Welcome to the Monday edition of your open thread. I’m sitting here watching the rain through my window. We’ve had the weirdest weather this summer so far. What’s on your mind?
Paul Krugman has a smart take on the popularity gap of President Obama. As you can imagine, it’s the economy, stupid.
The latest hot political topic is the “Obama paradox” — the supposedly mysterious disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want more passion. And so on.
But the only real puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting — who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback — actually matters.
This delusion is, of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama administration’s problem.
What political scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the economy, stupid. Today, Ronald Reagan is often credited with godlike political skills — but in the summer of 1982, when the U.S. economy was performing badly, his approval rating was only 42 percent.
I think there’s actually two problems. Obama is achieving a pretty ambitious agenda which is not enough for his critics from the left and too much from his critics on the right. He won’t get much credit for it until people start feeling more secure about their finances.
Tea fight! The Tea Party Federation has asked that the Tea Party Express (led by Mark Williams of the “Lincoln letter” fame) be removed from the Tea Party.
The Tea Party Federation called on the Tea Party Express to do three things if it wanted to remain part of the group (from the group’s press release Saturday):
1. Mark Williams must be officially removed from the ranks of the Tea Party Express.
2. Notice of Mark Williams’ removal must be placed prominently on the official Tea Party Express website.
3. Tea Party Express must issue a press release articulating points 1 and 2 above.
On CBS’ Face The Nation Tea Party Federation leader David Webb explained that Williams’ letter was “clearly offensive” and needed to be answered for.
Yeah, it didn’t really help when the NAACP asks that you condemn racism and you reply by batsh%t crazy racism. At least some people recognize this. Of course, Mark Williams isn’t taking this lying down. He had a few words to share:
Apparently I have offended the tea party “leadership.”
Mind you, there is no tea party leadership; every tea partier is a tea party leader. But something happens when the stronger egos and personalities in a movement begin to feel a sense of ownership. It is not long before they act to claim and defend that feeling.
An example of that happened today. And it is a crying shame. We are fighting for the future of not just this nation but for the future of Mankind. That’s just a little more important than my fat head, or the apparently even fatter head on Face the Nation Today who misrepresented himself as the tea party “leader”.
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My disappointment was a grandstanding statement on national television about expelling an individual (me) and my 34 other staff and performers from a grassroots movement that does nothing more than support the Constitution of theses United States because of the Constitutionally guaranteed exercise of the Creator’s endowed freedom to thought and expression is at least as damaging as the rest of the rhetoric that Morial, Sharpton, Dorelli and Shelton hammered such a delicate end.
Free speech! Free speech! Constitution! Apparently American is going to hell faster if the Tea Party criticizes each other, or something.