How our consumer obsession with originality and authenticity affects our taste in political candidates.
Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.
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Seventeen Candidates in Search of a Story
Only a few of the ’08 frontrunners have grasped the importance of the campaign narrative and built a successful story around their candidacies.
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WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT EDWARDS’ HAIR.
WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT EDWARDS’ HAIR. Watching the coverage of John Edwards has been pretty depressing lately. It’s obvious that a significant proportion of the political press corps has decided they just don’t like him, and they’re going to do whatever they can to destroy his candidacy. The principal vehicle through […]
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IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT POVERTY…
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT POVERTY… Garance makes some interesting observations in her piece about John Edwards and low-income voters, but I have to say, I doubt Edwards is banking on a huge groundswell of support for his candidacy from poor Americans. That’s not really the political point of his emphasis on poverty. Before […]
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The Power of the Campaign Narrative
All successful candidates have had a coherent, appealing story, while the losers tell bad stories — or more often, no story at all. Plus, a gallery of narrative campaign ads.
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NOW THAT’S SOME FAMILY VALUES.
NOW THAT’S SOME FAMILY VALUES. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has interviewed the prostitute Senator David Vitter used to frequent back in Louisiana. But the article contains this puzzling passage: Yow, contacted through relatives, called The Times-Picayune Wednesday night and said Vitter was a regular customer of hers, but said the two did not have a […]
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OBAMA AND RACE, PART 2,354.
OBAMA AND RACE, PART 2,354. In Salon today, Michael Scherer has an article, cleverly titled “Hillary Is From Mars, Obama Is From Venus,” arguing that Barack Obama is the girl candidate — touchy-feely, empathetic, cranking up the Indigo Girls; while Hillary Clinton is the boy candidate — direct, strong, presumably pumping up the Metallica in […]
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GOP Candidates Cross the Line in the Culture War
Despite their carefully cultivated images, Romney and Thompson have recently found themselves on the wrong side of conservatives’ view of sex.
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THE TROUBLE WITH IMPEACHMENT.
THE TROUBLE WITH IMPEACHMENT. Everyone has made good points about the possibility of impeaching President Bush; there are lots of worthy arguments on both sides. But there’s one political factor to consider: much as their epic incompetence at running the government has discredited the very idea of government, making new government solutions substantially harder to […]
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YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?
YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? Via Matt Yglesias, we see a study reported in the Washington Post showing that Major League pitchers from the South are dishing out the chin music. “I found that pitchers from the South are not more likely in general to hit batters,” said the study’s author, Thomas Timmerman, “but they are […]