Tag: American history

I knew Abe Lincoln, Abe Lincoln was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Abe Lincoln.

I agree with much of what historian Michael Kazin has to say about Obama here.  But this notion, which we often hear from Obama defenders, puzzles me: For all his talk about “winning the future”(and his undeniable intellectual gifts), Obama seems to think that solving immediate problems is the key to political victory. In fairness, the economic collapse has provided a surfeit of crises that must be addressed, and quickly. But, from the Great Depression until the great stagflation of the 1970s, Democrats dominated national politics by balancing crisis management with the building of a multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition tied together both by such programs as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and Medicare, and by expressing a generous ideology […]