Toobin’s profile of Ginsberg, not surprisingly, is admiring. No surprise there—Toobin is a liberal who likes her liberal jurisprudence. But Justice Ginsberg herself is hard not to admire. She is astonishingly accomplished, and she gets on well with her colleagues, even the sometimes caustic conservative Scalia. (They attend operas together.) Toobin’s piece is an interesting […]
Bob Woodward, “Time for Leaders to Deleg
Bob Woodward has proferred an interesting idea—elected official should delegate greater responsibility for crafting a budget deal. He points out that congressional staff were awfully close to a deal in October 2011 that raised revenues and cut spending. Woodward writes, Some staffers were ready to break out the champagne. They had a pipeline straight […]
First We Kill All the Policy Wonks
The blog of the American Enterprise Institute carries my impishly titled, “First We Kill All the Policy Wonks” (January 21, 2011). The piece is a response to a smart post by Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Its subject? Edward C. Banfield’s essay, Policy Science As Metaphysical Madness (1977). Obviously, I do not […]
Sam Ward, King of the Lobby
The December 6, 2010 issue of The Weekly Standard carries my review of Kathryn Allamong Jacob, The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man-About-Washington in the Gilded Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Sam Ward was quite a character—fantastically smart, frequently short-sighted, and endlessly lurching from fabulous success to disaster. When he arrived in Washington, […]
What the Tea Party Could Learn from the ...
In my nascent examinations of the Tea Party movement, I have been astounded by the frequency with which Tea Partyers speak of rebellion, secession, and striking out against the government. Thankfully, the data likely indicate only a minority of Tea Partyers hold such hostile sentiments. But, it is troubling to see some members of the […]
Who Is the Tea Party?
I have an op-ed in the Sunday, June 12, 2010 copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer that essays a provisional answer to this question. You may read the op-ed at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/. It builds upon my previous blog posts on this question. Call it a further step in my nascent effort at political sociology on the Tea […]