Search Results for: Republican

Alan Abramowitz’s Model Has Correctly Predicted Every Presidential Election Outcome Since 1992

The election model that’s most in vogue — that scored the highest when applied to presidential elections since World War II, correctly predicting every outcome since 1992 — is one created by Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz called “Time for a Change.” Abramowitz argues that the fundamentals in a presidential election are bedevilingly simple: the incumbent president’s approval rating in late June or early July, the rate of real GDP growth in the second quarter, and how many terms the party has been in the White House.

In 2012, for instance, Obama’s relatively lopsided victory may have shocked Republicans on Election Night, but by Abramowitz’s reckoning it was practically preordained. Although second-quarter real GDP growth was a relatively unimpressive 1.5 percent and Obama’s approval rating was a good-but-not-great 46 percent that June, he was seeking reelection, and, according to Abramowitz, “first-term incumbents rarely lose.” In fact, he believes that being a first-term incumbent is worth 4 percentage points. There was nothing in the Abramowitz model that looked good for John McCain in 2008 (bad economy, bad approval ratings of a second-term president from McCain’s party). In 1988, by contrast, George H.W. Bush was also running to give his party a third term, but Q2 real GDP growth that year was a booming 5.24 percent and Ronald Reagan’s approval rating was above 50 percent.

Jason Zengerle writing for New York about how Hillary Clinton stacks up as a candidate, and whether or not being a “good candidate” actually means anything in terms of winning the presidency.

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Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War

Saad Hossain | Escape from Baghdad! | Unnamed Press | March 2015 | 23 minutes (6,311 words)

 

Below are the opening chapters of the novel Escape from Baghdad!, by Saad Hossain, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

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A NOTE ON THE GLOSSARY AT THE END

There is a glossary of mostly factual terms and names at the end of the text (“factual” being a relative idea open to loose interpretation (“loose interpretation” meaning we’re aiming for a 50% chance of something on the page tallying with someone else’s verified opinion.)) So, if you find yourself wondering: Who’s Moqtada Al-Sadr again? Or what does JAM stand for? Or, bless you, IED? Just refer to the helpful, mostly factual glossary. Read more…

‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker

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Nikil Saval | Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace | Doubleday | April 2014 | 31 minutes (8,529 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Cubed, by Nikil Saval, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

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I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils…

—Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”

The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.

—Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849)

They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs. Read more…

The Last Freeway

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Hillel Aron | Slake | July 2011 | 20 minutes (4,888 words)

Hillel Aron’s “The Last Freeway” was published in Slake in 2011 and appeared as a Longreads Member Pick in September 2013. It’s a story about a city (Los Angeles), a freeway interchange (where the 105 meets the 110), and a man (Judge Harry Pregerson). Aron explains:

“Well, my friends Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa had this great quarterly called Slake, and I wanted to write something for them, so we sat down and talked about it… I think maybe I pitched it to them, I can’t remember. I’d was just always fascinated by freeways, growing up in Los Angeles, and I loved that Reyner Banham book, The Architecture of the Four Ecologies. When I was kid, I was completely enchanted by that 105 / 110 interchange, the carpool lane one, which towers above the city. It’s basically like a rollercoaster. Actually it kind of sucks—since I wrote the piece, they’ve turned that carpool lane into a “toll lane,” so normal carpoolers can’t use it anymore without one of those fast pass things. At any rate, I did some research and it turned out that (a) the 105 was the last freeway built in Los Angeles—the end of an era, really. And it was so tough to build that it basically set a precedent of not building freeways anymore. And (b), there was this nutty judge who turned the whole thing into a New Deal-style public works program to benefit the communities that were being bisected by this massive beast of a freeway. And he also ordered them to stick a train in the middle of it, which didn’t quite go to the airport, but that’s a different story…”

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How a Great American Theatrical Family Produced the 19th Century’s Most Notorious Assassin

John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth and Junius Booth, Jr. (from left to right) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Nora Titone | My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy | The Free Press | October 2010 | 41 minutes (11,244 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book My Thoughts Be Bloody, by Nora Titone, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky, who writes: 

“This is the story of the celebrated Booth family in the final year before John Wilkes made a mad leap into historical memory that outdid in magnitude every accomplishment of his father and brothers. When the curtain rises on this chapter of Nora Titone’s book, both Edwin and John Wilkes have already staged performances for President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater; by the time it comes down, one of them will be readying to assassinate him there.” 

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For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.

Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)

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We’re proud to present, for the first time online, “For the Public Good,” Belle Boggs‘s story for The New New South about the shocking history of forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States, and the story of victims in North Carolina, with original video by Olympia Stone.

As Boggs explained to us last year: 

“Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.

“At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.”

Thanks to Boggs and The New New South for sharing this story with the Longreads Community, and thanks to Longreads Members for your helping us bring these stories to you. Join us.

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When Mitch McConnell Met Roger Ailes: An Early Lesson in Winning At All Costs

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Alec MacGillis | The Cynic | September 2014 | 13 minutes (3,241 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from The Cynic, a book by The New Republic writer Alec MacGillis about U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. Our thanks to MacGillis for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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The Art of Arrival: Rebecca Solnit on Travel and Friendship

Rebecca Solnit | Orion | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,780 words)

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The word “journey” used to mean a single day’s travels, and the French word for day, jour, is packed neatly inside it, like a single pair of shoes in a very small case. Maybe all journeys should be imagined as a single day, short as a trip to the corner or long as a life in its ninth decade. This way of thinking about it is a;rmed by the t-shirts made for African-American funerals in New Orleans and other places that describe the birth date and death date of the person being commemorated as sunrise and sunset. One day. Read more…

A Step Back for The Civil Rights Movement

Over the next three decades, Hank Sanders became a fixture in the statehouse, ascending to the chairmanship of the Senate’s Finance and Taxation Education Committee. From his expansive office just off the Senate floor, he controlled Alabama’s Education Trust Fund, the largest operating budget in state government. Sanders tried to exercise his power to represent people who were unaccustomed to having a voice in Montgomery—namely poor, black Alabamans. He helped bring more money to their schools and their hospitals, better infrastructure to their neighborhoods, and greater fairness to their tax bills. Thanks to Sanders and a growing caucus of African American legislators, many of whom also chaired crucial committees, it was a period during which black people in Alabama enjoyed their most substantive political representation since Reconstruction. And Sanders, an exceptionally large man who suffered from severe obesity and whose supporters called him “The Rock,” was the cornerstone of the black political power structure in the state. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced off in Alabama’s 2008 Democratic primary, both candidates sought the endorsement of Sanders’s political organization; it went to Obama, and Obama won.

Sanders told me the story of his remarkable rise to power earlier this year, but his tone was more wistful than triumphant. For so long, his life had been an uplifting tale of slow but seemingly inexorable progress—not just for himself, but for African Americans throughout the South. In recent years, however, the trajectory of Sanders’s story has been abruptly—and just as inexorably—reversed. In 2010, Republicans took over the Alabama Senate and Sanders lost his chairmanship; in the four years since, he’s watched as the new GOP majority has systematically dismantled much of his life’s work.

-Jason Zengerle, in The New Republic, on the plight of black politicians in the South.

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The New Racism: This Is How the Civil Rights Movement Ends

Longreads Pick

Zengerle explores the plight of black politicians in the South, and how a Republican majority is undoing their progress.

Published: Aug 19, 2014
Length: 30 minutes (7,654 words)