Roundup: Media's Take

Michael J. O'Shea: Did I Mention That I'm Noble? (Re: Obama)

Is it 297 or 643 times we've heard Barack Obama toot: "I turned down more lucrative jobs and went to work for a group of churches"? As the Church Lady herself remarked: "Well, isn't that special?" Young Obama nobly sets forth in 1983 for a paltry $12,000 plus a $2,000 old car. Blessed be he. And ignored be these: the 2,929 who graduated that same year from West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy -- people every bit as bright, from schools a

Derek Shearer: Clintonism Without Clinton -- It's Deja Vu All Over Again

[Ambassador Derek Shearer is currently Chevalier Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles.] In the dog days of summer, I and my dogs take comfort in the wisdom of Yogi Berra. As that great Yankee catcher and philosopher said, "It's deja vu all over again." That's just how I feel seeing the photos and reading the reports of Barack Obama's economic gathering this week. It's as if I am rerunning a movie of the 1992 Clinton economic summit

Martin Wainwright: Peter Tatchell recruits unionist hero for gay rights cause

[Martin Wainwright is northern editor of the Guardian.] King Billy, the potent hero of Northern Ireland's unionists, will be summoned tonight in aid of the province's embattled gay community. Claims that the warrior monarch, portrayed in manly battle on wall paintings across Ulster, promoted handsome young retainers and chose lovers from among them, will be revived by the gay campaigner Peter Tatchell. In the Amnesty International Pride lecture in Belfast t

Vicki Woods: Barack Obama - the earth didn't move for me

[Vicki Woods writes in the Daily Telegraph.] Barack in Berlin was hyped and touted to such a level that I raced downstairs to watch the live broadcast of him wowing the Germans on Thursday. Glass in hand, phones off the hook, expectant. Oooh, lovely sunny day for it, eh? Plenty of long-shots, distant views of the Brandenburg Gate, American flags, high crowd volume - expert foreplay, all in all. Live speeches, like live rock concerts, do transport people. Once there were

Peter Popham: The Sarajevo legacy

[Peter Popham has written articles published in The Independent]. The jubilation of the people of Sarajevo at the capture of Radovan Karadzic, the man they blame for the bloody siege which pinned down their city for 44 months and cost 10,000 lives, has slowly evaporated during an extraordinary week of revelations. What was left yesterday was a coming to terms with the bitter fact that much of what the former Bosnian-Serb leader stood for has already come to pass. "

Fred Schwarz: Who Is Today’s Harry Truman?

[Fred Schwarz is a deputy managing editor of National Review.] Sixty years ago this weekend, the members of a reluctant 80th Congress trudged back to the capital for a special session called by President Harry S. Truman. The Republican-controlled Congress had adjourned in late June, as was customary in the days before air conditioning became common, but in mid-July Truman summoned them back to steamy Washington, supposedly to pass laws related to civil rights, Social Security, and h

Joshua Trevino: The Berlin Missionary

[Joshua Trevino is the president of Trevino Strategies and Media, Inc., in Sacramento, California. He served as a U.S. Army officer, worked in the Administration of George W. Bush from 2001 through 2004, and at the Pacific Research Institute from 2005 through 2008.] Democrats and star-struck adulators will remember Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin today as something more than it actually was.

E.J. Dionne: Young people could decide the election

The conventional wisdom on certain subjects is so deeply rooted that no amount of evidence disturbs its hold. That's how it is with those dreary predictions that young Americans just won't vote. Since the late 1960s, the same chorus has been heard from election to election: The young don't care. They're disengaged. They're too wrapped up in their music, their favorite sports and their parties to care about politics. Predicting that the young will vote in large numbers is like saying

James Surowiecki: The Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac debacle

["James Michael Surowiecki ("soo-ro-wiki") (b. 1967) is an American journalist. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a regular column on business and finance called 'The Financial Page.' "--Wiki] ... [Government Sponsored Enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are curious, because there’s no obvious reason for them to exist in the form they do: instead of creating private companies to do all these jobs, the government could just do them

Alvin S. Felzenberg: Senator, You’re No Jack Kennedy

[Alvin S. Felzenberg is author of The Leaders We Deserved and a Few We Didn’t: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.] It was not Kennedy and it certainly was not Reagan. Yet, in his speech in Berlin before a friendly but curious audience, Barack Obama achieved his principal purpose. The Democratic party’s presumptive nominee appeared informed, concerned, and presidential. Like two of his countrymen who preceded him to Germany (the presumptive nominee was not presumptuous enough t

William Kristol: In JFK's footsteps ... Obama in Berlin

[William Kristol is editor of the US Weekly Standard and a New York Times columnist.] I'll go out on a limb and say that Barack Obama will be well received when he speaks in Berlin tonight. OK, it's not exactly a limb. A recent poll shows that the German public prefers Obama to John McCain by 67% to 6%. But there is angst in Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel was reportedly not happy about the idea of a Ronald Reagan reprise in front of the Brandenburg Gate. So the Obama campaign has

Michael Schaffer: Obama is Lincoln? No, Reagan. No, ...

[Michael Schaffer is working on a book about the pet industry.] There's a challenge in writing about the overuse of analogy in contemporary political journalism: There's no perfect analogy for the device. Are analogies the new adjectives? (It's hard to describe anything without them.) Are they the office-seeker's version of the Social Security number? (Without one, it's hard to prove you exist.) Are they the narratives of our time? (Control it, and you control the campaign). Whateve

Richard Allen: Obama's Experience Doesn't Match Up

[Mr. Allen, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, was Richard Nixon's foreign policy coordinator in 1968, Ronald Reagan's chief foreign policy adviser from 1977 to 1980, and Reagan's first national security adviser from 1981 to 1982.] ... How does Mr. Obama's foreign policy résumé compare with the preparation of past presidential candidates? Richard Nixon gathered vast international experience in extensive travels as vice president under Dwight D.

Andrew Keen: The New Techno-Historical Determinism

[The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that “every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen.” Andrew is indeed the leading contemporary critic of citizen media. His controversial The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture.] My old sparring partner Clay Shirky is at it again. Responding on the Britannica website to

Adam Holland: Republican Blasts Israel's Kibbutz Roots

[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.] Republicans have been throwing everything at Barack Obama in the hope that something will stick. The facts that many of the charges are contradictory and absurd on their face have not served to deter this assault on reason. Here's an attack you may find interesting. Republican blogger Mark Finkelstein has claimed that Obama's support for Israel's historic commitment to social justice as exemplified by the kibbutz movement indicates a secr

Ilan Goldenberg: McCain's fatal misunderstanding of the Iraq War is not a gaffe

John McCain made a mistake this evening, which as far as I'm concerned, disqualifies him from being president.  It is so appalling and so factually wrong that I'm actually sitting here wondering who McCain's advisers are.  This isn't some gaffe where he talks about the Iraq-Pakistan border.  It's a real misunderstanding of what has happened in Iraq over the past year.  It is even more disturbing because according to John McCain, Iraq is the central front in the "war o

Alan Abramowitz: Obama's betting everything on voter mobilization. Will it work?

[Alan I. Abramowitz is a professor of political science at Emory University.] ... The Obama campaign is apparently convinced that a well-funded voter mobilization campaign can dramatically increase turnout among these pro-Obama demographics and potentially alter the outcome of the election in states including Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, and even Georgia, where such groups make up a large proportion of the population and an even larger proportion of non-voters. But how realis

John Arquilla: War Is More Than Just a Numbers Game ... Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan

[John Arquilla is a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he has taught in the special operations curriculum since 1993.] If you want to understand the American way of war, just look at a newspaper. Not the first section with all the world news. Go instead to the sports section, where you’ll find everything about every sport explained in a blizzard of statistics. Winning and losing are reckoned in things like numbers of service aces, yards per carry,

Toby Harnden: Top 25 political speeches of all time

[Journalist and author Toby Harnden is the Washington Bureau Chief of The Sunday Telegraph of London.] The bar is high because, as even his detractors concede, Mr Obama is a remarkable orator. He first shot to prominence when he moved many at the 2004 Democratic convention to tears. He announced he would run for president last year with a beautifully-crafted address in Abraham Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois. A pivotal moment of

Martin Kettle: What Hadrian can teach Obama

[Martin Kettle writes for the Guardian on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.] As you know, senator, there are two main objects of your day in London. One is to gladhand some of those big campaign donors who are allowed to live in the UK tax-free and so still have serious money in the bank to offer you. The second, of course, is to be seen by Americans in a setting that tells them you are already a leader on the world stage. Un