1) If conservatives really want to dismiss Nate Silver, it looks like they’d better dismiss stats entirely. Their piecemeal attacks on his method, model, looks, size, demeanor, voice, etc, just aren’t gonna get the job done.

2) As close as the presidential election is, partisans on both sides are damned confident that they possess the clearer view of how Tuesday will go. What if your side is wrong?

The first covers Michelle Obama’s speech—and conservatives’ obsession with painting her husband as un-American. Here’s the link, and here’s an excerpt:

Yes, the First Lady did a compelling job of contrasting the president’s humble background with Romney’s socioeconomic (and political) head start. There was always something weirdly hollow about Mitt Romney—a guy whose success came with a massive boost from unearned personal, racial, social, etc advantages—brandishing his bootstraps in defense of business owners who “DID build that, dammit!” Jane Credit Union, typical American, recognizes Barack Obama’s early career much more than Romney’s
…
The real genius of Michelle Obama’s speech is more elemental. From the beginning of his political career, Barack Hussein Obama has faced persistent attempts to define him as “other” than American. You know all the faltering, inconsistent, evidence-free labels. He is Kenyan or Indonesian, but certainly NOT a “real” American. He is a Muslim or a Black Nationalist Christian or a godless atheist. He has residual anti-colonial instincts fueling his fascism, socialism, and/or amorphous Europhilia. He pals around with terrorists and is either too black or not black enough. Whatever he is, he’s not us. He’s nothing you’ve heard—he’s NOT you.

The second post covers similar themes—why do conservatives have so much trouble engaging progressivism’s substance? Why do they insist that it’s usurping the American political tradition? Here’s the link, and here’s an excerpt:

Today’s conservatives are obsessed with maintaining semantic control over The American Idea: What sort of country are we? For the Right, we’re the Founders and Ronald Reagan and victorious armies and we’re certainly Christian and we all agree that the wealthy’s consumer choices drive prosperity both common and individual. We’re Austrian trickle-down economics and the Gilded Age and rugged individualism. Progressives have different policy goals, so they’re not just our opponents—they’re not our fellow citizens.

There are much more interesting questions lurking behind the (usually unprofitable) “are we/aren’t we a Christian or Protestant or WASP or plural nation?” debates: Just how much common ground does a liberal democracy need? Is there a point where a country becomes so diverse as to be unrecognizable as a distinct entity? In other words, can our cosmopolitanism eventually swallow up the things that make us American? And above all—have we already reached that tipping point?

Read the rest here!

While it’s still unclear whether the going flap over Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line is a net gain or a net loss for the president, I’m increasingly encouraged by the Left’s response. Sure, there’s the customary—and impotent—exasperation over the Romney campaign’s manipulation of Obama’s words, and there are some snarky proto-memelets kicking around, but there’s also an uptick in thoughtful leftist argument. If the Left is ever going to reassert a “moral vision” for the country, it needs to strenuously make the case that public institutions help to guarantee a prosperous common life for individual citizens. It needs to argue that markets rest upon these public goods, and that individual economic success depends upon the fabric of community life.

Read the rest here.

However we usually define tragedy, there’s something uniquely debilitating about those catastrophes that break into our lives for utterly arbitrary and senseless reasons. Indeed, traditional literary tragedy is often bearable because the pivotal moment of collapse has been foreshadowed and delayed and laden with meaning by much of the foregoing. Othello dies a victim of his own jealous and Iago’s cunning entrapment. Antigone worships the nobility of the martyrdom to which Creon eventually delivers her. However bad fictional losses may be, they are (usually) comfortably situated in a narrative that makes them sensible and even morally instructive.

Click here to read the rest.

Here’s Jonathan Chait:

[T]hough he has passed himself off as a deficit hawk, [Paul] Ryan actually is a dyed-in-the-wool supply-sider. At his core he believes, for both moral and economic reasons, in holding taxes on the rich low. He has successfully learned to pitch himself to the political center as a debt hawk but the pitch is at odds with his voting record, his current positions, and his own intellectual history.

Wowie! Paul Ryan is a Reaganomist at heart. Not exactly a shocker.

Meanwhile, here’s Noam Scheiber:

But if all the Bush tax cuts expire in January, then the Democratic position will be that everyone but the rich gets a tax cut, and the Republican position will be that everyone including the rich deserves a tax cut.

Zowie! The GOP really wants to protect low income tax rates for the wealthy! Even when it comes with a strategic cost!

I’m being too glib, of course—I don’t mean to pick on Chait and Scheiber. They’re two of the better news analysts in town. Both guys are trying to show how the political logic of the moment discloses GOP convictions and strategy. What’s more, given that so much of the Republican Party’s rhetoric is crafted in order to obscure their intentions, there’s always (some) value in pointing out the class warfare agenda they’re actually advancing. But it’s not really a story anymore to show that the GOP prioritizes the wealthy’s financial interests and hides it behind dishonest rhetoric. That’s been obvious for a long time (Years? Decades?). I actually worry that Chait and Scheiber’s approach actually legitimates the official Republican line by taking it seriously. 

• “The Non-Wonky Institutional Left”: Wait, are leftists starting to make strong moral arguments again? Am I out of a job, or at least a hobby horse?
• “Reflections on the Revolution in the United States of America”: On an alternate vision of July 4th celebrations.
• “The Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short Libertarian Life”: How much authority do we need to get meaningful liberty?

Posts should pick up—both here and there—in coming weeks as I clear a few final writing hurdles. Stay tuned.

Posts here will continue to be intermittent until a few personal and professional bottlenecks clear.