In my last post, I argued that we need to stop thinking about our inner city problems so heavily in terms of race.  Racial problems in the US contributed to the particular history of the urban underclass and race can never be totally ignored in this country, but the inner city today is haunted by […]

President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires.  By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War.  More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; […]

Some readers are wondering why I am spending so much time analyzing the political problems of a former vice president.  It is not out of any personal animus toward Mr. Gore.  Though I’m not expecting any invitations to any of Mr. Gore’s lovely homes, the doors to the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens are […]

Brazil’s former President talks with the AI’s Walter Russell Mead about his country’s emergence as a democracy and an economic powerhouse, and how a man of the Left got labelled as a man of the right.

That Al Gore’s definitive statement on the crisis of the climate change movement appeared in the back pages of Rolling Stone magazine rather than in a more prominent and prestigious location is one sign of the decline in his reputation.  At the peak of the climate movement, such an essay might have appeared in Foreign […]

It must be as perplexing to his many admirers as it is frustrating to himself that a man of Vice President Gore’s many talents, great skills and strong beliefs is one of the most consistent losers in American politics. “All political careers end in failure,” said Enoch Powell; Gore has not won an election on […]

Don’t anybody tell Louis Farrakhan, whose video calling President Obama a murderer is oozing through the web this week, but race is slowly and surely fading away. The problem of the twentieth century may have been, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it so eloquently, the color line; the twenty-first century is on course […]

When it come to excellence in education, red states rule — at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Tina Brown’s Newsweek.  Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rate to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public […]

Can the Obama Presidency still be saved?To some, the question may seem premature or even insulting.  President Obama’s personal popularity remains high and the most recent RealClearPolitics poll average has him at a more than respectable 47.6 percent approval; while the President’s popularity is drifting lower, congressional Republicans have been losing ground to their Democratic […]

The greatest example of anticlimax in the English language, said William F. Buckley, was the final line in the unofficial anthem of his undergraduate college:  “For God, for country, and for Yale.” Buckley’s anticlimax now faces a challenge from an even shorter phrase:  “The Obama Administration” is on the road to becoming the most anticlimactic […]