Ronald Brownstein

Given the prominence with which I quoted Jonathan Gruber of MIT in several recent pieces, I've been asked today whether his work for the administration came up at any point in our interviews on health care. I looked through my notes this morning of the two conversations I had with him last fall on health care, and in the notes there is no indication that his work for the administration came up-it wouldn't have occurred to me to ask and he didn't raise it. That is… More »

White, college-educated activists don't have to worry about health insurance More »

Ronald Brownstein makes the president's reading list More »

The cost curve. And makes history. More »

Busted budgets, failing schools, overcrowded prisons, gridlocked government—California no longer beckons as America’s promised land. Except, that is, in one area: creating a new energy economy. But is its path one the rest of the nation can follow?

Liberal critics of the proposal Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) released this week see it as a dead end in the health care reform debate. But if President Obama actually signs legislation revamping the health care system, it's more likely that the Baucus plan eventually will be seen as the foundation.The reason is that Baucus' draft bill offers the most fiscally sustainable framework yet devised for expanding coverage. It progresses much… More »

The final word on Bushonomics and poverty. More »

For Kennedy, there was no contradiction between soaring, uncompromising goals and the messier work of fashioning imperfect legislative compromises

The demographics of Obama's slide. More »

All the controversy about President Obama's upcoming appearance at Notre Dame is overshadowing a larger point about the university commencement tour he began Wednesday night in Arizona: Obama is presenting Democrats an opportunity to establish a lasting and potentially crushing advantage with the Millennial Generation, the largest in American history.Young voters are not as reflexively Democratic or liberal as many people might think. Since 18-year-olds were… More »

Some of the key strategists in former President Bush's administration have launched an offensive claiming that President Obama, who ran partly on healing the national divisions Bush left behind, is more polarizing than his predecessor. Bush "architect" Karl Rove, Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson, and former White House strategist Pete Wehner all made that case in writings last week. How should that claim be evaluated? Here are a few thoughts:1. As I documented… More »

Jonathan Chait is smart and acerbic and he gets a lot of things right in his extensive New Republic story on the relationship between Congressional Democrats and President Obama. Chait offers three principal reasons to explain why unified control of Congress and the White House usually isn't as seamless under Democrats as under Republicans. Each of his arguments tells part of the story. He's right that there is a tradition of Congressional independence among… More »

Considering that Democrats last November won their most sweeping electoral victory since 1964, and now enjoy unified control of government for the first time since 1994, the organized Left doesn't seem very happy these days. Some of that discontent reflects the difficulty of moving from an opposition party that perpetually prizes conflict to a governing party that must compromise to advance an agenda. But it also reflects a potentially destabilizing imbalance… More »

A fascinating survey released Thursday by the Pew Economic Mobility Project-one of the few million research arms of the Pew Charitable Trusts-illuminates from some fresh angles the complex American attitudes toward opportunity, fairness and government likely to shape public reaction to President Obama's sweeping agenda.The survey, jointly conducted by the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm of Public Opinion Strategies,… More »

No one ever went broke betting against the prospects for health care reform. Now that the Boston Red Sox have won the World Series (twice), the failed pursuit of universal health insurance by generations of political leaders arguably stands as the premier example of unremitting futility in American life.But a National Journal forum on health care I moderated last Thursday offered clear glimmers of hope about the possibility of a breakthrough. At the forum, held a… More »

From his inauguration address forward, President Obama hasn't pulled any punches in criticizing the record of his predecessor, George W. Bush. In that process--which reached a new peak with the release of the administration's budget plan last Thursday--Obama is aggressively employing a strategy used by the presidents who have most powerfully realigned the political landscape through American history. It is an approach that Yale University political scientist… More »

SACRAMENTO-While tensions are rising between President Obama and Congressional Republicans, California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he is eager for more opportunities to partner with Obama on big issues like health care and energy. He's also got some advice for the new president about building inclusive "post-partisan" coalitions.Schwarzenegger is positioned to become perhaps Obama's most important Republican ally. He was among the most prominent… More »

Everyone has a to-do list around the house. In an interview Friday afternoon on Air Force One en route to Chicago, President Obama shared his with a small group of columnists. Now that Congress has approved his economic recovery plan, he was asked, what's his plan for the rest of 2009? Here's his reply: THE PRESIDENT: My priorities for the rest of the year. Number one is to get the right structure for the successor to TARP; spending the $300-some billion that… More »

All the focus on the lockstep Congressional Republican opposition to President Obama's economic recovery has overshadowed an equally striking development: Congressional Democrats are uniting much more comprehensively around Obama's early agenda than they did around Bill Clinton's.So far, the experiences of Obama and Clinton are similar in one respect. Not a single House or Senate Republican voted for Clinton's economic agenda in 1993, either on initial passage or… More »

Obama and McCain both say they want to usher in a new, less divisive brand of politics. Which of them has the better chance? Is bipartisanship still possible?