Free Republic

Actual title is :Is this Media Matters ‘favorite’ WashPost columnist?: Undisclosed group instrumental in promoting Obama’s political career. A Washington Post columnist to which Media Matters reportedly pushed its content has a previously undisclosed connection to President Obama – the two were part of a small group at Harvard University that met for a period of three years purportedly to promote involvement with U.S. community institutions. Participants at the research project, which took place between 1997 and 2000, included scores of individuals with ties to Obama, including several activists who were later appointed to positions in the Obama administration. Other...

You can tell Michele Bachmann had a great debut at the Republican primary debate in New Hampshire last night, because swarms of liberal writers are breaking off from their pursuit of Sarah Palin’s tour bus to dive-bomb her. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post decided to headline a basically complimentary assessment of Bachmann’s debate performance as “Bachmann assumes the position.” He was riffing on CNN moderator John King’s instruction for the candidates to assume their positions at the lectern, which he turned into a rather tortured metaphor for the entire debate. (Milbank was watching a different debate than the rest...

In the 1980s and 90s, Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne, Jr. was a sensible centrist; a man who took conservatives seriously and often tried to comprehend what they were saying without animosity. In 1991, he wrote a book titled Why Americans Hate Politics. In 1996, just about the time Bill Clinton was set to run for his second term, Dionne was author of a book defending the “progressive” agenda, titled They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. I reviewed the book for Commentary, and you can find an abstract of what I said here. (Unless you...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calmly assessing the political cyclone that routed her Democratic majority and will, at least temporarily, force her to vacate one of the best offices in the city, with its inspirational view of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. She keeps coming back to the courage of her colleagues who cast hard votes that helped make the past two years one of Congress's most productive periods in recent times - and made her one of the most effective speakers in history. Her message is unmistakable: Democrats have nothing to apologize for, nothing to be...

President Obama allowed Republicans to define the terms of the nation's political argument for the past two years and permitted them to draw battle lines the way they wanted. Neither he nor his party can let that happen again. Democrats would be foolish to turn in on themselves in a fruitless battle over whether their troubles owe to a failure to mobilize and excite their base or to win support from the political center. In fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents. What hurt them most was this brute fact: Voters younger than 30 made up 18 percent...

Who could have imagined that the bailout of the auto industry, one of the single most unpopular moves by the Obama administration, would become one of its best talking points? But don't for an instant imagine that the comeback of the nation's rescued car companies, particularly General Motors, will change the way we debate government's role in the economy. When it comes to almost anything the government does, ideology trumps facts, slogans trump reality, and loaded words ("socialism") trump data. Let there be no mistake: Rescuing GM and Chrysler took political courage, and I want to put in a good...

President Obama's decision to televise his Q&A with House Republicans was one of his shrewdest political moves since he transformed the 2008 controversy around his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, into an occasion to discuss race in American life. The hour-long session accomplished two things that Obama has been struggling for months to achieve. It set his political base on fire, even as it set a post-partisan tone that political Independents, who have been straying from him in the polls, like so much. Evidence of how the base took the event was all over the blogs (Daily Kos, for example, live blogged...

If you held a contest to pick the worst thing a politician could be called at this moment, my nominee would be “Wall Street liberal.” That label has everything. I personally despise the way the noble liberal idea has been devalued, but face it: Conservatives have had great success in discrediting liberalism, to the point that most liberals dare not call themselves by their own name. And what institutions are held in lower esteem right now than those represented by the words “Wall Street”? The left has always disliked Wall Street. Populists of all stripes have gone after financiers since...

At the risk of flacking for the Boston Globe – a newspaper, I confess, that I dearly love, and not just for its Red Sox coverage – I’d like to share one other insight from a Globe columnist. This morning, Joan Vennochi makes an essential point: There is a long history of Massachusetts voters getting fed up with the dominance of Democrats in the state legislature and of sending a message of protest by voting for Republicans at the top of the ballot. This year, that disaffection is compounded by the unpopularity of Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick. (By the way,...

Is there room in the Republican Party for genuine moderates? Truth to tell, the GOP can't decide. More precisely, it's deeply divided over whether it should allow any divisions in the party at all. That's why the brawl in a single congressional district in far upstate New York is drawing the eyes of the nation. Conservatives are determined to use the race to prove that there is no place in the party for heretics, dissidents or independents. President Obama set up the fight by nominating the district's former representative, John McHugh, as his Army secretary. Maybe Obama is as fiendishly...

Things are looking up for the Republicans, relatively speaking. President Obama's poll numbers have dipped, GOP recruitment for the 2010 elections is going better than expected, and the health-care battle has been rough on the Democrats. On top of that, the surveys show Republicans now leading in this year's two major governor's races, in Virginia and New Jersey. There's just one problem: The country still doesn't like Republicans. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week captured the public's mixed verdict. The headlines focused on growing doubts about Obama's health-care plan and the drop in his approval rating, from 60...

In addition to disparaging Brian Williams for offering a "candygram" to Barack Obama in prime time, PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers organized another one-sided left-wing discussion on the alleged conservative bias of the news media last Friday, picking up on Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s complaint that the media are giving too much time and weight to Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich on the Sotomayor nomination. Former NPR correspondent Brooke Gladstone, who now hosts the weekly show On The Media for WNYC radio (distributed nationally by NPR), denounced the "canard" of liberal media bias and how it causes "overbalance": What I...

Liberals are obsessed with contradiction. I’m convinced that in order to be a Liberal one must possess the ability to suspend reality and replace it with some polar opposite to the truth, a flight over Bosnia or a Third Way if you will, which is a political philosophy that President Clinton was a disciple of. That is not what Barack Hussein Obama is doing [Obama is not attempting a Third Way Obama is tearing down the old way] and E.J. Dionne has got it all wrong in his article Obama and the limits of mastery.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic Presidential candidate, was accused of plagiarism while in his first year at Syracuse University Law School, academic officials familiar with Mr. Biden's record said today. Mr. Biden, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is presiding over the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork, has called a news conference for 9 A.M. Thursday to discuss this charge and reports that he has lifted material from speeches by other politicians to use in his public addresses. A Biden aide, who asked not to be identified, declined to comment...

John McCain's campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States. Of course, McCain's people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know. McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it's not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency. McCain's advisers clearly don't trust Palin to answer questions about...

John McCain's campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States. Of course, McCain's people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know. McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it's not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency.

It's sort of hard to come away from that thinking "nonpartisanship." McCain tried to get voters to remember that man in his acceptance speech Thursday night, the one who "worked with members of both parties to fix the problems that need to be fixed." But that man has disappeared. The stage in the middle of the cavernous Xcel Energy Center was rearranged so McCain could conjure the feel of the town hall meetings he loves as he laced into "partisan rancor" and "the Washington crowd." Yet a set change could not disguise the fact that this convention -- including the...

"To buttress his assertions of sincerity and openness, Mr. Biden released a 65-page file, obtained by the Senator from the Syracuse University College of Law, that he said contained all the records of his years there. It disclosed relatively poor grades in college and law school, mixed evaluations from teachers and details of the plagiarism."

It’s one of the most compelling storylines of the current composition of the U.S. Supreme Court – the notion that a 5-4 conservative majority could end up blocking the left-leaning agenda of a unified Democratic power structure in Washington. It may also be the next battleground in America’s emerging presidential slugfest, as supporters of Barack Obama are already sounding the alarm that their candidate’s so-called progressive agenda could be stymied by “judges appointed during the right’s ascendancy.” Columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. lent voice to this so-called populist rage last month, bemoaning the “danger” inherent in the Court’s recent “spate of...

WASHINGTON -- If the long conservative era that began with Ronald Reagan's election is over, will the judges appointed during the right's ascendancy be able to block, frustrate and undermine the efforts of a new progressive majority? Consider this analysis from two influential journalists describing Supreme Court justices as "the last hope of the conservative interests in the United States." Imagine, they write, that a new liberal approach to the country's problems "had been overwhelmingly approved both in Congress and at the polling booths," so "conservative interests resorted to the courts, starting literally thousands of actions to stay the government's...

Hillary Clinton is talking as if the battle over seating disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan at the Democratic National Convention is the greatest crisis for democracy since the 2000 Florida recount. Her rhetoric flies in the face of intensive efforts by members of the party's rules committee to settle the delegate battle with a compromise that would likely guarantee the nomination for Barack Obama. Ending the struggle quickly depends on whether the rules committee's peacemakers succeed in their work. Clinton's chances of winning are slim, partly because some of her own supporters believe the contest is over. They see...

Perhaps it was inevitable: The Democrats' battle for the presidential nomination has now led us into the thicket of race and religion. Hillary Clinton's significant victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary was the result of many factors, but most troubling for Obama's camp were exit polls suggesting that an underlying anti-Obama vote was responsible for the size of Clinton's victory. One little-noticed finding was that 6 percent of Clinton's own voters said that they would defect to John McCain in the fall against Clinton herself. These Pennsylvania Democrats were clearly not Clinton enthusiasts. They were voting against Obama....

The Democratic presidential candidates are doing a splendid job of helping John McCain get to the White House. Barack Obama violated two elementary rules of political campaigning. A candidate should never play the role of a political scientist or sociologist analyzing a key electoral swing group from afar and should never dissect the motivations of less privileged people when talking to a group of privileged people. If Obama's comments about working-class voters had come from the mouth of anyone except a candidate, they might have seemed mildly controversial but broadly true. The statement is being shorthanded in the press with...

If John McCain secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics — a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments. McCain would be the first Republican nominee since Gerald Ford in 1976 to win despite opposition from organized conservatism, and also the first whose base in Republican primaries rested on the party's center and its dwindling left. McCain is winning despite conservatives, not because of them.

If John McCain secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics — a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments. McCain would be the first Republican nominee since Gerald Ford in 1976 to win despite opposition from organized conservatism, and also the first whose base in Republican primaries rested on the party's center and its dwindling left. McCain is winning despite conservatives, not because of them. Those who built the American right, from Barry Goldwater in 1964 through the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, are intensely aware of the dangers a...

Conservatives claim to be in favor of stable families, small businesses, hard work, private schools, investment and homeownership. So why in the world are so many on the right attacking the family of Graeme Frost? Frost is the 12-year-old from Baltimore who delivered the Democrats' reply to a radio address by President Bush in September. The seventh-grader pleaded -- in vain, it turned out -- that the president not veto Congress's $35 billion expansion of the children's health care program known as SCHIP. A car crash in December 2004 left two of Halsey and Bonnie Frost's children comatose, Graeme with...

WASHINGTON -- When a nation alters its philosophical direction and changes its assumptions, there is no press release to announce the shift, no news conference where The People declare they have decided to move down a different path. Yet 2006 is looking more and more like one of history's hinge years, a moment when old ideas are cast aside, new leaders emerge and old leaders decide to speak in new ways. The changes in politics and culture are visible in the many sudden and outright reversals of the conventional wisdom. Nowhere is the evidence of change more striking than among...

Perhaps Vice President Cheney should quit his current job and work within a political system more to his liking, the kind in which those in charge can protect national security by telling everyone what not to say and what not to think. Cheney seemed terribly impatient with democracy Sunday on "Meet the Press" when he suggested that those who oppose President Bush's Iraq policies are helping -- excuse me, validating -- the terrorists. Our allies in the war on terror, Cheney said, "want to know whether or not if they stick their heads up, the United States, in fact, is...

Mexico is in a mess because voters in its presidential election were so closely divided between Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador, the candidate of the center-left, and Felipe Calder?n, the center-right candidate who was declared the narrow winner yesterday. As a result, there are charges of theft and miscounts, of "grave inconsistencies." L?pez Obrador has insisted that the authorities "help clear up any doubts" and "not allow the will of the citizens to be violated." Let's be clear: There's nothing wrong with Mexico's voters. Close elections happen. The test of a democracy is how a bitter dispute of this sort is...

There is no sturdier liberal or Democratic slogan than "Jobs, jobs, jobs." But liberals have a problem: The old capitalist job-production machine is not working the way it used to. The venerable promise that new (progressive) leadership will create masses of well-paying jobs is harder to make and even harder to keep. In principle this is a larger problem for conservatives, whose main economic program involves reinforcing the status quo by giving tax cuts to rich people so they have more money to invest. Conservatives simply ignore the fact that fewer jobs are being created, particularly at home, for each...

<p>By E. J. Dionne Jr.</p> <p>WASHINGTON -- The damage President Bush and the conservative movement have inflicted on their drive to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with allies will not be undone by Harriet Miers' decision to withdraw her nomination.</p>

Those who thought investigations were a wonderful thing when Bill Clinton was president are suddenly facing prosecutors, and they don't like it. It seems like a hundred years ago when Clinton's defenders were accusing his opponents of using special prosecutors, lawsuits, criminal charges and, ultimately, impeachment to overturn the will of the voters. Clinton's conservative enemies would have none of this. No, they said over and over, the Clinton mess was not about sex but about "perjury and the obstruction of justice" and "the rule of law." The old conservative talking points are now inoperative. It's especially amusing to see...

WASHINGTON — President Bush has survived summers of discontent before. But this season's doldrums — reflected in dismal poll numbers and a surprisingly weak Republican showing in a special Ohio congressional election — will be harder to surmount. They are the culmination of doubts about Bush that have germinated below the surface of public opinion for much of his presidency. Typical of the polls was a News-week survey released over the weekend. It showed Bush with a 42-percent approval rating, matching the lowest of his presidency. Only 34 percent approved of his handling of the war in Iraq. A remarkable...

If you were to prepare a list of the top 10 stories you will never, ever read in a newspaper, one of them would surely include a sentence beginning: "Thousands of angry, screaming moderates took to the streets yesterday demanding . . ." You can finish that sentence however you would like. The accepted view in politics is that moderates don't get angry, don't scream and don't demonstrate. Politics these days is said to be dominated by ideological enthusiasts. Moderates are thought of as people who sit on the sidelines and decide which batch of true believers they can most...

Switching Stories By E. J. Dionne Jr. Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A39 When you spend so much time torturing the truth, it's hard to keep your story straight -- or even remember what you just said. The most remarkable moment in Tuesday's debate between Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards came when Cheney issued a blanket denial of the obvious. Edwards, who proved both his value and his loyalty to Democratic nominee John Kerry, declared that "there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th. Period. The 9/11 Commission has said that's true. Colin...

It's not clear anymore that there is a plausible way to turn the Bush administration's disastrous policy in Iraq into anything that would look remotely like success. ...cut... This view is being taken seriously because of the incoherence of the administration's approach and its arrogance in dealing with its critics. If you think that word "arrogance" is too strong, consider the statement Vice President Cheney issued through a spokesman over the weekend: that "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had," and that "people ought to get off his case and let him do...

Here is the biggest surprise of the 2004 election so far: It is John Kerry who is eager to talk about terrorism and national security, and President Bush's campaign that is trying to quash a far-reaching debate on these issues. It wasn't supposed to be this way, at least according to the conventions of presidential politics. Usually it's the Republicans who try to change the subject to foreign policy. Ronald Reagan in 1984 and the first President Bush in 1988 both did exceptionally well among voters who said that international questions and toughness on defense were central to how they...

The Truth About Massachusetts washingtonpost.com By E. J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, February 3, 2004; Page A19 "Padodying Massachsuetts is a way to keep old resentments alive without getting intio any of the incovenient details..." Full text of article & liberal rant: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7220-2004Feb2.html

Tuesday, January 13, 2004, 12:00 a.m. Pacific Democrats try to forge a new moral majority CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa; Rep. Richard A. Gephardt is the bread-and-butter candidate who talks about lost jobs and trade. But in the middle of his stump speech at a packed rally in the public library here last Friday, a sermon broke out. Health coverage, he said, is not about economics. "It's a moral issue," he insisted. "It is immoral for people not to be covered by health insurance." And he closed by riffing with a preacher's rhythm on the refrain "We're all tied together" to evangelize...

A remarkably prescient column from an arch-liberal, but in this case I shudder to think that he's right on target. "If Bush is being attacked from both sides, does that make him a "moderate"? Not at all. What it means is that Bush is pursuing a very shrewd political strategy that could have some very unhappy consequences for conservatives, moderates or liberals. We just can't know now which of these groups will be most unhappy in the long run. That's why Bush's approach is perfect for an election year." ... "Here's what liberals and rebellious fiscal conservatives have in common:...

Democrats Drop the Lunch Pail By E.J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, October 14, 2003; Page A23 [...]But here's the secret of the Democratic primaries: They are no longer dominated by millworkers and milkmen. Steadily, the Democratic Party is becoming the party of the educated upper middle class.Just look at last week's recall vote in California: The strongest opposition to tossing Democratic Gov. Gray Davis from office came from voters with postgraduate degrees. (Davis also appeared to do reasonably well among voters who did not graduate from high school -- part of the Democratic base that pollster Andy Kohut calls "the partisan...

<p>WASHINGTON — President Bush's signature on his big tax cut bill Wednesday marked a watershed in American politics.</p> <p>The rules of policy-making that have applied since the end of World War II are now irrelevant. A narrow Republican majority will work its partisan will, no matter what. Democrats, at least until 2004, will have the grim satisfaction of being a relatively unified opposition that will suffer just enough defections to fail at the finish line.</p>

You have to hand it to President Bush and his judge-pickers. They understand the power of the judiciary to shape American political life for years to come. They brazenly use their executive authority to fill the courts with their allies. Then they attack, attack and attack again when opposition senators dare invoke their own constitutional power to slow a juggernaut whose purpose is to remake the world according to the specifications of Justice Antonin Scalia. To make clear who is in charge, Bush took two circuit court nominees rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, when it was in...