On the topic of his party’s chances in next year’s elections, Robert Menendez is a study in resolute optimism.
Not that he has much choice. Mr. Menendez, New Jersey’s junior senator, chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which recruits and provides financial and political support for the party’s U.S. Senate candidates. Optimism is part of Read More
At Barack Obama’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Tuesday, an older man who identified himself as a Republican calmly expressed to the president his concern that a government-run “public option” might undermine private health insurers because, “Who can compete with the government?”
Obama acknowledged the validity of this concern and then Read More
On August 6th, ten Midwestern Democratic Senators sent a letter to President Obama that began the hardball phase of creating climate policy as it moves from the House’s Waxman-Markey bill to Senate deliberations in the fall. In this letter, the Senators insist that climate change legislation must protect U.S. manufacturers from unfair foreign competition. They Read More
How many candidates for Congress—Democratic and Republican—have you heard loudly insist that they don’t believe in party labels, just in doing the right thing? And how many of them, once elected, end up voting with their party pretty much all the time?
It’s an absurd dance. Voters like hearing about “independence” and Read More
How many candidates for Congress—Democratic and Republican—have you heard loudly insist that they don’t believe in party labels, just in doing the right thing? And how many of them, once elected, end up voting with their party pretty much all the time? It’s an absurd dance. Voters like hearing about “independence” and “bipartisanship,” so candidates Read More
In the fall of 1991, the political right was gunning for Arlen Specter. Four years earlier, he’d infuriated them by lending a critical assist to the successful campaign to kill Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination and he’d done little in the intervening time to make peace with them. Now, with Specter facing reelection Read More
In the fall of 1991, the political right was gunning for Arlen Specter. Four years earlier, he’d infuriated them by lending a critical assist to the successful campaign to kill Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination and he’d done little in the intervening time to make peace with them. Now, with Specter facing re-election in 1992, Read More
It's easy to brand Arlen Specter's decision to leave the Republican Party—a move directly precipitated by his realization that his career would end with next year's Pennsylvania Senate primary unless he left the G.O.P.—a nakedly unprincipled act of political survival.
And that's just what Specter's critics, on the right, on the left, and in the Read More
It’s easy to brand Arlen Specter’s decision to leave the Republican Party-a move directly precipitated by his realization that his career would end with next year’s Pennsylvania Senate primary unless he left the G.O.P.-a nakedly unprincipled act of political survival.
And that’s just what Specter’s critics, on the right, on the left, and in Read More
