Paul Waldman

The Biggest Design Flaw in

The pathway to disaster.


AP Photo/John Amis, File

Everyone agrees that the rollout of has been something between a fiasco and a disaster. One of the mysteries is how a famously tech-savvy administration, headed by a president whose campaigns broke new ground in using digital technology to accomplish their goals, could have presided over this kind of screw-up. The answer is nearly as complicated as the website itself, but as the administration has said, the problems are not insurmountable and the site will be fixed (hopefully sooner rather than later).

Politician Tries to Be Cool Dad, Destroys Career

Party politicians in the house tonight/Everybody just have a good time...

If you don't live in the D.C. area, you probably haven't heard about the increasingly amusing travails of Doug Gansler, Maryland Attorney General and candidate for governor. But his latest problem raises a question we as a nation must confront: Under what circumstances should a politician make the heavily freighted moral decision to be a total buzzkill?

Terrible Republican Idea Exposed as Even More Terrible




The False Glow of Remembered Childhood

Three years ago, John Boehner was doing an interview when he lamented, perhaps with a tear peeking its way through the corner of his eye, that Democrats "are snuffing out the America that I grew up in." As Michael Tomasky noted at the time, the America Boehner grew up in (the 1950s) featured things like strong private sector unions, a 90 percent top income tax rate, enormous public works projects, and a moderate Republican party, presumably all things Boehner wouldn't like, not to mention Jim Crow, terrible discrimination against women and gay get the point.

But of course, "the America that I grew up in" is a place that exists only in the imagination—everyone's imagination. This is from an interview in Salon the other day with Adam Goldberg, creator of The Goldbergs, an ABC sitcom set in the 1980s:

Why do you think audiences will be interested in a family show specifically set in the 1980s?

I think the '80s works for a TV show because it's the last time the world was simple. It was before the Internet really changed everything and made the world really small. Today the whole notion of family is a bit different: You can reach out and if you don't get any support at home, you can find a like-minded family on blogs or on Facebook. In the '80s your family was the people in your house, at your dinner table, and the people you went to school with, those were your friends. You basically couldn't find other friends. So it was really the last time where the world was still simple and small.

No, no, no. The '80s wasn't "the last time where the world was simple." The '80s was the last time when your world was simple. Can you guess why? Because you were a child!

No,'s Problems Will Not Offer the GOP Political Deliverance

Some of the contractors testifying today.



The Key to the Broffordable Care Act's Success


Instead of a Grand Bargain, Let's Have a Little Bargain

Flickr/Julia Taylor




Before Long, We'll Forget about the Problems with



Continuing the Republican Civil War with Immigration Reform

Flickr/Elvert Barnes




Dick Cheney Still Thinks He Was a Character on "24"

One of these two is not a real person.




Don't Kill Your Darlings!

Flickr/Sharon Drummond



The Tea Party, Now and Forever

Flickr/Rob Chandanais

People (including me, I'll admit) have been predicting the demise of the Tea Party for a long time, yet it has managed to stick around, the tail wagging the Republican dog even unto the point of shutting down the government and bringing the country within hours of default. Yet at the same time, if you paid attention to this crisis, you would have seen the words "Tea Party" escaping only the lips of Democrats (and a few reporters). None of the Republicans holding out to destroy the Affordable Care Act started their sentences with "We in the Tea Party…" It has become a name—or an epithet—more than a movement, even as its perspective and its style have woven themselves deeply within the GOP. Not that there aren't still Tea Party organizations in existence, but how many Republican politicians in the coming months are going to be eager to show up at a rally where everyone's wearing tricorner hats?

What this moment may mark is the not so much the death of the Tea Party as the final stages of a transition. The silly costumes will get put away, and the angry rallies may draw no more than a handful of fist-shakers. But we should finally understand that the Tea Party has metastasized itself within its host, even if fewer people use its name. It would probably help to come up with a new name for it, since the word "party" misdirects us into thinking that if it isn't doing practical things like endorsing candidates or putting forward a policy agenda, then it's fading. But it isn't, and defeats like this one don't necessarily make it weaker.

The time has come to finally stop looking at the Tea Party as a political movement and understand it as a psychological, sociological, and religious phenomenon.

Conservative Does Journalism, Gets Hailed as Demi-God

The National Review's Robert Costa. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Back in 2009, Tucker Carlson gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, in which he told the crowd that what the right needed was more real journalism. He even pointed out that, as much as they hate the New York Times, that paper has people who do actual reporting and care about accurately relaying facts, and conservatives ought to try the same thing. He was booed resoundingly. Then Carlson founded the Daily Caller, which is kind of like giving a speech to a group of overweight people about the importance of cooking moderately sized meals filled with vegetables at home, then saying, "Let's go to McDonald's—Big Macs are on me!"

Conservatives aren't wrong when they say most journalists are liberals. That isn't because of a conspiracy to keep out conservatives, any more than the fact that most stock brokers are conservatives is a result of a Wall Street conspiracy to keep out liberals. It's primarily because of the kind of people who are attracted to that kind of work. Journalists tend to be comfortable with ambiguity, suspicious of powerful institutions, and many other things conservatives aren't. Acknowledging that most reporters are liberals isn't the same thing as saying the news has a liberal bias, however. In any case, it's unusual to see a conservative reporter win universal praise for his reporting, if for no other reason than that there aren't that many conservatives who do straight journalism. Which brings us to Robert Costa, the National Review reporter who became the undisputed media star of the government shutdown. Everyone who's anyone found themselves following Costa on Twitter, reading his blog posts, and using him to figure out what was really going on. People started writing profiles of him. He got invited to an off-the-record session with the President. How did Costa do it?

How Conservatives Reacted to the Shutdown/Default Deal

