Stories by Noemie Emery
The Soap Opera Comes to an End
Farewell to 'The Clintons'
Jan 30, 2017
Picture The Clintons as a top TV series that made its debut in January 1992, as Bill and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes on Super Bowl Sunday to refute charges that Bill had had a fling with a chanteuse called Gennifer Flowers. It peaked in 1998 with the gigantic impeachment debacle (a loser for everyone except Hillary), was renewed for 16 more seasons after Bill left office, sustained by the ongoing, aspirational “President Hillary" saga, and then wrapped up in a sensational six-hour special Read more
Always in Vogue
The airbrushed crossroads of fashion and politics.
Dec 19, 2016
Vogue magazine and the drab world of politics are not much alike. They are prose vs. poetry, fact vs. fiction, words vs. music, dreams vs. the cold light of day. Politics is mundane and essential to the running of everything; Vogue is escape and essential to nothing, dealing in luxuries that would be nice to have if we had them, but not things anyone needs. Reality in politics is harsh overhead light that flatters few people; reality in Vogue is artifice deployed with strategic precision to Read more
Don't Cry For the First Woman Almost-president
From the November 28, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
8:30 AM, Nov 20, 2016
Not long after the election, the front page of the Washington Post featured a wonderful piece about how Bill and Hillary Clinton lost touch with their home base and with it the White House; along with that came a number of other good stories about how and why. So far so good, as the paper's A section featured its A team of political reporters and writers. But then came the B and C sections with the B and C teams, which were all p.c. and quivering feelings and throwing around sand. There was so Read more
Tearing Up
Don't cry for the first woman almost-president.
Nov 28, 2016
Not long after the election, the front page of the Washington Post featured a wonderful piece about how Bill and Hillary Clinton lost touch with their home base and with it the White House; along with that came a number of other good stories about how and why. So far so good, as the paper’s A section featured its A team of political reporters and writers. But then came the B and C sections with the B and C teams, which were all p.c. and quivering feelings and throwing around sand. There was so Read more
A Tale of Two Towns
6:20 AM, Nov 10, 2016
Far be it from a recovering ex-#NeverTrump pundit to proffer advice to our 45th president, but our leader-in-waiting could do a lot worse than to call up the American Enterprise Institute and invite Charles Murray to tea. Murray is the man who in his 2012 classic Coming Apart put a name to the great aching sore that has made Trump our president—the fact that for the past thirty years we have become two countries, separate and unequal, divided between those who have profited from the new age of Read more
Profiles in Self-Preservation
When it comes to political pickles, even the greats equivocated.
6:00 AM, Nov 04, 2016
Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, and Kelly Ayotte, and of all you desperate GOP candidates, threading the needle between a working class base in thrall to a demagogue and another fairly large bloc that detests him: Ike feels your pain. So does John Kennedy, and a very large group of the best and the brightest in that particular 1950-1954 window, most of them people of courage and character, who found themselves faced with the test of a lifetime, and behaved, in most cases, like you. They did not have to Read more
The Year the 'Laws' of Politics Were Repealed
From the October 10, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
6:00 AM, Oct 02, 2016
A lifetime ago—on June 14, 2015, for example—people who worked in politics and elections thought that they understood with a fair sense of certainty how elections and politics worked. Politics, sort of like physics, had immutable laws, rather like gravity. Demography seemed to be one of them. On the left, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira had written a book saying that the increase in numbers of darker-skinned citizens would over time tilt electoral power toward the Democrats, while on the right, Read more
Good Luck With Your Predictions
The year the 'laws' of politics were repealed
Oct 10, 2016
A lifetime ago—on June 14, 2015, for example—people who worked in politics and elections thought that they understood with a fair sense of certainty how elections and politics worked. Politics, sort of like physics, had immutable laws, rather like gravity. Demography seemed to be one of them. On the left, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira had written a book saying that the increase in numbers of darker-skinned citizens would over time tilt electoral power toward the Democrats, while on the right, Read more
New Bottle, Old Whine
Taking the party for a ride
Jul 25, 2016
Call it déjà vu, call it old whine in new bottles, call it a tale thrice told, perhaps by an idiot; there are a lot of things one can call this Republican political season, but new is not one of them. Been-there-done-that might be more like it. It's been a generation or more, but we've seen outsider candidates take their parties on wild rides, grabbing the keys to the family vehicle, driving it into ravines and through fences, and bringing it back to the house with dents in the fenders and the Read more
Trump Is a Lemon, and Republicans Should Return Him
6:01 PM, Jul 14, 2016
"Lemon laws are American state laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance," goes the Wikipedia definition . Republican delegates should study this carefully, as it may be their best option yet. No product has ever failed to meet standards more comprehensively than has Trump, who, since he clinched the nomination in May, has malfunctioned in a manner more than s Read more
What Would Hamilton Do?
The lesson of the #NeverBurr campaign
Mar 21, 2016
All right, Trump people, you do have a point. A number of policies pushed since the 1990s by the establishment wings of both major parties may have had bad effects on millions of people. The industrial base of this country has changed in ways that eroded the financial and moral lives of lower-middle- and working-class people, through unemployment, underemployment, family breakdown, and similar ills. It may have been unintended, collateral damage, but it was nonetheless damage, and the worst thin Read more
The Young and Restless
Senators in a hurry
Feb 15, 2016
A good-looking young senator, short on experience, is seeking the White House, after what critics say are too few years served in the job he is holding, too few accomplishments in it, and altogether too little of the experience, tempering, grooming, and seasoning they think that a president needs. He is in his early-to-mid-forties, about 10 years less than the age at which most men seek that office, and creates resentment and anger in the generation he is trying to shoulder aside. On the plus si Read more
Family Business
The difficulty with dynasties
Aug 17, 2015
The dynasty project is not faring well. Two relatives of three of our most recent presidents have faced early woes in their succession plans, despite layers of aides, networks of backers going back generations, and extravagant levels of cash. On June 11, a front-page story in the Washington Post described the first six months of Jeb Bush’s campaign as a “political operation going off-course, disjointed in message and approach, torn between factions and more haphazard than it appeared on the su Read more
Are We Better Off Now?
Looking back at the Iraq war
Jul 06, 2015
Is the world better off than it was eight years ago? Is the Middle East? Is Iraq? These questions, echoing the one asked by Ronald Reagan in his debate with Jimmy Carter just before the 1980 election, should be posed by all Republicans until the polls close in November 2016. Added to these are a few other things . . . Is Ukraine better off? Do we have more allies? Are we more trusted by them? Of course some countries are better off now than they were before Barack Obama unleashed his tr Read more
Bobby Jindal, Indian Giver?
2:36 PM, Jun 24, 2015
“There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal,” goes the story in the Washington Post , casting the worst of all possible lights on the steps that the two-term governor of Louisiana and current candidate for president has taken away from his immigrant past. For a conservative not born a white male in this country, this is pretty much par for the course. There wasn’t much black in Clarence Thomas, not much woman in Kay Bailey Hutchinson (according to proto-girl Gloria Steinem), and there wo Read more
Alexander Hamilton, Poor Bastard
3:03 PM, Jun 19, 2015
Alexander Hamilton can’t get no respect. First, he gets born with at least four strikes against him---in the British West Indies, not exactly the hub of the universe; poor, illegitimate, dead-beat dad, and mother dead when he was eleven; then he blunders into the first great sex scandal of the nascent Republic; then he gets murdered at age 49, shot in a duel by the sitting vice-president, a sociopath who was running a side-line in plotting secession, creating a new state in which he’d be King. N Read more
House of the Stacked Deck of Cards
The privilege of being Hillary Clinton
May 25, 2015
"The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” Hillary Clinton has warned us, and she ought to know. Having been “at the top,” or close enough to it, since 1976, when her husband was elected attorney general of Arkansas at age 30—not the biggest job ever, but one with a whole lot of power to play with—she has leveraged every ounce that it held to bring to them ever and ever more money and power, until at this moment, 14 years after leaving the White House, she and Bill sit on a mile-h Read more
Woman’s Day
The Democratic matriarchy
Mar 23, 2015
"A matriarchy is a social organizational form in which the mother or oldest female heads the family. . . . It is also government or rule by a woman or women,” runs the entry in Wikipedia, adding helpfully that it can be a description for a society in which “the culture centers around values and life events described as ‘feminine,’ ’’ or in which “women’s power is equal or superior to men’s.” If this reminds you of the modern-day Democrats you are not mistaken, as over the course of the last fe Read more
Hartache
Democratic hero worship then and now
Nov 24, 2014
One month short of his 78th birthday, and 27 years after his self-immolation, Gary Hart has been given a present of sorts by writer Matt Bai, who in All the Truth Is Out recasts the past as Hart wants to see it, a great man brought low by a change (for the worse) in the national zeitgeist that deprived the United States of a truly great leader, and a great mind of its mission in life. This isn’t the first time that this take has been ventured—the late Richard Ben Cramer made Hart the hero Read more
Nobody’s Fault
Liberals make excuses for Obama
Sep 01, 2014
All of a sudden, people have noticed that we are in trouble, and many are saying it isn’t the president’s fault. All the bad news, from Iraq to Ukraine, from Libya and Syria to the Mexican border, just seems to have happened: Obama was standing there, golfing or shaking hands with donors, and, like a burst of bad weather, the winds blew, the skies opened, and things went to hell. Mysterious forces conspired against him, terrible setbacks occurred for no reason, and we were left with effects with Read more
Entitled to What?
Hillary Clinton’s long march through the institutions
Aug 04, 2014
Contrary no doubt to what she expected, Hillary Clinton has hit some serious snags in the rollout of her unannounced campaign for president. She has made Romneyesque comments about the size of her fortune, such as that she was “dead broke” when she bought her two mansions. When queried about events on her watch as secretary of state that proved embarrassing, she took responsibility without being accountable, projecting the impression that anyone who pressed further was crude. Most damning of all Read more
Hangover Blues
10:01 AM, Jun 17, 2014
The Big Hangover is a flopped ’50s film that is better forgotten, but it is the permanent state of Barack Obama, still in his bathrobe and feeling quite queasy, due to a headache called Bush. “Six years in, Barack Obama is still battling a Bush hangover,” says Politico . “The hangover was much, much worse than I think any president’s been left with,” said Howard Dean. “Barack Obama has had to clean up the mess that was left him,” said Barbara Boxer. “The rising chaos in Iraq—and the blame gam Read more
Jillary’s Wars
Identity politics devours its children
Jun 09, 2014
Call them Jillary: as in Jill Abramson plus Hillary Clinton, two women of an age, of a kind, and of a political genre, the reigning queens of modern identity politics, each rising high and becoming a model for generations of feminists who admired their guts and brashness and gall. And call him Pinch: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the Prince Charles of the house of New York Times , heir to the throne of one of the few modern-day institutions that still runs on the monarchical principle in which th Read more
They Had a Dream
Rule by experts comes a cropper
Jun 02, 2014
They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth. Their keen intellects would cut through the clutter as mere mortals’ couldn’t. They would lift up the wretched, oppressed by cruel forces. Above all, they would counter the greed of the merchants, the limited views of the Read more
A Slight Case of Bastardy
The curious and irregular conception of Obamacare
Mar 03, 2014
A number of apologists for the Obama administration declare themselves vexed at the ongoing hostility to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which isn’t affordable, and from which many people are seeking protection), regarding resistance to its charms as a perverse and irrational gesture, uncalled for, eccentric, and strange. It’s the law of the land, they tell us, passed fair and square by both houses of Congress, crowned as constitutional by the highest court of the country, an Read more
The Crisis Arrives
Obama’s dubious legacy.
Nov 18, 2013
In March 2010, Barack Obama placed a giant bet on the docility and stupidity of the American people, when he decided in the face of three huge electoral warnings to force his health plan down the unwilling throats of the American people. And by November 2013, it was clear he had lost. It was not going to work. It would never be popular. And it was falling apart on its own. The HealthCare.gov website unveiled on October 1 had immediate problems, which were quickly revealed as the tip of the icebe Read more
The Scandal Society
From Nixon and Clinton to Obama
Aug 26, 2013
Remember Black Jesus? The Lightworker? The One? The next Lincoln, the Democrats’ Reagan, the neo-FDR? He is now standing next to Tricky Dick and Slick Willie, caught in a quartet of burgeoning scandals, charged with rewriting the facts when they became inconvenient, harassing the press, and using the Internal Revenue Service to get at his enemies, subverting their rights of assembly, and speech. “Richard Milhous Obama,” writes Carl M. Cannon, and there are also Clintonian levels of cover-ups, li Read more