“Jerusalem, Israel” Goes Before the Supreme Court
Rick Richman 2011-11-04In “Scrubbing Israel,” Ben Smith notes that the Supreme Court will hear Zivotofsky v. Clinton on Monday, considering the constitutionality of the 2002 law that directs the secretary of state to designate “Israel” as the place of birth on the passport of an American citizen born in Jerusalem, if the citizen so requests.
Smith’s title reflects the fact that a few days after the New York Sun publicized the White House photos of Vice President Biden’s trip to “Jerusalem, Israel” (and hours after National Review Online published one of them), the White House scrubbed “Israel” from the captions. Smith also highlights Omri Ceren’s “startling” report on “Contentions” that the administration scrubbed references to “Jerusalem, Israel” in official State Department reports published by the Bush administration.
Finally, Smith cites newly discovered documents referencing “Jerusalem, Israel” in prior administrations as well:
A search of the Nixon Library, for instance, turns up his daily diary. A search of the Carter Library turns up ten similar documents. And a search of the Clinton Library finds all sorts of documents labeled “Jerusalem, Israel,” including the classic eulogy of Yitzhak Rabin. Even a search of current .gov websites turns up a spray of bureaucratic products referring to “Jerusalem, Israel.”
The Zionist Organization of America’s amicus brief in Zivotofsky lists references to “Jerusalem, Israel” on documents found on the sites of the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, State, and Treasury. Hillary Clinton’s brief nevertheless asserts that any U.S. action that would signal “symbolically or concretely” that it recognizes Jerusalem as within Israeli sovereign territory would “critically compromise the ability of the United States to … further the peace process.”
It is ironic that Hillary Clinton became the named defendant in this case. In 2002, as senator from New York, she voted for the law. In 1994, her husband signed legislation allowing American citizens born in Taiwan to have “Taiwan” put on their passports even though U.S. policy – both before and after the legislation — was that there is only one China (the People’s Republic) and that Taiwan was not a separate country.
It is even more ironic (to use the mildest possible word) that the candidate who in 2008 told 7,000 people at AIPAC, at a critical moment in his presidential campaign, that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided” is now seeking as president to have the Court hold unconstitutional a similar law with respect to Jerusalem, Israel.
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“Jerusalem, Israel” Goes Before the Supreme Court
Must-Reads from Magazine
The Same Palestinian Charade
Jonathan S. Tobin 2016-04-07
To anyone who read Bernie Sanders’ comments about Israel in his Daily News interview last week, heard the candidate’s Middle East policy speech (that he chose not to deliver at the AIPAC conference), or President Obama’s numerous evaluations of the current situation, there’s no mystery about the blame for the lack of peace in the region. They both put the onus on Israel for failing to better relations with the Palestinians and specifically think that the existence of settlements in the West Bank, as well as Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem that they also call settlements, is the primary obstacle to peace. That point of view received a kind of validation last week when Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas called for new peace talks with Israel.
Speaking on Israel’s Channel 2, Abbas claimed, “I want to see peace in my life” and called upon Prime Minister Netanyahu to meet with him “at any time.” The implication of the statement was that the Palestinians have been and continue to be willing to talk peace but that it has been the Israelis who have refused to engage with them or make any offers that would allow them the statehood and independence they desire. The interview fit in nicely with the image that Israel’s critics have nurtured about its “hardline” government.
Nor did those who take Abbas at face value understand the Israeli government reaction to Abbas’s attempt at outreach. Speaking with more amusement than eagerness, Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted that he had cleared his schedule on Monday and was waiting for Abbas. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted similarly, declaring that it was time for the Palestinians to make good on Abbas’ offer and to come and talk. The PA’s response was telling. “Negotiate what?” replied PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat. He went on to say that if the Israelis really wanted to talk they needed to concede in advance about settlements, agree to withdraw to the June 1967 lines, and release all imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.
In other words, Abbas wasn’t really serious about talking with Netanyahu. Moreover, just to make clear exactly what was going on, Palestine Media Watch issued a translation of a March 11 speech by Abbas broadcast on PA television broadcast to Palestinians. In contrast to the moderate champion of peace heard on Israeli TV, this Abbas had something very different to say. Instead of talking about mutual coexistence, Abbas said that the Palestinian people have “been under occupation for 67 or 68 years.”
For those who need help with their math, that means he’s talking about 1948 or 1949 when the modern state of Israel was born. In other words, according to Abbas, all of Israel inside the 1967 lines as well as the West Bank and Jerusalem is under “occupation.” This is significant not just because it contradicts his most recent attempt to pose as a moderate. It’s important because it explains everything the Palestinians have done since the Oslo Accords supposedly set the region on a path to peace in 1993.
It illustrates the one most important fact about the current impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. If he thinks of pre-1967 Israel as “occupied” land that illustrates that Abbas’s views are fundamentally similar to those of Hamas. The only difference between them is that sometimes, as he showed this past week, Abbas pretends to want peace whereas Hamas consistently proclaims its desire for Israel’s destruction. That explains why, even when pressured to do so by the U.S., Abbas refuses to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one no matter where its borders are drawn. He has been proclaimed by the Obama administration as the foremost Palestinian moderate, and that is actually true. But all that shows is that even the moderates don’t want peace. Abbas
When Obama and Sanders talk about settlements or Israel’s unwillingness to take risks for peace they are ignoring recent history during which the Jewish state has repeatedly sought compromise. That includes the peace offers of 2000, 2001 and 2008 in which Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert offered the PA under the leadership of first Yasir Arafat and then Abbas, an independent state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and a share of Jerusalem. It also ignores the fact that, in 2005, Ariel Sharon withdrew every Israeli soldier, settler, and settlement from Gaza, after which the area fell under the control of Hamas that set up an independent Palestinian state in all but name from which it launches terror raids and rockets. It also ignores Netanyahu’s willingness to accept a two-state solution in which he, the supposed hardliner, offered a West Bank withdrawal. That happened during the talks sponsored by Secretary of State John Kerry that were torpedoed by Abbas’s decision to sign a unity pact with Hamas and to do an end run around U.S.-sponsored diplomacy by going to the United Nations in order to get independence without first making peace with Israel.
Since then, Abbas has refused to talk with Netanyahu even though periodically he emerges to claim that he wants to do so only to, as was the case this week, to refuse to actually do it when the Israelis said they were ready to negotiate.
But Abbas’s hypocrisy wasn’t limited just to the charade of being willing to engage in peace talks. The PA has been actively involved in inciting the current “stabbing intifada,” in which hundreds of Palestinians have attempted to kill random Jews. Abbas helped bring the trouble by spreading lies about Israel planning to harm the Temple Mount mosques. Since then, he and his official media have continued to pour fuel on the fire by lauding terrorists, including those that kill civilians — even American citizens, as was the case with a U.S. Army veteran killed in Jaffa — as heroes and martyrs. It claims that when Israelis defend themselves against these killers, they are the aggressors and engaging in executions of “innocent” Arabs who just happen to be shot in the act of stabbing Israelis.
So to persuade the West that he is against incitement, he called for the reinstatement of a trilateral commission to stop the practice. But Abbas doesn’t need a commission that would include foreigners to do something about incitement. He can just stop doing it himself, and order his minions to do the same.
Doing so would be a problem because, as surveys of Palestinian opinion have consistently shown, these attitudes are popular. The vast majority of Palestinians agree with Abbas when he calls all of Israel “occupied” because they think Jews have no right to any part of the country and are, therefore, fair game for terror no matter where they live– be in a remote hilltop West Bank settlement or the slightly older settlement of Tel Aviv.
All this is easily understood by anyone that follows the Middle East closely. After all, Abbas, like his predecessor Arafat, has been playing this double game of saying one thing in English to Western and Israeli audiences and another in Arabic to Palestinians for two decades.
So why can’t Obama and Sanders get the message and stop hounding the Israelis to make more concessions in order to create a peace that the Palestinians don’t want? The answer lies in a blame-Israel-first mentality that is impervious to facts as well as recent history. The overwhelming majority of Israelis — including the leading opposition to Netanyahu — that a two-state solution is impossible without a Palestinian peace partner. But Abbas always seems to have a willing audience for his charades among those who prefer myths about Israeli intransigence to the truth about the Palestinians. Until the Europeans and the increasingly hostile to Israel left wing of the Democratic Party wise up to this game, it will continue and Jewish blood will continue to flow in this and future intifadas.
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Jonah Goldberg
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Charles Krauthammer
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William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
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Trouble in Trump-Land
Noah Rothman 2016-04-07
For any normal campaign, staff shakeups in the middle of a race are a red flag indicating that all is not right within the operation. Occasionally, mid-campaign churn is just normal turnover, indicative of nothing too serious. Most often, and particularly amid a spate of bad headlines, it is a sign of panic within a campaign’s ranks. The Trump camp’s internal staff shakeup falls decidedly in the latter category.
As I wrote yesterday, the Trump campaign is of two minds on how to conduct the candidate’s affairs, and they often come into conflict. A traditional presidential vehicle, for example, would probably have compelled its campaign manager to defuse an escalating feud with a journalist before it became a criminal matter. When that criminal matter escalated and that campaign manager was arrested on the charge of battery, a traditional campaign would have jettisoned the dead weight dragging them down and forcing their candidate off message. Not the Trump campaign. They and their candidate stood by embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, even going so far as to insist that his accuser had inflicted harm on herself to frame the accused.
That’s the Mr. Hyde face of the Trump campaign with which so many are familiar and to which Trump’s core supporters are so enthralled. Behind the scenes, the Trump campaign’s Dr. Jekyll is not impervious to reality and the challenges ahead. Amid a deluge of press accounts regarding Senator Ted Cruz’s remarkably effective efforts to undermine the Trump campaign’s delegate operation, Team Trump finally started getting serious about Cleveland in late March. They hired Paul Manafort, a veteran GOP operative and associate of Trump ally Roger Stone with experience navigating the last contested GOP convention in living memory – the 1976 nominating contest.
Just five days ago, Trump gave an indication that he was personally aware of how his campaign’s behavior had diminished his electoral prospects when he expressed regret for some of his and his campaign’s behavior. What’s more, the candidate appeared to be attempting a correction by reducing Corey Lewandowski’s responsibilities and shrinking his public profile. Meanwhile, Manafort had begun to take the reins of the campaign from Lewandowski. Though the Trump campaign manager was still formally Manafort’s superior, Politico reported last week that the new sheriff in town had taken over the campaign’s Washington presence and was hiring staff loyal to him. For the famously territorial Lewandowski, there was bound to be a clash.
In the wake of Trump’s landslide loss to Ted Cruz in Wisconsin, the campaign is performing the kind of house cleaning you might expect from a traditional campaign amid hard times, with the difference being that this was expected to be a particularly tumultuous realignment. “Behind the scenes, Lewandowski is fighting to preserve his own power and to box out Paul Manafort,” read a dispatch from Politico’s Eli Stokols yesterday. For his part, Manafort apparently had no intention of being boxed out:
Manafort met with Trump in New York Wednesday morning to discuss strategy and to outline his concerns about a lack of cooperation, according to one source. “If Manafort walks, this thing comes apart,” they said. “And some of the people close to him are ready to walk.”
The outcome of this internal squabble was never really in doubt. On Thursday, the Trump campaign announced that Manafort had taken over all duties related to the Cleveland convention and assembling the requisite delegates to win the nomination outright. Though the Trump campaign’s release indicated that Manafort was still subordinate to Lewandowski and his staff, discerning reporters were not buying it.
“Manafort is basically campaign manager without the name,” observed TIME Magazine reporter Zeke Miller. To the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, the move looked to him like a “takeover” of “professional political types within Trumpworld.”
Manafort joins a variety of veteran GOP operatives taking the wheel of the Trump campaign from the ragtag band of misfits who initially staffed the celebrity candidate’s operation. Team Trump has even taken on a Washington-based lobbyist to head the campaign’s “D.C. outreach” initiatives. Even Trump’s decision not to jettison Lewandowski and invite the negative news cycle that would accompany a “staff shakeup” narrative indicates a maturation of the campaign that has previously been lacking – even if it sacrifices the candidate’s favorite catch phrase in the process.
Ah, but Mr. Hyde does so resent being muzzled. He is never far off, as the Trump campaign’s bizarre statement released on Tuesday night in which the campaign accused Ted Cruz of complicity in a vast criminal conspiracy exemplifies. The campaign cannot mature if its chief executive continues to set a reckless tone. No matter how well staffed his operation is, Donald Trump will always be its principal.
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Arthur Herman
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Jonah Goldberg
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Charles Krauthammer
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William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
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John Bolton
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Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
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Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
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Cruz’s New York Values Problem
Jonathan S. Tobin 2016-04-07
It seems like a lot longer than three months since we first heard the words “New York values” pass the lips of Ted Cruz. At the time, Cruz was trying to persuade Iowa conservatives that Donald Trump was neither a Republican nor a conservative. He wasn’t wrong about that, but by seeming to damn an entire city, if not a state, for the sake of a shot at Trump, he handed the real estate mogul his first really good debate moment. On January 14, at the Fox Business Channel’s debate in Charleston, South Carolina, Trump body slammed Cruz by pointing out that, in speaking that way about New York, he was insulting all of its citizens as well as the memory of William F. Buckley, 9/11, and the first responders who perished that day. That exchange was largely forgotten in the tumultuous weeks that followed, but, as the campaign heads to New York where the next primary will be contested, it turns out that Cruz’s cheap shot might play a role in helping Trump get momentum back on his side after a devastating loss in Wisconsin. Indeed, that line may not just hurt Cruz in New York but also might remind Republican voters of what they didn’t like about the senator in the first place.
A lot has happened in the intervening 84 days since Trump’s devastating debate comeback.
Cruz won Iowa but then Trump began racking up primary victories that put him within sight of the nomination. That exchange in Charleston marked the end of a long period during which Cruz had refused to criticize Trump even as other candidates were trying in vain to point out his unsuitability for the presidency. But that period of Trump-Cruz détente seems like it happened sometime in the last century. Since then, we’ve had Trump’s birther claims about Cruz, his attempt to brand the Texas senator as a cheat and then his astonishing attack on Heidi Cruz. That latter piece of stereotypical Trump thuggishness was part of the prelude to the Wisconsin primary that seemed to signal that many mainstream Republicans were starting to accept Curz as the most credible alternative to Trump as well as a sign that the frontrunner was finally starting to pay a price for his behavior, misstatements and lack of knowledge about the issues.
Trump is responding to his Wisconsin setback in characteristic fashion by heaping more attacks on Cruz. Last night, at a Long Island rally, he led a crowd in chants of “lyin’ Ted” and revisited the “New York values” moment. Will this help him roll to a landslide in the April 19 primary where 95 delegates are at stake?
It is a matter of consensus among political observers that if Trump had been able to start acting like a president in the last month, the GOP race would be over. But he either can’t or won’t (he says it would be “boring as hell”), and he seems unable to resist the temptation to get into the gutter or to take the time to give serious study to issues as diverse as abortion or foreign policy. Instead of adjusting to the role of potential commander-in-chief, Trump is content to remain Trump, and his core supporters who delight in every outrageous thing or vicious attack he utters are happy about it even as the rest of the country recoils in disgust.
By contrast, in the last three months, Cruz has shown some growth. Whereas he started out in the race sounding at times like a televangelist, in his Wisconsin victory speech he seemed to be channeling some of Marco Rubio’s trademark optimism if not that of Ronald Reagan. He hasn’t changed his stance on the issues, but the tone is different lately. That’s important because the point about Cruz, who has a well-earned reputation as a bomb-thrower in the Senate that can’t get along with his GOP colleagues, is that his stance as an anti-establishment rebel was largely based on tone and tactics rather than ideology.
It’s true that Cruz has succumbed to the populist temptation and blasted trade deals as a betrayal of American interests and taken largely inconsistent stands on foreign policy (strong on Israel but all over the place when it comes to fulfilling U.S. responsibilities elsewhere). But take away the self-righteous attitude in which he always claimed to be the one honest man in Washington battling GOP leaders that he didn’t shrink from calling liars and, for the most part, you have a candidate that can be defended as a mainstream conservative. That is especially true when you contrast Cruz with Trump.
That’s still a bridge too far for a lot of establishment Republicans who remember how Cruz led the party off a cliff with the government shutdown in 2013. Others still view him as too wedded to social conservatives on issues that are losers for the GOP in a general election. Logic dictates that Republicans that don’t want Trump to be their nominee and lead them to certain defeat in the fall need to get behind Cruz. John Kasich may be more in line with their views, but he has failed everywhere but Ohio and is clearly out of touch with most GOP voters. Unless the Cleveland convention isn’t merely contested but actually deadlocked and forced to turn elsewhere, Cruz is still the only plausible alternative to Trump. The failure of the party establishment to mobilize for Cruz is rooted in a lingering distaste for him, as well as a belief on the part of some that he’s as much of a certain loser in a general election as Trump.
Cruz appears to be smart enough to learn from his mistakes as he goes along. Whereas he defined “New York values’ in January as symbolic of support for abortion and gay marriage, now he’s trying to associate it with unpopular Democrats like Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio. But the “New York values” line may continue to haunt him, not just because it helps Trump remind New Yorkers that he is a fellow native of the city, but also because it is a touchstone of what many in the GOP see as Cruz’s streak of extremism. And if that is the way most primary voters are going to think of Cruz, he is going to get creamed by Trump in New York as well as in the other Northeastern primaries this month, where he needs to make a dent in the frontrunner’s supposed stranglehold on the region.
Cruz understood long before anyone else did that 2016 would be a year in which voter anger and alienation from Washington would be decisive. The only problem for him has been the fact that Trump is even more of an outsider than he is. But now is the moment when Cruz needs to execute the difficult feat of holding onto his outsider status and true-blue conservatism while also signaling to the party that he is responsible enough to lead it. He’s capable of doing just that. But the more Republicans are reminded of Cruz’s attempt to pander to the right by bashing New York, the less likely mainstream Republicans will be to embrace him. If they continue to hold him at arm’s length and split the non-Trump vote, the Donald’s path to the nomination will become that much easier.
Everyone worth reading avidly reads COMMENTARY. Can you afford not to?
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
Never again miss another issue or article. Not a subscriber yet? Join the intellectual club, today.
Unlock the rest of this article and all other COMMENTARY articles, including our entire archive dating back to 1945, and featuring so many classic, epoch-defining articles by some of the very best minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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What Trump and Sanders Have In Common
John Podhoretz 2016-04-07
On Friday, Bernie Sanders gave a shockingly uninformed interview to the New York Daily News‘s editorial board. Unaware, perhaps, that the News is not the same populist paper it was when he left New York in 1959 and that the board’s staff is actually wonky and issue-driven, Sanders did not prepare and, in answer after answer, was unable to articulate specific policy aims or get the facts right (notoriously on the death toll in the 2014 Gaza war, which he exaggerated nine-fold). Liberal commentators were utterly and understandably appalled. “Pretty close to a disaster,” said Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post. On Twitter, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago called it “disturbing… If main policy is break up banks/reg wall st how can you not even know what’s legal or what regulators do.” There was a lot more of this.
Well, welcome, fellas, to our world.
Sanders is indeed vague on policy, ill-informed as to specifics, and full of argle-bargle on most everything. But if the liberal commentariat thinks Sanders fandom is going to be shaken to its core by the discovery he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that’s because they haven’t been paying attention to the lesson of 2016 or have reassured themselves that trends manifesting themselves in Donald Trump’s success with voters are isolated to the Republican party.
Sanders is the fun-house mirror image of Trump. These are both pitchfork candidacies based on the idea that voters need a tribune who will punish the bad guys. For Sanders, it’s the banks and “millionaires and billionaires.” For Trump, it’s Mexicans and the Chinese and Muslims (and hedge funds, when he remembers). They don’t have specifics because they don’t need specifics, and the people who are supporting them don’t want specifics. They want the emotion. They want to be told they’ve been screwed and those who screwed them will be punished. The complexities of punishing them, the mitigation of the consequences that will ensue when the bad guys are punished, and how exactly they will fulfill the promises they make to pay for college (Sanders) or to “win so fast it will make your head spin” (guess who) are matters of almost no interest to their fans.
So, when Mrs. Clinton seeks to take advantage of the Sanders interview by saying “he’s been talking for more than a year about doing things he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood,” and that “you can’t really help people if you don’t know how to do what you are campaigning [for],” and that “I think he hasn’t done his homework,” she’s talking like the Democratic Jeb Bush. Telling people in a revolutionary mood that politics is the art of the possible is like telling an angry mob standing in front of you, torches ablaze, to fill out a form and leave it in the suggestion box.
In fact, one of the reasons the #FeeltheBern crowd is so passionate and committed is because Hillary is so hapless at engaging most voters in a way that responds to the emotions that drive political involvement. And the same was true of almost everyone running against Trump.
Everyone worth reading avidly reads COMMENTARY. Can you afford not to?
“ In 1975 the Economist said of COMMENTARY: “The world's best magazine?” Take away the question mark and that statement still stands, thirty-eight years later. It's still the magazine America's liberals dread most, and the one America's enemies can't afford to ignore. It's the point of the conservative spear in the never-ending fight against the insanity of the left, whether it's in foreign policy or economic policy, social and cultural issues, or the arts—and no one does a better job standing up for Western culture and America's interests and those of its allies, including Israel. In fact, surviving the next three years—the Obama administration home stretch—and building the foundations for an American resurgence afterward will be impossible without reading COMMENTARY in print and online. „
Arthur Herman
“ There’s an enormous amount of shouting in the wild west of conservative media. That has its place, and is often a sign of the energy on the right. But amidst the cacophony there’s a special need for serious, considered, and compelling argument, presented in the hope of persuading, not just punishing. This is where COMMENTARY has always shined, perhaps more now than ever before. It aims to tackle the best arguments of its intellectual opponents, not just the easiest targets. It’s a journal I’ve read for nearly 30 years and I can’t think of a time when I’ve valued it more. „
Jonah Goldberg
“ For decades, COMMENTARY has opened its pages to the most serious uncompromising defense of the American creed—exemplar of ordered liberty at home, pillar of the free world abroad—in an era when it has been most under attack. From the exceptionally influential manifestoes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick to today's counterattack against the empowered advocates of the entitlement state and of American decline, COMMENTARY remains what it has been for more than a generation: fearless, informative, indispensable. „
Charles Krauthammer
“ COMMENTARY isn’t just an important magazine. It’s an indispensable one. It’s been indispensable for half a century, and it is today. It’s indispensable for understanding the moment we live in, and it’s indispensable for laying out a path forward. The challenges we confront are great, but COMMENTARY is used to facing grave challenges without fearful cowering or wishful thinking. So we need COMMENTARY today as much as we ever have, and we need it to be as strong as it’s ever been. „
William Kristol
“ COMMENTARY’s writing is predictably engaging and edgy, but its content is anything but homogeneous. Center-right perspectives characterize contributions, but not predictably so. Jewish affairs are thematic, but not always. Controversies of the day are the usual subjects, yet offered only with reflection well apart from the frenzied 24/7 news cycle. Intellectual honesty and analytical rigor characterize COMMENTARY and that is why even its political critics concede that they are still enlightened by the very arguments they often oppose. „
Victor Davis Hanson
“ COMMENTARY is an indispensable read on the Arab Spring, the Afghan war, the future of American conservatism, and all the other crazy stuff out there. But you already knew that. What I really love about it is that it’s a full-service operation, and its back-of-the-book guys—the fellows who write about music, literature, and all the things that make life worth living as the world goes to hell—are the best in the business. There is an observation in a Terry Teachout piece on the wonderful singer Nancy LaMott about “Moon River” that has stayed with me for almost two decades. I fished it out from the back of my mind to impress a gal at a Goldwater Institute reception only the other day, and it worked a treat. So thank you, COMMENTARY! Likewise, my differences with the arts’n’culture crew unsettle me far more than the geopolitical ones: reasonable people can disagree on how large a nuclear arsenal those wacky mullahs should be permitted to own, but I’m still agog at the great Andrew Ferguson’s mystifying praise for the New York Times obituaries page a couple of issues back. That’s COMMENTARY for you—provocative to the end, on matters large and small. In these turbulent and dismaying times, we can all use a huckleberry friend waiting round the bend, in the mailbox each month and on the computer screen every morning. For any journal of opinion, as “Moon River” teaches us, there’s such a lot of world to see. COMMENTARY sees most of it with piercing clarity: it can’t know all the answers, but it asks all the right questions, and with great farsightedness. It deserves your wholehearted support. „
Mark Steyn
“ COMMENTARY has played an invaluable role in American political discourse for decades, offering thoughtful analysis on issues rather than sound bites or bumper stickers. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign and defense policy, COMMENTARY has time and time again been ahead of the crowd, anticipating trends and developments that others react to only after the fact. I can't imagine not being a COMMENTARY subscriber. „
John Bolton
“ In the midst of today’s political rancor, COMMENTARY Magazine provides a rare venue for thoughtful discussion. COMMENTARY’s talented writers provide insightful analysis of foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the politics of the day. COMMENTARY is a treasure not only for conservatives, but for anyone looking for in-depth exploration of the issues that influence America’s public dialogue and shape the nation’s future. „
Karl Rove
“ It's notorious, and true, that government officials hardly read anything. Memos, sure; nowadays, emails and tweets as well. But magazines? People barely have time to eat lunch or see their kids, so how can an intellectual monthly affect public affairs? The question is a good one. How did COMMENTARY do it? The answer is that officials, like all citizens following American foreign policy, need a way to understand the world around them. When prevailing theories fail, when conventional wisdom is clearly at variance with what they see before their eyes, the outcome for senators and congressmen and White House officials is what the shrinks call cognitive dissonance. They may say one thing but believe another, or simply be unable to square previous beliefs and policies with the clear effects of U.S. conduct. They've lost the ability to explain the world. And then came COMMENTARY, offering month after month of piercing, bracing analysis—and value judgments of right and wrong, and clear writing about American gains and losses. Here was an insistence on looking reality in the face. Here was plain argument, seeking no quarter intellectually and giving none. And it mattered. It shamed some people, and emboldened others; COMMENTARY demanded that we conform policy to the opportunities and dangers that really faced America. In years of confusion and obfuscation, that striking clarity changed policies, and changed American conduct, because it changed the way we understood the world. „
Elliott Abrams
“ For more than 60 years, COMMENTARY has been a go-to source on matters of the greatest importance to our nation and our civilization. Today, its full-throated defense of the United States and freedom is as eloquent as it was a half-century ago, and no less urgent. Issues of the day will change, news cycles come and go, but COMMENTARY remains an indispensable authority in the battle of ideas that help to shape our world. Its continued success is both an indication, and source, of the country’s intellectual health. „
Donald Rumsfeld
“ COMMENTARY is America's most important monthly journal of ideas, period. For nearly seven decades it has published the best and most exciting writing from the most important thinkers: Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; Paul Johnson and Ruth Wisse; Cynthia Ozick and—of course—Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Is there anything remotely like it? No. It is the lamp by which America, and Israel, and the Jewish people, may find their way to safety. I'm proud to be published in its pages. „
Bret Stephens
“ Irving Kristol once called COMMENTARY the most influential magazine in Jewish history. Certainly, no publication had a greater influence on me as I evolved from adolescent reader (arguing over its articles with my father and older brother) into a “frequent contributor” who made it my intellectual home. The magazine did not exploit American freedom to escape from civilizing duty but rather activated the intertwined responsibilities of citizens and members of a group. American Jewry can boast of many contributions to the welfare of this country and the Jewish people, but few as fortifying as COMMENTARY. „
Ruth R. Wisse
“ Edward Shils noted that there are four means of education in the modern world: the classroom, bookstores (especially used-bookstores), the conversation of intelligent friends, and intellectual magazines. For me intellectual magazines were more important than any of the other three, and no magazine among them more so than COMMENTARY. I first happened on COMMENTARY as a student browsing in the University of Chicago Bookstore in 1957. I have not missed an issue since. The magazine spoke to my intellectual interests and passions, and still does. As a reader and as a writer, I should be lost without it. „
Joseph Epstein
“ Why does COMMENTARY matter? Since 1945, no other monthly magazine has so consistently published serious, provocative argument and analysis. No other monthly magazine has viewed America and the world through such a wide angle, encompassing economics, politics, society, culture, religion, and diplomacy. No other monthly magazine has published such a celebrated and wide-ranging list of editors and contributors. Cerebral, critical, and committed, the point of view found in its pages is as unique as it is formidable. And in a world of Iranian nukes, rising anti-Semitism, radical Islam, American disarmament, bipartisan neo-isolationism, and disintegrating institutions, reading COMMENTARY is more than a pleasure. It is a necessity. „
Matthew Continetti
“ COMMENTARY has long been an unmissable landmark on the American intellectual landscape. These days it shapes debate, propels argument, and explains society with renewed vigor and force. It is one of the small group of essential reads for anybody engaged in politics, Judaism, foreign policy, national manners, and morals. „
David Brooks
“ Anyone looking for a definitive exposition of a significant historical moment—whether UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, say, or the battles over "general education" at Harvard—has at his fingertips an inestimable gift: COMMENTARY's archives, which contain countless gems of reporting and analysis. Today's generation of COMMENTARY writers is building an equally invaluable store of knowledge for future researchers and scholars. „
Heather Mac Donald
“ I first subscribed to COMMENTARY in 1973, as a recovering liberal who had invested four years of my young life in writing speeches for a constellation of McGovernite candidates and office-holders. Living in Berkeley at the time, I relished COMMENTARY as a guilty pleasure, feeling grateful that the magazine arrived each month discreetly disguised in a plain, brown wrapper that concealed its suspiciously neo-conservative content. In the militantly leftist community in which I functioned forty years ago, receiving regular monthly installments of the most degrading porn would have produced far less embarrassment than my growing devotion to the persuasive prose of Norman Podhoretz and Co. Yes, my personal journey from left to right-center involved the usual biographical factors, including the three P’s: paychecks, parenthood, and prayer. Paychecks, because they arrived with shocking subtractions in the form of onerous and incomprehensible taxes; parenthood, because responsibility for a new generation forced a longer-term perspective; and prayer, because my own growing Jewish observance led to the conclusion that my “idealistic” ’60s generation, with all its narcissism and preening self-regard, might not provide life’s ultimate answers after all. Fortunately for me, reading COMMENTARY with near-religious regularity helped to organize my onrushing insights and experience into a more coherent world view. In a dark time in our nation’s history, while surviving (temporarily) in the most unhinged corner of the continent, this incomparable publication persuaded me that I wasn’t alone. „
Michael Medved
“ Just as one begins to despair of hearing the strong voice of sanity and courage, leavened with charm and good humor, in our modern polity, COMMENTARY arrives, and once a month one can be reminded that there are indeed some clear-sighted and articulate people who seem actively to enjoy the battle for truth. „
Andrew Roberts
“ Every month in print, and every day online, COMMENTARY somehow manages to pull off a dazzling balancing act: intellectual but unpretentious, serious but never boring, timely but not fleeting. On the leading questions of the day, it offers fresh and unfamiliar insights. And on the emerging questions that will dominate the years to come, it often sees things first and clearest. It is simply indispensable. „
Yuval Levin
“ In a time of passion, COMMENTARY champions reason. Against lies, COMMENTARY speaks for truth. Confronting those who would doom to death the Jewish people, COMMENTARY is a magnificent continuing achievement of American Jewish life. „
David Frum
“ COMMENTARY has become my new go-to website for news analysis because it is measured, substantive, thoughtful, and written for news consumers of all shapes and sizes. When juggling all the issues of the day and thinking them through, I find myself going back to COMMENTARY again and again to see if there’s anything more that can help me add the ingredients needed to finalize an argument. I like the mix of foreign policy and national political news, as well as the discussions about America’s place in the world and what it should be. I’m a print subscriber and a frequent website visitor, and I follow all of the writers on Twitter. Thank you, COMMENTARY, for providing such consistently helpful content. „
Dana Perino
“ There is more commentary in the world than ever before—whether in print, on the air, or on the Internet. But there is still a dearth of serious, informed commentary that reports, analyzes, and argues without ever stooping to name-calling or vitriol. If you further narrow down the segment of the commentariat that looks at the world from a conservative and Jewish perspective—well, you’re left with only one choice. The magazine you are now reading. COMMENTARY has changed over the years—for instance, it now publishes this blog—but one thing that has not changed is its steadfast commitment to providing the best analysis from the most informed writers of the most important ideas in the world, all written in clear prose that appeals to a general audience. There is nothing else like it. Never has been, never will be. „
Max Boot
Never again miss another issue or article. Not a subscriber yet? Join the intellectual club, today.
Unlock the rest of this article and all other COMMENTARY articles, including our entire archive dating back to 1945, and featuring so many classic, epoch-defining articles by some of the very best minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Enjoy every new issue—either in print, on our responsive website, or on our beautiful, hand-crafted iPad edition, enriched with multimedia and other web-exclusive content.
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Bernie’s Big Mouth
Noah Rothman 2016-04-07
At the rate that Bernie Sanders is raising money, the septuagenarian socialist senator can continue to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination for as long as he wants. Despite his successes at the polls, that effort still seems a quixotic one. Even if Sanders were to continue to perform as he has been over the past several weeks, which is certainly impressive, it would not matter; not so long as the Democratic establishment’s failsafe in the form of “super delegates” continue to disproportionately back Hillary Clinton. If Sanders continues to win elections and can present himself as a desirable alternative to Clinton, those party loyalists might begin to rethink their allegiance. While the former circumstance is entirely possible, as long as the brash Vermont senator keeps talking, the latter seems unlikely.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign had long rested the assumption that she should have already won the Democratic presidential nomination by now on her strength among Democratic voters in the South. Her vaunted “firewall” of support, buttressed by minority Democratic voters who remain supportive of President Barack Obama, did serve Clinton well in February and March. What she may not have accounted for, however, is that Sanders could survive past her “firewall” states. Even among African-American Democratic primary voters, opposition to Sanders is nowhere near as strong elsewhere in the country as it has been in the South.
In Michigan, where Sanders pulled off an upset victory on March 8, Clinton won just two-thirds of the African-American primary vote – which made up a dramatic 21 percent of the overall electorate. If Sanders had not won the support of an impressive 28 percent of black Democratic voters, he would have lost the state (which he won by just half a percent of the overall vote). The same phenomenon was evident in Wisconsin, where Sanders beat Clinton by a dramatic 13 points. While they made up a much smaller portion of the overall Democratic primary electorate in the Badger State (10 percent), Sanders was able to win the backing of 31 percent of African-American voters. Even despite his signature criticisms of Barack Obama’s performance in office from the president’s left, Sanders remains an appealing figure for Northern African-American voters.
Now, does this translate into the Northeast? It might. A CBS News/YouGov survey of the Empire State’s Democratic voters ahead of the critical New York primary showed Clinton beating Sanders by 10 points (53 to 43 percent). That poll also had Clinton winning the support of just 65 percent of African-American voters while 31 percent backed Sanders. Those findings are virtually identical to what Quinnipiac University pollsters discovered at the end of last month. It is reasonable to assume that Sanders could, with the help of accumulated momentum and some key ad buys in the New York City media market, make the New York primary a competitive race. Much to the consternation of narrative-weavers in the commentary class, Hillary Clinton can claim New York as her home state after winning two statewide races for federal office there. A loss, or even an unexpectedly narrow win for Clinton, would send panic shooting throughout the Democratic ranks and might shake a few of the former first lady’s super delegates loose. That is, it would if Bernie Sanders could just keep his mouth shut.
Let’s be clear: The coverage of Bernie Sanders’ supposed week of “gaffes” is largely a fabrication and is entirely motivated by Team Clinton’s apprehension. Clinton allies have mocked Sanders for an interview he gave to the New York Daily News in which he demonstrated a general lack of granular policy knowledge to support his proposals for tighter regulations on Wall Street. Clinton allies have feigned great effrontery over that same interview, in which Sanders said he would support a new “assault weapons ban” but would not subvert the law by supporting legislation that would allow victims of gun crime to sue gun manufacturers. Most gallingly, Clinton allies succumbed to a case of the vapors when Sanders had the audacity to contend that Hillary Clinton was not “qualified” to be the President of the United States as a result of her 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War. The former secretary of state’s supporters do their candidate no favors when they dramatically overreact to these defensible if clumsy comments. Instead, they demonstrate that their candidate believes herself to be entitled to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and she resents having to work for it.
That said, Sanders did step on a land mine this week; one that he should have been able to see from miles away. In their haste to make the Vermont senator pay for his perfectly legitimate and reasonable contention that gun manufacturers should not be liable for the criminal misuse of their lawful-sold product, anti-gun rights activists heaped scorn and derision upon Sanders that he did not deserve. Rather than endure the wrath of gun control activists with stoicism, Sanders played directly into their hands. When CBS reporter Nancy Cordes informed Sanders that Erica Smegielski, a 30-year-old Hillary Clinton supporter and the daughter of a victim of the Newtown massacre, demanded from Sanders an apology for his position on gun manufacturers, Sanders refused. Instead, he demanded an apology from Clinton for playing a role in the deaths of those who died amid combat and turmoil in Iraq following the 2003 coalition invasion.
In a sense, Sanders has a point. Clinton is about as responsible for the deaths of coalition forces and civilians in Iraq as Bushmaster is for those at Sandy Hook Elementary. But this is not a premise upon which reasoned debate is possible or even the objective. If Sanders were a skillful campaigner, he’d know that the raw emotionalism couldn’t be defused with legalistic pronouncements about appropriately circumspect liability laws. What gun control activists want isn’t a policy debate; they want enemies. Foolishly, Sanders gave them one.
In that moment, the Vermont senator handed Clinton the wedge with which she can cleave some weakly committed Sanders voters away from their candidate and ensure that a state like New York – not to mention the rest of Southern New England – does not become competitive. If Clinton sweeps the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic at the end of the month, that’s the whole ballgame.
The story of the Democratic race in 2016 is not how remarkable a politician Bernie Sanders is. The story of this cycle on the Democratic side is how remarkably weak Hillary Clinton is as her party’s frontrunner. If she had faced a reasonably competent liberal challenger, just imagine what might have been.
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