Month: January 2010
-
Latest attacks on patriotism and dissent
Former Senator Fred Thompson and the New York Post are the latest conservatives to suggest that President Obama or his administration are sympathetic to terrorists. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Frank Rich joined the emerging anti-dissent caucus on the left in his column today, which smears John McCain as “unpatriotic.” As Media Matters documented, Thompson
-
New design
A friend’s suggestion spurred me to dump all the junky banner ads (which pay very little anyway) and move to a cleaner and simpler design. Hope it’s an improvement — let me know what you think…
-
Twitter roundup
Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!): -Gallup reminds us that “President’s Support Usually Unaffected by State of Union” -People whose job it is to write about politics know nothing about politics -New York Times takes the lead in the “most insipid Haiti article to date” race –Moving tributes
-
Jennifer Steinhauer: The proto-Dowd?
As I noted a few years ago, New York Times Los Angeles bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer has a penchant for lacing her stories with cutting rhetoric about liberals. It’s all too reminiscent of Maureen Dowd, whose derisive coverage of Bill Clinton and other Democrats helped vault her to the paper’s op-ed page. The latest example
-
Obama on approval-driven media narratives
On Friday, I argued that the narrative of President Obama not “connecting” with the American public is a symptom of his declining approval ratings, not the cause. In a new interview with Diane Sawyer, Obama made a similar point about how perceptions of his personality tend to vary with his popularity: When your poll numbers
-
Presidents “connect” when they’re popular
Last Monday, I predicted that the combination of an unfavorable political environment for Democrats and the downward trend in President Obama’s approval ratings will spur the media to create elaborate narratives about how Obama is not “connecting” with the American people. Thanks to the special election in Massachusetts, those narratives have already arrived, and they’re
-
How much is health care hurting Dems?
Via John Sides, David W. Brady, Daniel P. Kessler, and Douglas Rivers have published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that is likely to fuel Democratic panic in Washington over health care: The majority party normally loses seats in midterm elections, but the Republican resurgence of recent months is more than a conventional midterm
-
The mythical health care compromise
What is going on in Washington? The panic-induced response to Scott Brown’s special election victory has pushed President Obama and Congressional Democrats into an obviously incoherent health care strategy: President Obama signaled on Wednesday that he might be willing to scale back his proposed health care overhaul to a version that could attract bipartisan support,
-
How will Democrats interpret Brown’s win?
The question of the moment is what effect Scott Brown’s victory will have on national politics. It’s important to note that his election to the Senate does relatively little to change the overall balance of power in the country. See, for instance, Joshua Tucker’s helpful chart: The loss of Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority seems to eliminate
-
Predicting post-Election Day feelings
Given the final poll numbers, it seems likely that Massachusetts Democrats will wake up tomorrow wondering why they didn’t work harder on Martha Coakley’s behalf. It’s a fascinating psychological phenomenon that reverses the usual pattern. As Daniel Gilbert describes in Stumbling on Happiness, people tend to overestimate the extent to which positive or negative events