Ferrablog

The Republican Party and Homer Simpson have a lot more in common that you think, and doubtless they had one of Homer's phrases in mind when the Sandy Berger news broke in the last couple of days.  It really is a pseudo-scandal at best, but of course that isn't stopping them from trying to make hay on it.  And I don't doubt that the Democrats would be doing the same if Condi Rice did what Berger did.  But I think they'd have better sense than the Republicans did in having Tom DeLay, of all people, call it a "third-rate burglary", in a lame attempt to bring up the spectre of Watergate.  This is the same Tom DeLay who's the subject of an ethics investigation for illegal fundraising and who was pretty much stuffed in the jacket pocket of Enron like a Sandy Berger classified document.   Their chutzpah knows no bounds.

This is the title of a very interesting article by longtime political sage Kevin Phillips that appeared in The Nation.  The gist of it is that the Democrats should embrace economic populism as a way to peel off the McCain/Perot voters from the Republican base.   It also contains some interesting analysis of how Clinton's moral foibles in essence "created" George W. Bush and interrupted what should have been a 12-16 year cycle of Democratic dominance.  It's one of the more thought-provoking political analyses I've read lately.