Josh Marshall
A quick update on our weekend site upgrade (see posts below). We’ve got the new system up and running. Thank you so much for your indulgence over the weekend. We really appreciate it. We’re still working to get the comments widget on the story pages back up and running. That should be up soon. Otherwise, on the reader end, everything should be back to the way it was and, under the hood, much better than it was.
Thanks again for your patience.
Just a reminder that we are currently doing a major site upgrade, specifically tied to our membership system, and no one can currently log in to the site. If you’re a member there’s an email about this in your inbox that you should have received yesterday. And you can see the post two posts down in the Editors’ Blog. This is a weekend long project. As noted below, we apologize for the inconvenience. But I assure you it’s both necessary and worthwhile. You don’t need to change your password. There’s no technical issue with the log in. It’s just not available through most of this weekend.
Joe Boosted By Roaring Biden Economy. No, Really.
In politics and in our personal lives we are often spinning ourselves in circles searching for explanations of the inexplicable when a bit of comparative analysis would do us wonders. For Democrats an abiding question of the Biden presidency, especially in 2024, is this: why hasn’t Joe Biden gotten more credit for the roaring 20s economy? Growth is steady, unemployment is at historic lows, inflation has fallen dramatically, wages are rising. Each rosy data point purports to have a context which shows it isn’t all its cracked up to be. And some of those contexts bear consideration. But the G-7 summit in Italy this last week is perhaps the most clarifying context.
Read MoreA slew of headlines greeted Donald Trump’s return to Capitol Hill yesterday. “Triumphant return” in the words of AP and others, Trump’s “flex” in the words of Axios. Others less generously, including TPM, heralded Trump’s “return to the scene of the crime.” And with Trump, characteristically, there are many crimes to choose from, not just January 6th, his greatest crime, but the fact that this was his first big get together since being convicted of 34 felonies and earning his new first name: “Convicted Felon.” What all seemed to agree on is that it was a “Unity Rally.” But I think there was both more and less to it than that.
First, it was some mix of surprisng and revealing how little of the first round of press coverage noted the very Pyongyang-on-Capitol Hill vibe of these events, right down to the set piece press opportunities with grown men and women from the Senate manically clapping like seals as Trump walks into the room, interviews where they express their hopes that Trump will come and lead them again. Our friend Aaron Rupar really seemed to have his eyes open for this, and he captured it in this video.
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Making Sense of a Big Stack of Editors’ Blog Posts
I want to thank all of you who wrote in in response to yesterday’s post asking for your favorite Editors’ Blog posts. Please keep them coming. At one level it’s just very gratifying and affirming to hear which ones you’ve especially enjoyed, which ones had some particular meaning for you. But this wasn’t just an ego trip. Or, it mostly wasn’t that. I’ve been considering putting together a collection of pieces from the last 24 years. I’m not sure whether that would include the “best” or most popular, or just ones that built up a series of themes or arguments over time. My thought was too pull them together, clean them up and assemble them into bundles focused on key themes and questions that have animated the Editors’ Blog over the years. And then on top of this, add a short essay for each trying to make sense of how the question or problem evolved over time, how the opinions stack up in retrospect, what we can say now about something that happened in … say 2010, the importance of which simply wasn’t clear at the time.
Again, this is a very general idea. But I just wanted to give you a sense of what spurred me to ask the question.
Read MoreI wanted to ask you a question for a project I’m putting together: Do you have a favorite Editors’ Blog post? This isn’t one of those things where you have to choose a single one. There are going on 24 years of posts in the Editors’ Blog. So I’m curious to hear from readers if there are particular ones that stand out or that you found memorable or anything else like that over that period. One, none, five — any number is fine. If there are ones that come to mind, can you drop me a line at the regular TPM email address — talk (at) talkingpointsmemo dot com — and just put in the subject line “Editor’s Blog,” or something like that?
You don’t need to know the title. For the first eight or nine years they didn’t even have titles.
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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