Salon.com > Rick Perlstein

America didn’t vote for a “grand bargain”

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 22:00:00 +0000

By 10 p.m. on Tuesday, it was all over but the shouting -- the shouting of Karl Rove, incredulous that Fox News' "decision desk" would dare deploy the best statistical evidence at its disposal to call Ohio for the president; the shouting of wingnuts everywhere that — no fair! — Obama only won because of superstorm Sandy (because demonstrated competence in running the government is no reason to choose someone to ... run your government); the shouting of the joyous throngs at McCormick Place waiting to receive their new second-term president. In my Hyde Park apartment just five blocks from the president's home, soon all around me was jubilation. A second Barack Obama term! I alone seemed to feel the disquiet. This reelection troubles me. It troubles me because of the signal it may send to some of the people running the Democratic Party, and to Barack Obama, a signal that may threaten the long-term health of the Democratic Party itself.

Stand against Rahm!

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 11:45:00 +0000

CHICAGO — I was awoken by honking car horns yesterday morning, and couldn't have been happier for the fact. Chicago's public schoolteachers are on strike against the city government and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And while no one likes the budget crisis that forms the strike's fiscal context, nor the fact that 350,000 students aren't at school, much of Chicago is finding joy in the municipal impasse — which is why, anywhere within earshot of the schools where the Chicago Teachers Union's 25,500 members are picketing in front of their workplaces, solidarity car horns are blasting away.

Since Rahm Emanuel's election in the spring of 2011, Chicago's teachers have been asked to eat shit by a mayor obsessed with displaying to the universe his "toughness" — toughness with the working-class people that make the city tick; toughness with the protesters standing up to say "no"; but never, ever toughness with the vested interests, including anti-union charter school advocates, who poured $12 million into his coffers to elect him mayor (his closet competitor raised $2.5 million). The roots of the strike began when Emanuel announced his signature education initiative: extending Chicago's school day. Overwhelmingly, Chicago's teachers support lengthening the day, which is the shortest of any major district in the country. Just not the way Rahm wanted to ram it down their throats: 20 percent more work; 2 percent more pay.

What Haley Barbour’s amnesia tells us

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:01:00 +0000

"January 7, 1970, dawned clear and bitterly cold, a cold that rarely comes to Mississippi. It was 16 degrees on South Main Street, the trees along the older avenues were seared and deathly, and the water in the potholes of the roads in the Negro section was frozen solid. All over Yazoo there was a cold eerie calm."

So recorded the great Southern writer Willie Morris in his classic book "Yazoo: Integration In a Deep Southern Town," with suitable melodrama, of the first day little black boys and girls and little white boys and girls sat together in classrooms in his Mississippi Delta hometown. The moment came fifteen years after the dawn of "Massive Resistance": an organized conspiracy, uniting all strata of white Southern society, high and low, to defy the order of the Supreme Court to integrate its schools "with all deliberate speed."

Thomas Frank on the Bush administration: Sabotage by design

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:33:00 +0000

Thomas Frank is back with another hunk of dynamite. His "What's the Matter With Kansas?" monopolized political discussion for over a year when it came out in the summer of 2004. "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" should monopolize political conversation this year. It's the first book to effectively tie the ruin and corruption of conservative governance to the conservative "movement building" of the 1970s, and, before that, the business crusade against good government going back at least to the 1890s.

Here, for example, is a splendid bit Frank pulled from the Journal of Commerce from 1928 about why it's best for business to wreck the state: "The best public servant is the worst one. A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast -- a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world -- the black plague is a house pet by comparison."

Why Democrats can stop the war

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:32:00 +0000

Earlier this month, the folks at MoveOn.org came to me with a challenge: Study the history of Congress' efforts to halt, or at least halt the escalation of, the Vietnam War, and mine it for lessons about what Congress should do about Iraq now. They found themselves saddled with a historian deeply suspicious of using history to glibly draw battle plans for the present -- but one who emerged, nonetheless, believing that this time the lessons are clear. Last Thursday, Salon ran Walter Shapiro's article "Why the Democrats Can't Stop the Surge." I've come to a different conclusion about what Congress can or can't do. The questions are not just: Can Congress stop the surge? Can Congress stop a war-mongering president in his tracks? The better question is what are the things Congress can accomplish just by trying to stop the escalation, boldly, and without apology?

The answer to that is: an enormous amount -- and that the only thing that can guarantee Democratic political weakness in 2008 is if they abandon a strong withdrawal (or, if you prefer, "redeployment") position.

The Reagan legacy

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 21:33:00 +0000

I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should -- not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace. (President Bush, in contrast, seems to know only how to derange the world with war.) But in the necrophiliac orgy that is now upon us, there are three messages that I -- as a historian of the rise of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s, and as a reporter on the conservative regency in election year 2004 -- wish that more people would hear.

The first is that if Reagan's partisans succeed in creating an indelible memory of him as someone that everyone loved all the time, they will have won an important political struggle with consequences for today.

The second is that if his partisans succeed in minting Reagan in public memory as a repository of bedrock principle, they will have been complicit in letting forgetting win the battle against remembering -- because on their own, conservative terms, Reagan was often a sellout.