Looking Back at the Arkansas Senate Race →

Nominating a more conservative candidate because she or he is the more electable Democrat is sometimes necessary, but nominating more conservative Democrats who can't win anyway is pointless. This is not just an abstract point, because candidates like Blanche Lincoln, even if she were to win, often stand in the way of successfully passing legislation once they are elected. Therefore, if they are not more electable in November, there is very little strategic reason to nominate these types of candidates in primaries.

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Bill Clinton, Blanche Lincoln and Democracy in Arkansas →

In an election like Lincoln's the general disdain for primary challengers which is held almost universally by political elites is also probably a factor which pushes people like Bill Clinton to support her. This demonstrates the enduring strength and allure of the insider political culture and the deep fear of a primary challenge which many elected officials fear. After all, if people like Lincoln lose primaries simply because they lose touch with voters, than almost anybody would be vulnerable to a primary challenge. The word for that is democracy; and it is disturbing to again see how many politicians are afraid of it.

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What Progressives Can Learn from the Tea Partiers →

As a political phenomenon, the Tea Partiers are more colorful than mysterious. They are not really a new or post-party phenomenon, but are the latest incarnation of the populist conservative wing of the Republican Party, the political descendants of Richard Nixon's Silent Majority or the angry white men who catapulted Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party into control of the Congress in 1994. Tea Partiers will vote overwhelmingly for the Republican Party in November, or they will stay home. Very few will vote Democratic; and third party rumblings that have not yet died away, will do so in the next months.

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Has Rahm Emanuel Become a Liability for the White House? →

Ascribing Emanuel's failure to an inability to get his voice heard in the White House is far from the full story. At key moments, Emanuel's advice was loud, clear and wrong. Emanuel's position, in the end of 2009, that Obama needed to pass something on health care so that he could take credit for some success was wrong-headed and may well have been the moment when the presidency was most in danger of unraveling. Urging the White House to cut a deal with, of all people, Joe Lieberman so that they could get a bill was an extraordinary lapse of judgment, one that was not without serious consequences for the White House.

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Obama After Massachusetts →

Scott Brown's victory was a major victory for the Republican Party as it demonstrated that they are, at least for now, a political factor again, but in some respects it was less significant for the Democratic President and his party. The Obama administration, and his party, was in trouble before this special election given the ongoing economic problems, growing discontent with Obama's policies from, predictably, the right and, less predictably, the left, and a compromise on health care that only further angered these groups. The election in Massachusetts was additional evidence of a trend that was already strong, rather than a turning point of some kind.

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2009 Was Not the Senate's Finest Year →

The U.S. Senate is a very unusual political institution. Revered by members and the political class as the world's greatest deliberative body, it is the only legislative body in the U.S. that violates the principle of one person one vote and is based on the notion of unequal representation. Some states, such as North Dakota are awarded one senator for roughly every 320,000 residents, while larger states such as California get by with one senator for roughly every 18 million residents. This principle is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but similar principles of basing legislative bodies on representing polities rather than people have been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in cases such asGray v. Sanders or Board of Estimate of New York City v. Morris.

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Improving the Health Care Bill After It Passes Will Not Be Easy →

Nonetheless, it remains important to look at the bill itself rather than the debate and news stories surrounding its passage. The biggest reason health care reform is so urgent is because there are more than 40 million Americans without health care today. For these people, a serious injury or illness can result not just in not receiving timely and adequate health care, but in devastating financial burdens as well. People without health insurance, of course, always had the option of buying health insurance from a private insurance company, but telling somebody without a lot of money to spend thousands of dollars on health insurance was something of a "let them eat cake" solution to the problem. The uninsured tended to be unemployed or concentrated in low paying jobs and could scarcely afford this option.

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Keeping the Wheels on the Obama Presidency →

The wheels have not yet come off the Obama presidency, but they could next year. The best way to prevent this from happening would be for Obama to reenergize his political base so that they can be help put pressure on uncooperative members of Congress and help work to minimize Democratic losses in November of 2010. This will require Obama to define a progressive position on almost any issue, be it marriage equality, Wall Street bonuses, health care or anything else, and aggressively pursue it.

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Towards the Next Victory on Health Care →

The passage of the health care bill is good news for President Obama and the Democrats, but it is more a case of avoiding defeat than of scoring a decisive victory. Given that the Democrats have control of almost 60% of the seats in the House of Representatives, by a margin of 257-178, and that all that was needed was a simple majority, this was not the greatest challenge facing Obama's health care reform. However, had the bill not passed the house, it would have been a stinging defeat for the president and his party.

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Is Anybody Still Surprised by Joe Lieberman? →

The decision of so many leaders of the Democratic Party to support a senator who while opposing most of the party on an increasing number of important issues, was still a colleague and, presumably, a friend, was a mistake, but that mistake was compounded by the failure of any of these prominent Democrats to insist that Lieberman back the winner of the primary before agreeing to support him in that primary. This kind of agreement is very common in primaries and one of the things which helps hold the party together. By not demanding this as a condition for their endorsement, all these Democratic leaders opened the doors for Lieberman, after losing the primary to Lamont, to continue to contest the general election. Most of those prominent Democrats endorsed Lamont after he won the primary, but because they had not done their political work in advance, had much less leverage with Lieberman as they should have.

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Sarah Palin, John Edwards and the Way We Choose our Vice Presidents →

The vetting process for vice presidential candidates is clearly quite different than that for the people on the top of the ticket. Vice presidential candidates must face a series of, presumably, difficult interviews from the nominee's team and provide information on their background to the candidate, but that is about it. Not only is there no way of knowing whether or not the vice presidential nominee is being entirely forthcoming, but the vice presidential candidate does not have to face any test from voters or the media until she, or he, is already on the ticket.

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Should She Stay or Should She Go? →

Hillary Clinton is at the point where staying in the race for the Democratic nomination for president will yield increasingly small and unlikely returns, and potentially be very damaging to her. After Obama and Clinton split Oregon and Kentucky on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton finds herself confronting the usual question of whether or not she should continue in the race, and if she does, how strongly she should criticize her primary opponent, Barack Obama. This is the question which has been facing Hillary Clinton for at least a month now. There seems to be a belief among many pundits and commentators that Senator Clinton has much gain and little to lose by staying in the race and continuing to do what she is doing, but it is worth investigating this notion more closely.

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