Ross Douthat

In response to those liberals who have written in taking me to task for refusing to give Douglas Kmiec's arguments the respectful consideration they supposedly deserve, I would suggest a thought experiment. Imagine that John McCain had narrowly defeated Barack Obama last week, and that Slate sponsored a dialogue on the future of the Democratic Party in which Joe Lieberman showed up to offer pious lectures on how the Democrats could retake the Presidency. Then… More »

JPod, on Obama's Nancy Reagan line:... I'm sorry he's getting hammered for it, because it made him seem like a more interesting person. Now, Obama is nothing if not an interesting person. His book Dreams from My Father is a very, very interesting self-portrait -- my friend Andy Ferguson has gone so far as to call it a "small masterpiece," which is higher praise than I would give it (and, moreover, from a source who is far less inclined to lavish praise than I am).… More »

On the day after the election, Robert Wright was kind enough to grill me about the GOP, Grand New Party, and related issues, and you can watch the results here. More »

Intemperate broadsides against Douglas Kmiec aside, I'll have more to say early next week, hopefully, about pro-lifers in the age of Obama. For now, let me quote Damon Linker, who notes that the Democrats didn't make much headway among the most religious - and by extension, most pro-life - Americans, and then offers the following advice to the Democrats:Rejoicing in their victory, many liberals will be inclined to say good riddance to such voters. And this may make… More »

Yglesias, Wilkinson and Manzi had an interesting round-robin on the subject yesterday. More »

The nice thing about a resounding defeat is that everyone can look at the exit polls and find confirmation that the GOP needs to do better among their favored constituency. I can read the exits and see a party that lost six points, compared to 2004, among voters making $30,000 to $50,000, seven points among voters making $50,000 to $75,000, six points among high school graduates and seven points among voters with "some college," and interpret all of this as… More »

The Slate dialogue continues, and I say some very unkind things about Douglas Kmiec. More »

Patrick Ruffini has the grisly details. Greg Mankiw ventures a conjecture:Why? I am not enough of a political scientist to be sure, but recent conversations I have had with some Harvard undergrads have led me to a conjecture: It was largely noneconomic issues. These particular students told me they preferred the lower tax, more limited government, freer trade views of McCain, but they were voting for Obama on the basis of foreign policy and especially social issues… More »

Chris Beam and Allahpundit have smart takes. More »

He died yesterday, and like C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley - both of whom entered the next life on November 22, 1963 - his passing was overshadowed by larger events. Not that he was in Lewis's or Huxley's league, obviously: Peter Suderman's observation that most of his novels "were blockbuster scripts written in choppy prose" is pretty much on the mark. (Not coincidentally, Crichton was a prolific screenwriter and producer as well.) But one of them - I mean Jurassic… More »

Mark Steyn:As for us losers, there's no point us going down the right-wing version of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Any shrill vicious ad hominem invective would be much better directed at each other. The Republicans lost this election. I disagree with Lisa. I think we are near a point at which America joins the rest of the west as a center-left society - that's to say, a society whose assumptions about the role of government and the size of the state are far closer… More »

I'm participating in a Slate discussion about the Right's future over the next two days. My first contribution is here; I highly recommend Jim Manzi's post; and I'll have something to say in response to Doug Kmiec's contribution later on. More »

The electoral college was a blowout, but it looks like I came pretty close calling a 52-47 split in the popular vote. Turnout wasn't all that much higher than in 2004, which means the Democrats did not suddenly discover a vast new untapped source of votes that will change American politics for a generation. If Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman, Saxby Chambliss and Ted Stevens (oy) hold on, then the Republicans will have come out of this better, perhaps, than could have… More »

I hope I will be forgiven a touch of hyperbole when I say that it's hard to imagine a more inspiring back-to-back of political addresses than McCain's concession and Obama's victory speech. God bless America, and good night. More »

Like many conservative writers, my good opinion of Barack Obama diminished somewhat over the course of the campaign. Part of this was the inevitable hardening of the partisan arteries that takes place during a Presidential year, but part of it was that Obama's particular gifts - his combination of charisma and thoughtfulness, and his ability to project sympathy for positions he does not himself hold - created unreasonable initial expectations for the kind of actual… More »

Matt Continetti ponders the long, long road to today's decision:It's worth revisiting why this has been a long campaign. The reason has nothing to do with when the primaries were scheduled. The early primaries were a symptom, not a cause. The cause is Bush. Starting with Hurricane Katrina, a large portion of the country simply wrote off Bush's presidency. That grew worse as the Iraq war worsened and the Democrats took Congress in 2006. As Jeffrey Bell has pointed… More »

While we wait for history (of some sort, either way) to be made, I just wanted to pull out this passage from Yuval's post yesterday on the looming fights over how to reform conservatism:... these fights need to be had on substantive grounds. Rush Limbaugh and Ross Douthat may disagree about what was best about Ronald Reagan, but do they disagree about the McCain health care plan? I think they don't. The challenge for conservatives if we find ourselves in… More »

Alex Massie has a long, thoughtful post on how the man and the moment (seem to) have met - and a shorter post pointing out how fortunate Obama was to lose in his first try at national office. More »

Chris Caldwell, on class and the election:... the Palin pick was the electoral equivalent of an atomic bomb. It was one of those tactics that turns into a strategy. What the Palin pick did was to unleash a latent class tension in American life and turn the two parties, previously somewhat socially mixed, into vehicles of social classes. Prominent intellectuals who once leaned rightward sorted themselves into the Obama camp. So did most north-eastern Republicans.… More »

I like Edward Rothstein's columns and I enjoyed this piece, but I feel like somebody else got there first. More »