(Un)Conventional Wisdom
Authored by Robert David Sullivan, a former editor at CommonWealth, (Un)Conventional Wisdom focuses on American politics, offering observations on current issues and presenting original research. The blog covers politics at all levels, as well as issues that challenge left-and-right stereotypes. (Un)Conventional Wisdom aims to find new ways to spark ongoing conversations about American politics, without being gratuitously provocative or disrespectful toward alternative views.
June 2015
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Jun 26 2015 - 8:13am2 comments
Thanks to the Supreme Court, Republican candidates will be able to continue attacking the Affordable Care Act without having to come up with an alternative. (Or, at least, a plausible alternative.) But a Republican president may find himself in a no-win situation.
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Jun 24 2015 - 10:01am22 comments
Why didn’t “Laudato Si” include more good news about the environment? That’s what David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times, wants to know.
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Jun 22 2015 - 11:08am0 comments
For most of its history, Georgia was a gimme for the Democrats in presidential elections, but the population boom of the past half-century has made the GOP supreme.
(Un)Conventional Wisdom is presenting a short history of each state’s role in modern presidential politics. Georgia is the fourth in the series.
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Jun 18 2015 - 11:59am1 comment
The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates provides more essential reading on the Kalief Browder tragedy: “At our implicit behest, a boy was snatched off the streets of New York. His parents were told to pay a certain sum, or he would not be released. When they did not pay, he was beaten and then banished to lonely cell. Browder’s captors then offered him a different way out—pay for your freedom in the political...
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Jun 17 2015 - 10:12am0 comments
New Jersey has long been one of our most affluent states. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that it’s been relatively comfortable with whichever political party is in occupancy at the White House, often lagging behind the rest of the country in lashing out against incumbents.
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Jun 16 2015 - 8:41am0 comments
Typical of presidential campaign announcements, Hillary Clinton’s kick-off speech on Saturday was a call to action that wasn’t as forceful as it first sounded. When running for executive office, you first describe public-policy goals (“Let’s make college affordable and available to all”) to make them seem so obvious, so bipartisan and so ecumenical, that they can be achieved without nasty political...
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Jun 10 2015 - 10:28am1 comment
Almost every four years Pennsylvania is treated as a swing state, but it has a persistent lean. It has been at least slightly more Democratic than the rest of America for more than 60 years, longer than Massachusetts or Minnesota or any other state. Since 1952, whenever the Democrats have lost Pennsylvania, they’ve lost the country by at least seven points.
(Un)Conventional Wisdom is presenting a history of each state’s role in modern presidential politics. ...
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Jun 9 2015 - 10:34am4 comments
Hillary Clinton’s speech on voting rights is keeping alive the argument over whether it’s a good thing to encourage more people to cast ballots.
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Jun 8 2015 - 12:29pm0 comments
The First State was the best place to find out where the country was going in the last half of the 20th century. Delaware voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1952 through 1996, the only state to do so. Since then, it’s been absorbed by the Democratic Party’s strongest region, the Northeast Corridor.
(Un)Conventional Wisdom is presenting a short history of each state’s role in modern presidential politics. Delaware is the first in the series....
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Jun 5 2015 - 8:33am2 comments
This summer (Un)Conventional Wisdom will be publishing profiles for each of the 50 states, giving shorthand histories of their roles in modern presidential politics. Today we’ll take a bird’s-eye view of the entire American electorate over the past century or so.
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Jun 4 2015 - 10:45am0 comments
St. Louis may be the latest city to adopt its own minimum-wage increase, with Mayor Francis Slay expected to propose a rate of $15 per hour. But the City Council must act quickly to beat a new state law prohibiting cities from setting their rates higher than Missouri’s (which is now at $7.65 per hour, or 40 cents above the federal minimum wage).
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Jun 3 2015 - 9:12am0 comments
Last week the Supreme Court announced it would consider the argument that states shouldn’t count people who are not eligible to vote when they draw legislative districts.
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