RealClearPolitics Articles

While pundits on all sides parse the closely fought 2020 election results, one result is clear: Democracy won. At least 150 million Americans voted. Of America’s voting-age population, 72% cast a ballot—the highest voter turnout since 1900, when President William McKinley defeated the populist orator William Jennings Bryan.  But, since then, voter turnout has steadily declined, dropping below 54% in 2012. In 2016, the United States ranked near the bottom (30th out of 35) of developed countries in voter participation. In...

Say what you will about 2020, but it’s undoubtedly a time of reinvention. As an election collides with a pandemic, protests, and riots, it would be easy to summarize it all as chaos. But any keen observer -- or “Game of Thrones” fan knows -- chaos isn’t always a pit. Sometimes, it’s a ladder. So, the question is: Which decaying institutions or dead ideas should we discard, and which should we reinvigorate? America’s welfare state jumps off the page. The pandemic has revealed just how rigid and costly our complex web of public housing, food stamps, Medicaid,...

With the Pentagon's announcement that U.S. forces in Afghanistan will be cut in half -- to 2,500 -- by inauguration day, after 19 years, it appears the end to America's longest war may be in sight. The Pentagon also announced a reduction of U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 2,500 by mid-January. In 2003, we invaded and occupied Iraq to remove a perceived threat from Saddam Hussein and to disarm that nation of weapons of mass destruction we discovered it did not have. No WMD were ever found, and the war George W. Bush launched to find and destroy them has been called the greatest strategic blunder...

Hassan Nemazee was a swaggering New York financier and A-list fundraiser for Democratic candidates. He was Hillary Clinton’s national finance chairman in 2008 and raised millions of dollars for Barack Obama’s first run at the  presidency. Nemazee was also a joint-venture partner with financial powerhouses AIG and J.P. Morgan and served on the boards of prestigious organizations including the Asia Society.  Then he made a series of mistakes...

Good morning, it’s Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, the day of the week when I reprise an instructive or inspirational quotation. Today’s comes from a onetime moderate Republican (remember them?) who turns 64 years old today. I’m talking about actress Bo Derek, who shares a birthday with a slightly older gentleman, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the man in line to become the oldest president in American history. Happy birthday, Mr. President-elect. In a moment, I’ll have Ms. Derek’s quotation, which concerns politics -- and relates indirectly to one of the greatest challenges facing...

Amid the fire and fury of Rudy Giuliani’s raucous, 90-minute press conference Thursday laying out President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor famous for busting the mob in the 1980s, declined to offer an opinion on one very substantive question: Does he think the American election system is so rigged and Trump supporters are so mistrustful of the election process that federal authorities should monitor the two Georgia Senate runoffs set for Jan. 5? “I can’t say what’s going to be done about it....

Beads of sweat -- mixed with what looked like hastily applied hair dye to create twin rivers of brackish perspiration -- trickled down both sides of Rudy Giuliani’s face as the president’s increasingly frenetic lawyer argued Thursday that his client had been robbed. In alleging that the presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump, the former New York mayor even acted out a scene from the 1992 comedy “My Cousin Vinny.” Hours later, with charts and graphs and a characteristically calm demeanor, the vice president of the United States led another press...

In the classic movie “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone travels to a small restaurant in the Bronx to meet with a rival Mafia boss. At the table the boss tells a corrupt policeman who is there to serve as a third-party witness that he is going to “speak to Michael in Italian.” In the movie they switch languages to keep the policeman in the dark. So I’m going to speak “Georgian,” not to keep anyone out, but to hopefully add context to two situations that the media has been conflating. First the recount. Despite assertions by Secretary of State Brad...

ATLANTA (AP) — A hand tally of ballots cast in Georgia for the presidential race has been completed, and it affirms Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead over Republican President Donald Trump, according to results released Thursday by the secretary of state’s office. The Associated Press declared Biden the winner of Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes on Thursday, after the hand count confirmed the former vice president leads Trump by roughly 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million counted. The complete hand recount stemmed from an audit required by a new state law and...

Because of Donald Trump, Vice President Joe Biden thundered during the campaign, the U.S. "is more isolated in the world than we've ever been ... America First has made America alone." Biden promised to repair relations with America's allies. And he appears to have gone some distance to do so in the congratulatory phone call he received from Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan. According to Suga, during the brief call, Biden said Article V of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty of 1960 covers the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, islands Japan controls but China claims as its...

Last week, on my syndicated radio program, I told my listeners that even though there was probably fraud in the election, it would not be enough to overcome the margin of Joe Biden's victory. Joe Biden is President-elect. I think there probably were some acts of fraud. In Pennsylvania, however, President Donald Trump's legal team has abandoned their fraud claims. In Georgia, while new votes have been discovered, it is not enough to overcome the margin of Joe Biden's victory. In Michigan, Biden's victory is over 147,000 votes, and the fraud claims as alleged amounted to only around 1000 votes...

For some unexplainable reason, conservatives rush towards fratricide with the same kind of urgency that drives lemmings over the edge of the cliff. It’s what they do, even when it's counterproductive and costly. Conservatism was not made better off by the four-year campaign waged against Speaker Newt Gingrich by some House conservatives who considered him ideologically unreliable. It was not helped by John Boehner’s premature departure from Congress, brought about by the continual political headaches caused by House Republicans on his right flank who branded him an establishment...

Among the most surprising of the multiple surprising results in this election was California's rejection of Proposition 16. The ballot measure was supported by the Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature; by long-established corporations and Silicon Valley tech firms; by leaders of mainline churches and nonprofit organizations. Some $20 million was spent on its behalf and only $1 million in opposition. Yet it lost by a solid margin of 57% to 43% in a state that voted 64% for Joe Biden. Why? Because Californians, like most other Americans, don't like racial discrimination....

The investigative journalists over at The Daily Beast report that Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina Republican who will soon become the youngest member of Congress in American history, "has admitted he tried to convert Jews and Muslims to Christianity." So what? As a Jew, I've had several Christian friends try to turn me toward Jesus -- Lutherans, Catholics and Evangelicals. Though denominations seem to adopt different philosophies on how best to proselytize in a secular world, they have all been exceptionally polite about it. I assume that they wouldn't be very good Christians if they...

One of the most memorable scenes in the "Hunger Games" books and movies is when the poor kids from the outer districts take the train into the glimmering capital. There they see affluence and decadence completely foreign to them in their poor, hyperregulated homelands. It's all fiction, of course, but it's not too far from what we are actually seeing in coronavirus-ridden America 2020. In case after case, we are seeing public officials completely flout the rules they are imposing on their own constituents. It's never been clearer that we are devolving into some sort of tiered society with...

Good morning, it’s Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020. Sometime overnight, this country passed a grim milestone: More than 250,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19. Although this is nowhere near the death toll from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, which claimed an estimated 675,000 lives in an America one-third as populous as today, this coronavirus pandemic is the most profound health tragedy of my lifetime. And although effective vaccines have been developed in record time, an estimated 50 million people around the world are already infected, 20% of them in the United States. In other...

ATLANTA (AP) — Move over, Iowa. Step aside, New Hampshire. Georgia would like a few moments of presidential campaign time. The state has fast become a stage for the cast of possible Republican presidential candidates after President Donald Trump’s defeat. Even as votes are still being tallied in the last election, Georgia’s two high-profile Senate contests are drawing top GOP politicians to the state to campaign, network and raise their profiles. Too soon? Not for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who arrived in Georgia last week to rally Republicans behind Senate...

In Pennsylvania, many Republicans are skipping the political autopsy of Donald Trump’s narrow presidential loss to Joe Biden – still contested in court by the president’s team – and celebrating the party’s resurgence in down-ballot races. Before Election Day, the state GOP’s electoral prospects seemed unclear, but then Pennsylvanians – again showing their mercurial voting patterns – delivered for Republican incumbents and candidates, particularly those with centrist views. “It was sort of the anti-wave election in Pennsylvania,” said...

Where has the coronavirus gone? Nowhere. The pandemic has gained a second wind, even as it is mysteriously scarcer in post-election headlines. If anything, COVID-19 seems more contagious as cold temperatures arrive, people stay in indoors and perhaps their vitamin D levels taper off. Whatever one's views on the virus -- whether it remains an existential threat or, contrarily, prompts overreactive lockdowns that are more harmful and maybe even deadlier than the virus itself -- nothing much has changed since Election Day. Or did viral perceptions suddenly change? The pandemic certainly no...