This issue: January 16, 2012 (Vol. 17, No. 17)

All We Are Saying . . .

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

The establishment usually wins. That, after all, is what it means to be an establishment. But not always. Three of the last six presidents—Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and Barack Obama in 2008—ran against their own party’s powerbrokers, captured the nomination, and then took the Oval Office from an incumbent president (1976, 1980) or an incumbent party (2008).

True, establishment candidates have more often beaten back insurgents. But that hasn’t always turned out so well for their party. Gerald Ford lost the general election in 1976, Jimmy Carter (who had held off challenger Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination) lost in 1980, Walter ...

A Winning Message?

The neglected substance of the Santorum campaign.

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

Manchester, N.H.

Rick Santorum’s campaign is more sophisticated than it looks. Superficially, it’s a shoestring operation: Just a few days before the New Hampshire primary, he’s perpetually booked into venues that are two sizes too small. He often speaks without a microphone or professional lighting. The advance work is minimal, usually just a couple of lawn signs tacked to the walls and two small posterboard placards that read “Faith, Family & Freedom” and sit on tripods at the front of the room. On good days, there are enough staffers to man a table near the entrance asking voters to sign up for his list, but this job usually exhausts the staff’s ...

One Korea, After All

Time to undo the Kim family regime

BY ROSS TERRILL

With 28-year-old Kim Jong Eun propped up to handle Pyongyang’s succession crisis, three facts about North Korea are salient. Kim Jong Il, who died December 17, like his father was a tyrant whose damage makes Qaddafi seem a choirboy. After six decades of peaceful competition with the capitalist South, the socialist North’s per capita GDP is 5 percent of South Korea’s. Years of futile disarmament talks with North Korea compare with the worst peace-effort fiascoes of League of Nations days.

George W. Bush’s comment to Bob Woodward, “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” was a fitter summation of this cruel nonentity than the full-page world-historical pomposity of the New ...

Germany’s Godfather

The life and legacy of Otto von Bismarck

BY STEVEN OZMENT

Jonathan Steinberg presents the fabled German chancellor as both an egomaniacal hypochondriac and a political-military genius: “He is the statesman who unified Germany in three wars .  .  . a hypochondriac with the constitution of an ox, a brutal tyrant who could easily shed tears, a convert to an extreme form of evangelical Protestantism, who secularized schools and introduced civil divorce.”

The reader learns early and often that Bismarck “made Germany but never ruled it.” As chancellor (1862-90) he served a line of three long-lived kings, any one of whom could have fired him at will—and at the end, one did. Active in politics from 1847 to 1890, he also maintained a hate/awe relationship with the large political parties. ...

Unmugged by Reality

Christopher Caldwell, nostalgic for nasty New York.

BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

A friend told me at dinner over New Year’s break that people had started walking at night in New York’s Central Park again. In the year just ended, the New York Times reports, there was about one robbery in the park every three weeks. Back in the 1980s, when I started visiting, there were two a night. I can more easily imagine Wrigley Field in July without baseball than Central Park after dark without random violence.

In the wake of power
outages in 1977, Lord of the Flies-style looting spread across the city. Longtime residents—the kind of people who could remember strolling at midnight with their sweethearts by the ...

But Enough About Me

One of the most amazing moments following the Iowa caucuses went largely unremarked​—​our friend Wlady Pleszczynski at the American Spectator seems to have been the only other scribbler who was properly agog. It came when Rick Perry conceded his fifth-place finish in a speech to supporters. Such smoldering disasters usually call forth from experienced candidates a cheerful and tearful mixture of chagrin, gratitude, praise, personal modesty, and, depending on future prospects, either fatalistic resignation or steely resolve.

Not the governor of Texas. Rick Perry had just lost an electoral contest for the first time in his political career; this was his first concession ...