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Tag Archives: Barack Obama
Government Misconduct in the Age of Obama
The Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative organizations, the changing Benghazi story, and now we find that the Department of Justice obtained two months of phone records from reporters and editors of Associated Press. It isn’t quite truthiness but is it time for Stephen Colbert to add another new word to our political lexicon?
Politics in the Blogosphere, May 6, 2013 Edition
Before The GOP goes gonzo for Gomez as Gabrielle Gurley puts it in Commonwealth Magazine, they should read Jeff Jacoby’s realistic Sunday column in the Boston Globe. To Gomez’s refrain that he has always been a Republican, Jacoby writes: “He has yet to tell voters why — and why they should find that attractive.” But that is the problem here – Massachusetts voters do not find the Republican Party to be attractive, especially its national variant.
No one has studied Where the votes are in Boston longer or with more precision than Larry DiCara, so read his article in CommonWealth Magazine to prep for the mayoral race, with a field that may be larger than the entrants in the Kentucky Derby.
A Dreadful State of the Union, Redeemed
From the Academic Blogosphere
Ever think gee, I’d like to serve my country – - perhaps an ambassadorship or Cabinet post. Prepare yourself for one of the worst experiences of your life — the confirmation process, says former Ambassador Christopher Hill (confirmed five times) in America’s Unconfirmed Hostages.
So with the president re-elected he (and we) won’t have to endure any more campaigning from him, correct? Incorrect. The perpetual need for money is so great that President Obama can look forward to many fund-raising events in the next four years (Bill Clinton attended 471 second-term fund-raisers). Read about it in Professor Brendan J. Doherty’s New York Times piece, A Campaign Without End.
Can Obama Win the Debate with Metaphors?
The Yale economist Robert J. Shiller is urging President Barack Obama to find a new metaphor to define his second term policies that would make inclusion its focus. Shiller means economic inclusion, which he sees as essential to our national and global progress. You can read Shiller’s post A Metaphor for Obama over at Project Syndicate.
The Real Impact of Big Money in 2012
One of the narratives that came out of the 2012 campaign was that “the people” (read: Obama backers) narrowly escaped an election hijacked by a narrow band of one-percenters funding Mitt Romney and associated SuperPACS. The reality is somewhat more complicated, as my UMB colleagues Tom Ferguson and Jie Chen and Paul Jorgenson of the University of Texas show in Revealed: Why the Pundits Are Wrong About Big Money and the 2012 Elections. As the authors argue it isn’t that some loose alliance of “the people” beat back big money, but that
Our conclusion is that there is nothing paradoxical about the Republican loss. One campaign funded largely by the super-rich lost to another just about as affluently funded.
Next Recession Will Be Political, Not Economic
One of the economics blogs I like to check out is Project Syndicate, where University of California at Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong recently posted America’s Political Recession. Professor DeLong takes up the notion of a bipartisan solution for our economic woes and has an interesting take on the intransigence of the Republican Party:
Obama broadly follows Ronald Reagan’s (second-term) security policy, George H.W. Bush’s spending policy, Bill Clinton’s tax policy, the bipartisan Squam Lake Group’s financial-regulatory policy, Perry’s immigration policy, John McCain’s climate-change policy, and Mitt Romney’s health-care policy (at least when Romney was governor of Massachusetts). And yet he has gotten next to no Republicans to support their own policies.
Why Don’t We See More Bipartisanship?
Some of us look back through our gauzy memories and remember President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill working together to solve the nation’s challenges. As Nina Totenberg on NPR reminded us today, they were fierce partisans with differing views of the role of government. But Totenberg says, they each had respect for the co-equal branch and institutional place of the other. That seems lacking today.
Gov. Patrick at SolomonMcCown&
Boston PR firm SolomonMcCown& hosted Gov. Deval Patrick for a post-election chat at the Boston Harbor Hotel Wednesday morning. I’ll have more to say about it in future posts perhaps but amidst the high policy and good humor from a relaxed governor there was this moving moment, which I quote from the SolomonMcCown& page on the event:
“(The governor) became emotional briefly in acknowledging that ‘it’s hard to engage on race in America,’ adding: ‘It’s all around us, but we haven’t figured out as a nation yet how to acknowledge both the extraordinary progress we have made … and how much remains to be done.’”
Election Day in America. Lucky Us.
Today is Election Day in America and we should be grateful for how fortunate we are. We get to elect our leaders and our votes are counted honestly and competently (almost always) and if an incumbent loses he or she actually leaves the office. This sort of thing hasn’t happened all that many times in human history and doesn’t happen to this day in many places We get to take it for granted.