Roundup: Media's Take

Paul McHugh: How the emptying of state-run mental hospitals produced a social disaster

[Dr. McHugh is a University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. His book "Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Memory, Meaning, and Mind" will be published in October.] There are times and situations that call for prophets. Not fortunetellers or soothsayers, but biblical prophets like Amos or Jeremiah who furiously proclaim the old truths, puncture our pretensions and predict from current tribulations worse to come if what lies de

Susan Faludi: Think the Gender War Is Over? Think Again

[Susan Faludi is the author of “Backlash,” “Stiffed” and “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.”] FOR months, our political punditry foresaw one, and only one, prospective gender contest looming in the general election: between the first serious female presidential candidate and the Republican male “warrior.” But those who were dreading a plebiscite on sexual politics shouldn’t celebrate just yet. Hillary Clinton may be out of the race, but a Barack Obama versus J

David Frum: Do veeps matter? Who should McCain pick?

Some years ago, C-SPAN's Brian Lamb played a dirty trick on a journalist friend of mine. My friend was appearing on C-SPAN's"Washington Journal" to discuss recent events. If I remember right, my friend was expanding on the future of East Timor when Lamb abruptly shifted the conversation. It was, Lamb announced,"vice-presidents week," at C-SPAN: surely one of the network's most successful ratings stunts--and, more importantly, an opportunity for Lamb to deploy his notorious deadpan humor. "

Jim Castagnera: The Ghost of George “Divine Right” Baer Still Insults Workers

[Jim Castagnera, who hails from a small town in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region, is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University. His columns and fiction are available at www.lulu.com.] In 1902 in the hard-coal counties of central-eastern Pennsylvania, the miners of John Mitchell’s UMW of A launched what is remembered as “The Great Strike.” As the strike, begun in May, dragged through the summer, President Theodore Roosevelt c

Naomi Klein: Why the Right Loves Disasters

[Naomi Klein is the author of Shock Doctrine.] Moody's, the credit-rating agency, claims the key to solving the United States' economic woes is slashing spending on Social Security. The National Association of Manufacturers says the fix is for the federal government to adopt the organization's wish-list of new tax cuts. For Investor's Business Daily, it is oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,"perhaps the most important stimulus of all." But of all the cyni

James Ridgeway: Seeing Bobby Kennedy in Barack Obama

It would be easy to make too much of the similarities between Robert F. Kennedy, who died on the night when the Democratic presidential nomination came within his grasp, 40 years ago today, and Barack Obama, who has just firmly taken hold of it. The times are different, and so are the men. But then again. Hope, like greatness, is a thing some men have thrust upon them. They emerge as repositories for the finer yearnings of a confused and bitter nation, a mirror in which we see ourse

Michael Waldman: Flunk the Electoral College: Getting Rid of the Exploding Cigar of American Politics

[Michael Waldman is the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a think tank and advocacy organization focusing on democracy. He was the chief speech writer for President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1999.] The Electoral College is an affront to basic democracy, warping competition and subverting political equality -- even when it works. It was the end of the long, sweltering summer at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Delega

Jim Downs: History's part in the Democratic nomination

[Jim Downs is Assistant Professor of History, Connecticut College.] In a crowded black church in Southern California in February 2008, President Bill Clinton announced, ‘I waited my whole life to vote for an African American for president. I waited my whole life to vote for a woman for president. And sometimes I look up at sky and say God you’re playing with my mind again.’ God may not be playing a trick on Clinton’s mind, but history seems to be. Throughout the nineteenth a

Johann Hari: If you really want to understand what this race is about, look at the two candidates' fathers

The Hillary-dam has finally burst, so now oceans of newsprint are being spilled over the long-delayed Republican vs. Democrat showdown. But as we simplistically blather about the candidates' race and age – it's hip vs hip operation, folks – we seem to be ignoring the best guide we have to John McCain and Barack Obama's hearts. Both men have written strange, searching books about their fathers. It is in their pages that we can find the clearest clues to their potential presidencies.

Leon Wieseltier: Let The Just Times Roll! A Pause To Appreciate The Marvelousness Of A Black Presidential Nominee

Whether or not this is the Lord's doing, it is certainly marvelous in our eyes. An African American is the Democratic candidate for president of the United States. The United States! If ever there was an occasion for soaring language, this is it; but the man of the hour has somewhat ruined soaring language. One is left mainly with a gulp, and a tear, and an unfamiliar sensation of the sweetness of history. When is history sweet? Truly this is an American benediction. So hyperbole may be forgiven

William McGurn: Obama, Religion and the Public Square

Barack Obama is no John Kennedy. And that may turn out to be a good thing. At least with regard to reversing one of the unintended consequences of Camelot: the idea that religious voices have no place on the public square. At first blush, Sen. Obama may appear to be an odd choice to lead such a reversal. Until very recently, he worshipped at a church whose preachers apparently regard America as something to be abhorred – and have a distressing penchant for being filmed while they do

Michael Lind: Relax, liberals. You've already won

... For 40 years, the radical right tried to destroy the domestic and international order that American liberals created in the central decades of the 20th century. The people who are known today as "conservatives" are better described as "counterrevolutionaries." The goal of Barry Goldwater and the intellectuals clustered around William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review was not a slightly more conservative version of the New Deal or the U.N. system. They were reactionary radi

Jim Castagnera: Is Barack Obama the African-American Al Smith or JFK?

[Jim Castagnera, formerly of Jim Thorpe, is the Associate Provost and Associate Legal Counsel at Rider University. His books are available at www.lulu.com.] My stomach is more distended than usual. I’ve just eaten a big plate full of crow. In January 2007 in this space I predicted that Barack Obama was a mere flash in the pan. As I write this, some 17 months hence, he is the Democratic nominee-apparent. As such, he is for African-Americans what either Al Smith or John Kennedy

Kyle-Anne Shiver: Obama, the Money Wizard: Old Left rhetoric meets New Media networking

[Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.] Most of us are wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits. We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims, and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the name of power, expedience, greed, or intolerance. — Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 8. During this campaign season, Barack Obama has raised such unprecedented mountains of cash that he ha

Jeff Greenfield: The Curse of the Third Term ... Does it spell doom for John McCain? Nope.

Among the burdens Sen. John McCain carries is this apparently stern lesson of history: Americans don't like to hand the White House to the outgoing president's political party. In the post-FDR era, they have done so only once, in 1988, when George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan. On three other occasions—1960, 1968, and 2000—a party's attempt to succeed a two-term president with a third-term successor failed. (And also in 1952, Adlai Stevenson lost his bid for a sixth Democratic term.)

Robert McHenry: Who Wants to be Vice President? Hands, Please!

How hard would you try to attain a prize that had been adjudged by a knowledgeable critic as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”? (The quote is more often seen in its bowdlerized version, with “spit” as the fluid in point.) He was John Nance Garner, a Texas legislator fondly known as Cactus Jack Garner – thirty years in the House of Representatives and then eight as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president. It was that latter office to which he referred, and he has not often been contradicted

Michael Ledeen: Iran and the Problem of Evil

[Mr. Ledeen, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "The Iranian Time Bomb" (St. Martin's Press, 2007).] Ever since World War II, we have been driven by a passionate desire to understand how mass genocide, terror states and global war came about – and how we can prevent them in the future. Above all, we have sought answers to several basic questions: Why did the West fail to see the coming of the catastrophe?

James Ridgeway: Seeing Bobby Kennedy in Barack Obama

[James Ridgeway is Mother Jones' senior Washington correspondent.] It would be easy to make too much of the similarities between Robert F. Kennedy, who died on the night when the Democratic presidential nomination came within his grasp, 40 years ago today, and Barack Obama, who has just firmly taken hold of it. The times are different, and so are the men. But then again. Hope, like greatness, is a thing some men have thrust upon them. They emerge as repositories for t

Harold Meyerson: Patching Up the Democrats

[Harold Meyerson is executive editor of The American Prospect and a columnist for the Washington Post.] Forty years ago tonight, I was one of a number of very young staffers on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign crammed into a Los Angeles hotel room, where we watched on television as Robert Kennedy, a few miles down Wilshire Boulevard at the Ambassador Hotel, claimed victory in the California primary. A few minutes later, the networks reported that Kennedy had been shot. The re

RJ Eskow: Barack and Bobby: Compare and Contrast; and, Obama-Clinton as Lennon-McCartney circa 1970

[RJ Eskow is a writer, consultant, and (occasional) songwriter/musician. He has worked in public policy, communications, IT, and finance, domestically and in over 20 foreign countries.] It was moving to read Tom Hayden's reflections on Bobby Kennedy's candidacy of 1968, his own role in it, and the ways in which Obama's campaign has reconnected him with the spirit of those times. Yet I find it equally moving to consider the ways in which Obama and RFK are different, the ways in which