“No mortal fares well when compared to a saint, which is how Republicans view Reagan,” writes Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney at Swampland. “But a party more focused on its grand past than its promising future is a party in deep trouble.” Carney continues:
Just ask Democrats who spent the seventies and eighties conjuring the next John Kennedy and getting Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart instead. In 2004 (and even in 2000), it was common to hear Democrats bemoan the fact that if only they had a candidate who was more like Bill Clinton, they’d stand a better chance of winning. You don’t hear that in this cycle. For the most part, Democrats seem excited about their choices. Just another reason for Republicans to worry.
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How to Make the Debates Worth WatchingMaybe the presidential campaign should be more, not less, like a reality-TV series. The Washington Post editorial page semi-seriously proposes making debates more like “American Idol”: “One possibility would be to allow viewers to vote off one candidate after each debate; it seems to work well for other TV programs.”
First, he said his favorite novel was L. Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth.” Now, he’s confusing the real Earth with a science-fictional one: During a graduation speech at Pat Robertson-founded Regent University, Mitt Romney said that marriages in France are “frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up.” The New Republic’s Bradford Plumer thinks he knows where Romney got that idea. “There’s an Orson Scott Card novel in which marriages actually are contracted out for seven years,” Plumer writes at The Plank.
If you listened to foreign-policy debates, you’d think the United States had fought only two wars in its history. The Atlantic’s Robert D. Kaplan plumbs the two analogies that “have battled for supremacy in American foreign policy circles” for decades: Munich (World War II) and Vietnam.
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