The Democrats' Strategy Against John McCain

Via DailyKos.

Update (3/10/08): The Democrats get their wish.

[continue reading...]

Jenna Bush Calls the President and First Lady on Live TV

[continue reading...]

Why Can't Ron Paul Come Up With Something This Good?

David All alerts us to another anonymous, online political ad. Following the example set by Patrick Ruffini, since the ad wasn't on YouTube, I uploaded it there:



The ad's argument: As many others have pointed out, electing Hillary Clinton president would be strikingly similar to giving George W. Bush a third term. Ergo, vote for a real change candidate: Mike Bloomberg.

Headline explanation here.

[continue reading...]

The Daily Digest

1. Ruth Marcus comes to Anita Hill's defense against Clarence Thomas:

First, Hill did not wait 10 years to complain about his behavior. Susan Hoerchner, a Yale Law School classmate of Hill's, described how she complained of sexual harassment while working for Thomas, saying the EEOC chairman had "repeatedly asked her out . . . but wouldn't seem to take 'no' for an answer." Ellen Wells, a friend, said Hill had come to her, "deeply troubled and very depressed," with complaints about Thomas's inappropriate behavior. John Carr, a lawyer, said that Hill, in tears, confided that "her boss was making sexual advances toward her." American University law professor Joel Paul said Hill had told him in 1987 that she had left the EEOC because she had been sexually harassed by her supervisor.

Second, Hill was not the only former subordinate of Thomas's with complaints. Former EEOC employee Angela Wright described how Thomas pressured her to date him, showed up uninvited at her apartment and asked her breast size. "Clarence Thomas would say to me, 'You know you need to be dating me. . . . You're one of the finest women I have on my staff," Wright told Senate investigators.

2. John Dickerson highlights the incurious mind of George W. Bush:

In his new book, former Mexican President Vicente Fox calls Bush "the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life." A recently released recorded conversation with former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar confirms that. "I'm an optimist because I believe that I'm right," Bush says about going to war with Iraq. "I'm a person at peace with myself." Self-confidence is now a warning sign for myopia, insulation, and the inability to accurately assess the world around you.

3. Harold Meyerson rails against Bush's veto of S-CHIP:

Bush fears that expanding health care for children from uninsured families who can't afford to buy insurance on their own . . . would enable some families, as he put it at a news conference last month, collectively to "move millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care". . . .

By the same logic, no more public schools should be built in well-off communities.

[continue reading...]

The Problem of Vetoing S-CHIP

Time contextualizes the p.r.:

The president who has famously never vetoed a spending bill is suddenly concerned with an increase that amounts to 2.4% of the $933 billion budget he requested for fiscal 2008. The man who created the $140 billion Medicare prescription drug program is threatening to veto a bill that would grow state children's health care programs by $35 billion. And out of the blue Bush is suddenly talking entitlement reform again, two years after his push to overhaul Social Security died.

[continue reading...]

Rove on Bush via Gerson

Michael Gerson interviews Karl Rove about "Bushism," of which Rove, like Gerson himself, is "the most serious, tireless advocate":

Rove argues that Republicans win as activist reformers, in the tradition of Lincoln, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. "We were founded as a reformist party," he said in our conversation this week, "not to be against something, but to help the little guy get ahead." The models he cites are 401(k)s and the mortgage interest deduction—government policies that encouraged individual wealth and ownership. Then Rove spent several minutes describing, with wonkish delight, the momentum and virtues of health savings accounts, a Bush-era innovation allowing individuals to save tax-free for routine medical expenses.

The activist use of government to help individuals get ahead may not sound controversial. Among Republicans, it is. In the 1996 presidential election, Dole's domestic message focused on the limits and flaws of the federal government—he talked endlessly of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which constrains federal power in favor of the states. In 2000, Bush's main domestic proposal concerned the use of federal power to catalyze state education reform—a head-snapping contrast.

Related: "The Compassionate Conservatism of George W. Bush."

[continue reading...]

Pot Does Not a Criminal Make

Until recently, Barack Obama, Al Gore, George W. Bush and Michael Bloomberg could not have landed a job at the FBI.

Now, recognizing the reality that sometime illegal drug use does not make you a criminal, the house that Hoover built has stopped disqualifying applicants who have toked up more than 15 times or tried other illegal narcotics more than five times.

[continue reading...]

The Compassionate Conservatism of George W. Bush

As synopsized by his former chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson:

[F]rom the earliest days of the nomination contest, he set out policies—a federal role in improving education, humane immigration reform, Medicare prescription drug coverage—that borrowed more from Roman Catholic social thought than from Friedrich Hayek.

[continue reading...]

White House Blames Big Government on Congressional Republicans

Neither George Bush nor Karl Rove have been shy about the fact that compassionate conservatism is at odds with limited-government conservatism. As David Keene recently told CBS News, "I've been to no end of meetings where [the president's] chief advisers have said, 'Watch not how much we spend but how we spend it.'"

Now that Democrats control Congress, however, the White House is shifting its rationalization of fiscal profligacy. As Fred Barnes reports,

Bush has never been known as a spending hawk. But aides now say he was "frustrated" at times by the insistence of congressional Republicans that he shy away from vetoes. They concede, however, that he willingly signed a farm bill in 2002, perhaps the most egregious of spending bills in his first term. The excuse was 2002 was an election year.

Related: Bob Novak, "Bush's Veto Strategy."

[continue reading...]