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- Ah, the zombie genre of "analyzing" politics through sheer presidential will. Brendan Nyhan says it best: "If/when the economy picks up, Obama's speeches will start 'connecting' and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become." Ironically, the advice to "give better speeches" applies better to the other prolific zombie genre, "the electorate is rejecting liberal ideology." When 44 percent of Democratic voters are not enthusiastic about voting in the midterm elections and Obama's approval rating sinks as core Democratic constituencies become disillusioned with him, clearly he needs to rally the Democratic base, not the country at large.
- Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have written a response to the many critiques (mine here) of their unpersuasive celebration of American exceptionalism, opening with the rejoinder, "But while our essay on American exceptionalism has been attacked quite severely, the attacks are too weak to constitute a serious provocation, and thus no heavy artillery need be deployed." They could have stopped there, for I am convinced enough. But the best line, by far, is when they observe that "sadly, a worse institution [slavery] took root here, but never became part of the national psyche." Being a connoisseur of conservative thought, I immediately recalled a throwaway line from Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind in the chapter on John C. Calhoun: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon; yet it needs to be remembered that the wild demands and expectations of the abolitionists were quite as slippery a foundation for political decency."
- I understand the concern for privacy that underlies this sentiment, but Mark Krikorian's suggestion that we all answer census questions on ethnicity with "American" is less an act of protest than it is to generate weird statistics. Indeed, the census map he links to (Krikorian notes that "'American' was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties") shows that our "Americans" hail overwhelmingly from Dixie. Thank God one region in this country has the courage to reject political correctness and truly embrace the color-blind American creed.
- This back-and-forth between Ezra Klein and Stephen Spruiell, where Klein finds conservatives trafficking in misinformation on health care and Spruiell keeps insisting that his objection is government involvement in health care, neatly exposes the fundamental difference between liberals and small government conservatives. Klein is correct that the modest proposals in Congress hardly amount to a government takeover, and Spruiell is more or less correct that reform does open the door to (but does not assure) government-provided health insurance. This, by Spruiell's own admission, is the "most important" consequence of the current health-care reform proposal. In other words, government involvement is just bad, period, which is why eliminating subsidies for private student loans, which ought to be a no-brainer, is also depicted as a government takeover of the economy.
- Remainders: The "tradition" of the filibuster was an accidental invention; our broken Senate discourages the House from working on progressive legislation; Mitt Romney grapples with the realities of being a political chameleon; I'm glad somebody remembers that Carly Fiorina's keen and pragmatic business sense nearly destroyed Hewlett Packard; a Republican candidate stumps on George Bush's "vision" for privatizing Social Security; and Boeing cements its relationship with Congress forever more.
--Mori Dinauer
