Jared A. Goldstein (Roger Williams): The Tea Party's Constitution. The perils of constitution-worship: One of the guiding principles of the tea-party movement is based on a myth (and a response). Stanley Fish on Antaeus and the Tea Party. From Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi on how corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster; and an interview with President Obama on the Tea Party, the war, the economy and what’s at stake this November. Kevin Drum on the Tea Party: Old whine in new bottles — Memo to Obama: Bill Clinton, LBJ, and FDR know how you feel. Noam Scheiber profiles the disillusioned David Axelrod. Howard Kurtz profiles Paul Krugman, disaffected liberal. Obama's forgotten base: The tragic irony of this political moment is that the people with the most faith in Obama are the hardest hit by the economic disaster, and this brute fact is driving the enthusiasm gap. The Tea Partyers aren't wrong about the growing influence of un-Americans in high places — they've just misidentified who those un-Americans are. From Boston Review, William Hogeland on Real Americans: In America the deadlock between liberalism and populism may be unbreakable. TAP debates populism: Reactions to Kevin Mattson's call for the left to abandon populism; and Robert Kuttner on how populism comes in two varieties — progressive and reactionary.
