Commentary Magazine

Posts For: July 2, 2012

Romney Trip Puts Obama on Defensive

| @alanagoodman 07.02.2012 - 5:33 PM

The New York Times reports that Mitt Romney will visit Israel to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu this summer, marking his fourth trip to the country:

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, will visit Israel this summer to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders, a senior aide to the prime minister confirmed on Monday evening.

Mr. Romney, who has pledged to “do the opposite” of the Obama administration on matters pertaining to Israel, is also expected to meet with Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority; President Shimon Peres of Israel; the American ambassador, Daniel B. Shapiro; and leaders of the opposition Labor Party in Jerusalem. He plans to have at least one public event in a trip that will likely last less than two days.

“He’s a strong friend of Israel and we’ll be happy to meet with him,” said Ron Dermer, Mr. Netanyahu’s senior adviser, who worked with Republicans in the United States before immigrating here. “We value strong bipartisan support for Israel and we’re sure it will only deepen that.”

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Forgotten POW Marks 3 Years of Captivity

| @bethanyshondark 07.02.2012 - 4:36 PM

During the weekend, the only remaining POW in Afghanistan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl of Idaho, marked three years in captivity.

The details of his capture are still a mystery. In a recent Rolling Stone article, the Bergdahl family released previously unseen emails which detailed Bowe’s discontent with his service in Afghanistan. Many of his fellow soldiers told Rolling Stone they believe he was captured because he deserted his post. The White House and Pentagon have both refused to comment on how the Taliban captured Bergdahl and have given few details about how they have worked to return him to his family. The Pentagon has not classified him as a deserter and gave him promotions while in captivity.

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One More Lesson From Shamir

| @eottolenghi 07.02.2012 - 4:07 PM

Jonathan did a great service to our readers in his eulogy of Yitzhak Shamir. I would like to add one more lesson we, in the West, should take from this great man’s lifelong political career.

Since Shamir left office in 1992, for the last 20 years of his life, he kept quiet. Politicians and statesmen who lose elections these days well before their meeting with fate have the tendency to teach politics to their successors. Think of Jimmy Carter, in America; Jacques Delors, in Europe; Gareth Evans, in Australia; and Yossi Sarid or Avrum Burg, in Israel. None of these men had the decency to confront their political defeat as graciously as Shamir did. None accepted the ineluctable verdict of the poll as evidence that, whatever the merit of their convictions, the zeitgeist was against them.

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The Problem With Child Activists

| @alanagoodman 07.02.2012 - 3:37 PM

Politico reports the breakout child star of CPAC 2009, Jonathan Krohn, has given up on conservatism and become an ardent Obama supporter:

Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009’s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party.

Now 17, Krohn — who went on to write a book, “Defining Conservatism,” that was blurbed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett — still watches that speech from time to time, but it mostly makes him cringe because, well, he’s not a conservative anymore.

“I think it was naive,” Krohn now says of the speech. “It’s a 13-year-old kid saying stuff that he had heard for a long time.… I live in Georgia. We’re inundated with conservative talk in Georgia.… The speech was something that a 13-year-old does. You haven’t formed all your opinions. You’re really defeating yourself if you think you have all of your ideas in your head when you were 12 or 13. It’s impossible. You haven’t done enough.”

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Liberals Can’t Handle the Truth

| @Peter_Wehner 07.02.2012 - 2:55 PM

Peter Baker of the New York Times writes about the Obama administration’s effort to explain the continuing unpopularity of the Affordable Care Act. (Baker points out that just 32 percent supported the Affordable Care Act when it was approved in March 2010, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll; and as of a month ago, 34 percent supported it, virtually unchanged.)

The problem, Team Obama would have us believe, has nothing whatsoever to do with the defects in the law. The blame rests with an insufficiently effective PR effort.

“Unfortunately, we never had a really effective strategy around communicating to the public the benefits and the rationale behind health care reform,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a physician and University of Pennsylvania vice provost who was a top White House adviser involved in developing the program. “We never had a spokesperson, and the public never really understood what we were doing.”

That failure still baffles supporters like Dr. Emanuel, given the significance of health care to Obama’s legacy. Some see it as a result of the president’s own instinctive diffidence or the natural desire to move to the next challenge. Others note the complexity of the act itself, or criticize the president’s advisers for not being more assertive.

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Frantic Fundraising on Air Force One

| @alanagoodman 07.02.2012 - 12:33 PM

In case you couldn’t tell from the dozens of Obama campaign emails you get each week begging for $3 contributions, or donations in lieu of wedding gifts, the president’s reelection team is apparently nervous about its money game. Exhibit B: The Daily Beast obtained a recording of a frantic 18-minute fundraising solicitation made by President Obama during a donor conference call on Air Force One:

The president’s 18-minute pleading—a recording of which was provided to The Daily Beast by an Obama contributor—hardly sounded like a man doing a victory lap after Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding ObamaCare, as the Affordable Care Act has come to be known. Or, for that matter, like a candidate who has been beating his Republican opponent in recent polls of key battleground states.

Rather, Obama sounded like a dog-tired idealist forced to grapple painfully with hard reality. “In 2008 everything was new and exciting about our campaign,” Obama said. “And now I’m the incumbent president. I’ve got gray hair. People have seen disappointment because folks had a vision of change happening immediately. And it turns out change is hard, especially when you’ve got an obstructionist Republican Congress.”

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The Great Miscalculation of John Roberts

| @SethAMandel 07.02.2012 - 11:16 AM

Conservatives have been rightly disappointed with the Supreme Court ruling to uphold ObamaCare, but that disappointment has been all the more bitter because the case has been full of unpleasant surprises. Conservatives believed they had two objectives to get ObamaCare overturned: convince a majority of the justices there was no “limiting principle” to the individual mandate that would excuse it from setting precedent on the Commerce Clause, and convince Anthony Kennedy (the assumed swing vote) that because there was no limiting principle, the law could not survive an accurate reading of the Commerce Clause.

They did both, and yet still lost the case, thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts’s decision to elevate politics over jurisprudence. But now it’s time for Roberts to confront disappointment himself. Roberts believed he was doing two things by upholding ObamaCare: he was settling the issue of whether the mandate is a tax (it is), thus protecting the Commerce Clause, and he was preventing the further delegitimization of the Supreme Court by the Democrats, thus improving its general reputation. He failed on both counts.

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Was Roberts’ Opinion Only an Essay?

| @jpundit 07.02.2012 - 10:50 AM

As Peter Wehner notes, now that Chief Justice Roberts has upheld the ObamaCare mandate as a “tax,” the administration no longer views it as a tax. Those finding solace in the fact that the chief justice, while adopting the administration’s extraordinarily weak “tax” argument, at least rejected its Commerce Clause contention, may be surprised to learn the part of his opinion relating to the Commerce Clause did not speak for the Supreme Court.

The official Syllabus notes that “Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Part II, concluding that the Anti-Injunction Act does not bar this suit,” and “delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Part III-C, concluding that the individual mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s power under the Taxing Clause.” Part III-A of the Roberts opinion – concluding the ObamaCare mandate was not valid under the Commerce Clause – was not in the portion of his opinion that represents the opinion of the Court.

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Younger Voters Turning Against Obama

| @alanagoodman 07.02.2012 - 10:24 AM

Political cynicism is on the rise among young voters, and they’re directing it at President Obama and government in general. According to a spring Harvard Institute of Politics poll, and today’s New York Times report, 18 to 24-year-olds are far less likely to support President Obama than 25 to 29-year-olds, and they’re more likely to hold conservative tendencies:

Polls show that Americans under 30 are still inclined to support Mr. Obama by a wide margin. But the president may face a particular challenge among voters ages 18 to 24. In that group, his lead over Mitt Romney — 12 points — is about half of what it is among 25- to 29-year-olds, according to an online survey this spring by the Harvard Institute of Politics. And among whites in the younger group, Mr. Obama’s lead vanishes altogether.

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Obama’s Systematic Assault on the Truth

| @Peter_Wehner 07.02.2012 - 9:19 AM

The Democratic talking points have been issued and are being followed to the letter (see here and here). And they go like this: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is not a tax; it’s a penalty. Those who suggests it’s a tax are wrong, in error, disingenuous, and dissemblers.

Here’s the problem, though: characterizing the Affordable Care Act as a tax isn’t simply the interpretation of Chief Justice John Roberts and a majority of the Supreme Court; it’s the interpretation of the Obama administration.

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