Today’s suicide-bombing of an Iraq peace conference and the American commander’s warning that we are “not winning” in Afghanistan are sobering reminders that the Obama troop withdrawal plan did not close the file on US misadventures in the Middle East. They underscore the final assessment of Thomas Ricks’ new book, “The Gamble”: “The quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged...

In the absence of an outrage du jour by the Bush Administration, the American Commentariat is now caught up in a more complex, elusive project–analyzing the nation’s fall into future shock and Barack Obama’s fitness to deal with it. Is the President on a speeding-up treadmill struggling not to fall behind, as Paul Krugman suggests today? “The problem with the budget,” John Cassidy diagnoses in the New Yorker, “isn’t its size or its underlying philosophy, which...

FDR gave Americans fireside chats on radio. JFK came into living rooms through live TV news conferences. Barack Obama is connecting with worried voters by Internet–email, online videos and proliferating web sites. In each case, as a new medium of communication became universal, the White House wired into it to speak directly to people–one at a time. What’s different now is that voters are invited to talk back, which may in part account for the President’s continuing popularity...

Good old American free-enterprise vultures may be trumping Obama’s Treasury theorists in slowing down the rate of mortgage defaults. Instead of complex schemes to lower interest payments for under-water home owners, speculators are buying up loans at distress prices and cutting the principal but still keeping it high enough to profit–a market-based solution if there ever was one. The media have been quicker to endorse this approach than the government. A New York Times editorial notes...

On a day dominated by news of falling retail sales and a diving stock market, the President held a pep rally for health care. He told 150 members of Congress and heads of labor unions, business groups, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and consumer organizations: “Since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform nearly a century ago, we have talked and tinkered. We have tried and fallen short, stalled time and again by failures of will, or Washington politics, or industry lobbying…This...

In all the hooha between Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, the GOP is overlooking the fact that, by long tradition, John McCain is the titular head of their party. That precept struck me in 1964 during a long conversation with former President Eisenhower. Discussing various issues, he clearly could not bring himself to mention Richard Nixon by name but kept calling him “the titular head of the party” as their 1960 candidate, even though Ike himself was the most recent Republican to occupy...

News about a “diplomatic” exchange between the US and Russia over an anti-missile system in Europe and Iran’s pursuit of WMDs underscores how little we really know about the threat of nuclear war. The “we” includes not only those who have watched a half century of posturing on the subject from the outside but, in large measure, the generations of leaders who have been acting as if they knew what they were doing. From today’s leak, we learn that President Obama...

How did we get so poor so fast? Under the radar of stimulus bills and bailouts, economists are toting up the damage and super-investors like Warren Buffet are still trying to figure out what happened. Now we learn the economy is shrinking twice as fast as originally thought–at an annualized rate of 6.2 percent in the last three months of 2008 rather than the original estimate of 3.2, making it the worst quarter since 1982. The downward spiral, reflected in a sinking stock market, has troubled...

This week Barack Obama became who he is going to be for the next four years. Amid a flurry of crucial decisions on the economy and foreign policy, his presidency is showing what may be its ultimate shape–out of necessity daring on domestic issues, more conventional and cautious on foreign policy. Liberals who criticized his response to the financial crisis as too careful, like Paul Krugman, were finally impressed: “If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through...

The decision to keep up to 50,000 American troops in Iraq after August of next year underscores the need for extreme caution in escalating our involvement in Afghanistan and any future commitment of forces in the region. Those originally drawn to support Barack Obama’s presidential campaign by his determination to get out of Iraq will have to be persuaded that continuing US presence of such magnitude is justified. Calling it a “transition force” will not mask the fact of an indefinite...

Among other Changes that Barack Obama advocates is a return to civility in American politics, but this week the media and the politicians who feed it failed to get the memo in piling on Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal for his rebuttal to the President’s Congressional speech. Ineffectual and lame (my word) as it was, the outpouring of invective over Jindal’s effort has prompted both the New York Times and Washington Post to treat it as an event in itself. “Governor Jindal, Rising G.O.P....

By my count, Barack Obama kissed at least two dozen women on his way in and out of the House last night, but the affectionate post-speech highlight was a quick back rub from Sen. Barbara Boxer, who had been seen having an ecstatic reaction during the President’s words on health care reform. There were hugs, too, many of them for men, including his polar political opposite, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, for whom Obama expressed friendship during the campaign. Not to make too much of it, but all...

In Barack Obama style, optimism is not cheerleading but understanding the situation, finding the best answers and getting to work on them without delay. Tonight, we saw that approach, expressed with more assertion than we have seen before from the President in charge of saving the American economy. “While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken, though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this,” he said in his address to Congress....

Tonight’s spotlight on Bobby Jindal to rebut Obama’s speech to Congress shows Republican reverting to the finest traditions of show business, type casting, in the wake of last year’s election disaster. Just as Marilyn Monroe begot Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren and one TV reality show spawned dozens more, the GOP now has an African-American chairman and is pushing forward Jindal and Sarah Palin to duke it out in the 2012 primaries–a plot twist with two demographically...

Republican gubernatorial presidential wannabes are facing a dilemma over the Obama stimulus similar to the one that led Senate Democratic hopefuls into voting for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2001. Just as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards et al feared retaliation at the polls in 2004 for being soft on terrorism, we now have Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford arguing against government spending in their states during a crashing economy to appease the Republican conservative...

He turns 77 tomorrow in a life much longer than those of his brothers Joe, Jack and Bobby, who died young and violently before he had reached the age of 40. In four decades since then, Ted Kennedy has lived in the shadow of legends yet survived to make his own place in history, the last son of a generation “wired to be optimistic,” as he tells a reporter today. “That’s the way I was born and brought up,” he says. “That’s the way we’re dealing with the challenges we’re facing...

For generations of Americans today, retirement will never be the same as that of their parents and grandparents. The President’s costly, complicated and inescapably necessary plan to save millions of homes recalls a discussion only a few years ago among recently retired professional people. Most were financing their later years not so much by savings from substantial earnings or market investments but profits from increasingly larger homes they had bought or built for their growing families...

As the Obama Administration unveils its $75 billion plan today to prevent foreclosures, an urban theorist argues that a nation of renters would be better for America’s future. In the Atlantic, Richard Florida takes on the sanctity of home ownership by calling decades of housing growth in the Sun Belt and elsewhere a Ponzi scheme: “To an uncommon degree, the economic boom in these cities was propelled by housing appreciation: as prices rose, more people moved in, seeking inexpensive lifestyles...

Signing the Recovery and Reinvestment Act today, the President will be asking Americans to take a leap of faith into a future that is darkening rapidly. Today’s bad news is that California is going broke, Kansas is following suit and even Donald Trump’s casino empire is filing for bankruptcy. Yet Barack Obama will try to reassure us that the biggest financial gamble in American history is our best choice for saving the economy. His inspirational skills are facing the supreme test. Before...

The Lincolnesque concept is meeting with iffy success on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Hillary Clinton goes to Asia reaching out for the Obama Administration, while John McCain is on talk shows lashing out against his former rival. On her first trip as Secretary of State, Clinton is visiting Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia to discuss trade, prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation and reversing global warming, but the economic meltdown is at the top of her list. Her first stop is...

Along with the economic crisis, a political preoccupation around the world is trying to figure out what to make of the new American president. Hamid Karzai joins the list today. Asked by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about Obama’s statement that the Afghan leader has a “bunker mentality” and “seems detached” from what is happening in his country, Karzai attempts condescension: “I was surprised to hear that statement. Perhaps it’s because the administration...

As uncertain as the effects of the stimulus may be, one thing is clear: The Republican Party has chosen clichés for its survival–deers in the headlights, heads in the sand and unity in a bunker to hide from the Obama battle with the destructive economic forces they helped unleash. As they congratulate themselves on near-unanimity in yesterday’s vote, the hairline cracks in GOP solidarity are beginning to show. Arlen Specter, who breached the party line to support the bill, said before...

“There is in the country a great deal of anger about the financial institutions,” Barney Frank told a row of bankers at a House hearing yesterday. Elsewhere in the Capitol, members of Congress were hammering out the stimulus compromise with rancor and recrimination. But with all the ugly public emotions rising out of the economic crisis, there are signs of something else. At the President’s Fort Myers rally Tuesday, a homeless woman asked for help. His reaction was to kiss her cheek and...

For a little light on the hot topic of the day, the final shape of the stimulus bill, here is an expert view under the title of “Can Tax Cuts Deepen the Recession?” A new paper by Gauti Eggertsson of the New York Fed argues that tax cuts will lead to increases in both supply and demand, failing to close the gap between the two. “Under normal circumstances,” notes the Times‘ Freakonomics blog, “this doesn’t present a problem, because the Fed can lower interest...

In this national nightmare, it’s hard to tell if all the voices we hear are real or the products of overheated imaginations. Was that the new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele saying that the Obama stimulus plan was “laughable” and that the economic mess is only “about 18 months old. The reality of it is, Bush inherited a recession. He got us through that recession”? Could that have been Ron Paul, back from the media dead, grousing about three Senate...