Diane and I were talking recently about how the incumbent President, Joseph Biden, has seemed to do relatively little campaigning for his Vice President, Kamala Harris. We both agree on that observation, but we had different interpretations. My initial thought was, "Maybe Joe is grumpy. Yes, he has supported her and done everything he had to as a party guy, but he was dumped over and may be ticked off." Diane thought this must be wrong. The reason is more likely not that he is grumpy about campaigning but that she and her team have decided he is more a liability than an asset on the trail. Whatever. Looking at this from a broader PoV. Harris is in a familiar position in US presidential history. She cannot seem to be disloyal to the incumbent president whose mantle she has inherited -- nor can she present herself as a mere acolyte. She has to be both her own woman and a loyal party gal. It is easy to get this wrong. George H.W. Bush ...
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Justice O'Connor has passed away. May she rest in peace. My first thought upon hearing of this sad event was about the CASEY decision in 1992, and about how this looks in retrospect. Casey came just as a twelve-year period of continuous Republican occupation of the White House was ending. Clinton won the election that year -- before then, Reagan and the elder Bush had been President, and it was widely believed that they had put enough Federalist Society types on the High Court to ensure that ROE v. WADE was going to be overturned. Yet Casey surprised people. Not only was ROE not overturned, what the court called its "essential holding" was specifically retained. This was due to the emergence of a "centrist bloc" consisting of Antony Kennedy, David Souter, and ... Sandra Day O'Connor. Although their decisive opinion in CASEY was put out as a joint opinion -- no one author among the three -- O'Connor was the one of the three with the greatest seniorit...
John Hinckley, the man who sought to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, has been granted unconditional release from his psychiatric confinement by a federal judge. If all goes as expected, Hinckley will be leaving where he chooses, coming and going as he pleases, as of June 2022, forty years after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a jury in Washington D.C. Hinckley was born in May 1955 to a wealthy family in the oil business. He was not yet 26, then, when he shot and severely injured President Reagan and three other people -- a police officer, a secret service agent, and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady. Hinckley was infatuated with the actress Jodie Foster, best known at the time for the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which it is precisely infatuation with Jodie Foster’s character (as above) that causes the character played by Robert De Niro to attempt a political assassination. Hinckley wrote Foster a letter,...
I think if the Democratic Party nominates Biden, they are looking at a loss. This election would end up looking like 1984. Biden has a lot in common with Walter Mondale, who of course defeated a large field of other primary candidates in the period 1983–84 and then lost in the fall as Reagan cruised to re-election. The Democratic Party’s best chance is for this cycle to end up looking NOT so much like ‘84, but more like ‘76. Remember, the Dems also had a large field in ’75 - ‘76. The candidate who emerged from that field was NOT an old familiar figure (not Muskie or Humphrey), but someone who had been utterly unknown to most of the country until the campaigning had gotten underway — Jimmy Carter. Who then defeated Gerald Ford in the general election. The Democrats need a fresh face to emerge from their large field, and then they need to come together behind that fresh face. Tulsi Gabbard (portrayed above) might pull off the Carter role.
I used to believe there was an enduring 30 year cycle in the history of the US which became especially evident in presidential politics. Four years ago I abandoned that belief in the face of what seemed clear Popperian falsification. Now I'm wondering if I have to go home again, in a conceptual sense. The 30 year idea included the view that there is a general drift of reform in our history in which each train of reform runs out of steam as its central figures age, get tired, and fall out into competing factions. When that train has lost forward momentum, there is a strong counter-reform move. I don't remember what the term for this is. Let's call it the Rightward Shove for now. The second election of Grover Cleveland to the Presidency, in 1892, was such a shove. Never mind now just in what respects. The next Rightward Shove after that came in 1920 , bringing in Harding and bringing an end to the Progressive Era. The next Shove after that ... 1952 , Eisenhow...
Hillary Clinton's recent misstatement about the early days of the AIDS epidemic and her effort to give the Reagans' some credit for a sensible reaction, in order to make nice at Nancy Reagan's funeral, inspired me to go back over the period. Here is a timeline of some pertinent events, without unnecessary editorializing. June 1981: Reports of clusters of Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis carini pneumonia in New York and California. Clusters involved gay men, later in the year clusters cases involving users of IV drugs appeared. In the following years, the presence of haemophiliac-patients among the victims will become clear. April 13, 1982: Rep. Henry Waxman convenes the first Congressional hearings on these deaths. July 1982: Somebody coins the term "AIDS" for what is going on. March 1983: CDC mentions a clustering of cases of AIDS among Haitians. May 1983: Scientists in France gave a name to a virus there, LAV. July 1983: San Francisco Gener...
For a long time, I thought of US politics in terms of a 30 year cycle. I thought of this as the "short cycle" of two, for I also had and still have a long cycle theory. But the short cycle was specifically keyed to Presidential election, so it manifested itself in 32 or 28 year intervals (since 30 is not divisible by four). Pursuant to the short cycle theory I compared President Obama's election in 2008 to the election of other relatively obscure figures who carried on the impetus of a reform movement past its prime. A haberdasher in 1948 was elected as the last hurrah for the New Deal. Four years later he bowed out, letting Adlai Stevenson take the fall for Eisenhower's victory. Twenty eight years after 1948 brings us to 1976, when a peanut farmer became President as a final upsurge of New Frontier/Great Society liberalism. Four years later he was mugged by an Ayatollah on the way to defeat by Ronald Reagan. Thirty-two years from 1976 brings us t...
The headline of this blog entry is "Preserver and Rebel." I deliberately don’t say “conservative” or “liberal” or “right” or “left.” Preserver and rebel have fairly obvious (and obviously relative) meanings, such that for example President Ford was a preserver within the Republican Party of themed 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was a rebel. Nothing very complicated or controversial so far I hope. The preserver often has a case. And when he does it is always the same case. Whatever he wants to preserve, he is willing in order to do so to lock out some interests and disdain some passions. The reasons always come down to this: those interests and passions are (a) inconsistent with the existing social equilibrium, and (b) we can not now see our way clear to a better one. But each passion has its champion, and the collective pressure of them helps make way (whether they as individuals wanted this or not is irrelevant) to a broader, more tolerant, equilibrium later. ...
David Stockman, who decades ago served as President Reagan's budget director, he of the "Trojan horse" gaffe, has written a wonderful brief essay on the latest move by the European Central Bank, which has jumped pumped one trillion new euros into circulation with a mammoth bond-buying program. Trillion. With a "t". This has all the looks of a desperation move to keep together a single-Eurozone system where the centrifugal forces are powerful. Here is Stockman's take on it. Charlatan of the Apparatchiks . Stockman introduces the graph above, which shows Europe's consumer price index since 1990. There has been a good deal of talk about how the ECB's dramatic move is necessary to slay the monster of "deflation." But as you can see below, that isn't much of a dragon worth slaying. The lowest the CPI has gotten since 1990 was -0.5, a mark it hit only once, briefly, in 2009. Then it quickly rose back to 3% and has fallen since, fo...
I've annoyed a semi-famous person. I'm stoked. Bruce Bartlett is a veteran Republican guru -- and, often, a staffer for successful Republican politicians. He was a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan, and a senior policy analyst in the White House under George H.W. Bush. Since leaving the White House, he's been known largely as a pundit and scold in intra-Republican matters. He is the author for example of IMPOSTER (2006), a broadside at what he saw as the ruinous policies of Bush the younger. Bartlett since has built something of a reputation as a pundit engaged chiefly in those intra-Republican battles. He is unhappy in particular with certain libertarian institutions and websites. This is where I enter the picture. Soon after 9 AM Tuesday morning (all my times here will be eastern time), Bartlett tweeted "Ron Paul's favorite website attacks the transcontinental railroad. Way to stay relevant, guys." This was a reference to something on ...
I don't have anything much to say about the impending sequestration, but if that's what you're into, I'll offer some links. We can always start with what a reference work says: Auburn University . But it might be more amusing to listen to what Maria Bartiromo, the Money Honey, thinks about it all: Click here . As a reminder, the subjects of discussion are across-the-board budget cuts designed to serve as a Monster (as a recent piece in Slate explained it) to scare both parties into coming to an agreement to do something important but less monstrous. The New York Times has focused on delays in air travel . That reminds me of the good old days. The early 1980s, when a new and jelly bean consuming president faced a job action from traffiuc controllers. PATCO is long gone , but air traffic controllers may be happy to see themselves in the news in a sympathetic light. Historic resonances aside, some observers just don't see the sequestration 'monster...
The Hon. Robert Bork (1927 - 2010) passed away on December 19. He had been a Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit from 1982 to 1988. Bork had been put on the DC Circuit largely as a stepping-stone, but he never got to take the next intended step. The Reagan administration thought of him from the start as a Supreme Court candidate. And it is as such that he achieved his most intense moment in the spotlight, during the confirmation fight of 1987. I have written of that fight, and of Bork, at some length, specifically in chapter 9 of my book, THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE SUPREME COURT. I won't repeat myself unduly here. I'll simply say that among the various obituaries, paying tribute or otherwise, that I have read in recent days I have to give pride of place to one by Jeff Greenfield. Who is Greenfield? He has been an [at least somewhat] left-of-center political commentator for decades. He was a speechwriter for Senator Robert Kenn...