News at Home

Why Vice Presidential Nominees Matter

by Leo P. Ribuffo

Despite the Sarah Palin phenomenon, whatever it may ultimately yield, commentators continue to declare that vice presidential nominees rarely affect the outcome of presidential elections.  The truth of this axiom depends on the meaning of the word rarely.  Good choices, bad choices, and  missed choices--usually in combination--have influenced as many as five of the presidential elections since 1960.  And "rarely" might be changed to "frequently" if we r

Old Andy Jackson Would Understand John McCain. Do You?

by Robert Elder

Honor is making a comeback in our national political discourse.  A recent Time article proposed honor as the best way to understand what makes John McCain tick, while the Obama campaign criticized a recent McCain television ad in language that produced the eye-catching headline, “Obama aide questions McCain’s honor.”

Is It Really Wise to Expand the FBI's Investigative Techniques?

by Douglas Charles

According to recent reporting by the Washington Post, in October 2008 FBI officials plan to expand their arsenal of investigative tools in the fields of crime detection, intelligence collect

The Parallel with 1929 We Ignore at Our Peril

by Robert Brent Toplin

With markets teetering at the abyss, the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the federal government's rescue of faltering behemoths like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG, some Americans are looking at the history of the 1930s in search of clues to the causes of the Great Depression. They want to know what went wrong in the past so they can make more educated judgments about what needs to be done to improve conditions in the present. Unfortunately, answers cannot be identified wi

Sarah Palin and the Politics of the Irrational

by Joseph Palermo

In The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby writes: "If Bush's election was not a measure of conscious anti-intellectualism on the part of voters, it was certainly a measure of the public's indifference to demonstrable mental acuity and knowledge as standards for the presidency." (p. 285) In recent years, presidential races have become highly personalized media events. They focus voters' short attention spans on the individuals who are running, rather than on the pol

Before Palin, Before Ferrarro, There Was Charlotta Spears Bass

by Cynthia King

Though partisans continue to debate the merits and demerits of Sarah Palin’s candidacy, the fact is that she is the first female vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party. This is also true of Geraldine Ferrarro for the Democratic Party in 1984. But even Ferrarro cannot lay claim to being the first female vice presidential nominee on the national ballot. That honor goes to Charlotta Spears Bass who ran for Vice President of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket i

Just How Secretive Was the Bush Administration?

by James P. Pfiffner

The Bush administration, in addition to its over-classification of documents, has undertaken more policies in secret than any administration in recent memo

Why Public Housing Is Viable

by Nicholas Dagen Bloom

The mere mention of public housing to most Americans summons a host of negative images: welfare mothers, gun violence, drugs, and forlorn buildings. Among

Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity

by Gary Cross

The old always seem to blame the young for the downfall of civilization.

Sarah Palin Distorts the Founders' Religious Views

by Howard P. Segal

Before the selection of Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, the 2008 campaign had been notable for the apparently declining influence of evangelical Christians on American politics. Notwithstanding the evangelicals' strong support for his candidacy, Mike Huckabee failed to get the GOP presidential nomination. And for all the distortion of Barack Obama's religion as supposedly Islamic rather than Christian, the controversy still offered hope that Amer

The Attempt to Hijack History at the 9/11 ServiceNation Forum

by Justin Jackson

In front of Columbia University’s Low Library last Thursday night, thousands of us watched Senators McCain and Obama as they attempted to answer or evade often difficult questions about the past, present and future of national service. Unsurprisingly, like most politicians throughout the annals of history, during the ServiceNation forum both senators selectively appropriated commonly accepted representations of the past th

Precedents, Vice Presidents—and Super-Tickets

by David Pietrusza

It is the perennial irony of presidential campaigns that selecting a running mate proves both so crucial to a specific campaign moment and, almost inevitably, so excruciating to the nation. The task remains, for

First Wave -- Second Wave -- And Then Came Sarah Palin

by Joseph Palermo

In the late 19th century, in Chicago, a grassroots organization founded by Jane Addams gave rise to Hull House where educated women worked to alleviate the suffering of the city's impoverished victims of laissez-faire capitalism. Addams's colleague, Florence Kelley, described Hull House as a "colony of efficient and intelligent women." Kelley later joined forces with Lillian Wald to establish the New York Child Labor Committee, and pressed the federal government to create the U.S

If the Great Debate Over Offshore Drilling Sounds Vaguely Familiar, it Should--But It's Time for a Happier Ending

by Tyler Priest

Every U.S. presidential election has to have an antecedent, an earlier race that can serve up comparisons about the candidates and issues.  Horserace election coverage is portraying the 2008 contest as a replay of the 1952 election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson.  The candidates in both elections were non-incumbents facing an electorate grown weary of war and U.S. military occupation overseas.   Barack Obama is cast in the role of Stevenson, another Ivy-League educated Illinois senator who championed the politics of civility and appealed to educated liberals and professional “elites.”  The “straight-talking” war-hero John McCain is the all-around “man of the people,” according to his biographer, and heir to General Eisenhower, who incidentally spoke at the 1958 Naval Academy commencement where McCain graduated 894th out of 899.

Crowds, Conventions and the Slow Death of Individualism in America

by Louis René Beres

Every sham can have a patina. Unwittingly, our two political conventions recently lay bare and magnified the hideous triumph of mass society. The perfectly choreographed events in Denver and St. Paul made clear that America richly rewards conformance and cliché, not “rugged individualism” and independent thought. The conventions were microcosm. Like the delegates, noisily desperate for simple truths, Americans in general feel most comfortable when they can chant in choru

Why Is Obama Having Trouble with White Catholics?

by Tim Meagher

A puzzled Chris Matthews turned to the camera.  He had just finished grilling two guests on his TV show, “Hardball,” about voting patterns in the recent Pennsylvania primary.  Yet the behavior of one group still seemed hard for both he and his experts to explain. Its members’ motives, Mathews sighed, were as inscrutable as “a tribe in New Guinea.”  The group whose behavior seemed so inexplicable? Matthews’s ( Holy Cross College cla

Blame Ronald Reagan For Our Current Economic Crisis

by Robert Brent Toplin

Ronald Reagan rarely catches any blame these days for the present economic mess that is destabilizing markets in the United States and around the world. In fact, Americans often praise the former president for taking the country in bold new directions during his years in the White House. Politicians contribute to this love-fest by naming schools and roads after the iconic president  These admirers rarely acknowledge how central Reagan’s ideas are to the market difficulties t

In Dreams Begin Politics

by John H. Summers

In The Epic of America (1931), the historian James Truslow Adams argued what many Americans have felt all along, that “there has been the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” The campaign season, a prolonged divination of suppressed wishes, is prime-time for the rhetoric of the American Dream. But rhetoric is not the same as propaganda,

The Parallels Between China's Olympics and Our Political Conventions

by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

When the media spotlight shifted instantaneously from Beijing to Denver last week, it was easy to focus on things that the Olympics and the Democratic Convention had in common as spectacles, especially since each ended with a

The Danger of an Unvetted Veep: An Israeli Lesson

by Dror Wahrman

A celebrated war hero turned elder statesman runs while in his 70s for the highest executive office in the land as an agent of change, and against the grain of his own party. Sounds familiar? Well, before the Republican party embarked on this route in the presidential elections of 2008, Ariel Sharon tried it in Israel in 2005. Nothing perhaps can bring some sober judgment – rather than PR hype – into the meaning of McCain’s choice for VP better than a quick reminder of what has