Roundup: Media's Take

James Naughtie: Nixon's long shadow

[James Naughtie presents Today on BBC Radio 4.] Watching Frost/Nixon is to have an encounter with sharp nostalgia. More than 30 years on, the quivering jowls and dark eyes are as familiar as ever, a president breaking down and revealing for a moment his understanding of his own tragedy. It's an image that's part of the tableau over which Barack Obama will preside on Tuesday, the ghost at the inaugural feast. No one who remembers Richard Nixon's last days in office can f

Robert Fisk: When it comes to Gaza, leave the Second World War out of it

[Robert Fisk is the Independent's award-winning Middle East correspondent.] Exaggeration always gets my goat. I started to hate it back in the 1970s when the Provisional IRA claimed that Long Kesh internment camp was "worse than Belsen". It wasn't as if there was anything nice about Long Kesh – or the Maze prison as it was later politely dubbed – but it simply wasn't as bad as Belsen. And now we're off again. Passing through Paris this week, I found pro-Palestinian demonst

Ishmael Reed: Hail to the reader in chief: Barack Obama

Ishmael Reed, who lives in Oakland, is the author, most recently, of "Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections" (Da Capo Press). He received the 2008 blues songwriter of the year award from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame for his song "The Prophet of Doom," recorded by Cassandra Wilson. Barack Obama, a Celtic African American with a golden tongue and a golden pen, will not be the first literary president. John Quincy Ad

Jonathan Alter: How Obama can score in the first 100 days

[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 "Ins

Andrea Tantaros: The Bush Farewell: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

As I watched President George W. Bush say a final farewell to the nation last night, my emotions were mixed. Though I admired the humility of his speech, I was left to wonder where that President Bush, and that tone, had been hiding for the last eight years. Mysteriously, there was no real acknowledgment of our current economic calamity, or at a minimum the reassurance that the situation was top of mind, and that he and President- elect Obama were working together to ensure a seamless hand off.

Noah Mendel: Finding Meaning in an Obama Victory

[Mr. Mendel is a recent graduate from Lewis and Clark College, where he received a degree in History.] What does it mean to have elected Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States? I began searching for the meaning in this election during the early evening of November 5, 2008, a Wednesday, the day after I helped to elect the 44th president. 2008 marked the second time I participated in a national election, and the first time my guy won. So far my voting average is 0

Simon Jenkins: Indiscriminate slaughter from the air is a barbarism that must be abolished

[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times.] A Palestinian woman is standing in her kitchen when she hears a deafening bang. Rushing to her living room she sees her family in pieces, spread across floors, walls and ceiling. The horror is total and meaningless. Nobody meant it to happen, so what was its cause? The tragedy in Gaza surely marks the time when the world declares air-launched bombs and long-distance shells to b

George Pitcher: Barack Obama's faith, like Lincoln's, is uncertain

[George Pitcher is Religion Editor of The Daily Telegraph.] We can hardly miss the Abraham Lincoln motif that runs through the inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States next Tuesday. He is restaging some of the train trip that Lincoln took to his swearing-in. He will take his oath of office with one hand on a Bible owned by his illustrious predecessor. Obama will make the same journey down Pennsylvania Avenue. After the ceremony, his guests at

John Conyers Jr: Learning the Lessons of the Bush Imperial Presidency

[John Conyers Jr. is a Democrat, represents Michigan's 14th District in the U.S. House and is chairman of the Judiciary Committee.] This week, I released "Reining in the Imperial Presidency," a 486-page report detailing the abuses and excesses of the Bush administration and recommending steps to address them. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. popularized the term "imperial presidency" in the 1970s to describe an executive who had assumed more power than the Constitution all

Nate Silver: History May -- or May Not -- Judge Bush More Kindly

Although George W. Bush's approval ratings have rebounded slightly, as often happens at the end of a president's tenure, he will nevertheless finish his presidency with among the lowest scores since approval ratings came into widespread usage. Gallup pegs Bush's final approval numbers at a -27 net (34 percent approve, 61 percent disapprove), the worst for any outgoing president save Richard

David R. Stokes: Of Mice, Pumpkins, and Former Presidents

[Mr. Stokes is the senior pastor of Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, VA.] Sometime after the transition in January of 1969, President Richard Nixon asked his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, how it felt the moment he knew he wasn’t president anymore. LBJ replied:I don’t know whether you’ll understand this now or not, but you certainly will later. I sat there on that platform and waited for you to stand up and raise your right hand and take the oath of office, and the most plea

Larry Sabato: The 2008 Election in Perspective ... Just What We Would Have Expected

[The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House. The book, which features several frequent Crystal Ball contributors as well as other journalists and scholars, will be published by Pearson Longman in March 2009.] Some readers will be very surprised by our title. The last outcome they would have expected from Election Year 2008 was the elevation of Barack Obama to the White House. And Obama's swift rise was certainly a s

Michael Boyle: In the shadow of Nixon

[Michael Boyle is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.] In May 1994, Hunter S Thompson wrote in a poison-pen eulogy for the recently deceased President Richard Nixon that he represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise." Amidst a time when most of the mainstream press was playing up the rehabilitated post-Watergate Nixon

Humbert Fontova: A Bailout for Castro Too?

The U.S. taxpayer remains among the few in the industrialized world not screwed and tattooed by Fidel Castro. But fear not! Most "analysts" see Obama moving quickly to rectify this shameful state of affairs, by scrapping his country's obnoxious (to liberals and foreigners) penchant for "unilateralism" in foreign policy. "Will Obama Shift Policy on Cuba?" pants a recent BBC headline. After all, as the AP reported from the Latin American summ

James Forsyth: You think Abraham Lincoln had it tough?

[James Forsyth is the online editor of The Spectator.] Short of wearing a stove-pipe hat, Obama could not make his desire to be compared to Abraham Lincoln any more obvious. He plans to travel to his inauguration via the same route that Lincoln did, be sworn in on the Lincoln Bible and eat lunch off replicas of the Lincolns’ White House china. Michelle and the girls must have wondered if he was going to change their name when he took them to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday night.

Con Coughlin: Don't misunderestimate Bush's record

[Con Coughlin is the Daily Telegraph's executive foreign editor.] Oh, the fun we’ve had. Not since the Reverend William Spooner dumbfounded Oxford undergraduates have we been so entertained by the garbled syntax and grammatical infelicities that have been one of the more diverting features of the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. ‘Tell me, was it you or your brother that was killed in the war?’, a question Spooner asked a former student after the first world war,

James Delingpole: I have seen your future, America, and it doesn’t work

[James Delingpole is a British writer and novelist.] No matter how excited you may be about Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday, I bet you’re not as pleased as I am. Never have I wished more devoutly for a presidential victory than the one won by this mighty intellect-cum-healer-cum-fashion-model-cum-general-all-round-Messiah — a man so conscious of his own merit that, unlike any president before him, he plans to swear his inaugural oath on the Lincoln bible. But thi

Susan Glisson: Race is still an issue for America

[Susan Glisson is director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, based at the University of Mississippi. It helps communities cope with racial issues and promotes research on race. Glisson is co-author of "First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America."] As the inauguration of the first African American president approaches, the national news is full of race-related stories. Rioters have been arrested in Oaklan

Henry Porter: Labour's attack on parliament invokes Henry VIII

[Henry Porter writes commentary for the Observer.] It's best to highlight this government's attack on liberty rights and privacy with cases where people have been penalised by the government or its agencies when they've done nothing wrong. But occasionally it is worth looking at the legislative process because it is the failure of democratic and protective instincts in parliament that are at the root of the crisis of liberty. I make no apology for reproducing part of an edit

Jonathan Freedland: Amid the horror and doom of Gaza, the IRA precedent offers hope

[Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for the Guardian since 1997.] The smart money in the Middle East is always on pessimism. Events can be relied on to get worse and worse. But perennial gloom has a flaw. Its unstated assumption is that the war between Israelis and Palestinians is somehow unique - that it is the only conflict in the history of the world that cannot be solved or even ended. Yet even as the horror continues in Gaza, it's worth recalling that people w