ArcaMax

The Wollman Rink episode, or, rather, the unduly optimistic conclusion I drew from it, explains a lot about Donald Trump's presidency and why he may not do as well against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) in the contest for the Republican nomination, as current poll numbers suggest.

The story of the ice skating rink repair is now ancient history, a ...Read more

A conservative, to paraphrase and slightly alter Irving Kristol's saying, is a liberal who has been mugged by reality -- especially by a reality that is plain to the vast bulk of ordinary people but remains inexplicably invisible to liberal intellectuals and politicians.

That saying applies, to varying extents, to two important political ...Read more

The report of special counsel John Durham is, or ought to be, devastating for anyone who has put any credence in what has now been definitively revealed to be the Russia collusion hoax.

With a painstaking examination of the evidence (1,753 footnotes!), Durham establishes conclusively that there was no basis for the FBI to have begun its ...Read more

Getting words right can clear up a lot of confusion about politics and public policy. Example: "segregate" is a verb that requires a subject. "Segregate" is not an impersonal verb, nor is "segregation" a mere accidental result of unrelated outside processes.

One segregates by deliberately setting one class of people or things apart from another...Read more

Reports of the death of the Republican Party continue to be premature.

You've heard the litany, often from reporters and commentators who never liked Republicans and, lately, from others who can't stomach former President Donald Trump. And they've got something of a point. Republicans have lost four of the last seven presidential elections and ...Read more

Lies beget lies. That's one way to summarize nearly the past decade of presidential politics, as well as the potentially dismal presidential race underway.

I leave to others commentary on the big media stories of the past week -- the ouster of the talented and high-ratings-earning Tucker Carlson from Fox News, the ouster of the less talented ...Read more

Are we watching a replay of King Canute commanding the waves to recede? That thought occurred to me while reading about the Biden administration's latest step in advancing the president's 2021 goal of having half of all new autos be electric by 2030.

The analogy isn't exact -- current thinking is that Canute knew his courtiers were wrong when ...Read more

It's just one poll, conducted by SSRS Research for CNN, but it provides interesting evidence about where voters are on issues, and it isn't glaringly inconsistent with other survey research.

So "which political party's views are closer to" yours on each issue? Answer: mostly the Republican Party. On the economy (41%-29%), immigration (40%-30%),...Read more

What do you do to win an election when your candidate is universally known and unpopular with a majority of voters? That's a question both major parties have had to face in the last few years. Both look like they're going to face it for some time longer.

One way is to get the other party to nominate someone who is even more unpopular. Sometimes...Read more

Twelve or 13 months from now, the race for the Republican nomination for president -- and the race for the Democratic nomination, if there is one -- will probably be over.

Prognostications this far ahead of such contests have a sad history. Just ask Rudy Giuliani or Jeb Bush what it felt like when the balloon drop started after their acceptance...Read more

Amid news that Donald Trump is about to be indicted by a hyperpartisan prosecutor and of his hysterical responses, and prompted by vagrant reading about the War of 1812 and Woodrow Wilson's violations of civil liberties in World War I, a thought occurred to me. America seems to go crazy every 50 years or so.

Start with the War of 1812, about 50...Read more

As one who has spent pleasant time on Sand Hill Road and the Stanford campus, I'm dismayed by the demands for special treatment coming from the denizens of one of America's most privileged and affluent precincts.

Sand Hill Road, leading up the hills above Stanford, was the home of Silicon Valley's first venture capital firms and of a branch of ...Read more

Big city elections provide clues about trends in national politics, the composition and attitudes of Democratic constituency groups, and voters' responses to emerging matters. Recent examples include the March 2019 primary for mayor of Chicago and the June 2021 Democratic contest in New York City.

The latest example is last week's nonpartisan ...Read more