The New Republic

Should Obama run as a populist?

“Obama is nobody’s idea of “just folks.” He’s too cosmopolitan, multiracial, professorial, self-controlled, and physically fit to present himself as an incarnation of the American common man. His otherness has always inclined him toward an E Pluribus Unum approach rather than Us Against Them.”

- Geoffrey Kabaservice, Should Obama Run as a Populist? Part One of a TNR Symposium

Photo courtesy of The Moderate Voice

“What Romney would do: Cut taxes and regulations, shrink government, undo pretty much the entire Obama agenda, and stick it to labor.

The Good: Using independent boards of experts to assign federal research dollars. Allowing more highly skilled immigrants to work and stay in the country. Getting tough with China, assuming it’s done right.

The Bad: Requiring congressional approval of all “major” regulations, apparent reductions in funding of productive investments like education and infrastructure.

The Ugly: Capping total federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, with 4 percent reserved for defense—a potentially devastating reduction in government services that, if implemented swiftly, could also deal a serious economic blow. Then again, his numbers don’t really add up, so who knows what he’d really do?

The Verdict: The focus on lower taxes and regulation will appeal to conservatives who see those as major impediments to long-term growth. The lack of investment in education, infrastructure, and technology will worry everybody else. In some ways, the real story is what’s not here: Proposals designed specifically to boost growth in the short run, despite still-high unemployment. 

They Said It: “Our best hope—and not an entirely implausible one—is that presumptive-nominee Romney has a secret plan for the economy. If he doesn’t, we may be in for years’ more stagnation.” - Josh Barro, in the Guardian”

- Jonathan Cohn, The Blind Spot in Romney’s Economic Plan

Photo courtesy of Business Insider

Is climate change a wedge issue versus Romney?

“Looked at another way, though, climate change might not be a bad thing for Obama to talk about—as a wedge issue, with certain audiences. Specifically, the well-educated swing voters who backed him last time around but may be taking a look at Romney, who showed strength with upscale voters in the Republican primary. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar recently argued that this is a real vulnerability for Obama:

It’s easy to forget, now that Obama is preaching a populist message on the campaign trail, that a major part of his support came from the very 1 percent that he’s now calling on to pay their fair share in taxes. Obama carried the super-wealthy—those making $200,000 or more a year—with 52 percent of the vote, 17 points more thanJohn Kerry won in 2004. But now surveys show Obama losing significant ground with affluent voters, trailing Romney 49 percent to 43 percent among those making $100,000 or more in the latest Quinnipiac poll—his worst showing among any economic demographic.”

- Alec MacGillis (and a quote from Josh Kraushaar), Is Climate Change A Wedge Issue vs Romney?

Photo courtesy of Earth beat Radio

Should Obama attack Romney for being hollow or extreme?

“Left without a manufactured scandal or over-hyped gaffe to talk about these past few days, the media circus has turned its attention to matters of a higher order: campaign semiotics. Specifically, the apparent shift in the framing of the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney, from casting him as a hollow man who “lacks a core” to casting him as someone who’s been sticking to a conservative, even extreme line for a while now on, among other issues, immigration, women’s health care, and the Ryan budget plan, which he recently declared “marvelous.” Monday, Politico went so far as to divine the big dog’s footprints in this messaging transformation, tracing it back to a meeting that Bill Clinton held with Obama’s top strategists back in November—“A more effective strategy, Clinton has told anyone who would listen, would be to focus almost exclusively on Romney’s description of himself as a ‘severe conservative,’ to deny him any chance to tack back to the center, according to three Democrats close to the situation.””

- Alec MacGillis, A False Choice For Obama’s Anti-Romney Message

Photo courtesy of seattlepi

What does the 2012 campaign’s biggest donor really want?

“The smoked-glass canyons of downtown Dallas were a heady place in the years of Simmons’s ascent, so awash in oil money following the 1973 embargo that a popular local bumper sticker of the era read, SECEDE AND JOIN OPEC. This was the Dallas of Dallas, a milieu of hand-tooled alligator boots and Blackglama furs in which old money imitated new money with abandon. “Nowhere else,” a local boutique owner told the journalist Sandy Sheehy in Texas Big Rich, her chronicle of the era, “would you put on pink shorts, a lynx coat, a seventeen-carat diamond, and get into a white Rolls-Royce to go to the Safeway.””

- Charles Homans, The Operator

Photo courtesy of Forbes

How might the Greek election cause Europe to crumble?

“Anyone anxiously waiting for the European Union’s death knell could do worse than circle May 6 on his calendar. That’s when Greece, a nation brought to its knees by an unprecedented economic crisis, is scheduled to hold what promises to be a turbulent parliamentary election. It’s an open question whether Europe’s fragile political balance—and Greece’s tenuous hold on membership in the Eurozone—will survive the subsequent aftershocks. What’s already clear is that life in Greece will never quite be the same.”

- Yannis Palaiologos, How an Election in Greece Could Cause Europe to Crumble

Photo courtesy of Red Pepper

Are swing voters as crucial as they are made out to be?

“The important factor is not where voters’ inclinations started out, but the fact that their inclinations were changed at all. The act of persuading a swing voter has traditionally been thought of as moving a given voter from more likely to vote against a given candidate to more likely to vote for him—say from 55 percent likely to vote against to 55 percent likely to vote for. But it could also mean moving that voter from somewhat likely to vote for a candidate to very likely to support that candidate (say from 55 percent likelihood to 65 percent)—or, for that matter, from very likely to almost certain (65 percent to 75 percent). All three of these examples are mathematically equivalent—and it makes sense to think of them all as swing voters.”

- Rut Teixeira, Why There Are Many More Swing Voters Than You Think

Photo courtesy of Flickr

Despite their rhetoric, is there any reason to believe the Muslim Brotherhood are not radicals and theocrats?

“Later, when pressed on the role of women at Georgetown by a liberal Egyptian activist, Asem said, “We are … working to improve the situation of women in society, getting to the root causes of the problem of the marginalization of women.” It remains unclear, though, how the Muslim Brotherhood’s longtime opposition to legislation banning female genital mutilation, which a Brotherhood parliamentarian recently reiterated, plays into the Brotherhood’s supposed concerns for women’s social role. And when CNN’s Brianna Keilar pressed al-Dardery on the Brotherhood’s clitorectomy stance, the parliamentarian suddenly got defensive. “The Egyptian people will decide for themselves what is good for them,” I overheard him telling Keilar. “It is not acceptable for anyone to tell the Egyptian people how to think this way or the other way.” Al-Dardery’s insistence on Egypt’s sovereign right to circumcise women was, perhaps, his most honest remark of the trip.”

- Eric Trager, The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mendacious Charm Campaign in Washington

Photo courtesy of POMED

When will Santorum fold?

“More than any presidential candidate since maybe Gary Hart in 1984, Santorum vindicated the quixotic dreamers who struggle on despite invisible poll ratings, tin-cup financing, and the dismissive wisecracks from political insiders. Santorum was a throw-back candidate—not only with his 1950s social values, but also in his forged-by-necessity embrace of the most old-fashioned way of running for president. In Iowa, where he made his move in the polls only two weeks before the January 3 caucuses, Santorum campaigned everywhere, responded at (sometimes tedious) length to every voter question, and cheerfully deflected skeptical press queries like the one I posed to him in mid-December: “Some days, don’t you get discouraged?””

- Walter Shapiro, The One Nice Thing About Rick Santorum’s Now-Doomed Campaign

Can we say that the economy is in recovery yet?

“This morning’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the economy added 227,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate did not change: It’s still 8.3 percent. But that is not surprising and that is not necessarily bad news.”

- Jonathan Cohn, New Jobs Report: Can We Say “Recovery” Yet?