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...also a fool. Yes, as it sits on the desk between my interviewer and me, its large gold Harvard logo is an awkward reminder of the only reason I got this interview. Yes, walking around with it is the equivalent of wearing a Harvard backpack to school the day after early decision letters came out. Yes, it has a built-in calculator and pen loop. But people could...
Breaking the Circle In recent years, Republicans have played this style of politics better than Democrats. Winning elections by making government look foolish is a more natural strategy for the antigovernment party. But there's no guarantee Democrats won't one day try something similar. Were a Republican President and Congress to make a genuine effort to rein in entitlement spending, Democrats might act in much the same way McConnell and company are acting now. At its core, vicious-circle politics isn't an assault on liberal solutions to hard problems; it's an assault on any solutions to hard...
Third, more Ross Perots. Vicious-circle politics thrives because while gridlock sours the public on both parties, the out-of-government party (particularly if it's also the antigovernment party) benefits anyway. That might change were our political system filled with latter-day Perots, cranky independent candidates determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done. In the early 1990s, the original Perot combined an assault on the way government did business with a demand that it climb out of debt. Like the public itself, Perot believed there was a commonsense, nonideological way to cut the deficit, if only...
...House blames the Senate, the Senate blames the House, and both chambers point accusing fingers at the White House. Obama, meanwhile, is struggling to find a tone of voice that resonates in Tea Party America, alternating chords of raging populism and calm centrism, sometimes both on the same day. (See 10 elections that changed America...
...morning of Valentine's Day, as Dick Cheney was once again calumniating the President on network television, I was in Doha, Qatar, listening to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempt to explain Barack Obama's foreign policy to several hundred restive representatives of the Islamic world. The event was the annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, sponsored by the Brookings Institution, and the mood was a bit more testy than last year's Obama-induced euphoria. There was a universal sense among the Muslim delegates that the President had offered fine words in the past year but not much action...