Jacob Weisberg's Blog, page 2329

Julian Castro vs. Marco Rubio

American political conventions are now principally talent shows. In distributing the coveted prime-time speaking slots, the parties showcase their future stars and give a chosen few their first taste of national celebrity. A boffo performance can make a career, as Barack Obama’s stunning 2004 keynote did. A lousy one can do just the opposite, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s hot-headed and self-regarding speech seems to have done last week in Tampa.

This year, both parties sent a strong me...

Top of the Ticket

Introducing his running mate against the backdrop of the USS Wisconsin on Saturday, Mitt Romney flubbed his easiest line. “Join me in welcoming the next president of the United States,” he declared. There is no way to avoid reading this as a Freudian slip. Romney’s chief problem as a candidate has been his substantive vacuity, his failure to stand for anything beyond flexibility itself. In choosing Paul Ryan, he opted to outsource the content of his campaign to his opposite: a principled, con...

Chicago Style

If I hear one more person accuse the Obama campaign of practicing “Chicago-style politics,” I'm gonna kick all his nephews off the park-district payroll.  I’m gonna send some precinct captains over to straighten him out. Mitt Romney and his surrogates don’t understand what Chicago-style politics means. No one seems to have told them that it’s been gone for 25 years. And they don’t get that Barack Obama, in his Chicago days, never had anything to do with it.

Chicago-style politics, in com...

The Pain in Bain

Mitt Romney seems genuinely stunned that President Obama would question the value of his proudest accomplishment, founding and running Bain Capital for 15 years (or maybe a little bit more). To Romney and others who work in finance, it’s self-evident that what private equity firms like Bain do is beneficial to the economy. Private equity firms buy underperforming businesses and restructure them. With new management and investment, some of these firms thrive while others fail.  As a resul...

Obama Outfoxes Romney

Between the end of the primaries and the start of the conventions, presidential campaigns are message wars. Both sides test slogans and proposals while trying to frame their opponents in memorably unfavorable ways. In this phase, President Barack Obama has been the clear winner.

Obama has used the element of surprise, has taken risks that seem to be paying off, and has put his opponent on the defensive. He first seized the initiative in May when he endorsed gay marriage, changing hi...

Hairy Eyeball

Sina Weibo is looking for more censors. The social media company, often described as China’s version of Twitter, has a rumored 1.000 “information security” editors working to remove posts and comments about forbidden subjects like “Chen Guangcheng” or “Tiananmen Square.” But according to a report in the Asian Wall Street Journal, the NASDAQ-listed company went so far this week as to post a help-wanted ad seeking reinforcements. In this context Sina’s logo—an enormous, red-rimmed eyeball, call...

Romney Is Kerry. Or Maybe Gore.

Republicans are doing something quite strange at the moment. They are in the process of choosing a candidate whom hardly any of them actually likes. Though Mitt Romney won the Florida primary handily yesterday, just 51 percent of those who voted for him said in an exit poll they were satisfied to have him as their party's nominee. Most of the others said they'd prefer the choice of someone who isn't currently running. Romney isn't so much winning the Republican nomination as having it...

Face It: Romney’s the Nominee

Is there anyone not annoyed by Mitt Romney’s narrow win in the Iowa caucus? Conservatives are disappointed because they recognize that the former Massachusetts governor, who used to be pro-choice and was for Obamacare before it was called that, is only pretending to be one of them. Seventy-five percent of Iowa’s Republican voters wanted someone further to the right. But because their votes were divided among too many weak and weird candidates, the only moderate running in their state came out...

Face It: Romney's the Nominee

Is there anyone not annoyed by Mitt Romney's narrow win in the Iowa caucus? Conservatives are disappointed because they recognize that the former Massachusetts governor, who used to be pro-choice and was for Obamacare before it was called that, is only pretending to be one of them. Seventy-five percent of Iowa's Republican voters wanted someone further to the right. But because their votes were divided among too many weak and weird candidates, the only moderate running in their state came...

Is Newt Nuts?

I spent last weekend absorbed in The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel about three Brown students in the early 1980s. The most captivating character in the book is the manic-depressive Leonard Bankhead and its most compelling passages depict the ravages of his illness. When he doesn't take his proper dose of lithium, Leonard becomes a superhero in his own mind, overflowing with self-confidence and charisma, before he inevitably crashes. Eugenides has protested, rather...