Jonathan Bernstein

E.J. Dionne has a nice column pointing out that while “Obamacare” remains unpopular, most of the provisions are well-liked, and thus Democrats should run on the issue. As regular readers know, I certainly agree that the individual components of reform are far more popular than reform overall. However, the column’s headline — “Obamacare has growing […]

A catch to Andrew Gelman for correcting an attempted but inaccurate catch by Alfred Moore, Joseph Parent and Joseph Uscinski, who thought they had caught Paul Krugman in an error on the always-fun topic of conspiracy theories. Not so! Here’s Krugman’s original assertion: Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left — which do exist, […]

Dan Drezner stuck a fascinating hypothesis about presidential politics down at the end of a post about foreign policy, and I want to highlight it because as far as I know no one has ever addressed this question. Here’s Drezner: This brings me to the final reason that I’m a bit more sanguine than Beinart […]

Oh, c’mon. I know we’re well into the campaign silly season, and I suppose that Republicans have earned what they’re getting today with their ill-considered government shutdown strategy last fall and other brinkmanship since taking the House majority in the 2010 elections, but reactions to Mitch McConnell’s latest comments are totally ridiculous. Here’s what the […]

Yesterday, Annie Lowrey considered Hillary Clinton’s recent (and continuing) stumbles over her wealth. She concluded that none of this “Mitt Romney problem” will matter because Democrats have a proven rhetorical flourish on the subject — Lowrey suggested, “Yes, we’re really lucky. And I know first-hand that we don’t need a tax break for our millions […]

Commenter “Davis X. Machina” asks: “What’s the absolute latest a candidate can realistically get into a presidential race? Not ballot-deadlines-latest, but real-world.” Great question. During the last cycle, numerous pundits talked up a late entry in the Republican nomination contest well into fall 2007, when it was clearly too late. So what’s the real answer? […]

Dave Weigel, who is an excellent reporter and (I’m pretty sure) just having some fun here, noted that potential Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has outsold Hillary Clinton in the campaign book sweepstakes. Weigel also supplied book sales results from other politicians and authors for context. My advice: Ignore those book sales numbers! Dismiss them, […]

Ed Kilgore notes today that the infamous Ames straw poll is less than a year away, at least if it actually takes place. There’s some talk about canceling it. For those who don’t pay close attention to Republican presidential nomination politics, the much-ridiculed Ames event works like this: Anyone with a ticket can vote in […]

One more lesson of Watergate: Spin is futile. Events are decisive. A persistent myth of the scandal is that journalists were the heroes. The movie version of that story, “All the President’s Men,” is perhaps still for many people the entryway to learning about that period. (It’s a good movie. “Dick” is better). In reality, […]

At the Monkey Cage today, Justin Levitt has a nice summary of the evidence — or better, the nonevidence — on voter impersonation fraud. The headline is that he has found all of 31 credible episodes since 2000. Some are proven, some aren’t, but that’s 31 out of, he says, about 1 billion votes cast […]