Ross Douthat

What was that I said about the lousiness of wild-card era postseasons again? C'mon, Cubs and Brewers and White Sox and Angels ...Well, okay, maybe not the Angels. More »

I stopped watching the first season of Mad Men before it ended, and keep meaning to pick it up again but haven't. But Michael Brendan Dougherty's take on the show as a whole dovetails with my own initial impression - namely, that it wears its condescension toward its era and characters on its sleeve, inviting the viewer to enjoy the guilty pleasures of the early 1960s secondhand, while looking down, with "how far we've come" smugness, on the people who actually… More »

Here's Joe Biden last night on the McCain health care plan:... do you know how John McCain pays for his $5,000 tax credit you're going to get, a family will get? He taxes as income every one of you out there, every one of you listening who has a health care plan through your employer. That's how he raises $3.6 trillion, on your -- taxing your health care benefit to give you a $5,000 plan, which his Web site points out will go straight to the insurance company.… More »

I think Jonathan Cohn is basically right about this:Let's stipulate that these instant polls are not the most accurate measures of public opinion. Here's the interesting thing: The results are virtually identical to the results from last week's debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. In CNN's poll, 51 percent thought Obama won while 38 percent thought McCain won. CBS had it 39-25 for Obama.... Obama and Biden don't really have similar personalities or… More »

This paper's findings won't be surprising to any college graduate who's pondered buying a house in the greater D.C. area:A large literature has documented a significant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a high cost of housing. This implies that… More »

What, you want a take? You know I'm no good at assessing these things. Okay, fine: They both won, in the sense that they both did what they needed to do. Palin needed to arrest her slide into political oblivion, to hold her own on the stage with Biden, and to give the TV pundit class - which has the most bizarre love-hate relationship with her I've ever seen them have with a candidate - a reason to switch their narrative from "Palin flops!" to "Palin exceeds… More »

With the debate only a few hours away - and with it, Sarah Palin's last best chance to reverse her slide into Quayle-dom - it's worth re-focusing briefly on her record as governor. You've probably noticed that my mounting disillusionment with Palin has centered almost entirely around her performance as a candidate, rather than on all the shocking revelations in the press and the blogosphere about what a terrible governor she actually was. That's because I don't… More »

Larison (and various emailers) think I'm mis-using the term:When someone at a restaurant asked Palin a question about Pakistan that generated some controversy because it seemed to contradict McCain's previous statement at the debate, the McCain campaign dubbed it "gotcha journalism" and right away when Gibson stumped Palin with his Bush Doctrine question there was a great hue and cry about the "gotcha" nature of this question. Apparently the questions on her… More »

What's been interesting - in a watching-from-behind-your-hands sort of way, if you're a conservative who wishes her well - about Palin's interviews with Charlie Gibson and especially Katie Couric is the way they've provided examples of almost every single way that an inexperienced politician can struggle in the media spotlight. Most of the attention has focused, justly, on Palin's flat-out incoherent answers to some of Couric's questions, and her difficulties… More »

Culture11 has an interesting debate between Conor Friedersdorf and Joe Carter on the question of whether Sarah Palin should be dropped (or recuse herself, I suppose) from the Republican ticket. I agree with neither of them - or rather, I agree with Carter on the narrow point of whether she should be dropped (that is, I think she shouldn't), but I disagree with much of what he has to say in Palin's defense, and with his read on what her performance to date says… More »

The long Vanity Fair piece on the rise and fall of Raffaello Follieri - a.k.a. Anne Hathaway's ex-beau - has me half-convinced that Follieri doesn't really belong in jail; it has me completely convinced that this story ought to be a feature film, or the very least a Lifetime Original Movie. I've blogged about the hilarity of Follieri's escapades before, but the VF profile captures what's truly fascinating about the whole thing: His apparent ability to charm anyone,… More »

It may be closer than you think.

The GOP’s future looks a lot like the Democratic Party’s past—the question is, which past?

Tim Noah thinks he has our number:The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy. Middle-class social conservatives loathed the government for legalizing abortion, forbidding prayer in schools, and coddling minorities through welfare and affirmative action. Upper-class libertarian conservatives loathed the government for soaking the rich through the income tax and… More »

Interesting stuff, summed up by Ambinder:Pew Research ... finds this week that public support has dropped; only 45% support a "government plan to invest or commit billions to secure financial institutions." 38% say they're opposed; the rest don't know. Independents are the least likely to support it (42%); Republicans are the most likely (49%) Two thirds say they're "angry" about the plan, which independents being the angriest and Republicans being the least… More »

Steven Waldman has a lengthy and judicious take on Barack Obama and the born-alive controversy. And Mollie Ziegler Hemingway has a lengthy and judicious takedown of the L.A. Times' report on Sarah Palin and her "fundamentalism." (And no, the fact that Palin looks more and more like a disastrous choice does not justify lousy religion coverage.) More »

As a counterpoint to my doomsaying yesterday, here's James Pethokoukis looking for an upside for John McCain and the GOP: So does yesterday's rejection of the Paulson plan by House Republicans serve as the electoral knockout blow? Well, maybe among McCain supporters on Wall Street. I've heard from plenty of those folks, professional money managers and such, who are furious that the bailout/rescue plan went down to defeat yesterday and claim to be washing their… More »

It feels somewhat irrelevant given how quickly economic events seem to be overtaking the campaign, but here's a quick final thought on last Friday's debate, and why the great and good American people (at least judging by the polls to date) emphatically disagreed with my conviction that McCain came out on top. I saw the debate as an evening in which the policy differences between the two men were muted, and McCain was able to steer the conversation around, again and… More »

Per Kristol: John McCain flies back to Washington and finds a way to get the bailout passed. The markets recover; the papers trumpet McCain's heroism, and he's elected by a thin margin in November.Unfortunately, I'd place the odds against this happening at roughly - oh, what the hell, I'll just choose a really large number at random - seven hundred billion to one. More »

The best case: This is an example of America's democratic institutions reasserting themselves in the face of the attempt by a panicked technocratic elite to prop up reckless institutions that richly deserve to fail.The worst case: You know what.The most likely scenario, as of 3 PM this afternoon: The stock market continues to drop. Some version of the bailout passes in the next week. The American economy staggers into a recession, but passes through the storm… More »