On Jan. 20, 1961, John Kennedy delivered his rousing Inaugural Address. But this speech was preceded, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution has reminded us, by an equally important speech: Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address. Kennedy’s speech was an idealistic call to action. Eisenhower’s...

When an officer was commended to his attention, Napoleon is reported to have inquired: “Is he lucky?” Luck is half the game. It’s no good having it and being incapable of using it. On the other hand, great striving may come to naught without luck. My sense is that President Barack Obama is a...

Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio...

Maybe President Obama was saving the magic for a time when we really needed it. We’ve been complaining for two years about the lack of music and passion in his big speeches. But if he’d moved the country when he was talking about health care or bailing out the auto industry, perhaps his words ...

President Obama has accomplished something extraordinary during his Hawaiian escape from Washington: his White House has gone dark for more than a week. Here on Oahu, where Mr. Obama and his family are staying in a luxury oceanfront rental home in the sleepy town of Kailua, the president is cloaked...

The defeat of the Dream Act in the lame-duck session slams the lid for this Congress on any meaningful repair of the immigration system, but that should not be the end of it for President Obama and his administration. Mr. Obama’s strategy of doubling-down on border and workplace enforcement to...

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed...

If not a transfer of power, the whole show seemed at least a temporary handoff. An embattled president, fresh off an electoral shellacking and struggling to sell a controversial tax deal to members of his own party, turned to a former president who, exactly 16 years ago, was struggling to right his...

It’s a lame-duck session. Time is running out. Unemployment is high, the economy is dangerously weak and, with five weeks to go, no one knows what tax anyone will be paying on everything from income to dividends to death when the current rates expire Jan. 1. And what is the president demanding...

“We did the Cole and we wanted the United States to react. And if they reacted, they are going to invade Afghanistan and that’s what we want … . Then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.” — Mohammed Atef, military commander of Al Qaeda, in November of 2000 You...