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Is the Surge Working?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 31, 2007 CommentYes, comes the answer from Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, in yesterday's New York Times. They write, after an eight-day trip to Iraq, with careful qualifications and with some stinging criticism of the Bush administration (perhaps to reassure readers that it really is the Times they're reading). Here is one key passage:
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Good News on Auto Accident Trends
Tweet Share on Facebook July 30, 2007 CommentWhen I was in second or third grade, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Mills, was killed in an auto accident. I was told that she was in a car hit head-on by someone going the wrong way on the then new Ohio Turnpike. She was an excellent teacher, and I still feel sad when I think of her death.
The number of people killed in traffic accidents every year is daunting: 42,682 in 2006. That's more than the number of Americans killed in the Korean War and more than 10 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq.
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Turkey Votes
Tweet Share on Facebook July 24, 2007 CommentTurkey held its election Sunday, and the ruling AKP party won a solid victory. The AKP has been called an Islamist party, and its success in this third straight election is a repudiation of the secular tradition established by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s and 1930s. But the AKP also seems more interested than the opposition CHP and MHP parties in conforming to the requirements for entry into the European Union. Here is a nuanced and, for me, pretty convincing analysis of the AKP from National Review Online's Jim Geraghty, who lived a year or so in Ankara; here is a more favorable view from Claire Berlinski, a keen critic of Islamist terrorists in Europe who lives in Istanbul and sees the AKP as far preferable to the opposition; here is a less optimistic view from Michael Rubin, whose knowledge of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey is impressive and based on a lot of on-the-ground experiences as well as extensive study. Here's Clifford May's pre-election take on Turkey's political background.
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The Intramural Baby Boom Battle
Tweet Share on Facebook July 23, 2007 CommentHere's my Creators Syndicate column, on our politics as a cultural civil war between two halves of the baby boom generation. The good news is that the baby boom generation will die out sometime reasonably soon. The bad news is that I will die at about the same time.
For interesting and illuminating news out of Iraq, I recommend the new Victory Caucus website, with convenient links to bloggers Michael Yon and Bill Roggio.
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The Greatest Living American
Tweet Share on Facebook July 18, 2007 CommentGregg Easterbrook offers a fitting tribute to the greatest living American. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has some apt comments, in which I concur. By the way, Karen Novak, wife of Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, has sculpted a statue of the honoree, which stands in his home state of Iowa.
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Our First Revolution (Update)
Tweet Share on Facebook July 16, 2007 CommentI want to link to some recent reviews of my book Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers: Gertrude Himmelfarb in the Weekly Standard, James Bennett in anglosphere.com, and Andrew Stuttaford in National Review (not online yet). I'm grateful for these thoughtful reviews and am somewhat awed to have been reviewed by a historian of Gertrude Himmelfarb's stature. And here is a nice comment from John Hinderaker of Power Line, who interviewed me on his radio show last Saturday.
Here is my Creators Syndicate column of the week.
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An Energized President Defends His Policy
Tweet Share on Facebook July 14, 2007 CommentFor more than an hour on Friday afternoon George W. Bush sat down with nine conservative opinion journalists in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. I was one of them. He looks older now than he did when he first became president—the change is more noticeable in person, I think, than on television—but he seemed not at all weary or anguished. To the contrary, he seemed very energized and talked for considerably longer than I think any of us had anticipated. The message that he delivered on Iraq was similar to that in his press conference Thursday and he made reference to the video-conference he had held with three U.S. leaders of Provincial Reconstruction Teams earlier in the day.
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Are the Millennials Different?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 12, 2007 CommentIn their excellent 1991 book Generations, William Strauss and Neal Howe described the just-emerging Millennial generation (born 1982 and after). At a time when all Millennials were prepubescent, they wrote:
As these kids pass through school, they will sail smoothly behind a debris-clearing insistence on quality education and good behavior...The Millennial youth culture will be more clean-cut and homogeneous than any seen since that of the circa-1930 G.Is. By the first decade of the twenty-first century [i.e., now], schools will at last be fully computer-equipped and the learning style of students will shift from an MTV-ish 'parallel' thinking back to a more logical 'serial' thinking. Where Boomers and 13ers had once seen computers as a forced for social individuation, Millennials will see them as a force for social homogenization. Teen peer leaders will express a growing interest in community affairs and a growing enthusiasm for collective action...Teen pathologies—truancy, substance abuse, crime, suicide, unwed pregnancy—will all decline...Teen sex...will become less matter-of-fact and starkly physical, more romantic and friendly.
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The Implosion of the McCain Campaign
Tweet Share on Facebook July 11, 2007 CommentJohn McCain’s presidential campaign is in deep trouble. On Tuesday, campaign manager Terry Nelson and chief strategist John Weaver resigned, and Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime top Senate aide, co-author of McCain’s books, and chief speechwriter, will stay on as an unpaid adviser. For informed reporting on these startling developments, check out bloggers Marc Ambinder, Chris Cillizza, Anchor Patrick Ruffini, and Ben Smith. As they point out, Weaver was McCain’s chief strategist throughout the 1999-2000 cycle and afterwards; Nelson was a highly regarded Bush-Cheney ’04 official and Salter, who writes beautifully with a perfect pitch for McCain, is close to him personally.
These changes evidently followed the disclosure that the McCain campaign raised only $11 million in the second quarter of this year and that it had only $2 million in cash as of June 30. This is taken, understandably, as evidence of poor tactical decisions: The campaign’s burn rate—the amount of money it was spending—was disastrously high as compared with its capacity to raise money. Yet at the same time Nelson, whom I don’t know, has been regarded as highly talented, and Weaver, whom I do know, is as well.
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Democrats Hang On to Party Faithful
Tweet Share on Facebook July 3, 2007 Comment (1)Pollster Scott Rasmussen weights his results by party identification, but also readjusts party identification monthly so he won't miss underlying changes in the political balance. Party identification tends to change slowly, and he measures it using tenths of a percentage. My recollection is that party identification remained fairly steady in the 1995-2005 period; Rasmussen's numbers suggest it has changed more since mid-2005. Let's look at it quarter by quarter, rounding off to full percentages:
