Ross Douthat

A reader writes:I read your posting on Limbaugh's monologue. There is one point I do not understand. You seem to claim that a bad campaign by McCain justifies moderate Republicans jumping ship. I do not understand why that in anyway justifies the actions of moderate Republicans in endorsing Obama after the Republican party nominated their candidate John McCain over the objections of conservatives. Even if the dubious claim that McCain ran a "substance-free… More »

This Rush Limbaugh monologue is a fascinating document, and should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand one of the most powerful conservative narratives emerging around the looming GOP debacle. For Rush, there are only two kinds of people in Republican Party: True conservatives like him, and "moderate Republicans." The latter is an ideologically-inclusive category: You can be pro-choice or pro-life, David Frum or Colin Powell, a Rockefeller… More »

One of the many fascinating things about Robert Draper's Times Magazine story on the McCain campaign is what isn't included in its account of the attempts to brand (and rebrand, and rebrand) John McCain's candidacy: Namely, any real discussion of policy. From Draper's account, the McCain campaign staff has gone around and around trying to figure out how to sell their candidate - as a fighter! as an experienced leader! as a maverick! etc. - but hardly ever seemed to… More »

Like any good movie geek, I've got David Thomson's "Have You Seen ...?" - the companion volume to his epically awesome Biographical Dictionary of Film - high on my Christmas list this year. And as with the Dictionary, a big part of what I'm looking forward to is the chance to disagree, vehemently, with Thomson's assessments. Here's Ben Schwarz's review in the latest Atlantic, and here, via Schwarz, is an example of what I mean:Thomson is most penetrating when he… More »

Basically, I agree with the Ambinder-Cillizza take on the question - namely, that Sarah Palin might well be a formidable contender for the GOP nomination in 2012 even if she's massively unpopular with the sixty-five percent of America that doesn't vote in Republican primaries. In an Obama-era GOP, where the various factions and candidates are competing for control of a increasingly purist rump, isn't hard to see a scenario in which Palin unites evangelical voters… More »

It occurs to me that in this campaign season, some of my readers may be spending so much time leaping from Atlantic blog to Atlantic blog ("these are the saddest of possible words: McArdle to Douthat to Coates ...") that they're neglecting the (snazzily redesigned) magazine that's responsible for the existence of all these blogs in the first place. If you're one of those people, I recommend taking a couple hours off from the Presidential race this afternoon to dig… More »

People keep emailing me to say that Biden's gaffe wasn't a gaffe at all, that he was just talking about how Barack Obama will be tested like any new President will be tested, etc. Daniel Larison makes a similar point, calling Biden's remarks "wholly unremarkable." But folks, God love you, it's just not so. Per Ben Smith, here's what Biden said:It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about… More »

Ambinder, on the Dem veep's comments about Obama being greeted by "an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy":In the 2008 election we were participating in circa August, Sen. Joe Biden's musings would have traversed the river separating gaffe from Gaffe. If the economy weren't collapsing, if Barack Obama's national security credentials were still suspect, if the conflict in Russia and South Osettia had yet to be resolved, then… More »

Jonah has a thoughtful response to my last post on the subject. More »

In this week's New Yorker, Steve Coll remarks that at McCain-Palin rallies "the mood has been not so much socialist as national-socialist." This comes on the heels of last week's New Yorker, in which Hendrik Hertzberg described McCain-Palin rallies as "bloodcurdling hate-fests." I thought of these claims while I was reading this Ben Smith item, on New York "street art" posters depicting Sarah Palin as a fanged creature with blood dripping down her chin: There's a… More »

Another thing on this subject - is opposition to wealth-spreading in principle really now a litmus test for being a conservative? I thought that being on the right meant that you wanted a welfare state that's small in size and limited in scope - that's what I signed up for, at least - and the most just and reasonable way to shrink and/or restrain the American welfare state that I can see is to make it more redistributive, rather than less so. To quote William… More »

... has been vindicated yet again.(h/t: Ericka Anderson)Update: Just for the heck of it: More »

So sayeth Jacob Weisberg: Sure, he allows, there were lots of contributing causes to the current meltdown, but "market fundamentalism" deserves the lion's share of the blame, and having brought the world to the brink of a Great Depression, libertarians should have the decency to just shut up from here on out. Now, I have my disagreements with libertarians now and then, but this strikes me as an uncommonly silly idea. (Almost as silly, one might venture, as the idea… More »

This Jane Mayer piece promises the story of "how John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin," but it's remarkably short on inside information from the actual McCain campaign; instead, it spends much of its word count cataloguing all the instances in which Sarah Palin angled to get national attention for herself while governor, and all the instances in which conservative pundits made favorable comments about Palin before she was picked. As such, I suppose it's a useful… More »

People keep pointing me to this Noam Scheiber piece on Sarah Palin's Alaskan past as conclusive proof that she's some horrifying combination of Richard Nixon and Greg Stillson, defined entirely by a mix of class resentment, machiavellian populism, and anti-intellectualism. It's a lively enough read, but basically my reaction was the same as Sam Schulman's, writing in this week's Standard, who noted that "Scheiber spoke to various people from Palin's past, all of… More »

For a week or so now, I've been listening to smart conservatives suggest that Obama's "spreading the wealth" remark might really, really hurt him - "talk about playing into the most extreme stereotype of your party, that it is infested with socialists," writes James Pethokoukis - and I have a question: Hasn't Obama been promising to spread the wealth throughout the entire race - a race he seems to be winning at the moment? His signal domestic-policy proposals are… More »

You earned it the hard way, you bastards. Good work, and welcome to the Show. More »

Jon Chait Cohn, on the media coverage of everybody's favorite everyman:... Running with thinly-sourced or unconfirmed allegations about Wurzelbacher's personal life--his financial records, his license situation, his marriage--goes too far. Wurzelbacher doesn't seem particularly skittish about speaking his mind or getting attention for it. But there's no way he could be prepared for the kind of scrutiny that comes with being the political world's most famous talking… More »

Ach, okay, I'll wade back in to this debate one more time, because I think Mark Steyn has slightly mistaken the thrust of this post:One of the things I love about America (speaking as a foreigner) is how decentralized it is. Pace "New York, New York", you don't have to make it there, you can make it anywhere. Yet, in contrast to other industries, our chattering classes are uniquely concentrated in the aforementioned corridor. Isn't this a little odd? And doesn't it… More »

Roger Angell, the greatest (and perhaps the oldest) baseball writer of them all, turns to blogging:Boston's comeback is the second-best October turnabout in major-league history, topped only by an eight-run seventh inning by the Philadelphia Athletics in 1929, which won the fourth game and put the White Elephants (as the A's were called then) on their way to a five-game championship win over the Chicago Cubs. That game and inning are well remembered by this writer… More »