Roundup: Media's Take

Jonathan Alter: Poof Goes the Purple Dream

[For two years prior to joining Newsweek, Alter was an editor at The Washington Monthly. He has also freelanced articles for such publications as The New Republic, Esquire, Slate and The New York Times. A Chicago native, Alter received his B.A. in history with honors from Harvard in 1979. Besides "The Defining Moment" (Simon and Schuster), widely praised by critics, he is coauthor of "Selecting a President" (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) and the coeditor of "Inside the

Michael Barone: The Real Lessons of the Great Depression

... Most of us in the political commentary business make frequent use of the phrase "New Deal Democratic majority" and tend to believe that Roosevelt's policies worked for his party for a long generation extending into the 1960s. I think the picture is more complicated than that. Democrats did win big in the 1934 and 1936 elections. They made big gains in large cities and factory towns, many of which were staunchly Republican in the 1920s. But these gains were not sustaine

Ken Livingstone: Should we have stopped Roosevelt after two terms?

[Ken Livingstone is the former mayor of London.] Only the media make the argument that there should be time limits on holding power, and that's because someone losing and a changing of the guard makes for a better story and sells more newspapers. As long as a leader still has the support of the people, he should be allowed to stay in power. Term limits really only started being en vogue after they were introduced in the US in 1951 following the death of Franklin Roosev

Jonathan Steele: Nato is deeper in its Afghan mire than Russia ever was

[Jonathan Steele is a Guardian columnist, roving foreign correspondent and author.] Twenty years ago tomorrow the last Soviet units left Afghanistan after a nine-year intervention that took 15,000 soldiers' lives. As they crossed the river Oxus I was in the air above them, the only foreign journalist to fly to Kabul that day. Russian friends in Moscow, where I was this newspaper's correspondent, doubted my sanity, convinced a bloodbath was bound to follow the Soviet ex

Fred Kaplan: The 2 Reagans ... Which version of the Gipper would Republicans like Obama to emulate?

When President Barack Obama starts stepping out on the world stage, trying to strike deals with foreign leaders, a chorus of Republicans and right-wing pundits will implore him to take his cues from Ronald Reagan, who—the popular history has it—brought the Soviet Union to its knees through military strength and iron will. In anticipation of these urgings, everyone should read the excerpt in this month's

Arthur Herman: Jimmy Carter and the Camp David Myth

Will Jimmy Carter be President Barack Obama's role model on how to bring peace to the Middle East? Some, especially in Israel, view that prospect with apprehension. Others, like Ralph Nader, have greeted the possibility with enthusiasm, urging Mr. Obama to rely on Mr. Carter's "wise and seasoned counsel" in dealings with the volatile region. After all, Mr. Carter is renowned as the master craftsman of the historic accord between Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Be

Sholto Byrnes: Time to rethink realpolitik

[Sholto Byrnes is a contributing editor of the New Statesman and the jazz critic of the Independent.] Henry Kissinger, in 1982, wrote: “Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.” The former US secretary of state is an unlikely – and unfashionable – source of reassurance, but his injunction is one that the west would do well to follow in the Obama era. The US National Intelligence Council p

Katharine Q. Seelye: Evoking Abraham Lincoln

[Katharine Q. Seelye is a political reporter for The New York Times.] Barack Obama is not the first president to feel a kinship with Abraham Lincoln. Nixon made at least one midnight visit to the Lincoln Memorial for a talk with the great man's statue. Teddy Roosevelt wore a ring that was made from a lock of Lincoln's hair. Franklin Roosevelt hired Robert Sherwood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," as his speechwriter. But Obama

Lou Cannon: Get Out of the (White) House

Almost from its inception, the presidency of the United States has been a heavy weight on its occupants. Thomas Jefferson famously called the presidency a “splendid misery.” John Quincy Adams described his four years in the White House as “the four most miserable years of my life.” Herbert Hoover wrote “The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson,” a sympathetic account of Wilson’s troubled presidency, then suffered through his own presidential ordeal. Some presidents, including Hoover and Jimmy Carter, aged n

Michael Lind: How would Lincoln vote today?

... So are we all Lincolnians now? Maybe not. It's perfectly reasonable to ask what political movements and factions today would attract someone with Lincoln's political values. Lincoln was not King Arthur, living in a wholly alien society. Many of the issues of the mid-19th century -- from the role of the federal government in the economy to whether America is a Christian nation to evolution vs. creationism -- remain issues in the early 21st century. In his long career as a Whig an

Steven Hayward: Obama Misreads His Mandate

[Mr. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of "The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989," forthcoming from Crown Forum.] President Barack Obama's honeymoon period seems to have ended quickly. That's because Mr. Obama doesn't grasp the essentials of presidential leadership. Rather than making a compelling case for his economic policies, he has resorted to curt rebuffs, such as telling House Republican whi

Jon Talton: Obama to be “Carterized”? Was He Elected “Too Soon”?

[Jon Talton is a journalist and author living in Seattle. He writes the “On the Economy” column for the Seattle Times and is proprietor of the blog Rogue Columnist.] Here’s one: What if Obama were elected too soon to be a Rooseveltian transformative figure? In other words, imagine if FDR had been elected president in 1928.Herbert Hoover had been president for only a few months when the

William Greider: Looting Social Security

Governing elites in Washington and Wall Street have devised a fiendishly clever "grand bargain" they want President Obama to embrace in the name of "fiscal responsibility." The government, they argue, having spent billions on bailing out the banks, can recover its costs by looting the Social Security system. They are also targeting Medicare and Medicaid. The pitch sounds preposterous to millions of ordinary working people anxious about their economic security and worried abou

Peter Ferrara: Reaganomics vs. Obamanomics

[Mr. Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan.] In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified." Or as administration spok

Will Bunch: Gipper's Ghost Haunts America's Recovery

Roughly this time a year ago, inspired by the insanity that was the 2008 presidential race, I started working on Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. With a target publication date right before the Gipper's 98th birthday (or Reagan Day as modern conservatives have declared it), I did have one nagging worry. What if a decisive election victory last November by Barack Obama and congressional Democrats appeared to slay the Reagan myth for once

William Galston: What Obama Could Learn From Reagan

I joined Walter Mondale's campaign as his issues director in June 1982, and I vividly remember the excitement that gripped most Democrats at the time. Ronald Reagan's approval rating had fallen below 40 percent, and party professionals believed that the failure of his economic plan to produce a turnaround all but guaranteed huge trouble for incumbent Republicans--political scientists predicted Republican losses of up to 50 House seats. It didn't work out that way, though: Republicans dropped a r

Gary Kamiya: Obama's Reagan problem

... Obama was widely, and legitimately, criticized on the left for saying during the campaign that Reagan "changed the direction of America" in a way that Bill Clinton did not. But that statement was gauzy and vague compared to what he wrote about Reagan in his second book, "The Audacity of Hope." "[T]he conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight -- that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bu

David Swanson: The Problem With Truth, Reconciliation, and Commissions

[David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush" published by Feral House and available at Amazon.com. ] Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has now joined House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers in proposing some sort of "truth and r

Drew Westen: What Happens When You Throw a Bipartisan Party and Half the Guest List Stays Home?

[Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of"The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation."] In the Presidential election, Barack Obama ran on two messages. One was a message of change, following eight years of a the most morally, administratively, and ideologically bankrupt administration in our nation's history, which has left our country in its most precarious state since t

George Selgin: hen fear of falling prices becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

[George Selgin is a professor of economics at West Virginia University who specializes in banking, monetary policy, and macroeconomics. He is the author of Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy.] ... Yes, deflation again. But this isn't the bad deflation of the 1930s. It comes not from consumers having less money to spend but from them being confronted with more to spend it on."Bad" deflation happens when demand shrinks;"good" deflation happens when