Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Schaffer: Obama is Lincoln? No, Reagan. No, ...

[Michael Schaffer is working on a book about the pet industry.] There's a challenge in writing about the overuse of analogy in contemporary political journalism: There's no perfect analogy for the device. Are analogies the new adjectives? (It's hard to describe anything without them.) Are they the office-seeker's version of the Social Security number? (Without one, it's hard to prove you exist.) Are they the narratives of our time? (Control it, and you control the campaign). Whateve

Richard Allen: Obama's Experience Doesn't Match Up

[Mr. Allen, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, was Richard Nixon's foreign policy coordinator in 1968, Ronald Reagan's chief foreign policy adviser from 1977 to 1980, and Reagan's first national security adviser from 1981 to 1982.] ... How does Mr. Obama's foreign policy résumé compare with the preparation of past presidential candidates? Richard Nixon gathered vast international experience in extensive travels as vice president under Dwight D.

Andrew Keen: The New Techno-Historical Determinism

[The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that “every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen.” Andrew is indeed the leading contemporary critic of citizen media. His controversial The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture.] My old sparring partner Clay Shirky is at it again. Responding on the Britannica website to

Ilan Goldenberg: McCain's fatal misunderstanding of the Iraq War is not a gaffe

John McCain made a mistake this evening, which as far as I'm concerned, disqualifies him from being president.  It is so appalling and so factually wrong that I'm actually sitting here wondering who McCain's advisers are.  This isn't some gaffe where he talks about the Iraq-Pakistan border.  It's a real misunderstanding of what has happened in Iraq over the past year.  It is even more disturbing because according to John McCain, Iraq is the central front in the "war o

Alan Abramowitz: Obama's betting everything on voter mobilization. Will it work?

[Alan I. Abramowitz is a professor of political science at Emory University.] ... The Obama campaign is apparently convinced that a well-funded voter mobilization campaign can dramatically increase turnout among these pro-Obama demographics and potentially alter the outcome of the election in states including Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, and even Georgia, where such groups make up a large proportion of the population and an even larger proportion of non-voters. But how realis

John Arquilla: War Is More Than Just a Numbers Game ... Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan

[John Arquilla is a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he has taught in the special operations curriculum since 1993.] If you want to understand the American way of war, just look at a newspaper. Not the first section with all the world news. Go instead to the sports section, where you’ll find everything about every sport explained in a blizzard of statistics. Winning and losing are reckoned in things like numbers of service aces, yards per carry,

Toby Harnden: Top 25 political speeches of all time

[Journalist and author Toby Harnden is the Washington Bureau Chief of The Sunday Telegraph of London.] The bar is high because, as even his detractors concede, Mr Obama is a remarkable orator. He first shot to prominence when he moved many at the 2004 Democratic convention to tears. He announced he would run for president last year with a beautifully-crafted address in Abraham Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois. A pivotal moment of

Martin Kettle: What Hadrian can teach Obama

[Martin Kettle writes for the Guardian on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.] As you know, senator, there are two main objects of your day in London. One is to gladhand some of those big campaign donors who are allowed to live in the UK tax-free and so still have serious money in the bank to offer you. The second, of course, is to be seen by Americans in a setting that tells them you are already a leader on the world stage. Un

Viveca Novak: Do veeps matter in winning elections?

(Click on the SOURCE link to view a chart accompanying this article) Q.: Historically, have vice presidential candidates really helped win states in the general election? A: Presidential nominees don't pick their running mates based on this strategy as often as one might think. Even when they do, the results are decidedly mixed. It's common every four years to hear speculation that a candidate's choice of a certain running mate could put the running mate'

Shelby Steele: Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama

A few weeks ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson made something of a fool of himself. There he was -- a historical figure in his own right -- threatening the castration of Barack Obama. It was sad to see. If I have often criticized Mr. Jackson, I have also, reservedly, admired him. He is a late 20th century outcropping of a profoundly American archetype: the self-invented man who comes from nothing and, out of sheer force of personality, imposes himself on the American consciousness. If he n

Maxim Shevchenko: Linking Communism With Nazism

[Maxim Shevchenko hosts the political talk show "Sudite Sami" on Channel One.] Lithuania is the latest country to conduct a hysterical campaign that equates Soviet symbols with Nazism. The bill, approved by the Lithuanian parliament last month, would prohibit public displays of Soviet symbols, including the Soviet flag, hammer and sickle, military uniforms and the five-pointed star -- in the same spirit that the country prohibits the Nazi swastika. Lithuanian politicians a

Editorial in Spiegel Online: Is Obama Speech Site Contaminated by Nazi Past?

Finally, it's official. Barack Obama, when he arrives in Berlin on July 24, will hold his speech at the Siegessäule monument in the heart of the city, according to an announcement made by his campaign office in Chicago on Sunday. In his speech, he will speak about the "historic US-German partnership" and about the importance of strengthening trans-Atlantic relations, according to his campaign team. The exact location of Obama's speech (more...) had become a matter of inten

Editorial in the Independent: Karadzic and the largest mass murder in Europe since WWII

The massacre of around 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995 stands out as the worst carnage of the Bosnian war and the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. The events in the Bosnian town, classed as genocide by the International Court of Justice and the UN War Crimes Tribunal, feature in the 15 counts faced by Radovan Karadzic of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities committed between 1992 and 1996. Even now, bodies of t

Brzezinski wary of repeating Soviet experience

[Daniel Dombey is the FT’s European Diplomatic Correspondent.] Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser and prominent supporter of Barack Obama, has warned the Democratic presidential candidate that he risks repeating the defeat suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Mr Obama has called for up to 10,000 more US troops to be deployed in the country, where the USSR once sent tens of thousands of soldiers only to suffer cataclysmic military failur

Spengler: Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution?

["Spengler" is the pseudonym of a columnist who writes for Asia Times.] ... A perfect storm of enmity has come down on the beleaguered Turkish secularists, who find themselves without friends. That is a tragedy whose consequences will spill over Turkey's borders, for the secular model established by Kemal Ataturk after World War I was the Muslim world's best hope of adapting to modernity. Many years of misbehavior by Turkey's army and security services, the core institutio

Choe Sang-hun: Korean War survivors tell of carnage inflicted by U.S.

[Choe Sang-hun is a South Korean correspondent for the International Herald Tribune.] When U.S. troops stormed this island more than half a century ago, it was a hive of Communist trenches and pillboxes. Now it's a park where children play and retirees stroll along a tree-shaded esplanade. From a hilltop across a narrow channel, General Douglas MacArthur, memorialized in bronze, gazes at the beaches at Incheon where his troops splashed ashore in September 1950, changing

Daniel Gross: Seeing Shades of the 1930s

[Daniel Gross is one of the most widely read financial and economic writers working today. He is a senior editor at Newsweek, where he writes the "Contrary Indicator" column. He writes the twice-weekly "Moneybox" column for Slate, which also appears on Newsweek.com.] On Tuesday and Wednesday, Federal reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the epic financial meltdown of the Great Depression, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a survivor of more recent Wall

Clive Crook: History suggests Mr McCain is toast

[Clive Crook, chief Washington affairs commentator for the Financial Times, blogs about politics and economics.] One cannot help but be struck by the current disconnection in US presidential politics between, on one hand, the excitement and enthusiasm that attend Barack Obama’s candidacy and, on the other, the tightness of the race according to recent polls. The first suggests a sweeping victory for the Democrat in November, the second a close election and the distinct possibility o

Michael Barone: Ghosts of 1976 in Today's Campaign

Looking back over the last 40 years, the presidential campaign that most closely resembles this year's is the contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Republicans were the incumbent presidential party that year, as they are now, but the Democrats had a big advantage in party identification -- on the order of 49 percent to 26 percent then, far more than today. The Republican president who had been elected and re-elected in the last two campaigns, Richard Nixon, had d

Here we go again . . . my, my, how can we resist the lure of the 70s?

[Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times.] I lived though the 1970s once already. Do I really have to go through it all again? Suddenly, almost overnight, we have slipped back three decades: a plunging economy, a tottering Labour government, flares, Leonard Cohen singing miserably, football teams failing to qualify for international tournaments, Doctor Who. . . It is like being stuck in some extended version ofLife on Mars. Everyone