“I am not terribly interested in what people who are not voters in the city of New York have to say,” Anthony Weiner declared yesterday evening, in response to a reporter’s question about rumored opposition to his continuing mayoral campaign by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Speaking at an impromptu press conference following a mayoral candidates’ forum in the Bronx, Weiner also declared that he would not entertain further discussion of his sex scandals: “I spoke at great length about this . . . I gave an 8,500-word story in the New York Times magazine, I think I’ve pretty much said what I had to say about that.”

John Fund exposed the notable moments from Hillary Clinton’s life that will be left out of NBC’s upcoming miniseries about her life — such as Travelgate, her cattle-futures controversy​, and Whitewater — which begins after the Lewinsky scandal. Read more on his take in his piece, “Get Ready for the All-Hail-Hillary Movies.”

Yesterday, CNN announced it was joining the parade of film projects on Hillary Clinton in the run-up to her likely campaign for president in 2016. It will produce a feature-length documentary, directed by liberal filmmaker Charles Ferguson, for release in theaters and then later show it on the network. 

It joins two other projects on Hillary that have been announced recently: a theatrical film called Rodham about Hillary’s days as a young lawyer on the Nixon House impeachment committee and a four-hour mini-series on Hillary starring Diane Lane that will appear on NBC. Politico reported that the sudden pile-on to produce Hillary projects even prompted a source close to Clinton to accuse CNN of focusing on Hillary to simply turn a fast buck. “I don’t know if I’m appalled or impressed,” the source told Politico. “Either way, they have some explaining to do on how they’re going to manage the conflict between news standards and the profit imperative. I’m not sure they know.”

Many people aren’t sure if the makers of the Hillary projects know the many minefields they will have to cross. 

What caught my eye when NBC announced its mini-series last Saturday was that it would only be covering Hillary’s life from the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998 onwards. So Lane, who is eye-stoppingly beautiful at 48 years old, will only be portraying Hillary from the age of 50 to her current age of 66 and later. It didn’t make any sense till I realized that airbrushing the first half-century of the former First Lady’s life away meant the pro-Hillary filmmakers wouldn’t have to deal with the messy collection of scandals she was involved in during her husband’s first term, from Whitewater to Travelgate to FBI Filegate to controversies over what a federal judge called a “cover-up” of her health-care task force’s records.

Bob Greenblatt, the head of NBC Entertainment, is promising his mini-series will be “even-handed” in covering Hillary, telling reporters: “I don’t think she will endorse it.” 

But he certainly doesn’t want to talk more about how he will ensure that. He didn’t respond to my request for an interview, just as he declined to talk with me back in 2003 when he was director of entertainment at Showtime, the pay cable network. 

Back then, the controversy I wanted to talk with him about was his decision to have Showtime air The Reagans, a TV movie on Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s life originally bought by CBS. The New York Times obtained a copy of the script and pointed out several scenes the Times called “historically questionable.” Ronald Reagan was depicted more or less acknowledging he was an informer for the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era. Another showed Nancy Reagan begging her husband to help AIDS patients only to be told, “They that live in sin shall die in sin.” Lou Cannon, Reagan’s most prolific biographer and no right-winger, scoffed at the film saying the blacklisting charge was “really wrong” and that “Reagan was not intolerant.” 

The backlash prompted Barbra Streisand — whose husband, James Brolin, played Reagan in the film — to claim the ensuing controversy had been whipped up by the Drudge Report and Republicans who couldn’t stomach the exposure of “the more unpleasant truths about his character and presidency.”  

But CBS couldn’t defend the film against charges it was pure, nasty fiction. CBS president Les Moonves maintained the rough cut he saw wasn’t the version the network had promised viewers. “We thought it had a very specific point of view that we thought was contrary to what we planned to air.” He told Daily Variety that his decision not to use it “was a moral decision, not an economic or a political one.” He dumped the film in the lap of CBS-owned Showtime, where Greenblatt agreed to air it.

Greenblatt held firm against requests he edit the “historically questionable” parts of the film, whose plot line can be summarized as “President Fuddy Duddy Dominated by Mommie Dearest.” His one concession was to take out the mean-spirited AIDS line attributed to Reagan. “That is the one political give that we agreed to,” Greenblatt told the Boston Globe. He also arranged for a panel discussion to follow the film that featured both Lou Cannon and AIDS activist Hilary Rosen.

The Reagans garnered mediocre ratings, failing to break the top 40 cable shows the week it aired. But at least at 180 minutes it covered all of Reagan’s life from young actor to his dotage. At the same 180 minutes, NBC’s mini-series on Hillary will cover just 15 years of her tumultuous life.

I have no doubt that NBC’s Hillary epic will do far better than The Reagans. Let’s just hope that Greenblatt sticks to his commitment that the film will be “even-handed.” The last time he green-lighted a film on a controversial political subject he fell well short of that mark. 

Senator Rand Paul took some shots at New Jersey governor Chris Christie over foreign policy and civil liberties tonight, continuing the feud between the two prospective 2016 presidential candidates.

Paul went after Christie for recently arguing that the senator should try to explain his non-interventionist foreign policy to the families of 9/11 victims, saying ”it’s really, I think, kind of sad and cheap that he would use the cloak of 9/11 victims and say, ’Oh, I’m the only one who cares about these victims.’ Hogwash!”

“If he cared about protecting this country,” Paul argued on Hannity, “maybe he wouldn’t be in this ‘Gimme gimme gimme, gimme all the money you have in Washington, or don’t have,’ and he’d be a little more fiscally responsive [sic] and know that the way we defend our country, the way we have enough money for national defense, is by being frugal and not by saying ‘Gimme gimme gimme’ all the time.” (Paul also recently described Christie and others’ attitude toward federal storm aid after Hurricane Sandy as “gimme gimme gimme.”)

The Kentucky senator further argued that Christie and his allies “do an injustice to our soldiers” by being “flippant about privacy, flippant about the Fourth Amendment, and flippant about the Bill of Rights.”

In remarks last Thursday, Christie characterized “this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines” as “a very dangerous thought,” and said of Paul and other libertarian critics of U.S. counterterrorism policy, “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, ’cause that’s a much tougher conversation to have.”

The second season of HBO’s The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s latest show, debuted two weeks ago (the third episode aired last night), and the show’s new intro, depicting scenes of a cable-news operation and New York, has an issue of NR on a desk next to a copy of the Times – before the former has a copy of the Washington Post slapped on top of it. You can decide how much deeper meaning there might be:

The show depicts a jaded Republican news host (Jeff Daniels) who’s decided his network has to “really do the news,” which apparently means offering it with heaps of smug liberal bias. The creator’s writing is strong, if not as strong as usual, but the show is so sodden with Sorkin’s liberal fantasies the first season was (almost) impossible to watch; the second season has been more of the same. At times, Sorkin’s message is so overwrought that’s it’s amusing: In the first episode of this season, there’s a scene where a producer from the self-consciously liberal news network is kept off the Romney campaign bus and told he can drive his car to the next event — a khaki-and-blazer-clad Romney volunteer sneers, “You’d better get some gas. What’s Obama got it up to now, $4.50 a gallon?” Now that’s putting the true mendacity of conservatism on display.

And it looks like the featured issue, which presumably they grabbed when filming the intro at some point last year, is the April 22, 2013 edition, which featured a picture of the Canadian tar sands on the cover for Charlie Cooke’s story on their development (“Wonderland”). But I’m open to other theories.

Alexis Tsipras, the Chavez-in-waiting who heads up Greece’s far left Syriza coalition. Syriza, the main opposition group in the country, is currently running either first or second in the polls, its popularity helped by its, uh, robust attitude to Germany.

Der Spiegel:

After being asked this weekend about previous anti-German comments, Greek leftist opposition leader Alexis Tsipras cut short an interview with one of the country’s top newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Within minutes, he threw out the reporter for allegedly unethical reporting, a charge the paper denies. It was all over after the fifth question. Alexis Tsipras, the head of the leftist Greek alliance Syriza, broke off an interview with Germany’s conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) after seven minutes and 50 seconds.

The journalist, Michael Martens, had asked the opposition leader what he meant when he said in June 2012 that the ruling parties, New Democracy and PASOK, “had denigrated the Greek flag and handed it to Angela Merkel.”

Tsipras took offense at the question. He said he had “never” made that statement. The German newspaper, however, says there is evidence that he did. It referred to video footage shot by Greek television of a Syriza rally on June 14, 2012, in Athens, as well as a Syriza press release.

In past editorials, the conservative FAZ has criticized Tsipras and called for continuing austerity in Greece, even arguing in a May 2012 editorial that a Greek exit could have a “disciplining effect on other countries.”

Syriza’s party newspaper Avgi, in turn, has published cartoons showing Merkel taking orders from Adolf Hitler. It also recently described Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble as a “Gauleiter,” the term for a regional Nazi party leader. Such Nazi references in the Greek press and at anti-austerity rallies where Merkel has been portrayed in Nazi uniform have angered Germans.

The euro  – bringing Europe together!

This story speaks for itself:

Nearly 1.2 million mortgage modifications have been completed since the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was first launched four years ago. Yet more than 306,000 borrowers have re-defaulted on their loans and more than 88,000 are at risk of following suit, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) found in its quarterly report to Congress.

In addition, the watchdog found that the longer a homeowner stays in the HAMP modification program, the more likely they are to default. Those who have been in the program since 2009, are re-defaulting at a rate of 46%, the inspector general found.

HAMP, which was launched by the Treasury Department at the height of the foreclosure crisis, aimed to help as many as 4 million borrowers avoid foreclosure by making their payments more affordable through reduced interest rates, extended loan terms or, in some cases, reduced mortgage principals.

Not only has the program fallen far short of that goal but with each year of the program, a growing number of homeowners have re-defaulted, the inspector general found.

What’s the cost to taxpayers so far?

As of April 30, taxpayers have lost some $815 million on the permanent mortgage modifications that have re-defaulted, the inspector general reported. As part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Treasury allocated $19.1 billion to the HAMP program. So far, it has spent $4.4 billion, the inspector general said.

However, instead of an end for the program that has seen roughly a quarter of its beneficiaries re-default on their loans at huge taxpayer expense, this part of TARP will be extended for another two years, until the end of 2015. The whole WaPo piece is here, and here is the report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP).

On Fox News Monday evening, Charles Krauthammer stated that he finds it “astonishing” that President Obama is giving speeches in which “he deplores the state of the economy . . . as if he has been a bystander” during the downward spiral.

The president’s latest round of speeches sound “like he has been out of the country for five years,” Krauthammer remarked, even though the policies his administration have put into place have resulted in ”the worst recovery since World War II . . . and [are] at the root of all the problems he is talking about.”

“It is magical,” Krauthammer concluded, that this is Obama’s economy, and “he’s pretending he’s just stumbled upon it” while proposing the exact same strategy he proposed in his first term.

Charlie, the distinctly right-of-center Spectator has weighed in on Cameron’s latest big government grab.  The whole editorial is well worth reading, but I’d highlight this extract:

The peril facing Britain is that the media is evolving, and the protections which have ensured a free press for 300 years is not evolving with it. Before entering politics, the Prime Minister worked for Carlton Communications as its PR chief, becoming a master of the murky terrain between media and government. Having failed to regulate the newspapers, he is now trying his  luck with internet companies. But government cannot be trusted with the internet any more than it can be trusted to license the press, as the leaked letter shows. Internet search engines, just like the newspapers, should not dance to a tune called by politicians. They ought to be regarded as part of the free press and kept far apart from government — not for their own benefit, but for the protection of the public.

The problem of internet pornography – both legal and illegal – is worldwide. Yet Britain is the only country in the free world where the government is using pornography as an excuse to give itself power over internet search engines. Cameron’s threat to Google – that it must do what he wants with search engine terms or face legislation – sets a dangerous precedent. After pornography, then what? National security? It is nonsense to claim that free press protection should not cover search engines. They have supplanted newspapers as they way in which most people go to find out information. The Chinese government is fully aware of the power of search engines, which is why ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ does not return any results.

The newspapers may not rush to defend Google, seeing as its search engine now provides for free the news that people used to pay for. It is odd to think that Google needs defending at all: if information is power, then Google is one of the most powerful organisations in the world. That is deeply disconcerting. But the idea of an alliance between Google and government – whether informal, or enforced by statute – is more disconcerting still.

Last week, I complained about the anti-porn legislation that British prime minister David Cameron has proposed for Britain. I asked this question:

Why is sexual obscenity the only area that presents a sufficient threat to British virtue to justify action? Once this opt-in list is extant, what will prevent the government from adding other indecent terms to it? Why would it elect to put a firewall around pornography? Why not include also any of the viewpoints whose expression the British have made illegal and whose advocates the British ban from their country?

Funnily enough, per the Huffington Post:

The United Kingdom’s new internet filters promise to block much more than just pornography, according to a report by the digital advocacy organization Open Rights Group.

Last week, Prime Minister David Cameron announced online porn would soon become automatically blocked in order to “protect children and their innocence.” The filters will be implemented by the UK’s major internet service providers, which encompass 95% of British web users.

Based on conversations with several ISPs, Open Rights Group says the new “parental controls” will reach far beyond pornography. By default, the controls will block access to “violent material,” “extremist and terrorist related content,” “anorexia and eating disorder websites,” and “suicide related websites.”

In addition, the new settings will censor websites that mention alcohol or smoking. The filter will even block “web forums” and “esoteric material,” though Open Rights Group does not specify what these categories would include.

The rest here.

Former New York governor and current candidate for New York City comptroller Eliot Spitzer said that fellow scandal-tarred Democrat Anthony Weiner isn’t getting his vote for mayor.

When pressed by Chris Matthews as to whom he would vote for in the upcoming Democratic mayoral primary, Spitzer — who was forced to resign as governor in 2008 after he admitted to patronizing prostitutes — declined to name a specific candidate. Matthews then asked, “You’re not going to vote for Anthony Weiner, can you just say that right now? You don’t think he should be mayor of New York.” Spitzer answered, “Fair point. That is correct.”

Kentucky investment manager Matt Bevin has long been Republican — and frustrated that the party isn’t conservative enough. Bevin, a father of nine (including four adopted children from Ethiopia), is a long-time Republican rebel: He voted for the conservative party candidate, not George W. Bush, in 2004 presidential election.

And Rand Paul style, he’s also sure to shake up foreign policy if elected, telling National Review, ““For some people in our party, there’s not a war they don’t love.” But while many are portraying this as a Tea Party vs. establishment race, Bevin is rejecting that depiction, saying, ““I’ve never been a member of a tea party.”

He’s up against the formidable Mitch McConnell machine, and it will be challenging for him to win. But if Bevin does, look for him to be a conservative stalwart in the Senate. Read my full profile of him here. 

A robbery in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in northwest Washington seems to have been motivated by the acquittal of George Zimmerman, according to D.C. police.

The Washington Post reports that the man was approached and attacked from behind by three black men who yelled, “This is for Trayvon Martin!” Two of the men threw the man to the ground and kicked him, before the three muggers made off with the victim’s iPhone and wallet.

The victim suffered only minor injuries and he declined medical attention.

According to a D.C. Police spokesman, the incident is being investigated as a robbery and a hate crime. 

In the aftermath of the coup d’état in Egypt, a consensus has emerged, to cite an anonymous Obama administration official, that “trying to break the neck of the [Muslim] Brotherhood is not going to be good for Egypt or for the region.”  

The thinking behind this view is that (1) it’s better to have Islamists in the political process than violently rebelling and (2) participating in civil society has the potential to tame Islamists, making them see the benefits of democracy and turning them into just another interest group.

May I vociferously disagree?

Yes, we do indeed want to break the brotherhood’s neck because that is good for Egypt, the region, and (not least) ourselves. Both the above assumptions are wrong. (1) Islamists can do more damage within the political process than outside it. To put it graphically, I worry more about a Turkey, with elected Islamists in charge, than Syria, where they are engaged in a civil war to attain power. (2) Islamists have a history of using the political process for their own ends, and not of being tamed by it: See Mohamed Morsi’s year in power for one clear example.

No tolerance for the intolerant. Just as fascists and Communists are not legitimate players in a democracy, neither are Islamists. No matter how smooth-talking, they remain autocrats who disregard the popular will. Better that they be excluded entirely from participatory politics. 

Our labor market is stuck in the mud. The employment ratio — the share of the population that has a job — has remained essentially flat since the depths of the recession, despite a visible reduction in the unemployment rate. One explantion is that people have given up looking for jobs. Many labor economists don’t think the unemployment rate is a very good measure of the health of the labor market because it doesn’t count workers who’ve left the labor force out of discouragement. But another reason is that it doesn’t make a distinction between those working full-time and those who would like to work full-time but can only find part-time work. This under-employment dynamic, which economic literature tells us can have serious long-term effects, is becoming a salient aspect of the labor market: The most recent jobs report found the number of part-time workers increasing in June to a record high of more than 28 million, while the number of full-time workers fell.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. For instance, there is some evidence that Obamacare is leading some employers  to lower the number of hours employees work to avoid having to provide health insurance under the ACA. Case in point: Virginia community colleges. 

For Kevin Pace, the president’s health-care law could have meant better health insurance. Instead, it produced a pay cut.

Like many of his colleagues, the adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College had managed to assemble a hefty course load despite his official status as a part-time employee. But his employer, the state, slashed his hours this spring to avoid a Jan. 1 requirement that all full-time workers for large employers be offered health insurance. The law defines “full time” as 30 hours a week or more. . . .

This month, the Obama administration delayed the employer insurance requirement until January 2015. But Virginia, like some other employers around the country that capped part-timers’ hours in anticipation of the initial deadline, has no plans to abandon its new 29-hour-a-week limit.

The impact on Pace and thousands of other workers in Virginia is an unintended consequence of the health law, which, as the most sweeping new social program in decades, is beginning to reshape aspects of American life. [...]

While a number of private businesses cut worker hours this year because of the health-care law, they have been loath to do it because of fears of public blowback, said Jared Pope, a Texas consultant whose clients include local governments and businesses. Governments have been more open because they must make their decisions publicly, he said.

He estimated that seven of his 62 clients had capped hours and that 18 were considering it. Those that curbed part-time hours are not likely to reverse course, only to have to reinstate the limit next year, he said.

“They kind of somewhat [ticked] people off already,” he said. “They don’t want to undo it and become a good guy now, only to do it all over again to be the bad guy.”

At a Capitol Hill hearing on the employer mandate Tuesday, Jamie T. Richardson, vice president of White Castle System, the Columbus, Ohio-based burger chain, said complying with the 30-hour rule would mean a 35 percent increase in the company’s health-care costs. He said White Castle would probably adopt a policy ensuring that new hires work no more than 25 hours a week if the mandate goes forward as expected in 2015.

Part of the issue for employers lies in the definition of “full time,” which diverges from the industry standard of 40 hours a week. Advocates say the 30-hour bar was supposed to discourage employers from shaving a few minutes off a full-time worker’s hours to skirt the law. But it turns out that “an awful lot of people work less than 40 hours a week,” said Timothy Jost, a health-policy expert and consumer advocate.

The whole thing is here.

Second, my colleague Jason Fichtner sends me this new NBER paper by economists Garthwaite, Gross, and Notowidigdo, which suggests the ACA may cause even larger reductions in labor supply of lower-income Americans. While I am not sure how reliable their data or methodology is, it is interesting and their conclusions don’t seem far-fetched considering what we’ve been observing in the past. Here is the abstract:

We study the effect of public health insurance eligibility on labor supply by exploiting the largest public health insurance disenrollment in the history of the United States. In 2005, approximately 170,000 Tennessee residents abruptly lost public health insurance coverage. Using both across- and within-state variation in exposure to the disenrollment, we estimate large increases in labor supply, primarily along the extensive margin. The increased employment is concentrated among individuals working at least 20 hours per week and receiving private, employer-provided health insurance. We explore the dynamic effects of the disenrollment and find an immediate increase in job search behavior and a steady rise in both employment and health insurance coverage following the disenrollment. Our results suggest a significant degree of “employment lock” – workers employed primarily in order to secure private health insurance coverage. The results also suggest that the Affordable Care Act – which similarly affects adults not traditionally eligible for public health insurance – may cause large reductions in the labor supply of low-income adults.

I am going to file these two pieces under the file ”unintended consequences of Obamacare” — which I’ve also written about here and here. Of course, when I say unintended consequences, I mean that the advocates and designers of the law didn’t expect them. Many people had warned that these specific consequences would come about.

An emotional John McCain took to the Senate floor this afternoon to eulogize retired Air Force Colonel George “Bud” Day, who spent five and a half years as a POW in Vietnam with McCain at the Hoa Lo Prison.

Day had a decorated military career — including a Medal of Honor for escaping his captors after his aircraft was shot down — while serving in World II, Korea, and Vietnam. While a prisoner of war at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” Day was subjected to torture; after being hung by his arms for days at a time, Day’s arms and hands never properly worked again.

After his release, he retired to Florida where he practiced law and became a champion of veterans’ health-care benefits. Day was 88.

The Washington City Paper reports that green paint splatters have been found in one of the lower-level chapels at the National Cathedral and on the statue of scientist Joseph Henry, which stands in front of the Smithsonian Castle.

These latest acts of vandalism have prompted questions about whether these incidents are connected to the green paint found on the Lincoln Memorial last week, though U.S. Park Police have yet to comment on the situation.

A National Cathedral employee stated that the paint was discovered on the organ console in Bethlehem Chapel on Monday afternoon. The vandalized statue of the Smithsonian’s first secretary has green paint marks along the base.

UPDATE: A 58-year-old Asian woman was arrested by D.C. police on Monday evening near the National Cathedral. The Washington Post reports that Jiamei Tian has been charged on at least one count of defacing property. Police Chief Cathy Lanier announced on Tuesday that the various vandalism incidents are believed to be connected.

UPDATE:  The Associated Press reported on Tuesday afternoon that Tian is an illegal Chinese immigrant who entered the U.S. on an expired visa. She faced a D.C. Superior Court judge on Tuesday and is being held without bond for defacing private property. The estimated cost of cleaning and repairing the vandalized area in the National Cathedral alone is $15,000.

I interviewed Thomas Craughwell about his coffee-table view of the election and first days of Pope Francis. Find out what Bruce Springsteen and Buddy Holly have to do with it here. 

And some post-Sunday Mass reaction I gave Breitbart.com is here. 

In a characteristically superb column yesterday, Ross Douthat described our contemporary political situation in terms of the “court party” and “country party” — terms drawn from 17th-and 18th-century British politics that refer to a party that wields power for the benefit of elite players and institutions and an opposition that seeks more dispersed power for the benefit of a larger public. No historical analogy is ever perfectly apt, but this one is powerfully clarifying. 

Particularly as laid out by its foremost intellectual leader, Henry St. John (the Viscount Bolingbroke), the country party’s idea of an organized political opposition as well as its particular policy vision — which combined a commitment to individual liberty and frugal, restrained government with a kind of social traditionalism — were enormously influential in colonial America and have always continued to exert a powerful influence over our politics. It is an influence that we have often, perhaps too loosely, described as populism. 

For much of the past four decades, that kind of substantive populism (as opposed to the far more insidious institutional populism advanced by the early progressives) has tended to be divided into cultural and economic populism, and the two parties have tended to break down along a double axis of populism and elitism: The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans have tended to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursued an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identified with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked “people against the powerful,” but tended to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans have tended to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive while Democrats tended to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

But in more recent years, perhaps especially the last decade, the Democratic party has been moving away from economic populism and becoming truly the party of concentrated elite power. As our elites have grown more socially liberal and our economy has grown more concentrated and consolidated, it has become easier to pursue liberal goals through the system than against it and the Democratic party has become the party of the large, established players — the court party, more or less. 

Much of the policy agenda of the Obama administration has embodied this approach. It has been an agenda of consolidation — protecting larger players from competition in exchange for their willingness to serve as agents of government power and driving crucial sectors of our economy (finance and health insurance above all, but by no means only those) toward greater consolidation. This has been something of a return to the original vision of the American progressives, with its active role for government in choosing economic winners who will best serve the common interest while otherwise restraining chaotic market competition. “In economic warfare,” Herbert Croly wrote in 1909, “the fighting can never be fair for long, and it is the business of the state to see that its own friends are victorious.” Big business and big labor, overseen by big government, would keep things in balance. As big labor gradually fades, the progressive economic vision has come down to big business and the state.