You will recall how when the tea-party movement erupted during the congressional recess in August, it was spun on the left that these events were the creation of conservative ideologues. At the start, yes. By the end, though, it was about anxieties deeper than that.

The GOP is now spinning the results in Virginia and New Jersey as proof that voters are fed up with the liberal ideologues in the White House and Congress. Yes, but it's deeper than that.

What was learned Tuesday is that the American voter is absolutely, totally, unremittingly disgusted with both political parties. More than anything, the American voter is...]]> Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If you're an elected Democrat anywhere to the right of Barney Frank, and trying to defend a competitive seat next November, you've got to be starting to sweat.

You wake up in the morning and just like every other morning as far as the eye can see the only thing in the news is the president's health-care reform. It's starting to look like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are leading the Donner Party, the snowbound emigrants who bogged down in the Sierra Nevada winter in the 1840s and resorted to cannibalism to survive.

The betting is that with raw political muscle and procedural magic, the Congressional Democrats will pass something, call it reform and hand Barack Obama a...]]> Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The "balloon boy" floating over Colorado last week got me thinking of the Obama photo-op airliner flying around lower Manhattan last April at 9/11 altitude. This is not to suggest that the Obama presidency is a hoax, though more on that later. It is to suggest it's getting harder to know what's real and unreal in a world that always seems to be slipping slightly out of focus.

The best thing to emerge from the balloon boy story, other than the uncontestable fact that six-year-old Falcon Heene was safe on the ground, is that the guy who did it thought that staging a hoax would get him into reality TV programming. It had to come to this.

I love reality TV, though I never watch...]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year's Peace Prize to a nine-month old American presidency. There's been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo. This is unfair.

The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his "vision of . . . a world without nuclear weapons" and for "meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting." I'd say that completes the argument over old and new Europe. This is a Nobel of decadence.

Let's be clear. This decadence isn't primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi's playboy club or French culture minister...]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In his Inaugural Address, President Obama spoke directly to the world's rogue nations. "[W]e will extend a hand," he said, "if you are willing to unclench your fist."

Question: How many rogue nations can you hold in one hand? Let's try to count.

Iran remains rogue No. 1. The world is riveted by the expanding Iranian nuclear threat, and one might expect a mess of this magnitude would occupy most of the diplomatic energies of any presidency. But this one has time for more.

The Monday after last Friday's bombshell that Iran has a hidden nuclear site, the State Department announced the start of a "direct dialogue" with Burma's hopeless junta. The administration has...]]> Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Delivering ObamaCare unto the world wasn't supposed to be this hard. Just how hard is obvious when the president of the United States does five Sunday talk shows of sequential shilling. The New York Times memorialized this low point for the office of the presidency by arranging on its front page five identical photographs of Mr. Obama with each anchorman sitting across from him like a can of Campbell's soup. Regard this as my order for the poster version of the Five Obamas.

Writing in these pages earlier in the month, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle suggested, as have other Democrats, that the country has been waiting for "national health reform" for 70 years. Seventy...]]> Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Delivering ObamaCare unto the world wasn't supposed to be this hard. Just how hard is obvious when the president of the United States does five Sunday talk shows of sequential shilling. The New York Times memorialized this low point for the office of the presidency by arranging on its front page five identical photographs of Mr. Obama with each anchorman sitting across from him like a can of Campbell's soup. Regard this as my order for the poster version of the Five Obamas.

Writing in these pages earlier in the month, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle suggested, as have other Democrats, that the country has been waiting for "national health reform" for 70 years. Seventy...]]> Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Shakespeare wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." As we know, that didn't happen. Four hundred years later, they're killing us with the smothering pillow of hyper-proceduralism. Now the lawyers are about to smother the war on terror.

This Monday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder named a special prosecutor to investigate persons who conducted the CIA's interrogations in the war on terror, Scotland's Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill stood before his parliament and gave this defense for releasing convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi:

"It was not based on political, diplomatic or economic considerations. . . . My decision was...]]> Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 To explain why the Obama health-care proposal pitched the nation's politicians into town-hall hell, we would like to call to the stand an expert on how things in life can sometimes go wrong-Mr. Billy Joel.

Using a song years ago to sort through the complexities of a relationship in trouble, the Piano Man repeated the same simple one-word truth: "It's a matter of trust."

Instead of whining about conspiracies, the average congressman getting yelled at this summer by his own constituents might ask: How come these people don't trust me?

The Democratic leadership and the progressive left think the town halls emerged from the electric fog of conservative talk shows, but...]]> Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Amid the hot town halls of August, one's mind keeps stumbling back to the astonishing presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Hadn't finished one term in the Senate, 47 years old, former community organizer, and he had the mighty Clinton political machine against the ropes.

The contest was electrifying. At one point the election got wilder than a night at the World Wrestling Federation. Obama had flattened Hillary in the South Carolina primary. Hillary's husband, unable to stand the hammering his wife was taking from the rookie, jumped over the turnbuckle and went upside Obama's head with the charge that his South Carolina primary victory resembled Jesse Jackson's wins in 1984 and...]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 A very long time ago, it was January. Barack Obama stood at the mountain top, bathed in the new light of a historic presidency and gazing down on a congressional lake afloat with contented Democrats. Those who spoke against him were vilified for not wanting this smart, vibrant president to "succeed." How could he fail? Eight months into his presidency, Mr. Obama may do just that-fail.

Back then, few would have argued persuasively that at the August recess the Obama plan to redraw the American health-care landscape could be at risk of failure, with Democratic Members of Congress going home to halls full of raving constituents.

Why is this happening now? Mr. Obama was clear...]]> Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Can Barack Obama talk his way onto Mount Rushmore? He might. In fact, if just half of what Mr. Obama has said that he, we or the world should do comes to pass, he's going straight to that mountain.

More than any U.S. president, The Speech is the primary vehicle of Barack Obama's politics. Web sites have been erected as shrines to his speeches. Obamaspeech.com offers the text of 100 Obama speeches back to 2002. The electronic library stops at January 2009, when the White House site takes over. Currently it's up to 36 pages listing the titles alone of the president's remarks and speeches.

Six months into his presidency, with more surely to come, it is an appropriate moment to...]]> Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In his speech on health care to the American Medical Association, President Obama explained why the U.S. has "failed" (yet again) to provide comprehensive reform that "covers everyone." He had a list of the failing people, who "simply couldn't agree" on reform: doctors, insurance companies, businesses, workers, others. And "if we're honest," he said (ergo, disagreeing with this is dishonest) we must add to the list "some interest groups and lobbyists" who have used "fear tactics."

It seems to me, if we're honest, that one other contributor to the health-care morass should have been on the president's list: Congress. Indeed a close reading of Mr. Obama's speech suggests he holds the...]]> Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Studebaker, Nash-Kelvinator, Packard, Hudson, Stutz, Pierce-Arrow, Stanley, Checker and American Motors were once household names of the U.S. auto industry. Unlike General Motors in our time, they were not too big to fail. Despite mergers and rescue efforts by their owners, each was shut down. Their legacy lives on as classic cars, restored with erotic affection by collectors.

GM's end is different. In the spirit of the new age, General Motors, like Citigroup and AIG, will be kept alive in an industrial coma. One has to ask: Is this where the entire country is headed? Since January, it looks like it is.

After GM's bondholders last weekend refused to answer the bell for...]]> Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In the year of our nation, 2005, "earmark," a term of trade known only to political technicians, became a household word. The Bridge to Nowhere, a mere outlay of $320 million in that year's $2.5 trillion federal budget, led to the decline and fall of the Republican Party. In 2006, a disgusted American electorate threw Republicans from office, and transferred House control to the Democrats.

When earlier this week President Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the fall, every account of the event noted the 800-pound contradiction in the room. Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before...]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Today is Holy Thursday for Christians and the start of Passover for Jews. This week was an opportune time for President Barack Obama to visit Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, which has been both a Byzantine church and Islamic mosque. In Turkey he spoke of seeking engagement with Islam based on "mutual respect."

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute criticized the Piketty-Saez study on these pages in October 2007. Whatever its merits, their "Top 1%" chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.

Turn to page five of Mr....]]> Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Barack Obama is proposing that the U.S. alter the relationship between the national government and private sector that was put in place by Ronald Reagan and largely continued by the presidencies of Bill Clinton and the Bushes. Then, the private sector led the economy. Now Washington will chart its course.

Mr. Obama was clear about his intention. "Our economy did not fall into this decline overnight," he said. Instead, an "era" has "failed" to think about the nation's long-term future. With the urgency of a prophet, he says the "day of reckoning has arrived." The president said his purpose is not to "only revive this economy."

In fact, people would probably coronate Mr. Obama...]]> Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 This, incidentally, is why Democratic economists claim to oppose using income-tax cuts to revive an economy. If one returns money to people in a large lump, as with a tax-rate reduction, they're likely to save rather than spend most of it. In other words, what would be revived is the long-dead American practice known as "thrift." Under current logic, that's bad.

Short-term economic stimulus, somewhat like a recreational drug, seeks an immediate "injection" of money into the economy, not the slow, steady drip of normal investment.

The Obama people keep telling audiences how "smart" their government is going to be, and Making Work Pay is a clever way to overcome humanity's...]]> Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Then after Tim Geithner scampered through the tax minefield and into a Cabinet seat, the Daschle tax bomb went off, laying open for public view the world of Washington's pay-for-favors that makes the average Wall Street banker look like Little Bo-Peep.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican refuseniks shot themselves in the foot by staying off the House stimulus package. Real wisdom holds that congressional Republicans should consider putting distance between themselves and anything Democratic just now. The party's crypts are opening.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with an apparently recession-proof cash hoard, is running radio ads against 28 House...]]> Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Every American absorbs the frontier experience from reading biographies of great Americans or from movies. Frederick Turner, however, made it clear that with this effort to transform the wilderness the Americans broke decisively with what he called, believe it or not, "old Europe." "Here is a new product," Turner wrote, "that is American."

"From the conditions of frontier life," Turner believed, "came [American] intellectual traits of profound importance . . . coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect...]]> Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

The political planets are aligned to make this achievable. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, prominent Democrats, European leaders in France and Germany and more U.S. newspaper articles...]]> Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 These rules have wasted the electorate's time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.

Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell's word, he is thought to be "transformational." One may hope so.

By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate's governing proposals,...]]> Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Call it Katrina Dysfunction Syndrome. The McCain camp should have seen the symptoms.

On Wednesday Sept. 24, Mr. McCain announced he was suspending his presidential campaign to return to Washington, likening the financial crisis to 9/11. Newt Gingrich praised the decision as akin to candidate Dwight Eisenhower's dramatic "I will go to Korea" speech in October 1952. Arriving in Washington, Gen. McCain quickly discovered that his troops in the Republican Congress were in disarray. Congressional Republicans hadn't really been led by anyone for at least a year. It was no surprise that the Paulson Plan, which indeed was controversial, broke the GOP into factions.

History in its...]]> Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 For behind it all sat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, running mortgage liquidity into the nation's neighborhoods like an open fire hydrant. Several years ago, when the Journal's editorial board met with Fannie Mae's top executives and pressed the issue of financial risks, we were told by way of ending the conversation that Fannie was merely fulfilling the "mandate of Congress" to spread home ownership across the land. Congress, of course, is a temple to moral hazard.

"Moral hazard" is an odd phrase. Its meaning isn't obvious though it does sound like something one ought to avoid. "Moral hazard" dates back hundreds of years in obscurity, but its use eventually settled inside the...]]> Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Once Mr. McCain picked Mrs. Palin as his running mate, he demoted "experience" and elevated a government "reform" message. It was the right thing to do. Presidential voters are ambivalent about Beltway-marinated senators like Mr. McCain and Joe Biden. John McCain's edge is his famous reputation as a reform maverick. So far, though, he is not casting his reform message in large enough terms.

Washington is arguably at its lowest ebb in the public mind since before World War II. Join that fact to Sarah Palin's personally gutsy and professionally strong reform credentials, and Mr. McCain has the chance to offer voters a reform presidency in historic terms.

Yes, the Obama campaign...]]> Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 When John McCain announced in Dayton, Ohio that his vice presidential running mate would be Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, he looked respectable but a little stiff -- a bit like his campaign. Then Sarah spoke. And after lying dormant across two years of presidential campaigning, the Republican faithful exploded.

It would be an exaggeration to say one had never seen anything like it, but the public take-up on the virtually unknown Alaskan governor was phenomenal.

Attribute the surge in the GOP base, if you wish, to Rush Limbaugh's concise Friday afternoon summary: "Sarah Palin: babies, guns, Jesus. Hot damn!" But even that probably won't get you 270 electoral votes.

The...]]> Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Jimmy Carter, the previous holder of the most mysterious candidate title, served four years as a reform governor in Georgia. Bill Clinton, though little known beyond Arkansas, was a governor for 12 years.

The U.S. presidency is a political office, and nearly all nominees for it had a record in politics to offer a basis for shaping a view of how they might conduct the nation's highest office.

By this most traditional of measures, the Obama candidacy is a leap of faith.

A New York Times article on his years at Harvard Law, where he was editor of the law review, said, "In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era,...]]> Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The New Russians now in Georgia are shaping a new world with rules based on the old Russian brutalisms. Their political instruments include the eternal silence of murder, routine energy-supply blackmail, and this week a revival of the massed-tank strategies of 1956 and 1968.

Deafening is the sound of scales falling from Western eyes, though it's worth noting how few commentaries about the post-Georgia reality have mentioned the wolves already inside the West -- the terror brigades of radical Islam. Iran's mullahs watch and wait; they'll grab the Gulf once it is clear the West won't resist. Soon?

There is an alternative to this dark opposition, whose goal is to displace the...]]> Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thus spake Sen. Barack Obama, b. 1961:

"There is no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton cannot deliver on. And part of it is generational. Sen. Clinton and others, they have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. And it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

Sen. Clinton "and others" would include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, various Senate and House Committee chairmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, and much of the Congressional Black Caucus whose political formation started and stopped in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Insofar as many of the people running Sen. Obama's own party...]]> Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500