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JUL
13
Mitt Romney dips a toe in The Atlantic
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
13
Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney makes a range of observations and criticisms in his latest essay, “America Is in Denial,” published in The Atlantic on July 4 — commentary that’s just panoramic enough, with only one individual called on the carpet by name, that the senator from Utah might be seen as appealing for something like a national consensus on solving the problems we face. Not least among them, the fact that we can’t seem to find a national consensus about anything. Fair enough — reach should exceed grasp, right? But in the current gridlock backdrop, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Romney’s comments — relatively benign, mildly reproving — could also be the genial opening overture for a 2024 Romney campaign. He’ll vigorously deny this, of course, pro forma that’s to be expected. Some of Romney’s essay observations go out of their way to position him as a nonentity in any serious talk a
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JUN
11
Along intraparty lines
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
11
We're still a year and a half from the election, and the 2020 campaign has already been a shape-shifting thing, with the biggest Democratic field in history, and a Republican president determined to prove that he and he alone can defy political gravity, a second time. The Democratic herd will thin itself out, of course; it’s subject to the same law of political thermodynamics as the president*: things fall apart. Majorities narrow. Bedrock constituencies have second thoughts. Lately, everyday GOPeople have done just that, pushing back against the transmitted wisdom of the Republican church. From those occupying the seats in Congress to the ones in folding chairs at town halls, Republicans are starting to think for themselves vis-à-vis Trump's legislative agenda, and who on the other side might be in a position to stop it a year from November. That fact will be problematical for a White House determined to establish a sense of Republican invincibility, behind a si
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MAY
14
Getting out of line: Four departures from the partisan
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
14
WE PROBABLY shouldn’t have wondered. When you spend enough time in the bizzaro world of presidential politics, anything, it seems, can happen. Anything at all. The one undying catechism of Republican identity in Trumptime, the absolute enduring reality is that the Republicans, from rank & file to leadership, constitute a solid wall for support for President* Trump in particular, and the Republican / conservative agenda generally. But few things monkey-wrench a rule like a real-world, working exception to that rule. Or four of them. Within the last month, four things happened that call into question the willingness of conservatives — from everyday-people Republicans in two deep-red states to lawmakers on Capitol Hill — to abide by the expected Republican orthodoxy of behavior toward those on the other side. There’s been listening going on, and maybe even a reach, back and forth, across the aisle. ◊ ◊ ◊ On April 15, Bernie Sanders, the Ve
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MAY
02
Biden's in. Deal with it.
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
02
AMERICA IS an idea,” Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. told us in the campaign video from the Biden web site, the web site that indicated like nothing else could that, as of April 25, the former vice president was officially joining the 2020 presidential conversation, making his bid to reclaim the American idea from its captors, foreign and domestic. In the video, Biden speaks over footage of the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, describing those involved as having “crazed faces, illuminated by torches.” “And that’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States. He said there were quote ‘some very fine people on both sides.’” Biden slowly repeats the words “very fine people.” He then said that, with those words, “the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew
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APR
21
The misinformation: William Barr's redaction of truth
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
21
IT WAS ALL supposed to be clean, neat, surgical. The newly-minted Attorney General William Barr would deign to read the overwhelming volume of the 400+ pages of the Mueller Report so we wouldn't have to. Barr, previously hailed as the last institutionalist left alive in Washington, would burn up a weekend to consume the report, and release its findings in a breathtakingly short four! page! summary that would satiate critics of President* Trump, burnish Barr's sterling reputation, and calm the turbulent waters roiling the moats around House Trump. All would be well in the fullness of time. Only it ... didn't turn out that way. What's been developing, or metastasizing, ever since in Washington and the nation has been a growing unease with Barr, President* Trump, and an increasingly brazen willingness to disregard the Constitution in the service of a single president. Barr, once the ostensible new adult on the block, has dug in his heels and refused to release the unexpurgated work
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NOV
18
The midterms 2018: Blue tides
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
NOV
18
FOR WEEKS, it seems, we’ve been using the shorthand phrase ”blue wave” to describe the long-forecast Democratic victories in the House of Representatives, and it actually worked. That tidy little aquatic metaphor to explain what was coming, or what was anticipated on Election Day 2018, worked fine for the race that was called the night of Nov. 6. That’s when more than 30 House seats were gained by Democratic candidates, confirming the long-held suspicion of analysts and pundits. But what’s happened since that already historic night has been even more profound. The original phraseology doesn’t work anymore. Not even close. Thanks to immense grassroots interest in the election; late-arriving absentee, provisional and mail-in ballots; a general exhaustion with the Republican style of rule; and a turnout that suggested people had crossed a mental threshold and decided that voting was, well, cool — the 2018 midterm count wasn’t really ev
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SEP
03
Florida's gubernatorial primary colors
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
SEP
03
FLORIDA FLORIDA FLORIDA: it’s the ultimate swing state, crazy from the heat of the weather or its own legislative invention, a lawless free-fire zone with guns more abundant than in the wild wild West. And with roughly nine weeks left before the November elections, the Sunshine State’s gubernatorial race is shaping up as the one to watch, thanks to an upset no one thought was possible, a racist dog-whistle everyone knew was probably inevitable, and the reliable potential for surprise common to a region in the center of the American Venn diagram of race and ethnicity, politics and the evolving national future. The Sunshine State has set the stage, and the stakes, for a compelling finale to the 2018 midterms, and quite possibly sets the terms of Democratic engagement with Republican power in 2020. There was idle talk that President* Trump had effectively nationalized the midterms, making them a referendum on his time in office. Inquiring minds would beg to differ: the
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AUG
07
The big guns of August
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
AUG
07
OF ALL THE MONTHS on the calendar, August always bears watching as a kind of pivot-point month, a transitional buffer between the chronically overheated days of July (when both tempers and temperatures reliably tend to flare) and September, when the first whispers of autumn announce themselves, giving us just a hint of the change of seasons to come. It’s not always like that in August, but it’s true often enough. It was sure as hell like that 44 years ago. That was the month in 1974, in the halcyon doomsday summer of Watergate’s crescendo, when Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency. Thursday, Aug. 9 (the 44th anniversary of the official resignation) was the day that marked a capstone to a season of relentless upheaval, as the scandal of Nixon’s creation, or at least his acquiescence, finally overwhelmed him. ◊ ◊ ◊ A lot can happen in the tree-ring time of 44 years; we’ve seen numerous opportunities for politicians to learn from
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JUL
25
The Republican base, revisited
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
25
JAMELLE BOUIE, in an essay in Slate on July 22, deftly explores particulars of the deeply feared panoramic Republican base, and finds it may not be the boogeyman that Democrats are fearing and Republicans are counting on. The monster we’ve been told is hiding under the bed may not be as fearsome as advertised. And digging further, it's possible to see that the identity of the Republican base is such a shifting sand that its value as a weapon against Democrats may be marginal or even illusory — not least of all because of the volatile nature of our electoral politics. Bouie observes: “Presidents always have partisans, and it’s rare that they break ranks. On the eve of his resignation in 1974, half of Republicans still supported Richard Nixon, and 59 percent said he shouldn’t be forced from office. Likewise, around 80 percent of Republicans backed Ronald Reagan at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal. For Trump, the key question is less ‘how man
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JUL
23
Romney redux?
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
23
THE METAPHOR of “dipping a toe in the water” is a bane of political discourse, invoked forever to describe a prospective candidate’s consideration of a run for the White House. Less attention’s paid to that rare politician who dips that toe in the moist shoreline before the water even gets there. We may be seeing that with Mitt Romney, the biggest loser of the 2012 presidential contest. We’re more than two years out from the 2020 derby, but it may soon be time to welcome back an old favorite, hopefully smarter than he was before. In ways both predictable and less predictable, the former Massachusetts governor and prime mover of the Salt Lake City Olympics seems to be slyly entering the 2020 conversation before it’s really even started. But certain statements of his own beg the question of what he’d bring to the table that’s any different from the people there now. ◊ ◊ ◊ He’s of course taken the customary route
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APR
20
Paul Ryan, the short-distance runner
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
20
IT HAD BEEN going so well, or, at least as well as could be expected under the circumstances. The Washington Post reported recently how, days earlier, political advisers to Rep. Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives “announced he had already raised $54 million over the last 15 months, $40 million of which was directed to ... GOP campaigns through the National Republican Congressional Committee.” The speaker’s reputation as a top-tier fundraiser was soaring, even if his cred as herder of fractious cats — leader of the Republican caucus — was under fire and his ability to navigate the turbulence of the Trump White House was always in question. But then he went and spoiled it all by saying something shocking like “I’m outta here.” Ryan, who replaced John Boehner in 2015, announced April 11 that he would not seek re-election to either his leadership role or his congressional seat. His reasoning is as understandable as it i
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MAR
28
John Bolton: The fire starter this time
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
28
WE MUST, as a nation, be more unpredictable ... and we have to be unpredictable starting now,” President* Donald Trump said on March 22 from Washington, uttering the breathtakingly foolish words that may be the defining language of the Trump Doctrine, right before introducing the Cardinal Richelieu who will advise him on how best to achieve the angry inscrutability that Trump demands. Trump named John Robert Bolton, the ardent überhawk who helped engineer the disaster of the Iraq war, to become his third national security adviser in 14 months. Bolton replaces Army lieutenant Gen. H.R. McMaster, thought to be a relative moderate in the Trump inner circle — and thus, subject to banishment from House Trump. The New York Times reported March 22 that “General McMaster struggled for months to impose order not only on a fractious national security team but on a president who resisted the sort of discipline customary in the military. Although General McMaster has
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FEB
07
More Time With the Family
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
FEB
07
A new year, like a new broom, sweeps clean, at least for a while. Before and after the start of this still minty-fresh jaunt around the sun called 2018, several Republican lawmakers have decided not to seek re-election. The rush for the out doors will include the retirements of relative newcomers to Congress and an institutional lion of the Senate. These exits, the ones that came before, and those likely to follow in the months between now and November have dire implications for a Republican party struggling to find its future stars amid an increasingly depleted cast of existing characters. ... Retirements from Congress are hardly party-specific, of course. Democrats in Congress have been dropping out, for reasons of exhaustion with the partisan atmosphere, and in response to various allegations of wrongdoing (Sen. Al Franken and Rep. John Conyers among the two most prominent Dems to be caught up in sexual harassment charges). But if you sense there’s a louder, more popu
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FEB
03
Trump's State of the Union: A tale of two GOPs
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
FEB
03
IT WAS A juxtaposition whose irony was cruel, unusual and inescapable: Hours before President* Donald Trump made nice across the aisle at the 2018 State of the Union address, proposing to govern in a new spirit of bipartisanship and commonality, a Republican senator called for the arrest of any DREAMers who dared to attend ... the State of the Union address. Politico reported that, before the SOTU speech, Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, tweeted that “Of all the places where the Rule of Law needs to be enforced, it should be in the hallowed halls of Congress. Any illegal aliens attempting to go through security, under any pretext of invitation or otherwise, should be arrested and deported." When Gosar acted as an apprentice to the tweeter-in-chief, he was setting the stage for a State of the Union address that had more news in it than usual. Some of that was the address itself; more of what made it news will have to do with whether it marks a turning po
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NOV
11
Flagging the Wave: The 2017 election
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
NOV
11
Russia voted last November. Last night, America voted.” — @stevesilberman A TRUISM of the human condition (and our equally human tendency toward impatience) has it that “good things come to those who wait.” The results of Tuesday’s various elections throughout the United States are a notable exception. Democrats, 10 months tired of what passes for an agenda from what passes for a president and a Republican Congress, aggressively reasserted their identity and their demographic backbone on Tuesday, courting everyday people where they live and letting House Trump whet its appetite for self-destriuction. The result — an Election Day of panoramic victory — may well be a sign of things to come, sooner and later. ◊ ◊ ◊ Where to begin? Let’s start in Hoboken, N.J., where Ravinder Bhalla, a Sikh American, was elected mayor of this small, progressive city across the Hudson river
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NOV
08
Anatomy of a Tragedy
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
NOV
08
“It’s never been so personal,” says Hana Barkowitz, an infectiously upbeat member of the Kent State College Democrats, in a frank assessment of the waging of the war of the 2016 presidential campaign, and what the outcome would mean to her on that night, one year ago today. In the new documentary 11/8/16, now streaming on Netflix, the United States of America is on display as a true mosaic, a pointillist canvas whose diversity leads to all kinds of surprises, especially the one handed to the largely gob-smacked nation on Nov. 8, 2016, when, against all odds and most predictions, Donald Trump, billionaire reality TV action figure and walking advertisement for himself, attained the presidency of the United States. The film is the chronicle of one day in the life of America, and how events affected 15 different people, widely dispersed physically and culturally, on the election day that bent the arc of America’s cultural and demographic destiny. If the c
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SEP
28
The, um, Evolution of Donald Trump II
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
SEP
28
Sooner or later, every autocrat finds it necessary to embrace some of the tenets of democracy. Sooner or later, kicking and screaming if necessary, every putative ruler obeys the call to govern — with all the parliamentary, deliberative and conciliatory actions the word “govern” implies. In fits and starts, that’s starting to happen to President* Donald Trump, whether he likes it or not. In a generally increasing series of rebuffs and rejections, the occupant of the White House is learning that the authority of the Oval Office isn’t the same as that in a C-suite in Manhattan. We remember the fire-breathing ideologue of the campaign days, last year, the man who insisted that if he won, there’d be no quarter asked of or given to the Democrats, scourge of species, Satan’s deputies on earth. And lo, the commandments were written upon the tablets: The wall protecting the United States from the tide of brown people in the south shall be buil
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MAY
05
Rewriting the Right
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
05
Less than four months into the unalloyed conservative triumph of Donald Trump assuming the presidency of the United States — an objective deeply desired and widely praised by think-tank and media conservatives — the symbol of American right-wing media and a leading conservative policy organization are going through major changes of their leadership and their missions. Just not the way they planned, or expected. Change comes at you fast, they say. For these groups, the sudden changes that have already taken place could lead to more upheaval, as the conservative bloc in Washington faces the prospect of having to realign its objectives with something called reality, the reality of changes they can’t control. The rightward realignment started last week when Bill O’Reilly, the longtime anchor and chief interlocutor of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, was fired, in the wake of numerous sexual harassment lawsuits; anecdotal statements of some who cla
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FEB
14
House Trump: The blowback begins
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
FEB
14
ELECTIONS HAVE consequences,” Republicans are fond of saying. The Trump White House has found out — in swift and unspinnable events over the last 12 hours — that those consequences can be as ominous and pivotal for the winner as they’re assumed to be for the loser. Within the administration, there’s resistance to some in the current Trump inner circle. Within the government writ large, there’s resistance to the Trump White House’s interpretation of the law. Either way, a fledgling administration is discovering that this is what democracy really looks like. ◊ ◊ ◊ John Schindler, a security expert and a former National Security Council analyst, writing Sunday in The New York Observer, offered a sharp, plenary overview of one of the Trump administration’s most dangerous ironies: Spy vs. Spymaster — in the process laying out exactly why tonight’s resignation of Michael Flynn as national security adviser (a
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JAN
20
The blind spots of Donald Trump
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JAN
20
WHAT ophthalmologists call “scotomas” we call blind spots. Donald Trump, the presumptive 45th president of the United States, has displayed their political and rhetorical equivalents from the start of his public life, and certainly from the start of the campaign that has led him — improbably, shockingly — to this day, hours from assuming the Oval Office. The 18 months of his scorched-earth campaign were an extension of the contractual, mathematical, business world he knows intimately, the world he lives and breathes, a world in which he takes no prisoners and brooks no dissent. When he wrote (in his 2000 book “The America We Deserve”) that “I'm a good businessman and I can be amazingly unsentimental when I need to be,” he was telling us in no uncertain terms exactly what moves him, and exactly the kind of unemotional, first-blush world view we can expect from a Trump administration. Call it Trump’s lack of vision thing. I
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OCT
11
Clinton-Trump II: The rage that changes nothing
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
OCT
11
MARTHA RADDATZ of ABC and Anderson Cooper of CNN did their best to, uh, maintain law and order at last night’s second presidential debate, but the presumptive law-and-order candidate, Republican nominee Donald Trump, was having none of that. Despite the moderators’ pushback, Trump tried to set both the tone and the agenda for this one, at Washington University in St. Louis, and failed miserably at doing either one. And by the end of the 90-minute slugfest, with an increasingly game Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, getting more confident, and an increasingly angry Trump working the room like a tent-show evangelist in a one-on-one with the devil, Trump employed antics that probably changed no minds and revealed — in ways Trump never anticipated — how little he really cares about changing any minds a month before the election. Least of all his own. ◊ ◊ ◊ Some parts of the debate were close to being as respectably spirited a debate
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OCT
07
Kaine-Pence: Style vs. substance on the undercard
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
OCT
07
WHEN A vice-presidential debate gets the nickname of “The Thrilla in Vanilla” before a word’s even spoken, you know you’re facing something with the potential to underwhelm. But in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Republican Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana and Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia both brought the fireworks, and two distinct styles of rhetorical combat, to at the Longwood University campus in Farmville, Virginia. We got the back and forth between Democrats and Republicans that we’ve had all year, at the lower wattage of a vice-presidential context. Flash polls — notoriously emotional and notoriously unreliable — proclaimed Pence the winner, largely on matters of style. But count on it, once fact-checkers and analysts check in with the accuracy of what was said, you’ll hear more of what’s bubbling in the social realm right now: that it was a somewhat clumsy, ham-fisted win for Kaine and the Clinton campa
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AUG
11
Truth to power, Trump to Twitter
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
AUG
11
WHAT WAS probably the single defining moment of the Democratic National Convention occurred while the convention was happening, but it more properly belongs to the everyday world outside the arena. We can thank Khizr Khan of Charlottesville, Va., for illuminating the real patriotism of a fallen son, the fraudulent patriotism of the Trump campaign, the ways in which that campaign thrives on division for its own sake, and what it means to be an American in the most jagged time in our history. It was the fourth night of a convention that was unnaturally well-oiled and operationally smooth. Hillary Clinton was yet to make her acceptance speech, the first money pitch for the presidency. Shortly before that, with his wife, Ghazal, beside him, Khan took the podium to pay tribute to his son, Capt. Humayun Saqib Muazzam Khan of the United States Army, killed in a suicide truck-bomb blast in Baquoba, Iraq, on June 8, 2004. Captain Khan, 27, was posthumously awarded the Bronze Sta
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AUG
05
The Democratic Convention Day 4: Hillary. Hillary. Hillary.
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
AUG
05
IT’S A SHAME that Time magazine already cashed in its great cover headline from 1993, speculating on the rise of Hillary Clinton, then “the most powerful first lady in history,” as a someday-viable presidential contender. The New York Times, mining exactly the same speculative editorial ground, used exactly the same headline in June 2006. What was wishful thinking 23 years ago, woefully premature 10 years ago and short-circuited at the ballot box eight years ago is alive and well today, a very going concern. “ASCENT OF A WOMAN” indeed. When Clinton took the stage last Thursday at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, finally gaining the Democratic nomination she was after in the bitterly fought contest with Barack Obama in 2008, it was an obvious validation of her tenacity, but also a testament to a candidate ready for the office she’s pursued, and a nation ready to embrace what it means. The name “Clinton” is no longer the defa
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