Roundup: Media's Take

George F. Will: Caesaropapism Rampant

Barack Obama recently said, "I believe in our ability to perfect this nation." Clearly there is something the candidate of "change" will not change—the pattern of extravagant presidential rhetoric. Obama is trying to replace a president who vowed to "rid the world of evil"—and of tyranny, too. But then, rhetorical—and related—excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year's most pertinent and sobe

Mark Mellman: Obama so far is doing ok with white working class voters

[Mark Mellman is a Democratic pollster whose clients include the majority leaders of the House and Senate. He polled for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.] DOES Barack Obama have a problem with the white working class? Despite the ubiquity of the term during this presidential campaign, it’s hard to say what, exactly, “working class” means. If you define class by education, which is polled more consistently than occupation or income, Mr. Obama certainly seems to have trouble w

Robert Kagan: U.S. foreign policy in expansive, idealistic, and militarist mode has done well: defeats of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet communism, for instance

[Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Transatlantic Fellow at The German Marshall Fund. He is the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf).] “The Iraq War will always be linked with the term ‘neoconservative,’” George Packer wrote in his book on the war, and he is probably right. The conventional wisdom today, likely to be the approved version in the history books, is that a small group of neoconservatives seized

Andrei Cherny: A lesson from Berlin for Baghdad

[Andrei Cherny, the co-editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, is the author of The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour.] Nearly three years after the invasion, it was clear that the occupation was failing. Little rebuilding had taken place in a country that had been showered with U.S. bombs. The economy was barely sputtering along. The security situation was growing worse. In the once-thriving capital, death from random violence and at t

Thomas Frank: Welcome to Nixonland

[Mr. Frank is the author of What's the Matter with Kansas.] ... Well, now the main events of the '60s are 40 years behind us, and still we can't shake them. In the last national election, we redebated the Vietnam War. In the one coming up, we will be forced to debate Barack Obama's not-even-tenuous connection to the Weathermen. (We will probably not be asked to judge the poisonous legacy of the Young Americans for Freedom, although McCain adviser Charlie Black was actually a leader

Dick Morris: Hillary is the new Wallace

In its final days, Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign has come to echo George Wallace's 1968 run. Like Clinton, Wallace as a candidate stalked the Northeast exploiting white anger. Like her, he bypassed the nation's more educated and liberal parts to focus squarely on those who felt left behind, rallying animosity against elites. But behind the mask of populism, it was race that fueled Wallace's campaign from the start. And it is race that has brought new life

Scott W. Johnson: The Kennedy-Khrushchev Conference for Dummies

[Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the blog Power Line.] BARACK OBAMA FIRST VOWED to meet unconditionally with the leaders of America's foremost enemies in the YouTube Democratic candidates' debate on July 23, 2007. Since then he has reaffirmed and expanded on the commitment in a variety of contexts, promoting such meetings as a sort of panacea for America's national security challenges. In making these pronouncements, Obama sounds like a precocious colle

Adam Holland: What Obama's Uncle Charlie Saw

[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.] Comments made on Memorial Day by Barack Obama concerning his uncle's role as a liberator of a concentration camp in World War II have attracted considerable attention. Obama told the story of his great-uncle being among the liberators of a death camp he erroneously identified as Auschwitz (read here). Republican blogs (

Walter Shapiro: The end of both Clintonism and its opposite -- Kennedy-style liberalism -- draws closer

The sun-dappled image from August 1997 shimmers in memory. The two great Democratic political dynasties had set sail on carefree waters. Aboard the Mya as the schooner maneuvered its way out of Menemsha Harbor on Martha's Vineyard were the reigning Clintons and the radiant Kennedys. The news photographs, which mesh with my memory, show the president and the ruddy white-haired Massachusetts senator, along with a waving Hillary Clinton and the extended Kennedy clan, including Rep. Patrick Kennedy

Douglas Feith: How Bush Sold the War

[Mr. Feith was under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 until August 2005. This article is adapted from his new memoir, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (HarperCollins).] In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war

Gregory Rodrigue: It's hard to reach a national consensus when so many people are hard partisans

[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist and author who specializes in a variety of contemporary social issues.] As we cloister ourselves in like-minded enclaves, we're less likely to reach national consensus. May 26, 2008 Voter turnout this primary season has been setting records. With interest so high, some analysts are predicting another blockbuster general election in November. But can American democracy survive all this heightened interest in the political process?

Donald Boudreaux: Is misogyny to blame for Clinton's misfortunes?

[Mr. Boudreaux is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University.] Hillary Clinton is now complaining that her candidacy has been harmed by sexism. Interviewed earlier this week by the Washington Post, Sen. Clinton said the polls show that "more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American." This gender bias, she grumbled, "rarely gets reported on." So a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley a

Robert McHenry: Who Can Account for the Rev. Hagee? (Hitler, Jews & the Middle East)

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] I wonder what sort of man the Rev. John Hagee must be (see video overview, produced prior to the news that McCain and Hagee were parting ways). That “Rev.” tells us that he is, as they say, a man of God. On the evidence, he’s a man who thinks in large, even cosmic terms – he explains great historical events in terms of vast plans, and he finds, if not specific prophesies, then at le

Andrew Stephen: Hating Hillary

[Andrew Stephen was appointed US Editor of the New Statesman in 2001, having been its Washington correspondent and weekly columnist since 1998.] History, I suspect, will look back on the past six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes - rather like Prohibition from 1920-33, or McCarthyism some 30 years later. This time it is gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind. It has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - soone

Mort Kondracke: Can GOP Reform to Avoid 'Kennedy Scenario' for 2008?

Everyone in and around American politics is pulling for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on a personal level. But Republicans have to work very hard to avoid the fulfillment of his political dream. In an interview in March, Kennedy talked about the difference that the 1964 Democratic landslide meant for the passage of liberal legislation, specifically Medicare. He clearly was hoping for a similar triumph this year. Kennedy recalled to me how, two years after his arrival in

David Horowitz & Ben Johnson: Party of Defeat

What nation can prevail in a war if half its population thinks the war is unnecessary and unjust, and its commander-in-chief is a liar, and its own government the aggressor? What president can mobilize his nation if his word is

Harvey Wasserman: Can a civil rights/feminist presidential union put John Edwards on the Supreme Court?

As the end game for the Democratic nomination takes shape, the historic union of the feminist and civil rights movements has never been more in evidence. Nor has the next upcoming appointment to the US Supreme Court ever been more pivotal. It's no accident that for the first time in history, we have both an African-American and a female contender. No matter what one may think of the two individuals -- their stands on the issues, their personalities, their "baggage" -- the

Michael Schwartz: The Loss of an Imperial Dream

[Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His analyses of America's Iraq have appeared regularly at Tomdispatch.com, as well as Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. His forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, June 2008) explores how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S

Kelpie Wilson: Why Dems and Republicans Are Afraid of Two Words ... Peak Oil

[Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry.] The pro-growth faction has reacted quickly and scathingly to the idea that there could be limits to growth. In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist with Shell Oil, presented a paper to the American Petroleum Institute that predicted US oil pro

Jeff Biggers: Appalachia's role in the national culture shouldn't be a laughing matter

[Jeff Biggers is author of The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006).] When I saw the clip of the Daily Show's Jon Stewart apeing a misinformed West Virginia voter last week, I had a flashback to a Saturday Night Live"Appalachian ER" skit, which featured rocker Neil Young embroiled in a mess of incest and depravity.How the media loves its hillbillies. Ma