Uncategorized
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Jon Chait on the GOP’s postelection spin
LA Times columnist Jon Chait (also of TNR) has written an amusing and insightful look at the wave of post-election spin from the right – not to be missed.
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Grover Norquist on Iraq: Then and now
Grover Norquist in the New York Times Week in Review on Sunday: “There were no conservative grass-roots group saying, ‘Invade Iraq,’” Mr. Norquist said. “If Bush changed the policy, you’d have four neocons whine and the rest of the movement would be fine.” Grover Norquist in the Washington Post, April 10, 2003: “‘The Democrats were
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New third-party hypesters: Hotsoup.com
Joe Lockhart and Mark McKinnon, two of the founders of the latest useless online political forum, Hotsoup.com, published a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed yesterday hyping the third party threat for 2008: An analysis of exit polls from the 2004 presidential election reveal that while the percentage of ticket-splitting voters has decreased every election since 1988,
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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