Roundup: Media's Take

Tom Baldwin: Transition team looks to emulate Roosevelt, not Carter

[Tom Baldwin is Washington correspondent for The Times.] At the end of a gruelling 21-month campaign that has already flecked his hair with grey, the hard work for Barack Obama is just beginning. Yesterday he began the task of turning the tight inner circle of advisers that ran his formidable election machine into a unit capable of running an administration confronting economic convulsions at home and fragile security abroad. Congressman Rahm Emanuel, a f

Jeffrey Hart: Why this former Reagan speechwriter sees a lot of Reagan in Obama

Now Barack Obama has been elected, he can begin to work as the transformative president he said he wanted to be. When he declared that ambition on the primary trail, he found himself vilified by Hillary Clinton for comparing himself to Ronald Reagan. But that comparison is apt, as is becoming evident by the hour. The inspiring, elevated, ambitious victory speech he gave in Chicago last night confirmed that he has taken on the mantle that Ronald Reagan laid down after two terms. Obam

Trey Ellis: History, seen up close, at last

I love history and had often whined to myself that I wasn't lucky enough to have lived during a more exciting age: I sometimes like to think that I could have been a Tuskegee Airman, Buffalo Soldier or beatnik. Instead, I grew up in an America that often felt like occupied territory. After freeing Europe from the Nazis in the Forties, and then blacks in the Sixties and women in the Seventies, politically, the next thirty-odd years have largely been a depressing, embarrassing, soul-grinding drag.

Mark Halperin: 10 things that never happened in a campaign before

A Former First Couple Switches Role Hillary and Bill Clinton have ruled the chessboard of Democratic politics for so long that almost no move they make comes as a surprise. But the image of a former First Couple swapping roles — with a past President trying to be a supportive spouse and a First Lady emerging as a presidential front runner looking for restitution and restoration — proved a media bonanza, a clashing intraparty cause for concern and elation, and a curiosity for the publi

John Robben: Election Day 1960 (Dear Diary)

[This diary entry, written in 1960, featured the last election of a member of a minority to the presidency.] Tuesday, November 8, 1960:7:20PM: This long Election Night is just beginning. Returns, meaningless at this hour, are commencing to trickle in. At 6PM Nixon had 40,000 votes to 22,000 for Kennedy. Now, at 7PM, with less than 1% of the National votes counted, Nixon has collected 219,000 votes to Kennedy's 168,000. But with roughly 67 million votes to be tallied, these ea

Michael Levy: Barack Obama ... From Mission Impossible to Mission Accomplished

[Michael Levy is Britannica's Executive Editor. He received a bachelor’s degree (1991) in political science from the University of North Carolina and a doctorate (1996) in international relations and comparative politics from the University of Kentucky.] On November 4, Barack Obama went from being a U.S. senator to becoming president-elect of the United States of America—the first person to make such a leap since

Lionel Tiger: Yes We Are

[Lionel Tiger, a weekly columnist at Forbes.com, is the Charles Darwin professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Decline of Males (St. Martins, 2000), Men in Groups (Marion Boyars, 1999) and The Pursuit of Pleasure (Transaction, 2000).] From the tape recordings of Lyndon Johnson's White House, we learned a few years back that the president hired a secretary with dark skin. But he did not announce the pioneering appointment directly and personally. Inst

Editorial in the Times: Barack Obama fulfils the dream

The election of Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan goatherd, as the 44th President of the United States of America is a moment to savour, proof that the promise of a better day, expressed in prose that rises like poetry, can still carry an electorate. The margin of victory was emphatic and, whatever else follows, today the world changed. The cheers of the exultant crowd in Grant Park, Chicago will find their echo across the free world. This is not to belittle the Republican candidat

Jerry Bower: Barack Obama, Fabian Socialist

[Mr. Bowyer is chief economist of BenchMark Financial Network and a CNBC contributor.] Barack Obama is a Fabian socialist. I should know; I was raised by one. My Grandfather worked as a union machinist for Ingersoll Rand during the day. In the evenings he tended bar and read books. After his funeral, I went back home and started working my way through his library, starting with T.W. Arnold's The Folklore of Capitalism. This was my introduction to the Fabian socialists.

Fred Barnes: We Could Be In for a Lurch to the Left

There's an old saying that politics in America is played between the 40 yard lines. What this means, for those unfamiliar with football, is that we're a centrist country, never straying very far to the left or the right in elections or national policies. This has been true for decades. It probably won't be after today's election. For the first time since the 1960s, liberal Democrats are dominant. They are all but certain to have a lopsided majority in the House, and either a filibus

Anne Karpf: Islamofascist slanders

[Anne Karpf is a columnist in the Saturday Guardian's Family section.] We live in McCarthyist times, or so it sometimes seems. An Indiana election official, it emerged last week, has distributed a blog that called Barack Obama a "young, black Adolf Hitler", while elsewhere an email was sent to Jewish voters warning of a "second Holocaust" if the Democrat was elected. Meanwhile, campuses around America last week marked "Islamofascism Awareness Week" with

Timothy Noah: Why Don't War Heroes Win?

John McCain entered the 2008 presidential campaign with a strong advantage shared by John Kerry in 2004, Bob Dole in 1996, and George H.W. Bush in 1992. All four were war heroes whose opponents bore no record of military service. (Dubya's spotty attendance in the Air National Guard doesn't count.) Yet Kerry, Dole, and Bush pére lost, and McCain will almost certainly lose too. If you broaden the McCain category from "war hero" to "wartime veteran," then add Al Gore (2000) to t

Jon Meacham: Our politics are rooted in the grand, complicated presidency of Andrew Jackson

In late January 1861, president-elect Abraham Lincoln was at home in wintry Springfield, Ill., contemplating his course. The South was seceding, the Union in danger of dying. In search of a quiet place to work on his Inaugural Address, Lincoln walked through streets of mud and ice to his brother-in-law's brick general store, Yates & Smith, near the corner of Sixth and Adams. Lincoln had told his friend and law partner, William Herndon, that he would need some "works" to consult. &q

Keith Thomson: The Most Accurate Election Forecast? Hardcore Gamblers

Recently I was in Kentucky, reporting on horseracing for Garden & Gun. A "whale" (bettor of thousands of dollars per day) I interviewed, Mike Maloney, successfully traded securities, options and futures, but chose to go to the track every day instead because it offered him a greater challenge. "There are many, many, many more factors to consider in betting horseraces," he said. Maloney is a youthful fifty-two, with alert, light blue eyes and a cheerful demean

David Bromwich: The Co-President at Work

[David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic and editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform. (November 2008).] ... The shallowest charge against Cheney is that he somehow inserted himself into the vice-presidency by heading the team that examined other candidates for the job. He used the position deviously, so the story goes, to sell himself to the susceptible younger Bush. The truth

Scott Horton: Best of the ’08 Campaign ... The effective use of history

History has an important role in our political discourse. It can be used to induce fear, to intimidate. It can also offer inspiration and a sense of common purpose. It can remind an audience of a communal legacy and a shared goal. History belongs to the staple of political speech-writing. Still, much of the political speech that draws on history sounds unconvincing and contrived; it reveals not historical depth, but ignorance. Often political figures stretch implausibly to tie themselves to

Michael Gove: Collapse of the pre-1914 world is still felt

[Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath.] Niall Ferguson is the man of the moment. In fact, so versatile an historian is Ferguson that he is the man for almost every moment. Crucially, he is always the perfect man for the moment just after the 9am news on Monday when Start the Week requires an expert at once timelessly authoritative and right on the news agenda. Ferguson's latest book, The Ascent of Money, is the perfect recession primer: a comprehensive econo

Peter Baker: Why would any one want to be president?

... What is it about the psyche of would-be presidents that makes them wake up in the morning and think it would be gratifying to take on the troubles of the world, to assume responsibility for the lives of 300 million Americans at a time when their lives are so precarious? And particularly now, in this moment of maximum crisis. Millions are in danger of losing their homes. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs. The national debt is skyrocketing. The Taliban is rampaging throug

Will Hutton: Will the real Keynes stand up, not this sad caricature?

[Will Hutton has written a weekly column for more than 15 years: six years at the Guardian and nine years at the Observer.] With the Bank of England declaring that the Western banking system is in its most acute crisis since 1914, John Maynard Keynes is back. Alistair Darling is the first Chancellor since Roy Jenkins to speak warmly of the 20th-century's greatest economist. Newspaper and television profiles mushroom. This is the man who said that countries must spend their way out o

Seumas Milne: The truth about South Ossetia

So now they tell us. Two months after the brief but bloody war in the Caucasus which was overwhelmingly blamed on Russia by western politicians and media at the time, a serious investigation by the BBC has uncovered a very different story. Not only does the report by Tim Whewell – aired this week on Newsnight and on Radio 4's File on Four - find strong evidence confirming western-backed Georgia as the aggressor on the night of August 7. It also assembles powerful testimony of wide-r