The New Two Party System
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 7th, 2010 5:31 am by HL
The New Two Party System
Dick Morris, The Hill
The very public way in which the existence of a center-right in the Democratic Party proved to be a mirage has done more to undermine the party's chances for victory in 2010 than any other aspect of the healthcare debate.When liberal Republicans failed to rally to Bill Clinton's 1993-1994 agenda – including his failed healthcare proposal – they laid the basis for their total demise in subsequent years. Sens. Jeffords, Chaffee, D'Amato, Packwood, Hatfield and Specter (as a Republican) are gone. Sens. Snowe and Collins are all that remain of the once-dominant Rockefeller wing of…
Stillbirth of a Progressive Era
Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — has raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era of progressive reform. The legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society — a few brief years in the 1930s and the '60s that fundamentally reshaped the nation's economy and society — are the templates that fire the liberal imagination.Two great liberal historians — the Arthur Schlesingers, senior and junior — posited a cyclical theory of American political history, in which periods of progressive advance…
If Fed Missed This Bubble, Will It See a New One?
David Leonhardt, NYT
If only we’d had more power, we could have kept the financial crisis from getting so bad.Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has said it is difficult “to know in real time if an asset price is appropriate or not.” That has been the position of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and other regulators. It explains why Mr. Bernanke and the Obama administration are pushing Congress to give the Fed more authority over financial firms. So let’s consider what an empowered Fed might have done during the housing bubble, based on the words of the people who…
Dodd Exits, Gracefully
Steve Kornacki, New York Observer
A Case for Presidential Power on Terrorism
Ruth Marcus, Washington Post