links for 2010-06-10
-
MY: "The precedent of Bill Clinton’s post-1994 repositioning comes up time and again, but Clinton’s re-election can easily be explained in terms of the economic fundamentals. I want to lay this marker down before the midterm not to bash the idea of moving to the center as such—I have centrist views on some issues—but simply because the world would be a much better place if Washington had a better understanding of the fact that trying to do a good job is actually a really good political strategy. What a President really needs to do to get re-elected is to preside over economic growth. Beyond that, you can do what you want, so you may as well try to do the right thing. It’s true that a handful of issues pit short-term macroeconomic performance against some longer-term issue, but this is generally quite rare."
-
AF: "With each step that American women have taken on the road to equality, detractors have fretted about what their advancement means for men -- particularly the "manly man." The lumber jack. The quarterback. The captain of industry. Clint Eastwood.... New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that "this is turning into a woman's world"... Harvey Mansfield eulogized Manliness, and a Newsweek cover story again warned of an impending "boy crisis."... The latest contribution to the masculinity-crisis meme is "The End of Men," a cover story in this month's Atlantic by Hanna Rosin.... It's disappointing that... Rosin makes the same oversight as all of the other hand-wringing articles about the state of the American male. She thinks the problem is men; really, it's traditional gender stereotypes. The narrow, toxic definition of masculinity perpetuated by Rosin and others -- that men are brawn not brains, doers not feelers, earners not nurturers -- is actually to blame for the crisis."
-
BP: "Once upon a time, Lindsey Graham was the great conservative hope for passing climate-change legislation.... [B]y all accounts, he thought it was an important cause worth fighting for.... But that's all gone now."