweet Share on Facebook February 28, 2007 CommentRudy Giuliani spoke to the Hoover Institution's overseers and trustees in Washington on Monday and presented a vision that suggests he's preparing to respond to the complaint in my U.S. News column this week. It suggests that he's thinking in broad conceptual terms and that he's going to be providing some details as well. I think he's going to make school choice a big issue, going beyond George W. Bush's accountability law.
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China and India
Tweet Share on Facebook February 27, 2007 Comment (1)Take a step back from pondering the latest news from Iraq and ponder some long-term questions. Like the long-term course of China and India.
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The Candidates and the Issues
Tweet Share on Facebook February 26, 2007 CommentIn my U.S. News column this week, I took a look at presidential candidates' websites and analyzed their treatment of issues. It didn't take too long to read through the websites; what I found was, as I wrote in the column, "pretty thin gruel." In the online version of my column, we have provided a link to a list of the candidates' websites, so you can easily read what they have to say and make your own judgments on whether I've fairly reflected their offerings. It's hard to do justice to the statements of 18 candidates in a 750-word column, and I think it's a good thing that those reading the Web edition can easily judge for themselves.
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Newt Vs. Hillary
Tweet Share on Facebook February 23, 2007 CommentPollster Scott Rasmussen reports that in a recent presidential pairing, Hillary Rodham Clinton would beat Newt Gingrich by a 50-to-43 percent margin. That sounds fairly plausible, although it's a little better showing for Gingrich than I would have expected. But take a look at the favorable/unfavorable ratings. Rasmussen's numbers have Clinton's fav/unfav at 50 and 48 percent and Gingrich's fav/unfav at 43 and 48 percent. You're tempted to think that Clinton and Gingrich both got the votes of every respondent who had favorable feelings toward her or him–and not a single vote more.
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Baby Pictures
Tweet Share on Facebook February 21, 2007 CommentThe Washington Times is running on the front page of its print edition, above the fold, two pictures of Amillia Taylor, the baby born after a gestation period of 21 weeks. They are striking pictures. The one on the bottom shows the newborn is only slightly longer than a fountain pen. The one on the top shows the baby's two feet between the hands of an adult; the baby's feet are not much longer than the adult's knuckle.
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Here We Go
Tweet Share on Facebook February 20, 2007 CommentHere's the first political ad of the 2007-08 presidential cycle, from Mitt Romney, who promises "STRONG. NEW. LEADERSHIP." More to come, from Romney and many others, in the days ahead. The two videos YouTube has to follow the Romney ad are "College Saga–Episode 1" and "Citizen Hero." On the "related video" sidebar is, among others, "ROMNEY HONORS VETERANS AT STATE HOUSE CEREMONY," submitted by one "KenMehlman." That person identifies himself as Chip and gives his age as 15. "I'm not really former RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. I am still a conservative Republican."
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All Those Books on Iraq You Haven't Gotten Around to Reading ...
Tweet Share on Facebook February 20, 2007 Comment (1)Well, you don't have to read them now. Because Michael Rubin has. Rubin is the editor of Middle East Quarterly and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Fluent in Arabic and Farsi, he spent 22 months in Iraq, most of it outside the Green Zone. In this review he gives his own magisterial take on no less than 33 books. He gives big pluses to Rick Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers, Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's Cobra II, Bing West's No True Glory, Fouad Ajami's The Foreigner's Gift, Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes, and Eric Davis's Memories of State. Minuses in varying degrees go to James Fallows's Blind into Baghdad, George Packer's The Assassins' Gate, Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory. He also gives a less than totally positive view of Gen. David Petraeus. But Rubin's verdicts are much more nuanced than a thumbs up or thumbs down. There's lots of insight here into what has happened in Iraq. I'm waiting for Rubin's book. In the meantime, read the whole thing.
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Contra Conventional Wisdom
Tweet Share on Facebook February 16, 2007 CommentA couple of interesting pieces today from Real Clear Politics.
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A Warning to Democrats
Tweet Share on Facebook February 15, 2007 CommentLawrence Haas, a former aide to Al Gore, argues that Democrats may be hurt in the long run by their opposition to the surge in Iraq. He looks back on history and notes that after Democrats pulled the plug on Vietnam, and after the four years of the Carter administration, they were seen as weak on national security. Some Democrats in Congress in the 1980s tried to set a different course–including, interestingly, Haas's old boss Gore, who is now as full-throated an opponent of our policy in Iraq as anyone. You can make a good case from today's public opinion polls for the course of action the Democrats are now pursuing. But poll numbers are not etched in stone. A stance that seems popular today might not prove popular in the long run.
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Rudy Takes the Lead
Tweet Share on Facebook February 14, 2007 CommentThe latest Gallup/USAToday poll shows Rudy Giuliani with a big lead in the race for the Republican nomination. Giuliani gets 40 percent to 24 percent for John McCain, 9 for Newt Gingrich, 5 for Mitt Romney, and 3 for Sam Brownback. Others get 2 percent or less. Caution: There were only 425 Republican respondents, so the margin of error is greater than in most polls you see. But it looks like a clear upsurge for Giuliani. The last three Gallup polls showed between 28 and 31 percent for him and between 26 and 28 percent for McCain: Ties. Now Giuliani is ahead by nearly 2 to 1. And I don't think you can attribute these results to McCain's strong support of George W. Bush's surge. Gallup asked Republicans whether Bush's troop surge and McCain's strong support of the war made them more or less likely to support McCain. Only 8 percent said those things made them much less likely to support McCain, while 21 percent said it made them much more likely to support him.
