By Lanny Davis – 06/29/11 – For several years in the late 1990s, I worked for the government of Pakistan, mostly when the late Benazir Bhutto, an inspiring small-“d” democrat and charismatic populist leader, was prime minister of Pakistan. I made lots of Pakistani friends, in Pakistan and among the large Pakistani-American community here.
By Lanny Davis – 06/22/11 – A remarkable purple moment has occurred regarding the president’s legal decision to define “hostilities” as not having taken place in the U.S. operations in Libya, and thus declaring that there was no need to seek congressional authorization under the War Powers Act. Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats don’t agree on […]
By Lanny Davis – 06/15/11 – It was the summer before the presidential year to come, more than seven months before the New Hampshire primary. All of the Republican presidential candidate’s top campaign staff had quit; he was virtually out of money. All the pundit class declared him politically dead, mocking his campaign. “It is about […]
By Lanny Davis – 06/08/11 – At first blush, the decision to indict former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) for conspiracy to accept illegal campaign contributions, given the facts and circumstances, seems like a stretch, to say the least. The definition of “campaign contributions” has never to date been used to apply in this particular fact pattern […]
By Lanny Davis – 06/01/11 – As a liberal Democrat, I was happy with the results of the New York 26th congressional district special election, in which Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin by emphasizing her opposition to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget proposal and her Republican opponent’s support of that plan. The fact […]
By Lanny Davis – 05/25/11 – The New York Times’s headline on Monday, concerning President Obama’s speech on Israel the day before to the national pro-Israel organization AIPAC, read: “Obama Presses Israel to Make Hard Choices.” The story, written by Helene Cooper, began with an unusually non-factual, subjective characterization: “President Obama struck back at Prime […]
By Lanny Davis – 05/11/11 – Just recently, certain elements of the gay-rights community reportedly succeeded in pressuring the nationally renowned law firm of King and Spaulding to withdraw from representing Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives to defend the constitutionality of the anti-gay marriage statute, the Defense of Marriage Act.
By Lanny Davis – 05/04/11 – The stunning news of the death of Osama bin Laden on Sunday night was quickly followed by spontaneous celebrations in front of the White House, Times Square and, most moving of all, at Ground Zero. I sat with my 13-year-old son and my wife, watching President Obama’s moving announcement […]
By Lanny J. Davis – 04/21/11 – So far, the one thing that President Obama and Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) agree on in their contrasting budget proposals is the necessity of avoiding specific proposals on Social Security reform. They both seem to accept the conventional wisdom that tampering with Social Security taxes […]
By Lanny Davis – 04/13/11 – Prior to President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech, I wrote a column in this space urging him to seize the initiative on the major moral issue of our time — the $14 trillion-plus debt and the trillions of dollars of deficits that will continue for the foreseeable future. […]