Roundup: Media's Take

Deepak Tripathi: On the Race for the White House

[Deepak Tripathi, a former BBC journalist, is an author and a researcher. His website is http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at DandATripathi@gmail.com.] The season of party conventions will soon be over and America is poised for two months of hard campaigning to elect the next president. There will be debates between Barack Obama and John McCain and between their ru

Christopher Meyer: A return to 1815 is the way forward for Europe

[Sir Christopher Meyer was Ambassador to Washington, 1997-2003.] Those who think that there is such a thing as progress in international affairs - that we are capable of learning the lessons of history - have been brutally disabused by the Georgian crisis. You can have all the rules you like to discipline international behaviour; but they are not worth the paper they are written on if they run against fierce nationalisms and ethnic passion. Ethnic and nationalist rival

Paul Rogat Loeb: The Rovian Politics of Choosing Sarah Palin

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly, email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe p

William Safire: Return of the phrase from 'Cold War I'

[William Safire winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, joined The New York Times in 1973 as a political columnist.] President Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi "to rally the free world in the defense of a free Georgia." Senator John McCain used the same phrase to an audience of veterans: Young democracies under attack "should be able to count on the free world for support and solidarity." Suddenly

Libby Purves: Why did Alistair Darling choose 1948?

[Libby Purves worked for some years for BBC Radio 4, as a reporter and a presenter on the Today programme and, since 1983, has presented Midweek.] Why did he pick on 1948? When the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in a curiously likeable interview, bluntly said that the economic downturn was “arguably the worst in 60 years”, why did he choose 60? He could have opted for 30, a far more common trope these days, and whipped us back to the 1970s Winter of Discontent. If he really wanted to

Daniel Finkelstein: Ten great Republican convention moments

[Daniel Finkelstein is Chief Leader Writer of The Times and writes a weekly column.] Ten great Republican convention moments Now that the Democrats are done, the Republicans are gearing up for their Minnesota moment. Here are ten of the most memorable Republican conventions. 1992 Republican Convention, Houston This convention kicked off a war, the culture war to be precise. Pat Buchanan's doctrinaire keynote address reverberated a

Richard Reeves: Who is Prepared to be President? Nobody

Is Barack Obama prepared to be president? No. Neither is John McCain. I have written about 12 pounds of books on the presidency over the past 22 years, three long studies that focused on the day-to-day work of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. This is the most important thing I learned in doing that, a paragraph at the end of the introduction to "President Kennedy: Profile of Power": "John F. Kennedy was one of only 42 men who truly knew

Fareed Zakaria: The Georgia attack will go down not as the dawn of a new era of Russian power but as a major strategic blunder

... The attack on Georgia will go down not as the dawn of a new era of Russian power but as a major strategic blunder. Look at what has happened. Russia has scared its neighboring states witless, driving them firmly into the arms of the West. For almost two years, Poland had been dragging its feet on the American proposal to deploy missile interceptors in that country as part of a continent wide shield (a few months ago public support for the shield varied between 15 and 25 percent). Within days

Dan Senor: Biden Wanted to Break Up Iraq

[Mr. Senor is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a founder of Rosemont Capital. He served as a senior adviser to the Coalition in Iraq and was based in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.] At the Democratic convention, Joe Biden had the opportunity to showcase his foreign policy experience. Yet his principal and most recent foreign policy initiative -- his plan for the soft partition of Iraq -- was glaringly absent from his acceptance speech. When Barack Obama na

John Fund: Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire

... Walking the rows of media outlets at the Denver convention, I had no trouble finding reporters who complained the campaign was secretive and evasive. Ben Smith of Politico.com has written about Team Obama's "pattern of rarely volunteering information or documents, even when relatively innocuous." Politico asked months ago if Mr. Obama had ever written anything for the Harvard Law Review as a student. The Obama campaign responded narrowly, with a Clintonesque statement that "as

Tom Baldwin: History? It’s enough to make you cry your eyelashes off

[Tom Baldwin is a Times journalist.] Whenever the Denver Broncos get a touchdown, a blonde woman dressed as a cowgirl charges across the pitch astride a white horse waving her arms furiously in celebration. It is doubtful, however, that their mile-high Invesco Field stadium has ever witnessed a spectacle or sent such a roar into the Rocky Mountain night sky as that which greeted Barack Obama. It was a pulsing, flag-waving, screaming, weeping, beachball-tossing, camera-

James Castagnera: Our GDP Suggests Yankee Ingenuity Is Alive and Well

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University. His novels and columns are available here.] Recently I had a couple of beers on a Friday afternoon with an old college chum, who now owns and operates a small, high-tech manufacturing company in Exton (PA). Bill made two intriguing comments. The first was an assertion: “If you’re not making money as a manufacturer in this country, it’s because you’re dumb.” The second was:

John B. Judis: Avoiding A Long, Disappointing Fall

The Barack Obama campaign has been floundering. If he had a lead in the polls in late June--and the summer polls are notoriously fickly--he clearly lost it by the convention's beginning. And so far, the convention--dominated, ironically, by the Clintons--has not particularly helped. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden performed quite well last night, but if Obama fails to deliver a spellbinding oration tonight, the Democrats could be in for a long and disappointing fall. Why is Obama in trou

Dick Morris: A strategic opening for McCain

Many political campaigns run against the wrong candidate. The opportunity to pick on a vulnerable target is so tempting that they are lured into attacking someone who isn’t running. In 1992, the Republicans unleashed their convention barrage at Hillary and left Bill unscathed. In 1996, Dole still ran against Clinton the liberal and ignored the changes in his political positioning. Campaigns go after the flaming red cape, so glittering a target, and leave the matador alone. That’s wh

Ian Breen: Notes on Past Conventions

Since their inception in 1832, national political conventions have played an important but ever-evolving role in presidential elections. Over the years, changes in nominating procedures have lessened the political power of conventions, even as new broadcast technologies have increased their impact on voters. Four Atlantic articles spanning nearly one hundred years examine this changing role and lend perspective to the conventions taking place this election cycle. In"Presidential Nominatio

Peter Beinart: Dems need to remain true to Wilsonianism in international affairs

... To revive the collective security tradition, Democrats must first conquer a fear: not of military adversaries overseas, but of political adversaries here at home. For several generations now, liberals have lived in terror of being labeled “soft” on national security. The policymakers of the early Cold War—men like Dean Acheson, Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson—saw colleagues and friends destroyed during the McCarthy years, and the experience haunted them to their graves.

Juan Williams: Uncles to the New China ... George Herbert Walker Bush and Henry Kissinger

Beijing, August 9 – Henry Kissinger is standing in the entry to the newly rebuilt Jianfu Palace inside the Forbidden City, once home to the Chinese emperor. The 85-year-old gets a greeting worthy of an emperor from Chinese political and business leaders. To Kissinger's right is another American imperial presence during these Olympics: 84-year-old former U.S. President George H. W. Bush. The senior Bush was the first U.S. liaison to China after Kissinger and President Nixon opened th

Michael Nelson: If Obama loses, is racism to blame?

[Michael Nelson, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.] A conventional wisdom is forming to the effect that if Barack Obama loses the presidential election in November, white racism will be the cause. The reasoning runs as follows: The combination of economic anxiety, the unpopular war in Iraq, George W. Bush’s low approval

Victor Navasky: Making History at the Convention

[Victor Navasky was the magazine's editor from 1978 to 1995 and publisher and editorial director from 1995 to 2005.] Yesterday, last night and this morning it was all about Hillary, and she didn't let her supporters or her party down. Go (or, depending on where you stand, Welcome Back) Hillary! But while all eyes are on the podium, the election and the direction (of the country) may be determined by events and ideas under consideration outside the formal arena.

David R. Stokes: Obama’s Very Un-JFK Moment

[Mr. Stokes is the senior pastor of Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, VA.] If Barack Obama winds up losing the election this November, most likely a significant portion of the blame will affix to his selection of a running mate. The issue will not have much of anything to do with Senator Joe Biden’s personality or performance. It will simply be a case of “what might have been” if Hillary Rodham Clinton had been placed on the ticket. In fact, the man who would be John F. Kennedy, who h