Michael Tomasky

Even by the standards of Democratic presidential nominees, Barack Obama did exceptionally well among black voters, winning 95 percent in 2008 and 93 percent in 2012. The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky thinks that Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s nominated, will come close to those numbers in 2016, partly on her merits and partly because black people understand that today’s Republican party doesn’t…

Never mind the vast right-wing conspiracy, suggests Michael Tomasky in the June 25 New York Review of Books. What Hillary Clinton needs to concern herself with are 1) a possible vast mainstream-media conspiracy and 2) her and her husband’s propensity for shadiness and avarice. In a nearly 3,800-word article that’s ostensibly a review of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash but in classic NYRB fashion…

A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use…

The faltering religious right would be well served to borrow a strategy from gay activists, but it almost certainly won’t, contended The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky in a Friday column. In Tomasky’s telling, the gay-rights movement in the 1980s alienated many because it could be self-righteous to the point of belligerence, but eventually “the leaders of the movement saw that it was more…

Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast is prone to wild overstatement. For example, after the last elections, he counseled the Democrats to just avoid the Southern states after Sen. Mary Landrieu lost. It was "just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment....Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off.” That same wild overstatement came in this new Daily…

Lefty pundit Michael Tomasky is no populist, at least when it comes to the Republican party. He gives props to GOP politicians like Marco Rubio who have “serious and unorthodox ideas,” but expects that Rubio, et al will soft-pedal said ideas during the presidential primaries since “you can’t be a smart candidate in a party that wants to be stupid.” In a Wednesday column, Tomasky asserted that “…

Michael Tomasky opines that the Republican candidates are “hostil[e] to actual ideas that might stand a chance of addressing the country’s actual problems,” and that even if one of them were “Lincoln and TR and Reagan all rolled into one, with a little bit of Thatcher on the side…it wouldn’t matter. He wouldn’t be able to demonstrate the breadth of his vision, because that isn’t what the GOP base…

Michael Tomasky is not content to argue, in the wake of Mary Landrieu's defeat, that Democrats should write off the South as politically unfriendly territory.  In his Daily Beast item of today, Tomasky goes to great lengths to trash the region in the ugliest of terms. "Reactionary, prejudice-infested, fetid, reject[ing] nearly everything that’s good about this country, just one big nuclear waste…

Last week, Wendy Davis, the Democratic Party candidate for governor of Texas, aired a controversial ad attacking her opponent, Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, depicting him as an empty wheelchair who had turned his back on disabled people in Texas. Despite MSNBC doing everything it could to promote Ms. Davis, her latest attack ad appeared indefensible for the “Lean Forward” network. On…

Insisting that "crush[ing]" or destroying ISIS is simply impossible to achieve, liberal Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky devoted an 11-paragraph piece entitled "Please—Let's Not Destroy ISIS" to explaining why he "wish[es] Obama had the conviction to stand up and say" that "contain[ing] [ISIS] is what we should do."

The establishment press is working mightily to shield President Barack Obama from blame for, or even association with, decisions he has made and actions he has taken — unilaterally and with dubious constitutional authority in many instances. One particularly egregious example is Libya. When Obama decided on his own to engage in "kinetic miliitary action" to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the…

Although more subdued compared to his June 18 anti-Dick Cheney diatribe, MSNBC's Chris Matthews returned on his Monday, July 14 program once again to his unhealthy, creepy obsession with the former vice president. The relevant news hook was what Matthews derided as a "Cheney family offensive," referring to a Politico Playbook lunch event held earlier in the day in Washington, D.C., featuring…

Addressing the critics of the Obama administration’s prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky posited that this controversy represents the Right’s new Benghazi, by which he means a new scandal obsession which will prove fruitless. The absurdity in the piece is unrelenting; Tomasky claims that “Bergdahl may well end up being the flimsy excuse for the impeachment…

Republicans want America's kids to be fat so they’ll grow up to be Republican voters! At least that's the fatuous argument from the Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky in a May 28 column, "Republicans for More Fat Kids." Tomasky went on a blistering rant blasting an amendment offered by congressional Republicans which would simply delay the requirements for Michelle Obama’s school lunch program…