ArcaMax

On the surface, Joe Biden seems to be doing pretty well. But underneath, there are signs of problems, areas where partisan overstretch threatens the underpinnings of what some are hailing as the new order of things.

Joe Biden enjoys a 54% average job approval rating, a good mark for a president midterm or facing reelection but below the 100-day...Read more

How will future historians explain this? From 2001 to 2014, majorities of Americans, including supermajorities of blacks and non-Hispanic whites, told Gallup pollsters that "race relations" were either very or somewhat good.

Then, after the election and reelection of the first American president of African descent, each case with majorities of ...Read more

It wasn't even close. The final count was 1,798 against and 738 for, 71% to 29%.

The issue in question was whether the employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, wanted to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Not, as The Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, put it: a contest of "Big Tech vs...Read more

The big lie works -- until it doesn't.

The big lie in this case is Joe Biden's charge that the changes in Georgia election law passed by the majority-Republican legislature and signed by Republican Governor Brian Kemp on April 1 being are "Jim Crow on steroids." This was doubling down on his March 25 press conference statement that the law "...Read more

"This is not politics," President Joe Biden said last week. "Reinstate the mandate if you let it down." Give him credit for consistency: When Gov. Greg Abbott ended Texas' mask mandate last month, Biden called it "Neanderthal thinking."

But maybe the Neanderthals got it right. COVID-19 deaths in Texas plunged in March, and as National Review's ...Read more

The acrid atmosphere last week at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, with its vivid murals of the 18th-century British seafarer James Cook's discoveries throughout the Pacific, sounds very much like the acrid atmosphere almost exactly 60 years ago in the Beaux-Arts American and Soviet embassies in Vienna: grim, at least for the United ...Read more

How to explain Joe Biden's ideological transformation over the years? Perhaps it's the same as the explanation of why the chameleon's complexion changes when he moves from desert to forest: adaptation to local terrain.

About the Biden transformation there can be no question. The senator who opposed government financing of abortions for 30-some ...Read more

"BIDEN," say the young demonstrators' T-shirts, imitating his campaign logo, "PLEASE LET US IN!" The picture ran in The New York Times, but one wonders whether whoever paid for the tees got his money's worth, for President Joe Biden's administration seems determined to let in as many immigrants as want to come.

The numbers are daunting. About ...Read more

When public policies have produced disastrous results, and when alternative policies have resulted in immediate, seemingly miraculous improvement, why would anyone want to go back to the earlier policies? Is there any reason to suppose that this time will be different?

Not that I can see. The earlier policies -- a pullback from active policing ...Read more

The last decade has seen a boom in voter turnout -- for both parties. Between the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections, total voter turnout rose 23%, with Democratic turnout up 23% and Republican turnout up 22%.

Yet, because of the changing distribution of votes, the results were significantly different. The 2012 election was not a close thing:...Read more

You expect a certain number of stumbles from a new administration. President Joe Biden's incoming team professed dismay at having to create a coronavirus vaccine distribution program "from scratch," due to its predecessor's handling of the situation, and this week, Biden complained that "we didn't have" a vaccine when he "came into office." He ...Read more

When you've been consuming and producing political commentary for many years, you get used to certain recurring themes. One is the imminent disappearance or relegation to permanent minority status of the Republican Party.

This was widely predicted after the Barry Goldwater defeat in 1964, after Watergate in the 1970s, after the elections of ...Read more