Sunday round-up, pre-labor day musings. Summer's over tomorrow.
NY Times:
As Democrats brace for a November wave that threatens their control of the House, party leaders are preparing a brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim grip on the majority.
In the next two weeks, Democratic leaders will review new polls and other data that show whether vulnerable incumbents have a path to victory. If not, the party is poised to redirect money to concentrate on trying to protect up to two dozen lawmakers who appear to be in the strongest position to fend off their challengers.
Brutal is the word. And no, we are not an ATM.
Frank Rich:
What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose "end" he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what "Freedom" mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s "The Bonfire of the Vanities" did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what "The Great Gatsby" did for the ominous boom of the 1920s.
Maureen Dowd:
The Economist’s review of "A Journey," the new autobiography of the former British prime minister, says it sounds less like Disraeli and Churchill and more like "the memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon."
Yet in the section on Iraq, Blair loses his C.E.O. fluency and engages in tortured arguments, including one on how many people really died in the war, and does a Shylock lament.
He says he does not regret serving as the voice for W.’s gut when the inexperienced American princeling galloped into war with Iraq. As for "the nightmare that unfolded" — giving the lie to all their faux rationales and glib promises — Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.
Joan Vennochi on Boston harshness:
Losing politicians can retreat for a while to Harvard’s Kennedy School, but they do not launch many successful second careers from here. Michael Dukakis did it once, long ago. After losing a governor’s race, he plotted a successful return to office. But when Dukakis lost the 1988 presidential contest, local voters who had embraced him quickly turned on him. Twenty-two years later, Dukakis can still count on getting whacked if he speaks up.
John Kerry is still a senator after losing the 2004 presidential race, and Martha Coakley is still attorney general after losing this year’s Senate race to Republican Scott Brown. But neither is celebrated, and their defeated status still subjects them to scorn.
Brown is currently the most popular politician in Massachusetts. But who knows when the tide of popularity will begin to turn on him, too?
Boston sports figures who are less than perfect do even worse than politicians. But the depth of anger over those who put Wall Street over Main Street has yet to be plumbed.
Jim Kessler with 5 ways 2010 is not 1994:
Even so, there is a model for Democrats: Ronald Reagan's triumph in 1982. What can Obama and the Democrats learn from the Great Communicator? Plenty. Reagan understood that the economy was so bad that to tout his "accomplishments" would be laughable. But though he couldn't sell the electorate on where the nation was at the time, he knew he could sell them on where he planned to take it. With the country shaken by a series of recessions and foreign policy setbacks, he rallied Americans behind his optimism ("Don't let anyone tell you that America's best days are behind her") and faith in American exceptionalism ("the last, best hope of man on Earth"). Things might look bleak today, he told voters, but blue skies lie ahead.
How about an economics "this is how we got here, this is where we're going" speech? Hello? Is this mike on?
Joe Klein:
So why doesn't Obama transform his blue-ribbon budget commission into a deliberative-democracy exercise? Let his 18 commissioners — who range from a conservative budget wonk like Congressman Paul Ryan to former Service Employees union leader Andy Stern — prepare a briefing paper for 500 Americans selected by Fishkin's team and then make themselves available for close questioning. Let them lay out the most vexing budget choices we face. Let the whole process be televised. It doesn't have to be binding. I'll bet the kleroterion would produce results bolder and more credible than anything Obama's commission will recommend. "People are tired of the elites telling them what to do," says Fishkin. Perhaps it's time to turn that process upside down.
Sasha Abramsky on Nevada:
Rancho versus Agassi Prep. The underresourced versus the opulent. The collapse of the state sector despite the resources available via the private. The sense of possibility versus the sense of impending doom. It is, in many ways, a metaphor for Nevada as a whole these days.
When it comes to ink spilled on states in crisis, California, which has seen its budget contract from more than $100 billion to about $80 billion over the past three years, has been getting the lion's share of attention. Yet some of the country's smaller states are seeing revenue shortfalls that, as a proportion of their total budget, far exceed California's.
State level pain is national anger. That's why people are tired of the elites telling them what to do.