This issue: November 19, 2012 (Vol. 18, No. 10)

Losing Can Be Liberating

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

After his defeat in Britain’s 1945 general election, Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine consoled him: “It may well be a blessing in disguise.” Churchill replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.”

As do any blessings to be found in last Tuesday’s election result. The country faces four more years of Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with an increased Democratic majority in the Senate, as a debt crisis bears down upon us at home and our enemies ramp up their efforts abroad. One hopes, for the sake of the country, that on some key issues the president can be persuaded to do the right thing—or, at least, that politics and reality will conspire to pressure the president to do the minimally acceptable thing.

The Lesson of 2004

Don’t immediately start looking for lessons.

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

In many respects, the 2012 election played out as a close cousin of the 2004 contest. A vulnerable incumbent president in a bad political environment faced a weak challenger who lacked a core ideology and who articulated no clear vision for the country. In both campaigns the challenger chose to present himself as a default choice, rather than an insurgent. In both campaigns the president pursued a base-turnout strategy. And in both years the president won, by a margin of victory just around 2.4 percentage points.

The similarities continued following the elections. After Mitt Romney’s defeat, ...

Decline and Fall

California votes for more: taxes, spending, debt, government

BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN

On November 6 voters in California did something nearly unheard of during the past 30 years: They approved, by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent, a ballot measure raising state income taxes on the most prosperous Californians and sales taxes on everyone, even though the state’s sales tax is already the highest in the nation.

The successful tax-hike initiative isn’t just a hoped-for generator of revenue: a projected $34 billion over the next seven years, which California desperately needs because it is running a $16 billion budget deficit and its cumulative total debt is at least $618 ...

Their Right Stuff

The evolution of the Harvard guinea pigs.

BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

In the 1930s, a group of psychologists and physical anthropologists at Harvard chose 268 students whose medical, amatory, and career experiences they wished to document over the remaining decades of their lives. Department-store mogul W. T. Grant, who bankrolled the study, was curious about what made a good commanding officer or retail manager—more generally, a good leader of men. The Grant study is now ending, as its youngest subjects pass 90. George Vaillant, the psychiatrist who has directed the study since the 1960s and published periodic updates on its findings, offers a final report in Triumphs of Experience. Turns out the main thing the study has discovered is the corruption of the various worldviews in the name of which it was ...

There’s Still Football

Geoffrey Norman finds solace in football

BY GEOFFREY NORMAN

Whatever the reason for holding elections in November, it works out as a merciful thing. If your party loses, you’ve still got football to remind you of what is truly important in life. There is nothing like college football—not even politics—for passionate, irrational affections and loyalties. A Texas Republican, for instance, would rather vote Democratic than switch over to Oklahoma. He might even rather die. This is true despite the fact

that the most successful coach in the history of Texas football played his college ball
at Oklahoma. 

A Hug Is Just a Hug

Sometimes a picture just isn’t worth a thousand words. Or to be more precise, the 947 words the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott published the day after the election about a photograph of Barack and Michelle Obama embracing earlier this year. It’s a lovely photo, and we don’t doubt that it captures an affectionate moment between the president and his wife. Kennicott, however, wants to inform us of a deeper significance in the photo, hidden to the unenlightened masses who gaze upon it:

But ...