Yesterday’s midterm election was nothing short of a catastrophe for the Democratic party. The combination of the worst economy since the Great Depression, a  jobless rate stuck at 10%, a president and a majority party unable to make a coherent case for their agenda or to articulate their vision, and the surprising uprising of the [...]

Back to the real story of this election, which is the $4 BILLION spent–as much as (and possibly more than, when it’s all counted) the last presidential election.  Most of the money, thanks to the Supreme Court’s outrageous Citizens United decision and the inability of Congress to pass the Disclose Act, is secret. We simply [...]

Well, Obama promised change. I don’t think this election is quite what he had in mind. It’s hard to read the polls as anything but a repudiation of the Democrats now in power. Republicans will read this as a rejection of Obama’s agenda. Democrats will read it as a rejection of Obama’s failure to execute [...]

The import of the Supreme Court’s drastic over-reach in the Citizens United case is coming painfully clear. Tens of millions of dollars in anonymous campaign contributions are pouring in to groups free to spend on this election with absolutely no accountability for where the money came from. Groups with innocuous names like The American Future [...]

Even if Republicans take back both houses of Congress this year, they should not cheer too loudly. They were soundly repudiated just two short years ago (how soon we forget), as the Democrats will be this time around. What does this tell us? It tells me that Congress, ever more beholden to special interests and [...]

I’m as perplexed as anyone by the lack of focus among Democrats running for office this election. It starts at the top, with a White House that has been unable to produce a coherent election message. It ought to be easy, especially for as gifted an orator as Obama, but he’s been bizarrely unable to [...]

It’s not even a question that the national economic policies of the last few decades have favored the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. We’ve seen an astonishing increase in income inequality as taxes have become more regressive and the marketplace has been increasingly deregulated. The percentage of the nation’s wealth controlled by [...]

I know people are angry; heck, I’m angry. It’s an inevitability of American politics that the party in power during bad economies gets punished at the polls, and the Democrats certainly haven’t distinguished themselves with the power we’ve given them. But I keep coming back to this question–what has the Republican party done to earn [...]

It may be a bit premature to predict the outcome of todays’ midterm primary elections, but given the unending stream of bad economic and environmental news and the generally sour mood of the electorate, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that incumbents, even if they eke out victories, are in big [...]

The first round of primaries confirms that an anti-incumbent fervor, in part a result of the poor economy and inflamed by Tea Party rhetoric, is gripping the electorate. A word of caution here: turnout at primaries tends to be low, and the results don’t always reflect the broader mood of the voters. Rainy weather may [...]