The New Republic

What is the best explanation of the moral, legal, economic, and strategic failures of the Bush Administration? Scott McClennan's What Happened offers a series of illuminating answers. While the book has received a great deal of attention, one of his principal, and most interesting, themes has been barely noticed.As McClennan describes the Bush White House, it is the very opposite of the team of rivals described in Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Lincoln's executive branch. READ MORE >>

Now we know why Barack Obama spent so much time in the gym those last days in Chicago before taking off for Afghanistan. He was practicing jump shots, preparing for the sensational 25 footer he sank in the Kabul gym in front of cheering US troops. READ MORE >>

Ten days ago, I watched "Venus Wimbledon," as her family calls her, defeat her younger sister Serena for her fifth Wimbledon championship. One's pleasure in this, the best of the sisters' matches I've seen, was marred only by the self-gratulatory garrulity of Mary Carillo whom, year after year, NBC couples with the adolescent stooge, Ted Robinson, and the informed, surprisingly modest John McEnroe, who, unlike the others, actually stops talking when the players are going about their business. READ MORE >>

The most level-headed, wise and modestly self-assured of George W. Bush's appointees, Robert Gates, has proposed a Rooseveltian enrichment of the already de-Rumsfelded Pentagon: the funding of social scientists and other professional researchers to work on such problems as China and Iraq: According to yesterday's New York Times,  "Gates has compared the initiative--named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors)--to the government's effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched READ MORE >>

The following is a revised, updated, and edited version of a piece originally published in The Independent of London a few months ago. In view of recent events, and continuing debates, I post a revised version here. I should add, by way of disclaimer, that I have been an occasional, informal adviser to Senator Obama. Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For more than a decade, Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago Law School. READ MORE >>

Thirty-six hours ago, on our annual trek to our summer residence on Tybee Island, Georgia, my wife and I stopped at a Comfort Inn in Dandridge, Tennessee, a few miles west of the Great Smoky Mountains. For dinner, we ate very well and very cheaply (for both of us, under $30.00 including a 30-percent tip) at a Perkins restaurant. Around us were tables full of contented, obese patrons, many of whom left with cartons of leftovers. READ MORE >>

By all accounts, one of the distinctive features of the Bush Administration has been its relative intolerance for internal dissent. High-level officials have tended to settle on a particular course of action, quite early on, and to squelch rather than to promote discussion and debate within the White House or the administration more generally. The point applies to the Iraq war, of course, but to many other issues as well, including climate change, tax cuts, energy policy, the mortgage crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and much more. READ MORE >>

I never have quite figured out what should go here as opposed to back on my own blog. I don't post here if I don't think the piece has any outside-academia interest; seems like this space should be a little more geared toward public commentary than toward strictly academic news. So I don't tend to, for example, blog conference announcements here. I'm pretty sure, however, that this one time a conference post is appropriate. READ MORE >>

Campaigning in Kinston, North Carolina, Hillary Clinton drew the line: "All I hear about is gas prices. Gas and diesel, everywhere," she said. "I want the Congress to stand up and vote. Are they for the oil companies, or are they for you?" And, lest one think that was just another moment of ‘misspeaking', she repeated her point in Jeffersonville, Indiana: READ MORE >>

Reasonable people are making reasonable arguments for and against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. But in a recent column attacking Barack Obama, Paul Krugman has lost his bearings. Krugman objects to Obama's suggestion, on Fox News, that he accepts the Republican claim that regulation should take the form of tradable emissions permits rather "top-down command and control." Krugman says that Obama is "giving Republicans credit for good ideas they never had." READ MORE >>