How leftist scholars rank the presidents.
Barack Obama had barely settled in office when he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Though he’s been in the job fewer than 18 months, liberal scholars are already rating him one of our better presidents, finishing ahead of even Ronald Reagan on 20 attributes ranging from legislative accomplishments to integrity. Continue reading
In Chicago, Daleytution is the law of the land
As Independence Day approaches, let’s remember that our Founding Fathers created a marvelous document to protect individual freedoms from the aggressions of government.
We call this the Constitution.
But along The Chicago Way, there is another text, full of decrees. The dusty scroll must be buried deep in a vault at City Hall, because few, if any, have ever seen it.
Still, Chicagoans know its power. Some may call it the Edict of Shortshanks. Others call it The Mayoral Carta. But most refer to it simply by its common name:
The Daleytution. Continue reading
The president’s low ratings mean he can’t lift his party by campaigning.
Democrats are acknowledging they’ll lose ground in the midterms. The only question is how much. Today, the evidence points to quite a lot. Continue reading
Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task. Continue reading
For the past several weeks the American people have been inundated with analysis about what’s wrong with Washington largely from the perspective of Washington insiders who are frustrated about health care and political retirements. We’re told that gridlock, procedural holds, partisanship and extreme ideology are preventing members of Congress from working together. While some of this analysis is true — Washington is petty, partisan and shortsighted — few are acknowledging that Congress does enjoy remarkable unity in one critical area: spending beyond our means. Continue reading
In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.
Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.
The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.
A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board — and fueled two decades of economic growth.
Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.
It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable. Continue reading
