News at Home

Will We Ever Get Past the Cultural Wars of the 1960s?

by Ron Briley

In the beloved Oscar-winning film Forrest Gump (1993), the cultural wars of the 1960s are apparently resolved with the triumph of conservative values embodied in the film’s title character. Forrest (Tom Hanks) is a patriotic, color-blind Southern entrepreneur who personifies American innocence. He volunteers for military service in Vietnam, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor, while his sense of philanthropy enriches the lives of his African-American neighbors. On the oth

Is Barack Obama Another Adlai Stevenson?

by Jean Baker

Americans know where Hillary Clinton fits into the tradition of Democratic politics. We have no farther back to go than the 1990’s and her husband’s two terms. But Barack Obama has arrived on the national scene as a political orphan. Perhaps this is why columnists, pundits and talking heads like to provide the Illinois senator with a Democratic ancestor. Sometimes it is John F. Kennedy, occasionally it is Eugene McCarthy, but most often it is Adlai Stevenson. In that appealing sel

Would Obama Be the Nation's First Black President?

by Phillip Payne

Racial and national identities have a long, complex, and often unfortunate, association. The current discussions about Barack Obama’s chances to become the first black president of “post-racial” America” mark the latest attempt to define race as it relates to the presidency. The current incarnation of this debate has created an unlikely link between former president Warren G. Harding and Barack Obama as pundits and bloggers search for a historical precedent. Since th

Like (Grand)father Like Son?

by Alton Keith Gilbert

Senator John Sidney McCain III has a very good chance of becoming the 44th President of the United States. Looming large in Senator McCain’s long list of qualifications is over forty years of service to his country: twenty-two years in the Navy and over twenty years in Congress. However, the McCain family tradition of public service goes back many more years than that. Great-great-uncle Major General Henry P. McCain was the father of the selective service system in the Great War, and was A

Letter to My Granddaughter: How to Decide Whom to Vote for

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

Dear Granddaughter Susan:You have asked me in your e-mail letter about Republicans and Democrats. You want to know some differences. Specifically, what kind of person would be likely to feel comfortable after choosing to be a Republican or a Democrat? Answering this flattering inquiry is supposed to be easy for me, since I have written steadily about American politics for some sixty years and more. But all is not quite what it seems in the highly controversial area of American political

The Risks and Rewards of the Pope's Visit to the US

by Thomas J. Carty

Pope Benedict XVI’s meeting this week with a U.S. president during an election year demonstrates how Americans increasingly tolerate the conflue

What Underlies Obama's Analysis of "The People"

by Leo P. Ribuffo

The controversy over Senator Barack Obama’s remarks about “bitterness” in small town Pennsylvania will bring back memories to anyone who has studied social and political movements during the past half century. Asked on April 6 why his candidacy had failed to catch fire among voters in such places, Obama responded that the “jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or r

Department of Corrections: Barack Obama on Annie Oakley and Hillary Clinton

by Sean Wilentz

In his latest round of ad feminam slurs, Senator Barack Obama has denigrated Senator Hillary Clinton and her position on gun regulation by likening her to Annie Oakley. But once again, Obama has shot himself in the foot. Annie Oakley was one of the first great female superstars in American history. Born in poverty in western Ohio, she began hunting when she was nine years old, and sold hunting game to locals in order to support her siblings and widowed mother. Her sharpshooting abilities

When the Bush Bubble Bursts

by Harlow Giles Unger

By 1694 Britain’s perennial wars had plunged the nation into bankruptcy, but a clever financier named William Paterson came up with a shell game that restored public faith in government credit

When is a Jeremiah not a Jeremiah?

by Andrew R. Murphy

I thought how I would set you among my children, and give you a pleasant land, the most beautiful heritage of all the nations. And I thought you would call me, My Father, and would not turn from following me. Instead, as a faithless wife leaves her husband, so you have been faithless to me, O house of Israel, says the Lord. A voice on the bare heights is heard, the plaintive weeping of Israel’s children, because they have perverted their way, they have

Historians for Obama

HNN Editor: The list of signers was updated 4-21-08. Our country is in serious trouble. The gap between the wealthy elite and the working majority grows ever larger, tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance and others risk bankruptcy when they get seriously ill, and many public schools do a poor job of educating the next generation. Due to the arrogant, inept foreign policy of the current administration, more people abroad mistrust and fear the United States than a

Pastor Wright: In Context

by Steve Hochstadt

Racism is still alive in America. Few would claim that racial prejudice against African-Americans, an enduring American shame, has been eliminated. Yet the explosion of criticism, mainly by white commentators, of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and of Senator Barack Obama for remaining his parishioner and friend, conveniently ignores the world of white racism in which Wright developed his ideas. The focus on Wright and Obama has obscured the larger truth about the sermons he has presented: they r

What If Someone from the Obama Camp Said Hillary Clinton Is Where She Is Because She's a Woman?

by Arica L. Coleman

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."--Geraldine’s FerraroGeraldine’s Ferraro’s comment sparked a firestorm of controversy which once again injected race into the 2008 Democratic primary. It was bound to happen as earlier remarks by the Clinto

The Obama Coalition

by Morton Keller

From the 1830s to the 1930s, most presidential elections were shaped by the major parties rather than by charismatic candidates or overriding issues. The great exception was the clash in the 1850s over slavery, states’ rights, and the territories, which divided the Democrats and destroyed the Whigs. But the Republicans quickly replaced the Whigs, and two-party hegemony prevailed thereafter.

Will the Democrats Blow It (Again)?

by Donald T. Critchlow

There is good news and bad news for the Democrats this year: The good news is that the conservatives are in disarray. (So much so that recently Boston University political scientist Andrew Bacevich, writ

London Calling: The Dollar is Falling!

by James Livingston

Being in London for a week is instructive, especially during a financial crisis that keeps creeping from its Anglo-American roots to the wider world.  No matter what paper I bought, headlines and front-page stories were full of exotic references to hedge funds, SIVs, CDOs, and the like.  Meanwhile, there was little coverage of the Obama speech except notice of declining support for his candidacy in the wake of the Reverend Wright’s YouTube performances.  (Two Financia

Before Obama Was a Favorite Son

by Timothy Stewart-Winter

In his losing 2000 Democratic primary campaign in Illinois's First District, Barack Obama won the white vote, which made up 30% of the electorate, but lost the all-important black vote. Obama's relatively little-known 2000 campaign was the most demoralizing moment of his political career; in The Audacity of Hope, he wrote, "It was a race in which

Is Reverend Wright a Black Liberationist?

by Clare L. Spark

Recently, in the aftermath of the Pastor Wright controversy, historian Ralph Luker, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and HNN, linked Martin Luther King Jr. to black liberation theology. In his first address to the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1955 King had said, Luker noted: The Almighty God himself is not the only, not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, 'I love you, Israel.' He'

Time (Yet Again) for Preventative Regulation

by Christopher McKnight Nichols

The Bush administration, Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve and the financial sector all think the actions they've taken in recent days and weeks will fend off disaster. That's unlikely. Today's crisis calls for a new take on what used to exist: preventative regulation. So how to get there? First, look at the nation's history: The recent salvage of the investment bank Bear Stearns is in fact the legacy of decades of anti-regulation ideology. After the Fed allowed Drexel Burnham

Column: Don't Hang Beijing Out to Dry

by William Thompson

Every country and every place has its problems. Whatever site is chosen for International games can become the site of protests. Nonetheless we should seriously contemplate the prospects for protests regarding the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, while China is a partner rather than an adversary on the issue of terrorism, we cannot deny that China has a whole slew of problems, many of which, even the most optimistic person cannot foresee being solved by 2007 or 2008. Here are just a few: