Mark Schmitt

The Preacher Vs. The Warrior? (The Hotline - National Journal) Meanwhile, TAPPED's Mark Schmitt offers Obama some advice: [Obama] is falling into the tendency that many 'wine-track' candidates do of talking about his candidacy as if it were some sort of other-worldly cause: 'something happening,'...'it's about you,' etc.

Last night's primaries raise more questions than answers regarding the state of the respective parties and thier candidates. In this short video clip (6 minutes), Schmitt and Clemons offer up New America's unique style of post-partisan analysis.

Mark Shmitt is a Senior Fellow at New America and a veteran of numerous national political campaigns. He cautions against over-analysis in the wake of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Steven Clemons heads… more

The Financial Times did a story following the Iowa caucuses. (quoted Mark Schmitt)

Mr Obama, who described his win as a "defining moment in history" and a victory of "the politics of hope over the politics of fear", can also appeal in New Hampshire to a much larger population of independent voters than in Iowa, where they came out for him in record numbers as did younger voters.

"It is hard to see what Hillary can do in five… more

This is the most important election of our lifetime (Guardian Unlimited - UK) The astute analyst and writer Mark Schmitt was the first to identify this phenomenon, naming the Democratic race the "theory of change" primary. ...

Despite the sustained economic growth of recent years, Americans are increasingly concerned with economic security. Even before economists began reporting signs of recession, skyrocketing health care costs, faltering pensions, and burgeoning inequality frayed the fabric of the American social contract. America's social contract is an evolving, complex web of legal and informal relationships between households, employers, government, and civil society that extends beyond particular federal programs. Now is the time to strike a new bargain between these sectors, rethinking the… more

The blue-ribbon commission has an inauspicious history in American public policy. Most often, assembling a dozen or two bipartisan grandees to deliberate soberly about a problem for several years is merely a way of evading the problem.

But there are exceptions. Though it will probably pass unnoticed, Dec. 22 of this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the creation of one of the most successful policy commissions in modern U.S. history: The National Commission on Children. Chaired by… more

Democrats and Republicans are alike in one respect, according to the libertarian writer Brink Lindsey: their shared nostalgia for the 1950s. Except, he says, "Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s, while Democrats want to work there."

Indeed, from television (where Mad Men has faithfully recreated the furnishings, boozy smell, and chronic sexual dishonesty of the New York executive suite circa 1960), to the celebrated 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, to the current… more

You may have noticed a recurring theme in this column: that there is a set of assumptions about political possibilities that date from the late 1970s and have led to the timidity of more recent liberal politics -- and that are overdue for questioning.

Here’s another: An unfinished challenge from the late 1970s involves the question of how to create a meaningful and successful politics suitable to what then-California Gov. Jerry Brown called "the era of limits." In that first moment… more

Mark Schmitt, of the New America Foundation, and Megan McArdle, of The Atlantic, discuss whether vouchers are the answer to public education's problems. Please click here for a link to the video on NYTimes.com. For Schmitt andMcArdle's complete conversation, please follow this link to Bloggingheads.tv, where they also cover inequality, taxation, and gentrification.

Bloggingheads.tv, the video site where policy analysts, bloggers, and other pundits argue about politics and policy, was co-founded by New America Senior Fellow… more

As even the most committed conservatives have begun to recognize the scale of the debacle, foreign and domestic, of the seven years during which they have held unchecked power, they have begun to plot a slick escape from the consequences. "Oh, that?" they will say. "That wasn't conservatism. That was something completely different." It started out as conservatism, they say, but was corrupted by the culture of Washington, by Jack Abramoff or Tom DeLay. Or, they say, so sorry, we… more