Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Kinsley: Obama, the Wealth Spreader

In the 1943 movie Tender Comrade, Ginger Rogers utters the words "Share and share alike--that's democracy." Nobody objected at the time, but four years later, Rogers' mother complained to the House Un-American Activities Committee that her daughter had been forced to express a communist sentiment. The scriptwriter, Dalton Trumbo (who actually was a communist), went to jail for refusing to testify and then spent years on the Hollywood blacklist, unable to get work. But "share and s

Peter Scoblic: What Newsweek's Editor Doesn't Get About John McCain

This morning on NPR, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham provided a bizarre analysis of John McCain's worldview, and then dove headfirst down the rabbit hole in arguing that it's quite similar to Barack Obama's. Meacham argued that, as fans of Reinhold Niebuhr, both McCain and Obama are "moral realists"--men who understand that good cannot always triumph over evil, that the world is stubbornly tragic, and, because we must live in that world, we must learn to compromise. Although I think Obama

Peggy Noonan: Obama and the Runaway Train

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes: He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. H

David Sirota: Mandate '08 ... Reagan vs. FDR

No, John McCain and Barack Obama have made the race's final weeks an ideological proxy war between two presidential icons who still loom larger than them: Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt. McCain promises to "follow in [Reagan's] tradition and in his footsteps" while vilifying Obama as a 1930s-era "socialist" looking to "redistribute wealth." Obama counters by invoking Roosevelt's speeches and depicting the financial meltdown as "the final verd

John Robben: Election Day 1964 (Dear Diary)

Monday, November 2, 1964: Tomorrow we elect a President. Four years ago tonight Jack Kennedy was not yet President, but at least he was still alive. Had he lived he certainly would have been reelected to a second term. Instead, his Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who became President on November 22 last year, is running in his place tomorrow. He is not the same calibre of man that President Kenney was, but he has been an effective President these past 11 months and he should defeat Barry

R. Taggart Murphy: Asia and the Meltdown of American Finance

[R. Taggart Murphy, a former investment banker, is Professor in the MBA Program in International Business at the University of Tsukuba’s Tokyo campus and a Japan Focus associate. He is the author of The Weight of the Yen (Norton, 1996) and, with Akio Mikuni, of Japan’s Policy Trap (Brookings, 2002). ] The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles. Schadenfreude is not a v

Nick Turse: How the Pentagon Could Help Bail Out America

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde Diplomatique (German edition), Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly at Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by M

Fouad Ajami: Obama and the Politics of Crowds

[Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We t

Christopher Meyer: Which President would be best for Britain?

[Sir Christopher Meyer is former British Ambassador to Washington.] Republican friends of ours in New York rang the other day in deep depression: Obama, they said, was going to win and the United States would have a socialist government. Even in Britain there is an expectation that, if Obama triumphs and the Democrats tighten their grip on Congress, America will take a sharp left turn. It is misleading to judge an American election through a British political lens. The

Robert Nedelkoff: The Obamamercial

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. Since 1997, he has worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.] When I was young, in the days before federal campaign-financing laws, presidential candidates more often than n

Jim Pittaway: Is there more to John McCain's rage than just bad temper? A psychotherapist puts the candidate on the couch.

[Jim Pittaway is a licensed psychotherapist. He resides and practices in Missoula, Mont.] He has been called McNasty and Senator Hothead, but John McCain has called his fellow senators far worse. Newsweek reported that he "erupted out of the blue" at Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, saying, "only an a--hole would put together a budget like this." He called Sen. Chuck Grassley a "f---ing jerk" and capped a profane tirade during last year's amnest

Stephen Kinzer: The reality of war in Afghanistan

[Stephen Kinzer is author of "A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It."] DESPITE their differences over how to pursue the US war in Iraq, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama both want to send more American troops to Afghanistan. Both are wrong. History cries out to them, but they are not listening. Both candidates would do well to gaze for a moment on a painting by the British artist Elizabeth Butler called "Remnants of an Army.&qu

Joan Walsh: What Obama really said in 2001

John McCain hit a new low Monday with his claim about a suddenly"revealed" interview with Barack Obama from 2001 proving that Obama favors"redistributive change" and that Obama is a"redistributor" (sorry, but that's not going to make it onto a bumper sticker). Did McCain or anyone in his campaign listen to the interview? Did Matt Drudge before linking to it? Open Salon's Kris Broughton broke it down in all its complexity earlier tod

Michael Barone: Obama's New New Deal No Better Than the Old One

With victory in sight, Barack Obama's supporters are predicting that he will give us a new New Deal. To see what that might mean, let's look back on the original New Deal. The purpose of New Deal legislation was not, as commonly thought, to restore economic growth but rather to freeze the economy in place at a time when it seemed locked in a downward spiral. Its central program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), created 700 industry councils for firms and unions to set min

Tim Hancock: Chilling echo of the past in Congo

[Tim Hancock is Amnesty International's UK campaigns director.] The escalating crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern region of North Kivu is chillingly reminiscent of the war that first erupted there 10 years ago. Between 1998 and 2002, we witnessed one of the worst conflicts ever recorded. Armed groups in search of political power and economic control over Congo's immense natural resources and backed by the Congolese, Rwandan and Ugandan governments, ma

Jonathan Freedland: The current president has three long, unaccountable months to cement his legacy

[Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for the Guardian since 1997.] We are about to enter the twilight zone, that strange black hole in political time and space that appears no more than once every four years. It is known as the period of transition, and it starts a week from today, the time when the United States has not one president but two. One will be the president-elect, the other George Bush, in power for 12 more weeks in which he can do pretty much whatever he likes. Not

Jeff Randall: Japan holds horrible lesson for FTSE 100

[Jeff Randall is a business journalist, formerly the business editor of BBC News and, from 2005, editor-at-large of the Daily Telegraph.] Labour's unsuccessful candidate in the Beaconsfield by-election, Tony Blair, lost his deposit. Unemployment broke through 3m, a post-war record. It all seems a very long time ago, yet not everything has changed. In October 1982, Japan's main stock market index, the Nikkei 225, was trading at 7,160. Earlier this week, it dropped back

C. Ikehara: Reviving Historical Quotations

[C. Ikehara has been a Librarian for over ten years. His Masters Degree in Library Science is from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.] Is this what spreading global democracy is all about?: - It has always been true that the men who were defending Western ideals were bound to be in alliance with men who intended to defend only Western interests. (Henry Butterfield)Does this help to explain the current economic crisis?: - As great edifices collapse of their o

James Taranto: The New York Times's (and The Wall Street Journal's) presidential endorsement goofs

Ho hum, last week the New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for president. Accompanying the endorsement, however, was an online feature of interest to anyone fascinated by the history of presidents or newspapers: "New York Times Endorsement Through the Ages," a compilation of every Times general-election presidential endorsement starting in 1860. The Times has been a Democratic paper for longer than we had realized. Although the paper's first six endorsements all went to Re

Gore Vidal: John McCain in the Echo Chamber

October proved to be the cruelest month, for that was the time that Senator McCain, he of the round, blank, Little Orphan Annie eyes, chose to try out a number of weird lies about Barack Obama ostensibly in the interest of a Republican Party long overdue for burial. It is a wonder that any viewer survived his furious October onslaught whose craziest lie was that Obama wished to become president in order to tax the poor in the interest of a Democratic Party in place, as he put it