John A. Farrell

Hey. I guess I should have waited until after John McCain and Barack Obama had a provocative exchange on abortion in their last debate before writing my post about Catholics and the Democrats.

Who knew their debate would be so revealing? Aside from making the "health" of a mother of parenthetical importance, McCain (and subsequent McCain campaign robocalls) tried to paint Obama as a baby killer.

But here's a column from a conservative Catholic legal scholar, who backs up Obama's argument that the Democratic presidential contender is offering a new approach that might actually lead to fewer abortions.

And to the Catholics who objected to my post the other day and labeled me a handmaiden of evil for suggesting that improving access to birth control and other imperfect solutions are better than taking no action at all, let me ask you this:

Because Oskar Schindler could save only 1,200 Jews by bribing and working with the Nazis during the Holocaust, should he have declined to save any?

Continue reading »

As an ACC basketball fan who's spent years rooting against the evil Tar Heels of North Carolina, I recognize the four-corner offense when I see it.

Too often, when his guys got a modest lead, North Carolina Coach Dean Smith would spread his team to the four corners of the offensive zone and have his point guard freeze the ball, while hostile crowds, who had come to see athletes play basketball, chanted "Bor-ing! Bor-ing!"

And that was Barack Obama last night, dribbling in circles like Phil Ford, sitting on a lead with one eye on the clock.

Continue reading »

Lib-err-al! Lib-err-al!

It's been 20 years since Republican crowds mocked Michael Dukakis with that chant. Some vacuous conservative commentators have had whole careers blaming everything that is wrong in America on leftist conspirators.

But today, it's maybe not so bad to be a liberal once again.

The masters of Wall Street, and the average American's 401(k) account, are being rescued by classically liberal economics.

The best and most honorable of liberal causes—civil rights for African-Americans—may be nearing fulfillment, with a black presidential candidate leading in the polls in mid-October.

Mercy! A liberal columnist for the New York Times just won the Nobel Prize for economics.

As the biographer of two great liberal icons—Clarence Darrow and Tip O'Neill—I might, you suspect, be happy that the pendulum has swung back toward the left.

But my work on Darrow and Tip, and my experience as a White House reporter during the Clinton and Bush years, fill me with foreboding. The more I study American history, the more I am firmly convinced that the American ideal is, at its core, libertarian.

Continue reading »

Rob, my colleague here at Thomas Jefferson Street, has invited us to quarrel with his declaration that the presidential race is over.

So, here goes.

In the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which showed Barack Obama with a 49 to 43 percent lead, voters were asked to choose between two statements.

Statement A: We need a president who will provide changes from the current Bush administration policies and create a government with more active oversight to protect consumers in areas such as housing and financial transactions.

Statement B: We need a president who will provide changes from the current policies in Congress and deal with waste and fraud in the system to protect taxpayers from government inefficiency and pork-barrel spending.

A big majority—58 percent—of those polled chose Statement B, the McCain-ish position. Only 38 percent chose Statement A, the Obama-like declaration.

As Democratic pollster Peter Hart put it in his latest analysis: "The reason this election is still ahead of us is that voter anger could turn into a stampede in any number of directions."

Continue reading »