Happy Birthday to Bob Odenkirk, 51.
Good stuff:
1. Seth Masket with a good point about voters and the shutdown.
2. Agree with Ezra Klein: what matters for both Obama and for ACA is to get the thing working; his speeches don't really matter much (Note: Philip Klein made the same point on twitter at some point today, too. Good).
3. Sarah Kliff is on the ACA hotline.
4. Rand Paul and the truth, from Jill Lawrence.
5. And Dan Drezner on Prince Fielder and foreign policy think tanks.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
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The Rand Paul link sends me to the Sarah Kliff article.
ReplyDeleteMight want to fix that.
Thanks; fixed.
DeleteLawrence repeats the unjustified statement that Gore claimed to have invented the internet. She could defend herself on the grounds that her sentence was deliberately unclear as to whether Gore lied or not, but that's a weak defense for a journalist. A flaw in an otherwise-reasonable piece.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to go ahead and disagree with Seth on this one.
ReplyDeleteIt's the primaries, not the generals that matter. Those are elections, and they have voters. The tea partiers and those scared of being primaried are scared BECAUSE people voting in Republican primaries will swallow this BS. The conservative info loop doesn't exist without marks willing to buy it.
But it's not a defense for GOP politicians and leaders to say, "It's not my fault. There were marks willing to buy it, marks whose consciousness we've shaped and cultivated for years."
DeleteRand Paul's rhetoric isn't outside the norm, but that's exactly the problem. Part of his father's appeal was that he didn't engage in cheap shot political bs. Voters can sense that, even if they aren't checking on every detail, and it can go a long way towards earning their trust and respect. Likewise, Rand is at his best when he confronts truths that no other politician is willing to touch -- revealing, for example, that the real secret of Benghazi was CIA gun running into Syria. My gut instinct is that this sort of thing will count for a lot more in a general election than Rand's characterization of Eizenhower's foreign policy or the effects of Obamacare on Congressional staffers. Still, Rand needs to be careful that his rhetoric doesn't make him sound like just another politician.
ReplyDelete