Campaign advisers for Barack Obama have been urging him to take the gloves off against Hillary Clinton and respond in kind to her down-and-dirty campaigning. But David Brooks of the New York Times warns that doing so could undermine the premise of Obama’s campaign — that people are “hungry for a different kind of politics.†Brooks wrote: “A candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.â€
The economy lost a net 63,000 jobs in February, the sharpest drop in five years. The losses appear mostly linked to the continued housing crisis. Some expect the Federal Reserve to respond by lowering interest rates again, perhaps by as much as a full point.
The National Democratic Committee created the fiasco it’s now confronted with regarding Florida and Michigan — by deciding that if they moved up their primaries to January, their votes wouldn’t count. It’s unbelievable that DNC Chairman Howard Dean would now refuse to enable those states to revote so their votes could count, especially by pleading poverty in a year of record-breaking Democratic fundraising. “We can’t afford to do that,†Dean said on CBS’ “The Early Show†of party-sponsored revotes. “That’s not our problem. We need our money to win the presidential race.†Nonsense. Other states should join Florida and Michigan in demanding the party do the right thing and rerun the primaries.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told Congress last week that the Iraq war “has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself. . . . By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.†In addition, there has been an opportunity cost to spending on Iraq and not on other priorities. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,†Stiglitz said, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.â€
It’s good that the Wichita City Council is taking a fresh look at reviving passenger rail transportation to Wichita. Council members asked city staff to look at a resolution supporting a north-south extension of Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer route from Oklahoma City through Wichita to Kansas City, Mo.
With rising gas prices and airline delays, Wichita should have more transportation options, and rail could be a popular option along this busy corridor.
It’s worth a close study. Could the old Union Station depot in Old Town actually be put back to use?
Campaign advisers for Barack Obama have been urging him to take the gloves off against Hillary Clinton and respond in kind to her down-and-dirty campaigning. But David Brooks of the New York Times warns that doing so could undermine the premise of Obama’s campaign — that people are “hungry for a different kind of politics.†Brooks wrote: “A candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.â€
