The partisan spin cycle was in full-effect following this week‘s midterm elections. President Obama did his best to frame the Republican victories as an expression of economic discontent rather than an outright rebuke of his legislative agenda. Needless to say, the opposition party interpreted the results a little differently. Conservatives, ...
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This weekend’s Rally to Restore Sanity was in many ways a rally against the oftentimes alarmist and hyper-partisan rhetoric of MSNBC on the political left and the Fox News Channel on the political right. Or, as Jon Stewart put it on Saturday, “We work together to get things done every ...
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In his “Political Times” column last week in the New York Times, Matt Bai wrote that we are witnessing a sudden rise in political longing – nostalgia, it seems, is winning the 2010 election. In hard times, Mr. Bai argues, Americans long for the “good old days.” We want to ...
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Meg Whitman, California GOP gubernatorial candidate, admitted to hiring an undocumented worker as a housekeeper for nine years. This sort of thing seems to happen every so often. However, you have to wonder why anybody gets upset: by the estimate of most Americans it would be pretty difficult not to ...
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Early this month, Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) angered gay rights organizations when he said that openly gay people (along with sexually active unmarried women) shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom. This comment was originally reported in the Spartanberg Herald-Journal and subsequently covered by a variety of national media outlets ...
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With many issues, despite strong opinions, voters are short on the details. For example, in a recent posting, Larry Bartels related survey evidence showing that there is a wide gap in voter enthusiasm between voters that favor renewing the Bush Tax Cuts and those that favor letting the tax cuts ...
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The shine has come off Barack Obama. His approval ratings are falling, fewer people would vote for him today than voted for him in 2008, and pundits interpret all of this as a bad sign for Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections. But, the shine is coming off the Republicans, too ...
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It’s hard to watch cable news shows nowadays without running into a segment on the role of racial prejudice in opposition to Obama’s presidency. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are keenly sensitive to any remarks or actions that could be interpreted as race-baiting. The Fox News Channel, on ...
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During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama skillfully crafted a popular position on renewing the big Bush-era tax cuts. Obama pledged to keep the lower tax rates for families earning less than $250,000 per year—the vast majority of American taxpayers—while letting the top tax rate revert to its 2000 level.With the ...
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