Sam Adams Alliance

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.

By Rachel Stewart

Carol Severance, a lawyer in San Diego, owns four houses near the beach in Galveston, Texas.  She rents them to others who come to enjoy sun and sand on the Gulf of Mexico. But after Hurricane Rita hit Galveston in 2005, Severance discovered she might no longer have claim to her property.

By Alan Pell Crawford

Paul Krugman in the New York Times is at his best when at his grumpiest, which makes his blast at Paul Ryan is worth a look. It’s a blast not only at the House Budget Committee chairman but also at just about everybody else who is not as appalled by Ryan’s budget as Krugman happens to be. It’s is an attack, above all, on “centrists” and the idea of centrism itself.

The token centrist in this instance seems to be James B. Stewart, another New York Times columnist. Stewart’s mistake is to assume that because Ryan is “mild-mannered,” he is not the “extremist” Krugman believes him to be. And because both Barack Obama and Ron Paul have attacked Ryan’s budget, it must “be carving out the reasonable center,” in the words of Jared Bernstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

By Alan Pell Crawford

This is a “Senior Spring,” a retired history professor named Silvio Laccetti writes in Philly.com, describing “a flowering of creativity and participation among older Americans.” Senior citizens are having

a visible and valuable presence in the Occupy Wall Street movement. They are emerging from the isolation of senior-citizen communities, where their voices are muted and mingling with other age groups is nigh impossible. They’re making their presence known in a maelstrom of social action … They are occupying parks and marching in the streets. They are sharing a vast treasury of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and experience.

Also, they’re old enough not to care very much if younger people approve of their antics or not.