Free Republic

I will reiterate right up front the fundamental truth that denial is not a plan. And yet we have Ed Kilgore at The New Republic arguing something that might be summarized as, "Well, the Democrats may be falling out of favor, but the Republicans still suck as much as ever." And because Republicans suck as much as ever, Ed argues, that there really is not much of a danger that the GOP can take back the House, much less the Senate, next year. Denial.

The last Democrat who held the White House, Bill Clinton, saw the core of his domestic agenda come to ruin, his political support collapse, and his failure spawn a massive Republican resurgence that made progressive reform impossible for a decade to come. The Democrat who last held the White House before that, Jimmy Carter, saw the exact same thing happen to him. At this early date, nobody can know whether or not Barack Obama will escape this fate. But the contours of failure are now clearly visible. In Obama's case, as with his predecessors, the prospective culprit is the same:...

A solution for the reading gap between black and white children was discovered four decades ago. So, why aren't we taking advantage of it?One does not expect to see New York's school Chancellor Joel Klein on the same stage as Reverend Al Sharpton. Klein is infamous for his emphasis on test scores and shutting down schools that fail to measure up. Not so long ago, Sharpton was in the barricades with Russell Simmons protesting mayor Michael Bloomberg and Klein's plan to cut New York City's education budget. Yet these days the two are teaming up for the Education Equality Project,...

Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned due to his involvement in a prostitution ring, is slowly attempting to edge himself back into the public eye with his new column in Slate. The problem from the POV of The New Republic is that Spitzer is trying to make himself relevant again much too quickly without showing the proper remorse. As a result, The New Republic gives Spitzer some atonement advice written by Jacob Gershman which does the former governor no real service since anything he does now will come off as a cynical attempt to return to the public...

They don't have political rallies to bring them together anymore, but it's no secret that a lot of people out there don't much like Barack Obama. The president-elect, according to his more fervent campaign-season detractors, has a raft of unforgivable faults: He's a socialist, a Muslim, an actual love-child of Malcolm X. His birth certificate was missing, his book had been ghost-written by William Ayers, and his wife, "Mrs. Grievance," as a National Review cover dubber her, was perennially on the cusp of getting caught ranting against the white man. The only thing keeping the Illinois senator's infamy from going...

The Democratic majority: It emerged! Even before the final results showing a Democratic sweep were in, Washington's pundits were declaring that nothing had really changed politically in the country. In a cover story labeled "AMERICA THE CONSERVATIVE," Newsweek editor Jon Meacham warned that, "[s]hould Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal." Meacham's judgment was echoed by Peter Wehner, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "America remains, in the main, a center-right nation," Wehner wrote in The Washington Post. These guys--and the others who are counseling Barack...

Why the Jews finally came home to Obama By late last spring, concerns about Jews deserting the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, had reached a fever pitch. Writing in his popular blog for Politico, Ben Smith declared that Obama had a "Jewish problem." In late May, Jodi Kantor of The New York Times traveled to Florida to interview the elderly Jews who were thought to be most skeptical of the Illinois Senator. Kantor's article--"As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of Its Jews Have Doubts"--included one octogenarian's ominous warning: "The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of...

It's been a confusing day of polling -- one of those where I'm happy to have a computer handy to do my dirty work for me. The trend over the past 7-10 days remains slightly toward McCain. It is difficult to pinpoint, however, just where the movement started. If I take the average of my daily point estimates from Thursday through Sunday -- since the final presidential debate was concluded -- I show Obama at a +6.0. That compares with a +6.6 in the ten days that proceeded the debate. However, looking at things even more precisely, it appears that...

McCain's surrogates are now raising questions about Barack Obama's past use of mind-altering substances. "God forbid somebody would do some reporting on Barack Obama's use of drugs," complained Rudy Giuliani on Fox News. Actually, the New York Times did just that back in February--and they discovered that Obama did fewer drugs than he said he did in his book. According to the Times investigators, Obama may have "added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic." That's right. When will Obama come clean with us and admit he's a secret goody-two-shoes?

David Brooks, the "House Conservative" of the New York Times, should seriously consider putting his self-description as "conservative" in quotes at all times in order to comply with truth in packaging. I mean how conservative can you be when liberal sources are quoting you favorably, especially when you sound like, without quite saying so, you are endorsing Barack Obama? The liberal New Republic cites Brooks favorably for his almost endorsement of The One: Has David Brooks Endorsed Obama? Not in so many words, but please continue: Well, not exactly. After all, he has one paragraph in his column in Friday's...

Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it. The campaigns themselves can't afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can't say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn't going to save John McCain. The race is over. John McCain's candidacy is as much a casualty of Wall Street as Lehman or Merrill. Like those once vibrant institutions, McCain's collapse was stunning and quick. One minute you are a well-respected brand. The next you are yelling at the messengers of your...

<p>The political word today is that the Republicans will return to personal attacks on Obama and Biden to draw attention away from McCain's erratic performance during the days before the passage of the Great Rescue/Bailout/U.S.-as-Sweden bill. We are supposedly to hear again about the Reverend Wright, the unreverend Tony Lezko, and William Ayers, the unrepentent Weatherman.</p>

Your humble correspondent is of the opinion that, without even knowing who wins the election in November, one can easily determine the winner by simply looking at the screen shots of liberal members of the MSM on the day after the election. Are the faces of Brian Williams, Katie Couric, Chris Matthews, etc. mournful? That will pretty much tell you who won the election the previous day. Likewise, simply by reading an analysis of last night's debate in Oxford, Mississippi in liberal publications, one can determine who won that debate without even watching it. It is called reading the liberal...

No rest for the pollsters on Sunday: So ... what's the headline here? Probably the Public Policy Polling survey showing a 46-46 tie there. One wonders if the McCain campaign's internals are telling them something similar, since they are now shifting resources into the state. And Barack Obama was out in Charlotte today. But yet, my model still does not consider North Carolina to be a plausible tipping point state. Why not? Partly because the polling there has hardly been uniformly favorable to Obama -- it was barely ten days ago when SuvreyUSA released a poll showing him down 20...

Jonathan! Oh Jonathan! Paging Jonathan Chait! To paraphrase a certain wide stance senator, you've been a bad boy, a naughty boy. In fact, you're probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy. You see, you've written a long smear of Sarah Palin in the New Republic where you are The senior editor and yet a certain name was missing in your attack. What was that name? Why, Joe Biden. And why is Chait so reluctant to so much as mention Biden nowadays except in passing? Simple. When it looked like Biden had not a chance in the world of ever being...

Even though the Obama campaign says it is. This one tries to saddle Obama with Franklin Raines, the disgraced former head of Fannie Mae, who, according to the McCain ad, has been giving Obama "advice on mortgage and housing policy" The Obama campaign has now sent out this statement from Raines:"I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." And Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton goes on to say: "This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth. Frank Raines...

But Obama was also worried about something else. He told Kellman that he feared community organizing would never allow him "to make major changes in poverty or discrimination." To do that, he said, "you either had to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials." In other words, Obama believed that his chosen profession was getting him nowhere, or at least not far enough. Personally, he might end up like his father; politically, he would fail to improve the lot of those he was trying to help. And so, Obama told Kellman, he had decided to leave community...

A new political map has been drawn, says The New York Times: With just over eight weeks left until Election Day, the two sides are settling into an unusually broad set of state-by-state face-off... The map is the same as ever, says The New York Times: While McCain aides once believed that his appeal to independents might help him win a traditional Democratic state like New Jersey, and Obama aides thought their candidate’s broad appeal could be a lift in traditionally Republican ones like Montana, the emerging battlegrounds picked by both campaigns so far resemble the Bush-Kerry electoral map in...

Although the topline results don't make it obvious, it appears that John McCain had a fairly strong night of polling in the daily tracking polls, which are the only numbers we have to look at today. The Gallup tracker now shows Barack Obama leading by 2 points, down from 4 a day ago. When I attempt to estimate the daily results from the topline numbers, however, I get the following: Wednesday: Obama +7.8 Thursday: Obama +2.4 Friday: McCain +4.2 So Obama's numbers are being propped up by a strong night of polling on Wednesday, which will cycle out tomorrow. He...

...But his campaign has taken the point a step further, implying that Obama the politician is a direct descendant of Obama the organizer--that he has carried the practices and principles of community organizing into his campaign, and would carry them into the White House as well. This is the version of Obama's biography that most journalists have accepted. In truth, however, if you examine carefully how Obama conducted himself as an organizer and how he has conducted himself as a politician, if you consider what he said about organizing to his fellow organizers, and if you look at the reasons...