The American Prospect

On June 11, 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at Yale. After some Harvard-Yale jocularity, he put forward the most memorable definition of that triumphal moment in what historians now call the era of liberal consensus: "What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies ... but the practical management of a modern economy." Economic problems of the 1960s, Kennedy said, are "subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided."

Sascha Meinrath, research director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation:

If there's one thing the financial crisis has taught us, its' that we grossly misjudged the risk we were taking on. We offer five perspectives on rethinking risk -- on everything from finance to housing to social policy--in the hopes of stopping the next major meltdown before it starts. ***

One of the greatest accomplishments of the first several months of Barack Obama's presidency has been the near-total marginalization of the Republican right. Rather than developing a coherent alternative to the president's agenda, the right has descended to frantic, tone-deaf cries of "socialism," has allowed some of the least popular figures in public life--Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich--to be their spokespeople, and most recently, seems to have staked everything on a defense of the previous administration's most disgraceful (and, incidentally, unpopular) conduct.

The New America Foundation looks at the Bush administration's weapons trade legacy in a new report that recommends President-elect Obama undertake a new ...

Interviewing Rick Perlstein, author of the mega-book Nixonland, Mark Hemingway of National Review lamented recently that "liberal or popular historians don't seem to be very interested in conservative history and ideology."

Perlstein answered politely, but the correct response would have been, "What planet are you living on?" Indeed, the legend of the rise of the right -- as told by and to the left -- has become the defining narrative of our political experience. I shouldn't admit this, but I probably… more

The U.S.-Israeli relationship may well be built to last, but in AIPAC's (and McCain's) world it's not built to love, but rather to wage war. As Daniel Levy put it, McCain offered "the same vision of perpetual warfare served up by Bush ... . What was most remarkable though was how shallow and devoid of context McCain's understanding of the region proved to be. He is indeed positioning himself as the true inheritor of the neoconservative mantle." LINK

"Saving our future requires tough choices today" may be a banal sentiment, but it's not an easy one to challenge. That is the headline on the "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour," a slide show created by David M. Walker, formerly head of the Government Accountability Office. In hopes that it will be to the long-term budget deficit what Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" slide show has been to climate change, Pete Peterson has set aside a billion dollars out of his recent… more

There are two points at which a political party or an ideological faction can find its voice and begin to claim power. One, of course, is when it is at the height of confidence and electoral success, like Ronald Reagan's conservatives in 1981. The other is when it has hit bottom, when there's nothing more to lose, no constituencies to feed, no illusion that anything in the current strategy is working, no excuse for caution.

The Republican Party today is certainly… more

Ever since "authenticity" became the quality we most value in our politicians, its converse, "hypocrisy," has been the political vice of which we are most conscious. Thus, those who have noticed that Sen. John McCain enjoys a reputation as a "maverick" who "stands up to special interests" while leading a campaign that is operated and funded entirely by lobbyists have seen this as a contradiction. Is McCain a hypocrite, or perhaps a divided soul, with the angelic maverick voice of… more