David Frum
David Frum
David J. Frumis a Canadian-American neoconservative political commentator. A speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum later became the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and also a CNN contributor. He serves on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the British think tank Policy Exchange, the anti-drug policy group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and as vice chairman and an associate fellow of the R Street...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
CountryUnited States of America
Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.
I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.
I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.
Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.
The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.
Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.
Think tanks do have points of view, and they are absolutely entitled to defend them.
Yet when the hour of decision arrives, it turns out that many conservatives care as little as ever about administrative skill and executive accomplishment. Our party and our movement overwhelmingly respond to symbolic cues. Sarah Palin is exciting and appealing. But what kind of executive is she? None of us have even the remotest idea.
Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is ... to put it mildly ... severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues. We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don't care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.
The Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.
Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king.
Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books.
What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance.