Citizens for Global Solutions — Panel on July 17, 2009

Click here to view full panel: http://globalsolutions.org/icc_hill_briefing_july17th

Weekly Standard
February 9, 2009

The singular advantage of being in the opposition is that the majority has to make the first move, and unlike chess, going first conveys no advantage the majority doesn’t already enjoy. What was striking last week about the House’s consideration of the stimulus package was the glimpse it offered of a potentially valuable political strategy for Republicans. Call it “Triangulation II”–the GOP effort to gain advantage by dividing Democrats in Congress from President Obama.

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Weekly Standard
September 22, 2008

Historians looking back on these tumultuous times will no doubt argue over the precise date on which the Age of Palin began. Her speech at the Republican National Convention on September 3 certainly catapulted her to national renown. But there is a good case to be made for her introductory appearance in Dayton, Ohio, five days before.

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Weekly Standard
September 10, 2007

The sequence of events leading to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, per media reports, goes like this:

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The Weekly Standard

There’s no obvious way to measure such a thing, but as a matter of intuition, you’d have to say that the most hated people in America today are sensible Democrats. The hard-core partisans of the Democratic left have never had a bigger megaphone than they now have on the Internet, and while they are united in the view that George W. Bush is public enemy No. 1, with Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove alternating in the No. 2 slot, what really pumps up the volume is any sign of deviationism on their own side.

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The Weekly Standard

A miniflap recently broke out over a Politico item about a July 9 memo to “Interested Parties” from Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist. Penn’s memo was definitely designed to foster an impression of growing Clinton strength. Politico’s Ben Smith went a step farther in his characterization of the memo, however, saying it implied a Clinton victory was “inevitable.” Penn and Co. disavowed that characterization, and Smith subsequently took out the quotation marks he’d put around “inevitable” in his original post. Thus did the Clinton campaign find itself in the enviable position of having established its humility while pressing the immodest line that the candidate’s “electoral strength has grown in the last quarter and she is better positioned today than ever before to become the next President of the United States.”

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The Weekly Standard

Prague
In January 2005, George W. Bush delivered what will surely go down as one of the most ambitious inaugural addresses in presidential history. He pledged the United States to “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny” in the world through the promotion of “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.” In other words, he proposed the eradication of the most consistently recurring character in politics since its misty origins in prehistory, the dictator or ruler or strongman.

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The Weekly Standard

Three weeks ago, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Bush administration’s firing of several U.S. attorneys and did so to bad reviews even from conservatives, most of official Washington figured he was a goner. When President Bush stepped out at the end of the day to say a good word for his embattled AG, the general reaction was that Bush had demonstrated yet again how out of touch he is.

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What the world needs now. 

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For years now, the political science literature has been exploring the phenomenon of the “democratic peace,” according to which, to state it in its bluntest form, democracies do not go to war with one another. It’s not that democracies are pacifist by nature. Democratic countries, acting alone or in concert, do go to war with nondemocratic countries from time to time, for example the United States and others against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and NATO against former Yugoslavia over the attempted ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

Moreover, the record of peace among democracies is not without its asterisks. As the neorealist scholar Kenneth N. Waltz has noted, Germany on the eve of the First World War was, by the standards of the day, “democratic.” German “militarism” in the late 19th century was not an authoritarian imposition on the German people but something they and their elected representatives supported–as indeed going to war in 1914 was popular in Britain as well. Reclassifying a country as “nondemocratic” because it has chosen to make war on a democracy is a temptation to which the “democratic peace” thesis may give rise.

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A self-help plan for the GOP. 

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PATHETIC REPUBLICANS, who can save you now? With all due respect to Ming the Merciless and all due deference to Sen. John McCain’s pending arrival on a Hawk-man rocket cycle in 2008, the answer is that Republicans can, and are going to have to, save themselves. To do that, what’s required is frank acknowledgment that the national majority that brought them to congressional power in 1994 is a thing of the past–no longer there, or no longer theirs.

The wave that gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in 40 years was truly national in reach and scope. You could see its effect in every region of the country, though of course it was at its strongest in the South, where the last redoubts of the yellow-dog Democrats were being overrun.

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