But the pundits, as usual, are wrong. In reality, Obama peaked the night he was elected.

That astonishing evening was both a blessing and a curse for our 44th president. As the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, Obama made the history books in indelible fashion, generating an uplifting sense of national pride and renewal along the way.

That alone is more than many...]]> Tue, 12 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Since Iceland is something of the epicenter of the global financial crisis - its government being the first to essentially go belly up - it's probably not surprising that the Icelanders have come up with the most novel and interesting theory as to what caused the meltdown. And they may be right.

It's all the fault of men. And not mankind, mind you, but the male of our species.

"The crisis is man-made," said banker Halla Tomasdottir, former general director of Iceland's chamber of commerce and one of the few figures who actually warned a meltdown was coming. "It's always the same guys," she went on to tell a German magazine. "Ninety-nine percent went to the same school, they...]]> Wed, 06 May 2009 22:00:00 -0700 So, Arlen Specter is now a Democrat. That's old news. But with all the media attention focused on the short-term effects of Specter's midnight conversion - thus likely giving Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate - commentators have missed the long-range (and more significant) consequences. Specter's action emboldens the rise of an energized "middle" in American politics. That could be the catalyst, over time, for a new significant political movement - or even the formation of a new political party.

Those with short memories have undoubtedly forgotten that, several years ago, Democrat Joe Lieberman made a similar move, leaving his party so that he could retain his...]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 A tension lies at the heart of the Obama presidency. After 100 days in office, the public still seems uncertain how to interpret the historic nature of the election last November.

One camp claims President Barack Obama's inauguration marked a decisive break with the patterns of American politics over the past four decades or so, giving him a mandate to forge ahead with sweeping changes. Another believes that while voters were ultimately fed up with President George W. Bush, the financial crisis, which broke in the fall, played the decisive factor in his election. More than just a matter of opinion, the resolution of this dispute will go a long way toward defining Obama's success,...]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 While political analysts understandably regard elections and politicians as the key forces of social change, nongovernmental forces are the ones that most often actually influence and transform our culture.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1850s novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, probably did as much as any political event to help shape northern opinion in a way that made a Civil War inevitable. Martin Luther King Jr.'s decision to emulate Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence gave the civil-rights movement a broader appeal that sped the pace of change. Civil-rights' lawyers strategic litigation, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s, did much the same.

In a similar vein, the...]]> Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 It's not news that newspapers are in huge trouble — victims of technological change and a mini-depression. What is news is the unadorned glee that is greeting the demise of newsprint.

When auto or city workers lose their jobs, there's talk of bailouts and extra measures to cushion the trauma, and even mournful country songs written in tribute. And when newspapers close? The blogs are full of self-congratulations at the demise of the journalistic establishment.

"Seeing newspapers fall apart brings me joy," writes an anonymous essayist in a broadside reprinted on the blog  Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 The great American sports machine is crashing to Earth. And, given the intensity with which Americans love and identify with their teams, that is likely to take a good part of the national psyche -- and a hunk of confidence -- along with it.

Take NBA basketball. It's "on the road to financial ruin," according to Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Bianchi. "[T]he entire business model on which new arenas have been built -- big naming-rights contracts, expensive seating and luxury suites -- is cracking," wrote fellow Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas. Attendance is off in many markets, too. The Sacramento Kings, once the darling of their metropolis, have failed to sell out a game this...]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:00:00 -0700 But it's time to set the record straight. The comparison is completely unfair -- not to Obama but to Carter.

At this point in his administration, Jimmy Carter (disclosure: I worked for Carter briefly in earlier days) was more popular and -- believe it or not -- almost as much of a phenomenon as Obama. He, too, jumped out of his limo to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue after his inaugural address, in a "first" that was remembered far more than anything that happened on January 20, 2009 (save, perhaps, for Aretha Franklin's hat). Several weeks later, Carter gave a widely praised national address on energy, sitting in a sweater in the White House. His first effort to bring the presidency...]]> Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Anyone, that is, except for the president.

It's hard, after all, for a commander in chief to stand in opposition to the government he leads. (Ronald Reagan was able to do it, but it helped that Congress was controlled by the opposite party for much of his presidency and he could run against it.)

Plus, Ivy League-educated, well-traveled Obama has the wrong background and temperament to grab the pitchfork.

If there are those who love Harvard intellectuals more than Harvard intellectual Obama himself, it would be hard to find them. The financial elite, too, seems to have a friend in the White House with in-house adviser (and former Harvard president) Larry Summers, if not...]]> Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0700 By looking at the characteristics of Obama's generation, we can learn a lot about the leaders we're putting our faith in. The result? We might be on the verge of either the first "Blackberry Presidency" or, figuratively, a "Steroid Presidency."

What characterizes the Obama generation? To its boosters, like Jonathan Pontell, author of the "Generation Jones" construct, they (people born in the mid-1950s to the mid-'60s) are "practical idealists," tempered by growing up in a world in which many of their parents were more interested in self-fulfillment than they were in their children. That meant that, as latch-key kids stuck in front of the TV or left to their own devices, they had to...]]> Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0700 Obama is, of course, a product of Harvard Law, and his books document the important influence of his Crimson experience. He has gone on to populate his administration with fellow Harvard Law grads and current profs, from former dean Elena Kagan to Cass Sunstein.

But the bottom line is this: if Scheiber is right in his initial thesis, what the times call for is a Yalie, not a Harvard man (or woman). He argues that different institutions produce different kinds of leaders, just as the military produces a different leadership style than, say, the political world. In a unique crisis like the present one, it makes all the difference what a leader's intellectual instincts are. And,...]]> Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:00:00 -0800 This is not an argument about the longevity of political popularity. Rather, it has to do with Obama's creating what political scientist Theodore Lowi called "a personal presidency," in which one unreasonably exaggerates the power of a president to influence events -- especially economic ones. Going down that path, warned Lowi, is a sure road to political failure.

"As visibility goes up, so do expectations and vulnerability," Lowi once told a reporter. "There's more of a chance to make really big mistakes. It's a treadmill to oblivion. It's why modern history is filled with so many failed presidencies."

A long line of skilled politicians have managed to wear out their...]]> Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 So the Republicans will certainly make their way back to equal footing (or worse). But their route to success may be stealthier than anyone anticipates -- it may even be a route that sees them lose more seats in Congress before they gain some.

Just look at what happened to the GOP in the period between 1965 and 1968. Lest Republicans think their party is in bad shape now, it was in far worse shape then. In 1965, along with the presidency, the Dems held a huge 295-140 majority in the House and a whopping 68-32 advantage in the Senate. Yet within four years, by 1969, the Dems had lost 11 seats in the Senate and 52 in the House, as well as the presidency.

It all began with...]]> Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 Krugman, of course, is a Nobel Prize-winning economist from Princeton, who's also a formidable columnist for the New York Times. He obviously knows Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke well from Princeton (Bernanke made Krugman the job offer that brought him to campus), so they'll work well together. And he offers three huge advantages over anyone Obama has appointed so far:

1) HE KNOWS WHAT TO DO Admittedly, this is a subjective category -- you have to buy into Krugman's notions (which I do) that the stimulus package was vastly under-funded and untargeted; that we're suffering from a solvency problem, not a liquidity problem with the banks; that some banks need to be...]]> Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0800 After only a little more than two weeks in office, Barack Obama is learning Harding's lesson the hard way, and it's his Democratic pals who could do him in.

First, let's check in with Obama's opponents. So far, the big story of the first two weeks in the press has been how not a single Republican in the House voted for the president's huge stimulus package. Of course, the surprise would have been if any of them had. Bi-partisanship sounds great in theory, and Obama deserves credit for walking the extra mile across the aisle. But the truth is that there's little politically to be gained for the GOP to be out there supporting Obama on his first initiative. If it succeeds -- even if...]]> Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 When times are tough and you're spending that much money, there has to be something wonderful and tangible to show for it. Yet that's not been the Obama approach, which has been more along the lines of "spend it or else." On other occasions, we've been reminded that the stimulus plan will bring us great (if boring) benefits -- better computerized medical records, smarter electrical grids, more high-speed Internet, school modernization, and better wastewater treatment.

This may fire the imagination of abstract-thinking economists everywhere. But for most of us the reaction is, "This is what I get for almost $1 trillion?"

That wasn't the FDR approach. Sure, New Deal...]]> Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 If there's one overriding theme that characterizes Obama's team, it is that anyone who went to Harvard (or another high-powered elite school) has his full trust. The Boston Globe calls the newly ensconced White House team "Cambridge on the Potomac." And Obama's actions and rhetoric confirm the same impulse. One Obama advisor even told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that the cabinet would be a mixture of Abraham Lincoln's "band of rivals" and "the best and the brightest." In truth, we've seen a lot more of the latter than the former.

Thus, as promised, Obama is moving beyond leftists and rightists and setting up "the establishment" in its place. The establishment, of course, generally...]]> Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:00:00 -0800 But those speeches were in the days before television, when Americans heard from their presidents much less frequently and regular presidential appearances hadn't become a kind of TV show in their own right.

In truth, it's been almost a half-century since anyone said anything memorable in an inaugural speech -- John F. Kennedy with his "Ask not what your country can do for you" oration in 1961, right before TV became a dominant force in our national life. Perhaps recognizing the obsolete nature of the whole exercise since, even our greatest post-JFK rhetorical president, Ronald Reagan, never bothered to display his best stuff on January 20 -- reserving it for other, more memorable...]]> Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:00:00 -0800 That doesn't mean Obama is headed for failure. Presidents design their office around what they know -- former governors tend to see the position as a "chief executive of the 50 states"; former armed-services officers see it as more organized along military lines. So what does Obama know? Chicago, the American epicenter of political patronage.

In Chicago, the chief executive (the mayor) primarily directs money to other parts of the public sector. In that sense, though he was never mayor, Obama may see himself as the embodiment of "the Chicago way" -- with the Windy City (and its mayor's office), for better or worse, as the model for how the federal government ought to work. (That...]]> Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:00:00 -0800 That's an important distinction, because it tells us a lot about our likely political future. Remember that, at the beginning of this fall campaign, the press fell all over itself proclaiming the Obama operation as the harbinger of a new, realigned type of post-Internet politics -- able to mobilize a massive network, mostly of the young, at a moment's notice. Turnout was predicted to set new records.

In reality, turnout was up, but not by much, and the young comprised nearly the same percentage of the vote they always have. As for Obama's decisive victory? It was about what one would expect from any challenger to an incumbent party running in the midst of a recession and the worst...]]> Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:00:00 -0800 On top of that, counting last Tuesday, the Republicans have now failed to win the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections. And in the fifth, they barely got by John Kerry. So despite appearances (owing to Washington's high neocon profile), it's actually been 20 years since the GOP was a dominant force in presidential politics.

There are plenty of theories circulating about how the GOP got itself into this mess, but one prime suspect clearly isn't getting its due -- conservative talk radio.

The partisans will howl in protest, but while certainly not the only culprit, the relentless stream of invective from the right side of the dial has undeniably been a...]]> Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:00:00 -0800 Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:00:00 -0800 It generally takes a gut-wrenching crisis to trigger a radical shift in our politics. Outside events set off wide-ranging swings in voter loyalties; good candidates (such as Franklin Roosevelt) merely take advantage of the crises. But in the past 150 years, only three such tipping points have produced that kind of earthquake -- the Civil War, which gave birth to GOP dominance in the mid-19th century; the Great Depression, which led to an era of Democratic supremacy; and the considerable fallout from the civil-rights revolution and the Vietnam experience, which initiated the Republican era that began in 1968 and was solidified by Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Historically, recessions are...]]> Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Way back in the early 1980s, in his brilliant book The Real Campaign, Jeff Greenfield convincingly argued that the media "made almost no difference" in the outcome of the 1980 Reagan-Carter-Anderson election. (Reagan won big, of course, even though the press disliked him.) And that was in the era when the mainstream media really did dominate -- pre-cable, pre-Internet, and pre-You Tube. Now, "the mainstream media" finds its numbers of readers and viewers dwindling. Every quarterly report brings more bad news -- or, as a friend once put it, "Every time someone dies, the print media and network television lose another customer."

The real reasons John McCain is in trouble are our...]]> Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Of course, Wednesday-morning quarterbacking is ridiculously easy, but in retrospect, what happened should have been crystal clear: Obama's lead was never as great as the media hype that accompanied it -- he only led by two to six points in some major tracking polls. In several of them, Obama tellingly never cleared 50 percent. (There was a larger-than-usual undecided vote.) And whether it was the so-called "Bradley effect" (suggesting a racial element to the vote) or something else, Obama performed last night exactly as he often had in the spring against Hillary Clinton: he ran below expectations.

Meanwhile, the tsunami of youth support for Obama never materialized. Instead, it was...]]> Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 The Pachyderm Party will face a situation where the only voices they'll be hearing in the proverbial wilderness are from talk radio. They'll have a scattered minority in Congress, and no discernible national or intellectual leaders pointing the way to a new future. Most of the "heavyweights" from the 2008 campaign face a cloudy future. Mitt Romney still hasn't proved he can appeal to the masses; Mike Huckabee will find it hard to become a national figure hosting a lackluster weekend TV show for Fox News. And as for Sarah Palin, four more years of gubernatorial experience will help, but it will be significantly harder for this hockey mom to survive a grueling primary campaign (when her...]]> Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 But the Great Depression redefined the political landscape (with an assist from Herbert Hoover's initial bumbling reaction to the crisis), giving the Democrats the upper hand in almost a mirror image of what had previously transpired. From 1932 through 1964, the Democrats won seven of nine elections. They ultimately lost power in that period after the GOP nominated Dwight Eisenhower, an apolitical national hero whose ideology was so amorphous that even the Democrats had sought him as a national candidate shortly before he began his political career as a Republican.

In 1968 the political map again dramatically changed, when the unrest caused by the Vietnam War -- combined with...]]> Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:00:00 -0700 But so far McCain has taken a bad situation and made it worse. In a presidential campaign, voters evaluate the candidates to see how they will handle the rigors of the office. This situation offers an ideal test of coolness and vision in a crisis. So far, Obama has successfully navigated it; McCain has hit an iceberg.

Impulsive to a fault, in the past several weeks McCain has certainly been anything but steady at the helm. The economy is good -- oops, no it isn't. I'm for the Paulson plan -- no, maybe I'm not. I won't be going to the debates unless there's a bailout deal -- oh, I guess I'll go. All along, McCain's trump card had been that Obama was too inexperienced to offer voters...]]> Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Who will benefit the most from the debates? Apply these rules and you'll know.

1) Debates are about memorable lines and key moments

What voters tend to recall are knockout lines and exchanges. This is especially true in that the media replays these moments again and again, reinforcing their importance.

In 1980, the headline replay was Ronald Reagan's "There you go again," and later, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" (which came in his closing summary, so voters could really remember it). In 1988, it was Lloyd Bentsen's riposte to Dan Quayle, "You're no Jack Kennedy." Note that, in each case, the comment was short (the better to be...]]> Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Palin may not have much of a résumé, but that only puts her into a long tradition of vice-presidential selections, many of them successful (at least in an electoral sense). There was Republican Spiro Agnew in 1968, himself a one-term governor, who began his acceptance speech by saying, "I stand here with a deep sense of the improbability of the moment." Or Barry Goldwater's 1964 choice, obscure New York congressman Bill Miller, whose claim to fame was that he later went on to appear in an American Express commercial. ("Do you know me?" he began. No one did.)

Going back even farther, there's Thomas Wheeler, a New York congressman who was the convention choice in 1876 to share the...]]> Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Keith Olbermann and MSNBC are commonly recognized as the leaders of the pro-Barack Obama movement in the mainstream media (through no fault of Obama's, by the way). It seems odd that a cable TV host, on a network with a relatively small audience, could help swing an election. And yes, NBC moved this week to rein him in, taking Olbermann and Chris Matthews off their hosting duties for live political events, including Election Night and the debates. And yes again, Olbermann's self-declared enemy, Fox News, is often every bit as partisan as he is.

But in the age of YouTube and the Internet, even a cable host can have a large, instant impact, magnified by his critics. And what...]]> Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Though the show has well-known British origins, there's something very American about the Idol concept, as anyone who has ever come across a Horatio Alger story or watched one of the 35 Rocky movies can tell you. But until now, the Idol blueprint had extended only to other TV programs -- it hadn't entered our more hallowed political realm. (Frankly, I'm amazed it's taken this long. Our politicians have always pretended to be more humble than they are, as anyone familiar with the career of corporate lawyer, a/k/a rail-splitter, Abe Lincoln knows.)

Today, politics are deemed above the pop-culture fray by the Sunday-morning talk-show set, but, for the rest of the country, they've been...]]> Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Overriding everything for McCain is the necessity to make his message in the upcoming week a far more positive one than it has been to this juncture. The temptation will be for the Republicans to keep lambasting Obama, because it has seemed to work until now. But without a compelling positive vision of change on domestic issues -- which they have largely so far failed to provide -- the Republicans can't win.

With that in mind, McCain has to achieve these four goals during the upcoming convention to stay competitive with Obama. They are, in chronological order:

1) Pick the right vice-presidential nominee

McCain's veep selection will kick off the week. If...]]> Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:00:00 -0700 So far, Obama has failed to construct much of a narrative to tie himself to the working-class voters who will decide the election. It's not really a question of race, but of background and novelty. Here is this eloquent candidate who has seemingly appeared from nowhere with little experience. And, as the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan has pointed out, he has few traditional geographical or family roots. Obama has a different kind of name and little personal experience with institutions Americans know well, such as the military or sports. The jobs he brags about -- like being a community organizer -- are unfamiliar and even alienating to many Americans.

Yes, Obama has written a...]]> Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:00:00 -0700 The dominant narratives of this race have been how Obama upset the odds (and the Clintons) through a brilliant campaign, and how McCain mostly stumbled his way to the nomination, staging a comeback in New Hampshire and riding the momentum to victory. But maybe that's not what really happened. In truth, Obama always had a much better chance of emerging as the nominee than the press gave him credit for -- which is why this column even made him the slight favorite over Hillary Clinton way back in March 2007.

Yes, Obama was new to the national political scene. But in the primaries, insurgency is often an advantage, especially if the novice is as brilliant an orator as Obama. More...]]> Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:00:00 -0700 True, Spain won't win all that many medals at the upcoming Games -- but that's beside the point. Despite all the hype about to smother the planet like a Beijing smog cloud, the Olympics will soon be unmasked as the overrated spectacle it is -- one that is also long past its modern heyday, which occurred in an era when there were few other international competitions.

Today, of course, is much different. In terms of the intensity of worldwide interest, the Olympics pale in comparison with such events as soccer's World Cup, and even the world cups for cricket and rugby. In the US, the Olympics do draw decent ratings, but mostly from a non-traditional-sports-fan demographic (i.e.,...]]> Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700 It's true that Obama has a powerful tail wind, thanks to the nation's desire for change, and he is the most eloquent nominee since Ronald Reagan, with star power to boot. He also will be able to outspend the GOP decisively. And so far, McCain has failed to gain much traction against his Democratic rival.

But Obama's head winds are just as strong. To win, he will literally have to rewrite history. Some of the hurdles he'll have to overcome, as I've observed previously, include:

• No Democrat who hails from north of the Mason-Dixon line has been elected since 1960.

• No candidate in the modern primary era has ever been elected in November after failing to win more...]]> Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700 McCain may be the candidate of experience in this election, but that know-how doesn't extend to facing off against a Democrat. He first won election to the Senate in 1986 against a relative unknown (he might have gotten a tough race from Bruce Babbitt, but Babbitt declined to run), and he's faced mostly token opposition ever since.

Having a general-election novice as a presidential nominee is a relatively rare occurrence. The last two nominees who had such similar inexperience were Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. Though both had faced tough primaries before running for president, neither had ever faced a bruising competition with a typical Republican. That helps...]]> Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700 When Barack Obama arrives in England in a few weeks on his celebrated European tour, he'll probably disembark assuming that George W. Bush is the most despised American in Britain.

If so, he'll be wrong. Currently, sitting atop the most-hated Yank chart is Tom Hicks, co-owner of the Liverpool soccer club and a Texas businessman who ran with the same crowd as the incumbent president when Bush was governor of the Lone Star state.

Hicks is part of a growing wave of Americans who have purchased English soccer teams (including the owner of the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Malcolm Glazer, who now also owns controlling interest in the world's most recognizable soccer team, Manchester...]]> Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700 The story being spun is that the Obama team wanted to share its Thursday-night magic moment with the masses, and take a page from the playbook of John F. Kennedy, who pulled a similar move when he accepted his nomination in 1960 in an outdoor venue. In truth, the Kennedy homage likely had little to do with the decision.

Before the change, Obama was scheduled to give his speech in a hall half full of hardcore Hillary Clinton supporters who don't particularly like him. So odds are that Obama was looking for a larger venue in which Clinton's supporters would be only a small portion of the crowd. If things had gone ahead as scheduled, Obama might well have given a stirring address,...]]> Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Say what you want about Obama, he's no radical. Yes, he has an unusual name, but once upon a time, all of our names -- whether Irish, Italian, or Hungarian -- were considered uncommon. Despite his unfamiliar persona, his is a charming and conventional American success story -- he grew up in a broken home, was raised by a relative, became chief editor of the Harvard Law Review (hardly the house organ for a bastion of bomb-throwers), and then spent most of his political career in the bowels of that well-known cauldron of Marxism: the Illinois state legislature.

Along the way, Obama clearly made the acquaintances of all kinds of folk -- including Ayres and Wright, the latter of whom...]]> Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:00:00 -0700 Wed, 28 May 2008 22:00:00 -0700