George W. Bush

"There may be somebody special here today," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack Obama's sister, upon observing the large audience in the Hilton ballroom this morning. Then she abruptly added, "Two somebodies."

It seems the Obama family is having a hard time remembering Hillary Clinton this week. Last night, Obama painfully forgot to make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt to his supporters at a fund-raiser that was billed as a unity event in which he would make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt. This morning, in front of roughly 2,000 donors, mostly women, who had donated between $200 and $23,000 to a variety of Obama-related funds, the two former rivals appeared together to argue that equal pay and rights for women was a crucial aspect of any plan for American progress, and that party unity was a critical step to winning in November.  read more »

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Michelle Obama did her part for Democratic unity here today, referring to Hillary Clinton as an "extraordinary woman" at a round-table event with former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

"Because of Hillary Clinton's work, the issues of importance to women and working families are more at the forefront than ever before," Obama said, the day before Barack Obama will appear with Clinton for the first time since the primary ended.

Naturally enough, she sought to portray herself and her husband as closely in tune with female concerns.

One of the first rounds of applause during her brief speech came when she paid tribute to her mother for resourcefulness.  read more »

Earlier today the Bush administration made clear they don't intend to intervene in the negotiations between the Iraqi government and several large oil companies.

Chuck Schumer, along with Claire McCaskill and John Kerry, responded quickly with a letter to Condoleezza Rice asking her to prevent the deals from going forward until there is an oil-revenue sharing law.

Both Schumer and Kerry are on the Senate Finance Committee; Kerry and McCaskill are both surrogates for Barack Obama, whose campaign has been going after John McCain for McCain's new, oil company-friendly position on offshore drilling.

Here's the release along with the letter (which, weirdly, doesn't include McCaskill's name at the end of it).  read more »

GRAND NEW PARTY: HOW REPUBLICANS CAN WIN THE WORKING CLASS AND SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM
By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Doubleday, 244 pages, $23.95

To their immense credit, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two dynamic young conservative thinkers, freely admit the comprehensive failure of George W. Bush’s so-called "compassionate conservatism." They acknowledge that the blue-collar voters who were supposed to benefit from his policies are feeling more beleaguered now than at any time since the recessionary 1970s. In Grand New Party, their intriguing outline for Republican revitalization, they don’t even bother trying to say something good about our 42nd president. (Efforts in that direction are making many of their colleagues sound as desperate as senators caught poking their feet beneath a toilet stall divider.  read more »

At an education forum in Florida, Michael Bloomberg praised John McCain for defending President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, and praised McCain and Barack Obama for supporting merit pay for teachers.

The legislation, which Ted Kennedy also worked on, has faced criticism. 

The mayor's office sent over a copy of the prepared remarks Bloomberg was set to give to the Excellence in Action National Education Summit at Disney World. The mayor said:

"Instituting accountability standards is central to the reforms embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act. And it says a lot about the independence and integrity of Senator John McCain that at a time when the allies of the status quo have made NCLB a political punching bag, he continues to express his support for those accountability standards.  read more »

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In 1990, the first Bush Administration banned off shore oil exploration and yesterday the current President Bush decided to ask Congress to end the ban. This is the same policy now being pushed by Senator John McCain in his effort to show he cares about rising gasoline prices. According to Sheryl Stolberg in The New York Times on June 18:

The Congressional moratorium was first enacted in 1982, and has been renewed every year since. It prohibits oil and gas leasing on most of the outer continental shelf, 3 miles to 200 miles offshore. Since 1990, it has been supplemented by the first President Bush’s executive order, which directed the  read more »

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Out on the campaign trail, town hall-style meetings are often held in barns, or factories or high school gyms. John McCain's "Town Hall Meeting in New York" on Thursday night took place under the vaunted marble dome and pillars of Federal Hall, where the audience mostly looked like they had wandered in directly from their Wall Street offices. Men wearing dark suits and long power ties and women, most of them blond, surrounded a wooden podium, next to a thigh-high speaker. In the quiet, show's-about-to-begin minutes before McCain arrived, Tony Carbonetti, the former chief political adviser to Rudy Giuliani and a good friend of McCain, twisted in his second row seat to chat with Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman behind him.  read more »

Here's a critical piece from the hawkish Jewish Press about Barack Obama that actually won't be all bad for him: it pans him for not being like George W. Bush and McCain-rejected Rev. John Hagee. It's evidence, if nothing else, that the narrative about unease with him in the Jewish community is being embraced most enthusiastically by people who are inclined to despise his politics anyway.

In its editorial yesterday, the paper offered a staunch defense of Reverend Hagee (who once said in a sermon that the Holocaust happened "because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the Land of Israel.'"), substantiating its praise of him with a quote from Catholic League president William Donahue (who once said that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular").

The piece also criticized Obama for criticizing President Bush.  read more »

Jim Baker was so tickled by his portrayal in the new HBO film Recount that he actually scheduled an advanced screening of the fictionalized Florida recount retrospective at the Houston public policy institute that bears his name.

In some ways, he should be. While the movie makes clear that the facts at the heart of the disputed election mostly favored Al Gore, it can’t suppress its respect for Baker’s shrewd and cutthroat pragmatism.  read more »

So maybe history isn’t always written by the winners.

In the fall of 2001, after George W. Bush mounted a pile of debris at ground zero and came up with one brilliant rejoinder to a skeptic’s taunt, the prevailing public attitude toward the previous year’s disputed election was: So what? The guy who was supposed to win won, and there was probably more than enough malfeasance to go around anyway.  read more »