In an article from our last print issue, Dayo Olopade rounds up five interesting races:
New Jersey, 5th District
Who: Rep. Scott Garrett (R) vs. Rabbi Dennis Shulman (D)
Why: Shulman would be the first rabbi elected to Congress. He's received strong backing from the "pro-Israel, pro-peace" group J Street and other progressive organizations, even as he campaigns in a traditionally red district against a three-term incumbent. The district, which runs from affluent old-money suburbs to working-class satellites of New York City, has an unambiguous commuter culture in which energy prices are a major campaign issue. The 58-year-old Shulman has been one of only a few local Democrats to successfully make hay of the issue, producing humorous spots tying Garrett to big oil.
Mark Schmitt writes that Obama has reinvented populism:
Obama doesn't just turn the volume down, he all but strips populism of its oppositional qualities. Sometimes he does so explicitly: "We will all need to sacrifice and we will all need to pull our weight because now more than ever, we are all in this together ... there is no real separation between Main Street and Wall Street." At other times, it's implicit: "We are not a country where a young woman I met should have to work the night shift after a full day of college and still not be able to pay the medical bills for her sister who's ill. That's not right -- and it's not who we are."
There are no pitchforks in this populism. No "self-serving and undemocratic" elites. They're just part of the same America. And yet, there is, in both the language and policies, a deep and profound commitment to "ordinary Americans," to their security and their chance to get ahead. And while the attack on Wall Street is muted, the sense that it has obligations beyond short-term profits is loud.
And Robert Kuttner argues that FDIC Chair Sheila Bair should be the next treasury secretary:
As I observed in the October print issue of the Prospect ("Meet the Next Treasury Secretary"), no positions will be more important than his senior economic team. In that piece, I argued that the two best Treasury picks would be either Tim Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, or FDIC Chair Sheila Bair.
Since then, my admiration for Bair has only grown. She has long waged a battle within the administration for direct assistance to homeowners, rather than having stressed mortgage holders be the incidental beneficiaries of bailouts to bondholders and banks. Last week, she went public with her dissenting views, giving an interview to the Wall Street Journal. "[W]e're attacking it at the [financial] institution level as opposed to the borrower level, and it's the borrowers defaulting. That is what's causing the distress at the institution level," she said. "So why not tackle the borrower problem?"
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—The Editors
