The Washington Times

This has been a good year for taking stock of the state of the political system. The reason is that this has been a year of major political change, as drastic as our politics gets, with the Democrats taking charge of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Times of change are good for a reckoning because times of quiet and stasis can be misleading. Specifically, people begin to attribute the mere continuation of the status quo for perfectly ordinary reasons to supposedly new structural characteristics governing outcomes. And then they waste a lot of time trying to remedy the deficiencies of the new structure, rather than getting back to basics.

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The Washington Times 

Not that they are in any other respect comparable, but Iraq and the Clinton health care reform effort of 1993-94 are politically comparable in that each precipitated the loss of control of Congress by the party of the president. Politically speaking, they were both the product of great ambition, the repository of the fondest hopes of each administration for fundamental policy change that would remake their respective policy areas in a fundamental way, and thus provide a lasting legacy for the administration.

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The Washington Times 

A literary agent once told me that when you are trying to sell a book to a publisher, you should always keep in mind that it’s not really the book you’re selling; it’s the idea of the book. Your objective is to get people excited about what’s to come. The finished book, even if it’s a very good book, ought to be almost anti-climactic. Otherwise, you haven’t managed to get people as excited as you should have in the first place.    

In this respect, indeed only in this respect, the report of the Iraq Study Group was exemplary. The idea that a bipartisan council of eminent persons would take an unvarnished look at
Iraq and offer their collective wisdom on a fresh approach to extricate ourselves from our troubles was one whose time had come.     

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The Washington Times 

RIGA, Latvia. –At the Riga airport on the way to a German Marshall Fund-sponsored conference running parallel to the biannual NATO summit, a German friend asked me what I thought George W. Bush would say in the speech he was scheduled to give. I said I thought he had better give a “values” speech. My interlocutor replied, “then we’re in big trouble.” 

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