- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama’s fighting words.
President Obama’s first State of the Union address came at the end of the most harrowing nine days of his young Administration. On January 19th, a Republican won the Massachusetts seat that had been held for nearly half a century by Edward M. Kennedy, thereby depriving the Senate . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama vs. the spill.
For the young Presidency of Barack Obama, and for the nation, this hellish summer of discontent started in balmy spring, on the evening of April 20th, forty miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. At first, after the explosion aboard the giant oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” and Barack Obama’s White House.
If the United States is one big book club, and sometimes it feels that way, then the White House must have been hoping that this would be the week when everyone was talking about “The Rogue,” Joe McGinniss’s much ballyhooed takedown of his erstwhile Alaska neighbor . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: What were the voters thinking?
Barack Obama had the mot juste last Wednesday for what had just befallen him and his party: a “shellacking.” The President’s choice of word was one syllable (and one “g”) longer than his predecessor’s summary after a parallel midterm debacle. But, then . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: The G.O.P.’s best hopes in the 2012 Presidential election.
It was a chilly winter for Barack Obama, politically speaking. For six months, he and his party shivered under the avalanche that had buried them in November’s midterm election while Republicans disported themselves on the partisan ski slopes, pausing only to throw snowballs, some of them dirty, and . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Why voters will blame Obama.
Franklin Roosevelt was a lucky man and, in 1932, a lucky candidate. Start with the name—or, as today’s political marketers would say, the brand. F.D.R.’s name paired that of the twinkly, kindly philosopher of the American Revolution—the Uncle of His Country— . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: What lies ahead for Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
If politics is show business for ugly people (which, by the way, it’s not, not this time, not the ugly-people part anyway, not with a cast of characters as glossy as Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin’s ghost, and Barack Obama), is Occupy . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Nobel Surprise
If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don’t force it on you while . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Can nuclear power make a comeback?
Once the unpleasantness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had a little time to recede, America discovered that “the atom” wasn’t all bad. The bomb, yes—it was terrifying, as terrifying as a hundred 9/11s. American children got the wits scared out of them at school . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Lies
After the tea-partying, town-meeting-disrupting, pistol-packing mensis horribilis of August, more than a few commentators complained, as one of them put it, that “Obama should have seen it coming.” No one doubted that the current attempt to overhaul America’s uniquely wasteful and unjust . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Glenn Beck’s George Soros shows.
It’s hardly news when Fox News airs something nasty. This time, though, it’s personal—or, at least, institutional. Recently, the nation’s highest-rated cable-news network’s biggest star devoted three hour-long episodes of his program to an attack on a . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: The speeches of Obama and Netanyahoo.
A week ago Monday, Barack Obama hied himself to the land—well, a land—of his forefathers. Like Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton before him, President Obama deemed it politic to drop in on his ancestral village on the auld sod of Ireland. In tiny Moneygall, surrounded . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Trash talk from the 2008 campaign.
8220;Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Harper; $27.99), has come along just in time. The nation’s political and political-commenting classes, whose nervous systems atrophy without a reliable supply of . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama and the left.
8220;All violent feelings have the same effect,” John Ruskin wrote, in one of his most famous essays. “They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy.’ ” Ruskin published “Of the . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Bipartisanship and your health.
Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, is a reader—and something of a postmodern interpreter—of the works of Albert Camus and George Orwell. A few days before President Obama’s big health-care “summit,” Gingrich addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. He . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Donald Trump and Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The Presidential candidacy as joke is a perennial sideshow along the raucous midway of the American political carnival. Sometimes the candidate—Will Rogers (1928), Gracie Allen (1940), Pat Paulsen (1968 through 1996), Stephen Colbert (2008)—is a fully qualified professional humorist. Sometimes he, or it, is an animal . . ....
- Seymour M. Hersh: How real is the nuclear threat?
Is Iran actively trying to develop nuclear weapons? Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush. There is a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Biggus Buckus
REG : All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?ATTENDEE: Brought peace?—“Monty Python’ . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Finding “Top Secret America.”
These are hard times for newspapers, and not just the Times. America’s other iconic daily of the past half-century, the Washington Post, has been doing a long, slow fade, speeded up lately by the Great Recession. The Post’s weekday circulation is barely two-thirds what . . ....
- Jane Mayer: Walter Mondale on how Obama is like Carter.
For most people, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be Barack Obama as his Administration’s high hopes are dashed by daily waves of bad news. But for Walter Mondale, who spent four years as Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President, the experience . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Presidential debates, Citizens United, and the politics of media.
8220;We’ve got to stop the debates! Enough with the debates!” That was John McCain’s plea on “Meet the Press” the Sunday before his favored candidate (Mitt Romney) pulped his unfavored one (Newt Gingrich) like an overripe orange in the Florida Republican primary . . ....
- James Surowiecki: Obama, jobs, and the G.O.P.
There is no truer truism in American politics than James Carville’s catchphrase from the 1992 election “It’s the economy, stupid.” When people discuss Barack Obama’s current approval rating, which is at its lowest level ever, they may invoke his supposed lack of . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama and the battle of the amendments.
There is the current crop of Ohio Republicans, and then there are those who art in Heaven. A specimen of the former, ultimate destination unknown, is Speaker of the House John Boehner, a perpetrator (and, arguably, a victim) of the terrifying debt-limit arson that his party, on fire with . . ....
- Steve Coll: Obama’s Middle East speech and policy on Syria.
The Damascus Spring of 2001 was so called because Syrian democrats hoped that President Bashar al-Assad, a mild-mannered doctor trained in London, who had been installed as the successor to his ruthless father, Hafez, might forswear tyranny. That Spring ended, and some of the hopeful landed in torture . . ....
- Nick Paumgarten: How to survive a terrorist attack.
Last month in Washington, President Obama convened world leaders to discuss the dangers of nuclear proliferation and of inadequately secured nuclear material. For people of a certain furrowed cast of mind, the summit revived fears of a nuclear terrorist attack on an American city. Over the years, Cassandras have conjured . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Sorting out the Senate.
The hundred and eleventh Congress, which had emitted more than a few whimpers along the way, ended with a fusillade of bangs. Reconvening for the last time after the shock of November’s Republican wave, the outgoing, still Democratic Congress legislated with unwonted vigor and speed. In the six . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: A new history of Britain’s role in the American Civil War.
For the first fourscore and, oh, six or seven years after our fathers brought forth what they brought forth, the former owners of the new nation did not always regard it with the unmixed admiration and respect that the noisiest ex-colonists considered their due. From the beginning—from . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Behind Obama’s clean-energy strategy.
The day after President Obama delivered his second State of the Union address last week, dozens of Web sites turned it into a “word cloud,” graphically showing the relative frequency with which particular words appeared. One such cloud-seeding Web site was none other than www.whitehouse.gov, where, as . . ....
