National Democrats
When Headlines Compete
Look at the news this week, and you see that Republicans made a classic PR mistake: They stepped on their story. For them, the best story would be problems, questions, concerns and online glitches with Obamacare. Instead, that story is competing with shutdown fallout: national monuments closed, WWII veterans turned away, school tours cancelled,…
Read MoreBeyond Quick Healing
The politicians, when you get down to the short rows, are the varmints who decided to hang a ‘Not Open for Business’ sign on the federal government – but, in an odd way, it wasn’t the politicians who were pouring gas on the fire. In the age of the twenty-four hour news cycle and…
Read MoreShutdown Politics
The shutdown showdown shows how much worse politics is today than in the 1990s. And it was bad then. Back then, Newt Gingrich shut down the government because…well, nobody can remember why. Except he was mad that President Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One. And Newt wanted to show…
Read MoreA History Lesson
It’s an old American saga: The President has a program he’s in love with but can’t muster the votes in Congress to fund it. So he doesn’t get his program. That’s the way it’s been for over two centuries. So why, now, isn’t the story coming out of Washington simply, “The President fails…
Read MoreThe Answer…
Yesterday I asked why the three camps in Washington – the House Republican Bigwigs in Washington, the House Republican Conservatives in Washington, and President Obama –couldn’t sit down and make a list of the government departments they can agree to keep open and then fund them this week to avoid an absolute government shutdown. …
Read MoreMillennial Politics
Today I suspend Republican-bashing to recommend a provocative political analysis. Titled “Will Disillusioned Millennials Bring an End to the Reagan-Clinton Era?,” it’s from a professor and Daily Beast contributor named Peter Beinart. It’s long, and it’s worth reading. Here’s my best shot at a short recap: For decades now, politics has been…
Read MoreA Three-Tribe War
With thick smoke clouds billowing out of the Capitol it’s hard to see who’s winning the latest war in Washington – plus, it isn’t a simple us versus them war: It’s a three tribe melee (with two camps of Republicans fighting Obama and each other at the same time). At first, a couple of…
Read MoreLost in Syria
Foreign policy is not my forte, so don’t ask me what America should do about Syria. But I get politics, and I don’t get President Obama’s political strategy. If you want to do something, why ask permission from a Congress that has proven itself incapable of doing anything? Most Republicans won’t vote for…
Read MoreThe Price of a Fiction
In the Senate of the world’s oldest democracy the Honorables sat down around a giant horseshoe-shaped table to hold a hearing to ask the Secretary of State how he figured bombing Syria was a good idea – but a strange thing happened: As soon as each Senator asked his first question the Secretary of State…
Read MoreNot One Overheated Washington Politician…
Broken politics and posturing politicians present one degree of mendacity when it comes to passing a budget – but the moment a war appears on the horizon that same devilment turns lethal. A few days ago the President declared that, as leader of the oldest constitutional democracy on earth, he needs the support of…
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