Matthew Cooper

Mark Sanford's extraordinary press conference leads to a number of questions about what happens next to a governor and former congressman who was once considered one of the brightest stars of the Republican party. It was a deeply embarrassing and painful moment and one that seemed to answer all of the questions that have been looming. But there are still others:1. Will pressure grow on him to resign the governorship? Sanford said he'd quit as chair of the… More »

Will be Twittering the Mark Sanford press conference at 2 PM Eastern. In the mean time, interesting reading can be done here on the Politics Channel and by my colleagues at Talkingpointsmemo.com who are using theiir crowdsourcing to solicit interesting reader comments on why it's suspect you would want to drive the Argentine coast this time of year. Kind of wondering when we'll get reaction from the likes of Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham and Sanford's pal, John McCain… More »

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration but the Huffington Post reporter is getting tweaked this morning for the question he posed to President Obama at yesterday's White House Press Conference. It was an odd moment because normally, of course, reporters raise their hands, the president calls on someone and they ask their question. In this case the president seemed to have Pitney in mind already. More »

Today's presidential press conference was supposed to be held in the Rose Garden, but it got canceled because of the heat. I suspect this was less a tender concern about the press corps, which would have to be seated long in advance of the president, and not wanting the president to sweat and drip on camera.Obama's poll numbers have been going down, although they remain high. Why are they going down? A lot of it seems to have to do with spending and government… More »

My old colleague and friend, Abigail Thernstrom, makes the case against minority-majority districts in the National Review. The Nation reverts to paleoliberal stereotype in its piece on the Supreme Court's temperate 8-1 decision on an Austin, Texas utility district. The New York Times is also worried. Please. Does the Times believe that Steven Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens and David Souter have taken a crazy shift to the right? The decision seemed… More »

It tells you something that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq came up at the president's press conference. The United States is simultaneously prosecuting two wars in the Muslim world and neither merited a question of the president. It's the surest sign of how quickly attention shifts and flits from one topic to another and how surefooted the White House needs to be in a fluid news environment. Iran might have gotten one question a few weeks ago. Now it dominates the… More »

Having read the opinion in the voting rights case, I got a little bit of the feeling I did after the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006. It ended unsatisfactorily for both sides and they're going to be at it again sometime. With a lot more cluster bombs and hostage taking.Despite the bonhomie of the 8-1 opinion and even Clarence Thomas's dissent--all sides genuflected toward the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and all that it had done for the country--you got the sense that… More »

Will have more later on the Roberts Court opinion on the Voting Rights Act. I guess a few things struck me after seeing the initial ruling. 1. You had to be impressed that the Chief Justice got an 8-1 ruling on this issue. Of course, it was a narrow ruling that sidestepped the larger controversial constitutional questions surrounding Section 5 of the VRA, which requires certain jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to have any electoral changes "precleared" by the… More »

A few things to know about Washington. The press loves centrists. Any self-styled moderate who bucks their party is sure to get good play and generally centrists aren't shy about letting you know it. So it's worth noting the important story by Molly Hooper in the Hill on Wednesday night. All kinds of moderates are having all kinds of meetings over health care. Will it lead to anything? Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. This time my guess is not. More »

You would think that the Neocons would be a tad temperate after having gotten so many things wrong for so long. But look at the way the amiable Weekly Standard writer and Dick Cheney biographer, Steven Hayes, takes a shot at President Obama for insufficiently supporting the protesters in Iran. I won't claim to understand Iranian politics well enough to know just what the right thing to do here is, and it may be that the administration should be more outspoken in… More »

Tonight there will be one of those lavish Washington tributes. Speeches, toasts, gentle ribbing and fulsome praise--they'll all be on display at the Mellon Auditorium when Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, retires. David Paul Kuhn has a smart piece today about how the Netroots and From's DLC have more in common than either realize. I'd add a few points. More »

There's been tons written about why this time is different than last time. The conventional wisdom has it that last time health care crashed because of the arrogance of the Clintons. A plan devised in secret, crazy in its scope, was presented to Congress with a take-it-or-leave-it disdain and the thing naturally failed leaving tens of millions of uninsured and incremental steps until now, when the Obama administration is supposedly doing the right things. More »

The usually wise and always engaging Mike Murphy has a piece in Time on a familiar there: the Hispanic woes of the GOP. The story he tells is familiar, of course. The country is becoming more Hispanic not just in the obvious states like Arizona and California and Florida but everywhere else, too. With Obama carrying Hispanics by a 35% margin--so much for the black-brown divide--the Republicans are screwed and will get more screwed until they come up with a message… More »

He was a lawyer and too smart, too cautious to say anything. So he would just roll his eyes when we passed at the NBC News building on Nebraska Avenue or run into each other at parties around town. Tim Russert landed in the messy CIA leak case even before I did. Russert tragically died a year ago--too young, much beloved. I was friendly with Tim, through journalism and Pat Moynihan, and friends in no way that was particularly special except for one weird bond: We… More »

An administration official took about eight minutes before whacking me (gently) about my post on the Biden stimulus celebration tour. So let me be clear. I think the stimulus was clearly needed and probably should have been even bigger and more focused on the kind of construction projects that are being touted. My only beef was with the aesthetics of doing a victory laps with such frequency. But that said, I love a bridge repair as much as the next guy... More »

Joe Biden was on the road today. Along with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and others, he was touting the benefits of the stimulus bill, this time at a bridge repair in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He's also off to Kansas this week as well as Michigan. You can always make the case for presidential barnstorming to promote upcoming legislation. President Obama is in Wisconsin today promoting health care reform. There's something a little tacky, I think, about taking… More »

For those of us who covered the tobacco wars of the 1990s, it's hard to believe how much has changed. Back then, tobacco companies, fearful of lawsuits, were eager to forge a national legal settlement, passed by Congress, that would give them immunity from lawsuits. Prominent trial lawyers, like Dickie Scruggs, who is now serving time for attempted bribery, were key players in pushing the companies to say Uncle.The idea of the settlement was that in exchange for… More »

This afternoon's shootings at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum are so awful as to defy credulity. A deranged white supremacist, it seems, started firing at the museum's entrance. When I came to the Atlantic's offices this afternoon, TV crews and a crowd stood outside of George Washington University Medical Center where one of the guards who stopped the gunman is being treated. Helicopters are circling the city. The overlapping police authorities are on display… More »

The Obama administration made a big deal today out of saying that it would adhere to so-called PAYGO rules, basically requiring that any new spending be accounted for. Having just thrown trillions of dollars at the banking crisis, mortgage crisis, auto crisis and this little thing we call the economic calamity, the sudden interest in fiscal rectitude may seem odd, but it's not crazy. Last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that we can't keep all these stimuli… More »