By Alan Pell Crawford
Steve and Cokie Roberts, Georgetown’s answer to Fred and Ginger, have issued a warning in what they no doubt believe to be Churchillian tones. Their complaint seems to boil down to this: Politicians who have devoted their lives to going along to get along suddenly find the old tricks are no longer working so well.
By Alan Pell Crawford
John Edwards owes more than $300,000 from his presidential run eight years ago, which will surely be dwarfed—one can only hope—by the legal fees he is running up in his criminal trial. My sympathies are more with the campaign aides who didn’t get paid back in 2004 than the lawyers. At least they knew what they were getting into when they agreed to defend the creep. My heart also goes out to the people who got stiffed by Rudy Giuliani, who owes $2.6 million from his 2008 presidential bid.
By Alan Pell Crawford
The millions of young Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are now four years older, which is not news since everyone else is, too. What political observers are noticing, however, is that that so-called Millennials—Neil Howe’s term for those born in the late 1980s and early 1990s—are not so fired up about this election as they were the last. Some reasons for this seem obvious, others not. History might repeat itself, but you still can’t elect an African-American president for first time twice. That these young voters are not as full of “Hope” time around is no surprise, either, given how few of them can find work. More than 60 percent of college-age Millennials are registered to vote, but only 46 percent say they are likely to cast ballots in November.
By Alan Pell Crawford
If Chris Matthews or Sean Hannity were hosting a cable TV show back in 1924—bear with me now—either one of them would know for a certainty three things about the Democratic Party.
African Americans would never join up with a party that had just deadlocked its convention over whether to condemn the Ku Klux Klan, the Democrats would always have a base in the “Solid South,” and the party was absolutely doomed because New York alone gave Republicans one-third of the electoral votes of the entire combined South.
So says Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, talking to In These Times, a left-of-center magazine of news and opinion. Trende has just published a thoughtful book, The Lost Majority, which points to any number of examples like the one above to show that much of what political observers take for granted about the future of American politics is nonsense.
By Alan Pell Crawford
A blogger could post a story a day on the latest decline in congressional approval ratings and never run out of material. It might get a little boring for the blogger by about the second day, not to mention monotonous for the reader. But there’d always be news, all of it bad. Or good if, like most of us, you think people should disapprove of Congress.
Clearly, the administration gets mileage from the fact that the people are sick of Congress, and that’s a problem.
By Alan Pell Crawford
A survey by the Pew Research Center purports to show that Americans aren’t quite as dumb as the researchers thought. The good folks at Pew (who, for what it’s worth, didn’t know enough not to saddle themselves with such a name) have “measured knowledge of current affairs by the general public for decades,” the Huffington Post reports.
By Alan Pell Crawford
America’s a big place, chalk full of people with different experiences and beliefs. And that’s great. That’s also why we should distrust supposed experts who try to lump us together into great mushy masses, as if we are as indistinguishable as mollusks. This is especially misleading in matters of religion which—in this country, certainly—is highly individual.
Yet to hear political experts, we can neatly be divided into Christians and everybody else, and by Christian, the experts almost always mean Protestant evangelicals who are social conservatives. (That a great many Protestant evangelicals who are social conservatives supported Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic, gives you some idea how complicated we are.)
By Rachel Stewart
South Bend, Indiana, like other small cities across the country, has faced its share of hardship. A drive through its historic neighborhoods hints at the once prosperous residents who built homes during the economic boom of the last century. But time, factory closings, company relocations and circumstance have taken a toll on the northeast Indiana community. Once grand houses now stand empty and crumbling, waiting for the wrecking ball.
By Rachel Stewart
Whether you love Tim Tebow or not, , his on-field and off-field activism has landed him squarely in America’s consciousness. The former starting quarterback of the Denver Broncos makes no bones about where he stands on certain issues – remember the anti-abortion commercial he starred in for Super Bowl 44? That activism has earned him both praise and ire from teammates, players, and the public. But it also raised awareness for the causes Tebow champions.
While he’s one of the most visible sports figures at present, Tebow’s not the only athlete using his notoriety to support his favorite causes. “In the last few years, we’ve seen sports activism at every locus on the ideological continuum,” as David Sirota writes in Salon. From Arthur Ashe and Muhammad Ali in the 1960’s to LeBron James today, sports stars, like Hollywood heavyweights, are using their fame for what they believe to be the good of the people.
By Alan Pell Crawford
Rick Santorum has “suspended” his presidential campaign, but his candidacy, for a moment, made a lot of people who’d given the nomination to Mitt Romney months ago question themselves. Good. And the key to his appeal, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza points out, has gone largely unrecognized. Santorum’s boomlet, Cillizza writes, “was built, in no small part, on a populist economic pitch centered on his upbringing in western Pennsylvania.” Santorum’s mentioning that his grandfather was a coalminer was “the best stump material of the year,” a Republican consultant named Rob Stutzman told Cillizza. When Santorum talked about jobs, he did well. When he brought up birth control, he bombed.
