Rinse, Wash, Repeat
They Ain’t With Main Street
Rinse, Wash, Repeat
I don’t think anyone would mistake me for a big fan of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main (as they put it) “pro-Israel” lobby in Washington. The only organization of that kind that I’ve ever given money to is Americans for Peace Now in Israel. And I have defended critics of AIPAC, including Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of The Israel Lobby, from charges of anti-Semitism. READ MORE >>
Response to Comrade Chait
Jon Chait reads far too much into my analysis of Obama’s weakness with white working class voters. He mistakes a special for a general theory of the Obama presidency. READ MORE >>
He’s a Yuppie
Here is a fact: Barack Obama has trouble generating enthusiasm among white working class voters. That’s not because they are white. He would have had trouble winning support among black working class voters if they had been unable to identify with him because he was black. He has trouble with working class voters because he appears to them as coming from a different world, a different realm of experience, a different class, if you like. And that’s because he does. READ MORE >>
The Quiet Revolution
These days, liberals don’t know whether to feel betrayed by or merely disappointed with Barack Obama. They have gone from decrying his willingness to remove the public option from his health care plan to worrying that, in the wake of Democrat Martha Coakley’s defeat in Massachusetts, he won’t get any plan through Congress. On other subjects, too, from Afghanistan to Wall Street, Obama has thoroughly let down his party’s left flank. READ MORE >>
The Salinger Generation
Does He Feel Your Pain?
Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While party loyalists might blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the president and his party. A less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but, if Obama’s program and presidency were more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won--and maybe by double digits. READ MORE >>
Obama's Learning Freeze
I defer to Noam on the administration’s motives for announcing this spending freeze and on the real impact of the freeze on spending. But I want to say two things about it. First, if it was done to appease bond traders (where have we have heard that before?), it is ridiculous. Interest rates aren’t exactly soaring these days. It is not 1993. READ MORE >>
