“You do not curse away the darkness of the night; you illuminate your area by holding up a light.” -Terry Sanford
All in Electoral Politics
By Blake Holt, staff editor As President Obama and the Republicans offer competing visions for balancing the federal budget, it is important to be clear about the scope of the problems we face and the options available to address those problems moving forward. However, the current debate seems to be ignoring the steps already taken to reduce the deficit.
By Anna Kawar, staff editor So, the government averted a shutdown. Again. To be honest, I’m not even sure what to attribute this “success” to. Everything has become so jumbled that it’s hard to follow who the “heroes” are—especially with the budget debate turning into outright moral warfare. I read this Russian joke used in reference to what has been happening, and I think it’s a perfect way to describe recent events: "We were at the edge of the cliff. Now we've taken a giant step forward."
Standard & Poor’s didn’t downgrade America’s AAA credit today. What they did is subtler: They attached a “negative outlook” to our AAA credit. That means they upgraded the chance of a future downgrade. So if you ask the S&P’s Magic ...
By Matt Vigeant, staff editor Plato’s Anthropological Principle says that society is simply man at large. If this is true, our spend-aholic government is a person who makes $50,000 a year but foolishly decides to take a subprime mortgage on a million dollar house. But, unlike the subprime man who cannot pass his debt on to his children, the government can – and seems poised to again – pass its debt on to the next generation.
By Ellen Whelan-Wuest, staff editor While the Middle Eastern protests and revolutions dominated the front pages, a democratic movement erupted in the heart of our own country. While recent reports indicate that counter protesters have joined the fray, the majority of the 68,000 people gathered in and around the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin are fighting for the long-standing right of public service employees to collectively bargain for their wages and benefits. Governor Walker and his supporters have denounced the unions organizing the so-called “Cheddar Revolution,” as standing in the way of responsible budget cuts intended to address Wisconsin’s budget deficit. According to state and national Republican leaders, Governor Walker’s budget bill is an “austerity measure” and not a move solely intended to weaken unions, as President Obama and others have speculated. However, there are two important and largely unexamined aspects to the events in Wisconsin that undermine such claims.
By Agustina Laurito, staff editor On November 28 Haiti held a presidential election to choose Rene Préval’s successor. The election was characterized by fraud, corruption and low turnout. After a series of protests, it was determined last week that Michel Martelly will compete against Mirlande Manigat in the March 20 runoff election. Despite this advance, in a country still dealing with the crippling consequences of last year's devastating earthquake, and where institutional weakness is the norm, the road to the runoff election is full of challenges.
By Jade Lamb, staff editor The Economist loves a good graph. In the past week’s issue, it put together a table showing the results of its ad hoc “Shoe-Thrower’s Index,” which measures the likelihood of unrest in Arab countries. Yemen comes out far ahead, rating nearly 90 on the hundred-point scale; its closest competitor, Libya, comes in around 70. Confirming the Economist’s place as a leader in current events reporting, popular protests in Yemen have already started. How was the Economist’s index so prescient? In essence, the index measures two categories: whether people have cause to protest, and whether the country has a protest-inclined (i.e. young) population. Yemen, with a government 32 years in power and a median age of 18, fits the bill on both counts.
By Jade Lamb, staff editor Egypt’s decision not to allow monitors at its recent election bodes ill for democracy in that country. Though Egypt is no paragon of emerging democracy—Egypt has had only three presidents since the British left after World War II, and President Hosni Mubarak will probably be replaced by his son when he finally leaves office in five or ten years—election monitors can still have some positive influence.
By Sofía Baliño, editor-in-chief The midterm elections earlier this month, which have been both hailed and vilified as a “seismic shift” in the nature of American politics, might not have the major ramifications that so many policy wonks and talking heads predict. That was the message that the panelists at this year’s Zeidman Memorial Colloquium on Politics and the Press told a sympathetic Duke audience last week. CNN’s John King, Politico editor-in-chief and cofounder John F. Harris, and Duke professors Sunshine Hillygus and Philip Bennett (also former managing editor of the Washington Post) led the Sanford-hosted discussion, in which the four conducted a post-mortem on the 2010 midterm elections. With candor, analysis, and a bit of wry humor, they broke down the events leading up to the November 2nd elections, and promised that the 2012 election is still very much up in the air, despite suggestions to the contrary.
By Anna Kawar, staff editor The Celtic Tiger has fallen and can’t get up. Unfortunately this one can’t be chalked up to overdoing it on the Guinness – the Irish government has formally applied for a financial rescue package upwards of $100 billion. This comes after months of insisting that it can handle its own finances, going so far as to prepare a four-year plan to reduce its deficit to 3% of GDP, down from 32%.
By Patricia Liever, staff editor The 112th Congress will make difficult decisions every day – and they will do it all in one of the most polarized environments that many of us can remember. Rather than make big cuts with costs that will be broadly felt by all Americans, members of Congress can likely be counted on to make the smallest, most politically safe reductions in federal spending. One of the likely victims of this effort is going to be the cancellation of NASA’s Constellation program and a reduction in funding for the nation’s space program. As someone who has recently lived and worked on Florida’s Space Coast – an area where NASA signs most people’s paychecks – I have seen firsthand the reality of “easy” budget cuts in the lives of the people affected.
By Ellen Whelan-Wuest, staff editor Americans are often accused of forgetting our own history. However, over the last few weeks and in the days following the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, it is clear that Americans are often too eager to interpret current situations as mere repetitions of our past. George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” but an over reliance on the past can be just as misleading.
By Jenny Orgill, staff editor Even Stewart and Colbert underestimated the masses that would pour onto the National Mall for the much anticipated Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. There were not adequate jumbotrons or speakers to accommodate the estimated 215,000 people that stretched from the Air and Space Museum to the Washington Monument. Why had people flocked to the mall in such great numbers? I think even the Colbert fans in the audience knew that this was all about restoring sanity. However, beyond being frustrated with the polarization of politics in America, I don’t think most of us understood what restoring sanity meant.
By Blake Holt, staff editor Christopher Hitchens’ recent article for Slate punned the above crack while discussing the indignities that seem to be par for the course in running for political office. Hitchens claims that electoral success is too often left to those willing to put up with these burdens and, further, willing to engage in populist pandering. But is this a bad thing? Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein says it isn’t.
By Ellen Whelan-Wuest, staff editor On October 24, 2009, thousands of people organized over 3,400 demonstrations around the world to demand the adoption of new energy policies. Nearly one year later, on October 10, 2010 (10/10/10), a similar day of action was coordinated and the number of events worldwide more than doubled. However, despite this increase in grassroots participation, American media coverage of this year’s day of action was almost non-existent, marking a dramatic contrast with last year when several major national news outlets covered the events. There are several possible explanations for the relative media silence that followed 10/10/10, but certainly one of them is the backwards shift in the climate change movement’s political momentum over the last year.