The life of Barack Obama is a tale of post-civil rights movement racial politics.
Alan Brinkley
Alan Brinkley is Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University and the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.
Posted inFeatures
What’s Next?
This time there are no excuses — no thwarted popular majority, no fatal butterfly ballots or hanging chads, no renegade Supreme Court decision, no Nader factor. This was a defeat, pure and simple — not a landslide, not an unambiguous mandate for the policies of the Bush administration, but unmistakably a defeat. So where do […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Based on a True Story
My Life By Bill Clinton • Knopf • 957 pages • $35.00 Presidential memoirs are among the worst of all literary genres. That is not because they are invariably self-serving and less than wholly honest. Even the greatest memoirs are both. It is because they are relentlessly inauthentic. One can read the memoirs of virtually […]
Posted inHousing and Transportation
Liberty, Community, and the National Idea
Is a renewed emphasis on the value of community the answer to our political woes? Not if it’s defined in purely local terms.
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Liberalism’s Third Crisis
This isn’t the first time liberals have faced reverses and needed to reframe their ideas.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Liberals and Public Investment: Recovering a Lost Legacy
T he emerging debate over the efficacy of public investment– a debate the Clinton administration seems certain to accelerate– has a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the staples of economic discourse then were warnings that the United States was suffering from what many called “economic maturity” […]