From the left: Trump Drowns Out Dems’ Populist Push
President Trump is making life both “too easy and very hard” for Democrats, suggests Jacob Weisberg at the Financial Times. Easy, because any party can look “capable and trustworthy in comparison.” But Trump also “sucks up all the political oxygen, making it difficult for Democrats to call attention to what they would do with power.” Case in point: the small-town Virginia event at which Democratic leaders unveiled their “Better Deal” platform for the 2018 midterms. It was swamped for attention by Trump’s attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his speech to the Boy Scouts. So no one focused on what, though “thin on policy,” was the Democrats’ first attempt “to make the crucial leap” from simple “disgust with Mr. Trump to selling an affirmative agenda.”
Conservative: Will Base Let Democrats Court Pro-Lifers?
Alexandra DeSanctis at National Review is skeptical of the declaration by Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, that “there is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates” on any issue, including abortion. After all, even Bernie Sanders came under fire in April for endorsing an Omaha mayoral candidate who’d once backed a bill requiring abortion providers to inform pregnant women about a fetal. At the time, national Chairman Tom Perez declared support for unlimited abortion rights to be “not negotiable” for all Democrats. So it’s “more than likely the powerful pro-abortion lobby will succeed in pressuring the Democratic Party into backing down, and abortion-on-demand will remain the Left’s highest sacrament.”
Analyst: Bartman Saga Shows Risks of Losing Privacy
Eric Peterson at the Washington Examiner sees an important lesson in the story of Steve Bartman, the Chicago Cubs fan who “caught hell” when he prevented outfielder Moises Alou from catching a foul ball in an NLCS game the team would go on to lose. “Beer and food began to fly down from the upper deck, along with chants of profanity,” he recalls. The Chicago Sun-Times published not only Bartman’s name, but his address and place of employment: He soon moved to Florida to escape the “harassment, intimidation and even death threats.” Now the Cubs, to make amends, have presented him with a 2016 World Series ring. But “across the political spectrum, there has been a movement to erase the privacy of political opponents in attempts to intimidate and harass them into silence.” Says Peterson: “Stop eroding the personal privacy of those we disagree with and treat them more like human beings.”
Foreign desk: Arab Moderates Can’t Restrain Extremists
A growing number of those in the US foreign-policy establishment believe “the influence of moderate Sunni Arab states that want to normalize relations with Israel can help to steer the Palestinians toward a two-state solution,” notes Jonathan Tobin in Israel Hayom. But the recent uproar over Israel installing metal detectors by Jerusalem’s Temple Mount proves “the truth is just the opposite.” Instead of neighboring Jordan “and its moderate monarch leading the Palestinians to be more reasonable, it was the rage of the Palestinian street . . . that forced Jordan to escalate the conflict.” So as long as Israel’s illegitimacy remains a core belief among Palestinians, “even the best-intentioned Arab leaders will find themselves incapable of breaking free of this dynamic.”
Media critic: The Times’ Nostalgia for Communism
The New York Times has been running a “very selectively explored” series on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, says Robert Tracinski at The Federalist. It’s full of “fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of twentieth-century Communism — the optimism, the idealism, the moral authority.” But there’s been precious little about “the gulags, the squalor and the soul-crushing conformity.” Indeed, “the overall thrust of the series is summed up in a call to try Communism again, but maybe this time try not to have any gulags.” Apparently, “Western intellectuals now feel they can get away with downplaying Communism’s crimes and failures and return to rapturous descriptions of its abstract ideals, without the need any longer to take a serious look at what those ideals really meant in practice.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann