As critics taunt the President about becoming another Jimmy Carter on the economy or Bill Clinton on health care reform, an older generation is haunted by the makings of another LBJ in Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal’s call for more troops with the or-else warning that our mission “will likely result in failure” is an invitation to follow the Vietnam path that led to 550,000 Americans fighting and 18,000 being killed in a tribal war that ended in defeat and humiliation. LBJ...

Is Barack Obama trying to hide some innate shyness? After being on 60 Minutes almost as often as Andy Rooney and rivaling Oprah on weekday TV, the President will go for overexposure records with five Sunday talk shows tomorrow to be followed by Letterman Monday night. The All Obama All the Time blitz is meant to explain and sell health care reform to confused Americans, but it calls up that ancient resistance to argument, “Don’t bother me with facts, I’ve made up my mind.” Can...

The man who received 345,937 votes (and $11.6 million of health lobbyist donations), has overruled Barack Obama, the choice of 69,498,215 Americans, who presented his proposals to a joint session of Congress last week. President Baucus’ plan, which omits a public insurance option and other key elements favored by the occupant of the White House as well as other Congressional committees, is seen as holding together “the fragile coalition of major industry leaders and interest groups central...

Joe Wilson’s blurtout last week lit a fuse to set off a slow-motion exposure of race in the national anti-Obama rage. Today the House Black Caucus takes the lead in censuring the South Carolina Congressman with what are clearly mixed feelings about dealing publicly with an issue that seemed to have been settled by the inauguration of a “post-racial” president only a few months ago. House Majority Whip James Clyburn has refused to call the “You lie” outburst racist,...

This past weekend reflects the state of anti-Obama invective as literally countless American patriots in Washington rage against the President while the dean of terrorists delivers a mild harangue against him as “powerless.” In both cases, there are fact-check problems. The bin Laden message comes in a ten-minute audiotape with an undated photograph while the Tea Party crowd, estimated at tens of thousands by neutral observers, swells to two million in the reports of sponsors and right-wing...

Today is a reminder for those who live where feeling safe is commonplace of what it’s like suddenly to live with fear, to have the ground stop feeling solid under your feet. Older generations experienced this epiphany in 1941 with Pearl Harbor. Their children were baptized by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now a new generation tells Peggy Noonan how they were transformed by the “life-splitting event” of eight years ago: “Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A...

If passion, eloquence and moral gravity were the main currency of American politics, Barack Obama would have changed the course of the health care debate tonight. But with Washington as it is, the President could hope for no more than to restore some sanity by calling out the opposition for its “scare tactics,” indicting insurance companies for greed and evoking the “large-heartedness” of Ted Kennedy’s efforts for universal coverage as “not a Republican or a Democratic...

In tonight’s confrontation with Congress, Barack Obama will not be sweet-talking Republicans, who are locked into a long-term temper tantrum, but Democrats and independents who embraced him last November and expected to live happily ever after. Maureen Dowd, as usual, puts it in quasi-sexual terms, complaining that she “always knew he was going to be trouble…He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left you flat, and then, when you...

To balance the furor over bureaucratic boards to decide whether the aged are worth saving with medical care, the financial wizards who brought on the mortgage meltdown have figured out a way to play roulette with their chances. Bankers, the New York Times reports, “plan to buy ‘life settlements,’ life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash–$400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to...

Previous generations marked the holiday with parades, speeches and editorials honoring the dignity of work. Today’s theme is despair over failure to find jobs. “Labor Day 2009 is a terrible time to be an American worker,” writes Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson. “Official unemployment hovers just under 10 percent, its highest level since the early 1980s. Add in the partly employed and those who have given up on hunting for jobs because there are so few jobs to be...

Embattled as he now is, Barack Obama has not lost his rhetorical touch. In today’s weekly address, he uses the fourth anniversary of the Gulf hurricane as an image for American efforts to repair the economy, reform health care and overcome political division. “Government,” he says, “must be a partner–not an opponent-–in getting things done.” His description of hands-on efforts to rebuild New Orleans comes against a backdrop of devastation in Washington as bipartisan...

Yes, no, maybe, depending on the beholder’s politics, economic theories and selective reading of the meager statistics and evidence available. Vice-President Biden speechified yesterday that, after 200 days, the $787 billion stimulus, although not a “single silver bullet” but “silver buckshot,” was helping the economy. “Without it we’d be in much deeper trouble,” he said, claiming that “Instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we are talking about the end...

“Atonement is a process that never ends,” Ted Kennedy writes in his memoir, confronting the shame shadowing his life that was avoided in a weekend of tributes–the death of a young woman at Chappaquiddick. In a preview of the 532-page volume to be published later this month, the New York Times discloses that Kennedy “called his behavior after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne ‘inexcusable’ and said the events might have shortened the life of his ailing...

The President is finally getting bipartisanship, not on health care, but against a war that has morphed into Iraq II as George Will, no bleeding heart liberal, now says it’s “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.” With calls for more troops and casualties rising, American abhorrence of an endless bloody occupation is coalescing into a demand for rethinking exactly what we are doing in that part of the world, why and for how long. Even advocates for staying like Andrew Cordesman concede...

When John McCain chose her as his running mate, she was virtually unknown. Now, twelve months later, Sarah Palin is sifting through more than 1070 invitations for paid appearances and speeches as well as a thick folder of offers for “network and pundit gigs, documentaries and business opportunities.” This makes her one of the 21st century’s first publicity saints, a status I once explained to Marilyn Monroe. “Why,” she had asked, “do they print things about me...

Team Obama is in full campaign mode, firing off e-mails and organizing events to push ahead for health care reform, but nobody knows exactly where the goal line is. According to the Washington Post, “President Obama’s supporters hope to recapture the energy of last year’s triumphant election campaign in a bid to regain control of the health-care debate, planning more than 2,000 house parties, rallies and town hall meetings across the country over the next two weeks.” The trouble...

After a half century of seeing Kennedys up close and reporting their history, watching Ted Kennedy’s funeral prompts renewed wonder about the complexity of American fame. President Obama’s eulogy, eloquent as always, was after all the tribute of someone who has known Ted Kennedy for only a few years, graciously lauding him as “a Happy Warrior” and “a kind and tender hero.” His words were part of a much larger tableau, the sense of how love and conflict, wealth...

Too-big-to-fail is morphing into bigger-than-ever swallowing up failing-faster-than-ever. The nation’s largest banks, infused with taxpayer billions, are feasting on the weak as the Washington Post reports that “no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.” FDIC chair Sheila Bair sums it up succinctly: “It is at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed. It fed...

It will be a short trip for Barack Obama from his vacation site in Martha’s Vineyard to Ted Kennedy’s funeral in Boston tomorrow, but the Senator’s interment will be the start of a longer, tougher journey for the President. He will have to follow his mourning by channeling the departed’s gift for inside politics, summoning up Kennedy’s legendary blend of toughness and people skills to lure Senators out of their “ideological caves” and come together to rise...

The etiquette of celebrity death brings the usual talking head tributes to Ted Kennedy but largely unseen is Joe Biden with an authentic outpouring of human grief. In an era when empathy is an accusation, the Vice President is an anachronism–a politician often demeaned right and left for speaking his mind and heart, exposing himself to political ridicule. Yesterday morning, in a routine appearance at the Department of Energy, Biden could not suppress tears along with memories of a friendship...

At the age of twelve, he pestered his family to let him contribute to a memorial volume about his oldest brother, Joe, who had been lost in World War II. What Teddy Kennedy chose to remember was how, after hounding Joe into letting him crew in a sailboat race and failing to help him win, he found himself thrown into icy water, only to be lifted back up seconds later by his brother’s strong arms. That fierce Kennedy will to win, coupled with even fiercer family love, marked the life of the man...

It’s definitely not Stand By Your Man Month as Mark Sanford’s wife and Bernard Madoff’s mistress join Elizabeth Edwards in going public to take whacks at the cheating hearts in their lives. After throwing out her lovesick husband, Jenny Sanford is posing for Vogue and telling an interviewer that the South Carolina governor, with whom she was not “madly in love” when she married him, “has got some issues that he needs to work on, about happiness and what happiness...

Forty years ago, Baby Boomers were out rocking and rolling in the mud to, as one put it, “terrify our parents in a deeply satisfying way.” Now, facing Medicare, they are acting out in public again, this time over death panels that might finally put those aged begetters out of their misery. “It’s a vivid reminder,” Frank Rich observes, “that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style...

After months of a bigger-than-life presidency, Barack Obama is being cut down to size–by the enormity of an economic crisis, by orchestrated fear of Change as a reality rather than an idea and by exhaustion of the hope and idealism he stirred up during two years of campaigning. But behind the falling poll numbers and raucous town halls, something else may be going on. “Health Debate Fails to Ignite Obama’s Web,” says a New York Times headline for a report from Iowa: “As...

One of the astonishments of old age is finding that something significant happened to you on this day 64 years ago, as the calendar marks the anniversary of victory over Japan in World War II. In this August of our discontent, it’s jolting to remember how close and united Americans were back then. As one of those foot soldiers who had fought through Europe, all we knew then was that mushroom clouds over Japan earlier that month had ended our dread of going to the Pacific to storm beaches and...