Mark Shields from Creators Syndicate

Against "Government-Run" Health Care for 06/27/2009

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

There is a theme, a mantra you will hear regularly expressed by those who oppose President Barack Obama's push to overhaul the national's health care system: their all-out resistance to any "government-run" health plan.

This past week on the Senate floor, when not a lot of press people were paying close attention, Democrat Sherrod Brown, the first-term U.S. senator from Ohio, t ...

Updated: Sat Jun 27, 2009

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Ugly Republican Backbiting for 07/04/2009

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Losing presidential campaigns are a lot like failed marriages. In their aftermath, both unhappy experiences regularly leave similar casualties: open wounds, paralyzing self-doubt and an irresistible urge to settle personal scores.

All are present in the fallout from the unflattering portrait of 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, painted (anonymously) by veterans of Jo ...

Updated: Sat Jul 04, 2009

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Our Humor-Impaired Politics for 07/11/2009

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

President John F. Kennedy frequently told audiences: "There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third." Nobody in recent American politics ever did more with and for laughter than former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who sadly left these mortal precincts, altogether too soon, not quit ...

Updated: Sat Jul 11, 2009

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Is Obama a "Tough Liberal"? for 07/18/2009

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

All Democrats with an IQ above room temperature understand the gigantic stakes involved in the success — or failure — of President Barack Obama's commitment to overhaul the nation's healthcare system. Those stakes include nothing less than the political fate, fortune and future of this still-new Democratic administration and, quite possibly, the continued survival of Democratic majo ...

Updated: Sat Jul 18, 2009

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Obama Without the Poetry for 07/25/2009

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The late Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, a political leader of surpassing eloquence, once introduced John F. Kennedy, the man who defeated him for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, this way: "Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, 'Let us march'?"

Updated: Sat Jul 25, 2009

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Independent Voters' Jury Still Out for 08/01/2009

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TOWSON, MD. — Those of us who live in Washington, D.C., do not make movies or airplanes. We do not raise corn or cattle. What Washington occasionally makes is public policy, and we constantly produce "conventional wisdom."

Here, just six months into the presidency of Barack Obama, in a two-hour focus group composed of 12 independent voters conducted by respected Democrati ...

Updated: Sat Aug 01, 2009

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August Musings for 08/08/2009

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Whatever happened to manners? Recently, my wife and I were two of the guests at a dinner party for eight in the home of friends. Two of the other guests were, by Washington standards, VIPs, of the kind who have their own assigned parking spaces or are guests on the Sunday talk shows.

I was amazed that during the evening these two VIPs did not go more than three minutes without checking f ...

Updated: Sat Aug 08, 2009

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Presidential Sibling Rivalry for 08/15/2009

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

None of our 44 U.S. presidents has been an only child — without at least half-siblings. Having your brother as president has meant both unforeseen opportunities and unwelcome scrutiny. Who could forget President Jimmy Carter's brother Billy, who registered as an agent for the Libyan government and accepted $220,000 from the Libyans?

Seeking to capitalize on his First Brother status ...

Updated: Sat Aug 15, 2009

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Can Obama Go One-on-One? for 08/22/2009

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

In their superb book on last year's presidential election, "The Battle for America 2008," Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, two gifted political reporters, persuaded David Axelrod, Barack Obama's political strategist, to share his Nov. 28, 2006, memorandum assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Obama as a potential 2008 presidential candidate.

Axelrod candidly questioned Obama's ...

Updated: Sat Aug 22, 2009

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Before They Vote for You, People Must Like You for 08/28/2009

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

On Jan. 21, 1971, the 55 Democratic U.S. senators caucused to elect by secret ballot their party leaders. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who had been elected to the Democrats' No. 2 Senate job, majority whip, two years earlier, was challenged by West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd. In an unexpected upset, Byrd defeated Kennedy by a vote of 31 to 24.

The rejection of Kennedy by his colleagues — co ...

Updated: Fri Aug 28, 2009

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Is There an "Obama-Clinton-Doctrine"? for 09/05/2009

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

As a young Army lieutenant, and later a major, he served two tours of combat duty in Vietnam, where he would know the personal pain of holding in his arms a young, dying soldier and where he pledged, if he ever were to make policy, that he "would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand."

Thus was Colin P ...

Updated: Sat Sep 05, 2009

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The End of the "Me" Generation? for 09/12/2009

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Beyond the constitutionally mandated annual State of the Union addresses, presidential speeches to a joint session of Congress — of the kind that President Barack Obama delivered on health care reform last week — are historically rare.

In fact, in the first 124 years of the United States, John Adams was the only president who — just once — addressed a joint congre ...

Updated: Sat Sep 12, 2009

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How Many 'Walks of Life' Are There? for 09/19/2009

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Tom Corbett is the Republican attorney general of the state (to be more precise, the commonwealth) of Pennsylvania and a candidate for governor. According to his campaign, Corbett deserves a look because he has protected Pennsylvanians "from all walks of life."

Hispanic Heritage Month, we are told by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is the time "to highlight the accomplishments ...

Updated: Sat Sep 19, 2009

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The "Real" Paul Kirk for 09/26/2009

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Let me begin with a confession. On Aug. 28, 2009, the Friday following the death of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," David Brooks of The New York Times and I were asked by Judy Woodruff: If somehow Massachusetts Democrats were able to change their state law that denied the state's governor the authority to fill the vacant Senate seat, who then ...

Updated: Sat Sep 26, 2009

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Shrinking Support for Abortion Rights for 10/03/2009

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Gloria Steinem, the feminist author and activist, argued that abortion was "the moral equivalent of a tonsillectomy" and that the human fetus was nothing more than a "mass of dependent protoplasm." If Steinem's stated views ever enjoyed popular support, they emphatically do not do so today.

In fact, according to a recent poll by the respected Pew Research Center, the ...

Updated: Sat Oct 03, 2009

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Confessions of a Recovering Red Sox Fanatic for 10/10/2009

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

It was a great run while it lasted. To be a Boston Red Sox fan meant your team — especially when matched against the too rich, too arrogant and altogether too successful New York Yankees — was predictably cast as the gutsy outsider David against baseball's overbearing Goliath.

Ever since the Revolutionary War, when a rag-tag collection of farmers and firebrands defeated the 1 ...

Updated: Sat Oct 10, 2009

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Outrage at Socialism for the Rich for 10/17/2009

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The anger rises. The fury rages at a new economic order that rules our lives. American capitalism has now been redefined to mean the freedom of the rich to reap enormous rewards if the risks they take do work out and — more importantly — if those risks do not work out, for everybody else to bail out the rich. In the American financial world, we have an economic hybrid: free enterpri ...

Updated: Sat Oct 17, 2009

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Politics: A Matter of Addition, Not Subtraction for 10/24/2009

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Some of my more disapproving colleagues in the press corps regularly remind the rest of us that there is only one way to look at any politician: down!

I disagree. Let me state at the outset: I like a lot of politicians and few of them more than I like Tom Davis, the shrewd and savvy Republican who chose, last year, to voluntarily leave the U.S. House after seven terms of representing his ...

Updated: Sat Oct 24, 2009

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The President Takes the Dover Test for 10/31/2009

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Former U.S. Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, who as a Marine pilot had flown 59 combat missions during World War II and an additional 90 missions in Korea — where in air-to-air combat during that war's last nine days, alone, he had shot down three Soviet MiG fighter planes — knew firsthand the suffering of war. So the plain words John Glenn spoke in the Senate on Jan. 22, 1997, about what h ...

Updated: Sat Oct 31, 2009

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Not All Politics Is Local for 11/07/2009

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Right there on the front page of the Oct. 23 Washington Post, "senior administration officials" attributed the predicted defeat on Election Day — then still a week and a half off — of Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds to Deeds' failure to seek and heed advice from the Obama White House.

This can only be called a "pre-mortem," obvious ...

Updated: Sat Nov 07, 2009

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