Roundup: Media's Take

Amity Shlaes: The Krugman Recipe for Depression

[Ms. Shlaes is senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperPerennial, 2008).] Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book "The Return of Depression Economics," emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn't spend enough. He's also argu

Neal Gabler: Think Goldwater is the father of conservatism? Think again.

[Neal Gabler is the author of many books, including, most recently, "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination."] Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker

Dick Morris: Obama's myths ... young voters and small donors

Myths in politics take on a life of their own and the Obama campaign has been quick to cloak its incredible electoral success with a new coat of mythology. Two fantasies, in particular, pervade the amazing triumph of the Obama candidacy: That young people propelled him to victory by finally voting in large numbers and that small donors financed his campaign. Were either myth a reality, it would be big news. Ever since the voting age was dropped to 18, politicians have been waiting f

Todd Gitlin: The difference between Obama's outlook and that of FDR and LBJ, and considers what it will take for him to succeed in office

With the country thrashing around and an incoming president as yet largely untested, hopes hearken backwards, converging on memories—and fantasies—of a time in the previous century when, in the wake of a catastrophic and self-destroying presidency, history met legend under the sign of a vague but promising phrase (what exactly was a "New Deal" anyway?), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt rushed to pull rabbits out of a hat, and the spirit of confidence—the refusal of fear—was part of the re

Mark Benjamin: Sympathy for Charles Graner

The detainee held on charges related to the so-called war on terror is clad in an orange jumpsuit. His wrists are shackled to a leather belt cinched tight around his waist. A short chain connects his ankles, so he can only shuffle down the barren hallways of the prison, escorted by a guard at each arm. He has spent more than 29 months in solitary confinement over the past four years, allowed out of his narrow cell during some of that period only to stretch his legs, alone, for one h

Marie Arana: He's Not Black

[Marie Arana, the editor of Book World, is the author of "American Chica," a memoir, and the novel "Cellophane." Her second novel, "Lima Nights," will be published in January.] He is also half white. Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black. We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old

William Safire: Generation what?

Welcome to the socio-literary parlor game of “Name That Generation.” It all began in a quotation Ernest Hemingway attributed to his Paris patron, the poet and salonkeeper Gertrude Stein. On the title page of his novel “The Sun Also Rises,” published in 1926, he quoted her saying to her circle of creatively disaffected writers, artists and intellectuals in the aftermath of World War I, “You are all a lost generation.” In the cultural nomenclature after that, the noun gen

Steve Plaut: Letter From President Peres of Israel to Prime Minister Singh of India

No, this is not correspondence from Shimon Peres to Manmohan Singh. It was actually written by Steven Plaut, an economist at the University of Haifa, as an approximation of what Peres would write to Singh if he were to encapsulate his own thinking on how Israel should deal with the Palestinians and extrapolate this to how India might deal with extremist Muslims. Dear Mr. Prime Minister, My heartfelt sympathies to you and the Indian people for the Bombay/Mumbai unrest an

Bob Gariano : Check recent history to keep economic turmoil in perspective

[Bob Gariano is President of RGA, an executive search firm in Lake Forest that recruits senior executives and board members for public and private companies. Bob can be reached at rgariano@robertgariano.com] There seems to be a constant flow of bad economic news these days. In an environment of recession and commercial uncertainty, it is easy to predict dramatic and unprecedented catastrophes on the horizon. Certainly, thi

E.J. Dionne: Barack H.W. Obama ... Accounting for the striking foreign policy similarities between 41 and 44

... The truth about Obama's worldview was hidden in plain sight in his most politically consequential foreign policy speech. Anti-war Democrats cheered Obama for addressing a rally against the Iraq War in Chicago's Federal Plaza on Oct. 2, 2002. His opposition to the war was a major asset in his nomination struggle with Clinton. Obama did indeed denounce the impending war as "dumb," "rash" and "based not on reason but on passion." But in retrospect, the

Stephen S. Roach: Dying of Consumption

[Stephen S. Roach is the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia.] IT’S game over for the American consumer. Inflation-adjusted personal consumption expenditures are on track for rare back-to-back quarterly declines in the second half of 2008 at a 3.5 percent average annual rate. There are only four other instances since 1950 when real consumer demand has fallen for two quarters in a row. This is the first occasion when declines in both quarters will have exceeded 3 percent. The current con

Editorial in the Guardian: India's 9/11

The attacks in Mumbai were as horrific in scale and as cold in execution as the bombings of Madrid or London. This was India's September 11. It was of a different order from other mass assaults on civilians that India has suffered - the attack on its parliament, the bombings of trains and crowded market places. The attackers arrived in commando boats from a mother ship: they shot up a crowded railway station and hospital, before targeting Americans, Britons and Jews. Military-style planning had

E.J. Dionne, Jr: Barack H.W. Obama

[E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.] In electing Barack Obama, the country traded the foreign policy of the second President Bush for the foreign policy of the first President Bush. That is the meaning of Obama's apparent decision to keep Robert Gates on as se

Catherine Philp: Mumbai ... A history of appalling violence and astonishing growth

[Catherine Philp is Diplomatic Correspondent for The Times.] Slumdog Millionaire, the new film by Danny Boyle, serves up Bombay’s heart on celluloid. A febrile, filthy city with one foot in the grandeur of its colonial past, another in its glass-plated future, and the rest of it struggling to make sense of its present. Even its name is a split personality: Mumbai to modern India but still Bombay to much of the rest of the world, including Britain, the country that created it.

Michael Schaffer: The Obama haters

[Michael Schaffer is the author of the upcoming One Nation Under Dog.] They don't have political rallies to bring them together anymore, but it's no secret that a lot of people out there don't much like Barack Obama. The president-elect, according to his more fervent campaign-season detractors, has a raft of unforgivable faults: He's a socialist, a Muslim, an actual love-child of Malcolm X. His birth certificate was missing, his book had been ghost-written by William Ayers, and his

Leon Wieseltier: Is Barack Obama Really The Savior Of Words?

.... again and again I observe an aesthetic reverence for a politician. The subject of the trance is, of course, Barack Obama, and it was plentifully on display in The New Yorker's election issue. It reached its ceiling, you might say, when the genius who some months ago drew the Obamas as terrorists in the White House now made amends by drawing Obama as Michelangelo's Adam--but tastefully cropped!--fist-bumping God, who was still a white man. But mainly the swoon was literary-critical, or more

Kathleen Parker: Bailing out the ignorance of America's voters

A new report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute on the nation's civic literacy finds that most Americans are too ignorant to vote. Out of 2,500 American quiz-takers, including college students, elected officials and other randomly selected citizens, nearly 1,800 flunked a 33-question test on basic civics. In fact, elected officials scored slightly lower than the general public with an average score of 44 percent compared with 49 percent. Only 0.8 percent of all test-takers s

Charlotte Higgins: Obama ... The new Cicero?

[Charlotte Higgins is the author of It's All Greek To Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World.] In the run-up to the US presidential election, the online magazine Slate ran a series of dictionary definitions of "Obamaisms". One ran thus: "Barocrates (buh-ROH-cruh-teez) n. An obscure Greek philosopher who pioneered a method of teaching in which sensitive topics are first posed as questions then evaded." There we

John B. Judis: How Obama's new economic advisor learns the wrong lessons from history

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] Barack Obama announced today that the chair of his Council of Economic Advisors will be Christina Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on government fiscal and monetary policy. As Romer stood beside him at the press conference, Obama uncharacteristically stumbled over his words in introducing her. He seemed to be learn

Thomas Sowell: 'Jolting' the economy is a bad idea

... No doubt we could all use a few billion dollars every now and then. But the question of who actually gets it will be strictly in the hands of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It is one of the few parts of the legacy of the Bush administration that the Democrats are not likely to criticize. Much as we may deplore partisanship in Washington, bipartisan disasters are often twice as bad as partisan disasters-- and this is a bipartisan disaster in the making. T