Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion. Thomas Frank More Quotes by Thomas Frank More Quotes From Thomas Frank Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution. Thomas Frank journalism special stories Is Wall Street the rightful master of our economic fate? Or should we choose a broader form of sovereignty? Thomas Frank economic wall fate I was never a fan of Barack Obama's bipartisanship routine. Thomas Frank barack routine fans I was in a bad mood when I wrote that. Thomas Frank mood bad-mood Acknowledging class was always difficult for 'New Democrats' - it was second-wave, it was divisive - but 2008 made retro politics cool again. Thomas Frank wave made class When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong. Thomas Frank figures research happens When the entertainers of the right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call “the Chicago way.” Thomas Frank thug president wings The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace. Thomas Frank business goal rose I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances. Thomas Frank people world thinking Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians. Thomas Frank valuable presidential legacy Public borrowing is costly these days, true, but interest rates on municipal bonds are still considerably lower than those borne by corporate debt. Thomas Frank debt these-days interest Republicans run the machine when it's their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough. Thomas Frank had-enough running hands Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains. Thomas Frank liberty care government Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn't have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all. Thomas Frank issues political jobs Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.' Thomas Frank cities successful simple Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense. Thomas Frank airports world ideas As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then. Thomas Frank president may war Above all else stands the burning question of bipartisanship. Whatever else the politicians might say they're about, our news analysts know that this is the true object of the nation's desire, the topic to which those slippery presidential spokesmen need always to be dragged back. Thomas Frank presidential desire needs We have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from. Thomas Frank self age add We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's? Thomas Frank opinion-leaders wall government
