Washington Monthly

For the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack, this past weekend’s commemoration yielded a “fairly astonishing” juxtaposition of President Obama’s “largeness of spirit” and Republican apathy, or worse. In a Washington Monthly blog post, Pollack argued that the low GOP turnout for “an event sacred to African-Americans sent an unavoidable message: These are not our people...Such discomfort with a…

The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman argues that Republican base voters routinely wind up hurting the party’s center-right presidential nominee because he feels he has to throw them one or more bones: “Poppy [George H. W. Bush] didn’t really need to promise no new taxes, but it was a broken promise that cost him dearly. [John] McCain overcompensated for his weakness with the base by giving us…

Bush seems not to share what Ed Kilgore calls the “vengeful rage about the alleged persecution of good conservative Christian folk” and what Peter Beinart describes as “the sense of Christian victimhood and superiority that lurks just below the surface in today’s GOP.”

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones claims that Obama’s executive action was meant to “gain Latino support for Democrats and provoke an insane counterreaction from Republicans” and concludes that Obama “succeeded brilliantly on both counts.” Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly notes that “the Republican Party was actually competitive among Latino voters a decade ago,” but adds, “Now that it’s…

Ed Kilgore comments that Walker may have an “especially seductive” appeal to the Republican base given that “he won over and over again in Wisconsin without compromising with conservatism’s enemies. Indeed, he behaved almost like a liberal caricature of a conservative villain…Walker tells [right-wingers that] they…can win by confrontation, not compromise or outreach, and his three victories are…

Ed Kilgore (at Talking Points Memo) and Mark Kleiman (at the Washington Monthly) agree that the Republican party has a serious racism problem but differ on what the GOP could or will do about it.

Ed Kilgore contends that if the Gipper had headed the Republican ticket that year, he would have lost to Jimmy Carter and consequently would have been an also-ran if he’d sought the 1980 GOP nod.

One blogger argued that media outlets which took the story seriously should “spend the next three-plus years publishing articles [or] airing pieces” telling the public that it was “a cynical and spiteful lie from the beginning.”

The Esquire blogger says that the “populist” Franken showed in his recent re-election campaign “how you embrace the themes on which Warren has based her career.” (Also, it would “cause Bill O'Reilly's head to detonate in a gorgeous orange fireball.”)

Kevin Drum and other pundits take the press to task for misleading Iowa voters by, in Drum's words, pushing a “charade” that Republican Senate contender Joni Ernst is a “pragmatic centrist.”

The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker rages that ten years ago, “George W. Bush, in essence, knocked down the towers of democracy,” and that “the right-wing interests that supported the Bush-Cheney administration still have an iron grip on our politics and media entities.”

Steven Waldman, a former Newsweek reporter and Obama adviser to the FCC, concedes that liberal bias can have an effect, but says that overall it’s a “minor factor,” far less important than journalists’ interest in advancing their careers.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall says Ernst’s ideas about localism and the ACA are “insane” and remind him of something you’d hear from “militia types.”

A symposium addressing the question “Where Is Liberalism Going?” produced what several online pundits considered nutty and ignorant ideas about topics including sex and the supposedly growing authoritarian tendencies of the left.