by Charles Krauthammer
Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. — Hillary Clinton, Jan. 7
So she said. And then a fight broke out. That remarkable eruption of racial sensitivities and racial charges lacked coherence, however, because the public argument was about history rather than what was truly offensive — the implied analogy to today. (FULL STORY)
Waiting for Reagan - You fight an election with the politicians you have.
by William Kristol
Conservative editorialists, radio hosts, and bloggers are unhappy. They don't like the Republican presidential field, and many of them have been heaping opprobrium on the various GOP candidates with astonishing vigor.
For example: John McCain--with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 82.3--is allegedly in no way a conservative. And, though the most favorably viewed of all the candidates right now, both among Republicans and the electorate as a whole, he would allegedly destroy the Republican party if nominated. (FULL STORY)
The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has thus far been marked by a heightened sense of history and optimism — the former because its two leading candidates are pushing up against societal barriers that were once thought unmovable; the latter because Democrats feel as assured of recapturing the presidency as they have at any time since the post-Watergate election of 1976. (FULL STORY)
How mad are the Republicans?
Conservatives in America are suffering from a psychosis, a McCain Derangement Syndrome
by Gerard Baker
There are no second acts in American lives, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tomorrow the voters of South Carolina will have a chance to prove him wrong.
The Democratic primary contest continues to absorb most of the media attention around the world as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama conduct an oddly content-free, identity-politics-heavy, race-versus-gender fight. But the race on the Republican side is simply bewildering. Three different primaries so far and we have had three different winners. Mike Huckabee in Iowa; John McCain in New Hampshire and Mitt Romney in Michigan. (FULL STORY)
Edwards's populist roll of the dice
by Derrick Z. Jackson
JOHN EDWARDS'S fate in the Democratic race for president will come down to undecided voters like LuAnn Holmes. A 41-year-old single mother, Holmes is a meetings facilitator in the city clerk's office here.
"I come from a long line of union members, so I know the issues," Holmes said before Edwards held a town hall meeting Thursday. "My child [a 9-year-old girl] has a reading disability and the resource programs she's in might be getting cut. My parents are getting older and they're on Medicare. My father is retired Air Force and I'm stunned at the cost of his prescriptions." (FULL STORY)
'The better angels' side with Obama - The candidate's appeal to a more unified electorate rings historically true.
by Joseph J. Ellis
Alively debate has developed in these pages and in the blogosphere about the viability of Barack Obama's politics of hope. Critics of Obama's promise to bring us together -- blue states and red, young and old, women and men, blacks and whites -- have described his vision as a naive pipe dream that would be dead on arrival if he were elected president.
Central to the critique is the claim that Obama's message flies in the face of U.S. history, that partisanship is, as one critic put it, "the natural condition of politics." Zero-sum, "I'm right, you're wrong" battles are fundamental to the republic. From the beginning of our history, so the argument goes, an Obama-like message has been a rhetorical veneer designed to obscure the less-attractive reality of irreconcilable division and an inherently adversarial party system. (FULL STORY)
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