Free Republic

“Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency,” writes Adam Nagourney in the Sunday New York Times. A similar theme appears in Sunday’s Washington Post from Dan Balz, that paper’s lead political analyst. The perception has formed, perhaps indelibly, that the reason Democrats will get hammered in the 2010 elections is that the party moved too far left in general and tried to reform health care in particular. This perception owes itself, above all, to...

My U.S. News column this week is on the roadblocks the Obama administration is encountering to its expansive budget and economic policies. Ours is not a parliamentary democracy like Britain's, where the majority party can push its program through the legislature without much trouble. Members of Congress are, to a considerable extent, independent operators, beholden not to the president but to their own constituents, and act accordingly. Obama's big plans on energy and taxes affect different states and congressional districts in different ways, ways that cut across party lines. So he's encountering roadblocks, and it's not clear whether he'll get...

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:...

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...

Now that Barack Obama has chosen Joe Biden to be his running mate, it will be interesting to see how some journalists will distance themselves from their own scathing opinions of Biden in the past. One such case is that of Jonathan Chait, The New Republic editor, who was very downbeat on Biden in a Los Angeles Times article published on February 4, 2007. Of course, back then it was "safe" to be honest about Joe Biden since it looked like his presidential bid was going nowhere. The very title of Chait's article, "Joe Biden’s just a barrel of gaffes," explains the problems the Obama...

Joe Biden’s just a barrel of gaffes By Jonathan Chait February 04, 2007 in print edition M-4 DELAWARE Sen. Joe Biden has been telling people for months that he’s going to run for president, as if nobody could actually believe it. Even when he formally announced last week, I still didn’t believe it. In fact, I’m not quite sure what it would take to make me believe it. If I turned on the television and watched Biden formally accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, I might believe it then. (On the other hand, I’d probably figure I was...

The presidential election has an oddly placid feel to it. Four years ago, the notion that George W. Bush would get another four years in office, actually ratified by a plurality of the voters, was more than any liberal could bear, and, after the election, there was loose talk everywhere about "Jesusland" and wanting to flee to Canada. This time, even though Democrats are extremely enthusiastic about Barack Obama, that life-and-death quality is absent. I think the reason is that a lot of liberals kind of like John McCain. I know I do.

John McCain and his fiercest enemies all publicly agree: He is and always has been a right-wing conservative. Indeed, those of us who saw McCain as lurching to the ideological left a few years ago are now being portrayed as delusional romantics and partisan schemers. McCain's allies, and delighted conservatives, are... --snip-- In the first two years of George W. Bush's presidency, McCain became, in the words of one prominent Democrat, "the leader of the loyal opposition." McCain voted against both of Bush's major tax cuts. In addition to shepherding campaign finance reform through Congress, he co-sponsored a patients' bill...

The presidential election has an oddly placid feel to it. Four years ago, the notion that George W. Bush would get another four years in office, actually ratified by a plurality of the voters, was more than any liberal could bear, and, after the election, there was loose talk everywhere about "Jesusland" and wanting to flee to Canada. This time, even though Democrats are extremely enthusiastic about Barack Obama, that life-and-death quality is absent. I think the reason is that a lot of liberals kind of like John McCain. I know I do. Eight years ago, I was a hard-core...

To urge the white working class to vote on the basis of economic policy is itself considered an act of elitism.... But nobody's challenging the validity of caring more about your religion, or even your right to hunt, than your income. The objection is whether it makes sense to vote on that basis. There are...stark differences between the two parties on economic matters. Republicans do want to make working-class voters pay a higher proportion of the tax burden, restrain popular social programs, erode the value of the minimum wage, and so on. Democrats, on the other hand, have no plans...

Last week, the Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias suggested that Hillary Clinton may want Barack Obama to lose the general election. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum, an Obama supporter who often defends Clinton, replies, "she's not rooting for John McCain and she's not secretly plotting Barack Obama's downfall." Who's right? Obviously, it's impossible to know for sure either way, since it's a question of motive. I think Clinton's political interests clearly militate toward a harsh campaign against Obama. Her only chance of winning is to disqualify him as a general election candidate, giving the superdelegates no chance but to contravene the elected...

Hillary's campaign tactics are causing some liberals to turn against the couple. Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read -- kept saying the same thing: They've suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons. The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions...

Earlier this morning, I noted that some Democrats have discovered that the Clintonian Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy meme may actually have been drizzly pap. In the Los Angeles Times today, Jonathan Chait reluctantly comes to that conclusion. He writes that the conservatives who have long railed against the lies and dirty tactics of the Clintons have been somewhat vindicated by the primary campaign tactics of Bill and Hillary: Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not...

Hillary's campaign tactics are causing some liberals to turn against the couple. Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, ... -- kept saying the same thing: They've suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons. The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing...

A few post-Iowa thoughts: 1. In his book about the Democratic Leadership Council, "Reinventing Democrats," Ken Baer recounts how DLC-ites always imagined Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign as a centrist crusade to take the party back from its orthodox liberal wing, picturing a Clinton battle against a liberal favorite like Mario Cuomo. Instead, Clinton found himself running against uber-centrist Paul Tsongas, and ended up emphasizing populist themes. Hillary Clinton is in a similar spot now. Her main strategist, Mark Penn, has been positioning her as the centrist for years. And now she finds herself running against an opponent in Barack Obama...

Of all the low points during the Bush administration, perhaps the most surreal was the week in December 2004 when Bernie Kerik was poised to become secretary of Homeland Security. By the traditional measures used to judge qualifications for this sort of job, Kerik was not an ideal candidate. The main points in Kerik's favor were his loyal service to Rudy Giuliani, first as driver for his mayoral campaign, then corrections commissioner, then police commissioner--the last of which was commemorated by the casting of 30 Kerik busts. On the negative side of the ledger were his multiple alleged felonies, including...

HH: Joined now by Jonathan Chait, editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times. Jonathan Chait, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show. JC: Thanks. By the way, I write columns, not editorials. So I don't write any of those editorials, so your readers know. HH: Are you on the editorial board there? JC: No, I'm not. HH: Okay. And do you live on the West Coast now? Or are you on the East Coast? JC: I live in D.C., Washington, D.C. I just write a column that appears every week. HH: Jonathan, to get some background for people to anchor them...

There have been a great number of petty and unfair attacks leveled at George W. Bush in the past five years. He's slow witted. He surrounds himself with incompetent "yes men." He's Hitler. But the pettiest and least fair to date is the charge that President Bush exercises too much. For whatever reason, liberals have developed an obsession with the president's "obsession" with physical fitness. Last month the New Republic's Jonathan Chait, writing in the Los Angeles Times, castigated President Bush for his "obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy." "Bush's insistence that the entire populace follow his example,...

One of the important ideas of a democratic culture is that we all have equal standing in the public square. That doesn't mean stupid ideas should be taken as seriously as smart ones. It means that the content of an argument should be judged on its own merits. The left seems to be embracing the notion of moral authority in part as a tactical response to the right. For years, conservatives have said or implied that if you criticize a war, you hate the soldiers. During the Clinton years, conservatives insisted that the president lacked "moral authority" to send troops...

Blindly battling over Roberts I'M HAVING a hard time figuring out who's less rational: the liberal activists campaigning to defeat John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination, or the conservative activists campaigning to support it. Roberts, of course, is President Bush's widely hailed surprise pick to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Roberts has won praise from moderate liberal legal analysts such as Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago and my New Republic colleague Jeffrey Rosen. Roberts is widely regarded as extremely intelligent. Unlike conservative ideologues such as Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, he prefers not to rewrite legal doctrine with...