David Atkins

I must admit I’ve been a bit hard on Hillary Clinton lately. It’s mostly out of frustration: I expect that she’ll be the Democratic nominee when all is said and done, but I fear that her campaign will fail to sound an adequately populist tone. While many consider the prospect laughable, I don’t think it’s […]

I wrote earlier today that Hillary Clinton’s defensive approach to politics is part of the reason she is shedding support. This story from the New York Times on her Southern firewall strategy is just another example of the once-inevitable campaign’s mindbogglingly defensive approach to politics: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign is methodically building a political […]

Hillary Clinton’s latest favorability ratings are not good: Dogged by continued scrutiny of her email practices as secretary of state, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s favorability with the American public has sunk to one of its lowest levels in Gallup’s 23-year trend. Currently, 41% of U.S. adults say they have a favorable opinion of the […]

In order to understand how Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican field despite openly promoting tax hikes on wealthy hedge fund managers, hinting support for universal healthcare and other wildly iconoclastic positions hostile to decades of Republican dogma, it’s important to note the that the Republican Party was teetering on the edge of a […]

Donald Trump has done it again. Once again he has captured headlines by taking a blunt, aggressive populist position contrary to GOP orthodoxy–this time against hedge fund managers: In a telephone interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Trump vowed to reform the tax laws if elected and said the current system was harming middle class […]

I’ve frequently used the devastating failure of Sam Brownback’s conservative economic experiment in Kansas to show that conservative policies aren’t just morally and ethically wrong, but also simply dysfunctional and counterproductive at a basic utilitarian level. Most educated people understand this about supply-side economic policy by now. It’s also, of course, true of social policy. […]

It’s the silly season of August, and political reporters can only write so many articles about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. So we get treated to the spectacle of a meeting between Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren being played up as a precursor to his possible entry into the race, after a […]

One way to know that Donald Trump isn’t just a flash in the pan doomed to go the way of Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann is to look at who Republican voters think will win the nomination. It’s one thing for a candidate to lead the field. It’s another to convince the primary electorate that […]

Politics is all too often couched in terms of morality and ethics, rather than simple right and wrong. What I mean by that is that reasonable people can come to different moral value judgments about ethical dilemmas: is it more moral to ensure that everyone has access to a social safety net even if some […]

Even mainstream pundits are now finally acknowledging what many of us have been saying for weeks now: the Trump surge isn’t just a flash in the pan, but a real reflection of the dissatisfaction of the GOP base and its desire for a tough-talking, no-holds-barred racist, sexist populist rebel. As the Very Serious People come […]