Having highlighted Charlotte Allen’s disastrous op-ed for the Post’s Outlook section last Sunday, I wanted to follow up with this good dissection by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell of the paper’s thinking behind the story (not to mention Katha Pollitt’s smart critique from Friday). Kudos to Warren Bass for getting it right, though I’m still kind of shocked that five women within the Post read the piece before it was published and thought nothing of it. Finally, a friend reminded me that Allen’s former group, the Independent Women’s Forum, was granted upwards of $10 million by the State Department to do women’s rights work in Iraq. Are they teaching Iraqi women that they’re dim, too?
Outrageous – Update
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The Phony War: Obama and Romney Are Debating Character, Not Policy
More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.
