The Editors

It isn’t surprising that the 2008 GOP playbook against Barack Obama will focus on race. But as Paul Waldman has discovered, the attacks will be anything but subtle: The voters Obama needs, it is now sometimes said, are the “Reagan Democrats,” those blue-collar whites who rejected their traditional ties to the Democratic party to support […]

Courtney Martin thought Michel Gondry‘s Be Kind, Rewind was a great commentary on the role of creativity in forging community: Everything about the Jersey town where Be Kind, Rewind takes place is dying and decrepit. The viewer has the sense from the very start that the townspeople are doomed to lose. The moneyed developers’ invasion […]

Kate Sheppard talks to state party representatives and finds frustration over the status of Florida’s delegates, compounded by reminders of the 2000 election: While much of the coverage of the Florida question has focused on the back-and-forth between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Democrats in the state like [Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen] Thurman have […]

Peter Dreier concludes from voting patterns that Obama‘s problem might be more class than race-based: [L]et’s be clear about the class nature of racial prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, and disparities. Wealthy whites are more likely than working-class whites to use the race card in the voting booth. Voting statistics reveal that most upper-income whites consistently vote […]

Tom Schaller wonders whether John McCain will ruin Democrats’ chances at making some gains in the Southwest. McCain represents Arizona, the fastest growing state in the nation’s fastest growing and increasingly pivotal electoral region, the Southwest. Couple his home region advantage with his prominent leadership role on the immigration issue and the man whom anti-amnesty […]

Spencer Ackerman on where we are now: So now the U.S. military command in Iraq has put together a new profile of the foreign cohort within al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). It’s based on debriefings of 48 foreign members of AQI currently in U.S. custody. In other words, Multinational Force-Iraq (MNF-I), the proper name for the […]

Paul Waldman takes a bemused look at Code Pink and the anti-war antics of the left and sees neither bark nor bite: If nothing else, progressives can take heart in the fact that relative to the extremists on the right, the fringe elements on the left are utterly harmless. The occasional eco-vandal notwithstanding, these days […]

If you’re here in D.C. for this year’s Take Back America conference, be sure to check out: Ezra Klein at the 11:45 panel, “Healthcare for All: The Plan to Get There” and Robert Kuttner at the 1:00 lunch session ” Out of the Hole: An Economy that Works for Working People.” We also have a […]

Today on TAP online, Thomas Geoghegan notes that our mass transit system (or lack thereof) is not only getting worse by the year but faces a steeper problem: Who is going to pay for it? America is disuniting. Compare the U.S. to the European Union. Over there, thanks to Eurostar (the high-speed rail system), easy […]

Gershom Gorenberg on why Israel should separate the state and the synagogue: While writing “How to Prove You’re a Jew” for The New York Times Magazine, I ran the personal experiment of seeing whether I could come up with evidence of Jewishness that might satisfy the Israeli rabbinate. My detective work yielded meager results. No […]