Roundup: Media's Take

Jeff Greenfield: How to recover from a big loss in the early primaries

OK, Hillary won tonight. Oh, waiter, two orders of crow, please. This is what happens when you ignore your own advice to let the people vote first. In late November 1950, U.S. Marines at Chosin Reservoir in North Korea fell under withering assault by a massive force of 18 divisions of the Chinese army, which had crossed the Yalu River into North Korea despite Gen. Douglas MacArthur's absolute assertion that American forces could conquer the North without fear of a Chinese response.

Ellis Cose: An Obama-Carter Reality Check

For months people have been asking whether Barack Obama's race made him unelectable. In Iowa, he put an entirely different question on the table: are Americans ready to vote for idealism over hard-edged realism, for hope over experience? By framing his candidacy in such a way, he makes talk of racial limits, or racial voting, almost irrelevant—and makes a virtue of his biggest supposed weakness, his inexperience in actual governing. The question, of course, is whether that framing can deliver hi

Ray McGovern: Creeping Fascism ... From Nazi Germany to Post 9/11 America

[Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. A former Army officer and CIA analyst, he worked in Germany for five years; he is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.] "There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater ... Perhaps the only comparably od

Carl Byker: The first 'imperial president': Jackson

[Carl Byker is the producer of the PBS documentary Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency, which debuts on public television stations nationwide tonight.] Secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping, sweeping claims of executive privilege. They have all been features of the Bush administration, and they are also hallmarks of what some call an "imperial presidency." The debate over just what powers a president can legitimately use has become so heated recently that some

Noah Feldman: What is it about Mormonism?

[Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He writes frequently on religion and public life.]Our post-denominational age should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president, or at least the Republican nominee. Mormons share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of the evangelicals who wield disproportionate influence in primary elections. Mormons also embody, in their efficient organizational style, the managerial competence that the party’s pro-business wing considers attractive. For the last half-century, Mormons have been so committed to the Republican Party that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints once felt the need to clarify that Republican affiliation is not an actual condition of church membership.

Kerry Howley: It Takes a Family (to Break a Glass Ceiling)

[Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason magazine.] SOME women, even progressive ones, are surely celebrating Hillary Clinton’s third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Those of us who think 43 male presidents in a row is quite enough, thank you, still sometimes question whether a woman whose greatest political move was her marriage deserves to be the first woman in the White House. But while there are plenty of reasons not to vote for Mrs. Clinton (as an antiwar libe

Max Boot: The Mideast is no aberration. Just ask the Scots.

[Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World" (Gotham, 2006).] President Bush will travel to the Middle East this week, where he will become the latest U.S. president, going back to the 1940s, to make a major push to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It is hard to see what in the current situation--with the Gaza Strip in the hands of a rabidly anti-Israel

Lawrence B. Lindsey: What We Want in a President

[Mr. Lindsey is author of "What a President Should Know . . .. but Most Learn Too Late," which will be published by Rowman & Littlefield this month.] In the next six weeks Americans are going to pick the two finalists in the long job search for the most important CEO position on the planet. As someone who has served in three White Houses and been a Federal Reserve governor during a fourth, I have become a firm believer that the character traits someone brings to the jo

Amartya Sen: India, Britain, and the wrong lessons

[Amartya Kumar is an Indian economist, philosopher, and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998.] As I entered secondary school in the mid-1940s in what was still British India, I remember thinking that, despite our irritation with the British, it was rather agreeable that the favorite military music of the British Army was "Beating the Retreat." There was little sign in 1944 that the British were about to evacuate the

Amity Shlaes: The candidates keep touting Depression-style public works programs. Why?

[Ms. Shlaes is author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins, 2007).] Is a public-sector job really as good as a job created in the private sector? I've been wondering about this a lot lately, in part because I just finished a book about the period of the first great American experiment in public job creation, the New Deal. Critics have written that I failed to appreciate the value of New Deal emergency jobs. But the quality of governm

Marty Kaplan: Political predictions about the Iowa caucuses are bull

.... Political predictions are undeniably fun and profitable. So are fortune cookies, clairvoyants and horoscopes. The reading of tea leaves, entrails and crystal balls has traditionally meant power, money and entertainment. Plus, it's only natural to be curious about how the story turns out. From the time our prehistoric forebears spun tales around the campfire, to the nested-narrative trick that Sheherazade used to keep her head from getting cut off, to Tim LaHaye and the whole End Times megil

Jim Castagnera: In This Election Year, Some Thoughts on Leadership

[Jim Castagnera, formerly of Jim Thorpe, is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. His novel about 19th and 21st century terrorism, “Ned McAdoo and the Molly Maguires,” is available at www.lulu.com.] This column is prompted in part by the back of a black pickup truck behind which I parked the other day in Media (PA). You’ve seen these vehicles: rolling billboards. This one was plastered with slogans and campaign stic

Steve Chapman: Can Anyone Win This Thing? History suggests all the candidates are fatally flawed!

... Hillary Clinton can take consolation that she's neither a mayor nor, really, a New Yorker. But history holds other ill tidings for her. Every morning, 100 senators see a future president in the bathroom mirror -- and invariably it's a mirage. Americans rarely regard sitting senators as presidential timber. The last person to go directly from the Senate to the Oval Office was Kennedy, and prior to that, Warren Harding in 1920. Kerry was nominated but lost, and dozens if not thous

Max Boot: On academics who refuse to work with the military

I thought that the follies of academia had lost their power to outrage me. I was wrong. Reading this New York Times account, about how some scholars have come under fire from their colleagues for working with the U.S. military, enraged me.There is nothing particularly new in the article, but it did wrap-up three current campus controversies:A

Jennifer Bradley and Doug Kendall: At long last, Democrats are finally trying to reclaim the Constitution.

[Jennifer Bradley is an attorney at Community Rights Counsel, a public interest law firm that promotes constitutional principles, and Doug Kendall is its founder and executive director.] Is the Constitution a partisan, Republican document? GOP candidates sure seem to think so--they have been relentless in asserting that they would "follow the Constitution" in pursuing goals from overturning Roe v. Wade (Mitt Romney) to restoring the gold standard (Ron Paul). And for decade

Michael Schudson: Lippmann and the News

[Michael Schudson is a professor of communication at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life and The Sociology of News.] The "present crisis of western democracy," the 30-year-old Walter Lippmann announced in 1920, "is a crisis in journalism." A co-founder of The New Republic in 1914, a Wilson Administration confidant and Army cap

Alan W. Dowd: The Left's hissy fit over Bush's presidential signing statements

[Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow at Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.] President George W. Bush’s critics are howling again, this time about his use of “signing statements,” the comments and clarifications he issues when signing a bill and filing it with the Federal Register. For example, Frank Rich of The New York Times labels Bush “a president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with ‘signing statements.’” Elsewhere in the Times, we find a

Jason Riley: The Mormons still haven't settled their race problem

[Mr. Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.] In an "Official Declaration" issued on June 8, 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints extended "priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy male members of the Church." The church announced that a "revelation had been received" by its then-president Spencer Kimball. Until then, Mormonism was a defiantly apartheid faith that denied blacks full participation based on do

Winfield Myers: Campus Watch singles out political scientist for criticism

[Winfield Myers is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East] In a move one would hope student groups nationwide might emulate, this past fall the College Republicans and College Democrats at the University of Delaware organized a panel discussion on"Anti-Americanism in the Middle East." Participants for the October 24 panel were to include two UD political scientists, Muqtedar Khan and Stuart Kau

Karl Rove: Why we need longer primaries--but a shorter process

The Iowa caucuses are 14 days away, with the New Hampshire primary five days later. And what follows from there won't be pretty. The way Americans are selecting our presidential candidates in 2008 is, frankly, a mess. The first problem is the overall length of the campaign. There are few more demanding physical activities than running for president, other than military training or athletics at a very high level--and this will be the longest presidential contest on record. The first