Barack Obama has said that “Washington is the place where good ideas go to die.” I have to agree with him in part that the ideas industry in Washington and the public policy field in general tends to be risk-averse and more comfortable with policy-retreading than policy-innovation.
I don’t have a crush on Barack Obama — though a slug of my friends do. Here’s the latest on the political crush front from Obama Girl: I only wish I had met Amber Lee Ettinger last year and had gotten her to try out “Hagel Girl” first. History might be different today.
“Radical centrists” and dead armadillos have a lot in common. They are sometimes whacked in the middle of the road. In fact, my friend and New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind originally proposed that New America choose a mascot of an “armadillo with a yellow stripe across it.
The first edicts that late-in-the-day Hillary Clinton Campaign director Maggie Williams issued to her staff as Patti Solis Doyle was heading out the door were: 1. Be respectful of your fellow staff members — generous in spirit, positive, constructive. 2.
Ronald Reagan thought acting was great prep for the presidency. And recently, Ben Affleck told me that he saw some obvious similarities between DC and Hollywood while here shooting his next film, State of Play. But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are taking “staging” to a new level.
My colleague and friend Anatol Lieven published a no-punches pulled critique of John McCain’s foreign policy and national security probabilities in the Financial Times today, titled “Why We Should Fear a McCain Presidency.” Lieven makes a point I did recently: McCain used to be considered “an old-style conservative realist.
House of Representatives buddies Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) Starting at 10 am today, a number of progressive blogs are going to encourage their readers to call the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to complain about the unwillingness of DCCC Red-to-Blue Program Debbie Wasserman Scultz’s refusal to assist Democratic contenders challenging her pro-Cuba…
As TWN readers know, I have been on a lot of international travel lately — to Beijing, Mumbain, Tokyo, Berlin, London, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. In all of these places, I met angry and frustrated finance ministry bureaucrats, central bankers, retail bankers, investment bankers, and other fund managers.
I had to laugh reading the news that Florida insurance regulators are zapping a major insurance firm because of the travel preferences of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL-20). Schultz apparently applied for an ‘increased amount’ of life insurance because she planned to travel internationally.
