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Mark Schmitt

Mark Schmitt is a former executive editor of The American Prospect. Previously he was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, director of the Governance and Public Policy program at the Open Society Institute, and policy director to Senator Bill Bradley.

Recent Articles

What Will a Republican Majority Do Next?

We know Speaker Boehner's opening moves. But what will the GOP do after those fail?

Mark SchmittJul 26, 2010
Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) (Flickr/republicanconference)

If, as predicted, the Republicans take control of the House, or both houses of Congress, this November, will they: 1) shut down the government? 2) propose massive budget cuts? 3) begin proceedings leading toward impeachment of President Barack Obama? 4) repeal the health-reform bill?

Some leading political-scientist bloggers (notably John Sides at The Monkey Cage and Jonathan Bernstein at A Plain Blog About Politics), along with Matthew Yglesias, have been discussing this question for several weeks, and the scholarly consensus seems to be "all of the above."

The Senate That Byrd Made.

Mark SchmittJun 28, 2010

There’s much to be said about the life and career of Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who represented all the possibilities for change that American life promises and delivers too rarely: Lifted from abject poverty to success and power through hard work; self-taught, to the point of erudition; an unhesitant racist who by the 1970s shed every hint of that heritage; the classic congressional inside operator who in the Bush years took up the voice of an outsider to describe abuses of power with a moral clarity that others weren’t capable of.

Failed States

From Bear Sterns to BP -- there is a reason "bailout" has become the defining word of the era.

Mark SchmittJun 21, 2010
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island. (Flickr/Center for American Progress)

The Gulf oil spill, we now understand, is not a natural disaster but a result of the interaction of two completely failed organizations: the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service and the oil company that now calls itself BP (nee British Petroleum). The sight of BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward at a yacht race on the Isle of Wight, days after indifferently telling Congress that he had barely known of the existence of the "nightmare well" known as Deepwater Horizon, is a lasting image.  As Joseph Nocera established in detail in The New York Times on Saturday, even now, there's something deeply sick about the culture of that company.

Boring Politics, Please

The American political system wasn't built to handle showdowns, culture wars, crises of legitimacy, or bids for total power.

Mark SchmittJun 13, 2010
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag look at President Barack Obama, March 24, 2009. (White House/Pete Souza)

In a column last April that had a subtle but profound influence on the financial-regulation debate, Paul Krugman recalled that when he was in graduate school in the 1970s, "everyone knew that banking was, well, boring." Make it boring again, Krugman proposed, by eliminating the crazy risks, huge bonuses, and near meltdowns that have characterized Wall Street since the late 1980s.

I don't remember when banking was boring (mine was the generation of the original "greed is good" Wall Street, not the forthcoming sequel), but I do remember times when Washington was a lot more boring. And while politics should never be as boring as banking, it would be a good idea for politics, too, to dull things down a bit.

Learning About the Left From Glenn Beck

The figures on his blackboard aren't the "wizards" or "masterminds" of current politics. But they are real figures in the history of liberalism.

Mark SchmittJun 07, 2010
(Glenn Beck)

Glenn Beck, the self-pitying shock-jock of Fox News, has over the past year and a half become the master of a very old medium: the blackboard. Sometimes it's a whiteboard, sometimes a set of PowerPoint slides, but most often it's the classic school blackboard with chalk dust and erasers on which, with swirling and intersecting lines, photos and logos, he diagrams the great socialist conspiracy to take over the country. Various figures, often unknown to viewers, are revealed to be "the wizard" or "the mastermind" behind all or part of the little-understood socialist plan to take over America, a complex he now refers to as "Crime, Inc."

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