Is it just me, or has The New Republic gotten buff alongside Sixpack-in-Chief Barack Obama?

The eight-year reign of Bush the Younger was advertising Viagra for liberal opinion journals. The Nation, for one, turned into the lefty-magazine Sidney Greenstreet. But the ad boom seemed to end-run The New Republic.

Until TNR took the radical step of going biweekly. Lately, anyway, it seems to have paid off.

TNR’s October 21, 2009 edition features 56 pages that are thick with full-page ads from: the Cato Institute, PhRMA, Harvard University Press, the National Association of Builders, America’s Natural Gas Alliance, the MIT Press, and energy conglomerate  AREVA.

And there are two other full-page ads that merit attention. They came from:

1) Broadband for America, a coalition “dedicated to promoting a practical, comprehensive approach to increasing high-speed Internet access and adoption in our country.”

The coalition includes a Star-Wars-bar-scene cast of 102 businesses, organizations, and associations that range from Verizon and Cisco to the Jewish Energy Project and the Dominican American National Roundtable.

Who knew?

2) International Securities Exchange, which “operates the world’s largest equity options exchange and offers options trading on over 2,000 underlying equity, ETF, index, and FX products.”

Whatever that means.

Anyway, last month ISE sponsored (and TNR hosted) “Inflection Point,” a $250-per-ticket event that brought together “influential leaders from Washington and Wall Street for an honest examination of our financial system and its future.”

In other words, the usual suspects dishing out the usual eyewash.

They included:

Bill Ackman, CEO, Pershing Square Capital Management
David Faber, CNBC
Niall Ferguson, Author and Professor at Harvard University
U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D-MA)
Gary Gensler, Chairman, U.S. CFTC
Glenn Hutchins, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive, Silver Lake
Christopher Lawrence, Co-Head of Investment Banking, Rothschild
Christina Romer, Chairwoman, Council of Economic Advisers
Eliot Spitzer, Former Governor of New York
James Stewart, Author, Den of Thieves
David Wessel, Washington Deputy Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal, and Author, In Fed We Trust

Eliot Spitzer? Not to mention New Republic editor Franklin Foer and senior editor Noam Scheiber, who also participated in the Beltway-industrial hoedown.

Moral of the story:

If getting fat means that The New Republic needs to jump into bed with the people it’s supposed to be covering, maybe TNR should rethink its business plan.