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Rick Perry: The God-Fearing, Know-Nothing, Pistol-Packing Embodiment Of Liberals’ Worst Nightmares

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Walter Shapiro - Aug. 24 (Opinion) - What Rick Perry has achieved in his inaugural strut on the political stage is unprecedented in the annals of modern conservative history from Barry Goldwater to Sarah Palin. It is not just that the Texas governor has dominated the news cycle, overshadowed the Iowa Straw Poll, vaulted over every GOP contender except Mitt Romney in the national polls, and reduced Karl Rove to sputtering frustration. All that is admittedly impressive for a first-time candidate whose name was familiar to only half of Republican voters just a few weeks ago. But what sets Perry apart and earns him his niche in the far right corner of Mount Rushmore has nothing to do with the gyrations of the 2012 campaign. Indeed, Perry is not only a presidential candidate, but also a cowboy-booted sociological experiment. It is almost as if Perry’s political persona was constructed by bundling together all the fears and phantoms in the left-wing anxiety closet. Since the hysteria of the 1950s Red Scare, no Republican figure has matched Perry in his God-given ability to give liberals the heebie-jeebies. Others can rival the governor’s disdain for academic achievement (Palin), his cross-on-the-sleeve religiosity (Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee), and his antipathy to Social Security and Medicare (Paul Ryan and Barry Goldwater). But never before has a top-tier presidential candidate embodied the whole lethal package—and more: 1. Anti-Intellectualism. Liberals revere high SAT scores. That is why it is no accident that, over the past century, the Democrats have nominated for president five former college or law school professors (Woodrow Wilson, John W. Davis, George McGovern, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama) plus Hubert Humphrey, who was a graduate teaching fellow while working on a Ph.D.

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Drew Westen's Nonsense

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Chait - Aug. 08 (Opinion) - There are some strong criticisms to be made of the Obama administration from the left, especially concerning Obama's passive response to the debt ceiling hostage crisis, and his frightening willingness to give away the store to John Boehner. I've made many of these criticisms myself. But Drew Westen's lengthy, attention-grabbing Sunday New York Times op-ed is not a strong criticism. It's a parody of liberal fantasizing.

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How Clinton Handled His Debt Ceiling Crisis Better Than Obama

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Kara Brandeisky - Aug. 02 (News Analysis) - “If they send me a budget that says simply, ‘You take our cuts or we’ll let the country go into default,’ I will veto it,” Clinton said at the time, calling Republican tactics “economic blackmail.”

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The Trouble With Independents

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Michael Kazin, - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - No group in American politics gets more respect than independent voters. Pundits and reporters probe what these allegedly moderate citizens think about this issue and that candidate, major party strategists seek the golden mean of messaging that will attract independents to their camp and/or alienate them from the opposing one. Presidential nominees and aides struggle to come up with phrases and settings that will soothe or excite them. But what if millions of independents are really just a confused and clueless horde, whose interest in politics veers between the episodic and the non-existent?

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Inside the Intervention

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Steven Metz - Apr. 02 (Opinion) - Put simply, Obama’s Libya strategy is designed to avoid the most undesirable outcomes rather than optimize the chances of a desired outcome, to do something without “owning” the conflict, to maintain maximum flexibility as the situation evolves, and to do all of this in the face of powerful constraints. The question is whether this strategy can actually work.

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Patriot Games

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By E.J. Dionne - Nov. 26 (Opinion) - I am afraid that we are about to enter a two-year period in which the Beltway Republicans will always blame Obama's America first--you know, the America that is not the "real" America, the America that happens to disagree with much of the conservative agenda, the America from which they want to "take back" the country, as if the rest of us represent an alien force. If Obama and his America are for something, even if that something is in the nation's interest, it will be rejected out of hand.

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A Lost Generation

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By John B. Judis - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - Republicans might say it’s the re-emergence of a conservative Republican majority, but that’s not really what happened. What this election suggests to me is that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced.

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Let Them Eat Credit

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Raghuram Rajan - Aug. 27 (Opinion) - By most counts, the U.S. economy started growing in the middle of last year. For many Americans, though, it does not feel as if the Great Recession has ended -- unemployment and underemployment are still alarmingly high, and job growth is weak. Many causes have been suggested for both the economic collapse and mediocre recovery, but one that is hardly ever mentioned is income inequality. This is a mistake. Growing income inequality in the United States and the policy responses it has spawned have done tremendous damage to our economy. And because we continue to ignore this...

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Should Businesses Be Run Like The Post Office?

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Alexander C. Hart - Jul. 12 (Opinion) - ... the post office doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Contrary to popular perception, it receives no federal funding for its operations, subsisting almost entirely on the fees it charges for delivering mail. It’s a great bargain: It’ll take your letter anywhere in the country for what’s still a modest fee. And when Consumer Reports compared package services, it concluded that “the good old U.S. Postal Service is often cheapest by far.”

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Finishing the Treatment

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - Indeed, one of the many lessons I learned over the last year is that, even at the very highest levels of power, people frequently operate with limited knowledge and perspective. That’s true of how they think about policy and that’s true of how they think about politics. As one high-ranking official memorably told me in February, while everybody was scrambling to salvage reform after the Massachusetts Senate race, nobody really sees the whole playing field.

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Street Fight

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Noam Scheiber - Apr. 05 (News Analysis) - ... the new reality in the battle to tame the banks: Both sides recognize that the reformers have the momentum, given the way last month’s health care victory has unified Senate Democrats, and given the political peril for Republicans in appearing to do Wall Street’s bidding. But both sides also recognize that, p.r.-wise, the consumer agency tends to overwhelm other elements of the reform effort.

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The GOP Wants Capitulation, Not Compromise

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Feb. 26 (Opinion) - Who won? It's the exact same question people asked in 2008, after each of the presidential debates. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. What's "winning"--scoring more debate points, making fewer gaffes, or simply appealing to more voters?

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The Quiet Revolution

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By John B. Judis - Feb. 02 (Special Report) - Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions. In doing so, he isn’t simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Obama’s revival of these agencies is arguably the most significant accomplishment of his first year in office.

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Great Speech. Don't Quit Now.

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Jan. 28 (Opinion) - If you follow health care reform, you probably want to know if President Obama saved health care reform with his State of the Union address . The answer is no. But that?s only because there?s no way he could save it with just one speech. It?s too big a job. All Obama could do Wednesday night was to send some messages, about his expectations and priorities. And there I think he did pretty much what he needed to do. Keep in mind that Obama was really addressing two separate audiences: The public and the Congress. The public needed to hear about policy--to be reminded of why health care reform even matters and why the type of bill President Obama supports would be good for them. Members of Congress needed to hear about procedure--to be told, by ...

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What Public Option Supporters Won

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Dec. 15 (News Analysis) - The public option is dead this morning. And this time, it isn't coming back to life. The Senate isn't going to include any version of the idea in its bill. And while the House can still demand a public option in conference, nobody I know expects the House to prevail.

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What Dubai Means For The U.S.

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Noam Scheiber - Nov. 28 (News Analysis) - Traders are racing to figure out what the default by Dubai World Group on $60 billion of debt means for their portfolios and the global economy. Dubai World is a conglomerate with large holdings of commercial real estate and ports across the globe, among other assets. The government of Dubai, one of seven states that form the United Arab Emirates, owns 100 percent of the company, but has no obligation to back its debt.

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The Drama Was In The History

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Do not be fooled by the Beltway conventional wisdom, which has repeatedly treated House legislation as inferior to its counterpart in the Senate. If anything, the opposite is true. Should the House bill or something like it become law, the vast majority of Americans would have health insurance--protecting them from financial calamity and giving them access to medical care when they need it.

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The Top Ten Things Worth Fighting For

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 14 (News Analysis) - As deliberations continue, in the floor debate and eventually in the House-Senate conference committee, the question is how these bills will come together. The best case scenario is that we get the best of both approaches--the far-reaching coverage and insurance reforms in the House and HELP bills, combined with the CBO-certified cost control of Finance. The worst case is that we get cost control like House and HELP, with coverage that looks like Finance.

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Is the Insurance Industry Declaring War?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - Over the weekend, America's Health Insurance Plans circulated a study it commissioned from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In a memo to AHIP members, reproduced here, president Karen Ignani explained its significance

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Against Transparency

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Lawrence Lessig - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

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The CBO Just Released Its New Health Care Score. Reason for Relief?

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 07 (News Analysis) - The good news, substantively and politically, is that CBO expects the measure would reduce budget deficits by $81 billion over the next decade and by even larger sums in the following decade, although it won't quantify that amount specifically because estimates are so imperfect that far out.

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Stocked Exchange

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 06 (Opinion) - Ten years from now, if health care reform is a boondoggle, you might be able to trace that failure back to a decision in the wee hours of last week's Senate Finance Committee hearings. It happened on Thursday night, just before midnight, when John Kerry put forward an amendment. It was amendment C-8: "Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers." The title may sound innocuous, if a bit arcane. But if you've followed the health care reform debate, then you know (or should know) that anything involving the insurance exchanges is important.

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Madison Weeps

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - Sep. 22 (Editorial) - Our sense of alarm has been growing for some time. From the moment Barack Obama entered the White House, the Republican Party has cast itself as the Party of No. Whether it was the stimulus bill--which garnered not a single Republican vote in the House--or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court--which only nine of 40 Senate Republicans supported--the GOP has defined itself in its opposition to Obama. But our alarm has been tempered by the knowledge that, in a way, this is as it should be: In our form of government, the minority party should be the opposition party; and, while the Obama administration did make overtures to the GOP on the stimulus and its selection of Sotomayor, those overtures were largely symbolic. The factionalism, while regrettable, was understandable. But, this week, as the health care reform battle reached a crucial juncture, the violence of faction has become gratuitous.

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The Centrists’ Take On The Speech: Pretty Darn Good

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Suzy Khimm - Sep. 10 (News Analysis) - The moderates and centrists critical to ongoing health care negotiations seemed to have found a good deal to their liking in the president’s speech tonight.

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Why Reform Survived August

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Sep. 08 (News Analysis) - The August recess began with critics attacking health care reform because of its high price tag. It ended with critics attacking health care reform because of how reformers proposed to reduce that high price tag.

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