The Washington Times

Now seems to be the point in the epic duel for the GOP presidential nomination at which those who make it their business to analyze and interpret elections are throwing up their hands in confusion, and throwing themselves on the mercy of an electorate whose behavior has regularly confounded them. Although I have more than a few bruises from erroneous predictions this year, the course of events has been anything but chaotic. Let us review.

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The Washington Times

In most presidential primary contests, a Democratic consultant once observed to me, there is a moment at which the front-runner stumbles and is vulnerable to being taken down – provided his opponent has the vision to see the moment and how to act when it arrives, as well as the resources to do the job. That challengers take down front-runners only once in a blue moon is testimony to how rare this combination is.

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The Washington Times

There are, let’s face it, a number of Republicans who can’t stand John McCain and are very unhappy about the prospect of a runaway train delivering the GOP nomination to him. Now, in any campaign, especially a competitive one, political passions are going to run high. But the specific character of the antipathy toward Mr. McCain is worth looking into.

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The Wall Street Journal

The end of the Steve Forbes campaign came only after many jokes among the cognoscenti about the candidate’s profligacy with the family fortune and about the Forbes 2000 staff’s ceaseless barrage of news releases about their man’s progress. Some were beyond parody: “November 08, 1999 — forbes endorsed by two-time buchanan republican convention delegate.”

But the Forbes campaign is not just the story of a wealthy man with ambitions out of proportion to realistic expectations. It also marks the end of a chapter in American politics.

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The Washington Times

Al Gore actually beat Bill Bradley rather narrowly in New Hampshire. But thanks to the nuclear warhead that went off on the GOP side, the vice president escaped most of the damage that Mr. Bradley’s show of continuing viability might have caused.

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The Washington Times

It’s hard to imagine a mightier blow to the Republican establishment than the one John McCain delivered in New Hampshire Tuesday. We now have a real and surprising experiment under way – whether a party establishment actually does have a decisive say in who wins the party’s nomination.

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View this article at Policy Review, February/March 2000

IMPEACHMENTS HAVE BEEN sufficiently rare in our national political life to make generalizing about them a risky undertaking. Granted, too, the proximity of the impeachment and acquittal of President Clinton and the still-raw feelings it engendered may have led us to a heightened concern with the subject in general, perhaps inflating out of due proportion the importance of impeachment in American history.

Yet Clinton’s impeachment by the House followed by the Senate’s unwillingness to remove him is one of four cases, each involving impeachment and acquittal, that can fairly be called epic confrontations, both politically and constitutionally. In the details of these four cases — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1804, Judge James Hawkins Peck in 1830, President Andrew Johnson in 1868, and President Clinton in 1999 — lies a tale of lasting significance broader even than the tumultuous issues that came out as these impeachments unfolded.

In these four spectacular clashes, a fascinating pattern presents itself. It is the story of how resort to the Constitution’s ultimate sanction became inextricably entangled with one or another law that was itself fundamentally suspect constitutionally. These laws amounted to grave extra-constitutional disturbances to a carefully wrought constitutional system based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It was these disturbances around which sentiment for removal gathered in the first place — only to dissipate in the end.

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The Washington Times

New Hampshire is a state that, more often than not, behaves like a good, respectable citizen in deciding the winners in the nation’s first presidential primaries. The esteem in which these flinty “independent-minded” New Englanders are held has to do first and foremost with their ability to sort out the field and pick the winners. Bob Dole, running for the Republican nomination in 1996, took occasion to observe that the winning Republican in New Hampshire would end up the nominee. He based that statement on New Hampshire voters’ perfect record from 1968 to 1992 in bestowing victory upon the man who would go on to win the Republican nomination.

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