politics

The price of oil has stopped climbing -- for now, at least.

Oil prices didn't reach cripplingly high levels because of surging demand in China and other emerging markets. Their growth in consumption was modest and predictable. So what was the main driver?

As House Republicans launch their "Guerrilla Congress" campaign to beat the drilling drum, the question of rising oil prices has become a political issue -- an issue voters now consider more important than Iraq. A number of prominent Democrats point to speculation in the oil market. Republicans, meanwhile, are convinced that the problem lies in our failure to exploit domestic energy resources more aggressively. Hence the Republican call for drilling, drilling, and more drilling, which has been mocked by liberals as a cockamamie ploy that won't solve the problem but will cause environmental despoliation.

As the most pro-Israel administration in Washington since Harry Truman enters its last six months in office, Israel faces a strategic choice. Will it use the possible indulgence of the Bush Administration to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, or will it wait and face an uncertain future with a new American president?

Halting Iran's path toward the development of a nuclear bomb appears to be one of those seemingly insoluble chess problems. The Iranians may agree to this negotiating proposal or that proposal, all the while playing for time, while they develop sufficient enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. A nuclear arsenal will allow Iran to become a Middle East hegemon like the Great Persia of antiquity, yet it will also encourage countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to develop their own bombs. Iran will represent the heretofore unseen and unconventional combination of being a nuclear-armed state which supports sub-state armies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip.

Enter Israel, which is the only state that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has specifically and repeatedly threatened with annihilation.

On his radio show, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson accused Barack Obama of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible" and promoting a "lowest common denominator of morality."

On the face of it, Dobson's comments seem like a bizarre overreaction to a two-year-old Obama speech, in which he argued for a progressive politics more accommodating to religious believers while taking some (relatively gentle) jabs at religious conservatives. It's easier to understand Dobson's outburst, though, in the context of events like Obama's recent off-the-record meeting with evangelical leaders, after which one attendee wrote that Obama "came across as thoughtful and much more of a 'centrist' than what I would have expected," and added that while he would be voting for McCain, he wouldn't be surprised if the 2008 race were "the first time a majority of evangelicals will vote for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter."

NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert died Friday. He was 58.

With Russert's passing, the country loses one of its most influential journalists -- host of Meet The Press, debate moderator, and trend-setter. He was a model for other, lesser hosts. Russert's signature innovation was to ditch the staid, respectful interviewing method implicit in a title like Meet The Press (as if the program were a social brunch) in favor of a more aggressive, at times bullying, in-your-face style. With the shift in approach came a change in style -- away from the classic television personality's search for patrician authority in favor of a newfound quest for working class authenticity.

Last week, the Bradley Project on America's National Identity released a report, entitled E Pluribus Unum, warning of "mounting confusion about the meaning of American national identity and a loss of commitment to its promotion."

The Bradley report, which draws on public opinion data and conversations with dozens of academics, scholars and journalists (full disclosure: I attended one such meeting), argues that Americans' sense of national identity is weakening, and that the American leadership class ought to do something about it. Citing declining civic and historical literacy, an education system that emphasizes ethnic identities over a shared Americanism, and a rising emphasis on "global citizenship" rather than national loyalty among the nation's political and business elites, the report offers a list of recommendations ranging from the broad ("a renewed focus on the teaching of American history" in America's schools, say, or a new "initiative to ensure immigrants learn English, understand democratic institutions, and participate fully in the American way of life") to the highly specific (the return of ROTC to elite universities; the creation of an annual Presidential medal to reward "commitment to American ideals and institutions").

With the final pair of primary contests in the books, Hillary Clinton has been mathematically eliminated from the race for the Democratic nomination.

The 1992 campaign was the first election that I followed closely, and with some understanding of what was going on. I was twelve, the son of two diehard Baby-Boomer Democrats, and every night we kept up with the race on ABC's World News Tonight, where the late Peter Jennings jousted entertainingly with then-White House correspondent Brit Hume. During the Connecticut primary, when the Democratic race was down to Clinton and Jerry Brown, my father took me out to Wooster Square, the old Italian neighborhood in New Haven, to see the Man from Hope put in an appearance. (All I remember is the top of his head, gray but not yet silver, bobbing just above the crowd.) Later, my parents made a sign -- this was just after the Republican Convention -- that read "Our Family Values Clinton" and took it to rallies, where at different moments my mother managed to shake both Clintons' hands. (Bill was warm, she told me, and definitely sexy. Hillary was cold.)

The Department of Energy is preparing to submit an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to store radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, under a plan endorsed by John McCain.

The word "mountain" has lovely connotations: icy streams, conifer forests, unblemished views of a snowy sierra, yodeling competitions. (OK, so not they're not all lovely.) Alas for Yucca Mountain, these images of alpine sweetness do not apply to it at all. If Yucca Mountain had a name that conveyed just how baking-hot, barren, forlorn, and lifeless it is -- perhaps "Yucca Death Vault" would do it justice -- more people might see the logic in the government's plan, now nearly thirty years old, to use it to store the nation's radioactive garbage. The mountain is dry, geologically appropriate, and far enough from human settlements to keep it secure in case of accident or attack. Nevadans and anti-nuke activists object and say that the risk of leaks, of terrorist attacks, and of unforeseen catastrophes is too great to allow Yucca Mountain to accept the waste. But the waste has to go somewhere, and Yucca Mountain is the right spot.

Primaries in Oregon and Kentucky drew attention to the salience of the white working class vote.

There was every reason to believe that the primaries in Oregon and Kentucky would end with Senator Barack Obama winning a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, reinforcing the widespread sense that Senator Clinton is at this point running a vanity campaign, a highly expensive effort to enhance her self-esteem. Thoughts naturally turn to the general election, in which Oregon and Kentucky (and states very much like them) will prove crucially important to building an electoral-college majority. Both have an unusually high proportion of white working class voters, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz note in a brilliant report on the changing class composition of the American electorate, and this represents a challenge to Obama, who has (as Clinton reminds us incessantly) had a hard time connecting with these voters.

Scandals, voting trends and helpless leadership portend electoral defeat for the GOP in the upcoming election.

A Republican Senate candidate is embroiled in the Jack Abramoff scandal. A Republican congressman is caught up in a tawdry sexual affair. And across the country, from Illinois to Louisiana to last night's special election in a deep-red district in Mississippi, which Democrat Travis Childers won handily, Republicans are losing races they expected to win. The 2008 election may be all about "change" -- but it has an awfully familiar feel to it. For the GOP, is this 2006 all over again?

Rumor has it that Hillary Clinton is struggling to save face by securing the vice presidential nomination.

In an effort to halt intra-Democratic partisan bloodletting, some, including The Atlantic's own Andrew Sullivan, have suggested that Barack Obama run for president with Hillary Clinton as his running mate. And it seems that some in the Obama camp are taking the idea seriously, so seriously that senior Obama advisors are reportedly weighing whether or not to take on Clinton's campaign debt -- including, amusingly enough, Clinton's campaign debt to herself. Note that Clinton has consistently argued that Obama is not ready for the rigors of the presidency, and not ready to take on America's rivals on the world stage. He is too green, he is too trusting. If Obama does indeed acquiesce to the Clintonites' desperate pleas for some kind of face-saving gesture, he will prove Clinton right.

John McCain delivered a speech on his judicial philosophy on Tuesday.

It's no surprise that liberals hated John McCain's speech on the judiciary on Tuesday, while conservatives (mostly) liked it. But it's disappointing that the speech didn't break any new ground in the debate over judicial nominations. McCain can be refreshingly clear when it comes to subjects that our political debate tends to constrict. Not this time.

Barack Obama won a resounding victory in the North Carolina primary, and Hillary Clinton barely edged him out in Indiana.

In a different, bygone era, Hillary Clinton's loss in North Carolina last night probably wouldn't have inspired the pundit class to pronounce her campaign finally and officially toast. After all, there's still no plausible way for Barack Obama to assemble the 2,025 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination without persuading at least a hundred or so of the famously uncommitted superdelegates to leap on board his bandwagon. And there's nothing in the Democratic Party's rules that promises the nomination to the candidate who's merely leading in the delegate count or the popular vote. If anything, it's the reverse: A system that requires the winner to marshal a supermajority of delegates rather than a mere majority, and that throws a slew of superdelegates into the mix, would seem to be designed to have close races decided at the convention, rather than by a whisker-thin majority in a voting system that, were it designed differently, might have Hillary in the lead instead.

Jeremiah Wright's recent media blitz has complicated Barack Obama's efforts to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.

To describe Jeremiah Wright as charismatic is to understate his extraordinary magnetism, which drew Barack Obama to Christianity twenty years ago. Sure, Wright is a divisive figure, but he's a uniter as well -- embracing gays and lesbians as well as militant Black Muslims, and building a kind of rainbow coalition of the excluded, which inspired Obama (and countless others) to go forth and perform good works. In turning on his pastor, Obama claims that Wright has changed. Could it be that Obama has changed?

Barack Obama addressed a rally at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one week before that state's Democratic primary.

It was a college crowd: young women with Kool Aid-dyed hair, mop-topped men in novelty bow-ties, kids wearing t-shirts that advertised ironic slogans ("Super Jew!") and summer holidays to Angkor Wat -- all grooving to "Big Yellow Taxi." But it was also more. A scan of the seats revealed lots of normal people as well, including a robust and enthusiastic contingent of African-Americans, thrilled to be in an Obama coalition, and by all evidence grooving to the Joni Mitchell just as to the Motown.

The coalition looked broad and deep. It did not, however, look like America, or even North Carolina. MORE

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?

Hillary Clinton wins the Pennsylvania primary with 55% of the vote.

Does Hillary Clinton represent the future of the Democratic party? At first glance, the idea seems laughable. As Ruy Teixeira has observed, the white working class - the core of Clinton's support in Pennsylvania and in the Democratic electorate writ large - is shrinking as a share of the U.S. population, while the mass upper middle class, a crucially important of Obama's base (and one that enjoys outsized cultural and political influence), is expanding at a rapid clip. And though Clinton has won a large share of the growing Latino vote, it's possible - as a number of Obama partisans have suggested - that this could be a function of some combination of '90s nostalgia and a reluctance on the part of new immigrants and second-generation Americans to embrace a politics of hope and change, both effects that will presumably erode over time.

Even with the Democratic Party locked in a fierce civil war, John McCain still hasn't pulled ahead of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in national polls.

The Democratic primary campaign - divisive, bitter, and seemingly endless - has made many Republicans optimistic about their party's prospects for retaining the White House this November. But the numbers still seem to tell a different story -- and not just secondary indicators like the enormous gap between McCain's fundraising and the dollars his Democratic rivals are raking in, or the underlying economic realities that will make this a tough year for the GOP no matter what. The polls themselves aren't running McCain's way, or at least not to the extent that would justify the current wave of conservative optimism about November.

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.

Bill Clinton's blunders on the campaign trail have tarnished his reputation as a political virtuoso.

After he made yet another campaign-trail blunder, Hillary Clinton has told her husband to back off. Many in the Democratic party, even those in Bill's corner, would like him to back off, too. The debate about his political legacy is effectively over, and no one but a handful of prominent Democrats will argue that his presidency was salutary for the Democratic party. Present circumstances reinforce that judgment. Bill has been pilloried for his conduct in this campaign. We've seen his bad side -- temper tantrums, parochialism, arrogance, promiscuity with the facts -- and none of his good side. His post-presidency cocoon, gilded in no small part by the American taxpayer, seems to have left him ill-prepared for the modern news cycle. He's certainly no longer his party's best political strategist.

Campaigning for her mother on college campuses, Chelsea Clinton has faced repeated questions from students about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Chelsea's answer has evolved since the question was first posed at Indiana's Butler University late in March. On that occasion, she replied with a terse: "I do not think that is any of your business." At N.C. State, her response was more elaborate. "I think that is something that is personal to my family; I'm sure there are things that are personal to your family that you don't think are anyone else's business, either," she told the questioner, but then added: "On a larger point, I don't think you should vote for or against my mother because of my father." At Purdue this week, she had a "let's talk about the issues" answer ready that was worthy of her Dad: "If that's what you want to vote on, that's what you should vote on. But I think there are other people (who are) going to vote on things like health care and economics."

Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker returned to Congress for hearings on the state of Iraq.

A critical moment during the Petraeus/Crocker hearings yesterday came when the general refused to play along. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), referring to the Democratic presidential candidates, urged, cajoled, and all but begged Petraeus to state that a rapid, one-brigade-a-month troop withdrawal would be a disaster. But Petraeus was cautious: "It clearly will depend on the conditions at the time."

John McCain raised $15 million in March. Hillary Clinton raised $20 million and Barack Obama raised over $40 million in the same month.

As Marc Ambinder reports, the McCain campaign raised only $4 million online and through direct mail. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has over 1.3 million donors, a number that will surely increase if he wins the Democratic nomination. So far, McCain has caught a lucky break. MORE

Mark Penn resigned as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, amid criticism for taking consulting contracts that clashed with Clinton's policies.

The news of Penn's having been forced out set off a wave of recrimination that's likely to last all week, in part because Penn won't have many defenders. Few people in politics are as reviled, especially inside the Clinton campaign, where he feuded with just about everybody.

A New York Times/CBS News poll finds that eighty-one percent of Americans think the country is now on the "wrong track."

That Americans are pessimistic isn't terribly surprising: The last year of the Bush Era feels like a cross between the final days of the Truman and the Carter Administrations, with a widely-disliked president presiding over an unpopular foreign war and a struggling economy -- a rare and understandably dispiriting combination. Still, the depths of the public's discouragement about America's prospects is striking, and one statistic in particular from the Times poll should be pasted on every political journalist's bulletin board: "Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off."

Hillary Clinton's latest ad features the senator taking a call at three in the morning to respond to an economic crisis.

When I asked Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser, to give his impression of the ad, he quipped: "It's more likely that the call at 3 a.m. is, 'Senator, you've just lost another superdelegate.'" Mark McKinnon, an even more creative McCain adviser, had an idea: the campaign should respond with an "ad" of its own. Calls were made. McCain ad whiz Justin Germany worked with McKinnon's script and had the video ready a few hours later.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan to reform the nation's financial regulatory system has been greeted with skepticism.

I'm not an expert in financial markets, so I don't pretend to know enough to evaluate whether Paulson's massive reorganization of the nation's financial regulatory apparatus is, on balance, helpful. But I do know this: Paulson and his White House sponsors are deaf and blind to politics.

Two prominent Catholic conservatives have endorsed Barack Obama for President.

The differences between the arguments that Douglas Kmiec and Andrew Bacevich have deployed to explain their support for Obama speaks volumes about how hard it is to generalize about Catholic conservatives, let alone Catholics as a whole. MORE

In his first foreign-policy address since winning the GOP nomination, John McCain argued that the U.S. has a "moral obligation" to fulfill in Iraq.

Place McCain's speech side by side with the address Barack Obama delivered last week, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and you don't just have two divergent takes on the war in Iraq. You have two completely different prisms through which to view the conflict.

In Taiwan's presidential contest, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang defeated Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party by an overwhelming margin.

The Kuomintang, perhaps the strangest, most resilient political organization in history, is back in yet another guise. Ma Ying-jeou is an affable, U.S.-educated, pro-market moderate. His most distinguishing feature might be his unwillingness to use scabrous rhetoric to denounce his opponents -- highly unusual in Taiwan's shall-we-say robust public discourse. MORE

Bill Richardson, former presidential hopeful and current New Mexico governor, endorsed Barack Obama for president.

Few politicians are as accomplished as Richardson; even fewer are as accomplished while projecting his air of bumbling and incompetence. By many accounts this impression is just a lack of charisma, and he has "substance" to make up for it. But the endorsement, embraced publicly by Obama, should provoke private shudders: This man is hexed. 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.

Ralph Nader is once again launching a bid for the presidency.

According to a "Rasmussen Reports poll taken in late January", a McCain-Obama race would leave considerable room for minor party challengers. Ron Paul, the anti-war libertarian firebrand, would garner an extraordinary 11 percent of the vote. Ross Perot, by way of comparison, won just under 19 percent of the vote in 1992. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg would win a respectable 5 percent. And as for Ralph Nader, well, Rasmussen didn't bother to include him in its fanciful scenario, most likely because his time has definitively passed. If we're going to have a fifth-party crank in the race, let it be someone colorful and costumed, like erstwhile Texas gubernatorial candidate "Kinky Friedman" or litigious chessmaster and veteran cabdriver "M. Ismail Sloan".

Hillary Clinton campaign struggles to recapture her once-formidable lead over Barack Obama.

Barack Obama may well be ready to destroy the deepest, most fundamental law of the political universe: that somewhere, somehow, the Clintons will find a way to win.

How can Hillary Clinton possibly pull this off? The mathematics are there. If two-thirds of the remaining superdelegates -- what her campaign cleverly and class-consciously insists on calling the “automatic” delegates -- break her way, then she will win.  The history is there, and this race has been full of black-swan moments.

The remaining 16 states and 816-odd pledged delegates will probably cut in her favor. Forget these static factors: for the first time, the elite political class is finally beginning to question -- or at least, to be aware of -- some of the irritating messianism of Barack Obama. 

The resignation of veteran dictator Fidel Castro provides an opportunity for a much-needed shift in U.S. policy, but will anyone seize the moment?

El Jefe's departure from power on his own terms almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the starkest reminder yet of what a dismal failure America's Cuba policy has been. Despite (or more plausibly in part because of) the unremitting hostility of the superpower next door, Castro succeeded in creating the world's most successful Communist regime. New waves of non-Cuban leftists have been growing disillusioned with the dictator for decades, but U.S. policy has allowed the regime to invariably maintain a hefty focus on America's persecution of him and the people he governs, rather than his persecution of the domestic opposition. Meanwhile, substantial portions of U.S. policy remain formally tied not to improvements in the Cuban human rights situation, but the Miami exile Community's quixotic efforts to secure the return of property acquired during the previous dictatorship and confiscated in the late 1950s. 

Economists debate how we should think about inequality. Should we focus on income, wealth, or consumption?

After W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published a short piece on inequality in the New York Times, economists led by Paul Krugman charged them of using misleading numbers to present a rosy picture of the lives of America's working poor. For Cox and Alm, the relevant inequalities are inequalities in consumption, and they note that inequality in consumption is far less extreme than inequality in income. By extension, the same is true of wealth. Say it's true, for the sake of argument, Cox and Alm are right: that in terms of consumption, today's poor are far better off than the poor of thirty years ago, and that they aren't that much worse off than the rich when it comes to the quantity and quality of their consumption. It remains true that wealth translates into political power and that political power allows some individuals to entrench their power, political, economic, and cultural. So even if it is silly to argue that poor Americans are among the wretched of the Earth, the real danger could be that the rich are becoming a cosseted, self-dealing elite that uses the state to insulate itself from robust competition.

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 ...