Roundup: Media's Take

David Frum: The Democrats' Ronald Reagan moment

[David Frum is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] Americans yesterday passed the gloomiest Fourth of July in years, if not decades. More than four out of five Americans describe the country as “on the wrong track,” the worst score since polling on this question began in the 1960s. Consumer confidence is reaching historic lows. Only one out of three Americans expects a better life for his or her children. The

Paul Wolfowitz: Democrats v Autocrats

Robert Kagan’s latest book is a short but powerfully written argument about the return of great power conflict and the danger of believing that history is moving towards a world of liberal democracies living at peace with one another. The prospect of “a new era of international convergence” has faded. “History has returned,” he announces, and — however embattled the democracies may be — they “must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them”. Kagan somewhat overstate

Editorial in the Independent: The Church would do well to learn from Elizabeth I

Powerful centrifugal forces are tearing at the body of the global Anglican Communion. Bishops in Africa are still up in arms over the consecration five years ago of the openly homosexual Gene Robinson as a bishop by the American Episcopal church. Many are boycotting this month's Lambeth conference over the perceived failure of the head of the Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to discipline the American church. Instead, these disgruntled bishops attended an alternative gathering of conserv

Ron Briley: McCain and Foreign Policy ... Challenging the Conventional Wisdom

            Retired General Wesley Clark, a candidate for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination, set off somewhat of a political firestorm when he questioned the conventional wisdom of John McCain’s foreign policy expertise by informing CBS reporter Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation, “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”  McCain immediate

Colbert I. King: Two Speeches, Two Truths About America

[Colbert I. King is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post.] Sen. Barack Obama's speech on patriotism this week at the Truman Memorial Building in Independence, Mo., stands in sharp relief to Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July oration before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in 1852. The two men's remarks, touching on loyalty, race and the country's moral foundation, underscore the difference 150 years has made in the life of our nation. Do

Alasdair Soussi: Déjà Vu in Beirut ... Lebanon’s current political crisis is eerily reminiscent of the crisis of 1958

[Alasdair Soussi is a journalist based in the Middle East.] AS HIZB’ALLAH demonstrated its political and military dominance over Lebanon in early May, it’s doubtful that anyone in the Bush Administration seriously even entertained the thought that American military intervention was called for. Although the Lebanese proxy of the Iranian and Syrian arms of the “Axis of Evil” was consolidating its strategic grip on the Land of the Cedars, the United States, heavily committed in Iraq, c

Joe Conason: What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam

[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush."] Nobody has denigrated the service of John McCain or his suffering in captivity as a prisoner of North Vietnam, as much as his supporters wish to pretend that someone did. Nobody has denied that his valor in captivity offers insight into his character. But so far almost nobody has asked the most important question about McCa

Helena Smith: The row over Macedonia's name rumbles on

[Helena Smith is the Guardian's correspondent in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.] Can one of the world's more abstruse diplomatic disputes finally be resolved with the election of a man widely seen as an unyielding Balkan nationalist? If senior foreign ministry officials in Athens are to be believed following the emphatic re-election of Macedonia's Nikola Gruevski, the answer is a resounding yes. The hardliner's victory with a result that has surprised even his

Fareed Zakaria: We Need a Wartime President

George W. Bush is fond of describing himself as a "war president." And he has made many decisions involving soldiers and battle. But does this make the description an appropriate one? For many people the answer is obvious. We're engaged in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, after all. But Bill Clinton initiated hostilities in the Balkans twice, George H.W. Bush invaded Panama and Iraq, and neither president ever described himself as a "war president." For a super

Peter Beinart: The Other Wilsonianism

John McCain has made this much clear: The 2008 election will be about national security. Barack Obama will discuss the economy, where he has an edge. He will even discuss Iraq, where his position enjoys public support. But McCain will broaden the discussion to the larger question of how the two candidates see the world. That was how George W. Bush won reelection in 2004. According to exit polls, voters who identified “Iraq” as their primary issue opposed Bush en masse. But he made up for that by

Thomas Frank: Charlie Black's Cronies

[Mr. Frank is the author of What's the Matter with Kansas.] Doing some research in the Library of Congress recently, an associate of mine came across a curious artifact of the Young Americans for Freedom, the high-spirited conservative group of the Vietnam era. It is a songbook prepared for YAF's 1971 convention, and in its mimeographed pages you will find a lyric poking fun at "Adlai [Stevenson] the bald-headed Com-Symp," and another moaning that, in the Stat

Tad Daley: 40 Years Later, Nuclear States Still Haven’t Kept Promises

[Tad Daley is writing fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.]Try an experiment today. Go into a Starbucks (or better yet, some locally owned alternative), and see if you can chat with 100 people waiting in line. There are always people waiting in line at these places. Tell them that forty years ago today, on July 1, 1968, in Washington, London, and Moscow, world leaders signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly

Barack Obama: Speech on Patriotism

On a spring morning in April of 1775, a simple band of colonists – farmers and merchants, blacksmiths and printers, men and boys – left their homes and families in Lexington and Concord to take up arms against the tyranny of an Empire. The odds against them were long and the risks enormous – for even if they survived the battle, any ultimate failure would bring charges of treason, and death by hanging. And yet they took that chance. They did so not on behalf of a particular tribe or

William McGurn: John McCain's JFK Opportunity

One presidential candidate says our Latin American neighbors are "drifting away" because we do not support our democratic friends. That "our failure to help the people of Latin America to achieve their economic aspirations" is a moral and strategic tragedy. And that we need to confront those who are "exploiting domestic distress and unrest, encouraging growing dislike of the United States, working to impose Communist rule." No, the words are not John Mc

Sam Fulwood III: Why Barack Owes Clarence Thomas

[Sam Fulwood III is a writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and lecturer at Case Western Reserve University.] Lately, I've had the most spirited debates with my students and friends, and I always come away feeling like the loser. I, for argument's sake, draw a straight line between Barack Obama's White House aspirations and the embarrassing spectacle of Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation. As soon as I dare utter "Thomas" in the same breat

Ed Kilgore: Why the sure-to-be blistering GOP attacks on Michelle Obama won't work

[Ed Kilgore is the managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum and blogging site.] In 1828, President John Quincy Adams's reelection campaign reportedly traded on innuendoes that Rachel Jackson had been imperfectly divorced from her first husband. Since her second husband, Andrew Jackson, once killed a man in a duel for the same insult to his wife's honor, Adams was perhaps lucky to lose no more than the presidency to Old Hickory. So, while there are a

Paul Krugman: Another Reagan or another Clinton?

[Paul Krugman is professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and is also a columnist for The New York Times, writing a twice-weekly op-ed for the newspaper since 2000.] It's feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It's also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country's direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton? Current p

Carla Anne Robbins: Thinking the Unthinkable: A World Without Nuclear Weapons

When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev talked at the 1986 Reykjavik summit about giving up all of their nuclear weapons within a decade, it was dismissed as a trick or more frightening proof that the American president was out of touch with strategic realities. The deal fell apart over Mr. Reagan’s refusal to limit testing of a missile defense program that was notional then and is still. In the days after, Mr. Reagan’s advisers denied that he had seriously entertained any such ide

Jon Meacham: How History Informs Our World

[Jon Meacham is the Editor of Newsweek.] History has always been a tactile thing to me, and I like to think that I come by it honestly. I grew up on Missionary Ridge, a Civil War battlefield where you could still find Minié balls in the ground and in trees more than a century after Union troops broke the Confederate line in the autumn of 1863. As a boy, I played World War II, wearing my grandfather's old gunnery-officer Navy helmet from the Pacific. Years later, a secretary to Winst

Michael Barone: Why Veeps Now Matter

"Not Exactly a Crime" is the title of a book on America's vice presidents published in 1972 -- a year before Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for actually committing a crime. The office of vice president has long been the butt of jokes -- you know the punch lines -- but as we await Barack Obama's and John McCain's choices for vice president, we do so with the knowledge that vice presidents in the last five administrations have been important officers of gove