How Obama will influence the genre On his posthumously released hit Changes, 2Pac rapped, “Although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president.” The song addresses problems like police violence, drug use, poverty, and the epidemic of incarceration in the black community. Blasting what he sees as the offenses of a racist government, he called on ... Read More
It is time for the United States government to address the most threatening nuclear proliferation threat of our day: Lehman Brothers. The former investment bank is sitting on enough raw uranium to make an atomic bomb comparable to the Hiroshima weapon. There is no question as to how the US government should respond: prompt and excessive violence. Lehman Brothers struck ... Read More
Can Michael Steele lead blacks to the Republicans? The recent election of Michael Steele, the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee, may be taken to symbolize the necessary modernization of the Grand Old Party, or merely cynical tokenism at its worst. Steele’s victory ended a racially charged contest in which one candidate, Katon Dawson, was discovered to have ... Read More
Emptying pockets, shifting concerns Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.” John McCain and Barack Obama would most certainly agree. This November, American citizens cast their votes to decide the course that the nation is to take over the next four years. In a contest that was dominated by ... Read More
Social issues move off center stage At the 1992 Republican National Convention, conservative media personality Pat Buchanan fired the opening salvos of the ongoing national culture war, declaring, “There is a religious war going on in our country…it is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” ... Read More
Creating precedent for the law The term “legislating from the bench” is frequently used but rarely explained. In the 2008 presidential debates Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) promised he would not appoint judges who legislate from the bench. But as Bruce Peabody, author of Legislating from the Bench, a Definition and a Defense, told the HPR, “I don’t think we can ... Read More
A Harvard Business School study has found that Americans tend to consume online pornography at roughly constant levels among the various states. But, surprise surprise, red states tend to be the biggest consumers: “Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election…. While six out of the lowest 10 ... Read More
Two weeks ago, Obama made a comment to House Republicans that they “can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done”. This was treated as the failure of bipartisanship*, and was perceived as an impolitic thing for him to say. Hypothesis: Obama messed up. Datum: Rush Limbaugh is incredibly unpopular. This story provoked a spate of Republicans rushing (I’m ... Read More
Barack Obama’s election to the presidency should not come as a shock. His political operation was more disciplined, more organized, and more effective than that of his opponents. The wisdom of his policy objectives compared to those of his rivals can be debated ad nauseam, but, it is not my intention to do so; I will leave all normative judgments ... Read More
It’s November 4, 2008. I’m currently sitting in a history seminar on the Yalta Conference of 1945, discussing how the Allied leaders decided to divvy up the Balkans. It’s striking to read the statements of Stalin and Churchill, because they read like ancient history. Churchill was driven by a single animating desire: the preservation of the British Empire. All of ... Read More
When I first heard Gov. Sarah Palin say, in the vice-presidential debate, that she would not “attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate,” I wanted to believe it was a mere verbal gaffe. I assumed she meant that she didn’t attribute every change in the climate to the activities of men. She meant that we might ... Read More
Bush fought for unprecedented expansion of presidential power – and failed By Gabriella Anderson ’12 and Elise Liu ‘11 Executive fiat. Secret orders. Martial law. These are the trademarks of authoritarian regimes, and yet they also rank among powers presumed by the Bush administration in the past eight years. Begun in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush’s ... Read More
Bush, Evangelicals, and the Republican PartyBy Ray Duer ‘11 Coming on the heels of President Clinton’s scandal-ridden second term, and campaigning in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative” with the promise of a return of moral fortitude to the Oval Office, George W. Bush won the heart of one of America’s most powerful voting blocs, Protestant Evangelicals. In 2004 family values ... Read More
How President Bush Won Latino Voters and His Party Lost Them AgainBy Kenzie Bok ‘11 “George W. Bush’s first foreign trip as President was not to a traditional European ally but to a ranch in a remote region of Mexico, where he met with another newly-elected cowboy president: Vicente Fox.” As Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, University Professor and Co-Director of Immigration Studies ... Read More
The everyday values of George W. BushBy Ian Merrifield ’12 Much of George W. Bush’s success in the 2000 and 2004 elections came from his remarkable ability to connect with American voters. Compared to Al Gore and John Kerry, President Bush looked and sounded much more like someone whom the typical American voter would “like to have a beer with.” ... Read More
