Editors’ Blog
What To Make of the Departure of Benny Gantz 
A number of you have asked me to share my perspective on one of the Israeli opposition leaders (one of, not the official one) Benny Gantz leaving the Netanyahu coalition. So here goes. My overall impression, sadly, is perhaps best captured by not posting on it until now, though I was kind of letting it marinate while I thought of what to say. Basically, I think it matters very little. But it’s helpful to walk through the different dimensions of non-mattering.
In the most basic sense it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t endanger the governing coalition’s majority. That majority had 64 seats on October 7th, which means a majority and three seats to spare. They were added and now taken away, a wash. In the short term it only makes Netanyahu more reliant on the ultra-rightist parties in the coalition — something Gantz’s party’s entry was in some ways meant to limit.
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Resilience Part 2 (or Thoughts on Sam Alito’s DGAF Justicehood)
I think a lot about resilience. It’s actually an underlying concern that forms a lot of my political opinions. Not about policy, though perhaps that too in some way, but politics in the sense of elections and how coalitions and individuals operate politically, how they sustain themselves. I thought about this when I heard these new recordings of Sam Alito, telling us in his own words what we’ve been learning in recent years from his actions. It was interesting to contrast Alito’s remarks with those from the parallel recordings of John Roberts. Roberts at least said the right things when pushed on these questions about polarization and the role of justices and the Court. I doubt the difference in the two responses is just about Roberts being more circumspect. While being part of the same corruption as Alito, he is at least concerned with public perceptions of the Court’s legitimacy and the historical reputation of the Court under his chief justiceship. He is concerned with the constraint of legitimacy, which is defined by public perceptions of the Court. It’s a low bar, but still a quite significant one.
The thing with Sam Alito is that he doesn’t give a fuck. He is a seventy-something Fox News watcher and religious fundamentalist who happens to find himself in a position of immense and almost incomparable power over all of American society and he’s going to take that power to the limit to advance his own political preferences. He’s not even going to go through the motions of pretending that’s not the case. You don’t like it? Well, tough shit. You should have thought of that in 2006. And he’s not the only one in this mode. Thomas is right there with him. The remaining four are functionally in the same place. They’re just more attuned to appearances and willing to pass up at least a few goodies in the interest of maintaining some patina of legitimacy and thus entrenching and confirming their illegitimate power.
So, resilience.
Read More538 just released its official 2024 forecast model. It shows a toss-up. (Technically, out of a thousand simulations, Biden wins 53% of the times and Trump wins 47% of the times.) This is significant, but not perhaps in the way you think.
First, while poll averages are helpful to making sense of the current state of the race, forecasts are like predicting the future. In fact, they are literally about predicting the future. And predicting the future is hard — a basic life lesson if you haven’t come across it yet. To me, the 538 modeling is the gold standard. But I see it still as half a novelty. That’s no criticism of the people who put it together, incredibly smart folks. It’s just that there are a lot of factors that can’t be reduced to formulas and data inputs and the data that can be put into the model come with their own clouds of uncertainty. To me it’s a helpful data exercise which takes a knowledgable person’s range of factors, adds a bunch more and looks at them in a systematic and consistent-over-time fashion, stripped of wishful thinking. That’s helpful. It’s just not the be all and end all.
But here’s why it’s significant.
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Seeing the Commonalities: EU Election Edition
You’ve likely seen the news of the new European Union elections in which the far-right — particularly in France and Germany — have made big gains. Those gains in turn spurred French President Macron to call snap elections for the national parliament, an extremely high stakes gamble. European politics are complicated and different from those of the U.S. in numerous ways. Each country, notwithstanding the centralizing force of europeanization, remains its own microcosm. But it’s worth taking a moment to focus on their essential similarity.
Take the example of France.
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Just Posting Endlessly
I wanted to share another thought on the Post’s travails. I’m chagrined that a friend had to make the point for me since it’s a point I should know as well as anyone. It’s not like there’s not a ton of money to be made on journalism in DC. The fact that it’s one of the few spaces in the U.S. that has spawned a series of successful media startups over the last fifteen years testifies to that — Politico, Axios, Punchbowl and more. Indeed, it was veterans of the Post who branched off and launched the first two and in many ways ate the Post’s launch before Bezos came into the picture.
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From TPM Reader RJ, who has a somewhat less generous view of the Post. This is a case where I should remind people that on some topics I post a range of views from readers. That doesn’t mean I endorse them. That said, there are some points here that ring true to me. As the dominant paper in what is an inherently political town, politics and government is inevitably the Post’s big thing. And as we’ve discussed in other posts, it’s hard to make it as one of the very few financially viable national papers if that’s your big and dominant thing.
Read MoreAn interesting perspective from TPM Reader CB on the unfolding Post drama …
Read MoreWe moved to the DC area – Maryland suburbs – straight from Northwestern Law in 1968 and have subscribed to the Post daily and Sunday ever since. From the elixir of the morning Woodward and Bernstein exclusives that chronicled the unraveling of the Nixon presidency, to a daily paper thinner than a half used yellow legal pad in the dying days of the Graham family ownership, we have stuck with the Post.
A bit more on my love/hate relationship with Puck. As I said in today’s Backchannel, it’s a curious mix of the very best and the very worst. But as I also noted, it’s helpful to keep an eye on the worst because they can have a lot of influence. Occasionally you can even learn something. Which brings me to Tara Palmeri of Puck. Her dispatch on Trump’s conviction is just drenched in the contempt in which she holds all Democrats. After listing off Republicans’ absolute and total unity behind Trump she says this: “Ironically, it’s the Democrats who seem confused about how to handle Trump’s newly minted felon designation.”
Let’s go back a few more days to our earlier discussion of this. The roar of rage and total confidence in Trump has two purposes. The one is to keep Republicans on side. The other is to make Democrats doubt the obvious: that Trump’s new first name, “convicted felon,” is bad news for his campaign. And the more it’s flogged and made his official first name, the worse it is. We don’t know how bad it is. We don’t know how many voters it will move. But it’s definitely not good. So saying it over and over again and putting it at the heart of the campaign against him is certainly a good thing. Again, that’s most of the goal of the Republican fusillade: to raise doubt about that completely obvious point.
The news pages are filled today with D-Day anniversary messages and accounts. It’s 80 years ago. So we’re at the outer rim of time where anyone there that day must be in their late 90s at the youngest. The thing that seems most important to remember is that it was not clear that it would work. The death, the fear, the terror, the sacrifice all take on a certain hue and logic because we know it was a success that would open the door for the reconquest of Europe. But that wasn’t clear at the time. You’ve probably seen references in the anniversary stories to the message Ike prepared to announce the landing’s failure.
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