Inside Politics

ORATOR IN CHIEF

“Benjamin Disraeli’s most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: ’Never complain and never explain.’ For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Churchill, Lincoln and Henry V at Agincourt look like first-round rejects on ’Orating With the Stars,’ Barack Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side,” writes Mark Steyn on NationalReview.com.

“He tried it with health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end, and the more he explained the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it’s time to sign on or else.

“Meanwhile, to take the other half of the Disraeli equation, Obama and his officials and their beleaguered band of surrogates never stop complaining. If you express concerns about government health care, they complain about all these ’racists’ and ’domestic terrorists’ obstructing his agenda. If you wonder why the president can’t seem to find time in his hectic schedule of international-awards acceptance speeches to make a decision about Afghanistan, they complain that it’s not his fault he ’inherited’ all these problems.

“And, if you wonder why his ’green jobs czar’ is a Communist 9/11 truther and his National Endowment for the Arts guy is leaning on grant recipients to produce Soviet-style propaganda extolling Obama policies, they complain about Fox News.”

FOX NEWS

“In normal times, it would make no sense for the White House to engage Fox News Channel in battle,” writes Terence Samuel on the Web site of the liberal magazine, the American Prospect.

“That tactical decision would make as much sense as a dog chasing a crocodile into a swamp — the White House is on Fox’s turf, and the cable network has all the advantages. But these are not normal times, and the White House is not dealing with a typical media outlet.

“Fox News is everything that (White House) press secretary Robert Gibbs says it is: It’s an arm of the conservative movement and an opposition research shop for the GOP. And now, the Fox affair is a test case about the future of American political journalism …

“In this post-Crossfire age, we’ve all been slowly, but surely, sucked into the maw of mass-media punditry, where we are all publicly for or against this issue or that candidate. This approach has made the public debate a bit more heated and a lot more entertaining. But for all the promise of an innovative and interactive media landscape, we have not yet been led into a new age of enlightenment.

“Fox News is the iconic example of the problem. The long-assumed liberal bias in the media may have reflexively challenged the legitimacy of conservative positions, but it almost never got to the point of trying to destroy the opposition. Fox takes criticism three steps further and instead goes on the attack.”

DEEDS’ DILEMMA

“Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, has a Barack Obama problem,” writes Fred Barnes in the conservative Weekly Standard.

“Obama won Virginia in last year’s presidential race — the first Democrat to do so in 44 years — but his popularity in the state has plunged since then. Deeds is conflicted. Asked if he’s an ’Obama Democrat,’ Deeds said he’s a ’Creigh Deeds Democrat,’ whatever that is. And he’s skipped two of three Obama appearances in Virginia during the campaign season.

“The rub is Deeds can’t live with Obama, and can’t live without him. His campaign is sputtering, he trails Republican Bob McDonnell by 7 points or more in every poll, and the Democratic base is demoralized. He needs Obama’s help in arousing voters and creating a Democratic surge in turnout on November 3.

“The downside is Obama motivates Republicans as well and is likely to have little effect on independents. In 2006 and 2008 — disastrous election years for Republicans in Virginia — ’the independents were behaving like Democrats,’ says former Republican congressman Tom Davis. They had turned sharply against President Bush and the war in Iraq. With Bush gone, independents are increasingly leery of Obama. For Deeds, the president is a ’net negative,’ Davis says.”

PALIN POLITICS

“Failed GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose new memoir, set to be released on Nov. 17, emphasizes her supposedly ’maverick’ tendencies with its title ’Going Rogue,’ has just dipped her toe into New York state politics,” writes Betsy Reed on the Web site of the liberal magazine, the Nation.

“By endorsing a right-wing third-party candidate, Doug Hoffman of the Conservative Party, in the Nov. 3 special election for the state’s 23rd Congressional District seat, she has indeed bucked the party establishment - in order to advance a hard-line social conservative agenda. In the nonsensical Palin universe, that’s what ’rogue’ means: walking in lockstep with the Christian right.

“The Republican Party’s candidate in the race, Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and has pledged to support the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act. While Scozzafava has been depicted as a radical leftist in the right-wing blogosphere, in fact she is a centrist with conservative leanings. The net effect of Palin’s ’rogue’ intervention may be to split the conservative vote and help elect the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens, who maintains an edge over the other two candidates in the polls.”

A THIRD SURGE?

“Dick Cheney has accused Barack Obama of ’dithering’ over Afghanistan. I suppose if the president were to quickly invade a country on the basis of half-baked intelligence, that would demonstrate his courage and decisiveness to Mr. Cheney,” writes Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. “In fact, it’s not a bad idea for Obama to take his time, examine all the options, and watch how the post-election landscape in Afghanistan evolves.

“The real question we should be asking in Afghanistan is not ’Do we need a surge?’ but rather ’Do we need a third surge?’ The number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in January 2008 was 26,607. Over the next six months, the Bush administration raised the total to 48,250. President Bush described this policy as ’the quiet surge’…

“In January 2009, another 3,000 troops, originally ordered by President Bush, went to Afghanistan in the first days of the Obama presidency. In February, responding to a request from the commander in the field, Obama ordered an additional 17,000 troops into the country. In other words, over the past 18 months, troop levels in Afghanistan have almost tripled. An additional 40,000 troops sent in the next few months would mean an almost 400 percent increase in U.S. troops since 2008. (The total surge in Iraq, incidentally, was just over 20,000 troops.)

“It is not dithering to try to figure out why previous increases have not worked and why we think additional ones would.”

• Sean Lengell can be reached at slengell@washingtontimes.com.