The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.
— Thomas Frank
Acknowledging class was always difficult for 'New Democrats' - it was second-wave, it was divisive - but 2008 made retro politics cool again.
Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle.
When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling.
Republicans run the machine when it's their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough.
Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.
Allowing a private rather than a public entity to take over your toll road merely means that your tolls will have to be that much higher to cover their more expensive debt.
Is Wall Street the rightful master of our economic fate? Or should we choose a broader form of sovereignty?
Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn't have - until recently - were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That's what the 'kids for cash' judges were apparently experimenting with.
Above all else stands the burning question of bipartisanship. Whatever else the politicians might say they're about, our news analysts know that this is the true object of the nation's desire, the topic to which those slippery presidential spokesmen need always to be dragged back.
Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion.
Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting.
Maybe that first, gigantic deficit the Reaganites piled up was an accident, just a combination of deluded 'supply side' tax cuts and a huge bag of good stuff for the Pentagon. But pretty quickly conservatives discovered that deficits, when done correctly, did something really cool: deficits defunded the Left.
Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day.
Most of Roosevelt's innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.
While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what's on the line is American liberty itself.
Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution.
Conservatives may believe that impoverished borrowers destroyed Wall Street. But we liberals will not fool ourselves that stupid bankers sank conservatism for good.
I was never a fan of Barack Obama's bipartisanship routine.
For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side.
Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.
In the subprime mortgage industry, bankers handed out iffy loans like candy at a parade because such loans meant revenue and, hence, bonuses for executives in the here-and-now.
As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.
The thing now is to seem concerned in a vaguely social-democratic way.
Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.
We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.
We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?
There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.
As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.
When done right - or wrong, depending on how you look at it - deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there's no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties.
Mr. Obama still has time to reverse course. A great deal depends on it. To fail on health care yet again might well be the 'Waterloo' Republicans dream of.
There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.
There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.
Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn't have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all.
Media bias has been a favorite theme of the Right for decades, of course.
Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.
Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it.
Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.
A president aiming for 'Great' or 'Near Great' status must do more. He must give lots of interviews, make records accessible, and heap the flattery on academia - each of which Mr. Bush has signally failed to do.
Public borrowing is costly these days, true, but interest rates on municipal bonds are still considerably lower than those borne by corporate debt.
Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.
Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government's justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?
Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.
It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.
Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and 'zombie' financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.
What is at stake in the debate over health care is more than the mere crafting of policy. The issue is now the identity of the Democratic Party.
Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.
There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source.
