A few years ago, a poll asked if the US were a divided nation. Fifty percent of respondents said yes, 50 percent said no. When it comes to politics, it’s surprising to us how little seems to change.
China has made a mockery of fair trade ever since Bill Clinton began encouraging it in the 1990s, and every US president has fiddled since, including President Obama. What would Mitt Romney have done? We’ll give you a hint: Walmart wouldn’t be pleased. National Review runs an intriguing cover piece by Romney’s former director of trade policy, Oren Cass, who argues that the US must develop a system of “tools” that includes not only import tariffs that could raise the insanely low prices on goods we’ve been paying, but also set up controls on Chinese access to US medical technology, capital markets, and even its universities. Sounds painful, right?
“Freedom isn’t free, and neither are free markets,” Cass says. “The US must be prepared to fight.” Chaaaaarge!!!
The New Republic
The New Republic’s reputation rests on the work of thoughtful scribes like Leon Wieseltier, who recently had some choice barbs for Obama’s do-nothing foreign policy. We likewise enjoyed Wieseltier’s column this month on Twitter, declaring that while he isn’t on it, he is “not a snob about it.” Elsewhere, however, we get a cover story by the incurably shrill Alec MacGillis, who gasps and tut-tuts ad nauseaum about local politics in Wisconsin under Gov. Scott Walker. “It is difficult to envision how Walker would broaden his party’s national appeal beyond the same shrinking pool of voters that Romney drew from,” MacGillis concludes. So why did he just spill 10 pages worth of ink on race in Milwaukee and the talk-radio show hosts that twisted his knickers?
Mother Jones
Mother Jones confirms its susceptibility to loopy liberal sensationalism with a cover that heralds ‘The Next Sarah Palin,” slapping this new, mystery 2016 hopeful as “Petty. Vindictive. And the Republican Party’s Great New Hope.” So who is this rough beast, its hour come round at last? New Mexico Gov. Susana Martínez! Citing “previously unreleased audio recordings, text messages and e-mails,” the mag reveals — gasp — that Martínez can be “nasty, juvenile and vindictive.” Sort of like Palin? Maybe. And maybe LBJ, and FDR, and the Clintons, too. Indeed, what this supposed exposé unearths is a picture of a still-learning but also driven and astute politician whose juiciest infraction appears to be that she privately called a debating opponent a “little bitch.”
Harper’s
Harper’s is, of course, prone to pander to its own knee-jerking liberal base. But fair is fair: an article on Obama’s environmental policy is packed with great reporting and uncomfortable truths of a different kind. Speaking quite frankly, White House counselor John Podesta tells the mag that the environment was “ninth on our list of eight really important problems” when Obama first took office. So why can’t the Democrats lead on climate change like Europe? Because kids, we’re selling oil. “The US is as much of an OPEC nation as most OPEC nations are,” a former Clinton official says. “The US is more like an energy producer, while the Europeans and Japan are energy-consumer nations.” Obama, for his part, has failed to seize “the moral high ground,” the article concludes.
The New Yorker
Most of the liberal media have been loath to acknowledge the rising profile of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), pretending that last fall’s government shutdown took Cruz and his presidential hopes down with it. But the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin quotes Cruz on the subject: “Like any good litigator, at times you think of a battle as a long-term battle,” says Cruz, a Harvard-trained lawyer who played a key, little-known role in winning George W. Bush the election in 2000 by helping to litigate the Florida voting crisis in the Supreme Court. “You don’t always accomplish everything on the first skirmish.” John McCain says Cruz’s effort to repeal ObamaCare in the Senate was “a fool’s errand … I think Ted has learned his lesson.” Cruz, Toobin notes, “has learned no such lesson.”
Time
On that point, Time profiles US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), who is exasperated at the legislative gridlock in Washington. “I know dysfunctional families that function better than the Senate does,” says Manchin, hinting that he’s entertaining a bid to return to his old role as the state’s popular governor. “You were measured every day by what you’d done that day,” Manchin says of the governor’s office. “I’ve never been in a less productive time in my life than I am right now, in the United States Senate.”