Roundup: Media's Take

Douglas Schoen and Scott Rasmussen: Obama's Poll Numbers Are Falling to Earth

[Mr. Schoen, formerly a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two Party System" (Random House, 2008). Mr. Rasmussen is president of Rasmussen Reports, an independent national polling company.] It is simply wrong for commentators to continue to focus on President Barack Obama's high levels of popularity, and to conclude that these are indicative of high levels of public confidence in the work of his ad

David Fiderer: How Dumb Does Alan Greenspan Think We Are? Very

[Fiderer is a banker and journalist.] "Don't blame me," argues Alan Greenspan in a piece of historical revisionism that would have embarrassed Kurt Waldheim. Greenspan offered up a Panglossian analysis in today's Wall Street Journal that goes something like this:The rise in housing prices was tied to the decline in the rates for long-term, fixed-rate mortgages. Historically there has been a strong histor

Walter Shapiro: Americans Like Big Government. They Just Don't Really Know It Yet.

Barack Obama flew to Columbus last week to announce a stimulus-funded rescue of 25 police jobs. During his speech, this most eloquent of presidents fell into a Lyndon Johnson-like sing-song as he detailed all the other pump-priming grants to Ohio from the stimulus package: "$128 million that will put people to work renovating and rebuilding affordable housing. ... $935 million to Ohio that will create jobs rebuilding our roads, our bridges and our highways. ... $180 million for this state t

Jack Shafer: Bill Moyers's Memory

Last month in a letter to Slate, former Johnson administration official Bill Moyers dismissed my recent column that criticized him for—among other things—instructing the FBI to investigate Barry Goldwater's staff. The Goldwater stuff was "very old news," he wrote, pointing to a Newsweek column he wrote about it in 1975. Dodging criticism by citing his March 10, 1975, Newsweek column ("LBJ and the FBI") is a standard Moyers move. When a 1991 New Republic feature d

Michael Hirsh: We wanted FDR. But halfway through his first 100 days, it's clear the 44th president's job is actually harder.

[Michael Hirsh covers international affairs for Newsweek, reporting on a range of topics from Homeland Security to postwar Iraq. He co-authored the November 3, 2003 cover story, 'Bush's $87 Billion Mess,' about the Iraq reconstruction plan. ] As the financial markets pause at the edge of the abyss, deciding whether to back away, we should take a moment to mull over all the Blame Obama rhetoric that's been building in recent weeks. Even some who were the president's most fervent supp

Atul Gawande: How should Obama reform health care?

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty. The Canadians had stories like the 1946 Toronto Globe and Mail report of a woman in labor who was refused help by three successive physicians, apparently because of her inability to pay. In Australia, a 1954 letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald sought help for a young woman who had lung disease. She couldn’t afford to refill her oxygen tank, and had been forced to ration her intake “

Edmund Conway: This is how depression looked in the 1930s

[Edmund Conway is Economics Editor of The Daily Telegraph.] No-business meetings, John Kenneth Galbraith called them. They sprout in the wake of a crisis like weeds in scorched earth, nourished by the overwhelming sense that Something Must Be Done. Men gather, they sit in a room, they look pious; they are photographed, they talk to the press, they go home. Politicians summon these grand meetings, said Galbraith, "not because there is business to be done but because

Jeffrey Lord: Obama's LBJ Syndrome

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa@aol.com.] Created by two academics, it was inspired by what now might be called LBJ Syndrome, the pattern of behavior exhibited in the 1960s by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. A pattern of behavior that gradually led Americans to the belief LBJ was a hopeless teller of untruths. "Credibility gap" was the much used political te

William Galston: Barack's Too-Long Wish List

[William Galston is a former policy advisor to Bill Clinton and current senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.] A surprised Rudolph Penner, assistant director of President Ford's OMB and later a CBO director, offered a blunt assessment of the new president: "[He] has proposed a huge restructuring of government, and people are actually taking him seriously. The man ... turns out to be downright radical." This president was Ronald Reagan, who pushed through changes in spend

Patrick Buchanan: Lyndon Baines Obama

It was the winter of conservative discontent. Barry Goldwater had gotten only 38 percent of the vote, and his party had suffered its worst thrashing since Alf Landon fell to FDR in 1936. Democrats held 295 House seats, Republicans 140. They held 68 Senate seats to Republicans' 32, and 33 governors to the GOP's 17. Democratic registration was twice that of the GOP. The liberal press was gleefully writing the obituary of"The Party That Lost Its Head." Decade

Editorial in the Telegraph: London summit must avoid the spectre of 1933

Few international gatherings have been so laden with expectation as next month's London summit of the G20 countries. Its stated aims are to agree coordinated action to revive the global economy, to reform financial sectors and systems and to restructure the big international financial institutions, notably the World Bank and the IMF. It is not a modest agenda and for this we have to thank the host, Gordon Brown, who sees the gathering as the pivotal moment of the global economic crisis. If the s

Simon Heffer: Northern Ireland has not been at peace - despite what Labour claims

[Simon Heffer is a British journalist, columnist and writer.] The only surprising facet of the wicked murders of two soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland is that so many people seem so surprised. An old record is stuck in a familiar groove. Since the days of O'Connell a movement peaceably pursuing the legitimate aim of independence from Britain has always given birth to a faction determined to seek it by violence. It is why the Fenian Brotherhood, Sinn Fein, the IRA and then

Dick Morris: Obama's inflation

In the last five months, according to the Federal Reserve Board, the money supply in the United States has increased by 271 percent. It has almost tripled. Have car sales tripled? Home purchases? Consumer spending? Corporate investment? Not only have they not tripled, they have all declined more sharply than they have since at least the recession of 1981-82, and perhaps since the Great Depression. So where is the money? If it isn't being spent, where is it?

Humberto Fontova: Heads Roll in Havana, Baffling 'Cuba Experts'

[Humberto Fontova is the author of 4 books including Fidel;Hollywoods' Favorite Tyrant and Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who idolize Him.] The very week Obama proposed cozying up to Castro by dropping some economic and travel sanctions, the biggest political shake-up in twenty years rattled Cuba's regime. Last week Raul Castro purged almost twenty regime officials. The most prominent among the purged were the youngest and most reform-minded (as these things are

Byron York: Why The Founding Fathers Would Want Obama's Plans to Fail

James Madison was not specifically contemplating Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, when he wrote Federalist No. 63. But reading the document — one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the U.S. Constitution — it’s clear Madison knew their type. And he knew they would come along again and again in American history, if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history. Obama and Pelosi, along with their most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current econ

Bob Herbert: Peak income year for ordinary Americans was back in 1973

... The seeds of today’s disaster were sown some 30 years ago. Looking at income patterns during that period, my former colleague at The Times, David Cay Johnston, noted that from 1980 (the year Ronald Reagan was elected) to 2005, the national economy, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. (Because of population growth, the actual increase per capita was about 66 percent.) But the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined during those years. The standa

David Grann: The Truth about the Lost Amazon Tribe "Hoax"

[Author, staff writer at The New Yorker.] Last year José Carlos Meirelles, who works for the Brazilian government agency set up to protect the country's indigenous populations, released photographs that captivated the public imagination. Taken from an airplane swooping over the Amazon jungle, the pictures showed a group of Indians--their faces streaked with war paint, their bows drawn with arrows--that were said to remain uncontacted by the outside world. Meirelles said

Laura D'Andrea Tyson: In Defense of Obamanomics

[Ms. Tyson is a professor of business and public policy at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. She served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and as the National Economic Adviser under President Clinton. She is a member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.] If leadership is defined as recognizing a crisis, addressing its challenges, and setting new directions while remaining true to one's values, then Barack Obama is already de

Michael C. Dawson: If anyone should be skeptical of New Deal policies, it should be black folks, not Republicans

[Michael C. Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.] It is often forgotten that, for all of its benefits, the New Deal reinforced structural black economic disadvantage in many ways. It is certainly true that the Work Projects Administration (WPA) put many blacks to work, and many blacks also benefited from the relief programs. But it is also true that key programs of the New Deal consciously excluded blacks. Black fa

WSJ Editorial: Obama adopts Bush view on the powers of the presidency

The Obama Administration this week released its predecessor's post-9/11 legal memoranda in the name of "transparency," producing another round of feel-good Bush criticism. Anyone interested in President Obama's actual executive-power policies, however, should look at his position on warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney must be smiling. In a federal lawsuit, the Obama legal team is arguing that judges lack the authority to enforce their own rulings in classified matters of