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The Democratic president, a former senator from a border state, was lightly regarded and not so hot in the polls. He had made plenty of mistakes in the Oval Office, and yet his aides knew one big thing: If they stayed on the right side of a key issue—the income security of Americans—and could paint the Republicans as being on the wrong side of that issue, they’d be fine. In fact, Republicans, enjoying newfound power on Capitol Hill, chose to pursue an unpopular ideological agenda. They played right into the Democrats’ hands.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case is both smaller and larger than it might first appear. Smaller Than It Seems It’s smaller in the sense that in and of itself the decision bans precisely zero abortions. To be sure, you might not know that to hear President Biden, who said on June 24: Today, the Supreme Court of the United States expressly took away a constitutional right from the American people that it already recognized. They didn’t limit it. They simply took it away. That’s never been done . . . but they did it. Yet despite all...

There's a cloud on the health horizon no bigger than a fist. Right now, that cloud is just a jumble of acronyms. But soon, those acronyms could darken the human future, as fewer life-saving drugs are created — and at a higher cost. Americans aren't always interested in foreign news, but we have learned that international organizations — summed up in acronyms such as "UN," and "NATO," and "OPEC" — can have great impact on our lives. And newer entities, such as the European Union, the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court, are becoming known by their initials....

It's hard to beat an incumbent president in wartime. At least this early in a war. Today, the fighting in Iraq is an abstraction to most people. Casualties are low - more Americans were killed in a few weeks' worth of Vietnam fighting - and there's no draft, so few Americans can argue that they are being called to face death against their will. And so the news from Iraq is easily shunted aside by news of hurricanes, political conventions or celebrity criminal cases. And while the Iraq war is increasingly unpopular, the public still applauds George W. Bush's leadership...

Could all the things that some of his fellow Vietnam veterans are saying about John Kerry - that he faked his heroism, that he filmed his fake heroism, that he lied to get his Purple Hearts, that he lied about being in Cambodia - be true?

Are we too paranoid? Or not paranoid enough? The key to effective fear is knowing what's real - who's really out to get you. In George W. Bush's case, it's the media culture that's on his case. The just-released remake of "The Manchurian Candidate" spins the politics of the original. Whereas the 1962 film imagined that the Red Chinese were plotting to kill a president, in the new film the villainous would-be assassins are capitalists, not Communists. The 2004 movie imagines "Manchurian Global" as a multinational company. Indeed, the filmmakers have imagined the company so well that Paramount Studios has...

See where Edwards puts his millions James P. Pinkerton July 8, 2004 Pundits seem taken with the idea that Sen. John Edwards is a man of the people. But maybe they should read the fine print about Edwards that's appearing in their own publications so that they can see what he's really all about. Writing in yesterday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof enthused, "He'll help with the Democrats' most crucial task: reconnecting the party to Middle American voters." The Washington Post's David Broder praised Edwards' stump speech as "a thing of beauty - a populist depiction of 'two Americas' divided...

Monday, March 8, 2004 Pinkerton: Leading another Liberal to slaughter? By James P. Pinkerton We've seen this election before -- or have we? Sixteen years ago, a Republican named Bush was running against a Democrat from Massachusetts. In the spring of 1988, that Bush launched an offensive; in the parlance of politics, he "went negative." Bush zinged his opponent as part of the "Harvard boutique," declaring that the Massachusetts man might be presenting himself as a centrist, but he was, in reality, a liberal. The negative attacks worked. The Republican -- full name: George Herbert Walker Bush -- went on...

<p>CONSERVATIVES and other limited-government types are furious at President George W. Bush for his big-spending ways. One group said the Republican-controlled government is dispensing cash like a "drunken sailor." But in fact, there's nothing spontaneous or accidental about the spending spree. What we're seeing is the sober logic of a changing Republican Party, as well as a changing American psyche, post-9-11 -- from peacetime consumerism to wartime welfarism. Those seeking to measure such changes might dip into Bush's newly released Fiscal Year 2005 budget; its pages offer proof that the era of big government is back again.</p>

Portsmouth, N.H. - There's something about Southerners campaigning among Northerners that causes those Yankees just to melt. John Edwards, the surprise second-place finisher in Iowa, is sweet-talkin' the locals here in New Hampshire, too - and it seems to be working. Part of the reason for Southern effectiveness, I think, is condescension: Northerners are inordinately impressed when a Southerner can finish a sentence without tobacco spittle running down his chin. Another reason is gratitude: Northerners, expecting to hear an accent such as that of Renée Zellweger in "Cold Mountain," are unduly happy when they can understand what a Southerner is...

The Republican president from the Sun Belt is portrayed as an amiable dunce. His lack of curiosity annoys his brainy adviser, who wants the chief executive to join him in wrestling with Big Issues. Eventually the brainiac aide is gone, taking with him a burning desire to get revenge in print. This might sound like the story of Paul O'Neill, ex-Treasury secretary — he was fired by President Bush in December 2002 — who provided the raw, bitter meat for a new book, "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill." O'Neill...

For 14 centuries, Christians and Muslims have waged a series of conquests and crusades. And while we know who started the fighting, we don't know who will end it. The one safe bet is that America's current crusade in the Middle East will not be the last. It's worth pointing out, of course, that the Muslims "started it." In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Arabs, fired by their new Islamic faith, burst out of the Arabian Peninsula. They swept across the mostly Christian Middle East, eager to conquer and convert. Their general, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, crossed into Spain from North...

What are we doing in Iraq? The latest explanation is the so-called flypaper thesis. That is, it's a good thing that we have 140,000 troops in Iraq, because the terrorists are going after our men and women there, lured like flies to flypaper. As President George W. Bush said on Tuesday, "Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York, or St. Louis or Los Angeles." This argument is dubious, however, for three reasons.

One day, this Iraq War will be thought of as the Intellectuals' War. That is, it was a war conceived of by people who possessed more books than common sense, let alone actual military experience. Disregarding prudence, precedent and honesty, they went off - or, more precisely, sent others off - tilting at windmills in Iraq, chasing after illusions of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and false hope about Iraqi enthusiasm for Americanism, and hoping that reality would somehow catch up with their theory. The problem, of course, is that wars are more about bloodletting than book-learning. Tilting at...

Ronald Reagan had three sons: Michael, Ron, and George W. Bush. That became clear yesterday when the 43rd president landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Why did he do it? Because it looked cool on TV. But while W. might be Reaganesque in style, he has yet to prove that he is Reaganesque in substance. It's a cliché that Bush 43 models himself more on Reagan than he does on his own father. And why not? The Gipper was a two-termer, while the elder Bush, having mostly inherited the presidency from his popular predecessor, managed to lose...