Roundup: Media's Take

Edward McClelland: Who is the real John McCain?

Twenty or 30 years from now, John McCain will occupy the same historical niche as John Kerry, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Wendell Willkie, in my opinion: a decent guy who never made it to the White House. McCain has run for the presidency twice, as two completely different candidates. His campaigns and his image have been shaped by the nasty partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century, an era that may be remembered as the Late Culture Wars. McCain has never seemed comfort

Myrna Blyth: McCain, unfortunately, is hurting himself by citing history

[Myrna Blyth, long-time editor of Ladies Home Journal and founding editor of More, is author of Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness — and Liberalism — to the Women of America. Blyth is also an NRO contributor.] I was touched when John McCain during the debate on Friday recalled the two letters that Dwight David Eisenhower wrote on the eve of D-Day. I liked it when he mentioned George Schultz and called him. “a great Secretary of State.” And, of course, when he

Richard O'Mara: The evolution of the American dream

[Richard O'Mara worked for 34 years as an editorial writer, foreign correspondent, and foreign editor of the Baltimore Sun.] ... Take my barber, for instance. She's a smart lady, independent, with her own business: She's been around. When I put the question to her, "What's the American dream?" she responded immediately: "Pfaat!!" Or something that sounded like that.... ... "Many social critics would argue that what millions of Ameri

Jacob Heilbrunn: Worse Than Hoover

[Jacob Heilbrunn is the author of the newly released, They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons, and a senior editor at the National Interest.] So the verdict is in. The House's failure to pass the bailout bill means that George W. Bush's record will not be as bad as Herbert Hoover's. It will be worse. When Hoover entered office, he called a meeting of economists and business leaders to discuss how the country should best deal with prosperity. Then came October

Jonathan Alter: McCain's answer to the charge he's impulsive: so was Teddy Roosevelt, and look how he turned out

John McCain wants us to think he's a man of character when he's actually just acharacter. There's a big difference between the two. "Character" connotes moral courage and fortitude, which McCain once possessed but now seems to have misplaced. By contrast, "a character" is merely a person with an instinct for eccentric self-drama that can be amusing or disturbing depending on the circumstances. Neither the moral preening nor the impulsive zigzagging turned up in M

Katrina vanden Heuvel & Eric Schlosser: America Needs a New New Deal

[Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher of The Nation. Eric Schlosser is the author of the bestseller Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal and Reefer Madness.] The Bush administration has proposed the most expensive government spending plan in American history, allocating as much as $700 billion to a Wall Street bailout. The proposal was attacked by members of both parties, who immediately began negotiations to find an alternative. The Bush plan was not on

Editorial in Deutsche Welle: Panel Calls for End to Nostalgia About East Germany

Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a growing number of people are romanticising about what daily life was like in the former communist East Germany. "Ostalgia," a pun combing "nostalgia and "Ost" (East), is on the rise and numerous businesses and individuals are cashing in on the trend. Today, you can have your picture taken with a Soviet soldier look-alike at the former Checkpoint Charlie crossing in Berlin or rent a room in a

Tim Jones: Debate made, changed history

Much of what you've come to expect — and loathe — from politics was born 48 years ago today, under the hot glare of Klieg lights in a downtown Chicago TV studio. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon became the first presidential nominees to appear jointly on live television, in what was billed as a debate. An estimated 70 million Americans — roughly 40 percent of the population — tuned in to witness what turned out to be a prime time event that married politics and television.

Samuel Brittan: Make the world safe from crusaders

The two books that most influenced me as a student were not by economists. One was by the US diplomat turned historian, George Kennan, entitled The Realities of American Foreign Policy. The other was by the Cambridge professor of history, Herbert Butterfield, entitled Christianity, Diplomacy and War. They appeared in the 1950s, about the time that a hawkish US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, used to talk about “rolling back the tide of communism”. Kennan’s target was what he

James Taranto: McCain's gambit to change debate rules

John McCain's campaign on Wednesday made two drastic departures from the rules that have traditionally governed presidential campaigns. The first is the one everyone has been talking about: his decision to call tonight's debate with Barack Obama into question. McCain announced this morning that he will attend the debate; Politico has a report and McCain's statement. But even the threat of nonparticipation was highly unusual. In every campaign since 1984, once the campaigns have negotiated the te

James Taranto: Is the "Wilder effect" the result of pro-black bias?

Barack Obama's presidential campaign has prompted a lot of talk about the "Bradley effect," a k a the "Wilder effect"--the supposed tendency of opinion polls to overestimate support for black candidates. The effect is named for Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder, the Democratic nominees for governor of California in 1982 and Virginia in 1989, respectively. Both men were black; their Republican opponents, George Deukmejian and Marshall Coleman, were white. Both seemed to be doing

Jim Castagnera: The Importance of Character

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. A collection of his columns is available at www.lulu.com.] I have expressed more than once in this space my reluctance to vote for Barack Obama, because of his inexperience. John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate complicates the choice for me, since McCain, age 72 and a cancer survivor, might not make it through even a first term. The carpi

Eugene Jarecki: Lessons of the Fall ... Ike's In, Reagan's Out

[Eugene Jarecki is an award-winning dramatic and documentary filmmaker whose most recent film Why We Fight won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and the 2006 Peabody Award, as well as the Adolf Grimme Prize, Germany’s highest television honor.] To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But I can't help seeing this moment of combined military and financial crisis as a validation of Dwight D. Eisenhower and a repudiation of Ronald Reagan. Eisen

Leon Wieseltier: The False Correlation Between A Moral Campaign And A Moral Presidency

One of America's quadrennial rituals is liberal shock. Again the Democrats are surprised by the brutality of the Republicans. They are lying. Yes, they are. They want very much to win. So should we lie, too? "We" already have. (John McCain did not say that America should stay in Iraq for a hundred years.) The Democrats believe that, by running roughly, "we" become like "them. " More grandly, the objection is that the moral character of a campaign is a premonition of

Philip Johnston: Is it time to scrap the Act of Settlement?

[Philip Johnston has been with the Daily Telegraph for 20 years. He is currently assistant editor and leader writer and was previously home affairs editor and chief political correspondent.] Gordon Brown is reportedly preparing legislation to repeal the Act of Settlement during the fourth term of a Labour government. The give away as to the likelihood of this happening is at the end of the sentence: the prospect of Labour winning a fourth term is about as great as the return of the

Geoffrey Robertson: Constitutionally flawed

[Geoffrey Robertson QC is the author of Media Law and The Justice Game.] The government's plans to update the monarchy are welcome so far as they go, but they do not go very far. Removing the sex and religious discrimination embedded in the British constitution – the 1701 Act of Settlement – is long overdue. But the anomaly remains: why should an important public office, that of head of state, be filled, not on merit or by public election, but exclusively by the descendants of a 17t

Robert J. Samuelson: Is Paulson the New Nixon?

... Contrary to much commentary, Paulson's plan would not be the largest government intervention in the private economy since World War II. That distinction still belongs to Richard Nixon's imposition of wage and price controls in August 1971. True, Paulson would socialize unprecedented amounts of private debt, but Nixon asserted control over the entire economy. What's fascinating are the possible parallels between the two episodes, starting with a shared irony: Both came from administrations co

Mackubin Thomas Owens: Our Generals Almost Cost Us Iraq

[Mr. Owens is a professor at the Naval War College and editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.] The dominant media storyline about the Iraq war holds that the decisions about how to conduct it pitted ignorant civilians -- especially the president and secretary of defense -- against the uniformed military, whose wise and sober advice was cavalierly ignored. The Bush administration's cardinal sin was interference in predominantly military affairs, starti

James Grant: Since 1971, nothing has stood behind the American dollar and now foreigners are changing their mind about its value

[James Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is the author of the forthcoming “Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond.”] ... The dollar emerged at the center of the monetary system that took its name from the 1944 convention in Bretton Woods, N.H. The American currency alone was made exchangeable into gold. The other currencies, when they got their peacetime legs back under them, were made exchangeable into the dollar. All was well for a ti

Stanley Kurtz: Obama and Ayers

[Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.] Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists. The CAC was the brainchild of Bill