Jonathan Chait's Slant

When Mitt Romney was 20 years old, he watched his father enter the Republican presidential race as a towering figure—a self-made auto executive turned popular progressive governor—and leave it a punch line. George Romney’s undoing was Vietnam. He attempted to approach the issue subtly, adjusti ..

1. For the world, the death of bin Laden provides important momentum for the United States and a brake on the prestige of al Qaeda. People around the world knew that bin Laden had defied the might of the American military and intelligence services, and this fact made the United States look impotent. ..

With few declared candidates and no clear frontrunner, the Republican presidential primary appears to be as muddled as ever. But I actually think things are shaking out in a way as to clear the path for Tim Pawlenty.My view of the primary selection system is that it consists of two basic constituenc ..

Of course, political events -- like the elections giving Obama a foil, or the spate of lame-duck accomplishments in Deecember -- probably played a role as well. But I'm guessing the polls reflect an improving labor market.It's the economy, stupid. Your hypothesis is a sound one, Jonathan. BHO as a f ..

Balko raises two points. First, he notes that the Kochs give a lot of money to the arts and other non-political causes such as the arts. ("Their gifts to?the arts and other non-political charities?exceeds what they've spent on politics many times over.")?That's nice, but irrelevant to any analysis o ..

Well, Klein's attempt to demonstrate that conservatives have a particular tendency to exploit crises was fatally flawed, as I argued in a 2007 review.I agree that Scott Walker and his allies have displayed relentless intellectual dishonesty in their robotic insistence on pretending their argument ce ..

The first-order description has to be that Obama's budget is bad. The domestic discretionary budget is not too big. We should not be cutting?Pell Grants or?heating assistance for low-income families in general, and we especially should not be doing so during a recession.On the other hand, the Budget ..

Politico has an interesting feature about the fear among conservatives that their campaign to canonize Ronald Reagan has turned their hero into a post-ideological hero, rather than an embodiment of conservative values. A specimen of this fear is Steven Hayward's National Review essay, Reagan Reclaim ..

The deficit is a huge dilemma that’s too big for one party to solve, say the pundits and various deficit scolds. (Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles: “Neither party can fix this problem on its own, and both parties have a responsibility to do their part.) Nonsense, I say. There’s a really easy, a ..

The substance of Obama's speech was moderate liberalism -- we like business, but government has a role too, neither too much nor too little, etc. It's hard to attach that kind of case-by-case pragmatism to an overarching theme. But I do think Obama pulled it off pretty well. He took a fairly hackney ..

When President Obama appointed William Daley as the new White House chief of staff, a great cry of relief was heard in the land, especially those parts of the land that happen to be corporate boardrooms. “His moderate views and Wall Street credentials,” reported The Washington Post, “make him ..

And so it begins. House Republicans have vowed to cut $100 billion from the federal budget. Of course, they're making exceptions for Social Security, Medicare, defense, and homeland security. Which means that the tiny slice that remains has to be subject to a 20% cut or more.They haven't even taken ..

Democrats propose to make it ever more slightly so. But restoring Clinton-era rates on the rich is not a utopian left-wing plan.Mankiw's argument serves the useful, if inadvertent, purpose of showing how it is that at least some legitimate economists support the GOP.?Republican economic policy is do ..

Now, I realize all those comments are a few months old. During (and in the wake of) the 2008 election, Republicans considered Palin a rising star and likely candidate, and devoted their energy to touting her credentials. In recent months, Palin's polling numbers among the general electorate have plu ..

The Weekly Standard's Jay Cost continues to crusade against the idea that demographic trends are slowly making the electorate more amenable to Democrats. Does that mean the country will become permanently Democratic? Of course not. Both parties will adjust to accommodate the shifting demographics. ..