The American Prospect articles from January 2009

The American Prospect archives from January 2009

The competence dodge.(PROSPECTS)(Barack Obama's economic staff)
January 1, 2009... IN NOVEMBER 2005, THE PROSPECT PUBLISHED AN ingenious and influential piece by Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias titled "The Incompetence Dodge." The article took lethal aim at liberal hawks who had argued that the Iraq War was the right idea; it...

Nothing is inevitable.(NOTED)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] MARK SCHMITT'S December cover story, "The Audacity of Patience," quoted a public letter from WILLIAM GALSTON, former Bill Clinton policy adviser and current BROOKINGS INSTITUTION senior fellow, to Barack Obama in...

High steaks.(NOTED)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... DEREK MARKHAM, a writer for the environmental news service PLANETSAVE, found solace in BEN ADLER'S piece ("Are Cows Worse Than Cars?") on the environmental impact of meat. "It really stands out as a reminder of the clearly divided environmental...

Bicycle built for two.(NOTED)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... Politics and culture blog THE AMERICAN SCENE enjoyed DANA GOLDSTEIN'S piece ("Street Fighter") on New York City transportation-policy reform and its biggest backer, Janette Sadik-Kahn. Wrote REIHAN SALAM, "Sadik-Khan has a winning quality that...

Suggestion soup.(NOTED)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... ED KILGORE of the group blog THE DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST got all tingly reading DAYO OLOPADE'S piece on progressive white papers covering Obama's desk ("The Paper Chase"). He wrote, "I had a spasm of nostalgia while reading Olopade's reference...

From the executive editor.(NOTED)(Editorial)
January 1, 2009... SO HERE WE ARE--AFTER A LONG ERA DURING WHICH progressive ideas were nurtured by a minority far from power, we find ourselves on the eve of the inauguration of a president who shares our values and whose resounding victory represents at least a...

Mustache mistrust.(Up Front)(facial hairs and distrust, Barack Obama's Cabinet)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WOMEN ARE SKEPTICAL OF MEN WITH FACIAL HAIR--at least according to the research of Dr. Chris Solomon at Kent University in England, who conducted interviews with 111 women reacting to photographs of 120 men. So...

Administration, to go.(Up Front)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... One little-known part of the presidential transition process is the removal and disbursement of old inventory from various executive offices and agencies. As with any large organization, closets full of supplies gather dust until review teams...

The upside of down.(Up Front)(job opportunities)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... It's official; we're in a recession. Are you desperate? Unemployed? Don't just sit there. Get in on these once-in-a-downturn boom economies. Cosmetics. Some women would rather eat less than buy less make-up. They will even buy fewer...

African American?(Up Front)(Cable News Network error)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Apparently having black national security advisers and black secretaries of state hasn't helped some folks at CNN get used to the idea of black people holding important foreign-policy jobs or, you know, being Americans. In early December, a CNN...

The question: what new committee should Joe Lieberman be appointed to chair?(Up Front)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... "The Select Committee on Unctuous Smirking and Self-Righteousness" --Paul Waldman Media Matters [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "A subcommittee of his Homeland Security Committee--looking into citizen disloyalty" --Curtis Gans,...

Parody.(Up Front)(a George W. Bush letter to Barack Obama)
January 1, 2009... Dear Bom-bom, I'm not much of a letter writer, I guess, but I wanted to leave some advice for you as Laura and I move out. That's what Bill Clinton did for me, and it worked out pretty fine. I don't want to get too deep into policy...

Our capitalist government.(WAYS AND MEANS)
January 1, 2009... THE BASIC STORY OF AMERICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY is that every crisis has brought an expansion of government. But crises--along with eras of progressive consensus--don't just grow the government in familiar ways, measured by dollars spent or the...

Getting ahead of Congress.(COMMENT)(Barack Obama on social issues)
January 1, 2009... GAYS IN THE MILITARY. REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AT home and abroad. Equality in public education. If this list of progressive policy priorities makes you cringe, you're not the only one. No sooner had the Democratic candidate flipped swing state...

A global New Deal: the next New Deal won't work if it's only American. Fixing our economy will require fixing international systems.(Cover story)
January 1, 2009... If you look at all of the U.S.-based operations of American International Group (AIG)--the insurance and annuities company that our government has been compelled to take over and bail out with more than $100 billion of our money--it's hard to...

Obama's economic opportunity: the dismal state of the economy presents Obama with the chance not just to produce a recovery but to restore a more egalitarian society--and a progressive majority.(Barack Obama)
January 1, 2009... History has delivered Barack Obama the greatest economic crisis since the one that greeted Franklin Roosevelt. As in 1933, the crisis is the direct result of free-market ideology and conservative misrule, which once again stand disgraced. This...

The number-cruncher-in-chief: when it comes to major policy reforms, cost matters. Luckily, Obama's budget guru knows how to change the price tag.(Barack Obama on Peter Orszag)(Organization overview)
January 1, 2009... "The history of health reform," explains Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, "is congressmen sending health legislation off to the Congressional Budget Office to die." That's not the history you often hear. Budget analyses do not make for gripping...

How Bush broke the government: to gain a true sense of Bush's legacy, we survey the systematic and politically motivated ways he undermined the federal government.(George W. Bush)(Report)
January 1, 2009... There is nothing new about presidents who are eager to overstep the bounds of their power, whether they are conservative or liberal in their political views. But the strategies that George W. Bush used to strengthen his presidency--and weaken...

Can partisanship save citizenship? In the 1990s, reformers and academics worried about how to improve civic life. But they didn't foresee that technology combined with party politics would renew civic engagement and even elect one of their own.(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2009... Public intellectuals don't agree on much. However, in recent years they seemed to nearly unanimously believe that American public life was in terrible shape. Political scientists debated whether voter turnout in national elections was merely...

Art in the age of Obama: a new era may be dawning in which artists, strongly supported by the president, will transcend starry-eyed campaign pictures and develop new forms of enduring art.(VISUAL ART)(Barack Obama)
January 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] LIKE MUCH OF AMERICA, THE ART world has fallen for Barack Obama with unguarded sincerity. From Shepard Fairey's widely reproduced poster to Robert Indiana's HOPE sculpture based on his well-known LOVE statue from the...

A really long heat wave.(The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing The Next 100, 000 Years of Earth's Climate)(Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic from Darfur to Napavalley)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... THE LONG THAW: HOW HUMANS ARE CHANGING THE NEXT 100,000 YEARS OF EARTH'S CLIMATE BY DAVID ARCHER Princeton University Press, 180 pages, $22.95 FORECAST: THE CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE, FROM THE AMAZON TO THE ARCTIC, FROM DARFUR TO...

Behind fortune's smile.(Outliers: The Story of Success)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS BY MALCOLM GLADWELL Little, Brown and Company, 309 pages, $27.99 THREE AND A HALF DECADES AGO, in their book Inequality, the sociologist Christopher Jencks and his co-authors claimed that where we end up in...

No one in charge.(The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How to Fix Them)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... THE NEXT GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES: WHY OUR INSTITUTIONS FAIL US AND HOW TO FIX THEM BY DONALD F. KETTL W.W. Norton & Company, 256 pages $25.95 THE STUDY OF HOW PUBLIC POLICY is carried out has been the stepchild of scholars and...

From consumers to commons.(THE LAST WORD)
January 1, 2009... NOT LONG AGO, I WAS TALKING TO SOMEONE WHO once had been a deficit hawk but had been turned into a full-blooded Keynesian by the current recession. He wanted a stimulus package in the range of $500 billion to $700 billion. "Consumers are dead...

A 21st-century agenda for democratic renewal: we stand on the threshold of a new age of democratic potential. Here's how to harness it.(REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY)
January 1, 2009... The 2008 elections in many ways showed that American democracy is still alive. Millions of voters volunteered for or donated to their favored candidates. Thanks to a free, open, and vibrant Internet, we could all tap an amazing wealth of...

A broader definition of democracy: small reforms won't bring the system-wide change we need.(REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY)
January 1, 2009... "Over the last several years, the race for money and influence and power has left the hopes and concerns of most Americans in the dust. All you see from Washington is another scandal or petty argument. And so we get discouraged. Half of us...

The case for keeping score: a democracy index could push states toward more ambitious electoral reforms.(REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY)
January 1, 2009... In 2000, Americans finally learned what Roy Saltman calls "election administrations family secret": Our election system is run badly. Election problems prevented us from learning the identity of our 43rd president until weeks after the...

More than the vote: being a citizen should involve active participation in the governance process.(REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2009... Democracy, it has been said, is something a nation does rather than something it has. If that's true, Americans did a remarkable job of democracy this year. More than 130 million Americans voted, more than have ever done so in our nation's...

Better together: the Midwest Democracy Network put comprehensive democracy reform into practice.(REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY)
January 1, 2009... It's been said time and again that "all politics is local." Truth be told, most people think of politics in national terms--this year more than ever. But the greatest potential for rethinking American democracy may lie in working at the...

Can money be a force for good? The revolutionary potential of small-donor democracy.(REVITALIZING DEMOCRACY)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2009... Early last year, as the 2008 presidential campaign loomed on the horizon, campaign-finance experts and newspaper editorial boards warned preemptively of a "billion-dollar election." In a February 2007 editorial, The New York Times invoked...