WASHINGTON — If you are the status quo candidate in a change election in which the national mood is sour and two-thirds of the electorate think the country is on the wrong track, what do you do? Attack. Relentlessly. Paint your opponent as extremist, volatile, clueless, unfit, dangerous. Indeed, Hillary Clinton’s latest national ad, featuring […]
Op-Eds
Posted inOp-Eds
Plenty to lose with Trump presidency
WASHINGTON — Even Donald Trump is capable of posing interesting questions, and he asked one of this election’s most important when he declared: “What the hell do you have to lose?” He was specifically addressing his query to African-Americans, but it’s something all Americans should think about. And the latest report on incomes released Tuesday […]
advertisement
Posted inOp-Eds
Federal budget woes need addressing
“Isn’t it a shame,” the late journalist Earl Wilson once asked, “that future generations can’t be here to see all the wonderful things we’re doing with their money?” New projections show once again that Washington’s budget woes need to be addressed sooner rather than later. Sticking with the status quo — including “automatic” spending programs […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Clinton’s lack of transparency could doom her campaign
NEW YORK — Frank Luntz, the Republican political consultant, is a master of the political epigram. Under his tutelage the estate tax became the death tax and global warming became climate change. So Luntz, once again going to the heart of the matter, recently put an either-or question to a group of about 50 people: […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Official child poverty rate inaccurate
WASHINGTON — America is on the mend. Witness the good news in the latest version of the nation’s “economic report card”: the Census Bureau’s annual estimates of the median household income and the poverty rate. Here are the crucial numbers. In 2015, median household income — the midpoint, with half of households above and half […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Clinton’s faith gives her the edge
WASHINGTON — This is the inversion election, a contest in which so many of our familiar mental categories have been turned upside down. This year, it’s the Republican presidential candidate who says the United States isn’t great anymore and the Democrat who insists it is. The Republican says that the former KGB agent now presiding […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Choice of vice president makes a difference
A friend 15 years older than Hillary Clinton recently came down with a mild pneumonia that sounds just like hers. Five days later, he was on a ladder pruning trees. The doctor wanted more rest, but he’s fine. And so will Clinton be. I will dispense with the interminable chitchat of whether she should have […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Colombian ceasefire holding … so far
On August 24, leaders of the “nominally Marxist” Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia agreed to what they called a “definitive ceasefire” with the pro-U.S. Colombian government they once vowed to topple. Weary Colombian citizens immediately applauded the announcement. They hope the deal will end the 52 years of war FARC ignited in 1964. 260,000 people […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Protests demonstrate that U.S. could be better
It keeps getting bigger. One might have expected last month’s protest by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, his refusal to stand for the national anthem, to have blown over by now. Instead, it has caught fire. Sunday, members of the Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs all staged protests of their […]
Posted inOp-Eds
‘Deplorables’ comment haunts Clinton
Every now and again secular progressives rip off their mask and tell conservatives what they really think of them. At an LGBT fundraiser last Friday in New York, Hillary Clinton one-upped President Obama, who said of conservatives during the 2008 presidential campaign: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns […]