The Daily Beast

or a couple of years now, optimists about Barack Obama's reelection prospects (myself included) have peddled the Ronald Reagan analogy. Reagan, you may remember, won 49 states in 1984 with the unemployment rate at 7.4 percent. The lesson: a president overseeing a weak economy can still win reelection—easily—if people believe the worst is over and prosperity is about to return.

Sarah Palin showed up at the Rolling Thunder bikers' rally Sunday and said nothing, thus throwing the press into a frenzy. Now she's headed to various other patriotic sites, which will send the press into further spasms. Everywhere she goes, she's mobbed. Which leads me to this admittedly far-fetched thought experiment: if I were Sarah Palin why wouldn't I run for president?

I watched Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress with a guy named Fadi Quran. He recently graduated from Stanford, where he double-majored in physics and international relations. He lives in Ramallah, where he's starting an alternative energy company. And he just might rock our world.

A sailor throws a drowning man a life preserver. How dare you, screams the man. Because of you, people are going to think I can't swim.

Can we now, after the president’s Thursday Mideast speech, finally stop calling Barack Obama a “realist?” Please. Ever since he emerged on the national stage more than three years ago, commentators have been claiming that Obama—unlike George W. Bush—places national interest, not human freedom, at the heart of his foreign policy.

Why did thousands of Palestinians yesterday converge upon Israel's borders? Partly because Syria's war-criminal leader, Bashar al-Assad, and his ally, Hezbollah, wanted them to. But there's more to it than that. Palestinians also marched from Jordan and Egypt, whose governments did their best to stop the protests. In fact, they marched from every corner of the Palestinian world, in a tech-savvy, coordinated campaign. What hit Israel yesterday was the Palestinian version of the Arab spring.

On American campuses, Israel feuds are nothing new. But the City University of New York's decision to deny playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree—and now perhaps reinstate it—is cutting-edge. It is cutting-edge because the debate over Kushner's degree is, at heart, a debate over whether people who want Israel to be a secular rather than a Jewish state can be tolerated in public life. That's a debate that Americans, and particularly American Jews, haven't had since the 1940s. But it's returning in a big way.

The killing of Osama bin Laden has greater potential to change the Democratic Party's reputation on national security than any single event since Vietnam. It almost perfectly rewrites the narrative of Democratic weakness that Republicans have labored decades to build.

No human's death is ever a blessing. But this comes close. Many modern revolutionaries have committed terrible crimes in pursuit of a vision that, at least in theory, had moral value. Osama bin Laden's vision, by contrast, was both totalitarian and parochial. And he murdered freely in its pursuit. He was evil in both ends and means.

President Obama's budget speech was one part Obama, one part Clinton, one part China. The Obama part came at the end. It was a gesture toward recapturing the image he enjoyed between 2004 and 2008: As the guy who didn't hate and wasn't hated, the guy who could help red and blue America get along. "This sense of responsibility—to each other and to our country—this isn't a partisan feeling," Obama declared. "It isn't a Democratic or a Republican idea. It's patriotism."