“Some people can never understand that you have to wait, even for the best things, until the right time comes.” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt If there was ever any doubt as to the essentially oleaginous nature of the Republican candidate for president, it was dispelled by Mitt Romney at last night’s debate. Governor Romney’s new-found aggressiveness repeatedly bubbled over into an arrogant peevishness, as when he defended his miasmic budget plans by dismissively snapping at moderator Candy Crowley, “Of course they add up.” He worked the ref belligerently all night, interrupting and speaking over and through the president whenever he wanted Read More

The whole rationale for the continuing existence of the conservative, Democratic Party leadership to which Mr. Obama belongs is that they, and only they, can save us—save our Social Security and Medicare, prevent us from invading Iran, and keep the Supreme Court at least where it is now. We were so scared and bewildered we continued buying into this rationale even as President Obama betrayed pretty much everything he ran on, hired back all the old Clinton hands who did so much to help cause the world financial panic in the first place, and turned over all of our names Read More

Maybe he really is a secret Muslim terrorist from Kenya. I mean, think about it. He runs for president as a populist, soaking up all the liberal energy for change in the country. Once in power, he surrounds himself with failed conservative advisers, and squanders most of his mandate. Then, just as it looks as if he will still be able to defeat his clueless Republican opponent, he turns in the worst performance any presidential candidate has ever given in a general-election debate, tanking the race and turning the country over to a party of fanatical Ayn Rand acolytes and warmongers. Homeland’s Abu Read More

Mark Lilla, in his entertaining and often brilliant cover piece for Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, paused from the volume he was working over (another piece of right-wing blather, not worth mentioning) to assure us that he is a “centrist Democrat,” and not some left-wing loony like the kind usually associated with, well, this publication. “Unlike the crybabies at MSNBC and Harper’s Magazine, we never bought into the campaign’s hollow ‘hope and change’ rhetoric, so we aren’t crushed that, well, life got in the way,” writes Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia University, in describing himself and those of his fellow Read More

Some have begun to detect a literary current in Mitt Romney’s seemingly mindless ramblings—a stream-of-consciousness that reflects, perhaps, the romantic wistfulness of the middle-aged man facing his own mortality. Or maybe that’s just me, being a middle-aged man and everything; my co-blogger Jack Hitt, for his part, tends to think of Romney’s gaffes as perfect near-haikus: Some have begun to detect a literary current in Mitt Romney’s seemingly mindless ramblings—a stream-of-consciousness that reflects, perhaps, the romantic wistfulness of the middle-aged man facing his own mortality. Or maybe that’s just me, being a middle-aged man and everything; my co-blogger Jack, for Read More

So here we are, hours away from the great debate, and Mitt Romney has announced his determination . . . to cheat. The presidential debate in Denver this evening is supposed to be exclusively about domestic policy. But in today’s New York Times, we read that “advisers said he would try to broaden the argument against Obama’s job performance by raising questions about how his administration handled the attack on a diplomatic mission last month in Libya that killed four Americans.” In other words, he intends to cheat, by bringing a foreign-policy issue into a domestic-policy debate. Mitt and fellow Republicans Read More

Just before Mother Jones posted the now-famous video revealing that Mitt Romney thinks almost half the country consists of hopeless “victims and dependents,” and that his life would have been easier had he been born to Mexican immigrants, some friends of mine were maintaining that he really could be a good president, based on his excellent record of containing sprawl in Massachusetts and passing proto-Obamacare there.?? In the same vein, Randy Johnson, one of a group of workers who addressed the Democratic National Convention about their experiences with Bain Capital, insisted, “I don’t think Mitt Romney is a bad man.” Johnson had worked at Read More