The New Republic

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Gerald Seib pinpoints the cause of President Obama's summer polling collapse: To grasp the importance of the summer's debt negotiations—which produced a plan to cut the federal deficit by at least $2.1 trillion over the next decade just in time to avoid a default by the federal government—look at both how the deal affected Americans' confidence, and how it is judged by them in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. READ MORE >>

The post-mortems on the debt deal are showing the degree to which, as I've suspected, the Obama administration completely misunderstood the Republican Party. Laura Meckler and Gerald Seib's tick-tock is especially good. Here are the negotiations bumping up against the fundamental ideological divide in American politics: READ MORE >>

The main thrust of the post-election commentary is going to be that Democrats governed too far to the left and are paying a price. But there's going to be a subs-strand of mainstream commentary, represented here by Gerald Seib, warning Republicans not to be too partisan or they'll alienate: READ MORE >>

Gerald Seib has a classic of faux journalistic even-handedness today in his efforts to mete out equal, or at least equivalent-sounding, blame to both parties for the deficit: [B]oth parties could start by being honest about what they've done recently to make this problem worse. READ MORE >>

Imagine for a moment that it is late 2010, perhaps a few weeks after the midterm elections. Barack Obama has scheduled a surprise prime-time televised statement from the Oval Office. Looking grave, even shaken, behind the presidential desk, Obama fixes his gaze into the camera and speaks: READ MORE >>

As I've been saying, the procedural critique of the Senate that some of us have been making for years is starting, but only starting to make headway into the conventional wisdom. The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib (who writes a centrist column for the news section) concedes that the filibuster has risen to unprecedented levels, but still sees disappearing comity and centrism as the primary culprit of Senate dysfunction: READ MORE >>

Wasilla, Alaska, is currently the most famous small town in America, thanks to its former mayor Sarah Palin. A healthy part of her appeal is that she seems to embody small-town values, nurtured in Wasilla and America's other hamlets and burgs. As she said in her firecracker acceptance speech, small-town people live lives of "honesty, sincerity, and dignity" and "do some of the hardest work in America." READ MORE >>