Republicans

While his Democratic rivals continued their battle, John McCain spent last week on a tour of America's "forgotten places" - most of them Democratic strongholds.

Was McCain's tour, which took him to Selma and Appalachia, the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and Youngstown, Ohio, a serious play for constituencies (the working poor, black and white alike) that go reliably for Democrats? Was it a cynical attempt to woo white suburbanites by burnishing his image as a different kind of conservative? Or was it just another play for free publicity - like his "biography tour" earlier in April - by a campaign that's short on funds and looking for ways to get the media to stop obsessing over Obama-Hillary long enough to give their candidate some airtime?

John McCain sketched out his economic agenda in an address at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

McCain's speech reads like an attempt to unify a divided party by offering every faction something to make them happy. For the GOP's supply-siders and business interests, there are promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and slash corporate rates. For moderate Republicans clinging to seats in Democratic states, there's a pledge to cut the Alternative Minimum Tax, which hits upper-middle class Blue Staters hardest. For free traders, there's a shout-out to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement; for flat-tax obsessives, there's a call for an alternative tax-filing option, featuring just two brackets instead of four or five. For deficit hawks and porkbusters, there's a promise to veto any bill with earmarks, an attack on corporate welfare, and a call for a one-year freeze in discretionary spending and a top-to-bottom review of every agency's budget. For entitlement reformers, there's a call to means-test the prescription drugs benefit. There's even something for the small band of conservatives (this writer among them) who have been agitating for a distinctively pro-family economic agenda, in the form of a pledge to double the tax exemption for dependents, from $3500 to $7000.

After failing to halt John McCain's momentum, Mike Huckabee finally drops out of the presidential race, raising questions as to what he might do next.

For all his foibles and limitations, Mike Huckabee proved himself a formidable campaigner during the fight for the Republican nomination. More than that, he proved himself wildly entertaining and very much in tune with a broad yet underrepresented segment of the American mainstream, as evidenced by his high-concept embrace of low-brow celebrities like action hero Chuck Norris, wrestler Ric Flair, and rocker Ted Nugent. That is, as Adam Thierer argued a few months back, Huckabee managed to decry moral turpitude and enjoy the sweet sounds of "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang" at the same time. How much more American can you get? MORE

Michael Bloomberg decides against running for president as an independent.

So who cares, right? Isn't Bloomberg just a rich dilettante? Actually, no. He was, by a wide margin, the best qualified of all the imaginable presidential candidates. Granted, he's not the kind of political figure who sends reporters into crazed reveries, and as a mouthy lower-middle-class kid from Medford, Massachusetts he doesn't embody America's changetastic post-ethnic future. He is simply the best mayor New York has ever had. Bloomberg's two terms have been marked by impressive improvements in the city's fiscal health, the crime rate, education, and environmental quality. And he accomplished all this by charming and disarming the same entrenched interests his predecessors failed to break through direct confrontation.

William F. Buckley Jr., America's most celebrated conservative intellectual, died Wednesday at the age of 82.

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it." So wrote Karl Marx, and William F. Buckley Jr. was no Marxist. But few American intellectuals have lived up to Marx's injunction as completely and impressively as Buckley. He was the intellectual paterfamilias to a movement that rose from obscurity to govern the United States, and a man whose efforts -- both as the founding editor of National Review and as a tireless proselytizer in books and essays and television interviews -- helped make once-unfashionable ideas seem first plausible, then persuasive, and finally obvious to countless Americans. There probably would have been some sort of successful right-of-center movement in late-twentieth century America without Buckley, but his Catholic-libertarian perspective shaped it, and it owed its immense success in no small measure to his wit and charm and indefatigability. MORE

Mitt Romney withdraws from the presidential race, citing a love of America and an unwillingness to "surrender to terror."

So what does that say about Mike Huckabee, who isn't dropping out? One assumes that Huckabee also loves America, and indeed that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama feel much the same way, despite their alleged eagerness to "surrender to terror." A valedictory speech is meant to be gracious, and to be sure there are uplifting moments in Mitt Romney's swan song. But what is most striking is the strident tone. Against the conciliatory politics of an Obama or a McCain, Romney portrays political disputes as a form of warfare against culture-killing liberals. This sounds particularly odd from a passionless technocrat some call the Republican Al Gore. Granted, the speech was given at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where red meat is in high demand. It seems that Romney is hoping to establish himself as the conservative standardbearer in 2012. Steve Forbes, you'll recall, tried something eerily similar. And we all know how that turned out. 

McCain hasn't won the Republican nomination yet, but the fat lady is just about read to sing. So will the celebrated maverick right Rove's wrongs, win the White House, and build a more inclusive Republican majority? Or is he the second coming of Bob Dole, an irascible, ornery war hero with a temperament unsuited to the times? There have been moments when Americans valued the martial virtues most: duty, honor, courage. But these have been, in truth, brief moments, which followed the most serious, sustained, bloody conflicts -- the Civil War, the Second World War. Americans then inevitably turned to what you might call our national equilibrium, a state that is diverse, disputatious, commercially-minded, perhaps to a fault. It is this bustling, grasping, devout, disorderly country the aristocratic McCain hopes to lead, despite self-professed ignorance of matters economic, despite an apparent indifference to matters of the spirit. Republicans having second thoughts are running out of time ...  

Can John McCain be stopped?

Last night the battle for the Republican presidential nomination drew to a close. Or at least it seemed to draw to a close.  MORE