The Washington Times

The Politico, the new Web site specializing in Washington political coverage, may or may not be the wave of the future. But it is trying to crack through an odd wall that has spontaneously sprung up between media new and old.

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The Washington Times

Several strands of conventional wisdom are gathering into an early narrative line on the 2008 presidential race. That being the case, it’s not too early to start picking them apart. 

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The Washington Times

No surprise, but Democrats on Capitol Hill and most everywhere else have checked out on Iraq, and they’re taking a few Republicans with them. Some people like to say that we can succeed in Iraq only if we have broad bipartisan agreement on the way forward. But the only way to obtain broad bipartisan agreement now would be for the Bush administration to acquiesce in the majority Democratic view that Iraq has been such a disaster that success is now impossible and the thing to do is get out as soon as practical.     

Thus the bipartisan agreement required for success depends on shared acceptance of the inevitability of failure. In other words, President Bush is on his own.    

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The Washington Times

President Bush has apparently decided that he wants one more chance to win this war. Likely, he will get it, but there will be a price: The sole proprietor of Iraq policy starting tomorrow will be the president himself.  

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The Washington Times

It’s not every politician who gets to write the headline for his own obituary. Usually, the sense of self required for the pursuit and attainment of high public office leads to an irresistible tendency to overstate, even if this occasionally expresses itself as transparently phony humility. Yet Gerald R. Ford was someone whom history has judged to have got himself exactly right with the title of his autobiography, “A Time to Heal.”    

The two and a half years of his presidency were not, in the end, his own. He had never sought — let alone been elected to — national office. The genuine legitimacy he possessed as president was not a product of the electorate’s judgment of him but of its faith in the constitutional process that brought him to power after first Spiro Agnew and then Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.

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