Paul Waldman

Remember during the 2008 primary campaign how Obama supporters argued that one reason not to elect Hillary Clinton was that she would unite Republicans against her? And that since they hated her so much, they’d wage a scorched-earth campaign against everything she tried to do, miring the country in years of bitter and angry conflict, […]

The blogosphere has been abuzz with the strange case of David Frum, who just got canned from his cozy sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute, probably the second-most-important think tank on the right (after the Heritage Foundation). Frum has an excellent conservative pedigree. He was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, among other things, and […]

The census Web site has long been dreadful, a circa-1995 dump of a place. Which is a pity, because they have some of the richest data in the world, yet to get at it you have to go through layers and layers of menus until you reach … a downloadable excel file. If they had […]

I teach a class at a local university, and in preparing for this week’s session on health communication campaigns, I came across this bizarre public service announcement from Canada from the 1980s, which appears not to be a parody. The refrain of the song goes, “Drugs, drugs, drugs. Which are good, which are bad? Drugs, […]

In today’s New York Times, Brendan Nyhan cautions Democrats not to convince themselves that now that health-care reform has passed, people will stop believing in death panels and socialist takeovers. “While some of the more outlandish rumors may dissipate, it is likely that misperceptions will linger for years, hindering substantive debate over the merits of […]

Mitt Romney is in a bit of a pickle. The Democrats just passed a health-care reform bill that all Republicans agree will transform America into a freedomless hellscape. Yet it’s almost identical to the one Romney pushed through in Massachusetts when he was governor. He’s even on record defending the individual mandate, which is the […]

Republicans have had many different reactions to the passage of health-care reform. But there seems to be a common strain running through them that might be described as “This can’t be happening!!!” Just as so many of them couldn’t bring themselves to see Barack Obama as a legitimately elected president, many can’t bring themselves to […]

We all have a tendency to justify our mistakes, convincing ourselves that either it wasn’t a mistake at all or that we did the best anyone could have done given the exigencies of the moment. We throw good money after bad and good energy after bad, all in the service of convincing ourselves that we […]

If you use Google’s Gmail, you probably felt a moment of unease upon learning that, in exchange for getting this free and extremely well-designed service (note to other e-mail providers: organizing messages into threads is the greatest thing ever), you’d have to give up a bit of your privacy. Namely, Gmail scans your messages, picks […]

I spent some time yesterday talking on Canadian radio, explaining health-care reform to our neighbors to the north. They were a bit puzzled at what’s been going on down here. Why, they wanted to know, was there all that talk about “socialism” when the reform left in place the private insurance system? And why were […]