Dayo Olopade reports on a congressional race in Minnesota that bears a striking resemblance to the presidential campaign:
Minnesotan viewers of the January candidates' forum with state Senator Terri Bonoff and two other Democratic challengers for the 3rd Congressional District seat could be forgiven for thinking they'd seen this movie before. Bonoff, a two-term state representative with strong institutional backing, found herself in a heated back-and-forth with two male opponents, each determined to take their insurgent candidacy all the way to Washington. The scene, of course, was an off-off-Broadway rendition of the widely watched debate between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, which had taken place in New Hampshire just two weeks prior.
Tara McKelvey interviews Barton Gellman, author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency:
Tara McKelvey: What do you think are the most important things Cheney has done that will last or have a legacy?
Barton Gellman: It's so hard to understand legacy with Cheney. He says he wants to be judged by history, but he has thrown up roadblocks to historians such as the new executive order on presidential records. In other cases, he simply did not keep records. They also invented this curious new form of quasi-classification where they would stamp things as if they were secret or sensitive information, but they would use the words, 'Treat As,' or 'Treat It As.' It could take decades longer than it's supposed to for that information to be released. What archivist is going to look at this stamp and just throw it into the open pile?
And Eric Rauchway writes that Herbert Hoover's vain attempts to restart the economy late in his presidency show the foolishness of government interventions run by people who don't believe in government:
We remember Hoover as talking constantly about the imminent return of prosperity -- which, in his view, was a mischievous scamp who always happened to be just around the corner from America and who might be lured back with, say, a cut in the capital-gains tax. But Hoover was far more than a mere happy-talker: He also managed to spend enormous sums of money trying to rescue banks without halting, let alone reversing, the nation's slide into financial disaster. He accomplished this feat because early in 1932 Congress voted to help America's ailing financial sector, creating an agency called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) with $500 million in capital and an authorization to borrow $1.5 billion more.
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—The Editors
