archives

Rick Perlstein:

Barack Obama has not run as a policy maximalist. By and large, his big proposals have all been in that safe spot where liberals can't quite get mad and the Beltway wise men can't quite get scared. He has advocated for not-quite-universal health care rather than single-payer, and promised tax cuts, not massive new social outlays. But this shouldn't worry progressives. There may be no better way to achieve an operational liberalism than to appeal to America's rhetorical conservatism. That, after all, was how the balanced-budget-promising Franklin Roosevelt ran in 1932 and how the let-us-continue Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964.

But when it comes time to govern, an ingrained habit of incrementalism may be a very profound problem indeed. Stopped in our tracks time and time again in attempts to assure Americans the basic social rights taken for granted by citizens of every other industrialized nation, progressives have made virtue of necessity — we have learned to think of strategic incrementalism

Read the rest of this entry...

Funny stuff from local blogger sad for a while:

I show up at this pretty house with a 3 car garage and lots of expensive camping equipment airing out on the front porch. A boy, maybe 12 years old, answers the door, asks the amount, and yells it to his parents who are in the kitchen. I pull the pizzas out of the bag as the father walks out to me.

"Can you take a check?"

"I can't take a personal check. We accept business checks, but not personal checks. Sorry."

He gets huffy. "Well, then you can take your pizzas back." [...]

"Look, I'm the majority leader of the state senate, I've lived in this house for 30 years, and I've never bounced a check." He's gruff. I am uncomfortable, my eyes pleading, but I say nothing. "Do you know what that means? I'm a public figure. If I bounced a check, it would be all over the papers. I'd lose my reputation!"

Quite the catch-22 — bounce a check, end up in the papers; act like a jerk, end up on the blogs.