Paul Waldman

There are a lot of reasons to feel despondent at what’s been going on with Democrats in Congress and the White House over the last week. What’s remarkable is just how easy it was for them to get sent into this spiral of fear. I shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but all of this […]

This is most likely a case of reporters taking a couple of comments made by senators, and over-interpreting them to come to a dramatic conclusion. But it seems designed to make liberals’ heads explode: Democrats Put Stop On Health Overhaul WASHINGTON — With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in […]

(Flickr/John Curnow) You might not remember, but one of the nice elements of the stimulus bill that passed last year was $8 billion in funds to develop high speed rail, something a lot of people have been waiting for. The Department of Transportation has been evaluating proposals from different states, and according to the Wall […]

Ezra Klein tells us the following, about breaking up the health-care bill, which makes me want to scream: I should say, at the outset, that I’m not a fan of this idea. But there’s no denying that breaking the health-care bill into different pieces is receiving serious consideration. Nothing is decided, but according to House […]

Over the weekend, we learned that David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign, will be returning to Washington to oversee the Democrats’ efforts to avoid an electoral disaster in the fall. This is a very good idea. It helps to have one person who is clearly in charge of all their campaign efforts, and […]

This is encouraging news from our newest senator: Sen.-elect Brown navigated the Russell Senate Office Building on Thursday for his first appointment with Sen. John McCain. A National Guardsman, Brown said in the interview that McCain was his senatorial model. “I have great respect for Senator McCain,” Brown said of the Arizona Republican, who was […]

Mark Schmitt knows more about campaign finance than just about anyone, so when he says that the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, though awful, may not cause the sky to fall right away, I want to believe him. But there’s an angle on this story that makes me really concerned, and it’s not the […]

One of the great fears politicians have is that there will be some wave of strong feeling among the public that they will be oblivious to, until it rolls over them and it’s too late to do anything about it. This happened to Democrats in 1994, and it happened to Republicans in 2006. Right now, […]

Progressives often observe that the news media let Republicans get away with things they never let Democrats get away with, and that’s often true. But we also have to acknowledge that how controversial a particular action becomes has a lot do with the choices that political actors make. Republicans are very, very good at ginning […]