News
“This Here’s Bonnie. I’m Clyde. We’re the New Left.”
Some weeks ago a commenter asked when I was going to complete my assessment of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. Rest assured it will come in a few days. In the meantime here is an interview with Perlstein from the new issue of the libertarian journal Reason, conducted by...
Doughnuts To Dollars
In the next day or so I'll put up a post concerning dollars - that is to say, the estimated $300 million that Sen. Barack Obama may raise for his campaign, now that he has reversed his previous position and become the first major-party presidential candidate since...
Winston’s Way with Words
On the day that changed everything, September 11, 2001, then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani seized the moment and guided that most unmanageable of all municipalities through its unsurpassed dark day. When the mayor reached the point of exhaustion in the early...
Still Scapegoating After All These Years
Republicans are comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's domestic policy adviser, claims that Carter does not deserve blame for the malaise of the late 1970s. He says: “What led to the economic problems was the built-in inflation, which we...
Who’s Mr. Conservative: Reagan or Nixon?
That is the query Barron YoungSmith, an intern at The New Republic, poses at the magazine's website this week. (YoungSmith is a 2006 Brown University graduate, incidentally. And some people were amazed that 39-year-old Rick Perlstein was fascinated enough by the...
Conrad Black on “Nixonland”
Countering Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, RN biographer Conrad Black argues that RN won in 1972 not because he was a good polarizer but because he was a good President: It is not mentioned that only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in more daunting...
RN and the African-American Vote
John Mitchell biographer James Rosen on a Nixon benchmark to which Sen. McCain may hope to attain: [I]t was...Nixon, that most complex psychological character, who earned more of the black vote — 32% in his 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy — than any GOP nominee of the...
Southern Strategy: Myth and Reality
Now that the general election campaign has started, there is a great deal of talk about the GOP's "Southern Strategy." Many accounts say that the strategy was responsible for electing Nixon in 1968 and thus became the template for Republican presidential politics. But...
Obama-Gore?!
Somewhere up there, perhaps, Tim Russert is sending the word out to the George Clinton who did not sing "dogs of the world unite," John C. Calhoun, Thomas A. Hendricks, Adlai E. Stevenson I, and Charles W. Fairbanks to appear on next Sunday's Meet The Press (Celestial...
The Progressive Book Club Cometh
Today's New York Times brings news of the latest effort on the part of liberal and left-wing media figures to sway American public opinion - the launch of the Progressive Book Club. Its CEO, nonprofit fundraiser Elizabeth Wagley (whose father John Wagley has long...