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Ismail Muhammad: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Uneasy Hope (The New Republic)
Ismail Muhammad: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Uneasy Hope (The New Republic)
The writer's critics call him a cynic. But as a new anthology shows, his thinking has matured in subtle ways over the years. --- The word most frequently attached to Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably pessimistic. His critics charge him with focusing on American racism’s intransigence, and overstating the power that white supremacy exerts on black life. […] The racial backlash that Obama engendered testifies to the fact that any attempt by black people to liberate themselves fundamentally threatens the American order. This is part of the glory of Barack Obama’s presidency, that black people possess the potential to recreate America as a true democracy. But the events that have followed the Obama presidency tell us that democracy’s advent will perhaps remain more of a potentiality than a reality, a protracted struggle that the nation will not resolve without enormous strength of political will. Eight Years in Power asks us to linger in that tension instead of dismissing it. Coates’s gradual drift away from post-racial hopes towards hard-nosed realism shows us that he has been in motion this whole time, not denying America’s capacity to change, but realizing how monumental the task before us is.
·newrepublic.com·
Ismail Muhammad: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Uneasy Hope (The New Republic)
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Which is all to say that, yes, this election matters more than most. It matters more politically because the party in power will likely see their agenda affirmed by a cyclical recovery. But it matters more to actual people because the Affordable Care Act is poised to reshape American health care in two years. A vote for Obama is a vote for the law to take effect and for 30 million Americans to get health insurance they won’t get otherwise. A vote for Romney is a vote for the law — and its spending and its taxes — to be repealed. There are few elections in which the stakes are so clear.
·washingtonpost.com·
Ezra Klein: The most important issue of this election: Obamacare (Washington Post)
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.
·guardian.co.uk·
Glenn Greenwald: Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory? (The Guardian)
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
I don’t agree with this completely, but it’s a solid argument. More broadly, the political problem of the Democrats is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend for electoral reasons sometimes that it’s not. All the complaints that liberals have about them—their weakness, tendency to compromise, the constantly lamented lack of a spine—emerge from this central contradiction. The Republicans have a coherent philosophy and use it to fire up a rabid base. The Dems are afraid of their base because it might cause them trouble with their funders. Romney believes in money. Obama believes in nothing. Most liberals want to write off Obama’s bad performance as a bad night. It’s not just that. It’s a structural problem.
·lbo-news.com·
Doug Henwood: Why Obama lost the debate
Mother Jones: Presidential Power
Mother Jones: Presidential Power
‘…in two years Obama has done more to enact a liberal agenda than George Bush did for the conservative agenda in eight. That's not bad, folks. All things considered, I'd say Obama is the most effective politician of the Obama era. And the Bush era too.’
·motherjones.com·
Mother Jones: Presidential Power
NYMag: The West Wing, Season II by John Heilemann
NYMag: The West Wing, Season II by John Heilemann
“Almost overnight, Barack Obama overhauled his White House and rewrote much of the script. Now all he needs is a happy ending.” On the self-examination and cabinet shuffling over the last two months, and what it could mean for the next two years. If anything it’s incredibly promising that Obama is willing and able to rethink everything and actually take the hard steps to implement a change of operations.
·nymag.com·
NYMag: The West Wing, Season II by John Heilemann
Rolling Stone: Obama in Command
Rolling Stone: Obama in Command
A good interview, and explains Obama's long-game strategy explicitly. His indignation at progressives and Democrats complaining about the state of things when much has actually been accomplished is reasonable, but his final statement bothers me. "We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard — that's what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we've got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." OK, but what does that mean? What's going to make a difference with ten-to-one odds and enormous corporations and special-interest groups lined up on the other side? Your base gave you a lot of money to help you get elected, but is that what you're asking them to do again, deep in a recession? They need direction, advice, some instruction or insight. What exactly do you want us to 'try harder' at?
·rollingstone.com·
Rolling Stone: Obama in Command
Vanity Fair: Washington, We Have a Problem
Vanity Fair: Washington, We Have a Problem
"A day in the life of the President." "Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."
·vanityfair.com·
Vanity Fair: Washington, We Have a Problem
Sophiologist: Pres. Obama on Republicans in yesterday’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, 9/6/10
Sophiologist: Pres. Obama on Republicans in yesterday’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, 9/6/10
"These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class. They drove our economy into a ditch. And we got in there and put on our boots and we pushed and we shoved and we were sweating and these guys were standing, watching us, sipping on a Slurpee."
·sophiologist.tumblr.com·
Sophiologist: Pres. Obama on Republicans in yesterday’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, 9/6/10