Salon

It is just as well that Barack Obama is emulating Abraham Lincoln by traveling to his inauguration in Washington by train. As the regional politics of the automobile bailout controversy demonstrate, the Civil War continues. If the major U.S. automobile companies go under, it will be partly because timely federal aid for them was blocked by members of Congress like Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, whose states have created their own counter-Detroit in the form of Japanese, Korean, and German transplant factories. The South will have risen… more

Three experts share their opinions about what is likely to happen after Obama takes the oath of office. Steve Clemons is a senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute. ...

Barack Obama is a man with a plan. On Dec. 6, the president-elect announced major parts of his plan to revitalize the American economy. He listed four priorities: "a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient"; "the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s"; "the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school

Three luminaries of political analysis agreed to share their insights with Salon. Chris Hayes is the Washington editor of the Nation and a fellow at the New America Foundation. His articles have appeared in the American Prospect, ...

If the conservative era is over, can liberals come out of their defensive crouch and call themselves liberals again, instead of progressives?

In the last two decades, Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, have abandoned the term "liberal" for "progressive." The theory was that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush -- and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan -- had succeeded in equating "liberal" in the public mind with weakness on defense, softness on crime, and "redistribution" of Joe the Plumber's hard-earned money to the collective… more

Alex Castellanos, Ron Christie and Reihan Salam offered their thoughts about whether the Republican Party's core principles remain intact, whether Reaganism applies to the 21st century, and who the front-runners might be for the GOP's 2012 presidential nomination. Reihan Salam: The composition of the electorate right now is so different in the United States than it was in any of those periods, including 1992, that it's very hard for me to see a very good analogue. We're also living… more

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.

In the past generation Bruce Ackerman, Theodore Lowi and I, in different ways, have used the idea of "republics" to understand American history. Since the French Revolution, France has been governed by five republics (plus two empires, a directory and a fascist dictatorship). Since the American Revolution, we Americans have been governed… more

John McCain, struggling to catch up with Barack Obama in the last days of the campaign, has finally found a theme for a campaign that until now has lacked one. He is running for the White House to defend capitalism against socialism. Because Barack Obama in an unguarded moment to Joe the Plumber said he wanted to "spread the wealth," McCain and Palin are painting the Senator from Illinois as a "redistributionist" or "redistributor" (they can't decide on the appropriate term), a subversive and sinister figure… more

On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, and of Barack Obama's announcement of his running mate, Salon asked three noted panelists what makes for a successful convention, how Democrats can avoid the pitfalls of John Kerry's convention, and what to do about those pesky Hillary Clinton supporters.

Michael Cohen: ...I was thinking about how Ronald Reagan's '80 convention speech was a great speech, but actually, there was also a great convention, where basically all four days played up the notion that Reagan was a different kind of… more

Virginia Woolf was wrong when she wrote, in her 1924 essay "Character in Fiction," that "on or around December 10, 1910, human nature changed." But there is no doubt that at some point between 2004 and 2008 American politics changed. It is clear to everyone, not least conservatives, that the era of right-wing hegemony that began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968 has come to an end. But this does not mean the triumph of post-1968 liberalism by default. If we are really in a new… more