Who is william kristol

Kristol has been an important figure in the Republican Party for decades. He served in the Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush administrations, founded the now-defunct conservative Weekly Standard, was a fierce supporter of the Iraq War, and became an influential opponent of former President Bill Clinton's health care reform. What about the Republican Party he so fondly engaged with in years past? He says right now, the GOP needs to focus on whether the party can be saved after the Trump administration.

On what he meant by his tweet on becoming a Democrat. So if you want to replace Trump as president, it's going to be by a Democrat. I mean, Trump turned out to have such a stranglehold on the party. On criticism that Kristol bears responsibility for Washington partisanship after he wrote influential memos telling Republicans not to work with Democrats on health care during the Clinton administration. And maybe in some of those times I was wrong, but I think I have a pretty good record on foreign policy especially, including under President Obama, of trying to find times to support Democratic presidents when they did the right thing.

We supported Bill Clinton in Bosnia, we supported the surge in Afghanistan. But no, the conservative counter establishment was mostly a healthy counter establishment, unless the left's view was that there should be no one on the other side.

You want a conservative counter establishment. You don't want a bigoted, xenophobic conservatism. Maybe we haven't done as good a job as we might have in fighting that at every stage. But we certainly try to.

I said I would not support Ron Paul in or if he won the Republican nomination. On whether the Republican Party can be reconstructed without rethinking some larger infrastructure and media outlets.

From to , Kristol worked as a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In , Kristol became the chief of staff for William Bennett, U.

Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration. From the mids until the Presidential election, Kristol was a leading conservative intellectual. The organization rallied Republicans in the Democrat-controlled Congress to oppose legislation supported by President Clinton. In particular, Kristol starkly opposed any Democratic health care reforms, and he urged Republican U.

Kristol successfully convinced Congressional Republicans to stop all Democratic health care legislation. This failure by Clinton was considered a major cause of the Republican resurgence in the mid-term elections that gave Republicans control of Congress.

The organization was focused on foreign policy, with Kristol advocating for an aggressive strength projection strategy that became closely associated with contemporary neoconservatism.

PNAC endorsed U. Bush to intervene. In , PNAC shut down. The book argued for American intervention into Iraq and laid down much of the strategic and ideological groundwork the George W.

Bush administration would use to justify the Iraq War. In the mids, Kristol was an early proponent of deploying more soldiers to Iraq to combat the rising insurgency. With retired U. In , Kristol became a regular contributor to the New York Times , despite writing in that the paper should be investigated and potentially prosecuted for leaking confidential information on the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.

Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the New York Times , later wrote an op-ed expressing regret for having hired Kristol. In , Kristol served as a foreign policy advisor in the Republican presidential campaign of John McCain.

Senator in In , in response to the election of President Barack Obama , Kristol founded a think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative , with seed funding from Republican hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer.

Kristol urged all Congressional Republicans to reject the bill on the grounds that its border enforcement was lacking and the bill would further liberalize immigration. The bill was rejected, with Kristol and Lowry receiving much credit for rallying Republican opposition. In , the Foreign Policy Institute closed because its main policy goals were no longer relevant.

In , Kristol co-founded the Weekly Standard with funding from billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The political magazine featured punditry on current events and especially foreign policy from an interventionist-contemporary neoconservative perspective.

Kristol also served as co-editor with co-founder Fred Barnes, a long-time conservative pundit, until The publication reached the height of its popularity during the Bush administration when its viewpoints were seen as the ideological exemplification of the Republican leadership. Though the Weekly Standard had a circulation of only 55, for its 48 annual issues, it was considered one of the most influential publications in America during the George W.

Bush administration. The Weekly Standard was outspokenly interventionist on foreign policy: Most writers supported an aggressive foreign policy with increased military spending, more pressure on allies, and extensive military interventions abroad, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. The magazine also published articles from well-known right-of-center think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Hudson Institute.

The Weekly Standard closed in