The great power the president has is that he is the most prominent person in the biggest media event on the planet. He has the attention of the nation and the world. When he speaks, everybody listens.

Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is ... to put it mildly ... severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues. We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don't care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.

We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.

We've all been wrong- I certainly have- and we should thank those who set us right. Not always fun, but always best in the end.

If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes.

Donald Trump is not supposed to save jobs one by one. He's supposed to build a sound macro economy in which private enterprises create jobs.