Tag Archives: Gary Andres

America Speaking Out

BY GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from Weekly Standard

 The day Abraham Lincoln delivered his electrifying speech at New York City’s Cooper Union in 1860, he sat for a now famous photograph by Mathew Brady. Lincoln’s stem-winding perorations that night won him high praise from political elites, but the picture – widely used and reproduced in the campaign that year — contributed as much, or more, to his presidential victory.

 Reprinted in newspapers in the days and weeks that followed, the photograph created many Americans’ first impression of the next president.  Instead of an awkward, gangly, thin-faced man with dark eyes, Brady’s photograph made the future president look learned, proportional, and statesman-like.

 Historian Harold Holzer, who wrote Lincoln at Cooper Union, notes that when the president-elect encountered the photographer in Washington a year later, he said, “Brady and Cooper Union made me President.”

Fashioning the “new Lincoln” constituted the first major use of photography in American politics. It was a triumph of that epoch’s new media.

 The pace and content of media use in governing and politics is always in flux. But the velocity of progress is escalating.

Today’s new media evolution progresses like Darwinism on steroids – change happens in weeks and months, not millennia.

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Raising Arizona

BY Gary Andres

From Weekly Standard.com

When Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed her state’s new immigration law on April 23, reaction from the political Left was swift and furious. They predicted jack-booted rogue cops staging midnight raids on the homes of everyone.

But after over a month of national debate and media coverage – including criticism from both the American and Mexican presidents, and a host of newly minted experts, a curious thing is happening.  The state’s new law has not led to massive deportation or racial cleansing in the desert. And there is even some evidence it’s growing in popularity, both in Arizona and nationally.

Ironically the same liberals, intent on tearing down the new law through hyperbolic invective, may be contributing to its widening support.

Arizona’s immigration law deeply offends the sensibilities of most liberals – particularly those who don’t live there. Their rhetoric would be comical if it weren’t so predictable.

Miguel Guadalupe, writing at the Huffington Post, described the measure as a “Gestapo Law.”  Colombian singer Shakira called it “unjust and inhuman.”  Seth MacFarlane, creator of the TV show “Family Guy,” told Reuters Television, “Nobody but the Nazis ever asked anybody for their papers.”
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Republican Majority Bubbling Up in Burbs

BY GARY ANDRES

Reprinted from Weekly Standard

The American suburbs fueled the emergence of the Democratic congressional majority in 2006 and then helped expand it 2008.  During those two election cycles, Republicans lost 24 incumbent or open seat races in these cul-de-sac filled districts.

But now suburbanites are shifting again. As a result, many of these districts could swing back to the GOP, providing more than half of the forty seats Republicans need to capture the majority in the House.

The battle for the suburbs will determine if President Barack Obama continues to work with his own party as the congressional majority or if Washington reverts to divided government.

Many swing voters live in the suburbs. As these regions grew following World War II, they became an increasingly large and pivotal piece of political real estate.
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Exposing an American Myth

BY GARY ANDRES

From the Weekly Standard

Voters elected Barack Obama in November 2008 – at least in part – based on an American myth. Seventeen months later, the same allegory is creating a host of consequences for individual politicians, as well as the way citizens view political institutions like Congress.

The myth concerns the level of political consensus in America. It’s a lot lower than most people think.  Polls may show high levels of agreement on generic aspirations like peace, prosperity, or even a better education system.  But when it comes to specific steps to achieve these goals, things begin to unravel.

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The Democrats’ Tylenol Moment

BY GARY ANDRES

appeared in the Weekly Standard

In 1982, Tylenol faced a potentially lethal brand crisis.  Someone tampered with its packaging in a number of Chicago retail locations, randomly lacing the pain relief capsules with cyanide.  Fear and chaos ensued.  Seven people died, and the well known product risked commercial extinction.

Fortunately, the company slowly clawed its way back from the abyss through a combination of smart repackaging and crisis communications.
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Obama Can Reshape School Debate

BY GARY ANDRES

For the Weekly Standard

President Obama missed a host of opportunities to remedy Washington’s fever of polarization during the health care debate. Instead of forging a bipartisan coalition and ratcheting back the campaign-style rhetoric, he agreed to a one-party strategy and consistently demonized his opponents with over the top rhetoric.

Mr. Obama also falsely raised citizens’ expectations that one bill or a new government program could remedy all that ails us. Government is no wonder drug.  It cannot deliver all the life altering promises on the president’s wish list.

But American politics can also produce second chances. The president may have an opportunity to generate a more realistic kind of change when it comes to education reform. Yet it’s unclear if he has the conviction or the political fortitude to do so.
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Zugzwang: Democrats’ Dilemma

BY GARY ANDRES

I first encountered the word Zugzwang in a 1985 New York Times Magazine column by the late William Safire.  It’s a chess term that means “compelled to move, but imperiled by doing so.” The word’s political implications are profound.

For the past 25 years, I’ve regularly witnessed the repercussions of that hard-to-pronounce term.  During the 1990s, my friend Arne Christenson (who served as chief of staff to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich) and I would lament some thorny political problem faced by Republicans or Democrats and how being “compelled to move” would cause unavoidable collateral political damage.  Arne would just shake his head and say, “Zugzwang.”  We both knew exactly what he meant.
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