Jonathan Chait

Among the insights: Fiorina "has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination"; a discussion of childhood vaccines showed that the party is "fervid, claustrophobic, recklessly insinuating, and, at the same time, utterly timid when it comes to extremism in its own ranks”; and the GOP as a whole is "wedded to the tenets of [George W.]…

Politics involves the heart and the mind, and in general the best politicians appeal to both. Then there’s Donald Trump. Jonathan Chait of New York magazine argues that Trump’s campaign is pretty close to mindless, but it seems that to many rank-and-file Republicans, that’s a feature rather than a bug. “Outsiders have struggled to comprehend how Republican voters can attach themselves to an…

Boldly combining the investigative techniques of David McCullough and Maury Povich, New York magazine’s  Chait has done a little historical paternity testing and determined that Andrew Jackson “is, clearly, the father of the modern Republican Party.” Chait argued that Jackson’s status as “the progenitor of the Democratic Party” is based on “a myth.” On the other hand, Jackson “believed the…

Richard Nixon’s campaign did what it could to make sure the Democratic party didn’t nominate its strongest presidential candidate in 1972, thereby facilitating Nixon’s re-election. President Obama won’t be on the ballot in 2016, but New York magazine's Jonathan Chait speculates that Obama is trying to smooth Hillary Clinton’s path to the Oval Office by nudging Republicans into nominating Scott…

Though both Jonathan Chait and Amanda Marcotte approve of same-sex marriage, they differed on Monday in their assessment of the case against it. Chait, of New York magazine, claimed that anti-gay-marriage arguments have been pitiful and consequently were doomed from the get-go. He declared that “preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry…

Hillary Clinton’s call in a Thursday speech for federally mandated automatic voter registration and a minimum of twenty days for early voting won widespread applause in the lefty blogosphere. So did Clinton’s blasts in the same speech at alleged Republican efforts to throw a wrench into the ballot works for certain Democratic-leaning groups. Two ringing endorsements of Hillary’s proposals and…

In the uproar over George Stephanopoulos’s hefty, long-undisclosed contributions to the Clinton Foundation, New York magazine blogger Jonathan Chait casts himself in a role similar to that of the child in the tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who, after so many have admired their ruler’s supposedly magnificent outfit, points out that the monarch actually is wearing nothing at all. “Everybody…

There’s been plenty of mockery of the three actual or potential Republican presidential candidates who named Ronald Reagan as the greatest living president, but New York magazine's Chait feels their pain, sort of. Chait observed in a Wednesday post that GOPers are in a bind when choosing the best living POTUS given that 1) for obvious reasons, they wouldn’t pick Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton; 2)…

New York magazine’s Chait declares that “even if the relatively sober Jeb Bush wins the nomination, he will have to accommodate himself to his party's barking-mad consensus. [Hillary] is non-crazy America’s choice by default. And it is not necessarily an exciting choice, but it is an easy one, and a proposition behind which she will probably command a majority.”

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait claims that for today’s GOP, “everything Reagan thought or did was presumptively correct, even the things that contradict the other things he did.” Specifically, “the Reagan cult is largely (though not entirely) a propaganda vehicle for the anti-tax movement,” even though “in reality, Reagan veered wildly out of step with anti-tax orthodoxy.” The Washington…

One of the most discussed articles of the past week was Matthew Yglesias’s Monday piece in Vox contending that this country’s combination of a presidential system and increasing ideological polarization is a recipe for eventual political breakdown (the article was headlined “American democracy is doomed”). New York magazine’s Chait thinks Yglesias overlooked something important. Chait argues that…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait argues that “Inhofe’s argument was breathtakingly devoid of a factual or logical grasp of its subject matter” and remarks that while “the design of environmental regulation, or the appropriate balance between economic cost and clean air, is a subject on which reasonable people can disagree…the modern Republican party (as opposed to the one of a generation ago)…

Jonathan Chait, Paul Waldman, and Amanda Marcotte each discuss how the Wisconsin governor and probable presidential candidate has responded to recent questions about issues including evolution, Obama’s religious beliefs, and Obama’s patriotism, as well as how his answers might play with the “paranoid” Republican base that thinks, in Waldman’s words, that “Obama is The Other, an alien presence…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes, “If a candidate for a managerial job at your office insists that two plus three equals seven, it wouldn't matter how well-qualified this candidate may be at any other aspect of the job,” and that similarly, “even if you agreed with everything else the Republicans stood for” other than climate-change denial, “how could a party so obviously unhinged be…