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We’ll devote a lot of our time to Bill Buckley. National Review editors first.
… When Buckley started National Review — in 1955, at the age of 29 — it was not at all obvious that anti-Communists, traditionalists, constitutionalists, and enthusiasts for free markets would all be able to take shelter under the same tent. Nor was it obvious that all of these groups, even gathered together, would be able to prevail over what seemed at the time to be an inexorable collectivist tide. When Buckley wrote that the magazine would “stand athwart history yelling, ‘Stop!’†his point was to challenge the idea that history, with a capital H, pointed left. Mounting that challenge was the first step toward changing history’s direction. Which would come in due course. …
William F. Buckley Jr. struggled with the pain and inconvenience of emphysema for years, but it was only when he broke a bone in his right hand — the hand he wrote with — earlier this month that the physical decline of a man who very much lived by words quickly accelerated. He sent out a note to a few close friends essentially saying that he knew the end was near.
That end came at the desk in his study yesterday morning, perhaps as Buckley was struggling to put the finishing touches on his latest project — a book on the president he helped bring to office that he planned to call “The Reagan I Knew.” That project was far enough along that it will no doubt be published posthumously. …
WSJ with a bunch of good quotes.
Mark Steyn Corner post.
Let’s cover some other items with the Captain. First, he posts on the NY Times smear and how it might have backfired.
The New York Times marks another milestone on its journey to National Enquirer status. The Gray Lady’s smear piece on John McCain got 66% of Rasmussen respondents believing that the paper deliberately trying to kneecap the Republican frontrunner. Only 22% think that the paper had clean motives in publishing the unsubstantiated gossip: …
Then the Times has decided to raise another McCain issue. This time whether he can run for president.
The staff at the New York Times has burned the midnight oil trying to find ways to derail John McCain’s campaign. After endorsing him in the primary, the paper then ran an unsubstantiated smear against him as a philanderer. Now they ask whether he is eligible for the office, given his birth in the Panama Canal zone while his father served the country: …
The Captain has also discovered Obama tipped the Canadians to his NAFTA bashing saying he wasn’t serious. Wink, wink. “It’s just for the rubes.”
Barack Obama has joined Hillary Clinton in trashing one of her husband’s major economic and diplomatic achievements on the stump. He has told Americans that he rejects NAFTA, the program that created a free-trade zone out of North America, hoping to ride protectionist fever to the White House. However, the man who runs as a different kind of politician has a different kind of message to Canadians about NAFTA:
Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned. …
Tony Blankley on how Obama might be beaten.
Republicans owe Hillary our gratitude. She has road-tested several versions of attacks on Obama that don’t work. Obviously, and first, don’t come out against change and hope — the perennial themes of successful election campaigns. In 1984, even my old boss Ronald Reagan campaigned for re-election in response to the claim that America needed to change, on the words: “We ARE the change,” as well as on the hopeful theme of “morning in America.”
If a candidate is not for change, he is not for us. It has been almost two centuries since Prince von Metternich gained the first ministry of the Hapsburg’s Austrian empire by assuring the emperor that his administration consciously would avoid any “innovation.”
Nor will Americans ever vote for presidential candidates based on what the candidates have done for us already. In American politics, gratitude is always the lively expectation of benefits yet to come. The question is always, What will you do for us tomorrow? Americans will not give Sen. McCain the White House because we are grateful for his heroism 40 years ago at the Hanoi Hilton. We are grateful, and he was heroic. Americans might gladly vote for him to receive a medal, or even an opulent retirement home, but not the presidency.
Beyond these obvious points, Republicans should learn from Hillary’s campaign that Obama is remarkably adept at ridiculing the old style of campaigning. …