ABOUT THIS MONTH:Among the Cynics

...Happily for us, laughter offers all the shelter we need from cynicism...

...Maybe Will has stronger reasons for holding the latter to higher standards...

...And this from a man who, as our Philip Klein reports (page 24), has declared a War on Cynicism...

...What a fortunate problem Republicans and conservatives face in having to live up to Reagan’s greatness...

...Thus even before he officially launched his presidential run, there was Fred Thompson in Connecticut telling cheering voters “the biggest problem we have today” is that Washington’s petty politics and backbiting “is creating a cynicism among our people...

...He just couldn’t say offhand what those things were...

...It features on the jacket the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Emma Goldman, Socrates, Mohandas Gandhi, Rachel Carson, Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Margaret Sanger, and… Ronald Reagan...

...It is talk like that that has led the venerable George Will to criticize Thompson’s coy candidacy for creating delusional expectations that he compares to Holland’s Tulip mania of the 1630s—this from the same George Will who late last year had nothing but kind things to say about Obama’s looming candidacy...

...Nowhere did he recommend that Obama’s backers remove the wool from their eyes— which is precisely what he calls on Thompson’s enthusiasts to do...

...Contrast that with Barack Obama’s approach to the very first question that evening, in the wake of the FBI’s arrests in a terror plot at JFK airport, “Could it be that the Bush administration’s effort to thwart terror at home has been a success...

...No,” he emphatically, coldly, replied...

...They are conservatives, after all, and he doesn’t want them to fall into a trap in which they will be praising Thompson as a second coming of Ronald Reagan simply because he’s a good actor without demanding the substance and commitment that made Reagan special...

...Just before going to press we received a review copy of a lefty collection entitled Voices of Protest: Documents of Courage and Dissent...

...Which doesn’t mean Obama isn’t here to stay...

...Without a Reagan of their own to emulate, they are beginning to co-opt him...

...Look, all of us are glad that we haven’t had a terrorist attack since 9/11, and I think there’s some things that the Bush administration has done well...

...It would seem he’d fallen victim to the war he rushed into...

...So there was Joe Biden on CNN in early June, attempting, however clumsily, some honest talk on illegal immigration none of the other debaters dared offer...

...Democrats and liberals should be so lucky...

...Fourteen million illegals: Now, you tell me how many buses, carloads, planes—they’re going to go out and round up all these people, spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars to do it, with the whole world watching, while we send these folks back...

...Indeed, he suggested Obama owes it to those whose affections he’s won to make a serious run lest he be regarded as a tease...

...But perhaps a truer sign of a pol’s stature is when his ideas begin to be echoed by the other side...

...He is the only Democratic candidate creating genuine excitement and attracting legions of earnest supporters, however knuckleheaded they may be...

...Leading Reagan authority Peter Wallison (page 68) dissects a major recent attempt to wrench the 40th president from conservatism and refashion him into a product of the Harvard Divinity School and the Council of Foreign Relations...

...A B O U T T H I S M O N T H Among the Cynics by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski RESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES say the darnedest things, but once in a while one of them will get something right...

...Characteristically, though, as if mindful his image is supposed to be that of a nice guy, Obama quickly began to backtrack...

...6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7...

...We can expect such efforts to continue...