Word: obamas
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...third strand of thinking is more prosaic and might feel familiar to survivors of politics of the early 1990s. That too was an era of deep divisions and wildly swinging opinion polls: Obama's recent roller-coaster ride is nothing compared with the 50-point plunge in George H.W. Bush's ratings as he approached his re-election campaign. Then, as now, the culprit was a sour economy, but the voice of indignation came not from TV ranters but from a Dallas billionaire. H. Ross Perot catalyzed an anti-incumbent, back-to-basics, pox-on-Washington movement that...
Californians with individual health-insurance policies from Anthem Blue Cross must have breathed a collective sigh of relief on Feb. 13. Under heavy pressure from the state insurance commissioner and the Obama Administration, the company announced that it would delay a set of dramatic rate hikes. In the meantime, at the request of the commissioner, independent actuaries will review the company's books and investigate whether one-year premium increases of up to 39% are legal and justifiable. Surely they can't be, right...
...morning of Valentine's Day, as Dick Cheney was once again calumniating the President on network television, I was in Doha, Qatar, listening to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempt to explain Barack Obama's foreign policy to several hundred restive representatives of the Islamic world. The event was the annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, sponsored by the Brookings Institution, and the mood was a bit more testy than last year's Obama-induced euphoria. There was a universal sense among the Muslim delegates that the President had offered fine words in the past year but not much action...
Good question. In fact, it cut to the heart of the Obama-foreign policy frustrations. Clinton's tough talk on Iran got most of the U.S. headlines, but her position on Gaza was far more important to the Islamic participants at Doha, especially the Arabs. The Israelis have stubbornly maintained a stiff blockade after pounding Gaza into submission in January 2009. Food is allowed in; Gazans aren't starving. But tight restrictions remain on construction materials for rebuilding homes and public buildings and on many of the nonessential necessities of life (Israel recently lifted the ban on cigarettes). Israel...
Wrong answer. And not merely because the Islamic participants in Doha were hoping for something more concrete. It was wrong because it demonstrated the chronic weakness of Obama's Middle East strategy. As soon as he was inaugurated, the President went directly for the big prize: a comprehensive two-state solution. But the timing was lousy. The Israelis had just elected a right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition partners were vehemently opposed to negotiations. The Palestinians were fiercely divided between Fatah, which controls the West Bank, and the more militant Hamas. U.S. envoy George Mitchell's slow...