Day: May 1, 2012

Welcome to Corndog-Eatin’ Season

Buck Banks

The long, grueling GOP primary race is over. Now comes a summertime lull the candidates could find just as difficult — not because the schedule is crowded but because it isn’t,” the AP reports… “It is four months until the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., in late August. Democrats hold their convention a week later in Charlotte, N.C. That’s a long time to fill, with no votes that matter, no debates to draw national attention. Voters tend to hibernate politically from the end of the primary season to the start of the conventions.” That lull “should be a bigger problem” for Mitt Romney than for President Obama. “A challenger must keep stirring up enthusiasm if he hopes to oust an incumbent president.”

DC Wise Men to Beltway Media: ‘Let’s Just Say It, The Republicans Are the Problem’

Jon Ponder

Books by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, <i>It's Even Worse Than It Looks</i> (2012) and <i>Broken Branch</i> (2008)
Books by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks (2012) and Broken Branch (2008)
Thomas Mann of Brookings and Norm Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute published an op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday that was aimed directly at members of Beltway media. Titled “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem,” it is a plea to journalists in the capital to stop their lazy both-sides-do-it reporting and recognize that blame for the political morass facing the country rests predominantly with the GOP:

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. […]