Ruth Marcus makes the case for Joe.
Could Joe Biden be the man for this season?
... there is an argument that 2016 could be Biden’s year — a moment that will reward, even celebrate, his loose-lipped authenticity and his from-the-gut middle-class politics. In Iowa the other day, Donald Trump received thunderous applause when he proposed outlawing teleprompters. In 2016, Biden’s unscriptedness could be appealing.
Look at the latest polling. Matched up against Trump, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, Biden outperforms Clinton in the new Quinnipiac poll.
Sure, there are stumbling blocks, even leaving aside the still-dominant position of Clinton and the daunting mechanical challenges of instantly assembling the necessary staff and money.
... One person’s career politician is another’s devoted public servant: Biden has never spun through the revolving door to vacuum up six-figure speaking fees. A delicate topic, to be sure, but a comparison with a Certain Other Candidate that others might make.
I'd like to see Biden run, not because I don't like Hillary, or because I don't think Sanders represents a real challenge. I'd like to see Biden run because, I like Biden. Forget the reputation for "speaking from the gut," he's a sharp guy with a lot of experience, decent positions on most topics and a willingness to think out of the box when encountering tough problems. There's not much more than that I look for when flipping a lever.
Come on in. There are a lot more candidates to cover...
Frank Bruni demonstrates that we are deep into the political silly season, and I'm not talking about Trump.
The predicted Republican front-runner flails. The actual Republican front-runner rails, peddling insults instead of ideas. And the story line caroms from misogyny to xenophobia to a tussle over tresses: toupee or not toupee?
It’s impossible to see how anyone electable is salvaged from this.
Then again it’s not, because if you sort through the rabble, you find John Kasich.
Every season we get this kind of thing. The "Democrats should be really scared of this one Republican who has a semi-moderate position in some areas" while, of course, still be a wealth-coddling corporatist who is fundamentally wrong about... everything. And all it would take would be a thousand coincidences that all break exactly his way!
He has expressed openness to some kind of path to citizenship for immigrants who came here illegally. He has shown little appetite for the culture wars that other Republicans gleefully fight (although, it must be noted, he formally opposes gay marriage and abortion rights).
So he's anti-gay and opposed to abortion... and not interested in the culture wars? What in holy hell are the culture wars again?
Dana Milbank on another increasingly unlikely Republican candidate.
What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
Jeb Bush has been stumping his way across the country, explaining what he would do as president. But nobody seems to understand what the heck he’s talking about.
In July, he said that “people need to work longer hours” as part of an economic recovery. Then he said his remarks had been misinterpreted.
A couple of weeks later he said “we need to figure out a way to phase out” Medicare. Then he complained that critics were taking his remarks out of context.
A week or so after that, he proclaimed that “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.” Then he said he misspoke.
Here's the thing to remember: no matter how flumbuzzled the words coming out of a Bush's mouth... he means them. Anyone who thinks that Medicare, women's health, and overtime pay wouldn't suffer under a Mr. ! presidency hasn't been paying attention.
Ross Douthat on Trump the gentle despot.
The Donald Trump phenomenon is a great gift to pundits because it can be analyzed and criticized in so many different ways. But two shorthands seem particularly useful. First, Trump is essentially using the Republican primary to run a third-party campaign, not a right-wing insurgency. Second, Trump’s appeal is oddly like that of Franklin Roosevelt, in the sense that he’s a rich, well-connected figure — a rich New Yorker, at that — who’s campaigning as a traitor to his class. ...
So far he’s running against the Republican establishment in a more profound way than the Tea Party, challenging not just deviations from official conservative principle but the entire post-Reagan conservative matrix. He can wax right wing on immigration one moment and promise to tax hedge fund managers the next. He’ll attack political correctness and then pledge to protect entitlements. He can sound like Pat Buchanan on trade and Bernie Sanders on health care. He regularly attacks the entire Iraq misadventure, in its Bush-era and Obama-era manifestations alike, in a way that neither mainstream Republicans nor Hillary Clinton can plausibly manage.
Like most Douthat columns, this one exists mostly as a means for him to package a few ashes from William Buckley's silver plated cigar tray (such as this week's blatant historical re-write in describing Henry Wallace, who loudly and publicly opposed diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union as "effectively pro-Soviet," partly because Wallace was a progressive, but mostly because Douthat apparently couldn't think of any leftward counterpart to George Wallace). But the real theme of this week is that Douthat, like every other right wing pundit, wants to both own and disown Trump. And the dance continues to be hilarious. Rossy baby, Trump isn't running a "third party campaign." He's running a modern Republican campaign, the three foundations of which are hatred, nonsense, and... I forget.
Stephen King on writers who... write.
There are many unspoken postulates in literary criticism, one being that the more one writes, the less remarkable one’s work is apt to be. Joyce Carol Oates, the author of more than 50 novels (not counting the 11 written under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly), understands perfectly how little use critics have for prolific writers. In one of her journals she wrote that she seemed to create “more, certainly, than the literary world allows for a ‘serious’ writer.”
As with most postulates dealing with subjective perceptions, the idea that prolific writing equals bad writing must be treated with caution. Mostly, it seems to be true. Certainly no one is going to induct the mystery novelist John Creasey, author of 564 novels under 21 different pseudonyms, into the Literary Hall of Heroes ... One is reminded of Truman Capote’s famous bon mot about Jack Kerouac: "That’s not writing, that’s typing."
King goes on to defend some famous names who piled up a serious page count. Whenever King talks about writing, I tend to listen. Whether or not you love or hate his own fiction (and I often fall in the "love" camp) there are few people who work more deliberately and with more simple awareness of what they're about. And besides, I've only written thirty-four utterly forgotten novels at this point. I need to start cranking if I'm to catch Creasey.
Firmin DeBrabander on why if you care about the goals of Black Lives Matter, you need to work on gun violence.
It has been a bloody summer in Baltimore. July saw 45 people killed, the most murders in one month since August 1972.
... Baltimore is not alone in its misery. The Baltimore Sun reported that “a rising number of homicides have been recorded in cities as different as Chicago (up 18 percent from last year), Milwaukee (up 117 percent) [and] Houston (up 36 percent).” In Washington, more than 100 people have died compared with 72 this time last year, or a 39 percent increase. Officials in these cities are equally confounded. However, there are two common threads: The victims are mostly African American, and the bloodshed is fueled by easy access to guns — illegal guns in particular.
The Black Lives Matter movement has brought deserved attention to police killings and mistreatment of African Americans. Beneath the well-known incidents that have galvanized the movement, however, there has been a steady slaughter in urban areas. This month, the 300 Men March from Baltimore to Washington sought to call attention to the carnage as African American neighborhoods try to find ways to reduce the violence.
DeBrabander makes good points in saying that African Americans have always been more in favor of gun control than whites, that guns are far too easy to get, that gun laws that cover only a single city or state are of limited effectiveness, and that BLM and the police have a shared interest in reducing the number of illegal guns. For all that, there's a note of "all lives matter" in this piece that bugs me.
Leonard Pitts on the Virginia shooter and bringing murder home.
When terrorists beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 and posted video of the killing online, I refused to look. I explained my reasoning in this space. To watch that video, I wrote, knowing it was staged specifically to fill me with revulsion and fear, would feel like cooperating with the monsters who killed him. It would make me an accomplice.
I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want that blood on my soul.
Not long after that column appeared, I did see Pearl die. The video of his killing showed up in my inbox, sent by a stranger. Before I even knew what was going on, a terrorist was on my computer screen holding up the head of this 38-year-old husband and expectant father.
And I learned a sobering truth about murder and media in the new millennium. Increasingly, the decision about what we will and will not see is not ours to make. Increasingly, we are at the mercy, not simply of murderous monsters, but also of our own friends, family and colleagues who act as their henchmen, forwarding, re-tweeting and re-posting their grisly misdeeds as casually as neighbors in another age might have shared recipes over the back fence.
When I was a kid, it was common for the hosts on television variety shows – guys like Red Skelton or Milton Berle – to end their show with a thanks for letting them "come into your living room." These days, we seem to be welcoming a different crowd.