Recently in government Category
When George W. Bush stole the 2000 election, this country showed a maturity and self-assurance that makes us great. Even in losing the battle, we showed we can win the war.
The Iran situation? Not so much. Democracy isn't in the rules, it's in the execution. It's in the zeitgeist. It's measured reaction in the worst of times and the best of times.
And not how the leaders react, how the People react. Think 9/11. Does Bush's reaction define the county that day? No. The reaction of the people of New York City, the people on Flight 93, the people at the Pentagon, that's America. That's democracy in action. Iran, democracy in name only.
Anyway, on a much lighter note:The Ayatollah is following you on Twitter. (thx Drew)
A neat New Yorker profile on Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Aside from the clean-freak riff, the gist is this: He is the pugnacious gatekeeper that an "open door policy" president needs.
That is clear, and the fact that he is currently being politically neutered to fit the (at least superficially) apolitical office he holds.
Not easy, no doubt, neutering the man who has been known to send Godfather-like political messages:
More than any other story about Emanuel's tactics--and there are lots of them--the tale of the "dead-fish race" came to define his public persona as a Democratic operative. He and Axelrod were working for David Swarts, a Democratic official from Erie County, New York, running an underfunded campaign for a congressional seat long held by Republicans. "We were rolling the dice on the race, just spending the money we had as it came in to try and get these numbers up," Axelrod said. Their plan was to take a poll at the end of the contest which they hoped would show a competitive race and then use the results to help raise last-minute funds and overtake their opponent.
"The poll came back a week or two before the end, and it said we were down by seventeen," Axelrod said. "And that was it." According to Axelrod, Swarts's campaign manager later studied the poll's findings and concluded that the pollster had botched the analysis: the survey showed that Swarts was just five or six points behind. (The pollster says that the error was actually minor and quickly caught.) Axelrod added, "Had we gotten that correct poll then, we would have put our foot to the pedal. But it was too late. So Rahm, being as invested as he was in the thing, expressed himself as only Rahm can." After the election, Emanuel and his colleagues hired a Massachusetts company called Enough Is Enough, which specialized in "creative revenge," to send the pollster a box with a dead fish inside. Emanuel laughed mischievously when I asked him about the prank. "We had our choice of animals," he said.
