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Good genes run in the family! Senator Scott Brown’s daughter Arianna is spending her summer modeling with Maggie Inc. in Boston, Politico reports. Director Robert Casey said Arianna is “what the business calls ‘aspirational.’ She’s a better, more perfect version of the girl next door.” We can’t wait to see her work, but in the meantime, there’s always this bikini photo.
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Arianna appeared as a guest on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday, along with Eliot Spitzer, Ross Douthat And Katrina Vanden Heuval. In the second part of the roundtable, the group discussed Sarah Palin and what the Tea Party movement represents.
“Is the right’s answer to Obama going to be, you know, what traditionally happens with parties in opposition — they go to their base, and they find somebody who’s true to the base, but probably can’t win the general election?” Zakaria asked.
“Well, Sarah Palin is responding to something beyond the base,” Arianna responded. “She is responding to the anger at the bailout. And she’s responding to a sense of unfairness among the American people which goes to independents and which goes to a lot of middle class Americans who are feeling that the game is rigged, that the fix is in, and that therefore, they’re in real trouble. And she’s appealing to that.
“If you really interview a lot of the people in the Tea Party movement, no matter what their first explanation is, their second explanation for their anger is the bailout. And I think Republicans and Democrats have to come to terms with that. Especially now that we’re seeing this anemic Wall Street reform going through, which we all know is not going to prevent the next meltdown.”
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It’s a very right-wing kind of anger, Vanden Heuval countered. “I mean, I think both Arianna and Eliot are right that the president should have put demands on Wall Street, talk about personal responsibility. And in defaulting there, he has left a vacuum open for the right to seize this ‘I’m on your side,’ mantel. I think what he did with B.P. — there were two Obamas there. The speech wasn’t very strong. But the next day standing tough on the side of people against BP was strong.
“But I do think the core question of our time in my view — people may disagree — is the role of government. Really. And I think that debate is happening proxy-wise with that deficit-versus-investment debate right now. And unless we win that, we are going to see long-term unemployment in this country — joblessness, that I think will scar this country even worse than the Great Depression.”
“Ross, do you, when you look at Sarah Palin, the Tea Party — does this just seem to you generic populism. Or is there a shift to the right?” Zakaria asked.
“There’s absolutely a shift to the right,” Douthat respnded. “You can see it in basically every opinion poll you look at. And you can tell it’s real, because it isn’t just on issues related to taxes and spending that are in the news — if you look, people have actually shifted to the right on gun control for instance, since the last election, on abortion since the last election. So it’s real.”
“I think what you see with the Tea Party is sort of there’s an inner core, and then an outer group of sympathizers. And the inner core is as you say, pretty right wing, pretty partisan, pretty sort of doctrinaire Republicans, I would say. And in some cases they aren’t people who are involved in politics before. But they are people who would have always voted Republican.”
“But then you have a second ring of people who tend to sympathize with the Tea Party movement. And you see this in opinion polls. People who say, ‘I’m not a Tea Partier, but I like what they’re up to.’ … I don’t think it’s just the financial bailout in Wall Street and so on. I think it’s everything from the G.M. bailout, and the Cash for Clunkers, to sort of the spending on, you know, people who may have lost homes. … It’s a sense of rewarding people — using public funds to reward people who made bad bets.”
“This goes to what Arianna was saying, the sense of unfairness,” Spitzer concluded. “There is no accountability in the asymmetry as we all have said over and over. We — we socialize risk — privatize pay. But I think Katrina put her finger on it. The real debate under this is what is government all about? What should it be doing? And we give all this money to Wall Street, but then ask nothing back. And we’re not investing adequately in school, in high speed rails, in R&D, in the sorts of things that will permit us to compete either with China, or Vietnam, or Brazil. And I think that sense of underinvestment, however you do it — through a government program or the private sector, is what is gnawing at people.”
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Arianna appeared as a guest on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday, along with Eliot Spitzer, Ross Douthat And Katrina Vanden Heuval. The roundtable discussed the growing frustration with Obama over his handling of the economy and the Gulf oil spill.
“President Obama is front and center in the news again this week,” Zakaria began. “This time it’s for the firing of Stanley McChrystal. Before that he was being criticized for his handling of the oil spill. His approval levels are down, and the nattering nabobs of negativism have been hammering him around the clock. Even some of the most left leaning of the commentary have turned on Barack Obama. So what does all this mean?”
Spitzer said that Obama needs to do more to take charge of the oil spill response. “He trusts people too much,” Spitzer said. “He trusted Wall Street. He trusted the Republicans to engage in a meaningful way. He trusted BP. He’s 0 for three.”
“What Eliot said is absolutely critical,” Arianna continued. “It’s not just trust. I think there is almost like a reverence that the president has for authority. You know, a reverence for establishments. You know, the Wall Street establishment. The military establishment. The BP establishment, you know? Even his own admiral in charge of the BP oil spill a few weeks ago said that ‘I trust that what Tony Hayward is telling me.’ He actually used those words. So that is really very fundamental problem that is affecting his whole presidency.”
“Liberals are dismayed. They’re angry. They’re abandoning him,” Zakaria said.
Arianna replied that “This whole framing as a right versus left debate — a liberal verse conservative debate is completely flawed. It’s obsolete. It’s making it much harder for us to solve our problems as a country.”
“Wall Street reform is a classic example,” she continued, “where some of the best conservative minds, and some of the best liberal minds agree that if you don’t have the end of too big to fail, if you don’t have fundamental derivatives reform, everything else is ultimately cosmetic.”
“But the two parties are now ideologically polarized,” Zakaria argued.
“You know what? I think Arianna is right,” Vanden Heuval responded. “Because the left-right construct is artificial. And I think too much of it is the establishment media.”
“The point here is that there is something really important about this left and right obsession that the media has,” Arianna continued. “I mean, at the Huffington Post we have a tag line called, ‘Beyond Left and Right.’ And we use it a lot. … When you have Mayor Bloomberg coming together with Fox News to push for real immigration reform. On drug reform. There is a huge left-right coalition on Afghanistan, and Wall Street reform. This is not really the easy division that the media likes to present.”
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Arianna appeared as a guest on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday, along with Eliot Spitzer, Ross Douthat And Katrina Vanden Heuval. The roundtable discussed the growing frustration with Obama over his handling of the economy and the Gulf oil spill.
“President Obama is front and center in the news again this week,” Zakaria began. “This time it’s for the firing of Stanley McChrystal. Before that he was being criticized for his handling of the oil spill. His approval levels are down, and the nattering nabobs of negativism have been hammering him around the clock. Even some of the most left leaning of the commentary have turned on Barack Obama. So what does all this mean?”
Spitzer said that Obama needs to do more to take charge of the oil spill response. “He trusts people too much,” Spitzer said. “He trusted Wall Street. He trusted the Republicans to engage in a meaningful way. He trusted BP. He’s 0 for three.”
“What Eliot said is absolutely critical,” Arianna continued. “It’s not just trust. I think there is almost like a reverence that the president has for authority. You know, a reverence for establishments. You know, the Wall Street establishment. The military establishment. The BP establishment, you know? Even his own admiral in charge of the BP oil spill a few weeks ago said that ‘I trust that what Tony Hayward is telling me.’ He actually used those words. So that is really very fundamental problem that is affecting his whole presidency.”
“Liberals are dismayed. They’re angry. They’re abandoning him,” Zakaria said.
Arianna replied that “This whole framing as a right versus left debate — a liberal verse conservative debate is completely flawed. It’s obsolete. It’s making it much harder for us to solve our problems as a country.”
“Wall Street reform is a classic example,” she continued, “where some of the best conservative minds, and some of the best liberal minds agree that if you don’t have the end of too big to fail, if you don’t have fundamental derivatives reform, everything else is ultimately cosmetic.”
“But the two parties are now ideologically polarized,” Zakaria argued.
“You know what? I think Arianna is right,” Vanden Heuval responded. “Because the left-right construct is artificial. And I think too much of it is the establishment media.”
“The point here is that there is something really important about this left and right obsession that the media has,” Arianna continued. “I mean, at the Huffington Post we have a tag line called, ‘Beyond Left and Right.’ And we use it a lot. … When you have Mayor Bloomberg coming together with Fox News to push for real immigration reform. On drug reform. There is a huge left-right coalition on Afghanistan, and Wall Street reform. This is not really the easy division that the media likes to present.”
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Arianna appeared on “Morning Joe” Monday to weigh in on the White House’s response to the BP oil spill.
She explained that frustration extends beyond the political left and right, and pointed to the administration’s lack of urgency in reforming the Minerals Management Service, the corrupt regulatory agency that oversees the oil industry. Arianna also took issue with the White House’s willingness to accept BP’s estimations on the size of its spill.
“As recently as ten days ago, we had Admiral Thad Allen saying that he trusts Tony Hayward,” Arianna said. “How can they still trust after everything [BP] said, which is completely untrustworthy?”
Arianna argued that going forward, President Obama should use the BP oil spill to engage critics of federal government about government’s proper role in tragedies like the oil spill.
“The key here is, can he use this as a teachable moment about the role of government? Because you have Republican governors who have made a career out of attacking the government, saying the government is not doing enough to solve that problem. So could we have a debate here about the proper role of government?”
She went on to stress that assertions by the Chamber of Commerce that American taxpayers should help to shoulder the cost of the spill are flat out wrong.
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