Blog: TAPPED

In a piece encouraging people to chill out about Rick Perry, Ed Kilgore makes a small but critical point: Following an initial love-fest, Rick Perry is about to undergo the kind of heightened scrutiny that’s already afflicting Bachmann. The centerpiece of his campaign message, the Texas Economic Miracle, is already coming into question in the […]

To Politico’s Roger Simon, Rep. Ron Paul was “shafted” by the national press, despite his strong second place finish in the Ames Straw Poll. “Any fair assessment of Ames . . . would have said the winds of the Republican Party are blowing toward both Bachmann and Paul,” writes Simon. Ron Paul’s Iowa campaign was […]

Should Ron Paul be getting more attention? Roger Simon says yes. Jon Stewart says yes. Kevin Drum says no, as does Steve Kornacki. I’m going to take a slightly different position. The pro-Paul argument is that if you’re going to pay attention to something like the Ames straw poll, then you have to treat the […]

Three days out of the gate, and Texas Governor Rick Perry has already had his first gaffe in the Republican presidential primary. Speaking before a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Monday, Perry called loose monetary policy and act of treason, and made not-so-subtle threats about the physical safety of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t worried that Rick Perry might be too dumb to be president: I’m sure there some level of imbecility which would be too much for Americans, but it seems that the ability to understand and speak to the ambitions of a critical mass of the electorate is much more important. Intelligence might help […]

In their despair over the debt-ceiling deal, liberals have admonished President Obama for his failure to use the “bully pulpit” and take his case to the public. Political psychologist Drew Westen offered a lengthy version of this argument in last week’s New York Times, lamenting Obama’s failure to capture the public’s imagination and act as […]

If you’ll permit a little cross-self-promotion, I had a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, which opened this way: If you aren’t old enough to remember it, you’ve probably heard the story of the most consequential presidential campaign gaffe of the modern era. In 1972, Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie responded to a series of attacks by […]

Much of conservative Forbe’s blogger Avik Roy‘s response to the devastating list of quotes complied by Matt Yglesias from Rick Perry‘s book consist of assertions that Perry didn’t say what he said. But one of his responses I found remarkable. Here’s Perry on the constitutional scope of federal power: [Perry] regrets the existence of jurisprudence […]

Here’s the problem with our politics. Conservative eminence grise Norman Podhoretz writes the following in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend: Furthermore, what Mr. Westen regards as an opportunistic appeal to the center we [conservatives] interpret as a tactic calculated to obfuscate his unshakable strategic objective, which is to turn this country into a […]

For the first time, a federal appellate court has ruled that the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The 2-1 ruling [pdf] is notable for three reasons. First, this new conflict between circuit courts makes it likely that the Supreme Court will hear the case in the upcoming term. Second, Judge […]