The Crisis of the “Gentry Presidency”
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 16th, 2011 4:31 am by HL
The Crisis of the “Gentry Presidency”
Joel Kotkin, Politico
The Obama administration's belated attempt to address the looming employment crisis "” after three years focused largely on reviving Wall Street, redoing health care and creating a "green" economy "” reflects not only ineptitude but a deeper crisis of what is best understood as the "gentry presidency."
Obama Is Making His Problems Worse
Michael Walsh, New York Post
Do President Obama's advisers realize they've got him frittering away the last political asset he has left? As unpopular as the president's policies — and especially his results — have proved, a majority of Americans still like and, somehow, even trust him personally. But his new political strategy is based on a manuever that even fellow Democrats see as transparently cynical.He's tramping around the country "demanding" that Republicans "put country before party" to pass his "jobs" bill right now — knowing full…
Rick Perry’s Higher Education Reform
Andrew Ferguson, Weekly Standard
In his 30-year public career, Perry"‹—"‹how to put this delicately?"‹—"‹has shown no sign of being tortured by a gnawing intellectual curiosity. “He’s not the sort of person you’ll find reading The Wealth of Nations for the seventh time,” said Brooke Rollins, formerly Perry’s policy director and now president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market research group closely allied with Perry. At Texas A&M he majored in animal science and escaped with a grade point…
Why Is the Media “Fair” to Idiotic GOP Ideas?
Eric Alterman, The Nation
There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.” No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull…
