Jamelle Bouie

According to the latest Gallup [poll](http://www.gallup.com/poll/147524/Americans-Oppose-Raising-Debt-Ceiling.aspx), Americans aren’t so hot on lifting the debt ceiling: Given the extent to which Americans know very [little](http://prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=04&year=2011&base_name=what_voters_think_when_they_he) about the federal budget, this result is better read as the public’s response to a divisive political issue. Democratic and Republican elites disagree, and as such, the public believes that there […]

House and Senate Republicans have decided to hold the economy [hostage](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/us/politics/13budget.html?ref=politics) to regressive spending cuts, and **David Brooks** is [thrilled](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html?_r=1&hp): >I’m fiscally bipolar. Most of the time I think there’s no way the two parties will do anything to address the nation’s ruinous debt problem. >But some weeks there are rays of hope. This is […]

I spent an hour of this morning on a conference call with the Main Street Alliance, the American Sustainable Business Council and the American Independent Business Alliance, where they urged President **Obama** to sign his draft executive order mandating contribution disclosure from government contractors. According to existing campaign finance regulations, government contractors are already required […]

This afternoon, Republican presidential hopeful **Mitt Romney** is giving a major speech on health care, in an attempt to redefine his position and persuade conservative skeptics. The pundit consensus is that this is an exercise in futility — see: [Jonathan Chait](http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/88308/romney-death-watch) and [Josh Green](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/how-romneys-health-care-speech-will-go-down/238787/), for example — but as Salon’s **Steve Kornacki** points [out](http://www.salon.com/news/2012_elections/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/05/12/romney_healthcare), Romney […]

At the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, **Alan Abramowitz** [investigates](http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/AIA2011051201/) the affect of racial resentment on opinions of President **Obama**. For those unfamiliar with the concept, “racial resentment” is a political framework that fuses whites’ belief in traditional conservative values (hard work equals success, for example) with negative opinions about African Americans as a […]

Now that Newt Gingrich is officially running for president, I wouldn’t be surprised if this video begins to make the rounds on conservative blogs: On the bright side, Gingrich isn’t alone in his former acknowledgement of climate change and support for proactive measures. As Dave Weigel points out, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Jon Huntsman […]

If you’re wondering why Republicans have begun to scramble away from Paul Ryan‘s plan for Medicare reform, look no further than upstate New York, where Democrats are on the verge of scoring a special election victory in the state’s 26th Congressional District: John A. Boehner, the House speaker, plans to visit upstate New York on […]

Public Policy Polling details Donald Trump‘s rapid collapse into political obscurity: Last month we found him [Trump] leading the Republican field with 26%. In the space of just four weeks he’s dropped all the way down to 8%, putting him in a tie for fifth place with Ron Paul. […] As Trump got more and […]