The emotional power of 60 Minutes tonight went deeper than a disaster story with a happy ending–the safe ditching of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River with 155 passengers and crew. In a time of fear and anxiety, it affirmed a powerful collective belief that, against all odds, human beings can save themselves and others from disaster. The retelling of that story was ironically interrupted by commercials for a CBS reality series, celebrating the more dominant values of our time, competition and...

After he saves the economy, the new President will face a really tough decision: With March Madness almost here, where will he shoot hoops and with whom? Barack Obama, the nation’s first basketball-playing chief executive, lives in a White House with a tennis court and bowling alley, but he will have to leave the grounds to get a game–either at Fort Myers off Arlington Cemetery three miles away, the Interior Department’s basement or the House’s Rayburn Building, where he could...

The cover of Time this week shows not the Person of the Year but a vanishing artifact–the American newspaper–and reflects, in a larger sense, the coming end of journalism as we know it. After a lifetime of putting words and images on paper–selling them, if you will–the computer screen and the crashing economy are conspiring to make what I did obsolete. (The timely site “Newspaper Death Watch” should be expanded to “Printed Word Death Watch” as magazines...

In the aftermath of the Hillary Clinton replacement soap opera, there is a footnote to the misadventure of JFK’s daughter in seeking the seat–the price of getting involved with political pygmies in the desire to continue a family tradition of public service. The New York Times, which played a part in discrediting Caroline Kennedy as not ready for prime time, has gone back (with one of the same reporters) to untangle the final scenes of her withdrawal and the efforts of a governor’s...

When Tom Wolfe dramatized the Age of Greed in the 1980s, his novel satirizing the downfall of a Wall Street Master of the Universe was not taken as prophecy, but reality is overtaking his art. Now David Brooks, the New York Times pop sociologist in residence, is declaring that “after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. “Now lifestyle standards for the privileged...

Taxpayer money pouring into banks has not only failed to get loans flowing but even worsened the practices of those that received it. “The federal government,” the Washington Post reports, “has invested almost $200 billion in U.S. banks over the last three months to spark new lending to consumers and businesses. “So far, it hasn’t worked. Lending has declined, and banks that got government money on average have reduced lending more sharply than banks that didn’t.”...

The Washington air is filled with fake piety as Republican survivors of 2008 try to feign amity with a popular president and vote against him by making villains out of Congressional Democrats. In the House, they lined up unanimously against the stimulus bill, despite more schmoozing with Barack Obama than any recent president, while blaming Nancy Pelosi for their disaffection. Pointing out Obama’s belief that “economic recovery is about psychology as well as money and that Americans...

When he left the Senate as Minority Leader in 2005, Tom Daschle was a man of modest means with a good reputation. Four years later, he is the wealthy and beleaguered Obama choice to overhaul America’s health care system. The verdict on his nomination is in doubt (the Senate has a tradition of taking care of its own), but the trajectory of his life over the past four years is deeply disturbing. Barred by law from lobbying, Daschle went to work as a “special policy adviser” to a high-powered...

In the frenzy over jump-starting the economy, the House stimulus bill includes, among other straws being grasped, $117 billion of spending for health care, most of it to maintain coverage for the disabled and newly poor. Otherwise, the political consensus is that we can’t “afford” to reform the system. If anything, there is a stronger case to be made that we can’t afford not to. Paul Krugman scratches the surface today with the argument that “helping families purchase...

The House stimulus bill recalls those old TV game shows with contestants racing the clock to fill shopping carts, items spilling into the aisles in a mad dash to the checkout counter. In the House, $200 million to re-sod the National Mall and $200 million to extend Medicare to cover family planning services fell out yesterday as Democrats keep ransacking the shelves from what the livid Wall Street Journal calls their “40-year wish list.” Is this the only way to revive a sinking economy–to...

Here is what we know after seven days of Change: (1) The new president is aggressively attacking the economic downturn and, though perhaps too eager to make tax-cut concessions to roll up a bipartisan score, is realizing that nothing will appease Republican know-nothings and, as a result, showing some signs of toughening up in getting a stimulus bill passed without delay. (2) Though there is much that can be done by executive fiat, it will take longer and be more complicated to make good on campaign...

Call it “partial” or “temporary,” the momentum for nationalizing US banks is growing across the political and economic spectrum. President Obama, Paul Krugman writes, is “going to have to decide how bold to be in his moves to sustain the financial system, where the outlook has deteriorated so drastically that a surprising number of economists, not all of them especially liberal, now argue that resolving the crisis will require the temporary nationalization of some major...

Writing about her withdrawal from seeking Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, I committed a journalistic sin–burying the lead. The last sentence was: “The Obama Administration should ask her to serve as ambassador to Great Britain (as her grandfather did) or France or Ireland, where her intelligence and instincts, along with her Kennedy and Bouvier background, could be an important American asset.” This self-rebuke arises after reading the new New Yorker piece about Caroline...

At the White House yesterday, the President made it clear that his Inaugural message to Muslims “on the wrong side of history”–that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist”–applies to Congressional Republicans as well. Responding to Rep. Eric Cantor’s objection to the proposal to increase benefits for low-income workers who don’t owe federal income taxes, Obama reminded him of the November election results. “I won,”...

If she ever had doubts about getting into the rough-and-tumble of politics, the mean-spirited aftermath of JFK’s daughter’s withdrawal from seeking Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat should reinforce her decision. Governor David Paterson’s aides are anonymously attacking Caroline Kennedy (“The fiasco of the last 24 hours reinforced why the governor never intended to choose her”) and contradicting themselves with assertions that “problems involving taxes and a household...

The withdrawal of JFK’s daughter as a replacement for Hillary Clinton leads to questions about gender and race in national politics in what we all celebrated as the Age of Obama this week. In Illinois, the future felon Rod Blagojevich appoints Roland Burris amid calls to retain the President’s seat for an African-American and now, with Caroline Kennedy gone, New York’s governor speaks publicly and privately about “the importance of selecting a woman to replace Mrs. Clinton.” With...

It was a tale of two cities today with joy in Washington and despair in the financial markets of New York. When George W. Bush left the White House, he took Wall Street’s free-lunch order forms with him and the panic is on. The Dow lost 4 percent, the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s 500 index more than 5 as Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup fell to new lows. While Barack Obama was saying “Without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control,” Wall Street was...

The very word cuts both ways–meaning true trust and also deception, as in “confidence game.” But the added layer of irony for Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address is that, in an environment of potential panic, confidence is a key to getting America back on track. Whatever he says after taking the oath today will in itself be as crucial, as real in its impact, as the stimulus bills, bailouts and fiscal maneuvering to come. The new President knows that. With his uncanny emotional...

He has been gone now for more years than he lived but, on the birthday we celebrate today, Martin Luther King Jr. would have been only 80 years old. Michelle and Barack Obama are doing community service in his honor and urging all Americans to do the same. In more ways than one, the inauguration of an African-American president tomorrow is part of his legacy. Martin Luther King preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force. At the...

Yes, yes, we get it. Barack Obama has themed his installation to the Great Emancipator–”A New Birth of Freedom” from the Gettysburg Address, yesterday’s train trip to Washington, last week’s family visit to the Lincoln Memorial, the swearing-in with Lincoln’s bible, everything but a stovepipe hat for the Inaugural Address. No fault of Obama’s, but it may all be on the brink of what Esquire used to call Wretched Excess with the Congressional Inaugural Committee’s...

In the most important foreclosure of all, the White House will be taken back Tuesday by the majority of Americans who lost it to lawyers in 2000 and the legions who have joined them while watching in disgust as George W. Bush lowered American property values in the world neighborhood. Our new tenants, the Obamas, are holding an open house as they move in and, although visitors won’t be able to see it, the most cherished heirloom of all will be back in the people’s possession, the patriotism...

Whatever else he is, George W. Bush has not been a lucky president. Here he is, after eight disastrous years in office, in the TV spotlight to make his case for history in a sentimental setting, and millions of viewers can’t wait to see the last of him and get back to watching a miracle in Manhattan–a crippled airliner with 155 people landing without loss of life on a strip of river between the crowded shores of New York and New Jersey. As the President was praising himself, Americans...

Watching the VP interview by Jim Lehrer on PBS last night recalled the movie “Westworld” about a theme park in which lifelike robots run amok and start killing. It came out at the time that an automaton named Dick Cheney, codenamed Backseat by the Secret Service, was serving in the White House, getting toilet leaks fixed and installing a headrest for Betty Ford on the presidential helicopter. More than three decades later, asked whether 4500 American and more than a hundred thousand Iraqi...

At her confirmation yesterday, Hillary Clinton invoked the concept of “smart power” as a guide to American diplomacy. In his hearings, Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited Barack Obama as a role model for America’s school children. “Never before,” he said “has being smart been so cool.” And in another hearing room, Senators were mooning over Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, the nominee for Energy Secretary. Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman enthused over...

He could turn out to be a one-term president, according to New York Times White House reporters in a panel discussion this weekend moderated by their assistant managing editor who complained: “When the current president was elected, one of the first things he did was sit down with the New York Times and a battery of reporters. This president has not sat down with our New York Times press corps in a very long time, as even Bush did.” As uncharitable as it may be to connect the gloomy assessment...