Jacob Weisberg's Blog, page 2330

Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party: Compare and Contrast

The Tea Party movement began on Feb. 19, 2009, when Rick Santelli, the CNBC financial journalist who reports from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, ranted against the government bailing out homeowners who couldn't pay their mortgages. The Occupy Wall Street protest got going two and a half years later, when editors at the anti-corporate Canadian magazine Adbusters were inspired by events in the Middle East to call for a mass demonstration against the financial industry on Sept...

Mitt’s Unlikely Victory

Last week resolved the remaining questions about which Republicans are running for president. Chris Christie, the outspoken governor of New Jersey, and Sarah Palin, the misspoken conservative celebrity, won’t. The field is now set and pointed toward a somewhat surprising outcome. In the most conservative moment the United States has experienced in decades, a party dominated by Tea Party radicalism is on course to nominate the mild and moderate Mitt Romney.

In the interminable staged debates t...

Mitt's Unlikely Victory

Last week resolved the remaining questions about which Republicans are running for president. Chris Christie, the outspoken governor of New Jersey, and Sarah Palin, the misspoken conservative celebrity, won't. The field is now set and pointed toward a somewhat surprising outcome. In the most conservative moment the United States has experienced in decades, a party dominated by Tea Party radicalism is on course to nominate the mild and moderate Mitt Romney.

In the interminable staged debates t...

Don't Believe Ron Suskind

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the w...

"Let Him Die"

Wolf Blitzer put a terrific question to Rep. Ron Paul at last night's CNN/Tea Party Express Republican debate in Tampa, Fla. What should happen, the moderator asked hypothetically, if a healthy 30-year-old man who can afford insurance chooses not to buy it—and then becomes catastrophically ill and needs intensive care for six months? When Dr. Paul ducked, fondly recalling the good old days before Medicare and saying that we should all take responsibility for ourselves, Blitzer pressed the...

Republicans vs. Economics

You can't stop President Obama from reaching out to Republicans; it's what he does. In Thursday night's speech, he tried two separate maneuvers—reminding them of their support for stimulus measures in the past and accepting the good faith of their opposition. "Now, I realize that some of you have a different theory on how to grow the economy," he said. "Some of you sincerely believe that the only solution to our economic challenges is to simply cut most government spending and eliminate...

Lessons of the Crisis

It is hard to remember a more dismal moment in American politics. The debt-ceiling crisis and the agreement that ended it point to deep dysfunction in our system. In a variety of ways, the episode portends continued short-term economic misery and long-term national decline. It's as if the United States chose at the last minute not to commit financial suicide—but only out of preference for a slower, more excruciating form of self-destruction.

The crisis has, however, been clarifying in...

Going Sane

Just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama's re-election bid was beginning to look like an easy downhill jog. The daring raid that the president ordered delivered Osama bin Laden to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Economic prospects looked brighter. Perhaps most helpfully, the Republican Party seemed to be indulging some kind of collective death wish, putting Donald Trump first in the polls and Rep. Paul Ryan's budget-cutting at the top of its legislative agenda. The GOP's early presidential...

Bubble Trouble

The first conversation I ever had about the Internet was in 1993 with Robert Wright, who was then a colleague at the  New Republic. This "Net" thing was going to be a big deal, I remember Bob telling me, but it could create a few problems. One was that it was going to empower crazies, since geographically diffuse nut jobs of all sorts would be able to find each other online. Another was that it could hurt democratic culture by encouraging narrow-minded folk to burrow deeper into their...

What Is Obama's Foreign Policy?

Few presidents arrive in office with large plans around foreign affairs. Yet most live to see their reputations defined by it. For Barack Obama, whose time in office coincides with a series of tectonic shifts in global structure—the Arab revolutions, the relative decline of American power, the rise of China—that pattern shows signs of holding. But what kind of foreign policy leader is he? How Obama thinks about America's role in the world turns out to be one of the murkier questions about...