A Nation of Singles
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 2nd, 2012 12:08 am by HL
A Nation of Singles
Jonathan Last, Weekly Standard
Unfortunately, by the time the window closed on the public's demographic curiosity no one really understood either of these shifts. Or where they came from. Or whether they were even particularly true. As is often the case, people tended to fixate on a relatively small, contingent part of America's changing demographic makeup and look past the bigger, more consequential part of the story.
Mitt Romney’s Oval Office Moment
Gail Collins, New York Times
You undoubtedly have heard that Barack Obama invited Romney for lunch this week, in what was described in many reports as a longstanding tradition of re-elected presidents having a good-fellowship meal with the person whose political dreams they had just shattered.“They pledged to stay in touch, particularly if opportunities to work together on shared interests arise in the future,” said the official report. “Their lunch menu included white turkey chili and Southwestern grilled chicken salad.”
The Crisis of American Self-Government
Harvey Mansfield, WSJ
'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency.”Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never…
Nothing Like Being Re-elected
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
The financial plan that Tim Geithner advanced yesterday caught everyone by surprise in its suck-on-this boldness, so unusual for Obama in such situations. Up to $1.6 trillion in revenue; new stimulus spending; new mortgage help; and elimination of Congress' role in the debt limit! Wowza. What's behind this?First of all it looks like the White House just figured, and correctly: Let's not get bogged down in technicalities like Medicare reimbursement levels. It's of course inevitable that these negotiations will eventually get bogged down precisely in Medicare reimbursement…