All posts tagged: New York TImes
It wasn’t supposed to end this way for Democrats. Eight years ago, Barack Obama won the presidency promising to transform America. A supremely self-confident politician, Mr. Obama was the object of extravagant hopes that he nurtured and encouraged. After his Super Tuesday primary victories in 2008, Mr. Obama said that the movement he began would “ring out across
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Early in my Christian pilgrimage, as a young man struggling to understand the implications of a story I had only a surface knowledge of, I stumbled onto a theological insight. For followers of Jesus, salvation was based not on his life so much as his death. Jesus could have been incarnated as a man and
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The Trump era will be unpredictable in many ways. But there’s one thing that we can reasonably count on. Moderation, an ancient virtue, will be viewed with contempt. After all, the most temperamentally immoderate major party nominee in American history ran for president and won because of it. Victory spawns imitation, and the Trump template
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With only hours left before Election Day, here’s the painful, self-evident truth facing lifelong Republicans like me: The 2016 presidential campaign has revealed dark and disturbing things about not only Donald J. Trump but also the party that nominated him. Self-renewal starts — but doesn’t end — with self-examination. The forces that propelled Mr. Trump’s
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One of John F. Kennedy’s favorite books was John Buchan’s 1940 memoir, “Pilgrim’s Way.” Buchan, who served as a member of Parliament for the combined Scottish universities, wrote, “Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition.” Politics, he added, “is still the greatest and
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When I was on Christmas break from college in 1980, I wrote a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, The Tri-City Herald. It was published soon after I began to embrace Christianity, a gradual rather than a dramatic process that didn’t come all that easily. The letter was a response to a man who
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For my entire adult life I have listened to the invective leveled against the Republican Party by liberals: It is a party sustained by racist appeals, composed of haters and conspiracy nuts, indifferent to the plight of the poor and the weak, anti-woman. I have repeatedly denied those charges, publicly and forcefully. The broad indictment,
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Since Donald Trump assures us that the Bible is his favorite book, it’s worth asking: Just what is his theology? After Mr. Trump met with hundreds of evangelical Christians a couple of weeks ago, James Dobson, who is among the most influential leaders in the evangelical world and serves on Mr. Trump’s evangelical executive advisory
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At this stage in a presidential campaign, Republicans, generally a rather disciplined lot, have usually united and begun to train their fire on Democrats. Circular firing squads are for them, not us. Not this year. The candidacy of Donald J. Trump is not only fracturing the Republican Party, it is breaking up friendships as well.
Read More“I think you’d have riots.” So said Donald J. Trump last week, when he was asked by CNN what he thought would happen if he arrived at the Republican Convention this summer a few delegates short of the 1,237 needed to win outright and didn’t set forth from Cleveland as the party’s nominee. It is
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