Democratic Party
Stuff White People Like
Frustrated conservatives have a theory for why their ideas didn’t win more support on Election Day: They can’t compete with the offer of “free stuff.” As this argument goes, President Obama and the Democrats won by promising their constituencies government goodies, but without asking those constituencies to pay for them. Women got free birth control. Latinos got more open immigration policy. The poor got food stamps. Tons of people got subsidized health insurance. And so on. READ MORE >>
Wall Street Is Probably Preparing to Crawl Back to Democrats
Once a reliable cash source for the president, Wall Street has all but abandoned Obama in his reelection campaign. And he isn’t the only Democrat to lose their goodwill. READ MORE >>
How the GOP Destroyed its Moderates
Mitt Romney has been running for president as the Republican nominee, de facto or de jure, for eight months now, and the grand historical joke of it has not yet worn off. A party that has set itself to frantically, fanatically expunge its moderates, quasi-moderates, suspected moderates, and fellow travelers of moderates chose as its standard bearer the lineal heir, biographically and genealogically, to its moderate tradition. It entrusted its holy crusade to repeal Barack Obama’s hated health-care law to the man who had inspired it and run, four years before, promising to do the same for the rest of America. The man and his historical moment could not be more incongruous. It was as if the Mongol tribes of the thirteenth century, setting out to pillage their way across the Asian steppe, had somehow chosen Mahatma Gandhi as their supreme khan.Romney’s capture of the nomination required an incredible confluence of good fortune. Any one of several Republicans—Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—could have outflanked Romney in both grassroots enthusiasm and establishment support but chose not to run. The one candidate with the standing and financial reach to challenge him who did grasp for the prize, Rick Perry, performed his duties with such comic, stammering ineptitude that his final oops-de-grace by that point was not even startling. What remained to challenge Romney was a gaggle of third-raters lacking the money or the rudimentary organization even to get their name on the ballot everywhere. Still, running even against the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum (which is to say, running essentially unopposed), Romney still trudged laboriously to victory after endless weeks.But there is another way to make at least some sense of the Romney nomination. READ MORE >>
Why Democrats Need a Woman on the National Ticket
Mitt Romney’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Campaign
During the past two weeks, the dynamic of the 2012 presidential election has shifted, and President Obama has moved out to a modest but significant lead against Mitt Romney. No developments in the economy or the world can explain this shift. That leaves the campaigns themselves. And during the past two weeks, Romney’s campaign has revealed itself to be stunningly incompetent. READ MORE >>
The 2012 Long Game for the U.S. Economy is Competitiveness
Tonight, President Obama will accept the Democratic Party nomination with a speech in which he will lay out the case for a second term. The context, of course, is the volatility of the past four years in the U.S. economy and the entire global economy, marked by deep recession and weak recoveries in the developed economies and cooling growth in emerging markets. READ MORE >>
