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
Few aspects of American politics are as ridiculous and dangerous as the right-wing urge to substitute macho posturing for foreign policy. That irrepressible habit surfaces constantly now that President Obama is in the Oval Office, most recently when he shook hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at the Summit of the Americas, a smiling moment Read More
It's easy enough to ridicule Wednesday's "tea party" protests as a top-down partisan propaganda effort unconvincingly dressed up as an organic grass-roots outpouring.
And it's just as easy to mock the Republican partisans who organized and hyped the protests for their irrational hypocrisy: These are the same folks who lionize Ronald Reagan (under Read More
As Barack Obama’s economic advisers confront choices that vary from bad to worse in their mission to revive the financial sector and the broader economy, it is worth remembering that those were choices inherited by the president, who is still new to his office. Listening to his critics, especially on the right, it would be Read More
Barack Obama will stand for re-election in 2012, while the 254 Democrats in the House of Representatives will next face the voters in 2010. There will be friction.
For House Democrats, whose ’10 campaigns will succeed or fail based on the public’s confidence in Obama, it’s essential that voters feel the economy is Read More
If a doctor can’t accurately diagnose what’s wrong with his patient, then the treatment he prescribes is doomed to fail. Republicans tempted to heed Rush Limbaugh’s advice on how to return to power ought to keep this in mind.
According to Limbaugh, who spent about an hour fulminating against assorted villains from Read More
Here’s a dirty secret about Ronald Reagan: he never would have been elected president if he hadn’t been running in 1980.
For their own good, Republicans, who have turned worship of the 40th president into their unofficial religion (my favorite moment of last summer’s G.O.P. convention was when a video tribute to Read More
Here’s a dirty secret about Ronald Reagan: He never would have been elected president if he hadn’t been running in 1980.
For their own good, Republicans, who have turned worship of the 40th president into their unofficial religion (my favorite moment of last summer’s G.O.P. convention was when a video tribute to Read More
On Sunday's "Meet the Press," David Gregory confronted David Axelrod, one of President Obama's chief advisers, with a respected economist's grim conclusion that the stimulus package Obama will sign on Tuesday simply isn't big enough and that the unemployment rate will hover around 10 percent at the end of 2010.
"You heard people saying it Read More
On Sunday’s Meet the Press, David Gregory confronted David Axelrod, one of President Obama’s chief advisers, with a respected economist’s grim conclusion that the stimulus package Obama will sign on Tuesday simply isn’t big enough and that the unemployment rate will hover around 10 percent at the end of 2010.
"You heard people saying it Read More
