Beltway veteran: New Dem Plan Is Same Old, Same Old

Not even the Democrats’ most senior leaders really have a clue “how to get out of the hole they dug for themselves while Barack Obama was president,” contends Peter Roff at US News & World Report. Obama’s “shift to the left” (after running as a centrist) convinced “a whole new generation” of voters that Democrats will “tax you, spend your money on someone else and impose regulations on the economy that make it tough for you to find a job.” Which is why the party’s “latest try at assembling an agenda for the future was released to little enthusiasm.” It’s “several parts Bernie Sanders, a few parts Obama and a generous helping of Clinton.” Meaning the Democrats are still “out of touch with America” — and their “Better Deal, which isn’t anything of the kind, proves it.”



Urban wonk: NYC Is Hurtling Forward to the Past

City Hall “made sure to roust any homeless people from the route to provide a sanitized backdrop” for Mayor de Blasio’s weekend subway ride, notes Bob McManus at City Journal. But even de Blasio “is no longer oblivious to the ugly reality behind his Potemkin city,” pinpointing as a root cause what he says is voluntary panhandling — though “he doesn’t resent it enough actually to do something about it.” Which is “a pity,” because “aggressive vagrancy can be managed, if not eliminated.” Left unchecked, though, “it overpowers public spaces, encourages petty crime and degrades the quality of municipal life,” as it did for so long. The real problem is “the refusal of city leaders to recognize that aggressive vagrancy and related disorder even exists — let alone that such offenses merit police attention.”

From the right: Either Rein In Mueller or Fire Him

Special Counsel Robert Mueller appears to have “veered sharply off course to investigate matters that have nothing to do” with Russia’s election tampering, say the editors of Investor’s Business Daily. They suggest he be “reeled in to do the job he was hired to do, or fired.” Mueller has decided “to broaden the investigation, according to news reports,” probing a broad range of financial transactions, including Russian purchases of Trump apartments. If true, “it marks a significant departure from the agreed-upon limits of the original investigation.” Indeed, it has “now turned into a free-for-all” in which “he is looking to find a crime, any crime, that he can even remotely attach to Donald Trump’s past activities.” And that “will give the Democrats what they wanted all along: An all-purpose reason to pursue impeachment.”

Foreign desk: Trump Doctrine MIA and Will Remain So

Six months into his term, “there is little indication that the president and his advisors have developed the kind of strategy — what academics call ‘grand strategy’ and pundits refer to as ‘doctrine’ — designed to impose America’s will on the world, rather than vice versa,” warn Rebecca Friedman Lissner and Micah Zenko at Foreign Policy. Instead, Trump is focused on “short-term wins rather than longer-term strategic foresight; a ‘zero-sum’ worldview where all gains are relative and reciprocity is absent and a rejection of values-based policymaking.” Ironically, this “has resulted in an astounding degree of continuity” with “Obama-era foreign policies.” But it also means the US will remain “the object, rather than the agent, of history.”

Religion writer: The Sorrow of Charlie Gard

No one could fail to be moved by the plight of Chris Gard and Connie Yates, the English couple forced to battle for last-ditch experimental treatment for their infant son Charlie, says Matthew Walther at The Week. But there has been nothing “edifying about how the case — hideous legalistic shorthand for such monumental private anguish — has played out in our public discourse.” Indeed, hospital officials who fought the Gards were probably right: “Medicine, like every other human activity, involves certain inherent limits — logistical, financial, technological — that cannot be prudently ignored . . . It is simply an acknowledgment of reality.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann