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From McCain campaign: Please see comment from me on Barack Obama’s new ad supposedly running in Georgia: “Barack Obama’s ad is ridiculous. Because of John McCain, corruption was exposed and people like Jack Abramoff went to jail. “However, if Barack Obama wants to have a discussion about truly questionable associations, let’s start with his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, at whose home Obama’s political career was reportedly launched. Mr. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for countless bombings against targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and numerous police stations, courthouses and...

JESSE Jackson must have been forgiven by the Obama campaign and welcomed into its inner circle. Because it sure seems as if he's giving the campaign advice. Responding to a McCain ad knocking him as a world celebrity, Barack Obama essentially accused the McCain campaign of race-baiting. It was a hair-trigger resort to the charge of racism of the sort that Jackson built a career on, making himself anathema to the political center. In 24 hours, Obama had lurched his carefully crafted brand in Jackson's direction. And for what? The McCain ad intersperses footage of Obama's massive political rally in...

Jesse Jackson must have been forgiven by the Sen. Barack Obama campaign and welcomed into its inner circle. Because it sure seems as if he's giving the campaign advice. Responding to a Sen. John McCain ad knocking him as a world celebrity, Obama essentially accused the McCain campaign of race-baiting. It was a hair-trigger resort to the charge of racism of the sort that Jackson built a career on, making himself radioactive and anathema to the political center. In 24 hours, Obama had lurched his carefully crafted brand in Jackson's direction. And for what? The McCain ad intersperses footage of...

Jesse Jackson must have been forgiven by the Obama campaign and welcomed into its inner circle. Because it sure seems as if he’s giving the campaign advice. Responding to a McCain ad knocking him as a world celebrity, Barack Obama essentially accused the McCain campaign of race-baiting. It was a hair-trigger resort to the charge of racism of the sort that Jackson built a career on, making himself radioactive and anathema to the political center. In 24 hours, Obama had lurched his carefully crafted brand in Jackson’s direction. And for what?

A Strategy For McCain Hillary Clinton — only more so. By Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru Editor’s note: A longer version of this piece appears in the new issue of National Review. The good news for Republicans is that Obama can be beaten. The bad news is that the McCain campaign has embarked on a course that — although it has some of the right elements — seems likely to fail. McCain would be most comfortable running in accord with his particular notions of political virtue while emphasizing character, national security, and a few pet causes such as earmarks. If...

A signature moment of Barack Obama's primary campaign came last November in Des Moines, Iowa. He gave a speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner that electrified the crowd and gave his campaign a kick that helped win the Iowa caucuses -- a victory without which he wouldn't be the Democratic nominee. Obama declared that "the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won't do." Deploring "triangulating and poll-driven positions," he said that "telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won't do." The Democratic Party had been...

White working-class voters typically aren't in vogue, with the political chatter tending to revolve around "soccer moms," the "youth vote" or other boutique demographic groups of the moment. But the late charge of Hillary Clinton's doomed presidential campaign made white working-class voters surprisingly fashionable. They'll stay that way if the important new book "Grand New Party," by two young writers for The Atlantic, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, has the impact on the political debate that it should. In an incisive analysis of the past 30 years of our politics, Douthat and Salam puncture self-comforting delusions of both the right...

Lately, the Iraq War has looked more and more like another Vietnam - not for us, but for al Qaeda. CIA Director Michael Hayden says the terror group has suffered "near-strategic defeat" in Iraq. It has been routed from Anbar, Diyala and Baghdad provinces, and now is getting a beating in its last stronghold of Mosul, in the north. It is reviled by the Iraqi populace, and its downward trajectory began with indigenous uprisings at its expense. When the United States lost Vietnam, it lost credibility and saw an emboldened Marxist-Leninist offensive around the Third World. Al Qaeda is a...

The price of everything, not just driving, is going up in the era of $130-a-barrel oil, but our presidential candidates have a hopelessly thumbless grasp of pocketbook politics. Their mutual slogan could be "Let them eat abstractions." Barack Obama famously couldn't connect with working-class voters in the primaries, offering them an airy diet of hope and change. John McCain rose on his personal honor, which is why on energy he's fumbling away the GOP's best domestic political opening in years. For a politician whose forte has never been domestic policy, McCain has a peculiar taste for complex, verging on unworkable,...

A Big Dog in Winter By Rich Lowry New York Post | 6/5/2008 FEW things are sadder than former greats past their prime: a bloated Elvis Presley in a sequined suit; a diminished Michael Jordan making one last comeback with the Washington Wizards. And now a gaunt Bill Clinton desperately plugging his wife's doomed presidential campaign- the Big Dog in winter. With his media enablers gone, with his most faithful constituency (African-Americans) lured away by another, with the prospect of again attaining the commanding heights of American politics lost, with his magic touch in abeyance, Bill Clinton has been whittled...

SCOTT McClellan has learned the profound wisdom of the old Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him. The former press secretary has written a scathing memoir about his time in the Bush administration - but nothing he says in his book, dully titled (appropriately enough) "What Happened," is as damning as the fact that he spent nearly three years as White House press secretary. Likable, but maladroit and plodding, he was the perfect spokesman for the administration of Harriet Miers, Michael Brown and Al Gonzales. For anyone who doubted that President Bush...

In their litany of American presidents who met with hostile dictators, supporters of Barack Obama cite John F. Kennedy and his meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. They leave out how it went. The earnest, young American president wanted to forestall any possibility of misunderstanding and to win Khrushchev’s commitment to the international status quo. The blustery, risk-taking Soviet premier wanted to bludgeon Kennedy into making concessions that would further the Soviet goal of global revolution. With such clashing objectives, the two leaders didn’t exactly hit it off. When Kennedy thought he was being accommodating, Khrushchev...

If there's just one candidate of change this fall, John McCain will be the Horatio Seymour or James Cox of 2008 - a presidential also-ran all but forgotten to history. The only way McCain can hold the White House for the Republicans is if he trumps his opponent on values and national security and sells the public on a domestic reform agenda that keeps Democrats from sole ownership of the theme of change. Otherwise, Barack Obama will out-inspire him, or Hillary Clinton out-policy him, in a classic out-with-the-old election. McCain would seem a natural candidate of reform, given how often...

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has taken Barack Obama's critically acclaimed race speech in Philadelphia, ripped it to bits and tossed it in the air to serve as confetti for his parade through the media... Then cometh the good reverend to step all over the out-of-context defense in a speech at the National Press Club. He defended his "chickens come home to roost" statement about 9/11 in exactly the same terms as in his original sermon: "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you." He stood by his damnation of America and his...

...But the real cause of the housing mess is a classic bubble in the housing market, the bursting of which has hammered lenders as well as borrowers. If the market had continued to rise, we never would have heard complaints about subprime loans. In fact, Washington had long encouraged these sorts of loans through the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) as a way to make marginal - largely minority - borrowers into homeowners. What's the difference between socially responsible loans extending the American dream to deserving people with poor credit histories and predatory lending? It's whether those loans work out or...

In his hour of political need, Barack Obama went to his base -- the media. He delivered a speech about the nation's racial divisions that couldn't possibly get anything but lavish praise from the press, burying for now the controversy over his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama made two arguments for why he couldn't reject the Rev. Wright. One was that the Rev. Wright lived through the era of segregation. So did many others. Surely, there are plenty of black pastors in the country who have suffered more than Wright without letting a left-wing racialist ideology taint their...

--snip--Obama explicitly denied that he was excusing Wright’s views, even as he did it in exceptionally high-toned sophistry. The reason Obama had to give a 38-minute speech is that he was incapable of saying four unadorned words, “I made a mistake.” He could have said long ago that his gratitude to Wright for bringing him to Christianity and his bond with the church community blinded him to Wright’s lies about America and hateful rants. Most of the public would have understood, and forgiven him.--snip--In the end, Obama made the case for the respectability of a man who is a hater...

In the first sermon Barack Obama ever heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor railed against "white folks' greed," the bombing of Hiroshima and "the callousness of policymakers in the White House and in the statehouse." For Obama, the experience was formative. The sermon's title, "The Audacity of Hope," became the title of Obama's second book and the theme of his presidential campaign. Now that videotapes have surfaced of Wright's more scorching diatribes -- arguing that America deserved 9/11, exclaiming "God damn America" for spreading drugs in the black community, and declaring the U.S. the "US-KKK-a" -- Obama professes...

Long ago, Hillary lost her ability to win the Democratic nomination cleanly in the primaries and caucuses—she'd have to pick off super-delegates in a drawn-out fight. Now, Obama finds himself in a similar situation. Last Tuesday he had a chance to end the race by winning Ohio or Texas and making it unsustainable for Hillary to go on. He won neither. It's still possible to imagine Obama forcing Hillary out with unexpected wins in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but it doesn't seem likely. Anti-Clinton liberal pundits are insisting that her campaign is still a lost cause, because of "the math," i.e.,...

Hillary Clinton ceased to be the Democratic front-runner weeks ago, humiliatingly enough for her formerly inevitable campaign. But it was only after her drubbing in the Wisconsin primary that she became an inconvenience, the superfluous woman of Democratic politics. Among elected Democrats and the press, there is a palpable impatience with Hillary’s continued presence in the race: Won’t this lady ever leave so we can consummate our love affair with Barack Obama? Hillary’s bulwark was to be the Democratic establishment, but here was the party’s immediate past presidential nominee, John Kerry, an Obama supporter, shooing her off the stage. On...