By every indication, President Obama has tried to negotiate grand bargain deficit deals with Speaker Boehner. And twice, Boehner, not the president, walked away from the negotiating table.
Many of you saw Matt Bai's recent profile of Ohio in the Sunday Times magazine section. To summarize it crudely, Bai explores this question: Ohio is c...
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- On the morning of Aug. 30, Sheelah Kolhatkar, a features editor and national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, made her way...
President Obama and Speaker Boehner understood the parameters of a solution and came remarkably close to a deal. The solutions are not difficult to imagine, just the willingness of our leaders to embrace them, and their followers to follow.
Nothing in nihilism's long intellectual history has prepared the world for its latest incarnation as the 21st century Republican party, or in its ultimate flowering in the likes of Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.
Perhaps mainstream media reporters are feeling threatened in their own jobs, but that is no reason to turn on the few people who still have some modicum of economic security in this country.
A legendary film captured the battle over the soul of news and the women and men who delivered it.
And if we're going to have the civility conversation, it would be nice if commentators avoided resorting to the mindless meme that "both sides" are equally responsible for the ugly, over-heated rhetoric that is now so commonplace.
Yes, there are people who called Bush a "modern Hitler," or believed he had some role in the 9/11 attacks. Those people are generally not given talkshows, and cannot be found in positions of power in the Democratic Party.
If there's one thing you can still count on from today's increasingly erratic politics, it is pure unadulterated paradox. One could say the Washington circus features as many morons as oxymorons.
Today's "journalists," like Matt Bai of the New York Times, see no difference between themselves and those they serve. Indeed, when they hear the term "political elites" -- they now see themselves in the mirror.
If the president can let go of his attachment to his postpartisan self-image and embrace the policies Americans want and need, they can be his North Star. But he needs to get over his reflexive distaste for the "old dogma" of the "left."
The Blue Dogs are right about campaign strategy in some conservative districts -- but they greatly overstate their case. Granularity is usually lost in our political narrative, and the numbers suggest subtle, diverging politics.
The conservative wing of the Democratic Party just drove it over a cliff, but you'd never know if from reading Matt Bai's latest New York Times piece.
Social Security is in surplus until 2037. Yet the idea that the road to recovery leads through cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other social outlays that are keeping the depression from worsening, if anything, is gaining traction among opinion elites.
It's hard not to be impressed by the science-fiction weirdness of that "giant milk cow" image, which seems like a mashup of The Matrix and Babe. But the fact that he spews abuse is less of a problem than his lack of comprehension.
Is the "only potent grassroots" populist movement on the right? Is populism for Democrats a dead strategy? Being a student of history, and an active participant in movement politics right now, I think it is important to make a few points here.
In the 2010 midterms, the DNC will have to convince voters who went to the polls for the first time for Obama to vote for Democratic candidates and incumbents lacking Obama's charisma.
Martha Coakley and her out-of-touch strategists lost touch with what Barack Obama and his creative campaign did to rally a new winning coalition in 2008.
Obama's Bittergate remark -- which I broke and which is revisited in David Plouffe's new book -- was and still is one of the biggest stories of that historic presidential run. It is also still one of the least understood. Here's the untold story behind it.
One of the key measures the Obama White House has employed in crafting a comprehensive health care reform package is to ensure that the avenues of com...
Put enough pressure on Wal-Mart over the healthcare issue, and they will push even harder to offload the burden to the government.
