Jacob Weisberg's Blog, page 2328

Radical Republicans

For the past 20 years, American politics has been defined by Republican revolt. The right-wing radicalism that now worries the whole world first emerged in response to Bill Clinton's election in 1992. It's not that Republicans were never extreme before that time. Challenges to the legitimacy of federal authority from the people who now identify as Republicans trace back to pro-slavery attempts at nullification and segregationist assertions of states’ rights. But it was 20 years ago that the C...

The Two Washingtons

It’s a funny thing about Washington: Everyone complains about it, but no one ever seems to leave. Take former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. The Missouri Democrat twice ran for president as a voice of organized labor. Today he pockets $7 million a year to lobby on behalf of corporate clients and advise them on busting unions. Or consider former journalist Jeffrey Birnbaum, who used to write exposes of the lobbying trade for the Wall Street Journal. Today he works for Haley Barbour, t...

It’s Scandal Season!

Washington’s need for periodic scandal is almost biological. For legislators, it’s an opportunity to strut on the national stage. For the party out of power, it is politics by other means. For the press, it’s an escape from the boredom and frustration of a second term. Scandal means a break in the routine, a thrilling emergency. At some level, the whole political class loves it.

Which is not to say that scandal is never real. Watergate was real. The Whitewater affair was not real but managed...

Amazon’s Sales-Tax Victory

Amazon has built its empire on the legitimate advantages it has over retail shopping: an endless range of products at steep discount, personalized recommendations, and stunningly good customer service. It has also benefited from one enormously unfair advantage over its bricks-and-mortar competitors: It doesn’t have to charge sales tax. Depending on where you live in the United States, this can save you nearly 10 percent on purchases—making it foolish not to buy online when you have the c...

I Dare You

Barack Obama campaigned and won re-election without anything much resembling a second-term agenda. On the campaign trail, he called for greater tax fairness, more jobs, and doing something or other about immigration. Seeking refuge in even greater vagueness, Mitt Romney was in no position to call him out.

Since the election, however, the president has been steadily filling in the missing pieces, asserting his renewed mandate on behalf of an ambitious, liberal agenda. As of last night’s State...

The Agenda

Four years ago, Barack Obama took his oath of office against a backdrop of enormous expectation and great peril. He was a figure of inspiration and societal change taking the stage amid the worst financial crisis in 70 years. In that context, the question of the president’s fundamental view of government’s role seldom arose. Emergency simplifies the job of a chief executive. For any president of either party, the agenda in January 2009 would have been largely the same: keep the economy from f...

Obama II

Barack Obama’s most cherished illusion during his first term was the possibility of cooperation with Republicans. Time and again, the president came to Congress bearing preemptive concessions—on his original economic stimulus package, his health care plan, and the 2011 debt-ceiling fight—only to have the door slammed in his face by an obstructionist GOP that viewed politics as a zero-sum game. Because the president has long seen himself as a conciliator and a bridge figure, he was unwilling t...

Beating Guns the Bloomberg Way

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

The day of the Newtown massacre, another lunatic attacked a group of helpless school children, in the Henan province of China. There, because the assailant wielded a knife and not a gun, the result was 23 children and an adult with nasty injuries, but no deaths. This follows an established pattern. China, like the United States, has experienced a spate of mentally disturbed men attacking school children. But without easy acc...

Why Mitt Lost

What ought to pain Republicans most about Barack Obama’s victory is that 2012 was entirely winnable for them. In European elections over the past few years, voters have thrown out leaders who were in charge during the worst of the financial crisis, whether those leaders deserved the blame or not. Economic indicators in the United States, where an unemployment rate of 8 percent is highly correlated with defeat for the incumbent party, pointed in the same direction. Obama himself had proven a d...

Why Did Romney Overpay His Taxes?

You don’t often see Republican politicians donating money to the federal government. But that’s what Mitt Romney did today. In a statement about Romney’s just-filed 2011 tax return issued by his campaign, Brad Malt, the trustee of Romney’s blind trust, notes that the candidate and his wife paid $1,935,708 in taxes on $13,696,951 in income, for an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent. Malt notes that the Romneys claimed only $2.25 million in charitable deductions, despite having given more than...