Roundup: Media's Take

Gregory Mankiw: But Have We Learned Enough?

[N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and advised Mitt Romney in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.] LIKE most economists, those at the International Monetary Fund are lowering their growth forecasts. The financial turmoil gripping Wall Street will probably spill over onto every other street in America. Most likely, current job losses are only the tip of an ugly iceberg. But when Olivier Blan

Daniel Sinker: Why 2008 is Not 2004 Redux: Remember the Bush/Kerry Matchup? Kerry was Polling Strongly, Right? Think Again.

I've heard whisperings the last few days that, despite the polls, people shouldn't be too confident in an Obama victory next week. The reason? Kerry was polling well leading into election 2004, but Bush won the election. While the latter is true--obviously, we've all been suffering under it--the former is a memory that is been clouded by wishful thinking. We wanted the polls to be better, so we remember them as better. Looking at polling results from the final days of the 2004 campa

John B. Judis: Down with Divided Government

I am a great fan of the Financial Times, and I was interested to see that they endorsed Barack Obama for president. But they couldn’t do so without perpetuating one of the great fallacies of American politics--a fallacy that is currently echoed by the McCain campaign and the Republican party. Describing their reluctance to endorse Obama, they write, "Since the election will strengthen Democratic control of Congress, a case can be made for returning a Republican to the White House: divided g

Dick Morris: How McCain could pull off a Truman and win

The most reliable surveys put McCain five to seven points behind Obama as we enter the last week of this interminable campaign. But in a race that will be famous for years afterwards for its volatility, it is not too late for the Republican to pull out a victory. For Harry Truman in 1948, the presidential race shifted dramatically in the final week, and it's happened three more times in the past 30 years. In 1980, Reagan came from eight points behind to a solid victory by winning hi

Moisés Naím: What the lessons of 9/11 could teach the world about the financial crisis

[Moisés Naím is editor in chief of Foreign Policy.] The global financial meltdown is as surprising and unprecedented as the 9/11 attacks. Beyond that, the two calamities are very different; the financial crash will undoubtedly have broader consequences, hurting more people in more countries. Yet, 9/11 and its aftermath continue to offer a case study in some pitfalls to avoid when catastrophe hits. Perhaps the most important lesson from 9/11 is that the U.S. reaction to

Mark W. Hendrickson: The Politics of Pure Hatred

[Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.] Politics in America is a contact sport. Passions flare and the rhetoric can get heated and nasty. Political parties stoke these fires, playing on people’s fears as a key fund-raising tactic Conservative authors have produced books with insulting titles like “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They Would Be Republicans” and “Liberalism

David Brooks: McCain Ceding the Center

There are two major political parties in America, but there are at least three major political tendencies. The first is orthodox liberalism, a belief in using government to maximize equality. The second is free-market conservatism, the belief in limiting government to maximize freedom. But there is a third tendency, which floats between. It is for using limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. This tendency began with Alexander Hamilton, who created a vibrant nat

Menachem Rosensaft,: McCarthyism Redux ... The McCain Campaign's Calumny Express

[Menachem Rosensaft, a lawyer in New York City, is the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.] "Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism." While these words seem tailor made for the divisive rhetoric of the McCain campaign, they were actually spoken more than 58 years ago on the floor of t

William Rees-Mogg: The banks must rediscover Victorian values

[William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times. He was Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times before becoming Editor of The Times in 1967, a position he held until 1981.] The British are - or were - particularly good at banking. British banking financed the Empire and the Industrial Revolution. These achievements owed a great deal to the stability of the gold standard, which lasted from Isaac Newton's recoinage of gold in 1717 until Ramsay MacDonald

Roger Bootle: We now face Keynesian conditions and need truly Keynesian solutions

[Roger Bootle is managing director of Capital Economics and economic adviser to Deloitte.] This has raised a hornets’ nest of controversy, with people holding forth with much sound and fury – and often signifying nothing. So I want to ask what, if anything, the teaching of this long-dead economist has to offer us today. John Maynard Keynes, born in 1883, died in 1946; present at the Versailles negotiations in 1919; Britain’s representative at the Bretton Woods conferen

Jim Castagnera: Voting for Obama

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. His novels and a collection of his columns are available at http://www.lulu.com.] In 1962 a Rand Corporation strategist named Herman Kahn wrote a controversial book on nuclear war, which he entitled “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” The title came to my mind this week, as I listened to radio reports of polls that put Barack Obama’s lead at anywhere from five to 10

Robert B. Zoellick: A World in Crisis Means A Chance for Greatness

Aspiring U.S. politicians dream of being FDR, but rarely do the times and the person converge. The next president will have the chance to be a 21st-century FDR. For either Barack Obama or John McCain, the first duty will be to restore confidence. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been allotted to fix the financial breakdown. But fears have gripped the country. The new president needs not only a bold program but also the resolution to reassure. The parallels with FDR

Lawrence Kudlow: Reagan + Friedman + Keynes: We Need All the Help We Can Get.

Back in early 1981, when I went to Washington to work for President Reagan, one of the architects of supply-side economics, Columbia University's Robert Mundell, visited my OMB budget-bureau office inside the White House complex. At the time, we were suffering from double-digit inflation, sky-high interest rates, a long economic downturn and a near 15-year bear market in stocks. So I asked Prof. Mundell, who later won a Nobel Prize in economics, whether Reagan's supply-side tax cuts

Cordula Meyer: An interview with sociologist Michael Eric Dyson on Barack Obama, Martin Luther King and race relations in America

According to sociologist and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, Barack Obama has already won the election. But if he were white, "he'd be up by 15 to 20 points in the polls." In an interview, Dyson talks about why Barack Obama can't be emotional, his similarities with Martin Luther King, black self-hatred and the shades of black success. Professor Dyson, the polls show Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama clearly ahead of Republican candidate Joh

Fred Kaplan: Sitting on an aircraft-carrier deck in 1962 didn't prepare John McCain for the presidency

In the last few days, Sen. John McCain has told crowds that he's "been tested" when it comes to dealing with international crises, and as proof he cited the big enchilada of crises, the showdown over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. "I had a little personal experience in that," McCain said in Ohio. "I was there." But where was "there"? Was McCain a White House fellow or a junior aide in the Pentagon, watching, albeit from a distance, w

Steve Israel & Norman J. Ornstein: We should move voting to the weekend

[Steve Israel is a Democratic representative from New York. Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the co-founder of Why Tuesday?, a nonpartisan group seeking to increase voter participation.] BY Nov. 4, more than $5 billion will have been spent trying to persuade voters to cast their presidential and congressional ballots one way or another. Despite all the money and the news media hysteria, and even with record numbers of Americans heading

Russ Rymer: The George Wallace We Forgot

[Russ Rymer is the author of “Genie: A Scientific Tragedy” and “American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth and Memory.”] JOHN McCAIN deplored them, Barack Obama distanced himself from them, but the comments that Representative John Lewis of Georgia delivered on Oct. 11 may turn out to be some of the most trenchant — and generous — of the campaign. Mr. Lewis charged Mr. McCain and Sarah Palin with “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” in their fervently red-meat rallies, not unlike “

Arthur L. Blaustein: Economy has fared better under Dem presidents

[Arthur L. Blaustein was chairman of the President's National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity during the Carter administration and was appointed to the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities by Bill Clinton. He teaches public policy and economic development at UC Berkeley. His most recent books are "Make a Difference - America's Guide to Volunteering and Community Service" and "The American Promise."] Most Americans have one eye on the nation

John F. Harris: Twin giants of postwar liberalism

[John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of Politico. ] The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in 2006 at the age of 97, lived so long that he spent the last several decades of his life as an anachronism. He was a respected figure among those dwindling few who recalled his once-vast influence, but one whose ideas were regarded as relics of a different age. He did not live quite long enough to witness something remarkable in American politics: the turning of the cycle.

Robert Skidelsky: An impossible crash brought Keynes back to life

[Lord Skidelsky is author of John Maynard Keynes: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman.] When Alistair Darling said that “much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense”, anyone under 40 might well have asked: “And who on earth is Keynes”? When I first started writing about him in the early 1970s, John Maynard Keynes was a name to conjure with - not in the league of Led Zeppelin, to be sure, but certainly familiar to the mythical educated layman. Economic policy was “Keynesi