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Charles Krauthammer writes on Bush and the historical perspective to come.
For the past 150 years, most American war presidents — most notably Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt — have entered (or reentered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George W. Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.
Indeed, the three presidential campaigns between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Sept. 11, 2001, were the most devoid of foreign policy debate of any in the 20th century. The commander-in-chief question that dominates our campaigns today was almost nowhere in evidence during our ’90s holiday from history.
When I asked President Bush during an interview Monday to reflect on this oddity, he cast himself back to early 2001, recalling what he expected his presidency would be about: education reform, tax cuts and military transformation from a Cold War structure to a more mobile force adapted to smaller-scale 21st-century conflict.
But a wartime president he became. And that is how history will both remember and judge him. …
David Warren has thoughts on the strengths of our culture when dealing with difficulties.
… Not Canada alone, but the English-speaking peoples flourished through the course of the last few centuries from a cultural inability to be carried away.
We recall the wartime accounts of the British under aerial attack, getting up each morning to go calmly about the business of clearing the latest mess. We recall the way in which our own parents and grandparents stolidly proceeded through the Great Depression. And we may wonder, practically, if the same qualities are still in us — or if, rather, we have lost our sang-froid.
Politicians cannot help us when times get very rough. The people themselves must be equal to the challenge. We must be ready to do our part, without whining; without indulging in self-pity, or engaging in the excitable sport of choosing scapegoats. The attitude must be that of my admired banker friend: “This has happened. We must deal with it.”
And deal with it in the knowledge that there are no more “quick fixes” now, than there ever were. It is the belief in quick fixes that created the problems. The world, to those who have any wisdom, is a place that repays diligent labour, when it gives any repayment at all; and routinely punishes those who shirk — together with everyone around them. …
David Leonhardt in the NY Times with his ideas on the origins.
… How did this happen? For one thing, the population of the United States (and most of the industrialized world) was aging and had built up savings. This created greater need for financial services. In addition, the economic rise of Asia — and, in recent years, the increase in oil prices — gave overseas governments more money to invest. Many turned to Wall Street.
Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.
“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”
Which might serve as a summary of how the current crisis came to pass. Wall Street traders began to believe that the values they had assigned to all sorts of assets were rational because, well, they had assigned them. …
Larry Sabato from UVA gives his take on the electoral college as it stands today.
In early summer, the Crystal Ball took its first look at the likely November 4th Electoral College map. Our assessment was that, in the College at least, the contest appeared close. John McCain had 174 solid or likely electoral votes to Barack Obama’s 200 solid or likely. The lead switched once we added in states that were “leaning” to one or the other: McCain had 227 votes to Obama’s 212, with 270 needed for election. Fully 99 electoral votes in eight other states (CO, MI, NH, NV, OH, PA, VA, and WI) remained in the toss-up category.
We based our map not just on current polling but also the recent historical record in presidential elections. To some degree, this explained the differences between our map and those of some other analysts. As we revise it in this essay, we will once again add a dose of history to current trends, and at least tentatively, we will attempt to narrow the number of toss-ups.
Just think about all that has happened since early July. Obama took his European trip, hailed in some quarters and condemned in others. The McCain campaign came alive for the first time in months, attacking Obama as “the biggest celebrity in the world” after his travels–a hint of the strategy that was to come. Polls narrowed between Obama and McCain, as Obama lost some of his earlier luster. The Democratic Convention in Denver temporarily revived Obama’s survey numbers, producing a small convention bounce, mainly on the strength of Obama’s closing night speech. Much of the rest of the week had been consumed by intrigue about what the Clintons would or would not do, and Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as Veep-nominee was met with general approval but no special enthusiasm. It avoided any controversy but was not, in the overused term of 2008, a “game changer.”
Then the presidential contest got its real shake-up. …
Rush Limbaugh calls Obama on his racist ads in the Hispanic community.
I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama — the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change — has gone where few modern candidates have gone before.
Mr. Obama’s campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering. …
John Fund with more on that ad.
Corner post on the subject also.
… The other thing to note about this episode is the force and speed with which Limbaugh responded. The moment the television ad was up, Rush began an effort to correct the record through his radio program, comments to reporters, and now his Journal editorial. It has succeeded, and an ad that was supposed to help Obama may well turn out to hurt him. As Limbaugh wrote, Barack Obama, in appealing to racial divisions, is playing with political dynamite. It is a very unfortunate turn for the candidate who once promised to be a unifying figure and source of civic and racial comity.
Barack Obama has tangled with the wrong fellow. There’s a reason Rush has been on top for two decades. This latest episode helps demonstrate why.
Steve Hayward says Sarah is a natural.
Lurking just below the surface of the second-guessing about Sarah Palin’s fitness to be president is the serious question of whether we still believe in the American people’s capacity for self-government, what we mean when we affirm that all American citizens are equal, and whether we tacitly believe there are distinct classes of citizens and that American government at the highest levels is an elite occupation.
It is incomplete to view the controversy over Palin’s suitability for high office just in ideological or cultural terms, as most of the commentary has done. Doubts about Palin have come not just from the left but from across the political spectrum, some of them from conservatives like David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will. Nor is this a new question. To the contrary, Palin’s ascent revives issues and arguments about self-government that raged at the time of the American founding and before. Indeed, the basic problems of the few and the many, and the sources of wisdom and virtue in politics, stretch back to antiquity.
American political thought since its earliest days has been ambiguous or conflicted about the existence and character of a “natural aristocracy” of governing talent. If the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are watching the storm over Palin, they must surely be revisiting their famous dialogue about America’s governing class. Adams’s widely misunderstood argument that there should perhaps be an explicit recognition and provision for an aristocratic class finds its reprise in the snobbery that greeted Palin’s arrival on the scene. It’s not just that she didn’t go to Harvard; she’s never been on Meet the Press; she hasn’t participated in Aspen Institute seminars or attended the World Economic Forum. She hasn’t been brought into the slipstream of the establishment by which we unofficially certify our highest leaders.
The issue is not whether the establishment would let such a person as Palin cross the bar into the certified political class, but whether regular citizens of this republic have the skill and ability to control the levers of government without having first joined the certified political class. But this begs an even more troublesome question: If we implicitly think uncertified citizens are unfit for the highest offices, why do we trust those same citizens to select our highest officers through free elections? …
Susan Estrich takes a look at Alaska’s “first dude.”
… There may be only one truly regular guy, a guy regular enough that he doesn’t begin to have the arrogance to believe he speaks for anyone other than himself, in this race. And therefore, of course, he does.
He is not fancy. He is not elite. He is not a single one of the things that Barack Obama has been criticized for. He is from a town even smaller than the one he grew up in. He was secure enough to marry a smart and ambitious girl, a girl he has always thought had great things in her.
A Beverly Hills dinner with 300 best friends at $28,500 apiece is not where you would ever place him, much less ever imagine him to be. The Democrat is the guy in Beverly Hills, as comfortable as he could be, even if he didn’t grow up there. He has the pedigrees. So does his wife. So does his opponent, and his opponent’s wife. So ultimately does a 36-year member of the Senate wherever he is from. It is the Republican guy who is real not rich, hard-working not fancy, so All Alaskan that he is in fact much more in touch with what he is, which is a whole lot easier for a very lot of he voters who are likely to decide this election. …