Roundup: Media's Take

Steve Kornacki: Ignoring "the American People" Can Be a Good Thing

[Steve Kornacki is the news editor for Salon.] With House Democrats set to stick with Nancy Pelosi as their leader, the chamber's No. 2 Republican, Eric Cantor, proclaimed over the weekend that "It is almost as if they didn't get the message from voters in this election. The voters outright rejected the Democratic agenda. This is a woman who puts ideology first, and this is the direction they want to take again." Cantor's emphasis on the popular will called to

Jonah Goldberg: The Bashing of American Exceptionalism

[Jonah Goldberg is an editor at large with the National Review and his columns appear in the LA Times.] ..."The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America," "and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Ever since, historians have argued that America's lack of a feudal past, its Puritan roots, the realism of its revolutionary ambitions and man

Michael Lind: Can Liberalism Save Capitalism from Conservatism?

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] Conservatives have long succeeded in persuading business that they are its friends and liberals are its enemies. In reality, the reverse is true. Liberalism saved American capitalism during the depression, and if American capitalism is to be saved from the Great Recession, lib

James Carroll: The Prison Boom Comes Home to Roost

[James Carroll writes for the Boston Globe.] ...It is commonly observed now that, beginning about 1981, during the Reagan administration, the wealth of a tiny percentage of top-tier earners sky-rocketed, while the wages of the vast majority of Americans went flat. A rapid escalation in the illusory value of homeownership soon followed. But an unseen boom began then, too — in American rates of incarceration, the housing bubble in prisons. A recent issue of Daedalus, the journal of th

Bob Herbert: The Impossible Dream

[Bob Herbert is a columnist for the NYT.] One of the most frustrating tendencies of mainstream leaders in the United States is their willingness, year after debilitating year, to embrace policies that have no hope of succeeding. From Lyndon Johnson’s mad pursuit of victory in Vietnam to George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq to today’s delusionary deficit zealots, the tragic lure of the impossible dream seems never to subside. Ronald Reagan told us he

Jonah Goldberg: The bashing of American exceptionalism

[Jonah Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author.] Last year, when asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, President Obama responded, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." This reminded me of the wonderful scene in Pixar's "The Incredibles," in which the mom says "everyone's special" and he

Michael Tomasky: George W Bush's Decision Points towards rehabilitation

[Michael Tomasky is editor-in-chief of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.] The exit polls from last week's midterm elections – those venerated scrolls that tell us why Americans voted as they did and what they think of the state of the nation – contained continuing bad news for poor George W Bush, now out of office two years and, for the most part, impressively silent. One question asked voters whom they blamed for the economic collapse. While the No 1 answer was Wall Street at 35%, the

Joan Walsh: How the Democrats Shellacked Themselves

[Joan Walsh is Salon's editor in chief.] It had to happen this way. In the wake of a self-described electoral "shellacking," President Obama's first crucial test will be deciding whether he'll hold his ground on extending the Bush tax cuts only for the working and middle class, or whether he'll cave to Republican demands that they go to the wealthiest Americans, too. On Fox News Sunday, Eric Cantor said there's no room for compromise; the GOP opposes "decoupling"

Robert Zoellick: The G20 must look beyond Bretton Woods II

[Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank Group, served at the US Treasury from 1985-88.] With talk of currency wars and disagreements over the US Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing, the summit of the Group of 20 leading economies in Seoul this week is shaping up as the latest test of international co-operation. So we should ask: co-operation to what end? When the G7 experimented with economic co-ordination in the 1980s, the Plaza and Louvre Accords fo

Jonathan Rauch: Divided We Thrive

A GRAND victory for Republicans in the 2010 midterm election? Yes, of course. But also no. In all three of the most recent earthshaking midterm elections — 1994, 2006 and now 2010 — the same candidate won: divided government. That is not a coincidence. In the last two decades, a strong and persistent pattern has emerged, one that will dominate our politics for some time to come, because it is rooted in two important political realities. First, the public strongly prefers divided gov

Maureen Dowd: 'Blindsided': A President’s Story

[Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.] ...In his deftly crafted and utterly selective new memoir, W. is the president we all wished him to be: compassionate, bipartisan, funny, charming, instinctive, independent, able to admit and learn from mistakes — and a good dad, who sang his twin girls the Yale fight song as a lullaby.... The book lacks the vindictive or vaporous tone of many political autobiographies. It’s peppered with endearing personal stories, like the ti

Andrew Neil: The New Republicans

[Andrew Neil is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster. His Tea Party America is available on BBC iPlayer.] ‘I am not a witch.’ Now that’s not something you hear very often from a politician. But Christine O’Donnell, Tea Party darling and Republican candidate in Delaware for the US Senate, felt the need to say these words in a campaign commercial, after a youthful dalliance with witchcraft was revealed. The denial was somewhat undermined by the all-black outfit and smoky background.

David A. Love: Americans, Your Country Isn't So Great

[David A. Love is the Executive Editor of BlackCommentator.com, and a contributor to The Progressive Media Project and theGrio. He is based in Philadelphia and is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.]This is a commentary I was bound to write regardless of the outcome of the midterm election. I start by saying that your country is not so great, Americans. Any discussion of"what went wrong" must be prefaced with that statement. Harsh words, perh

Arturo Lopez-Levy: Not Your Father's Cuban-Americans

[Arturo Lopez-Levy is a lecturer at the Colorado School of Mines and a Ph.D. candidate at the Josef Korbel School of the University of Denver.] ...The 838,000 exiles in the Miami area -- less than five percent of Florida's population -- have been a pillar of Republican support in presidential elections since 1980, and over the subsequent years have sent two Cuban-American Republican senators and four Republican congressmen to Washington.... Over recent decades, however,

Lord David Alton: The Way Toward Change in North Korea

[Lord David Alton is a life peer of the House of Lords and chairman of the British-North Korea Parliamentary Committee.] The North Korean state has been constructed on the ideology of juche — total self reliance: “Man is the master of everything and decides everything.” And, in the heart of Pyongyang, on the banks of the city’s Taedong River, opposite Kim Il-sung Square, stands the Juche Tower. Completed in 1982, to celebrate Kim Il-sung’s 70th birthday, at 558 feet the tower stands

Norman Ornstein: The Lame-Duck Session

[Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] ...Congress is back, and one thing is obvious: There is no way they can complete the amount of work they have left before the November election. They still need to pass most of the spending bills for a fiscal year that starts in less than three weeks. On top of that, they must deal with energy; the small business tax-incentive plan; the new Obama “don’t call it a stimulus” stimulus package, which includes

David Brooks: Midwest at Dusk

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] If Balzac were alive today, he would plant himself in that region of America that starts in central New York and Pennsylvania and then stretches out through Ohio and Indiana before spreading out to include Wisconsin and Arkansas. He’d plant himself in the working-class families in this area.... Many people in these neighborhoods distrust government but still look to it for help. They disdain Wall Street but admire capitalism. T

Colin Graham: Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn, and Putin

[A British journalist based in Warsaw, Colin Graham writes on culture and politics in Eastern Europe. He has written on Real Estate Investment in the Montenegro Coastline, The European Union, the Polish satirical cartoonist Marek Raczkowski, the Stanislaw Wieglus scandal as well as Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan for Culturekiosque.] The two news items came out almost simultaneously and couldn’t have been more at odds with one an

Shmuel Rosner: Forgetting Rabin

[Shmuel Rosner is a Tel Aviv-based columnist.] A year ago, I was invited to speak at a Tel Aviv gathering commemorating the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The prime minister was murdered on Nov. 4, 1995,* by a Jewish radical who opposed the Rabin government's policy of negotiating with the Palestinians. The murder shook Israeli society to the core.... Attendance at the event was pretty unimpressive. Marking the anniversary had been an annual tradition at this synagogue

Fareed Zakaria: The Republican Revolution: Real This Time?

[Fareed Zakaria is Editor at Large for Time magazine.] We are watching the third Republican revolution unfold — the third time the Republican Party has come to power promising to fundamentally alter the relationship of the U.S. government to society. If the past is any guide, the Republicans are going to have a tough time fulfilling their pledge. If they do not deliver yet again, the American people, at some point, will surely conclude that they are hypocrites. The firs