Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute.

It is far too early to know whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will win the presidential election, but the latest polls must not be giving Obama much comfort. The New York Times/CBS poll, one heavily skewed to give the Democrats a bigger margin (surprise, surprise), shows Mitt Romney with a 3-point lead over the president. It is within the margin of error, but it nevertheless reveals Romney quickly widening what was a large gap in the president’s favor.  Sixty-two percent of the respondents said that the economy and jobs were most important to them in deciding who the candidate of their choice should be. In other words, Romney’s lead is due to the belief of those polled that he would be able to deal with producing jobs and improving the economy better than the president.

For the president’s base, his recent announcement in favor of gay marriage was greeted with an outpouring of gratitude. But when asked by the pollsters whether Obama’s support of same-sex marriage would make them more or less likely to vote for him, 26 percent said less likely and only 16 percent said more likely. A strong 57 percent said it would not influence their choice at all. Moreover, 67 percent of those polled said Obama’s announcement was done for political reasons, while only  24 percent thought he announced it because he thought it was right. To put it another way, Obama may have motivated his base, but in terms of the general election, his position has not helped him at all....

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine.

Much is made of how President Obama’s position on same-sex marriage has “evolved” to an endorsement of legalization. One hopes his position on the atrocity called the “war on drugs” is evolving.

It’s not really a war on drugs. It’s a war on people, most of whom have committed no violence or other aggression against person or property. Those who do commit violence are encouraged to do so by the very “war on drugs” that Obama and other enlightened leaders so enthusiastically support. Black markets often feature violence — precisely because they are illegal. Decriminalize the activity, and the violence goes away.

America had a natural experiment in this principle: Prohibition. When the manufacture and sale of alcohol were made illegal by constitutional amendment in 1920, booze didn’t disappear from society. It simply went underground to be dominated by those with a comparative advantage in thuggery. Ending prohibition brought alcohol into the legitimate market (although unfortunately regulated and licensed). The violence related to the manufacture and sale of alcohol went away....

John T. Kuehn has taught military history at CGSC since 2003 and retired from the Navy as a commander in 2004. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Kansas State University in 2007. He graduated with distinction from Naval Postgraduate School in 1988. He won the Society of Military History Moncado Prize in 2010 and is the author of Agents of Innovation (2008), Eyewitness Pacific Theater (with D.M. Giangreco, 2008), and numerous articles and editorials.

There is much discussion these days that [professional military education (PME)] is a mess, in part because of the post-9/11 wars, and in part because of more deep seated institutional problems. Tom, Bob Scales, and others have directed the attention of the public (and some military leaders) to the system in place today. As a professor of history at the Army's Command and General Staff College (CGSC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my informed take is that PME is not as bad as some people think, especially in regards to its faculty. On the other hand, it is not as valued by policy makers, either those in uniform or civilians, as one would wish -- and it is especially denigrated by those folks in the Pentagon who work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Joint Staff, or in joint lingo, the J-staff.

Let me start with the bad news first. Former Congressman Ike Skelton, the patron saint and founder of the modern PME system -- as it was reformed and institutionalized in the Goldwater-Nichols Act -- must be appalled at how his vision for PME is being undermined. The real problem facing us has to do with revisions to the Officer Professional Military Education Programs instruction and policy (I'm referring here to the OPMEP, CJCS 1800 series. I understand the Joint Staff has some kooky notion about changing the 4-1 student to faculty ration to 5-1 in the OPMEP. 4-1 right now works out to about 15 students to one instructor in the classroom because of all the "non-teaching or barely teaching" staff that get counted as faculty or partial faculty. This ain't right. The move toward 5-1 must be killed -- it goes in the other direction from the best graduate education practices for resident education. Our problems, no matter what the quality of the faculty, will increase substantially. Additionally, the J-staff continues prevaricate about assigning key JDAL billets to joint faculty at the PME schools, to include the active duty officers of other services -- for example navy officers assigned as faculty at CGSC. Joint education will never be properly valued if a joint tour in a PME billet is not valuable enough to be coded that way.

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" (Times Books) and of the new book "Governing America" (Princeton University Press).

(CNN) -- Mitt Romney spoke this weekend to the students at Liberty University, a hotbed of conservative studies,and he has been forced to think about his ties to the right. He is facing a difficult challenge in determining what his relationship should be with the tea party Republicans who helped revitalize the GOP after the doldrums of 2008.

Although there are more conservative Republicans grudgingly endorsing Romney and polls show that more tea party activists are coming to accept Romney as their candidate, there is strong evidence that there remains a great deal of distrust, which could dampen enthusiasm on the campaign trail and create tensions if mishandled. According to Congressional Quarterly, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert told reporters, "I am not as excited as I am desperate" to elect someone other than Obama.

Any misstep could cost Romney the election. If Romney is seen as too close to the tea party, he could easily undercut his ability to win independent votes in the swing states that will determine the outcome of the election....

Adam Cathcart is assistant professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and the editor of SinoNK.com.

The boundary between satire and reality can blur when it comes to the behavior of despots, particularly in East Asia. The Chinese Communist Party's irony deficit showed clearly this week when state media praised the country's media openness precisely as the Party expelled a foreign journalist. In neighboring North Korea, Kim Jong Un spent his first display of public anger in tongue-lashing his subordinates, not for starving citizens or excessive military spending, but for their failure to clean up an amusement park.

On Chinese social media, satire leveled at despots is common. Chinese netizens, after all, added this gem to the "Hitler Downfall meme" after a scandal involving a CCP official who didn't realize that his tweets on Weibo to his mistress to set up a tryst were public. The army of paid censors cannot staunch the flood of irreverence. And one solace to living in a one-Party state, after all, is that everyone already knows which Party your joke is about....

David Greenberg, a contributing editor to The New Republic, teaches history at Rutgers University and is at work on a history of presidents and spin.

The results are in: The electorate on the whole regards Barack Obama’s proclamation of personal support for gay marriage as a political maneuver, rather than an expression of heartfelt belief. Unfortunately, if Obama’s heavily hyped interview last week was in fact a political calculation, it was a bad bet—from a purely strategic standpoint, that is, not a moral one—since it seems to have hurt him in the polls. The giddiness and jubilation that marked the press coverage—see the covers of Newsweek and The New Yorker, which The New Republic all but predicted—could hardly be further from the mundane reception afforded the announcement by the general public.

Obama, of course, did the right thing. It’s high time a president endorsed equal rights for gays and lesbians, and whatever hit he suffers at the polls should earn him points for courage. But neither is it surprising that his interview has been greeted with cynicism. For his was a reluctant, narrowly framed, almost apologetic endorsement of same-sex unions—a far cry from the exercise in moral leadership from the bully pulpit that pundits have made it out to be....

Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com.

Why do conservatives hate freedom? The question may be startling. After all, don’t conservatives claim they are protecting liberty in America against liberal statism, which they compare to communism or fascism? But the conservative idea of “freedom” is a very peculiar one, which excludes virtually every kind of liberty that ordinary Americans take for granted.

I distinguish conservatives from libertarians, who, on issues of personal liberty, tend to side with liberals. Since World War II, mainstream conservatives have opposed every expansion of personal liberty in the United States.

During the Civil Rights era, the leading conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, and the leading conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley, Jr., along with most of their followers opposed federal laws banning racial discrimination. To their credit, they later admitted they had been mistaken; indeed, both Buckley and Goldwater supported gay rights late in their careers. But at the time that conservative support for a color-blind society might have made a difference, the leaders of American conservatism sided with the Southern segregationists. They claimed they did so, not because of racial prejudice, but because they feared federal tyranny — a weaselly stance which, in practice, made them side with white supremacist tyranny at the state level. If they had truly believed in their own propaganda about federalism, conservatives could have opposed federal civil rights legislation while campaigning for civil rights laws at the state level. They didn’t....

Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University.

...It’s important to point out that [a] shift [of power in Europe to Germany] has been a long time in coming. It was prefigured by the famous photo from the cemetery at the great World War I battlefield of Verdun, which depicted the massive figure of Chancellor Helmut Kohl holding hands with the diminutive President Francois Mitterand. But what irrevocably altered the balance in the Franco-German pairing was German unification in 1990. Germany’s addition of territories with a new population of some 16 millions upset the almost precise demographic equality of the European area, which until then had contained four large countries with almost the same population and economic size (the other two were politically unstable Italy and politically semi-detached Great Britain). For a time, the implications of the addition were hidden because of the enormous financial cost of rebuilding the eastern German territories, run down by the legacy of catastrophic communist central planning....

In that way, the clearest evidence of Germany’s newfound comfort with its power is the language now used by Frau Merkel. Sometimes she addresses the European situation, and the need for austerity to be imposed on southern Europe, with a bluntness of language that reminds of nobody so much as Otto von Bismarck. In May 2010, pleading to the German parliament, the Bundestag, to accept the first Greek rescue package, Merkel explained that “the rules must not be oriented toward the weak, but toward the strong. That is a hard message. But it is an economic necessity.” It had overtones of the Iron Chancellor’s 1862 “iron and blood” speech to the Budget Commission of the Prussian parliament, in which he explained that German unity would be achieved through demonstrations of Prussian strength, not Prussian liberalism. Three wars followed in short order, and German was, indeed, unified....

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His Latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, has just been published by Penguin Press.

With the sap rising and the governments falling, all the European powers are merrily acting in national character.

In the midst of a severe financial crisis, the French have just elected a champagne socialist on promises of a 75 percent top tax rate and a lower retirement age. The Greeks also had an election in which the established parties lost to a ragbag of splinter groups. The outcome of the election was that they need to have another election. (Cue Zorba the Greek theme music.) Meanwhile, the wailing gloom of the flamenco emanates from Spain, where youth unemployment is now around 50 percent.

Within a few hours of arriving in London, I hear the following announcement on the train: "We apologize for the late departure of this service. This was due to the late arrival of essential personnel. [Translation: the driver overslept.] However, we are happy to inform customers that the London Underground is running a nearly normal service." It’s that "nearly" that is so quintessentially English.

Three days later, in Berlin, I finally reach the Europe that works. Well, sort of. As usual, I find myself marveling at the sheer idleness of the richest and most successful country in the European Union. Lunchtime in the leafy garden of the Café Einstein on the Kurfürstenstrasse shows no sign of ending even at 3 p.m. It’s Thursday. Did you know that the average German now works 1,000 hours a year less than the average South Korean? That’s why when you go on holiday the Germans are already there—and when you go home, they stay on...