Four new books for the summer ahead — Last summer, I shared four books I was looking forward to reading. Summer is here again and there’s more great reading ahead. If you had to plan a summer party, could you do better than inviting Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mary McLeod Bethune? How about Abraham…

A few words on Thinking Like an Economist — Reading Elizabeth Popp Berman’s new book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy (Princeton University Press) got me thinking about an old interview with Elaine Kamarck. Kamarck was an early leader of the Democratic Leadership Council or DLC, the hub of Clinton-era New Democrats. Thinking like an Economist For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying…press.princeton.edu

Did Bill Clinton’s think tank remake the Democratic Party? — Every DC story — especially the good ones— has a Rashômon-like retelling by everyone in the room. The significance of the Democratic Leadership Council — or DLC — is one of them. Take the party held in Union Station after Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992. The DLC —…

Nearly lost in the archives are the stories of Black History Month — Black Americans helped Jimmy Carter get elected and then they helped him run the country. Ten years before he was to be elected to Congress, John Lewis rallied new voters to support Carter as the head of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project. Once in office, Carter appointed Patricia Roberts Harris…

Cooperation is real, but it’s nothing new for immigrant groups — There’s been a lot of noise about New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait article this week, “Joe Biden’s Big Squeeze.” He muses on the direction of the Democratic Party and various forces shaping the progressive policy agenda. …

Transferring Power Should Not Entail A Military Take Over — When you study something as obscure as the 70-odd days that occur less often than Supreme Court nominations, you get used to being ignored. …

30 years since publication of classic book on interest groups in the US, this is the story of its publication — Thirty years ago, in September of 1991, the University of Michigan Press published Jack L. Walker Jr.’s Mobilizing Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professions, and Social Movements. …