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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”
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Revisiting the 1994/2010 comparison
Josh Marshall argues that the GOP landslide in 1994 was driven by the changing political landscape of the South — a point I’ve made before — and that 2010 is likely to be different: The main cause of the Dems 1994 rout was structural. And most of the other causes, tended to play off or
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The Senate without the filibuster
I’m sympathetic to the case that Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias (among others) have been making against the institutionalization of the filibuster in the Senate, but the debate has often felt highly abstract. Other than a brief spate of posts on whether the filibuster helped block President Bush’s Social Security legislation in 2005, advocates of
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You Are What You Choose
My friends and former Duke mentors Scott de Marchi and Jay Hamilton have just written You Are What You Choose, a book about the factors that predict individual choices in political and economic life. The authors argue convincingly that a battery of personality characteristics they call TRAITS (Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness) are
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Twitter roundup
Apologies for the blog hiatus — Thanksgiving and a series of project deadlines intervened. To get things rolling again, here are some quick hits adapted from my Twitter feed, which I’ve been using to post original content more than I expected (follow me!): –Via Seth Masket, the Denver school board hired a therapist to help
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False hopes on Obama approval
A New York Times story on President Obama’s approval rating yesterday included this unpersuasive claim: If Congress passes Mr. Obama’s health care bill, the White House — and many independent analysts — believe that the accomplishment of a signature campaign promise is likely to push the president’s approval ratings back up. I can see why
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Palin smears Obama on troops
Via Ben Smith, an utterly baseless claim by Sarah Palin that Obama does not “acknowledge the sacrifices” of US military: “There’s been a lack of acknowledgment by our president in understanding what it is that the American military provides in terms of, obviously, the safety, the security of our country,” Palin said during an interview