Did President Obama Just Realize Income Inequality Is a Problem →

Obviously, it is good that the President saw fit to address this very serious issue, but it is, frankly, outrageous that it took him almost five years into his presidency to address an issue that has been a growing problem in the US for decades and that was brought unmistakably to the fore by events that occurred in the last months of the 2008 campaign. While it is interesting that Obama quoted the Pope in his speech, it is almost as if Obama waited for some kind of political cover from the Pope before publicly addressing the issue of income inequality; either that or the depth and impact of the problem had not occurred to him until the Pope tweeted about it.

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Remembering Reagan →

Much of what Democrats and progressives hate most about the Republican Party, including the class warfare that has shifted enormous amounts of wealth to the rich while economic conditions have gotten worse for most Americans, radical social conservatism and enormous defense budgets that both create massive debt problems and ensure an aggressive and often disastrous US foreign policy, have their origins in the Reagan years. However, Democrats understand that Reagan's enduring popularity means that Reagan can never be criticized and that the rather obvious point that the roots of many of today's problems lie in the Reagan presidency cannot be mentioned, without incurring significant political consequences.

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On Afghanistan and Presidential Certainty

Afghanistan is a confoundingly difficult dilemma for the president. Continuing the course in Afghanistan means getting deeper and deeper into a war in which the end is only very remotely in sight as casualties and costs inevitably increase. Moreover, while the issues at stake in Afghanistan have direct bearing on our national security, it is far from apparent that the war as it stands now is doing anything to make us safer. Withdrawing from Afghanistan will also be difficult as it will not only raise a new set of security issues and require retooling a range of national security strategies, but will also make Obama vulnerable to charges of weakness, timidity and probably anti-Americanism from the far right.

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Another Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party →

Rendell's decision to make these comments now, at a time when the sitting Democratic president is attacked almost daily as a socialist, might seem strange, but it is not. President Obama, like every Democratic president, has veered to the center and upset the party's progressive base, so in that regard Rendell's comments are not entirely apropos of nothing. Rendell, however, is something of a strange messenger for this sentiment. As a governor and former chair of the DNC, Rendell is, as much as anybody, a Democratic Party insider, not a firebrand outsider trying to shake up the party. If Rendell really believed that the party was losing its soul, he might have said or done something about it at some point in the last several years.

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The Sweet Background Music of Lou Piniella

Piniella is a baseball lifer who was a good, but not great player and a great, if controversial, manager, who has been associated with an impressive range of baseball moments and people. He played alongside Harvey Haddix a few years after his 12 inning perfect game loss, and Don Mattingly as he was becoming one of baseball’s top hitters. Piniella, who later earned a reputation for being a fiery and excitable manager himself, played for Billy Martin during his first three stints as Yankee manager. Sweet Lou made a cameo in one of the best baseball books ever written, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, and made a game saving, of often overlooked, play in the outfield preserving a Yankee victory in one of the most famous baseball games ever played, the one game playoff between the Yankees and Red Sox in 1978. He played for two expansion teams in the same year, including one that does not exist anymore, and two World Series winners.

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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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Obama's Unconvincing Argument that Afghanistan is Not Vietnam

Comparisons between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam have grown stronger in recent weeks. While this concern has been raised, often with the buzzword quagmire, about every conflict since the end of the U.S. effort in Vietnam, it is not without reason that this is mentioned with regards to Afghanistan. It is hard to ignore the similarities between the two conflicts. In both cases, the U.S. got involved in a war far away for which there was no easily foreseeable resolution. Obama, like another Democratic president more than four decades ago, was convinced, to some extent by his own generals, that more troops would make the difference and drew the U.S. further into the conflict. The Vietnam War destroyed Johnson’s presidency and overshadowed some of his impressive accomplishments on domestic issues. Critics of the war in Afghanistan, many of whom are supporters of the current president, do not want to see the same thing happen to Obama.

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Who Will Be Hurt if the Democrats Pass Health Care? →

Eight months or so into the Obama presidency, it is pretty clear that Obama's bipartisan efforts have not been, and will almost certainly not be, fruitful. Critics of Obama might claim this is because Obama has already been captured by the far left of his party, while people more sympathetic to the president might point out that the Republican Party has been captured by an angry and out of touch right wing that has driven the party to irrelevancy. The question this raises for the Obama administration is whether or not it is now prudent to abandon efforts at bipartisanship and seek to pass major legislation, most obviously health care, alone.

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Obama+Afghanistan=Bush+Iraq=Johnson+Vietnam

And yet Obama has already shown in his presidency that his views on Afghanistan are more than just a campaign tactic. The easy thing for Obama would have been to lump Afghanistan in with Iraq as failed Bush policies and instead begin a slow–some might say too slow–pullback of troops in Afghanistan, similar to that in Iraq. And yet it seems that Obama’s assessment of national security concerns made this option less appealing. Obama’s reward for this approach is that Afghanistan may do for Obama what Iraq did for Bush, what Vietnam did for Johnson, what Afghanistan itself did for the Soviet Union, or whatever other analogy you like.

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Achieving the Impossible: Expectations for an Obama Presidency →

Managing expectations, as we saw again in 2008, is a key part of presidential campaigns. If a candidate is unable to meet expectations, a minor defeat, or even a narrow victory can be a serious setback. The most historic example of this was in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination for president after the New Hampshire primary where the peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, didn't actually beat President Johnson but merely exceeded expectations by coming within six points of the incumbent president. New Hampshire was again the place for unmet expectations this year when a somewhat unremarkable victory by Hillary Clinton, in a state she had long been expected to win, breathed new life into her campaign because in the few days leading up to that primary, Obama had been expected to win that state

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Making an Obama Presidency a Success →

An Obama presidency will, almost no matter what, be a welcome relief and major improvement on the current administration. The impact of that alone should not be understated. If, however, Obama is a four year interlude between Republican administrations like Carter was, or if, like Clinton, he fails to pass any major legislation or build the party, Obama will have been a disappointment. Moreover, a truly successful Obama administration will not only succeed legislatively, but strengthen the Democratic Party moving forward.

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Are They Experienced? →

The question of how we define foreign policy experience, however, is worth examining a little more closely. Currently foreign policy is experience is defined far too narrowly with credit being awarded for only a few conventional accomplishments. Understanding how the US government makes decisions about foreign policy and having detailed knowledge about the perspectives of people outside the US are both valuable components of foreign policy experience, but the former is usually the criteria used for measuring foreign policy experience. The latter, however, for the most part, cannot be gained once somebody is elected to the senate or holds high office in the American government. Congressional delegations, for example, can be used by participants to gain a deeper understanding of a foreign policy issue, or how the leadership of a particular government thinks, but they are not the same as spending time working or living in a foreign country. This kind of experience is best gained before a candidate becomes a famous public figure.

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Managing Expectation and Understanding the Financial Crisis →

The expectations calculation is not so simple for Obama because the tone coming from the White House is viewed as having an effect on the country's economic performance. So, if the economy only improves slightly in the next 18-20 months, during a period when Obama carefully reduces expectations for a recovery, many will undoubtedly blame the tepid recovery on the failure of Obama to instill confidence in markets or consumers, leading to reduced support for Obama which will make it increasingly difficult for the administration to pass additional legislation. If Obama becomes a cheerleader for the economy, there is a chance that this will have some short term impact on confidence of investors and consumers and begin a short term economic recovery, but it will also have the added effect of raising expectations to a level which the recovery will almost certainly not meet. So, from a partisan strategic angle, it is not clear what the best course for the president should be.

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