Hands on Diplomacy: the foreign policy failure of America

American presidents can’t keep their hands off of other heads of state.  It has become embarrassing.  They touch their shoulders, their backs and hold their arms as they guide them to places to stand or sit.  It is as if their guests were little children or blind men who need the assistance of the almighty

Barbara Bush wants Hillary Clinton to run for president.

Barbara Bush, not the former First Lady, but the daughter of former president, George W. Bush, has said that Hillary Clinton is “unbelievably accomplished” and hopes she will run for president in 2016.  It’s about as close to an endorsement as a Bush could give a Clinton and surely qualifies as news.  Former First Lady

Ken Walsh writes about the isolation of the presidents

Kenneth T.  Walsh, Chief White House correspondent for U.S. News, has written yet another important book on the American presidency.  Prisoners of the White House: The Isolation of America’s Presidents and the Crisis of Leadership. (Paradigm Publishers, Boulder – London. ) Walsh may be this nation’s greatest authority on the modern American presidency.  His career

The Legacy of George W. Bush

Today, the George W. Bush library will be dedicated and a long list of luminaries will laud the life and legacy of our 43rd president.  I first met the future president in 1986, in Corpus Christi, Texas.  I was an independent businessman at the time, and simultaneously, working for his father as an adviser.  As the host

George H.W. Bush: Tweets before Twitter, his personal notes

. The Forty First president, George H. W. Bush, has reissued his book All the Best.  And with the new publication come another trove of personal notes and observations.  These were tweets before twitter.  Here is my take. . What do you think of the notes and personal letters of GHWB? I think the presidents’ notes and letters

The Politics of Blame? “George did it.”

We have all heard President Obama’s refrain, “it took us a long time to get into this mess and it’s going to take us a long time to get out of it.” This is his explanation for why, now in his fourth and final year of his first term as president the Great Recession persists. But is it a legitimate excuse? And if we applied this principle to other presidencies, how would the landscape of American history change?

Almost Presidents: Sons of presidents who almost won the White House themselves

Eight men who might have been president. Everybody knows that there were two sons of presidents who became president themselves.  John Quincy Adams, son of our second president, John Adams, was elected the sixth president of the United States.  And George W. Bush, who was the son of  George Herbert Walker Bush, was elected the 43rd president.  But

Presidents’ Vacations

Presidents’ vacations. There is an uproar over President Obama’s vacation.  And once again the charge is hypocrisy.   He is a president who champions public schools for the masses, while sending his own daughters to private schools.  And in this case, a president who urges us to visit the beaches of the devastated Gulf while he

Obama: Right speech, wrong time?

The only thing that history will remember about President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation tonight is the date.  Obama has called the oil spill his 9-11.  If so he is offering the nation too little, too late.  The oil spill happened on April 20, 2010.  He finally got around to addressing the nation on

This man tried to kill my dad?

A couple of days ago we passed the tenth anniversary of Operation Desert Fox, when U. S. Air Forces, under then president Bill Clinton, tried to take out Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.  Of course, there probably were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) then.   We learned that when the next president, George W.