WORST EVER. The question, “Is George Bush the worst president ever?” was asked and answered a few months ago, and now Bush is just playing like Hank Aaron in his last days, trying to put the record further out of reach. The other day as we were driving past the vice president’s mansion, my daughter […]
Mark Schmitt
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FUNDRAISING NUMBERS IN PERSPECTIVE.
FUNDRAISING NUMBERS IN PERSPECTIVE. A little non-Obama-centric context for the campaign fundraising numbers as they begin to come in: The previous record for the first quarter of the year before the election was Al Gore’s $8.8 million in the first quarter of 1999. Bill Bradley raised about $4.4 million that quarter (which was big news […]
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BETSY WHO?
BETSY WHO? Via Kevin Drum, an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times by Betsy McCaughey embraces my colleague Phil Longman‘s conclusion that the Veterans’ Administration health system is a good model for national health care. (Phil’s book, Best Care Anywhere, is now available.) The paper identifies McCaughey only as “chairman of the Committee to Reduce […]
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MARGINAL McCAIN.
MARGINAL McCAIN. What’s most interesting to me about the story (or really the additional evidence supporting an old story) that John McCain almost switched parties in 2001 is not so much that he considered it, but why he quickly abandoned the idea: He balked when Sen. James Jeffords left the Republican Party to caucus with […]
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Penn, Inc.
A debate is unfolding in the print pages of the latest Prospect as well as on Tapped about Hillary Clinton’s merits as a Democratic presidential candidate. I’ll avoid jumping in directly here, but one line from Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias’s print piece is worth singling out for emphasis: The news that Mark Penn is […]
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Freakopolitics
If you start to read the policy proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates and the mainstream Democratic think tanks, you will quickly get the impression that, while Democrats see lots of problems, there’s always just one solution: a tax credit. John Edwards proposes an “American Dream Tax Credit” — up to $1,000 a year for […]
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THOSE AREN’T RETIREES — THEY’RE LOBBYISTS.
THOSE AREN’T RETIREES — THEY’RE LOBBYISTS. I couldn’t hope to match Ezra‘s skewering of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a new think tank whose $7 million in funding achieved its obvious goal, which was to produce a single glowing David Broder column. But I will note two things: 1. What portion of the $7 million was […]
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DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER! MICHAEL BARONE MAKING SENSE!
DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER! MICHAEL BARONE MAKING SENSE! Relax, all is right with the world. In a previous post, I contrasted Michael Barone‘s acknowledgment that a U.S. senator intimidating a federal prosecutor is deeply corrupt with his hilarious reinterpretation of Watergate, which I’ll quote again because I love it like a favorite poem: “Richard […]
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WAY WORSE THAN…
WAY WORSE THAN WATERGATE. A few years ago, Michael Barone wrote a column about how conservative presidents are always under attack by us ultra-powerful liberals who refuse to accept their legitimacy. It included a dazzlingly audacious one-line historical reinterpretation of Watergate: “Richard Nixon…unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration.” Compare that with […]
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THE COSMOPOLITANS.
THE COSMOPOLITANS. So many things are amazing about the emerging field of presidential candidates, but here’s one that hasn’t gotten much attention — just how many of the candidates are from no fixed address. Most presidents, like most Americans, are clearly the products of a single particular place, and understanding that place — Bill Clinton‘s […]