All posts tagged: George H. W. Bush

As Rafah hangs in the balance, will Bibi defy Biden? – POLITICO

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] It’s true. While American Democrats, who have long been urging for conditions to be placed on arms transfers, argue that Biden’s been underestimating Washington’s clout, the history of U.S.-Israeli relations suggests his leverage may not be as great as some progressives think. Sometimes bare-knuckle pressure works, sometimes not — and particularly less so when Israeli leaders believe their actions are fundamental to their national security. Indeed, Netanyahu is just the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders who brazenly disregarded U.S. presidents. Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, engaged in a battle of wills with Kennedy over Israel’s nuclear program. Reagan was furious with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin over Israel’s bomb raids on west Beirut in 1982, nine weeks into the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (though Reagan’s suspension of the delivery of did bring Begin round). And George H.W. Bush was one of several U.S. presidents who tried to halt Israeli settlement encroachments in the West Bank to little avail. In 2007, Olmert himself went ahead and targeted a suspected nuclear reactor …

The Ego Has Crash-Landed – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] If Donald Trump loses November’s election, it will be for one reason: He can’t help making it all about himself. Illustration by The Atlantic; Source: Getty. March 19, 2024, 8:20 AM ET Donald Trump dominated the news cycle this weekend. Everybody’s talking about the outrageous things he said at his rally in Dayton, Ohio—above all, his menacing warning of a “bloodbath” if he is defeated in November. To follow political news is to again be immersed in all Trump, all the time. And that’s why Trump will lose. At the end of the 1980 presidential debate, the then-challenger Ronald Reagan posed a famous series of questions that opened with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Why that series of questions was so powerful is important to understand. Reagan was not just delivering an explicit message about prices and wages. His summation also sent an implicit message about his understanding of how and why a vote was earned. As a presidential candidate that year, Reagan arrived as a hugely famous and …

Joe Biden’s Most Urgent State of the Union Priority

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back. In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office. The second is to structure it as a comparison between his four years and Trump’s four years as president. The third is to offer it as a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House. The referendum route already looks like a dead end for Biden. The comparison path remains difficult terrain for him, given that voters now express more satisfaction with Trump’s performance as president than they ever did while he was in office. The third option probably offers Biden the best chance to …

Other Presidents Have Retired in March

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] With more than 100,000 people casting a vote against the incumbent president in the Democratic primary this week in Michigan, a swing state essential to his reelection, the wisdom of Joe Biden’s decision to face voters in November is again under intense scrutiny. Historically speaking, it isn’t too late for President Joe Biden to voluntarily drop his reelection bid. And he must know it: Two other Democratic presidents in his lifetime surprised the nation by announcing in March of an election year that they would not seek a new term. The enormous challenges that confronted Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson—wars in Korea and Vietnam—have little substantive resemblance to Biden’s current predicament. But the question Biden now faces is the same: Should he risk his presidential legacy by seeking another term in office? The events of 1952 and 1968 are as much a guide to making what is a hard, lonely decision as they are a warning: Having lost the advantages that incumbency incurs, the Democratic Party lost both of the elections that followed, …

Why an Improving Economy Hasn’t Helped Biden

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Just since last November, the most closely watched measure of consumer confidence about the economy has soared by about 25 percent. That’s among the most rapid improvements recorded in years for the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, even after a slight decline in the latest figures released yesterday. And yet, even as consumer confidence has rebounded since last fall, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has remained virtually unchanged—and negative. Now, as then, a solid 55 percent majority of Americans say they disapprove of his performance as president in the index maintained by FiveThirtyEight, while only about 40 percent approve. That divergence between improving attitudes about the economy and stubbornly negative assessments of the president’s performance is compounding the unease of Democratic strategists as they contemplate the impending rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump. Most Democratic strategists I spoke with believe that brightening views about the economy could still benefit Biden. But many also acknowledge that each month that passes without improvement for Biden raises more questions about whether even growing …

Biden Is Still the Democrats’ Best Bet for November

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Let’s start with the obvious. The concerns about Joe Biden are valid: He’s old. He talks slowly. He occasionally bumbles the basics in public appearances. Biden’s age is so concerning that many Biden supporters now believe he should step aside and let some other candidate become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. The New York Times journalist Ezra Klein made the best-available case for this view recently in a 4,000-word piece that garnered intense attention by arguing that Biden is no longer up to the task of campaign life. “He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago,” Klein writes. “The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.” In one sense Klein is correct. As the political strategist Mike Murphy said many moons ago, Biden’s age is like a gigantic pair of antlers he wears on his head, all day every day. Even when he does something exceptional—like visit a war zone in Ukraine, or whip inflation—the people applauding him are thinking, Can’t. Stop. …

How the GOP’s Thinking on International Issues Evolved

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point. Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every Republican presidency from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush. But even so, during Trump’s four years in office, a substantial remnant of traditionally internationalist Republicans in Congress and in the key national-security positions of his own administration resisted his efforts to unravel America’s traditional alliances. Now though, evidence is rapidly accumulating on multiple fronts that the internal GOP resistance is crumbling to Trump’s determination to steer America away from its traditional role as a global leader. In Congress, that shift was evident in last week’s widespread Senate and House Republican opposition to continued aid …

Appeals court rejects X challenge to secret demand for Trump Twitter data

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Jaap Arriesn | Nurphoto | Getty Images A federal appeals court on Tuesday denied X Corp.’s latest challenge to a nondisclosure order it received as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Smith first served X, formerly known as Twitter, with a search warrant for Trump’s account data in January 2023, part of a criminal investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. At the same time, Smith obtained a nondisclosure order barring X from disclosing the search warrant to Trump or anyone else. In granting Smith’s request to keep the warrant a secret, a federal district court said it was reasonable to believe disclosure of the request would “result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and serious jeopardy to the investigation.” X initially refused to comply with the warrant, and the district court in Washington, D.C., held the company in contempt and fined it $350,000. X ultimately turned over the data Smith was seeking. In …

The president is not Superman

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. America is facing an existential authoritarian threat from Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2024, in part because voters have for too long thought of the presidency as an omnipotent throne. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: The Glare of Presidential Power President Joe Biden is trying to run for reelection on a record of policy successes. In modern American politics, this is a nonstarter: Many Americans no longer tie policy successes or failures to individual politicians. Instead, they decide what they like or don’t like and then assign blame or credit based on whom they already love or hate. Donald Trump understands this problem and exploits it. Whatever his other emotional and intellectual failings, he has always grasped that many American voters now want a superhero, not a president. The public’s cultish fascination …

The Humbling of Henry Kissinger

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Brilliant, witty, and ambitious, Henry Kissinger made diplomacy the stuff of unrivaled celebrity. He thrived on attention, and would have been thrilled by  the flood of coverage that marked his death last week. Whether the obituaries and commentaries put his record in a positive or negative light, almost all of them treated Kissinger as the master of events. This may be how he wanted to be remembered, but it’s not what really happened. No matter how often Kissinger is described as the Cold War’s most powerful secretary of state and a peerless elder statesman, the truth is that his tenure was often rocky, as full of setbacks as acclaim. By the time he left government, he was viewed by many of his colleagues as a burden, not an asset. Once out of office, the advice he gave his successors was sometimes spectacularly wrong, and frequently ignored. In President Richard Nixon’s first term, Kissinger presided over three big diplomatic transformations—withdrawal from Vietnam, the opening to China, and détente with the Soviet Union. When he became …