“In public, they smiled and waved,” Jodi Kantor writes, “but how were the Obamas really reacting to the White House?”
Why it's a very bad sign for the Obama Administration, and for Washington.
Republican Presidential nominees have opposed Roe v. Wade since Reagan. But this year’s candidates are taking more extreme steps…
A candidate who should be raising his arms in unalloyed triumph—he’s officially the first modern Republican who’s not already President to win both Iowa and New Hampshire—is instead battered and bleeding…
Cheri Daniels, Anthony Kennedy, and three others to point a finger at…
Cheri Daniels, Anthony Kennedy, and three others to point a finger at…
Back before his hair turned whiter than the Republican base, Newt Gingrich used to call Democrats “the enemy of normal Americans.” If so, then where, oh where in the G.O.P. field is there a normal American for a Dem to be enemies with? O.K., Huntsman seems fairly normal. But Romney, the dog-on-car guy? Santorum, the man-on-dog dude? Pistol-packin’ Perry, who guns down canines while jogging? Ron Paul?
Granted, the exit of Bachmann—who, despite being told to run by dog spelled backwards, was the first of the seven who made it to the voting stage to quit—precipitated a slight rise in the overall normalcy quotient. Who will join her among the departed after New Hampshire and South Carolina? Click on the drawings, right, by Tom Bachtell, to see the candidates’ ratings.
—Hendrik Hertzberg
> Rating: Family Guy.
> Why? His wife and children are his favorite talking points, even though they’re not unborn.
> How’s it going? When other Christianists faltered, Santorum went from “Who he?” to “How about that nice young man?” It’s too bad he’s already a Catholic. If he were a mainline Protestant, like Republicans used to be, he could: 1. Become an Episcopal priest like ex-Senator John Danforth. 2. Convert. 3. Join the Catholic clergy while staying married under a recent loophole. 4. Switch his office-seeking target from Washington to Rome. 5. Puff of white smoke!
> Read More: Tie goes to Santorum
Santorum and abortion
Latest coverage
> Rating: Paleoprophet
> Why? In the future, everyone gets to be not Mitt Romney for fifteen minutes, but in the Iowa Bowl, little Ron was QB Mitt’s beefiest lineman, throwing a key block on Newt to prevent the sack.
> How’s it going? Alas, Republicans want a Santa, not an elf. But still: he’s so cute! He says the darndest things! Forget all that bigoted stuff. That’s yesterday’s newsletters! Spry, sassy Ron’s the Occupy-pacifist-anarchist left’s favorite Republican! The Fox News ward bosses are correct that he can’t be nominated, but so what? On his plane of existence, squalid considerations like “winning” and “losing” do not apply. You can’t kill a dream.
> Read More: Ron Paul, spoiler?
Nicholas Lemann: Enemy of the State
Latest coverage
> Rating: Hillary, 2008 B.B.O.
> Why? The inevitable nominee. The inevitable nominee. The inevitable nominee. Everybody said so then, everybody says so now, but even a stopped conventional wisdom is right once in a while. Is he “likable enough,” though? If not, does it matter?
> How’s it going? Quite well, actually. These things are relative, you see. For Mitt to blow it, somebody else has to do less badly, and not just for a week or a month but consistently.
> Read More: Eight Was Enough
The Mittster And The Job Figures
Latest coverage
> Rating: Vote Huntsman 2016!
> Why? The plan, at least as seen from the outside: 1. Use 2012 to polish campaigning skills, build name recognition, become a press darling, make some friends and not too many enemies, get a rep as a non-crazy, relatively moderate conservative. 2. Wait for whoever gets the G.O.P. nod to blow a sure thing by being too right-wing. 3. Get elected in 2016.
> How’s it going? Losing was always an essential part of the plan. Not losing this badly, though.
> Read More: The Huntsman Girls
Evan Osnos interviews Huntsman
Latest coverage
> Rating: Once and Futurist Has-Been.
> Why? Many Republican voters were too young or too ignorant to know about Newt’s excellent adventures of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but the Republican establishment made it its business to educate them. The elephant remembers.
> How’s it going? Newt’s in kamikaze mode, and he’s aimed himself directly at Mitt Romney. But he’ll come out all right. As he has reminded us, Newt was “selling speeches” for sixty grand apiece when he was in the “private sector.”
> Read More: Kelefa Sanneh on Gingrich
Hertzberg: “Alt-Newt”
Latest coverage
> Rating: Oops.
> Why? It’s not just what he said when he forgot the name of the third department he’d like to eliminate. It’s how he ought to feel about his decision to jump into the race to begin with. (Embarrassed Texans feel it for him.) After Iowa, he had to choose between withdrawal and denial. He’s goin’ with denial.
> How’s it going? In a dog whistle to evangelicals, Perry likened himself to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. The flaw in the comparison: when Tebow ostentatiously goes down on one knee to pray, he’s already in the end zone.
> Links: Why Perry’s no Tebow
Perry and Texas
Latest coverage
> Rating: The Lady Vanishes.
> Why? The Lord moves in mysterious ways. He was just leading her on when He whispered in her ear that He wanted her in the White House. Turns out He’s not a member of the Promise Keepers.
> How’s it going? What didn’t happen in Iowa won’t even get a chance to not happen in New Hampshire.
> Read More: Ryan Lizza on Bachmann’s rise
Bachmann Exits
Latest coverage
On television in New Hampshire, the fight for the libertarian anti-war vote takes an interesting turn.
Click each graphic to expand
What’s next on the road to Super Tuesday.
It takes two hundred and seventy to win. How much is each state worth?
A blue-red breakdown of the 2008 Presidential election.
Stories about campaigns past and politics from our archives.
A Harris Survey released this week reports that in an election held now with George Romney at the head of the Republican ticket, Romney would win with fifty-three per cent of the popular vote. Such findings establish the approximate extent of the President’s vulnerability; they cannot be taken as a measure of the problems that face Romney or any other Republican candidate…
Michael Kelly on the 1996 primaries.
James Thurber on 1948’s “Dewey Dewey Fog.”
Recommendations from The New Yorker’s writers and editors.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two Brits, explain the roots of radical conservatism in America. Published in 2005, but anticipates the problems both of Obama and of the Tea Partiers.
Bill Clinton’s talking points about the need for “smart government,” for Democrats who have been cowed into silence or confusion. Also, inevitably, an exercise in Presidential one-upmanship.
You think post-partisanship is a good idea? Princeton historian Sean Wilentz may change your mind. He argues in The New Republic that Presidents who have been averse to party politics invariably have invited “political defeat and even catastrophe.”
Larry M. Bartels explains the link between growing income inequality and our dysfunctional political system. (Turns out that, in the last fifty years, low-income white voters have become more Democratic, not less.)
Key quote from this Wall Street Journal piece: “The rate at which the firms Bain invested in ran into trouble appears to be higher than experienced by some rival buyout firms during the era.”
The gridlock in D.C. has sent me searching through the literature on the polarization of American politics. Bill Bishop’s 2008 book offers an insight on every page.
A carefully researched work by London-based scholar Anatol Lieven; he lays out the ground-level case that Pakistan is not quite as frail and doomed as is commonly declared in the West.
Bruce Cumings’s book is a well-argued narrative that insists upon greater understanding of North Korea’s originating pathologies.
Beyond its enviable title, David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf’s 1996 book is a definitive, deeply reported account of the original Gingrich Wave, which changed Congress and Washington’s political assumptions.
