OK, sorry, fixed now. It's not linked on the Monthly site yet, though the magazine is out.

Posted at October 26, 2007 7:26 PM in response to Can There Be A Decent Right?

Indeed! It's a small but interesting point.

Posted at September 28, 2007 6:51 AM in response to Whose Argument is It?

I won't belabor the point with another full post, but I can't help but comment that to write, "I spent about three years...following ...bloggers and the Democracy Alliance donors and the MoveOn juggernaut and Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy—...and the number of people I met who had any passion for discussing and debating these ideas could fit into Mark’s living room" -- is kind of like saying, "I spent three years going to football games and basketball games and even soccer games, and no one seems to play baseball."

Yes, I could fill my living room. We fill our conference room all the time. I could and sometimes do spend my entire day in large packed rooms, all over the country, with people who are part of the emerging progressive infrastructure, many of them bloggers and donors, who have a passion for discussing and debating these ideas, and an open mind about them. I spend almost no time talking about voter lists, framing, etc.

Posted at September 27, 2007 7:00 PM in response to Whose Argument is It?

You seem to be labelling something a "Freudian slip" when it was in fact my entire point: AEI is not Harvard. It wasn't in 1989, and it definitely isn't now. Nothing subtle in that point.

Posted at September 5, 2007 1:54 PM in response to My Life Among the Neo-Cons

I hope I wasn't confusing -- I wasn't proposing that such a commission be created in the current congress and given subpoena power. I was imagining a commission that would begin in 2009. Congress could pass a resolution now -- without requiring a presidential signature -- that would call on such a commission to be created, and lay the groundwork so that it could start immediately in 2009.
Still ambitious, but at least not subject to a veto.

Posted at August 9, 2007 7:53 PM in response to An Alternative to Impeachment: Transitional Justice for the Bush-ites

I'm not sure that this has to be defined as "major tax reform/overhaul," although it could also be the first step toward such a reform, and it is a major provision of Senator Wyden's reform. The differential rates were not introduced in major reforms, but in smaller tax/budget bills, in 1997 and 2003. I think the focus on hedge funds is a distraction from the more basic economic/tax principle that all income, regardless of source, should be taxed on the same progressive basis.

Posted at May 23, 2007 8:16 AM in response to Time to Trim the Hedge

As someone who has written a lot about Penn myself, including here, I would say that a lot of what Berman writes about is "standard" -- as in common practice for mainstream Democrats. That doesn't mean it isn't also "troubling," but to the extent the Glover Park Group, for example, is troubling, it is equally troubling about many Dems, if not most.

I do think that there is something sui generis about Penn, for the reasons outlined in the article. His dual roles, and his dubious polling, are singularly troubling. That's why, even though it sometimes seems like I'm picking on advisors, I've focused my own critique on Penn and not on Senator Clinton.

Posted at May 22, 2007 1:35 PM in response to NATION Unloads on Hillary Inc.

I'll make one more attempt at introducing sense to this argument:

1. I don't hate Senator Clinton. I know her, I know many people who are close to her politically and personally; I think she'd be a fine president. If I don't vote for her in the primary, it will be because another candidate is more appealing to me, not because I dislike Clinton. In fact, I doubt you will find a critical word about Clinton in anything I have written. I have developed a particular obsession with Penn for the reasons I develop in the last paragraphs of my post -- I think he offers a narrow, uninspiring and very corporate politics which has had too much influence on Dem politics generally.

2. Penn and Carville did not cite any data to support their claims regarding Clinton's appeal to independent women last July. That point is irrefuted. That a poll they cited elsewhere in the article may also have had some data to support that point is entirely irrelevant. So might a dozen other polls. (The data apparently is that three in ten Republican women "would consider" voting for Clinton, as opposed to two in ten men -- which doesn't quite prove the "thrilled with" point, and isn't compared with any other potential Democrat.) I argued last July that since Penn was a pollster, he was uniquely positioned to find out more about Clinton's actual appeal to women, and it was odd that he did not do so.

Posted at May 10, 2007 4:59 AM in response to The Real Case Against Mark Penn

In my original post, I quoted several specific assertions that Penn and Carville made regarding Clinton and women, and said that they provided no data to support those assertions. That is true. In this post, I quoted one of the assertions and linked back to the older post. What I said remains true. I also said in the original post that I did in fact believe that Senator Clinton could do particularly well with women, and that if I were a pollster I would want to test that idea out. I thought it was weird that an actual pollster would not offer more than "we think" to support that assertion.
I don't hold the view that "Hillary can't win," especially having lived in New York and watched her 2000 campaign with admiration. I just think she is ill-served by a pollster with a very limited and compromised view of political possibilities.

Posted at May 9, 2007 4:00 PM in response to The Real Case Against Mark Penn

There are two pieces of data in that op-ed, and neither is from Penn's own research. One is Clinton's overall approval rating, the other involves the percentages of women and Hispanics in the electorate. Neither bit of data supports the main claim of the op-ed, which is that women, and independent women in particular, look more favorably on Clinton than on other candidates. As I wrote, not one piece of data to support the assertion I quoted.

Posted at May 9, 2007 1:24 PM in response to The Real Case Against Mark Penn