"Because liberalism typically doesn't sell in American presidential politics, liberal candidates tend to run as culturally conservative centrists." -- Rich Lowry
Richard A. Lowry (born 22 August 1968) is the editor of National Review, a conservative American news magazine, and a syndicated columnist.
"Al Gore adopted three utterly different personas in three national presidential debates.""Al Gore's performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes.""Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting.""Bill Clinton was a liberal who could appeal to conservative-leaning Bubba voters.""Bush's faith in the rightness of his strategy in the broader war is deep-seated. It is a product of faith.""Calculation has its advantages, but no one likes naked calculation.""Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.""Comedians still make fun of Bill's out-of-control appetites, but with Hillary, the mockery is about how she lets nothing be out of control.""If Bill was all id, Hillary is all superego.""In person, George W. Bush is extremely forceful. He has a restless energy when he sits in a chair, and nearly leaps out of it when making certain points.""It is Hillary's lot in life not to be able to fake it well.""John Kerry couldn't even order a Philly cheesesteak properly.""Message to Obama: Fighting the Clinton machine won't be as easy as picking up favorable press clips.""The debate about the war seems pretty robust and free. Many publications, from the New Yorker to the Nation, feel perfectly comfortable printing anti-American articles and that's fine. That's what the First Amendment is all about.""The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.""There's no wobble in Bush. If anything, the opposite. Right after hello, the next words out of his mouth are: I've never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.""You have to check out 'March of the Penguins'. Penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy."
Lowry was born in Arlington, Virginia and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1990 and won second place in National Review's Young Writer's Contest which was announced months after the submission deadline. Competition was intense and over half received at least Honorable Mention.. He joined William F. Buckley's National Review in 1992 and has been the magazine's editor since 1997. He regularly appears on the Fox News Channel. He has guest-hosted on Hannity and Colmes and Fox & Friends, and is a guest panelist on PBS's The McLaughlin Group, Fox News Watch, and NBC's Meet the Press.
Lowry refused to fight Al Franken when challenged in 2000 .
In 2002, Muslim organisations called for Lowry to apologise, after he posted a message on National Review Online's blog, "The Corner", discussing the "nuking" of Mecca, as retaliation for a terrorist attack .
His book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years is a polemic about President Bill Clinton, whom he deprecates as "Navel-Gazer-in-Chief." He also has a syndicated column with King Features. He once served as a guest on The Colbert Report.
Most recently, Lowry and Keith Korman wrote Banquo's Ghosts, a fiction novel published by Vanguard Press in 2009. The political thriller's plot revolves around a nuclear-armed Iran and an inebriated leftist journalist.
Lowry has held that in extreme circumstances the practice of waterboarding "belongs in a murky space short of unambiguous torture."
Following the 2008 Vice Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, Lowry gained some publicity and was selected as liberal commentator Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World for writing: "A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It's one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O'Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, 'Hey, I think she just winked at me.' And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.".
