Senator-elect Mark Kirk meets with democratic rival Alexi Giannoulias at the Billy Goat Tavern November 3, in Chicago. (Photo by Frank Polich/Getty Images) –The economy added 151,000 jobs in October, with private sector gains significantly outstripping government losses. The labor force shrank and the overall unemployment rate remained at 9.6 percent, but all in all, [...]
David Brooks is totally on target today. The Democrats lost, in large part, because they spent too much time on issues that either hurt the middle west middle class in the short-term (cap and trade) or seemed too peripheral or distant to their immediate needs (health care). By threatening to repeal health care and fixing [...]
Mitch McConnell has never been a very interesting leader or legislator. Over the past few days, he’s proved himself to be a vile and graceless public figure as well. Not even the slightest hint of comity, which, I expect is an effort by this eminently establishmentarian figure to woo the Teasies. Trouble is, he’s lying [...]
Michael Grunwald and I teamed up to write this week’s cover story, a profile of the speaker-in-waiting, John Boehner. It was striking in trying to coax Boehner into speaking to us – he never did – how much he wanted to avoid the limelight. The victory, his staff said, was not about him, but about [...]
These are the hazards of buying public stock footage. Here is Sarah Palin’s new pat-on-the-back election video. At 36 seconds, she says, “This is our morning in America,” as an apparent orange sunrise is shown behind the Statue of Liberty. That stock footage is for sale here, for $45. It is called “Time Lapse–Sunset behind [...]
Bill Galston has an elegant statistical analysis of what happened on Tuesday: it wasn’t so much that Republican enthusiasm was up or Democratic fervor was down–there was a near symmetrical shift from blue to red among independents. This stands to reason: almost all the action in the electorate takes place in the middle of the [...]
–A lot of good stuff in this week’s newsstand issue of TIME. That cover says a lot all on its own. –Mitch McConnell will restate his priority of making Obama a one-term president today. It looks like a bad cop routine to compliment Boehner’s good cop one. –Jim DeMint settles into his role and catches [...]
President Barack Obama makes an Election Night phone call to Rep. John Boehner from his Treaty Room office at the White House. Pete Souza/The White House (Via our White House Photo Blog)
There is a tradition of contrition for presidents who have just been rejected in midterm elections: A sober press conference, a public rededication to concerns of voters, a visible attempt at approximating candor. And so President Obama gathered a couple hundred reporters in the East Room on Wednesday to dutifully take “responsibility” for the election’s [...]
