He is 75-year-old Chicago congressman Bobby Rush and he wants to spend more time with his grandkids after serving fifteen terms in the House. Rush beat Obama in the 2000 Illinois 1st congressional district Democratic primary by about thirty percentage...
Democratic Party
The Democratic race for Pat Toomey’s Senate seat reveals the divisions in the party
The frontrunner is Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman. His top challenger is western Pennsylvania congressman Conor Lamb. Here is Holly Otterbein at Politico: One candidate promises he won’t be a centrist Democratic senator like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. Another...
Episode 29: “The Rise of Barack Obama”
The background to the speech that would change his life and the life of a nation. Episode 29: “The Rise of Barack Obama” dropped last night. Subscribers to Current at the Longshore level and above new episodes of this narrative history podcast. Here is...
Historian David Blight champions teachers; criticizes Democratic Party’s “endless debates over the right language”
Here is the Pulitzer Prize-winner and Frederick Douglass biographer: Blight is also concerned about the current state of the Democratic Party:...
The Jacobin editors on the “commonsense solidarity” of the American working class
The socialist magazine Jacobin recently published a study on the political views of the American working-class. The editors offer several takeaways: “Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal...
Ron Sider on the problems with the Democrats
At his Substack page, progressive evangelical Ronald Sider reflects on the current state of his political party. A taste: You would think Democrats would recognize the vast cultural and ideological diversity of the country and say that our pluralistic society...
The Author’s Corner with J. Matthew Gallman
J. Matthew Gallman is Professor of History at the University of Florida. This interview is based on his new book, The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2021). JF: What led you...
“Democrats are misreading the room to an astonishing degree”
Here is a New York Times reader from Georgia responding to this New York Times op-ed: Democrats are misreading the room to an astonishing degree. Let this sink in: my Mexican yard man likes Trump. Although immigration laws should be...
“The median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb”
Matthew Yglesias offers some advice to the Democrats: Back in 1992, James Carville supposedly hung a sign in Clinton campaign headquarters that said, “it’s the economy, stupid.” By the same token, Democrats today could improve their performance enormously if every staffer’s computer...
Pew Research: “Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say increased attention to the history of slavery and racism is bad for the country”
Here is a taste of the recent Pew Research study: Among U.S. adults overall, 53% say increased attention to that history is a good thing for society, while 26% say it is a bad thing and another 21% say it...
The DNC is collecting opposition research on potential 2022 GOP candidates, including Mike “MyPillow Guy” Lindell
Yes, you read that title correctly. Here is Alex Thompson and Daniel Payne at the Politico West Wing playbook: The Democratic National Committee has quietly assembled a core team that is focused not just on the 2022 midterms but on...
“84% of Republicans believe history should celebrate our nation’s past, while 70% of Democrats think history should question it”
Our culture war is rooted in competing perceptions of the American past. Here is Peter Burkholder of Fairleigh Dickinson University and Dana Schaffer of the American Historical Association at Time: Our recent national survey of people’s understandings and uses of...
James Carville is glad that Joe Biden is not into “faculty lounge” politics
The political consultant best known for running Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns comes from an era when Democratic politics was all about making appeals to the things working and middle-class people had in common. He has reacted strongly to the identity...
Pro-life Democrats march in defense of the Hyde Amendment
I don’t see many news outlets covering this story. Here is Ryan Foley at The Christian Post: A group of pro-life Democrats and other pro-life activists gathered on Capitol Hill and across the country Saturday to oppose the exclusion of...
What happens when you watch “The West Wing” during the Biden era?
Damon Linker explains in his column at The Week: The West Wing is what you get if you take the outlook of the most committed Democrats during the two terms of Bill Clinton’s presidency, add an overlay of rhetorical grandiosity derived...
Michelle Cottle offers a “dictionary for these polarized times”
The premise of Cottle’s piece at The New York Times is that Democrats and Republicans no longer speak the same language. Take, for example, the phrase “fake news”: Pre-Trump, most folks thought of fake news as media sources that trafficked...
Do Democrats have an immigration policy?
It doesn’t look like it. Here is a taste of David Leonhardt’s piece at The New York Times: . . . In recent years, however, a growing number of immigration advocates and progressive Democrats have become dissatisfied with this combination....
How did Democrats lose “Joe Bailey”
Over at Dissent, historian Gabriel Winant reviews two new books on working people. The first is David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. The other is Jacob S. Hacker...
62% of Americans say that we need a third political party
Here is Gallup: WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ desire for a third party has ticked up since last fall and now sits at a high in Gallup’s trend. Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults say the “parties do such a poor job...
Kazin: The Democratic Party must embrace a “new politics of economic justice”
How does the Democratic Party move forward in the post-Trump era? Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, who is writing a new history of the Democrats, offers some thoughts in a recent piece at The New Republic. Here is a taste:...