The most famous dog story in American politics came from then vice-presidential candidate Richard Milhous Nixon (who was also the Republican Senator from the great state of California). Known ever since simply as the “Checkers speech,” the dog yarn that Nixon deployed on national TV that evening in the heat of the 1952 campaign...
In a recent piece in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, titled “Against Despair: How Our Misreading of History Harms Progressivism Today,” Michael Tomasky notes how The Huffington Post sometimes evokes Franklin D. Roosevelt in its assessment of President Barack Obama, which tells him something about “the way liberals interpret and talk about history.” (3)...
For well over a year now I’ve been wondering why President Barack Obama, (who is a talented communicator and a student of history), failed to recognize Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s example of the necessity of speaking directly to the American people. Tonight, at long last, Obama gave his first “fireside chat.” He should have done...
Peter Baker’s profile of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the New York Times Magazine raises some interesting questions about President Barack Obama’s top aide. For Emanuel, it seems that all politics are electoral politics. He wouldn’t know a social movement if he saw one. Widely considered a wizard inside the Beltway,...
There’s been a lot of commentary about President Barack Obama’s failure to construct a winning “narrative” for the elections of 2010. In 2008, there were millions of people “fired up and ready to go.” But after a year plus of the Beltway-Rahm Emanuel strategy of never exposing oneself to political risk the grassroots energy...
We hear repeatedly that President Obama and the Democrats’ shouldn’t attempt any boldly progressive reforms because we live in a “center-right” country. Pundits like Charles Krauthammer, when they’re not warning us about the danger of deficits they helped Bush create, constantly tell us that any problem in Washington stems from the Democrats not accepting...
“Deficits don’t matter.” When Vice President Dick Cheney uttered this famous line he was making a political judgment, not an economic one. In 2001, when the newly selected President George W. Bush and his posse rode into Washington they immediately began in earnest the chicanery, lying and recklessness that we came to expect throughout...
Civic-Minded Plutocrats
It’s truly touching how much interest in America’s great democratic experiment that our esteemed men and women of industry, finance, and commerce have shown in the 2010 midterm elections. Elementary school teachers across the land might lead civics lessons by pointing to these salt-of-the-Earth hedge-fund managers, oil tycoons, derivatives traders, and outsourcing zealots who...
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