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Sestak Job Offer Microscandal Was a Waste of Time, Energy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 29, 2010 Comment (21)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
There are still a couple of questions about the White House effort to persuade Rep. Joe Sestak to quit his primary campaign against Sen. Arlen Specter.
The first one that springs to mind is: Did Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who apparently dispatched his old boss, former President Bill Clinton, to do the sweet-talking, actually think the offer of an unpaid executive advisory would be at all enticing? -
A Sestak Bribe? What Constitutes a Bribe?
Tweet Share on Facebook May 27, 2010 Comment (15)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Before today, I had no opinion on the relative hunkiness of Jonathan Chait and Michael Kinsley. For the record, in my previous post, I had meant to employ the colloquialism “out-thunk.” My bad.
Now, onto substance: Chait writes: “I've been trying to make people understand that a White House job offer to Joe Sestak could not be a quid pro quo--let alone an illegal quid pro quo--because the quid (Sestak accepts an executive branch job) is identical to the quo (Sestak quits the Pennsylvania primary race.) Maybe you don't believe me.” -
Why the Sestak Job Offer Is a Big Deal
Tweet Share on Facebook May 27, 2010 Comment (18)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
In Washington, you can safely assume the air is beginning to stink when administration apologists play the “Politics isn’t a crime” card, as the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen has here in reference to the brewing Joe Sestak job-offer scandal. [See who supports Sestak.]
Funny, I don’t remember Democrats being in such a forgiving mood when the Bush White House was accused of politicizing the Justice Department by firing a batch of U.S. Attorneys. Or when Rep. Tom DeLay launched his notorious K Street Project and helped to favorably redraw Texas’ congressional district boundaries. These efforts went beyond the pale of “exert[ing] influence in developments related to [the president’s] political party.” (Which indeed they did.) -
Republicans Should Beware Rand Paul's Utopian Delusion
Tweet Share on Facebook May 21, 2010 Comment (22)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Rich Lowry makes a lot of sense when he says, “I’m sympathetic to libertarianism, but it sometimes has a weakness for theoretical exercises removed from reality." But that doesn't go far enough. Sometimes? How about: Libertarianism is a utopian fantasy. It has never existed, and will never exist, outside the confines of academia. Period.
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Arizona's Ethnic Studies Fight Is About Defining American History
Tweet Share on Facebook May 17, 2010 Comment (5)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I’m arriving late to it, but the controversy over Arizona’s new law on ethnic studies seems to me to reenact a tired old pantomime of multiculturalism and its discontents.
Conservatives, it’s true, appeal conveniently to the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. and insist that all individuals be judged by the “content of their character.” Liberals reply that the kind of ethnically-focused curricula they favor are necessary precisely because various groups in America’s past have not been judged by the content of their character--and so, to start talking like that now smacks of that Seinfeld episode where Kramer keeps violating his vow of silence. -
Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive-Fascist Distinction
Tweet Share on Facebook May 12, 2010 Comment (13)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Jonah Goldberg graciously, if forcefully, responds to my musings on the legacy of Woodrow Wilson. Rather than repeat the points I made in an earlier follow-up—short version: I don’t deny that Wilson was a Progressive nor that Progressivism was generally a bad thing—I’ll focus on this contention of Jonah’s:
If you want to claim everything stemming from the Western Enlightenment tradition as “progressive” you’re free to do so. But analytically, where does that get you? By this logic we’re all progressives—and by all, I mean conservatives, libertarians, Bolsheviks, liberals, anarchists, and Maoists—because we’re not Medievalists. But if progressive is to mean something more concrete and specific—say, the ideas associated with the New Republic, Herbert Croly, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, and the administration of Woodrow Wilson—then Scott’s use of “progressive” is almost meaningless.
Let me refine that a bit.
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Republicans Can Finally Be As Conservative as They Wanna Be
Tweet Share on Facebook May 11, 2010 Comment (11)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
For all the grief I tend to direct at Tea Partyers, I’ll say this: They seem to be exerting a rightward pull on the electorate that, 15 or 20 years ago, Republicans could only have dreamed of. According to the latest Real Clear Politics polling averages, former Rep. Pat Toomey is running ahead of both Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak in the Pennsylvania Senate race.
That’s simply extraordinary. -
Glenn Beck Still Doesn't Get It on Woodrow Wilson's Legacy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 7, 2010 Comment (16)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Easy, tiger! On his radio show today, Glenn Beck responded to my post yesterday about Woodrow Wilson’s legacy. I’m not sure he, or his research staff, made it beyond the headline. Not only did I not try to airbrush the history of Wilson and Progressivism, I explicitly said the movement was “indeed guilty of much of the baggage that [Jonah] Goldberg lays at its doorstep.”
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Tea Party, Glenn Beck Wrong on Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism
Tweet Share on Facebook May 6, 2010 Comment (22)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Which American president said the following: “If America is not to have free enterprise, then she can have no freedom of any sort whatever”? The same one who said this: “Any man who can survive by his brains, any man who can put the others out of business by making the thing cheaper to the consumer at the same time that he is increasing its intrinsic value and quality, I take off my hat to, and I say: ‘You are the man who can build up the United States, and I wish there were more of you.’”
And this: “I know, and every man in his heart knows, that the only way to enrich America is to make it possible for any man who has the brains to get into the game ... Are you not eager for the time when the genius and initiative of all the people shall be called into the service of business?”And the same one of whom Herbert Hoover said this, referring to the regulation of food sales during World War I: “He yielded with great reluctance to the partial and temporary abandonment of our principles of life during the war, because of the multitude of tasks with which the citizen or the states could not cope. But he often expressed to me the hope that our methods of doing so were such that they could be quickly reversed and free enterprise restored.”
That last no doubt gives away the answer—Woodrow Wilson. Surprise. -
GOP Contradicts Itself on Economic Policy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 5, 2010 Comment (6)By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Have Democrats effectively become the old Eastern Establishment?
The Weekly Standard’s Christopher Caldwell seems to think so. In a portrait of “Wall Street Democrats,” Caldwell writes that conservative Republicans have been snookered by “a class that despises them.” And he flags contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics to demonstrate the financial sector's fealty to Democrats.
The salience of anti-bailout populism and libertarian purism among Republicans right now may be circumstantial, and thus temporary. When the economy recovers more broadly, perhaps antipathy toward Wall Street will recede. But maybe it signals a more permanent shift—or the emergence of what Jon Chait calls “Naderite conservatives.”
Myself, I’m not too thrilled by the prospect.
Scott Galupo
Scott Galupo is a Washington-based freelance writer. He formerly worked for House Republican Leader John Boehner, and was a staff writer for The Washington Times.
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