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Obama and Health Care: Confronted by Critics, Haunted by History

by Gil Troy

In pushing health care reform, President Barack Obama is confronted by contemporary critics and haunted by history. Americans are ambivalent about big government, not just since Ronald Reagan but since the American Revolution. A review of American attitudes toward government since the Revolution demonstrates this tension between Americans’ desire for government help and their fear of government intrusiveness. Obama also must learn from Bill Clinton’s health care reform failures.

In Praise of “Happy Holidays”

by Edward T. O'Donnell

Here we go again. If it’s December then it must be time for that annual Christmas tradition established a few years ago—the outrage mongering by conservatives over an alleged “War on Christmas” being waged by a cadre of secularists who employ the phrase, “Happy Holidays.” Particularly galling to these self-appointed defenders of tradition are retailers that avoid the word Christmas in their advertising and in-store decorations. In recent years groups like

Fred Hampton, Barack Obama, and the American Urban Poor

by Simon Balto

 I remember moving to Chicago in the summer of 2007, a city and moment charged by the excitement of the presidential candidacy of one of its own—a young, intelligent, and handsome African-American man committed to organizing for the improvement of the social conditions facing the Black community.  For reasons that many of us within the progressive community may recall, it was an invigorating time and atmosphere.  While living in the city, and in what now strikes me as a fort

How the Vice President Can Serve as the President's Most Unbiased Adviser

by Joel K. Goldstein

There's a common perception that Vice President Joe Biden lost the administration's debate over Afghanistan policy because President Obama did not adopt the course Biden favored. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On the contrary, Biden played the distinctive vice-presidential role that Walter Mondale proposed 33 years ago. In so doing, Biden helped shape Obama's policy toward Afghanistan and offered a model for a constructive role vice presidents can play in presidential decision-

What After All Do Americans Mean When They Say They Love "Liberty"?

by David Reynolds

“Liberty” is stitched into the fabric of U.S. history, from Patrick Henry’s cry “Give me liberty or give me death” to George W. Bush’s assertion that liberty is “t

Will the GOP Find a New Reagan?

by Derek Catsam

If Republicans don't want to consign themselves to irrelevance, they'd serve themselves well to look back to that most maligned of decades, the 1970s. In the years of Jimmy Carter the Republicans were similarly divided, but they recovered and even flourished.By 1977, after the triple blows to the American psyche of Vietnam, Watergate and an economic crisis that lingered into the 1980s, the Republicans appeared hopelessly divided. Internecine warfare threatened to tear the party apart.

When the Advocates of Full Disclosure Go too Far

by Steve Usdin

“I believe that, in order to protect our constitutional rights, everyone should refuse to permit inquiry into his political beliefs.” -- Published testimony of Linus Pauling to California Senate Investigating Committee on Education in 1950In the 1950s, during the McCarthy communist witch hunts, the U.S. Public Health Service revoked grants it had awarded Linus Pauling, the intellectual father of molecular biology, because of his opposition to demands that scientist

Rosy Scenarios and Red Realities: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and the Deficit

by Iwan Morgan

Elephants are supposed to have long memories but the Republican variety patently does not, judging by the fury over the ‘Obama deficits.’ In the GOP universe, these are the ou

What's Grand About the Grand Concourse in the Bronx

by Constance Rosenblum

Several years ago, when I was waiting in the lobby of the Bronx Museum of the Arts on the Grand Concourse to attend a meeting about the boulevard’

Seeing Red: The Budget Deficit - Past, Present and Future

by Iwan Morgan

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2009, the United States government incurred its largest ever peacetime budget deficit of $1.4 trillion, equal to 10 percent of GDP.  The way out of this fiscal hole m

Pathology and Ideology: Major Nidal Malik Hasan and the Case of Leon Czolgosz

by Evan Matthew Daniel

The discourse in the public sphere debating the motivation of mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan—the psychiatrist who recently shot forty-three people in Fort Hood, Texas—has taken two primary forms. The first argues he is a lone, depressed, and deranged gunman motivated by the stress of impending deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. The second claims he is a terrorist motivated by an extremist ideology. Few have noted that he is likely both and that neither case is mutually exclusi

The Bush Pardon Obama Needs to Deal with

by Jeffrey Crouch

Obama should start planning now for Toussie to challenge his “unpardon” in court.

The Marshmallow Center of American Politics in the 21st Century

by Rich Benjamin

   Despite stark philosophical differences, Democrats and Republicans are recognizing a bipartisan lesson: Injecting race into American politics is treacherous terrain. When Democrats all

Is Health Care a Human Right?

by Walter G. Moss

In a presidential debate in October 2008, moderator Tom Brokaw asked, “Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?” When Barack Obama answered, “I think it should be a right for every American,” he was following in the footsteps of three Roosevelts. When Theodore Roosevelt, the former Republican president, ran as the Progressive Party candidate in 1912, he ran on a platform that stated: "We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly

The Appalling Decline of Literacy Among College Graduates

by William O'Neill

Everyone who cares about higher education in this country knows about the chronic under funding of public universities, which has been going on for at least 25 years but has now reached crisis levels owing to the curren

Barack Obama in the Footsteps of James Meredith

by Frank Lambert

On September 26, 2008, Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama arrived on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford, Mississippi for his first debate with the Republican candidate Senator John McCain.  Many of

Weimar America

by Steve Hochstadt

Dangerous political movements have threatened the peace and structure of democratic society throughout recent American history. Violent hatred has motivated groups on the left and right extremes, and sometimes these movements have gained considerable local power. I found Maine to be a most tolerant and peaceful place when I lived there for 27 years, but I learned to my surprise how pervasive the influence of the Ku Klux Klan had been in Maine during the 1920s, when it had 150,000 members. The W

The Moderometer: Charting Obama's Zig-Zag, September 28 to October 12

by Gil Troy, with Theodoric Meyer

 This is part of an ongoing project to track the ideological shifts of t

The Moderometer: Charting Obama's Zig-Zag, September 3 to 27

by Gil Troy

 This is part of an ongoing project to track the ideological shifts of t

Why Justices of the Supreme Court Make Bad Historians

by Ken Shear

Led by Antonin Scalia, several justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have declared that the Constitution must be interpreted according to its original meaning -- or more precisely, what the Court majority might declare to be the official, legal version of history by virtue of their judicial authority. It is an Orwellian exercise, historical truth by government edict. Scalia has urged the First Amendment, in particular, should be limited to its “original meaning” which he deems much narrower than our current law of free expression. In Unoriginal Understanding, a monograph discussing the development of press freedom in eighteenth-century America, I review historical evidence showing this “originalist” view to be very questionable, and on a deeper level, how dangerous it is for judges to set themselves up as official arbiters of  historical truth with regard to fundamental rights such as press freedom.