Blog: TAPPED

Ed Kilgore explains that the working poor have become the new “welfare queens”: Underlying this assault, there seems to be a current of genuine anger at the working families who no longer receive “welfare as we knew it,” but remain beneficiaries of some form of redistribution, even if it’s only progressive tax rates. You can […]

In recent days, Republican candidates Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman have both had occasion to share their views on evolution (Perry says no, Huntsman says yes). The National Journal’s Ron Brownstein suggests that this might help Huntsman a bit to make his case to “the overlapping circles of the party’s best-educated, least religiously devout, and […]

Yesterday, before a group of Republicans at the Reagan Library in California, Florida Senator Marco Rubio gave a speech on the failure of the welfare state, and the danger it poses to civil society. Here is the crux of his argument, which should sound familiar to anyone who pays attention to the Tea Party: These […]

For a while, the Republican presidential nominating contest was between Mitt Romney and a bunch of underperforming candidates. Then Michele Bachmann entered the race, offering a shiny new object for everyone to look at for a couple of weeks. She was charismatic, novel, and extremist enough to appeal to the large portion of the Republican […]

There’s a bit of a blogospheric debate going on (see here) about whether conservative nostalgia for the 1950s is, shall we say, a little insensitive. After all the 1950s were a time when, among other things, Jim Crow was in full force, and rapists could go free if the woman was wearing a short skirt. […]

Jon Huntsman, languishing in the low single-digits in primary polls, has recently proclaimed his acceptance of both evolution and the contribution of human activity to global warming, which in today’s GOP puts him somewhere to the left of Wavy Gravy. The Atlantic’s James Fallows calls this the “what the hell, I might as well keep […]

As recently as last month, President Obama stood strong in polls against his potential Republican challengers: With the exception of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney – who lagged by several points – Obama was far ahead of each of his competitors. Now, according to the latest Gallup survey, 48 percent of registered voters say they […]

You may remember the scenes in Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks past shops, which scan his eyes and deliver a personalized advertisement (“Stressed out, John Anderton? Need a vacation? Come to Aruba!”) Well, according to the Los Angeles Times, we’re almost there: Picture this: You stop in front of a digital advertising display at […]

Most of the decisions campaign strategists make are based on folk theories, by which I mean theories that have been developed over time by practitioners about what works and what doesn’t, without much empirical evidence to demonstrate whether they’re true or not. At the end of a campaign, you have a sense about what worked […]

In a column tearing his party a new one for ever defending Sarah Palin, David Frum says that we should “Quit treating consumption patterns as substitutes for character”: It’s very important that politicians understand the everyday lives of Americans. It’s important that politicians champion the ordinary person and not pay undue heed to the wishes […]