May 19, 2021
Perspective by Dan O’Donnell
Since he was first elected to Congress in 1997, Wisconsin Democrat Ron Kind hasn’t exactly been known as the hardest worker in Washington. So low a profile has he kept over the past 24 years that most Wisconsinites would be hard-pressed to name their longest-serving Congressman.
Over the past year, though, Kind has turned invisibility into an art form, as he has taken full advantage of the proxy vote system House Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic last May. Over the past 11 months, Kind has seemingly used the proxy vote to take 12 long weekends, a monthlong summer vacation late August, and a two-week break for Thanksgiving before apparently ending his year on December 7 and having a proxy vote for him until after the Christmas recess.
Who’s Transformative Now?
You remember Barack Obama. He was still more than a year away from becoming president when journalists began using the “T” word to describe his significance. The word is
transformational. It’s the media’s favorite adjective when referring to Democratic politicians. Obama’s candidacy, Andrew Sullivan wrote in the fall of 2007, “is a potentially transformational one” because, “unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America finally past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.” Obama himself said his presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” He spoke of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” David Brooks believed Obama’s “perfectly creased pant” revealed that the freshman senator from Illinois would become president and that “he’ll be a very good president.
With Israel’s operation Guardian of the Walls concluding its 10
th day, international pressure for a speedy end to the fighting intensified on Wednesday, as foreign governments urged Jerusalem to wrap up its airstrikes on Hamas.
US President Joe Biden, in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, “conveyed to [Netanyahu] that he expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a cease-fire,” a White House statement said Wednesday.
And in a joint statement released by the French, Egyptian and Jordanian governments, Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi along with King Abdullah called on Israel and Hamas to “immediately agree on a cease-fire” and resume negotiations to “achieve a just and lasting peace.”
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