About Benj Demott

A week is a long time in politics, as Tip O’Neil once said. Obama’s first responses to Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts had even strong supporters wondering if the President was up to the job. (His vague line about the need for Congress to “coalesce” around the least controversial elements of healthcare reform was reminiscent … Read more

Obama’s remarks at the memorial service for 29 coal minters on April 26 in Beckley, West Virginia. To all the families who loved so deeply the miners we’ve lost; to all who called them friends, worked alongside them in the mines, or knew them as neighbors, in Montcoal and Naoma, or Whitesville, in the Coal … Read more

What do you get when you fall in love? You get a lot of pain and trauma Even with Barack Obama I’ll never fall in love again! What do you get when you vote your heart? You get some heavy bailout spending An economic downturn that’s unending I’ll never fall in love again! Don’t tell … Read more

Amiri Baraka issues a Call to FIRST readers. WHAT IS THE WORK OF THAT PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATRIC COALITION THAT ELECTED OBAMA? That is the central question, the key link in the work of Revolutionaries, Progressives, Marxists today. I proposed this panel to a “Left Forum” revving up. But this is a question that must be debated … Read more

President Obama gave the following sermon at a D.C. Church on January 17th. His Sunday text has historical interest since it hints the President wasn’t ready to hear the hard news from Massachusetts where Scott Brown would win Teddy Kennedy’s old senate seat two days later. But Obama’s speech is worth more than a snarky … Read more

For the generation that came of age intellectually in the 1970s and 80s, Staughton Lynd’s Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968) was one of those tattered Vintage paperback (number V-488 to be precise) you came across browsing in used bookstores. It was like Black Power (or any text by Richard Hofstadter). Something you couldn’t help … Read more

Right after the Massachusetts debacle, Bernard Avishai published a short post on “Who’s to Blame” at his website BERNARD AVISHAI DOT COM. Avishai spoke as someone “marinated” in Massachusetts politics who wondered at Coakely’s grudging (“forced and fake”) nods to Obamacare. He argued: “The real question Democrats have to ask themselves is: how come the … Read more