Archive for October, 2011

Drew Westen’s piece in the New York Times this weekend might have achieved anti-perfection. John Sides already dismantled it yesterday. And Jon Bernstein piled on this morning. Seth Masket added some more this afternoon.  I was going to write a longer post, but the targets are quickly evaporating, so I’ll just address one so-far-unaddressed...
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Herman Cain is under fire for alleged sexual harassment, which his campaign is now flatly denying. What can we say about all of this? Two quick points: 1. Amateur presidential candidates are more likely than career politicians to be tripped up by past indiscretions. This is because they’ve never been vetted politically before. For...
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Drew Westen’s piece in the New York Times this weekend might have achieved anti-perfection. John Sides has already dismantled it as a factual matter. Tomorrow I’ll have some thoughts of my own on Westen’s understanding of politics. Update: The post is up, although now that Jon Bernstein and Seth Masket have piled on, I...
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The floor of the House chamber plays a central role in the practice of congressional politics in Washington. In one sense, this centrality is obvious: the floor serves as the physical location of official decision-making and debate. But the importance of the floor to the structure of congressional politics is much wider than this,...
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Oh, Nelly. First off, the win-probability fangraph from last night is just ridiculous. Anyway, less than five minutes after the game ended, a friend of mine texted me the following: amazing. too bad game 7 will probably be a huge letdown. In one sense, that’s almost certainly true. It’s hard to imagine tonight’s game...
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Following a Twitter challenge yesterday, Nate Silver  — whose work I generally very much admire — posted an article in the Times today that strikes me as unusually pedantic: But I do know what an analyst should not do: he should not use terms like “never” and “no chance” when applied to Mr. Cain’s...
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Today, October 26th, is the 10th anniversary of the Patriot Act. I’m pretty surprised that no one seems to care. Whatever you think of the merits of the law (P.L. 107-56; reauthorizations in P.L. 109-177,  P.L. 109-178, P.L. 111-142, P.L. 112-14), I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s the symbol of America’s public...
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Back when I was a lowly intern on the Hill in the 90′s and flat tax proposals were enjoying their second(?) renaissance, I got talking about them to my boss (a conservative Democrat) on a car ride and he said something that always stuck with me. I don’t think it gets more succinctly correct...
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It appears that President Obama is about to unveil some new initiatives regarding housing and student loans. These may or may not be good policies — I honestly have no idea. But the idea that the president is somehow “sidestepping” Congress in doing this strikes me as just wrong. And yet that’s exactly how...
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1. The Iraq war is about to end, at least for U.S. armed forces. I don’t care what your partisan alignment is, this is a great thing. Period. I only hope that it will begin a more general policy of reversing the trend of American military presence abroad. And I don’t mean the post-9/11...
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Some random theorizing I was doing today in the wake of some political discussions. Two statements that I think are indisputably true: (1) In any democracy, some small subset of the citizenry will be better informed about politics than the rest of the population. Following Popkin, we could call them high-information and low-information voters....
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There are a lot of things in politics that just don’t matter much. That is, they don’t have any independent effect on the political outcome — which candidate wins, what policy passes, etc. This is often true even about things that seem like they should matter a lot, especially in the world of campaigns...
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People keep pointing me toward  E.J. Dionne’s op-ed in today’s Post. I’m not all that enthused about it, in part because the analogy is absurdly tortured and the  history is a bit stylized, but mostly because I don’t see how the lesson of Lincoln can be applied here. Let me explain. Dionne’s pitch is...
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I always cringe when candidates start to riff on U.S. history in debates, but last night, thankfully, wasn’t too bad. Gingrich, not surprisingly, threw out a couple of historical items that I thought were noteworthy. First, the question was raised by the moderator regarding the relevance of Romney’s Mormon faith and all that jazz. ...
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There’s a tendency in popular political culture to assign the Framers a laughably extreme degree of reverence, one way or another. In one popular view, they’re treated as god-like figures who could do no wrong and wrote an infallible Constitution, with neither the men nor the Constitution worthy of anything but complete adulation. In...
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Jonathan Bernstein has a post today that I highly recommend, about the problem with the political term ‘establishment:’ Which is why I try to avoid the term “establishment.” It conjures up, to me at least, a monolithic group of insiders who either control or fail to control everyone else. But that’s just not the case...
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I’m in northern New York right now, back to my hometown for the weekend for my nephew’s 1st birthday party. Always a good place to talk politics, and some pretty memorable conversations with the family: Friday morning, on the plane Me : Anna [my 3-year old...
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Forty-six years ago today — October 15, 1965 — David J. Miller, a 24-year old Christian pacifist of the Catholic Worker Movement, burned his draft card in Manhattan, and became the first person arrested and convicted under P.L. 89-152 (79 Stat. 586; August 31, 1965), which had altered the Selective Service statute by four...
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I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the 25th amendment, which did three things: formally specified that if the President leaves office prior to his term ending, the Vice President becomes President (as opposed to “acting President” or “having the powers of the Presidency devlove to them,” which was ambigous in the original Constitution); put in...
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As we continue to adjust the trims on our Who Will Be the Nominee© model, let’s assess Rick Perry’s chances of the GOP nomination, given his track record in the first four debates. If we go with the traditional political science wisdom that campaigns don’t matter that much (good review of topic here), then ...
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