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Barack Obama Needs to Cut Taxes as He Promised
Tweet Share on Facebook November 6, 2008 Comment (1)Fired up! Ready to go! Cut taxes!
One would think that Barack Obama's vow to cut middle-class taxes is one of two inviolable promises he made in the campaign.
(The other being a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.)
But the ballots were not all counted before the big spenders in Washington—in temporary league with deficit hawks—have started grumbling about the wisdom and necessity of cutting taxes.
There are no signs of wavering in Obama HQ in Chicago. But should the members of the president-elect's economic policy team have any doubts that he needs to move quickly to fulfill his tax-cutting pledge, they should look to the Maryland suburbs, where liberal constituencies, with conviction, approved two antitax ballot questions Tuesday.
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Chris Matthews, Barack Obama Fan
Tweet Share on Facebook November 6, 2008 Comment (14)As I write this, just before 8 a.m., Chris Matthews is on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" saying that he is rooting for Barack Obama to succeed and that he sees it as his duty to help make that happen.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reacted with horror: It's not your duty as a journalist to root for, aid, or abet the new administration!
It's a fine but not indistinct point, but Matthews is not being inappropriate here. He may be a journalist in that he is involved in the greater news business, but he is not a reporter—his job is not to gather the facts and present them in a dispassionate way. He is a political commentator whose livelihood is dependent not only on the keenness of his analysis but on the flair with which it is presented. (Which is why it was appropriate for MSNBC to relieve him and fellow commentator Keith Olbermann of anchoring duties during the campaign season.)
That's not to say that Matthews is incapable of dispassionate analysis (his is often quite good) or of breaking news, but that's not his role. And as such, rooting for Obama success is no more inappropriate than smart conservative commentators like Ross Douthat and the folks at places like NRO, Hot Air, to name a few, opposing Obama.
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Congressional Democrats Came Up Short
Tweet Share on Facebook November 5, 2008 Comment (2)President-elect Obama's victory has overshadowed the fact congressional Democrats did not pick up anywhere near the number of seats some pundits and pollsters were predicting and hoping they might win.
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Barack Obama’s Election Headlines—Today’s Best
Tweet Share on Facebook November 5, 2008 Comment (3)This is the sort of day of which headline writers dream, but the best, as a friend of mine (a self-described "aging southerner") pointed out to me, might be this from the Anniston (Alabama) Star:
That pretty well says it all, doesn't it?
(Thanks to the Newseum.)
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Barack Obama's Suburban Revolution
Tweet Share on Facebook November 5, 2008 Comment (6)Several important milestones were reached with President-elect Obama's historic win. I mentioned earlier, but want to discuss in greater detail, Obama's Suburban Revolution. This revolution was in evidence not just in the South but also in the Southwest. It is driven by the politics of liberal northerners from outside such states as Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado, who flocked to new areas in great numbers—wooed by cheaper real estate and warmer climes.
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Barack Obama's Victory Was Not a Mandate for Liberalism
Tweet Share on Facebook November 5, 2008 Comment (52)So how should Democrats interpret last night's victories? Not as the broad mandate for liberalism that many of them would hope it to be.
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Sarah Palin's Progress
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (149)Gov. Sarah Palin's god was apparently not listening when she voted in the pre-dawn hours in Alaska:
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Barack Obama's Election Gives Us a Rarity: a Positive Instantly Historical Moment
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (10)Historical moments—where were you were when you heard?—come rarely and are almost always negative. My father's generation could tell you with precision where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor and about FDR dying; a younger generation can recall the moment they learned of JFK's death, and RFK's and MLK's; I was in grade school when the Challenger exploded and can remember the crisp clarity of the air as I walked to work on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Instantly historical moments are almost invariably defined by searing tragedy (exception: the fall of the Berlin Wall).
We have experienced this evening such an exception: We will all always remember this evening (some more blurrily than others, depending on the nature and duration of one's celebration or commiseration), when the United States elected its first African-American president.
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President-Elect Barack Obama: Today We Corrected Our Historical National Flaw
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (53)"The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them." —Thomas Jefferson
We are confronted by enemies, sunk in war, bleeding gold.
And yet, our America is a finer place today.
It took 232 years; the loss of 600,000 lives in a horrible Civil War; the ugliness of Reconstruction; untold lynchings; a civil rights movement of 50 years; soul-crushing assassinations; church bombings and race riots; ruined presidencies; momentous Supreme Court decisions; and the consignment of the Democratic Party to minority status for four decades.
And that's just what is listed in the history books.
Unmentioned go the silent toll of crushed hopes, the forgotten bravery, the astonishing faith, and the awful sorrows of those black Americans who escaped the noose and the whip, but lived, generation after generation, as second-class citizens in a land that celebrated, each Fourth of July, a hollow proclamation that all men were equal.
And then, today.
Today, we got it done.
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President-Elect Barack Obama: an End to the GOP’s Southern Strategy
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2008 Comment (3)President-elect Barack Obama's win is so cataclysmically historic one knows not where to begin. First, his victory signifies the death of the Old South and President Nixon's infamous "Southern Strategy," which the GOP has used successfully for almost four decades to win presidential elections:
When President Lyndon B. Johnson championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some Republican strategists saw a potential bonanza in the South. They thought their party could reap the votes of white people uneasy with Democrats, or downright hostile to them, for advancing the cause of black people.
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