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Worst post-election column ever
There’s been a lot of dumb post-election commentary, but it’s hard to believe that Patrick Goldstein attempted to determine the significance of Obama’s victory using the box office performance of “Soul Men”: ‘Soul Men’ delivers mixed verdict on Obama victory Over the past few days, everyone has been offering words of wisdom about what Barack
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Summers distortions circulating again
With former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers under consideration as a possible Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, various distortions of his controversial comments about gender are popping back up. For instance, John Heilemann wrote the following in New York Magazine: [National Organization for Women president Kim] Gandy told the Huffington Post
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Obama’s standing: High faves + ugly smears
I’ve been wondering whether John McCain poisoned the well for Barack Obama by inspiring the conservative base to loathe him with Clintonesque fervor. As I noted in my last post, Obama has historically high favorable ratings but also has approximately 25% of the country that is “afraid” as a result of his election and strongly
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Presidents don’t “rule,” they “govern”
Like this blogger at Newsbusters.org, I cringed when Obama transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett said on “Meet the Press” that Obama is “prepared to … begin to rule day one”: [G]iven, really, the daunting challenges that we face, it’s important that President-elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one. In
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Does Obama need a “mandate”?
I want to clarify my claim last night that Republicans in Congress will not dramatically shift their voting patterns in response to a perceived Obama mandate. A friend correctly pointed out to me by email that a mandate response isn’t necessary for Obama to change the legislative status quo. What mattters is the configuration of
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Election myths and the mandate debate
I’ve been too sick and busy with teaching and research to try to fact-check all the election interpretations out there, so let me recommend the excellent “Truths and Myths about the 2008 Election” series by John Sides of GW and The Monkey Cage, which distills the relevant political science for a general audience: 1. The
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WSJ’s geography lesson for conservatives
Things have deteriorated pretty far in America when the Wall Street Journal editorial page has to remind fellow conservatives that “New Jersey is part of America too”: Our advice would be that [Alaska govenror Sarah Palin] also broaden her appeal beyond the politics of cultural division. One unfortunate campaign decision was to turn Mrs. Palin’s
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Has McCain poisoned the well for Obama?
One of the most important questions confronting Barack Obama is how he will be treated by Republicans in Congress and the electorate after the afterglow of his victory fades. During the campaign, John McCain riled up the base to think that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer who “doesn’t put country first.” McCain tried to back
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Ramesh Ponnuru on McCain’s tax cut
In a New York Times op-ed today, Ramesh Ponnuru claims that “Mr. McCain’s plans would have cut taxes more than Mr. Obama’s for a lot of middle-class families, but Republicans rarely bothered to point that out.” However, the Tax Policy Center found that Obama would have cut taxes more than McCain for the second, third,
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Retrospective wisdom on the campaign
Time for another dispatch on the bizarre epistemology of campaign journalism. As I noted yesterday, the conventions of campaign journalism require journalists to obsess over the twists and turns of the presidential horse race and to ignore the fact that its outcome is highly predictable. But everything changes after Election Day. For instance, CNN.com’s retrospective