Kenneth S. Baer

In the middle of the discussion, the candidate’s veteran media consultant pulled out a thin book–heavily underlined and annotated–and began reading passages from it as if it were the Bible. The book was George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, a volume that quickly has made its author […]

In the annals of diplomacy, it’s not the most sophisticated theory of great-power politics, but it proved to be effective. In their first joint news conference in February 2001, when asked if the two leaders had anything in common, Bush responded that they both used Colgate toothpaste. Many–including those in Blair’s inner circle–thought that dentifrice […]

Twenty-eight years later, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira have published a new book with the same title arguing, essentially, the same thing. In their version of The Emerging Democratic Majority, the authors argue that since 1992, American politics has been in transition from an old order of Republican dominance–which began with Richard Nixon’s election […]

Do you believe that “Americans across the country are shamefully being denied their Constitutional right to vote” and that “we haven’t come as far since the early days of the Civil Rights movement as we often let ourselves believe?” Are you “not for spending the whole surplus on tax cuts for the rich, not for […]

For critics across the political spectrum, Joe Klein’s character’s assessment of the fictional governor of a small Southern state (who, in the film version of Primary Colors, did go on to win the White House) summed up the Clinton presidency even before Monica Lewinsky. Liberals thought he was faithless for his stances on deficit reduction, […]