Handicapping This Year’s Senate Races
February 17, 2010If 2010 were a presidential election year, we would be deep into the primaries by now. There would be front-runners and challengers, and we would have some ideas about how the final election showdown might look. But the big battle this year is for control of Congress. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs in November, along with 36 of the 100 seats in the …
Talk To Chuck
February 10, 2010Most of New York’s leading politicians, including Gov. David Paterson and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have come to Wall Street’s defense against President Obama’s attacks on “fat cats” and other populist demons. The notable exception is the state’s senior U.S. senator, Charles Schumer, whose seat on the Senate Banking Committee — and whose past political support of, and from, the financial industry — gave him a front-row seat …
Winds Of Political Change Blow In Massachusetts
January 19, 2010Democrats lose races in Massachusetts about as often as the Harlem Globetrotters lose basketball games, which is why today’s special election in that state is so interesting. Some polls last week indicated that Republican candidate Scott Brown, a state senator, has a chance to beat Democratic attorney general Martha Coakley in today’s balloting to fill the U.S. Senate seat held until last year by Edward Kennedy. Coakley had been expected …
Look, Mom — I’m A Gay Republican Now
December 30, 2009If being a Democrat can run in families, it runs in mine. My parents were one generation removed from Ellis Island and the Lower East Side. Tammany Hall’s ward heelers helped my grandparents become Americans by telling them how to vote. My father enlisted in the Navy at 16, got married at 20, and joined a lodge (the Knights of Pythias) and a union, both of which were virtual Republican-free …
Universal Coverage: A Bus Ticket To Omaha
December 22, 2009Is the health care overhaul staggering through the Senate this week the most important social welfare legislation in a generation, as Democratic leaders claim? Or is it so compromised that the final product is not worth the agony, and the political risk, required to produce it? The bill that cleared its first crucial test vote in the wee hours Monday morning has become a make-or-break gamble for President Obama and …
The Estate Tax Disappears, For Now
December 17, 2009A lot of tax professionals are going to be surprised to learn, when they read this morning’s newspaper, that the estate tax really is going on hiatus effective New Year’s Day. I am not. Events have played out pretty much as I anticipated in the commentary that appeared in this space on Aug. 20. Last night, Senate Democrats abandoned their attempts to extend the tax before Congress adjourns for the …
Narrow Minds, Small Tent
November 3, 2009Republicans hope to launch their return to national power today by obliterating their own candidate in a New York congressional race. That, in a nutshell, is how strange and intolerant American politics has become. Today’s off-year elections include just a few races of national significance. The governor’s race in Virginia is an early indication of whether President Obama and fellow Democrats can maintain support in a Republican-leaning state that Obama …
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