John Atcheson
John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, and he has just completed a book on the 2016 elections titled, WTF, America? How the US Went Off the Rails and How to Get It Back On Track, available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @john_atcheson
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, August 14, 2018 With 3 Months To Go, Pundits and Democrats Still Clueless Democrats will win the House in 3 months , and they have an outside shot at the Senate. But it’s not because they’ve figured out how to win elections, it’s because Republicans have – once again -- handed it to them. That’s the only way Democrats win these days. Obama’s victory was a direct result... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 24, 2018 Why Looking for the “Winning Issue” Is a Losing Proposition There’s been a spate of articles and pronouncements from the usual suspects speculating on what the winning issue might be for Democrats. Pundits and politicians have pitched everything from Trump’s treatment of immigrant children to legal weed, to relief from college debt, to defense of social... Read more |
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Views Saturday, July 21, 2018 The Big Tent Is Really No Tent: Why the Democrats' Old Guard Has to Get Out of the Way Mahatma Ghandi once said, “There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” "The nearly complete defeat of the centrist, corporate Democrats over the last four decades should have made it obvious that the age of the DLC centrists has been coming to an end for some time." The... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, July 04, 2018 Listen Up Voters – If You Want Change, You Can't Keep Voting for the People Resisting Change The evidence that people are fed up with politicians and political parties is overwhelming. For example, the Smith Project found that nearly 80 percent believe that both political parties “…are too beholden to special interests to create any meaningful change.” And a recent poll found that just 35... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, June 27, 2018 Can You Hear Us Now? On Why Documenting the Daily Outrage Is Not Enough Can you hear us now? Ben Jealous and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just showed Democrats how to win. Both backed single-payer health care, a living wage, criminal justice reform, a more humane immigration policy, and both ran grass roots campaigns that didn’t hew to the party machine’s middle-of-the... Read more |
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Views Monday, June 25, 2018 Lessons From the Healthcare Wars: or Why Democrats Will Be Disappointed in 2018 One of the things that came as a complete surprise to the establishment media and the punditocracy was the speed with which the attempt to repeal Obamacare mobilized support for it as well as for a single payer, Medicare for all approach to health care. A recent poll found that a slim majority now... Read more |
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Views Monday, June 18, 2018 We Get It — Trump Is Awful Every morning the news is full of Trump’s latest antics, and the Republican Party’s complete surrender to his insanity, and the liberal and progressive outlets are the worst offenders. They just can’t seem to tell us enough, what an idiot the man is. Here’s the thing. Those of us who know that... Read more |
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Views Saturday, June 16, 2018 If the Economy Is So Good, Why Are People So Unhappy? Trump is collecting credit, while shedding blame Donald Trump—like the narcissistic, compulsive, hyperbolic blowhard he is—keeps bragging about how good “his” economy is. The self-aggrandizing superlatives flow out of Twitter like some rancid national virus. Leaving aside the fact that presidents... Read more |
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Views Monday, June 11, 2018 Republicans Lost Their Way Long Before Trump (But So Did the Democrats) There's been a spate of articles about how Trump has "taken over" the Republican Party. For example, New York Times columnist Charles Blow opened a recent column saying, "In one way, Donald Trump’s presidency has been a raging success: He stole a political party.” And former House Speaker John... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, May 30, 2018 Sides, Balance, and the Death of Truth Something I’m hearing a lot from thoughtful people these days is how we have to learn to communicate with the other side. They bemoan the degree to which the US has sunk into two camps, each entrenched in their own reality and separated by a chasm of ideological intolerance. “It is critical that we... Read more |