Is victory sweet because your side wins - or is it really because the other side loses?
— John Podhoretz
Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills - the pension bills they cannot afford - come due. They'll have to go after existing contracts with current workers.
This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.
The defense of ObamaCare's constitutionality relies mainly on the truism that everyone is sure to get sick at some point in their lives, and this makes the health-care market unlike any other market.
Obama's presidency hasn't been dedicated to achieving economic growth in the short term, or about creating jobs.
Whatever Romney's failings, he certainly doesn't suggest that the United States is teetering on the brink of a moral cesspool.
When you have controversial parents, people have expectations about you. If every day at work I thought to myself, 'How does this relate to them?' I'd be paralyzed.
Aside from being bad sportsmanship - Romney basically said Obama won by cheating - he was displaying the same obtuseness about the wants and needs of ordinary people that did more to torpedo his campaign than any goodies Obama might have had to dole out.
By keeping most tax rates at present levels, Obama and the Democrats will claim that they have championed tax cuts for the middle class.
I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.
Romney is a good, intelligent, extraordinarily generous man who put on a great fight. But he didn't understand the country or the people he sought to lead, and that is why he lost.
The exit polls suggest that after a relatively disappointing first term, Obama managed to reassemble almost all of his 2008 electorate.
Barack Obama is one of the greatest politicians in American history.
The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.
Here's a very good rule of thumb in politics: losing begets losing.
Robots have a rich and storied history in movies.
Making recess appointments when the Senate isn't in recess is neither rational nor moderate. It's a raw misuse of executive power by a president whose love of government is his most vulnerable spot with the electorate.
There is a new conservative establishment in America, made up of those who claim to be the anti-establishment.
All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth.
When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight - though whether the insight was conscious or not I don't know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.
Let us now praise Barack Obama.
Insulting the electorate and accusing it of spiritual weakness and sinfulness are not the ways to get yourself the job of president.
I've worked as someone's deputy, and now it's time for me to run something. It's time for me to run my own shop.
Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn't care. This is war - not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that's a victory he savors and desires - unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.
The classic rule of thumb is that if you are an intellectual ideological magazine, you do better in opposition than you do if your views are reflected by people in power.
Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.
Romney is right that the Obama vision is too centered on government. But his is too centered on the promotion of business and wealth creation at the expense of everything else.
Obama's coalition would have consigned him to the political margins as little as 12 years ago, but the nation's demographic changes are moving far more quickly than most Republicans anticipated.
Comedians and impressionists used to be two different showbiz animals entirely, but now there's no such thing as a comedian who doesn't do impressions.
She needs to seem tough, and whatever Hillary's weaknesses, tough is a pretty good word to describe her.
Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.
I was wholeheartedly attracted to the conservative atmosphere that permeated the city of Washington.
Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a 'shellacking' in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.
That distinctive presidential conduct is now gone forever, banished to the snows of yesteryear by Barack Obama. From the beginning of his presidency to the present, he has spoken specifically and in unprecedented fashion of Republicans as his rivals, his stumbling blocks, the primary cause of his troubles.
The attack on ObamaCare was that Congress does not have the power under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen into a private contractual relationship. If such a thing is permitted to stand, the anti-ObamaCare forces argue, there will be no limit to Congress's power in the future.
By the time Obama came into office, Washington had already agreed over a period of a few weeks to a $700 billion government infusion into the world banking system. Nothing of the sort had ever been done before, and it was done spit spot with very little national debate.
America may be in a dour condition, but it is not going to elect a dour president.
I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.
As the Republican nominee, it was Romney's job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.
Obama's claim is that he wants to give. The GOP is saying it wants to take.
I look at 'The New York Review of Books.' It's what it has been for 35 or 40 years, which is a highly sophisticated vehicle for anti-American self-hatred.
Your race and gender don't change, but you can choose to change your political affiliation at will.
Many people crave security and stability rather than risk-taking, and that doesn't make them any less American. They are the workers rather than the job creators, and all societies need both.
The 2004 presidential election that saw George W. Bush win with 51 percent of the vote was the last one Republicans will ever win with the overwhelmingly white and male coalition they have now.
For the record, I am not an admitted homosexual, nor am I a homosexual, though I do know the lyrics to every show tune ever written, which might perhaps account for the confusion.
Conservatives must avoid the siren song of schism, or all is lost.
The presidency is not an entry-level electoral job.
