Politics
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Does the GOP Have a Future?
The country needs a serious right-of-center party – one that has real ideas, one that can engage in a serious debate with the Democrats, one that has a sense of a larger national purpose beyond winning the next election, and one that can actually attract more Americans to its banner because it has earned their
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Obama’s Healthcare Speech
Nice speech, although it should have been given months ago, but let's see how he follows up. I liked his tone of determination, let's see if he actually gets it done. It's clear he gets it, but he's said the right things before and backed away from them. He has developed a credibility problem for
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Presidential Insouciance
From the outset of the 2008 campaign, the rationale for his long-shot candidacy was that he stood firmly for a set of principles in policy and governance and against political business as usual, as well as a style of politics that emphasized citizen activism. He would drive the corporate lobbyists away from Capitol Hill, the
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Whither America?
It's always important for us to remember what the last eight years have again taught us, which is that America has a very strong civic fabric, one that can withstand, absorb and conquer all manner of ugly behavior. It can take in stride a lot of angry rhetoric, townhall fisticuffs and more. But as this
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Drum Optimistic about Meaningful Healthcare Reform
I'm not, but here's Drum's thinking: Republicans have been given every chance and have obviously decided to obstruct rather then work on a bipartisan compromise. So the Blue Dogs and centrist Dems feel like they're covered on that angle. What's more, the townhalls have shown them what they're up against: if they don't pass a
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Progressives: Forget about Movement Conservatives . . .
. . . and get your own house in order. The problem does not lie in that movement conservatives do what they do. We understand that. And yes, of course, it must be continually exposed and vigorously resisted. But the more fundamental problem lies in that, with some exceptions, progressives mostly complain about conservatives rather
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Democracy & the Information Problem
Julian Sanchez commenting at the Daily Dish on why most political reporting is about the horserace and not about the policies politicians support: . . . the ratio of horse-race to policy coverage may be a rough gauge of our cynicism about the political process. If you think of American democracy as a fundamentally deliberative
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Does Obama Have What It Takes?
There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political
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The Tortured Mind
Can we all agree that Cheney has zero credibility and that he should not be heard from again unless subpoenaed? Eric Holder, whether for him happily or unhappily, has got the ball rolling in his appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate torture. I think this move will develop a momentum that will shift us
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Is Government the Problem?
The myth has been getting a lot of play from conservatives in recent weeks as the debate over health care has heated up. The message, as always, is that government can't do anything right. Where the conservative mythologists show their hand is when they use their own monumental screw-ups, committed during conservatism's long years in