This issue: December 10, 2012 (Vol. 18, No. 13)

The GOP’s Payroll Tax Opportunity

BY JAMES C. CAPRETTA AND YUVAL LEVIN

Despite the outcome, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney did many things right during the course of this year’s campaign. Perhaps most notably, polls suggest that he was able to convince a plurality of Americans that the GOP’s plan for smaller government was better for promoting long-term economic growth than the president’s statist approach. But there was one line of attack Romney was never able to overcome, and which may well have cost him the working-class voters he needed to win: The Obama campaign effectively drove home the notion that Romney, and Republicans more generally, care more about the rich than the middle class.

There can be no doubt that answering that charge, by proving it wrong, ...

The Sebelius Coverup

Obamacare’s insurance exchanges need scrutiny.

BY JEFFREY H. ANDERSON

Many states are wisely signaling that they aren’t interested in doing the Obama administration’s bidding on Obamacare. As a result, many if not most of Obamacare’s insurance exchanges — the heart of the beast — will have to be set up and run by the Obama administration at the federal level.

States are not required to set up Obamacare exchanges, but it seems to have surprised observers that many are choosing not to. Politico reports that, with only 17 states so far having said they will set up the exchanges, the “Department of Health and Human Services’s role in bringing the law to life is going to be a lot bigger than originally thought.” More than a third of ...

A Nation of Singles

The most politically potent demographic trend is not the one everyone talked about after the election

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

For a brief moment last month​—​roughly a 72-hour span beginning at 11:00 p.m. on November 6 and concluding late in the evening of November 9​—​everyone in America was interested in demographics. That’s because, in addition to rewarding the just, punishing the wicked, and certifying that America was (for the moment) not racist, President Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney pointed to two ineluctable demographic truths. The first was expected: that the growth of the Hispanic-American cohort is irresistible and will radically transform our country’s ethnic future. The second caught people by surprise: that the proportion of unmarried Americans was suddenly at an all-time high.

Whose Kind of Town?

Understanding the Second City.

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

Twenty years ago an editor for the Chicago Sun-Times told Neil Steinberg—at the time a young reporter for the paper—that he might someday become the next Sydney J. Harris, and Steinberg, for reasons unclear, did not punch him in the kneecaps. Harris was dead by then, but from the 1950s to the 1980s he had tortured Sun-Times readers with a column composed of nothing but aphorisms, sententious squibs, little dollops of uplift that were so banal or dubious they perversely compelled a reader’s attention.

 “The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress,” Harris would write, letting the sentence hang there all alone in a sea of newsprint until an asterisk pulled a reader’s eye, kicking and screaming, down to the next one: “The time to ...

The Day the Twinkie Died

BY MATT LABASH

Just as everyone remembers where they were when JFK was shot (I was in Heaven with Jesus and Buddy Holly, still unborn), it will similarly be impossible to shake the memory of where you were on the day that Hostess died. I was in my car, listening to public radio. The news of 18,500 people losing their jobs, not to mention the demise of an American institution—one that predates FM radio, the ballpoint pen, radial tires, and rock ’n’ roll—came almost irreverently. Torn between disrespectful Twinkie jokes and food-scold haughtiness, the faux-nostalgic announcers were unable to invoke crushing grief, the only kind called for on this tragic day. The kind they’d feel if, say, This American Life went on hiatus, or the Hipster Snack Emporium stopped selling wasabi peas.

Cliff Diving