Month: December 2009
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Obama as missionary-turned-cannibal
From the department of unusual metaphors: Ross Baker, an expert on the presidency and a professor at Rutgers University, said that Obama's “effort [to promote bipartisanship] was a sincere one.” “It's sort of like a missionary who goes to a primitive tribe and tries to convert them from cannibalism and ends up eating human beings,”
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Fred Barnes: Hack
Fred Barnes in a 2005 Wall Street Journal op-ed: Popularity Isn’t Everything By Fred Barnes …Bush’s popularity dropped in 2003 after the terrorist insurgency spread in Iraq. And except for a blip or two, it hasn’t risen significantly since… Instead, his job performance rating in the Gallup Poll has dipped further… [T]the president has taken
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Missing context on growth in polarization
Journalistic accounts of the rise of polarization like the one in Thursday’s New York Times almost always fail to provide two crucial pieces of context: 1. Partisan polarization has increased relative to the mid-20th century. But as I’ve pointed out many times, that period was a historic anomaly — polarization is actually returning to the
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Orrin Hatch: Badgered by “The Internet”
Orrin Hatch on why the Senate is so polarized — they’re under assault by a communications medium. Apparently, “The Internet is constantly badgering everybody”: “Both parties have become very polarized,” Mr. Hatch said. “A lot of that is because of the stupid ethics rules. We can’t get together at various events. A lot of people
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Twitter roundup
While I’m traveling for the holidays, here are some short items from my Twitter feed (which you should follow!): -TNR’s Jon Chait on the triumph that the health care bill represents. -It’s absurd for Karl Rove to mock Dem. hopes for a “40-year majority” after what he said back in 2000. -Matthew Yglesias notes questions
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Beck suggests Obama committed treason
On Tuesday, the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldbarb claimed that the Obama administration had threatened Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) with closing Offutt Air Force Base, home of the US Strategic Command, if Nelson didn’t support the health care reform bill in the Senate (Michelle Malkin made a similar claim). Even though this questionable report was based
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The game theory of Lieberman punishment
Democrats are upset at Joe Lieberman’s defection from the proposed health care reform compromise in the Senate, but don’t know what to do about it. Annoying Lieberman by denying him time to speak on the floor may make Al Franken feel better, but it also raises the odds of a damaging party switch. (Despite his
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The costs of Green Lantern-ism
Earlier this week, I mocked liberals who attribute the Obama administration’s domestic policy compromises/failures to a lack of presidential will. If only Obama had tried harder, they say, he could have passed the public option, expanded Medicare, etc. As I’ve argued, this claim, which I call the Green Lantern theory of the presidencyTM, fails as
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Klein smears Lieberman on health care
Yesterday Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein accused Joe Lieberman of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people” after the Connecticut senator scuttled a health care reform compromise (my emphasis): The Huffington Post and Roll Call are both reporting that Joe Lieberman notified Harry Reid that he will filibuster health-care reform
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The Green Lantern theory of the presidency
Matthew Yglesias pinpoints an important — and absurd — meme in which liberals blame Obama’s legislative compromises on a lack of will (see, for instance, Kos and Hamsher on health care reform): I sort of want to stop writing about Matt Taibbi, but his decision to respond to his critics with an article on “Obamania”