President Obama’s middling job approval rating has been quite steady over the last few months, devoid of much movement outside of the relatively subtle shifts seen from poll to poll. This is nothing new: Based on Gallup’s polling, Barack Obama’s approval rating has the smallest standard deviation of any modern […] Read more »
Gloomy Republican Campaigns Leave Behind Reagan Cheer
To listen to the way some Republicans tell it, America is a pretty awful place these days. … Appeals to voters’ insecurities and anxieties have always been part of politics. But what is striking about the current dynamic inside the Republican Party is how pervasive the sense has become that […] Read more »
How Jimmy Carter championed civil rights — and Ronald Reagan didn’t
… Carter is largely remembered as a feckless leader; even his own party tends to ignore his time in the White House. But he had a strong record on civil rights, and his work to advance the cause would have been far more consequential if his successor, Ronald Reagan, had […] Read more »
Donald Trump Is…
Donald Trump a populist? Wrong. Trump has nothing to do with Andrew Jackson or Huey Long. He has everything to do with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the modern Republican Party. Trump is a Mixmaster blend of the right-wing Republican politics of the past 50 years. CONT. Sean Wilentz (Princeton), […] Read more »
Trust Me: We All Liked President Carter Then Too But …
… But, given his defeat in the 1980 presidential election after serving only one term, it is easy to forget that even while serving as president he was held in relatively high esteem by the public for his personal qualities. … The lesson, as I discussed in a previous post […] Read more »
New research shows just how much presidents try to manipulate public opinion
The political scientists James Druckman and Lawrence Jacobs have just published a book, “Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation.” Early reviews call it “a breakthrough” and “a fascinating study” whose “picture is not pretty.” I talked with Druckman and Jacobs about the book via e-mail. An edited version of […] Read more »