Month: June 2008
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Astrophysicists with polls running amok
Dear New York Times opinion editors, Please don’t publish op-eds from astrophysicists applying polling projection methods five months away from the general election: If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to
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Elisabeth Bumiller reads Bush’s mind
Via Spencer Ackerman and Matthew Yglesias, Russell Baker quotes this swami-like passage from Elisabeth Bumiller’s biography of George W. Bush in the New York Review of Books: [Bush] had never met anyone like Rice. She could talk baseball, football, and foreign policy all at the same time, but she did not sound like an intellectual
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The UC-Berkeley love for “protesting via tree”
I love this quote from a UC-Berkeley undergrad in The New Yorker: Personally I have never understood the idea of protesting via tree, but I know many of my classmates find it admirable. Somehow it seems to sum up the ethos of a place where tree-sitters and non-tree-sitters live in harmony.
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Featured on new RealClearPolitics blog
I’m happy to announce that I’m one of the featured bloggers at the new Cross Tabs blog at
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The remarkable rise of Barack Obama
Matthew Yglesias notes how improbable it was that Barack Obama would win the Democratic nomination: The fact that Obama’s had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5 has tended to obscure the fact that his primary victory has got to be the greatest upset in the history of American presidential politics. In retrospect, whatever
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More insinuations Obama is un-American
Chris Matthew continues his efforts to suggest that Barack Obama is different and not a “regular” American: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews criticized Sen. Barack Obama’s expression of patriotism, asserting that Obama “thank[s] America” because he “got certain things from it,” rather than, Matthews claimed, “express[ing]” “that gut sense of Americanism,” which, Matthews said, is “a hard
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David Brooks on Obama and salad bars
It’s easy to be a pop sociologist because you can just make things up: On MSNBC, David Brooks asserted that “less educated” and “downscale” people “look at [Sen. Barack] Obama, and they don’t see anything,” adding: “And so, Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee’s
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Hillary: For Hillary
Is Hillary Clinton trying to reinforce the stereotype that she is calculating and power-hungry? I’m not the only one who noticed that she doesn’t seem to be putting the party first. Two other points: (1) The idea that Obama must appease her and her supporters or they will not back his campaign is reminiscent of
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John McCain’s anti-partisan tics
As many observers of John McCain have noted, one of the reasons the press loves him so much is the way he signals his disdain for normal politics. Even when McCain delivers partisan attack lines, he winks and nods to reporters as if to say “I know this is silly.” The problem his speech last
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The tiresome Bush lies debate
On Monday night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart got bogged down in a semantic debate with Scott McClellan about whether the Bush administration “lied” and the extent to which its deceptions were willfull: But as we wrote in All the President’s Spin (which Stewart generously praised back in 2004), this debate is unproductive — Bush rarely