SmartRemarks

As of this week, I can happily announce that I’ve accepted an offer from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) to pursue a Ph.D in Public Policy, complete with four years of guaranteed funding and a research assistantship. SPEA is the #3 public policy school in the nation according to the U.S. News rankings (right behind Syracuse’s Maxwell School, and tied with Harvard’s Kennedy School).

A doctorate is something I’d considered for many years, but I’d hesitated to take the plunge. But the job market had been showing me no love, and last year I decided to get serious about the idea and apply to some graduate programs. I kept this close the vest until now, being unsure how it would turn out. But now it’s real, and I’m doing it, and hoping this will let me shape the kind of personally fulfilling, intellectually stimulating career I’ve always wanted. In August I’ll be relocating to Bloomington, Indiana. With any luck, in five years I’ll have more letters after my name and a junior faculty position somewhere.

But man, let me tell you, getting even this far was not easy, and it came surprisingly close to not happening at all…

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Tags: education, grad school, Indiana, Indiana University, Ph.D, SPEA, University of Chicago

Just going from the press coverage, of course. I haven’t read the actual FY 2010 federal budget the administration presented to Congress. (Have you ever tried to read a federal budget? Even in outline form, they’re large. And arcane. The legislators themselves don’t usually bother. They have staff lobbyists for that sort of thing…)

Anyway, I’m going to tackle this one in bullet-point format, starting with the largest category:

Good Things About Obama’s Budget

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Tags: climate, Congress, economy, education, energy, environment, federal budget, health care, Obama, taxes

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Obama’s address tonight may well have been the first presidential speech I’ve ever seen that genuinely lived up to the full meaning of the word “presidential.” The first time in my life we’ve had real, effective leadership in Washington. So this is what it looks and sounds like!

It’s sincerely heartening these days, of course, just to hear a presidential speech delivered in complete, grammatical sentences, shorn of angry fearmongering and brazen paralogia. But Obama had to achieve far more than that. He had a tightrope to walk, having to avoid being too doom-n-gloomy (and thereby get accused of talking down the economy) but also avoid making unrealistically rosy promises (and thereby get accused of empty politicking). The times we are in are indeed, as he phrased it, “difficult and perilous,” yet he had to make clear that they are not insurmountably so.

He pulled it off.

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Tags: Bill Kristol, economy, education, energy, financial crisis, George Lakoff, health care, media, Obama, polling, Rachel Maddow, Republicans, State of the Union