Michelle Goldberg looks at how Mark Dybul's ousting will reshape the fight against AIDS:
[A] fierce debate is underway about whether Dybul was unfairly treated. What's at stake is more than just the reputation of one man, because the argument is really about America's AIDS policies and the future of PEPFAR, Bush's lone but in many ways impressive humanitarian achievement. Since Bush created it in 2003, PEPFAR has spent tens of billions of dollars fighting AIDS in the developing world, providing life-saving anti-retroviral drugs for more than 2 million people infected with the disease, and caring for millions of AIDS orphans. With Bush gone, though, the program's future direction is unclear. Will it proceed Obama-style, with lots of continuing outreach to religious conservatives, a focus on treatment and a sidelining of inflammatory gender issues? Or will it, under Clinton's leadership, work to address the sexual realities that drive the epidemic, even at the cost of bipartisan support?
Attending this week's Thinking Big event, Harold Meyerson is reminded of a conference three decades before:
The comparisons between Democratic Agenda and Thinking Big are instructive. Each sounded themes of liberal rebirth; speakers at both conferences combined long-range visions with legislative specifics; both conferences issued a call to arms. But the Democratic Agenda conference, unbeknownst to its participants, came at the end of the New Deal era. Reaganism was already abroad in the land, and Carter's deregulatory initiatives were a taste of the laissez-faire policies to come.
And Noy Thrupkaew reviews Steven Soderbergh's Che and considers the power of charisma:
Che is best appreciated as an enigma caught between twin urges, poised on the brink of calamitous action. Soderbergh does a masterful, if grueling, presentation on how these tensions played out in Che's everyday decisions in battle and has created an intriguing cautionary tale for pinning so much hope on only one man. Even within the restricted scope of Che, Soderbergh makes clear the problems of a cult of personality separated from the people, and a revolution that has ceased to be responsive.
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--The Editors
