Only his most sycophantic admirers might compare Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter with Winston Churchill, but the two do have something in common. Both had long and turbulent political careers, and both switched parties twice.
It's tough trying to please people who crave vengeance almost as much as Madame Defarge, the unsparing French revolutionary in Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities."
The balance between the executive and legislative branches in writing laws has changed over the centuries. In the 19th century, Sen. Stephen Douglas wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with President Franklin Pierce just an interested bystander.
As Barack Obama finishes up his second major foreign tour, a pattern in his approach to foreign policy seems to be emerging.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That's the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The "quants" who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.
If you have a long enough lever, you can move the world. That's an old saying attributed to Archimedes. But what Archimedes didn't add is that a long enough lever may splinter in your hands if the material is not strong enough. You may end up not moving the world where you wanted it to go and finding yourself in a position you didn't want to be in.
Barack Obama's foreign policy is beginning to take shape. Semantically, it's a sharp repudiation of the policies of the George W. Bush administration. In reality, it's something like a continuation of Bush policies. Or, if you want to distinguish between the allegedly confrontation-minded policies of Bush's first term and the more accommodationist policies of his second term -- a distinction that I think is exaggerated but has something to it -- then it's something like the second Bush term. With, of course, some differences.
Roadblocks. That's what Barack Obama has been encountering on the audacious path toward a European-style welfare state he has set out in his budget and other proposals.
The Obama administration's budget is full of proposals that threaten to weaken our staggering economy.
We've been hearing a lot of criticism of Barack Obama in recent days from pro-Obama corners -- from celebrity investor Warren Buffett, from moderate conservative columnist David Brooks, from one of the Democratic Party's deepest thinkers, William Galston -- all along the same lines.
"Animal spirits," said John Maynard Keynes, are the essential spring of capitalism. We depend on the animal spirits of investors, high earners and entrepreneurs for a growing economy.
On the last day of her trip to East Asia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke briefly of the place of human rights in American policy toward China. "Our pressing on those issues" -- issues she didn't identify any more fully -- "can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis."
All of America was watching Barack Obama on Jan. 20 as he promised to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." But few thought that, within a month, controversy would arise over the Constitution's census clause.
"Not since the Great Depression." "Not since the 1930s." You hear those phrases a lot these days, and with some reason. As Congress prepares to pass the Democratic stimulus package, it may be worthwhile to look back at Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and consider how well it worked as policy -- and politically.
Tuesday, Feb. 3, was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Barack Obama.
There's a debate going on in some Republican circles over which groups of the electorate the party should target.
Last Tuesday, for the 22nd time in 220 years, Americans saw the peaceful post-election transfer of power from one political party to another. In our great outdoor national ceremony, scheduled for some reason on a day that is as likely as any other to be the coldest of the year, Barack Obama took the oath as our 44thth president and spoke to the nation for 19 minutes in a speech that was far more somber than the mood of the crowd of 2 million on the Mall.
Evidence keeps accumulating that the tide of immigration is ebbing. Tough enforcement laws passed by states like Arizona and Oklahoma and localities like Prince William County, Va., have reportedly spurred Latino immigrants to move elsewhere.
As we approach the change from a Republican to a Democratic administration, I have been thinking about the differences in the basic character of our two historic parties -- the oldest and third oldest free political parties in the world (number two, at least by my count, is the British Conservative Party).
Barack Obama and his family are vacationing in his native Hawaii, far from the wintry snows of Chicago -- and far from almost every other American politician.
