Mark Schmitt

One lesson of the 2006 vote was so obvious that Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times was able to write about it two days before the election: the return of the swing voter. Karl Rove’s strategy of mobilizing a conservative Republican base while ignoring the flippable voters in the middle "lay shattered in pieces," exactly as pollster Stan Greenberg told Brownstein it would.

It is with a sense of relief that we welcome back the swing voter. The craziness is… more

The greatest challenge in politics is to understand when a political era is closing and the door to a new one is ready to be opened. Thirty years ago, a small band of conservatives understood that what they called the era of “tax and spend” -- in which government grew inexorably on a tide of invisible tax increases through Republican and Democratic administrations -- was ready to be challenged.

In 1977, Rep. Jack Kemp and Sen. Bill Roth introduced a bill… more

Our current experience of capitalism -- corporate, short-term and globalized -- is rapidly squandering our shared inheritances. Peter Barnes, Co-Founder and Former President of Working Assets Long Distance, a wireless, long distance and credit card company that links its products with donations to nonprofit groups, examines the dynamics of the market place in Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. Barnes argues that capitalism in its current form gives too much power to profit-maximizing corporations that deplete the public… more

In novels, films, or real life, There’s really only one Washington story: Newcomer comes to town, full of idealism and ready to change the country, but soon encounters the permanent government that defines what you can’t do and whom you have to deal with if you want to try. The permanent government might be octogenarian committee chairs, ruthless staffers, or -- more recently, as the power of the committee chairs has waned -- the lobbyists.

It’s the story of the Carter… more

Back in 1994, legend has it, a Republican Revolution captured Washington. Revolution was surely the right word, featuring as it did a leader who would have ordered his portrait painted onto the façade of public buildings, except for the fact that he wanted public buildings torn down. Like any good revolution, it came with a manifesto, a pseudo-intellectual vanguard, a taste for theatrics, absurd promises, and a quick slide into decadence and corruption.

Now, 12 years later, the Democratic Party has… more

It’s a brilliant strategy as long as it works. But eventually, it will become apparent that the normal rules of the game were there for a reason. Without a broad mandate, power alone was not enough to get Bush’s Social Security plan moving. It wasn’t enough to permanently resolve the distinctions between social and economic conservatives that constitute the majority. And it won’t be enough to prevent the crackup that will soon finish off the era of Republican dominance.

For the… more

Over a period of nine months, U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman’s political fortunes spun from being rejected by his party after three decades of service to solidly winning a fourth term and returning to Washington as a hybrid "independent Democrat."

But then, after repeatedly promising to remain a Democrat and caucus with them if re-elected, Lieberman dropped a bombshell last week when he refused to rule out switching to the Republican side, although he added in an NBC interview, "I… more

The crowning disgrace of this country’s five-year experiment with one-party Republican rule was surely the passage of a bill on September 29, that sanctioned abusive treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror," banned habeas corpus claims for those identified as "enemy combatants," and allowed the president to place that designation on anyone, including U.S. citizens.

Even with their president’s approval ratings at Nixonian levels, and their own sinking below that, congressional Republicans were able to muster one last grand gesture… more

It is conventional wisdom that the new democratic activists of the "netroots" are strong on political tactics but don’t have much to contribute to the war of ideas. Matt Bai, writing in The New York Times Magazine, charged disparagingly that "leaders of the netroots... will tell you that Big Ideas are overrated."

This isn’t entirely fair, but let’s take the point: The better-known lefty blogs are indeed weighted toward the tactical. They argue that the liberal establishment of think tanks and… more

Last fall, after President Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, the conservative blog Redstate.com explained the vehement opposition to the choice. It was not so much doubts about Miers’s conservatism, but the very fact that she could win confirmation without a fight: “[The White House] does not understand how badly some of us want the final showdown with the Dems.”

"The final showdown” is a concept that fits awkwardly into the American democratic tradition. Democracy… more