Published for www.city-journal.org, Winter 2012

This past summer, Edward I. Koch, a Democrat, made headlines by noisily endorsing Republican Bob Turner in a special election to fill the congressional seat of disgraced Tweeter Anthony Weiner. The former mayor explained that he’d decided to rally Jewish voters in Brooklyn and Queens to chastise President Obama for his Israel policy. Koch’s outsize role in Turner’s surprise victory made for big political news and led to speculation that Obama could be facing trouble in his reelection bid.

The episode was unusual, but unusual has always been de rigueur for Koch, a three-term mayor and a constant post-mayoral presence in New York City. For one thing, Koch has long described himself as a “liberal with sanity” in a city that consistently tilts left. Further, Koch’s personality and ego have always been larger than life, and long before the era of 24-hour news, the mayor found imaginative ways to keep himself in the spotlight. So while the role he played in the Turner election was eye-catching, it wasn’t surprising when you considered his eventful, iconoclastic career.

Ed Koch was born in the Bronx in 1924 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents. After completing his law degree at NYU and beginning his legal career, he moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village, where he became involved in local Democratic politics. In 1963, he ran for Greenwich Village district leader as a reform Democrat and won, beating the powerful machine pol Carmine De Sapio. Koch’s willingness to run against the local Democratic Party machine was an early sign of his independence: for this Democrat, party loyalty wasn’t the ultimate virtue.

In 1968, Koch ran for Congress and proved a tireless politicker. One month before the election, his opponent, Whitney North Seymour, Jr., saw him asking for votes outside a subway station, struck up a conversation, and asked how long he had been doing that kind of campaigning. “Oh, about a year,” Koch replied. The “look on Seymour’s face,” Koch wrote in his autobiography, Mayor, meant that Seymour knew that the man with two names was going to beat the man with four names.

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Published for www.nationalreview/corner, January 13, 2012

The Washington Times ran a really nice tribute to the late Tony Blankley today, devoting its entire Commentary section to articles by and about Tony.

One piece that caught my attention was the one by Mike McCurry on how Blankley saved McCurry’s job as White House press secretary under Clinton. As I wrote in a piece for Commentary on the use by Democrats of Mediscare campaigns against Republicans, McCurry had charged from the podium that “the reason they’re trying to slow the rate of increase in the program, I suppose, is because eventually they’d like to see the program just die and go away. You know, that’s probably what they’d like to see happen to seniors, too, if you think about it.” This shocked even the Clinton-friendly White House press corps; the official transcript records the press reaction to this statement as “Q: Ooooooooh!”

Unsurprisingly, then-Speaker Gingrich didn’t much like the comment, either. As McCurry writes today, “That was too much for the speaker and he more or less told President Clinton that there would be no more negotiating until I was sent packing.” Fortunately for McCurry, “Tony intervened and rescued my job after coaxing me to eat a little humble pie at the podium.” A classy guy, even if McCurry may have deserved more than just a little “humble pie” for the comment.

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Published for National Affairs, January 5, 2011

One of the most peculiar, and least understood, features of the Washington policy process is the extraordinary dependence of policymakers on the work of think tanks. Most Americans — even most of those who follow politics closely — would probably struggle to name a think tank or to explain precisely what a think tank does. Yet over the past half-century, think tanks have come to play a central role in policy development — and even in the surrounding political combat.

Over that period, however, the balance between those two functions — policy development and political combat — has been steadily shifting. And with that shift, the work of Washington think tanks has undergone a transformation. Today, while most think tanks continue to serve as homes for some academic-style scholarship regarding public policy, many have also come to play more active (if informal) roles in politics. Some serve as governments-in-waiting for the party out of power, providing professional perches for former officials who hope to be back in office when their party next takes control of the White House or Congress. Some serve as training grounds for young activists. Some serve as unofficial public-relations and rapid-response teams for one of the political parties — providing instant critiques of the opposition’s ideas and public arguments in defense of favored policies.

Some new think tanks have even been created as direct responses to particular, narrow political exigencies. As each party has drawn lessons from various electoral failures over recent decades, their conclusions have frequently pointed to the need for new think tanks (often modeled on counterparts on the opposite side of the political aisle).

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Published for The Corner at The National Review, December 21, 2011

Tablet’s Allison Hoffman has a big piece on Team Obama’s recent desire to improve its standing in the Jewish community. The argument that Team Obama seems to be making is that Obama has lots of Jewish friends — some of my best friends are Jewish — and that there is some kind of nefarious “whisper campaign” against Obama on the issue of Israel.

The argument is flawed on several fronts. I don’t doubt that Obama has Jewish friends, but this has not made his Israel policies any more palatable. As for the notion of a whisper campaign, it seems to me that Republicans have been shouting their concerns about Obama and Israel from the rooftops. Nobody seems to be whispering, not the Emergency Committee for Israel, not the Republican Jewish Coalition, not Dan Senor, nor any of the dozens of writers and analysts who have made the case that Obama has exhibited a certain coldness towards Israel and towards Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Debbie Wasserman Schultz seems to be leading the bury-your-head-in-the-sand brigade when she says that “To the extent we have a problem, it’s being created by individuals who . . . are attempting to mischaracterize, distort, and lie about the president’s record.” There is no need to “distort” or “mischaracterize” Obama’s problematic record on Israel. Dan Senor gave the best short summary of the argument in the Wall Street Journal in September, and it is as yet unrefuted in a serious way. Obama and his team can denounce their critics and trot out a host of liberal Jews to say what a great guy he is, but that will not change the fact that many in the pro-Israel community, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, recognize the problem and will be willing to vote accordingly in November.

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Published for The Washingtonian, November 30, 2011

With the publication of Condoleezza Rice’s No Higher Honor, most of the George W. Bush administration staff’s memoirs are now out, and there appears to be a unifying theme: the tendency to refuse to name certain players. Rice uses this device more than 20 times. For example, she often refers to conflicts with “the Vice President’s staff,” notes that “a speechwriter” inserted the words “axis of evil” into a speech, and says “one of my aides” informed her “that Israelis are among the most legalistic people on Earth.”

Why Rice is so cryptic seems itself a mystery. She’s not protecting sources as a journalist might. She isn’t unwilling to name names—the Washington Post chided her for name-dropping. She’s also willing to criticize, going after Doug Feith by name, among others. It’s not because she doesn’t want to waste time naming ancillary characters: She identifies her trainer even as some ambassadors go nameless. It isn’t because the IDs of the people in question are a mystery: It’s well known that David Frum claimed credit for the “axis of evil” line. And space couldn’t have been an issue, because the book is more than 700 pages.

Karl Rove en-gaged in this coyness in his Courage and Consequence. The most intriguing instance concerned an aide in the 2000 campaign “who could be counted on to share sensitive, unauthorized information with the press” and whom Rove misdirected into telling the media that John Danforth, not Dick Cheney, was going to be the vice-presidential nominee. The most identifiable of Rove’s anonymous characters, at least to anyone familiar with the administration, is the “enforcer” Josh Bolten brought in “to make certain that [the facts behind candidate Bush’s policy speeches] were accurate, ready on time, and as meaty as possible”—talented but tough Gary Edson. When I asked Rove about his use of anonymity, he explained he “wanted to illustrate a certain point without embarrassing somebody.”

Less prominent aides also used the technique. Even though Tim Goeglein’s The Man in the Middle at times appears to include the names of every one of his White House colleagues (this writer included), he at one point has a long conversation with an unnamed staffer who talked to him, fairly innocuously, about the thinking behind Bush’s stem-cell policy.

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Published at The Corner for The National Review, November 30, 2011

The New York Times has an editorial today called “A Vacancy That Needs to Be Filled,” which blames Republicans for the departure of Don Berwick from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. According to the Times, “Senate Republicans need to put aside their rancor and obstructionism and confirm [Marilyn] Tavenner” to replace Berwick at CMS. This editorial is misguided on several fronts. While it is true that Republicans have criticized Berwick’s past statements and at least 42 of them still oppose his nomination, the primary fault for not getting him confirmed lies with the Obama administration and not the Republicans.

From the very beginning, the Obama administration mishandled Berwick’s confirmation process. First, the administration delayed for 18 months before naming him for CMS, waiting until after the passage of the Obama health bill to put his name forward. This delay stemmed from administration concerns about the various controversial statements Berwick had made over the years, statements that Avik Roy lays out in his NRO piece on the subject.

In addition, the 18-month delay meant that the Obama administration missed the window in which they had a 60-vote Senate majority that could have confirmed him. Furthermore, the Senate had not even scheduled a hearing on Berwick before the Obama administration recess-appointed him, irking the Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus. At that time, Berwick had not even completed all of the necessary paperwork for Senate confirmation, and a Senate source has informed me that he still has not completed all of his paperwork. Regardless, once the Obama administration recess-appointed Berwick without a hearing, Berwick’s chances of ever getting confirmed plummeted.

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Published for The Corner at The National Review, November 14, 2011

The Washington Post has reported that the Supreme Court will take up the question of the constitutionality of the Obama health-care law. This is unquestionably good news for conservatives and opponents of the law. First, there is the obvious point that if they didn’t take up the case, the challengers would be out of legal options. As long as the case is proceeding, there remains the real chance that the Supreme Court, which does have a 5–4 conservative — albeit unreliable — majority, can overturn it.

The fact that the oral arguments will be heard, and the court decision will be made, ahead of next November’s election is good news as well. If the Court overturns the individual mandate, such a decision will highlight the unconstitutional basis of the Obama law and bolster the political case for its full repeal. If the Court upholds the law, that would certainly be unfortunate, but it would also serve as a stark notification that an Obama win in 2012 could cement the health law in place for the foreseeable future. This closing of the option for judicial repeal would galvanize conservatives and all opponents of the law in advance of the 2012 election. Either way, today’s acceptance of the case by the Supreme Court allows the law’s opponents to continue the struggle for repeal and the eventual movement towards a workable kind of health reform.

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Published for The Corner at The National Review, November 8, 2011

Jonah noted last night that we would be hearing more about Obama and Sarkozy agreeing in their disdain for Bibi Netanyahu, and he was right. Jay Carney tried to duck the issue in a press conference today, saying three separate times some version of “I don’t have any comment on the specific conversation.” He even tried to spin out of it by pointing to the U.S.’s disagreement with France on France’s recent vote granting the Palestinians UNESCO membership. This, I suspect, will not fly.

As Jackson Diehl wrote on the Washington Post site, Obama’s and Sarkozy’s disregard for Netanyahu is not really justified by Netanyahu’s actions. As Diehl put it, Netanyahu “has been an occasionally difficult but ultimately cooperative partner” whereas Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas “has gone from resisting U.S. and French diplomacy to actively seeking to undermine it.” The anti-Netanyahu comments of course provide more proof of Obama’s coldness towards Israel, but they also demonstrate that Obama still does not grasp the essential foreign-policy principle of rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior.

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Published for The Corner at www.nationalreview.com, October 27, 2011,

James Frazier has a piece in today’s Washington Times on the favorite movies of our presidential candidates. For what it’s worth, the choices, in the order in which they appear in the article, are:

Herman Cain: The Godfather

Michele Bachmann: Braveheart, “or maybe Saving Private Ryan”

Newt Gingrich: “Probably” Casablanca

Rick Santorum: Field of Dreams

Ron Paul: “I don’t watch many movies”

Gary Johnson:  Dr. Zhivago

Mitt Romney: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Rick Perry: Immortal Beloved

Barack Obama: Casablanca, The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I am not sure how much we learn from this, other than that Perry’s pick is the most unexpected and that Paul, typically, is playing a different game than everyone else. I have written before on the movies presidents watch, and found that presidential movie selections are both unpredictable and not necessarily indicative of a president’s public persona. I doubt that anyone would have guessed that Jimmy Carter watched an astounding 480 movies during his one term in office. Still, it is a fun exercise, and good to know that Gingrich and Cain each share a favorite movie with Obama. It will give them something to talk about if they ever run into each other on the campaign trail.

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Published for The Washingtonian, October 19, 2011

In 2001 I was working at the Department of Labor as a deputy assistant secretary for policy. An issue came up that was somewhat controversial, and the Labor Secretary, Elaine Chao, had to go to the White House to present her perspective on it.

There was disagreement between our department and some of the White House staff. Steven Law, the Labor Department chief of staff, was concerned that the issue might go the wrong way. So he asked me, the policy person, to join the Secretary at the briefing.

Beforehand, Law pulled me aside and said, “You’re going to be in the Oval Office for the first time. It’s very intimidating. But this is an important issue and there’s going to be a moment when people are going to look to you. The issue could go either way. You need to stand firm.”

I remember being in the anteroom before the meeting and seeing every famous name in the administration—Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer. It was intimidating.

I entered the Oval Office, was introduced to the President, and sat down. I didn’t know it at the time, but there’s a standard procedure for how these briefings go. There are two chairs that flank the fireplace where the President and Vice President sit. The top White House staff member sits on the couch to the right of the President. The person leading the briefing sits on the left-hand couch. That’s the firing-line seat.

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