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What Effect Would Obama's Election Have on Race Relations?

by David R. Roediger

That sharp student of race and change in the U.S., Malcolm X, once observed that white supremacy was like a Cadillac. Both featured constant model changes, but also an ongoing pattern that gave the branding continuity

Ed Koch's Lesson for Today’s Mortgage Crisis

by Jonathan Soffer

With the takeover of  defaulted mortgages by the government, the American people, like John McCain, now have no idea of how many homes they own.   The lessons of Mayor Ed Koch’s ten year housing plan suggest that this crisis can be turned into an opportunity. As Barack Obama has insisted, Main Street must be helped along with Wall Street. Koch’s plan provides one successful precedent. We, the American people, are going to own thousands of delinquent mortgages

Old Andy Jackson Would Understand John McCain. Do You?

by Robert Elder

Honor is making a comeback in our national political discourse.  A recent Time article proposed honor as the best way to understand what makes John McCain tick, while the Obama campaign criticized a recent McCain television ad in language that produced the eye-catching headline, “Obama aide questions McCain’s honor.”

Is It Really Wise to Expand the FBI's Investigative Techniques?

by Douglas Charles

According to recent reporting by the Washington Post, in October 2008 FBI officials plan to expand their arsenal of investigative tools in the fields of crime detection, intelligence collect

Can Sarah Palin Say the Pledge of Allegiance in Good Conscience?

by Daniel Herman

Can Sarah Palin say the Pledge of Allegiance in good faith? Can she take the Oath of Office in good faith? No, she can’t, as I’ll explain below.Remember when in 2003 Michael Savage said he'd like to rip “traitors” from their cars and beat them senseless because they exercised their constitutional right to speak against the war? Unlike Savage, I want to talk about real traitors: enemies to the Constitution.As you HNN readers probably

The Vice Presidency Should Not Be an Accident Waiting to Happen

by Christopher Bates

John Adams, while serving as the nation's first vice president, characterized his job as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Woodrow Wilson's vice president, Thomas Marshall, liked to joke that "once there were two brothers: one ran away to sea, the other was elected vice president -- and nothing was ever heard from either of them again." John Nance Garner, a two-term veep, was even more blunt, describing t

Why Vice Presidential Nominees Matter

by Leo P. Ribuffo

Despite the Sarah Palin phenomenon, whatever it may ultimately yield, commentators continue to declare that vice presidential nominees rarely affect the outcome of presidential elections.  The truth of this axiom depends on the meaning of the word rarely.  Good choices, bad choices, and  missed choices--usually in combination--have influenced as many as five of the presidential elections since 1960.  And "rarely" might be changed to "frequently" if we r

The Parallel with 1929 We Ignore at Our Peril

by Robert Brent Toplin

With markets teetering at the abyss, the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the federal government's rescue of faltering behemoths like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG, some Americans are looking at the history of the 1930s in search of clues to the causes of the Great Depression. They want to know what went wrong in the past so they can make more educated judgments about what needs to be done to improve conditions in the present. Unfortunately, answers cannot be identified wi

Why Public Housing Is Viable

by Nicholas Dagen Bloom

The mere mention of public housing to most Americans summons a host of negative images: welfare mothers, gun violence, drugs, and forlorn buildings. Among

Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity

by Gary Cross

The old always seem to blame the young for the downfall of civilization.

Just How Secretive Was the Bush Administration?

by James P. Pfiffner

The Bush administration, in addition to its over-classification of documents, has undertaken more policies in secret than any administration in recent memo

Sarah Palin and the Politics of the Irrational

by Joseph Palermo

In The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby writes: "If Bush's election was not a measure of conscious anti-intellectualism on the part of voters, it was certainly a measure of the public's indifference to demonstrable mental acuity and knowledge as standards for the presidency." (p. 285) In recent years, presidential races have become highly personalized media events. They focus voters' short attention spans on the individuals who are running, rather than on the pol

Before Palin, Before Ferrarro, There Was Charlotta Spears Bass

by Cynthia King

Though partisans continue to debate the merits and demerits of Sarah Palin’s candidacy, the fact is that she is the first female vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party. This is also true of Geraldine Ferrarro for the Democratic Party in 1984. But even Ferrarro cannot lay claim to being the first female vice presidential nominee on the national ballot. That honor goes to Charlotta Spears Bass who ran for Vice President of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket i

Sarah Palin Distorts the Founders' Religious Views

by Howard P. Segal

Before the selection of Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, the 2008 campaign had been notable for the apparently declining influence of evangelical Christians on American politics. Notwithstanding the evangelicals' strong support for his candidacy, Mike Huckabee failed to get the GOP presidential nomination. And for all the distortion of Barack Obama's religion as supposedly Islamic rather than Christian, the controversy still offered hope that Amer

The Attempt to Hijack History at the 9/11 ServiceNation Forum

by Justin Jackson

In front of Columbia University’s Low Library last Thursday night, thousands of us watched Senators McCain and Obama as they attempted to answer or evade often difficult questions about the past, present and future of national service. Unsurprisingly, like most politicians throughout the annals of history, during the ServiceNation forum both senators selectively appropriated commonly accepted representations of the past th

Precedents, Vice Presidents—and Super-Tickets

by David Pietrusza

It is the perennial irony of presidential campaigns that selecting a running mate proves both so crucial to a specific campaign moment and, almost inevitably, so excruciating to the nation. The task remains, for

First Wave -- Second Wave -- And Then Came Sarah Palin

by Joseph Palermo

In the late 19th century, in Chicago, a grassroots organization founded by Jane Addams gave rise to Hull House where educated women worked to alleviate the suffering of the city's impoverished victims of laissez-faire capitalism. Addams's colleague, Florence Kelley, described Hull House as a "colony of efficient and intelligent women." Kelley later joined forces with Lillian Wald to establish the New York Child Labor Committee, and pressed the federal government to create the U.S

If the Great Debate Over Offshore Drilling Sounds Vaguely Familiar, it Should--But It's Time for a Happier Ending

by Tyler Priest

Every U.S. presidential election has to have an antecedent, an earlier race that can serve up comparisons about the candidates and issues.  Horserace election coverage is portraying the 2008 contest as a replay of the 1952 election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.  The candidates in both elections were non-incumbents facing an electorate grown weary of war and U.S. military occupation overseas.   Barack Obama is cast in the role of Stevenson, another Ivy-League educated Illinois senator who championed the politics of civility and appealed to educated liberals and professional “elites.”  The “straight-talking” war-hero John McCain is the all-around “man of the people,” according to his biographer, and heir to General Eisenhower, who incidentally spoke at the 1958 Naval Academy commencement where McCain graduated 894th out of 899.

Crowds, Conventions and the Slow Death of Individualism in America

by Louis René Beres

Every sham can have a patina. Unwittingly, our two political conventions recently lay bare and magnified the hideous triumph of mass society. The perfectly choreographed events in Denver and St. Paul made clear that America richly rewards conformance and cliché, not “rugged individualism” and independent thought. The conventions were microcosm. Like the delegates, noisily desperate for simple truths, Americans in general feel most comfortable when they can chant in choru

Why Is Obama Having Trouble with White Catholics?

by Tim Meagher

A puzzled Chris Matthews turned to the camera.  He had just finished grilling two guests on his TV show, “Hardball,” about voting patterns in the recent Pennsylvania primary.  Yet the behavior of one group still seemed hard for both he and his experts to explain. Its members’ motives, Mathews sighed, were as inscrutable as “a tribe in New Guinea.”  The group whose behavior seemed so inexplicable? Matthews’s ( Holy Cross College cla