Jonathan Bernstein: “All unpopular presidents look to Harry Truman. President Joe Biden has more reason than most to do so.”
“Not just because Truman won a second term (actually, a first full term), despite being unpopular. Biden should look to Truman because Truman is also the president who symbolizes the difference between contemporary public opinion and historical reputation.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “It’s sort of a miracle that televised general-election debates ever happened at all in the U.S. If the Republican National Committee gets its way, they may never happen again. Their apparent demise tells us a few important things about the Republican Party, but before getting to that it’s worth thinking about the institution itself.”
“To begin with, debates just never should’ve happened. Most campaign professionals don’t like to subject their candidates to high-profile unscripted events, and general-election debates are extremely high profile. That goes double for a campaign that thinks its candidate is winning. Why risk the possibility that something could go wrong? Moreover, the conventional wisdom has always been that by participating in one-on-one debates, incumbents elevate their opponent. Presidents always seem ‘presidential’ and challengers rarely do — but supposedly that gap is narrowed by watching them debate as formal equals. More basically: Given that both candidates have to agree to participate, a debate requires both campaigns to think they’ll benefit, which can’t be true.”
“Would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. — who attempted to kill then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981 — has apparently hit his goal of rebranding as a singer,” the New York Post reports.
You can also book him for your own show.
Tim Naftali: “A major presidential scandal isn’t complete without missing evidence, though Donald Trump seems to have been the first president to swallow his own words, literally. The former president had a habit of tearing drafts and signed documents into small pieces to be thrown away—or flushing them down a toilet. And there have even been reports that, on occasion, he consumed them.”
“Now a seven-hour gap has appeared in Trump’s official daily White House diary, part of the documentation that the congressional January 6 committee requested for its investigation into all aspects of the country’s 2021 insurrection. The diary has no evidence of Trump making the calls that others have admitted receiving from him during the height of the violence in the Capitol. Nor does it document any meetings during that time, when the president was thought to be under pressure from aides to calm the situation on the Hill.”
“The comparisons to Richard Nixon were immediate and inevitable—but they missed a key difference: What happened in those seven hours should ultimately be knowable, at least at some level.”
Ishaan Tharoor: “In Washington, let alone the capitals of Western Europe, there’s a palpable change in atmosphere. The heroism of Ukraine’s defenders and the reported atrocities carried out by Russian forces have fired the imaginations of the Beltway class, which after years of quagmire and stalemate in the Middle East now has a far more morally clear and potentially winnable conflict to get behind.”
“American flags seldom fly in my left-leaning Washington neighborhood, but a brief Sunday stroll turned up myriad iterations of Ukraine’s blue-yellow bars hanging from fences and doorways. European diplomats in the city speak of an unprecedented solidarity among NATO allies and hail the Biden administration’s leadership in rallying support for Ukraine and sweeping sanctions on Russia. The West as a geopolitical entity has rarely been more united as a bloc and more coherent as a political project.”
Phillips Payson O’Brien: “Let me tell you a story about a military that was supposedly one of the best in the world. This military had some of the best equipment: the heaviest and most modern tanks, next-generation aircraft, and advanced naval vessels. It had invested in modernization, and made what were considered some of Europe’s most sophisticated plans for conflict. Moreover, it had planned and trained specifically for a war it was about to fight, a war it seemed extremely well prepared for and that many, perhaps most, people believed it would win.”
“All of these descriptions could apply to the Russian army that invaded Ukraine last month. But I’m talking about the French army of the 1930s. That French force was considered one of the finest on the planet. Winston Churchill believed that it represented the world’s best hope for keeping Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany at bay. As he said famously in 1933, and repeated a number of times afterward, ‘Thank God for the French army.'”
“Of course, when this French army was actually tested in battle, it was found wanting. Germany conquered France in less than two months in 1940.”
The congressional naming commission which was set up to remove Confederate names from military bases will review the names of “more than 750 Department of Defense items” that include everything from military bases to streets and bridges, to determine whether their names “commemorate the Confederacy,” CNN reports.
“Sixty three House Republicans opposed a bill honoring Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first two female justices of the Supreme Court, with statues in Congress,” Politico reports.
“For what it’s worth: The Senate cleared this legislation by unanimous consent in December 2021. So it is headed to President Joe Biden’s desk.”
New York Times: “Did the United States and its allies, through excess of optimism or naïveté, simply get Mr. Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today, whether because of perceived Western provocation, gathering grievance, or the giddying intoxication of prolonged and — since Covid-19 — increasingly isolated rule?”
“Mr. Putin is an enigma, but he is also the most public of figures. Seen from the perspective of his reckless gamble in Ukraine, a picture emerges of a man who seized on almost every move by the West as a slight against Russia — and perhaps also himself. As the grievances mounted, piece by piece, year by year, the distinction blurred. In effect, he became the state, he merged with Russia, their fates fused in an increasingly Messianic vision of restored imperial glory.”
We’re headed back from a fun visit to Austin, Texas where I finally got to visit the LBJ Presidential Library, something I’ve wanted to do since beginning the incredible Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson more than 25 years ago.
We toured historical and political sites in Austin, walked nearly 30 miles and had some truly amazing food. Terry Black’s Barbecue, Launderette and Suerte are all highly-recommended places to eat.
Madeleine Albright, the first woman US secretary of state, who helped steer Western foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War, has died, CNN reports.
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky equated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Nazi campaign to subjugate Europe in an address Sunday to Israel’s Knesset, urging leaders to do more to prevent the carnage in his country,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Zelensky: “We know that you know how to protect your interests, to protect Ukrainians, and the Jews of Ukraine. But we ask why we’re not receiving weapons from you, why you haven’t applied sanctions on Russia and on Russian businesses. You will need to give answers, and to be able live with those answers.”
Niall Ferguson: “I don’t think Putin is mad. I think power has corrupted him. And it has also distanced him from reality. He clearly underestimated the Ukrainian resistance, and he clearly underestimated the risk to the Russian economy. These are miscalculations, not signs of madness. They’re the kind of miscalculations you make if you are very divorced from reality, because you lead the life of a czar, in vast — if hideous — palaces, surrounded by people who are terrified of you and tell you what they think you want to hear.”
“If I put myself in Putin’s position, I don’t think he’s trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. He’s looking back even further and trying to bring back the Russian Empire, with himself as ‘Czar Vladimir.’ It’s an ideology of conservative, orthodox nationalism that Putin offers, that has nothing to do with the Soviet legacy.”
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.”
— George Orwell, explaining doublethink in 1984.
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Robin Sears: “This is not the era when Helmut Kohl, George H.W. Bush, Brian Mulroney and many other world leaders were able to gently nudge the Russians away from confrontation. Putin is not Gorbachev. We are at the end of the quiet decades of Russian integration into the global community, with occasional wrist slaps for Putin’s earlier, smaller aggressions against neighbours.”
“This is 1939, when a crazed autocrat drove his hundreds of tanks across the Polish border, only a few hundred kilometres east of where Putin invaded across the same vast, rolling plains, ideal for tank warfare. Then as now, the invader downplayed his strategic ambitions, attempting to soothe the world into not reacting. Both dictators got it badly wrong.”
Associated Press: “To a watching world, his message is this, in both his words and his resolute, sometimes haggard appearance: He stands as a mirror to the suffering and spirit of his people.”
“It appears to be getting through. Just days into the war engulfing his nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is drawing historical comparisons as an effective and stirring wartime communicator — yet with a distinctly modern touch inflected by the sensibilities of live television and the personal feel of social media.”
New York Times: Zelensky is seen in his office in Kyiv for the first time since invasion began.
New Yorker: “The community was founded in 1833 by West Ford, who lived and worked at Mount Vernon for nearly sixty years, first as an enslaved teen-ager and continuing after he was freed. Following Washington’s death, in 1799, Ford helped manage the estate, and he maintained an unusually warm relationship with the extended Washington family.”
“Awareness of West Ford had faded both in Gum Springs and at Mount Vernon, but in recent years his story has been at the center of a bitter controversy between the two sites. His descendants have demanded that Mount Vernon recognize Ford for his contributions to the estate, which was near collapse during the decades after Washington’s death. They also argue—citing oral histories from two branches of the family—that Ford was Washington’s unacknowledged son, a claim that Mount Vernon officials have consistently denied.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) “is expected to argue in a high-profile speech Monday evening that presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump share common roots in the Republican Party and that those who suggest the GOP must pick a path that embraces one or the other are wrong,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Cotton, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, is the latest Republican invited to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California as part of a speakers series on the party’s future following its loss of the White House, Senate and House during Mr. Trump’s tenure in office.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.