Month: November 2006
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Conservatism gone wrong: A WSJ fairy tale
As The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait explained back in June, the right has been constructing a narrative in which the failures of President Bush are attributed to a lack of adherence to “real” conservatism, which by definition can never fail politically or substantively. In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal tries the same approach
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Don’t overinterpret the election
I think Kevin Drum gets it right — despite the inevitable effort to spin some sort of “soccer mom”-type fable out of the election, it was an almost pure anti-GOP swing that cut across demographic lines: Here’s the baseline: the overall Democratic share of the congressional vote was about 5 percentage points higher than in
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Alcee Hastings issue won’t go away
Now that Nancy Pelosi is officially Speaker, she faces the tough choice of whom to appoint as Intelligence Committee chair, which the media is already starting to focus on: Many Democrats are closely watching the decision for signs of two things: how the speaker-in-waiting will chart her party’s course on national security issues and how
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Lincoln Chafee’s defeat
One of my mentors at Duke, David Rohde, made a great point in an interview (Real Video) about the election with the Duke communications staff: Certainly the most striking outcome last night was Rhode Island. The exit polls in Rhode Island showed that the approval rating of the Republican incumbent, Lincoln Chafee, was 62 percent.
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The social (de)construction of mandates
Check out this hilariously convoluted argument on Power Line for why the GOP had a mandate in 1994, but Democrats don’t now: There is another difference, though, between 1994 and 2006. In 1994, the Republicans ran on a platform, the Contract with America. Their victory therefore gave them a mandate, notwithstanding that many voters were
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2008: McCain and Clinton surge
The verdict of the political futures market on the 2008 presidential race is clear: Hillary Clinton and John McCain are heavy favorites. The futures contracts on Clinton and McCain winning their respective party’s nominations have trended upward over the past week to prices that reflect a 55% predicted probability of victory. McCain, in particular, surged
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The Wikipedia wars
How crazy are the Wikipedia wars? As soon as I heard Bush announce Robert Gates as his nominee for Secretary of Defense, I pulled up Gates’s entry on Wikipedia and — eerily — it already named him as Bush’s nominee. A minute later I tried to go back to the page and it had been
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Bob Gates’s history at CIA
Bush is nominating Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense. Given the administration’s history of postmodern intelligence analysis, this 1991 article on the debate over his performance at CIA is disconcerting: [T]he Gates period produced a rash of complaints that, on controversial issues like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Iran, the agency tailored its reports to fit
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A Northeastern realignment?
Hotline editor Chuck Todd is describing last night’s results as a realignment of the Northeast: A Category 5 political storm hit the shores of the Northeast on Tuesday, realigning the region from a moderately competitive terrain between the two parties to solidly Democrat. The Northeast for congressional Democrats is now the mirror image of the
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Was Dean’s strategy responsible?
The rush to credit Howard Dean’s “50-state strategy” for the Democratic wins is apparently on — here’s Adele Stan on Tapped: As much as I’ve seen Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, all over the airwaves in the last 24 hours, I’ve yet to hear him sing the praises of Democratic