"Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city," former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. "No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination."
Now they tell us.
Will the second Trump administration come undone by an economic policy based on what the British military historian Lawrence Freedman, describing Vladimir Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, calls "tendentious history"?
Some thoughts spring to mind after President Donald Trump's 100-minute address to Congress.
Sooner or later, The New York Times catches on to the news. In the case of immigration policy, the news it has caught up with is that mass immigration, legal and illegal, from less-developed countries is politically toxic.
If you follow these things closely, you may have seen a clip of the chairman of the Munich Security Conference breaking down in tears, unable to speak any further while reflecting on Vice President JD Vance's speech there. This breakdown is remarkable because the chairman, Christoph Heusgen, is not a minor apparatchik but a sophisticated and knowledgeable official who was former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's national security adviser from 2005 to 2017.
As one who shared the hope, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that representative government, guaranteed liberties and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections would spread across the globe, I naturally look back over the intervening long generation and ask what went wrong.
After a flurry of activity -- the president's tariff threats and showdowns
Move fast and break things. That's the original operating philosophy of Facebook founder and Meta mogul Mark Zuckerberg, and it seems to be the operating procedure of President Donald Trump in these first weeks of his second term.
The portrait of Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he entered for the first time as the 47th president.
"It is not enough in life that one succeed," the droll economist John Kenneth Galbraith is supposed to have said. "Others must fail."
The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps
New Year's Day is a good time to take a long look backward with a cautious eye toward possible futures. My guide here is RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende's 2012 book "The Lost Majority," whose bold thesis was unduly neglected by political scientists spinning tales of a permanent New Deal Democratic majority.
Maybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough.
Why did Marc Andreessen -- inventor of the first internet web browser, and perhaps the prime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today -- switch from his longstanding support of the Democratic Party and back President-elect Donald Trump this year?
Whatever happened to the Democrats' reputation as the party favoring the working man? Put another way, what happened to the Democrats as the party promising economic redistribution from the rich to the average man?
Postmortems of the Democratic Party's loss, running well beyond the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), are starting to come in from some of the party's most perceptive thinkers.
Did anyone expect, when they heard the candidate's announcement at the base of the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015, that nine years later, he would be elected to a second term with sharp increases in Republican percentages from nonwhite people -- Latinos especially, but also Black and Asian people?
Here's another way to look at why Republicans swept the 2024 elections: It's the fault, only partly, of course, of the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party. Going back through history, it's hard to find a time when a party's leadership was so far along in years. The founder presidents retired in their mid-sixties. Andrew Jackson retired at 69, Abraham Lincoln was murdered at 56, and Ulysses S. Grant retired at 54. Theodore Roosevelt died at age 60, Franklin Roosevelt at 63.
Here are some observations on what you didn't hear on election night. Most networks' focus was, quite properly, on whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would carry enough of the 93 electoral votes of the seven target states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- to win the needed 270 electoral votes. Public polling, as reported and analyzed by websites such as RealClearPolitics and Silver Bulletin, had Trump ahead in most of the target states, but by microscopic percentages, and polling in both the 2016 and 2020 cycles had understated the percentages Trump ended up winning.
