At The New Republic, John Judis today offers a lengthy “Response to My Critics” -- those of us who challenged his hyperbolic account of the president’s “Unnecessary Fall.” While I’m one of four critics he links to, Judis barely touches the points in my “Tale of Three Presidencies,” which mainly concerned his failed attempt to show that Obama’s pattern of sagging support looked more like Jimmy Carter’s fatal fall than like Ronald Reagan’s short-term drop during the severe recession of 1982.

For most of the 20-year history of The American Prospect, I have been not a writer but a reader of the magazine. When the first issue was published in 1990, I was probably exactly the sort of reader the founders had in mind. In fact, having just been hired as a speechwriter for an ambitious and wonky Democratic senator (Bill Bradley of New Jersey), I got a copy as soon as I could, figuring that immersing myself in the swirl of new ideas about policy and politics could be considered a legitimate part of my new job. If the goal of the early Prospect was to set an ambitious liberal agenda, I hoped to be a cog in the transmission belt between the magazine's ideas and actual policy.