This issue: November 22, 2010 (Vol. 16, No. 10)

Roadmap Rules

BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI

The calls were unexpected. Early in 2010, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, began receiving requests for information about the Roadmap for America’s Future, his ambitious plan to reform entitlements, taxes, and spending. Ryan, a Republican star, is no stranger to press inquiries. But these were coming from an unexpected source: Republican candidates for Congress who were looking for solutions—any solutions—to America’s fiscal crisis. Ryan estimates that he sent about 100 copies of the Roadmap to interested candidates. “We didn’t plan that,” he says.

Nor did Ryan fully anticipate the left’s ferocious response to his suggestions. Almost as soon as the updated Roadmap was ...

Speaking Truth to Mullah Power

At a conclave of big shots, Lindsey Graham steals the show.

BY TOD LINDBERG

Halifax, Nova Scotia

On a dangerously windy early November afternoon, a military plane carrying a delegation of six U.S. senators made four successive approaches attempting to land at Halifax airport before giving up and turning around. Rather than heading for home, though, the plane landed in Bangor, Maine, where senators and staff overnighted before trying Halifax again, this time successfully, early the next morning.

There was, then, a certain determination in their ...

American Narcissus

The vanity of Barack Obama

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

Why has Barack Obama failed so spectacularly? Is he too dogmatically liberal or too pragmatic? Is he a socialist, or an anticolonialist, or a philosopher-president? Or is it possible that Obama’s failures stem from something simpler: vanity. Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama’s vanity is overwhelming. It defines him, his politics, and his presidency.

It’s revealed in lots of little stories. There was the time he bragged about how one of his campaign volunteers, who had tragically died of breast cancer, “insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt.” There was the Nobel acceptance speech where he conceded, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war” ...

Norman’s Conquest

How Norman Podhoretz made it

BY DOUGLAS MURRAY

Norman Podhoretz

A Biography
by Thomas L. Jeffers
Cambridge, 408 pp., $35

Biography is more of a trade than an art form. And while the troubles of the trade are legion ...

Appointment in Berlin

Christopher Caldwell's Nightmare Cab Ride

BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Not knowing how to say “Buzz off” in German, I consented when the taxi driver insisted I put my briefcase in the trunk. I was in a rush—I had a meeting at a government ministry. Almost from the moment the taxi began to move it was clear I had made a mistake. 

It was a new-ish Mercedes, neat as a pin. Like every other Berlin taxi, it was a wan yellowy-beige. The upholstery was the same color. It would show any stain. Hence the cabbie’s rule against my briefcase, which had been sitting on a puddly stretch of sidewalk when I hailed him. 

Revolting Students

The sweeping Republican victories in the midterm elections have yielded the customary progressive analysis: Americans are not just fearful and irrational, they are angry and downright dangerous as well. And as everybody knows, when non-progressives get mad—when they suffer a mass temper tantrum, or vote their hatreds, or lash out against some unidentified “other”—the long dark night of national shame ensues. Already, responsible observers, recognized experts, and prominent newspaper columnists are publicly worried about being targeted by right-wing crazies, whipped into an ideological frenzy by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Fox News, Rep. Michele Bachmann, or the Wall Street Journal (take your pick). 

The trouble with this scenario is that it is not only patently untrue, ...