Bye all. It’s bee a lot of fun. I love my trips to the ‘Lake. Stay well.

Van Hollen said it was “a factor,” Celinda Lake is simply doing a CYA for future business. Coakley could have come out for single-payer, Finland-style health-care and nobody would have known it because she…didn’t…campaign.

Tom –Since we’re heading for home here, can you expand a little on your notion that the “middle class” may have been a transitory period in our history and our politics? Is it because politicians abandoned the concept or because we’ve decided, in a hundred ways, that we don’t need/deserve to have one?

To what purpose is he “deliberately trying to destroy this nation”? What’s he gonna get out of it? I mean, this is the stuff I hear from the Birchers. Yoicks.

Marcy Kaptur once told me that what happened was that people in my business became “overprofessionalized” and lost touch with the middle class. I think that applies to Democratic politicians, too. Which is a long way around to agreeing with Mauimom.

My reasonable answer is that I choose to live under Barack Obama, and his dishwatery Democratic policies, than under a theocrat like Santorum, or a pliable cyborg like Romney. Jesus, these people are out there seriously talking about nullification. There is a difference.
I’m with Tom on the passing moment of the middle class.

That’s what I think, too. Tom. Democrats are terrified to have “populism” attached to them because, in their historical context, it means “radical” economic policies– Oh, noes! — whereas the R’s just take the racism and hatred of The Other from it and run away with it.

If you can honestly look at the GOP primary performance and ask that question, I can’t help you.

Tom — Most misused/misunderstood word today — “socialism” or “populism”?
Discuss.

You have to have lived through the Coakley non-campaign to know how wrong that is.

OK, so I wish you luck with President Santorum.

It’s Woodstock!

Simply? Because the opposition party is obviously demented.

Point B gets you the basket +1, Stewart,

Tom –
Is the Tea Party out of gas as a movement now? Beck has virtually disappeared as a presence. (He’s saying “We’re all Catholics now.” That’s just what we Papists need.) Their pols have sort of folded themselves into the establishment. The wildness seems to be gone. Catching their breath, or genuinely tapped out?

I wouldn’t call that “anti-progressive,” per se. Both FDR and LBJ flirted with similar notions. The idea that the government has to balance its books like a family, which the president does say too much, is simpleminded and wrong.

In 1932, in Columbus, FDR said the following at a campaign stop:

“It was the heyday of promoters, sloganeers, mushroom millionaires, opportunists, adventurers of all kinds. In this mad whirl was launched Mr. Hoover’s campaign. Perhaps foreseeing it, a shrewd man from New England, while in the cool detachment of the Dakota hills, on a narrow slip of paper wrote the historic words, “I do not choose to run.”

I’m sorry, but you simply can’t find anything like this in the speeches the president gave in 2008. (More’s the pity.) This notion that he promised you an FDR and then faked you out simply doesn’t hold up.

I don’t think he was “outrageously anti-progressive.” Lily Ledbetter is not outrageously anti-progressive. The auto bailout is not outrageously anti-progressive. Even the health-care bill, while flawed, is not outrageously anti-progressive. (We love our ObamaRomneycare here in very blue Massachusetts.) I think, and I wrote this in Esquire in 2008, he mistook the country’s hunger for justice for a desire for healing. He may never recover from that. But an awful lot of D’s got pissed and sat out 2010. He didn’t deserve that, either.

Absolutely do not agree. If he’d gotten a gigantic stimulus package through, unemployment (maybe) is in the 7′s and the Republicans still control the House, because their margins were a bunch of D’s in R districts who got elected in 2006 and 2008, and who wouldn’t have run on the stimulus anyway.

I’ve been doing this, in one place or another, and from sports to politics and back again, and I can tell you that the deadweight of “objectivity” is the worst fcking thing that ever happened to journalism.