Pistol Pete

1. You really do need to be checking out NO LEFT TURNS now and again to keep up with the astute insight of Pete Spillakos . He explains—riffing off an article by Beran—that Obama is no Bill Clinton. He’s both better and worse: He’s positioned to be able to protect the CHANGES he and Congress imposed on our country, and he won’t trade principled reform for popularity. And he probably really believes that his real problem is that CHANGE is just coming to slowly for impatient voters.

2. Still, our Carl Scott reminds us in the thread of the convincing evidence in the Kurtz book that our president for most of his adult life was a follower of Michael Harrington and his Democratic Socialists. (Kurtz also shows that Harrington and his socialists were a lot less admirable and somewhat less democratic than we’ve tended to believe.) But Carl goes on to doubt the common view that our president IS a socialist. He WAS a socialist seems more accurate, but now he seems at least somewhat ideologically adrift. If he really is drifting a bit more than Pete thinks, there’s reason for hope, in my opinion.

3. In a previous post (just scroll—I’m too lazy to link twice in the same post), Pete explains why the Republican gains in the SENATE were disappointing. Angle (NV) and Buck (CO) weren’t necessarily more extreme than the fabulously successful Rubio (FL). It’s just that they only felt comfortable preaching to the converted, and they were incapable of arguing effectively with those who disagreed with them. Maybe extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, but liberty still has to be defended in intelligent and persuasive speech.