Free Republic

The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai (Penguin Press, 316 pp., $25.95) Matt Bai’s The Argument is the most significant book to date on the upcoming 2008 elections—not because it has anything to say about the horse race for the Democratic nomination, but because it offers an account of the people who constitute what Howard Dean calls “the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.” Bai writes regularly on politics for the New York Times Magazine, where some of this material originally appeared. He has been sharply critical of George W. Bush and...

Seven years later, the pain lingers for some. “Since ‘Seinfeld’ ended its first run, no new network sitcom has come along that even compares with it in terms of intelligence and wittiness -- especially not at NBC, which each fall stands for New Bad Comedies,” Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote in July 2003, after watching Jerry Seinfeld perform his standup routine. It’s cute that he slips the words “first run” in there, as if there may eventually be a “second run.” There won’t be. The actors have plenty of cash, and aren’t likely to tarnish their franchise with...

After last November's defeat, Democrats were like aviation investigators sifting through twisted metal in a cornfield, struggling to posit theories about the disaster all around them. Some put the onus on John Kerry, saying he had never found an easily discernable message. Others, including Kerry himself, wrote off the defeat to the unshakable realities of wartime, when voters were supposedly less inclined to jettison a sitting president. Liberal activists blamed mushy centrists. Mushy centrists blamed Michael Moore. As the weeks passed, however, at Washington dinner parties and in public post-mortems, one explanation took hold not just among Washington insiders but...

At the Shadow Party’s "Take Back America" conference in Washington on June 3, 2004, following a glowing introduction from Hillary Clinton, George Soros stepped to the podium to explain to the audience that when it came to electoral politics in the USA, he was a newcomer. Only his outrage over Bush’s invasion of Iraq had stirred him to get involved in the partisan struggle. "[I]t is the first time that I feel that I need to stand up and do something, and become really engaged in the electoral process in this country," Soros said.[1] This was far from the truth,...