Election08. Far from uniform. 9 July 2010Last updated at 16:23 In both the US and UK, civilian leaders have the upper hand over the military - but the two countries have very different attitudes to veterans reaching the top, says David Cannadine in his Point of View column. The recent decision by President Barack Obama to accept the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal and to replace him with General David Petraeus caused a predictable media storm on both sides of the Atlantic.
But taking the long view of American history, there's nothing particularly unusual about the president, as commander in chief of the US military, asserting his authority over the armed forces in this way. In the aftermath of the departure of Gen McChrystal, several commentators rightly noted that in April 1951, Harry S Truman had sacked Gen Douglas MacArthur after he had publicly criticised the president's limited war strategy in Korea.
Gen McChrystal's dismissal was controversial, but constitutional But this isn't invariably the case. From West Wing to the real thing. Jimmy Smits, who played the West Wing's Matthew Santos, with Barack Obama in September 2005. Photograph: Chris Greenberg/Getty Devotees of the West Wing have been talking about it for weeks: the uncanny similarity between the fictional presidential contest that dominated the final seasons of the acclaimed TV show and the real-life drama of this year's election. Both the real and imagined campaigns have centred on a young, charismatic candidate from an ethnic minority, daring to take on an establishment workhorse with a promise to transcend race and heal America's partisan divide. But there's a twist. For what those West Wing fans stunned by the similarity between the fictitious Matthew Santos and the real-life Barack Obama have not known is that the resemblance is no coincidence.
"I drew inspiration from him in drawing this character," West Wing writer and producer Eli Attie told the Guardian. "When I had to write, Obama was just appearing on the national scene. Barack Obama Matt Santos. Leaked memo reveals what Whitehall really thinks of its new masters. The documents, instructing senior officials at the Department of Communities and Local Government how to woo their new bosses, give a checklist of what are called "hot button", Tory-friendly words, to be dropped into conversation whenever possible.
These include "families," "radical," "neighbourhoods" and "progressive. " The document suggests that the DCLG's budget may be cut by as much as two-fifths, much more than anticipated. It includes a list of questions expected to be asked by a new Conservative Secretary of State, including: "Why are we doing this? How soon can we stop doing it? The department's new Secretary of State is Eric Pickles, the former Conservative Party chairman, with Grant Shapps and Greg Clark – both Tories – as ministers of state. The other junior ministers are Bob Neill and Baroness Hanham, both Tories, and Andrew Stunell, who is a Liberal Democrat. The document reveals that civil servants have been conducting "role-play" sessions to work out how to build rapport. Why do people often vote against their own interests? Americans voicing their anger at the healthcare proposals at a "town hall meeting" The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate.
This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US. Political scientist Dr David Runciman gives his view on why there is often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters. Last year, in a series of "town-hall meetings" across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.
What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence. Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough. Anger Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal. But that would be a mistake. Stories not facts. The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers. Bush's Secret Dictatorship - washingtonpost.com. The end of the neocons? | BBC News. Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs looks back at the rise and fall of the neo-cons, who encouraged George Bush to invade Iraq.
With the Bush administration about to recede into history, a widely asked question is whether the neo-conservative philosophy that underpinned its major foreign policy decisions will likewise vanish from the scene. The answer seems likely to be yes. But the epitaph of neo-conservatism has been written before - prematurely, as it turned out, in the 1980s. Having been apparently headed for extinction at the end of the Reagan administration a second generation emerged in the mid-1990s. This was period of post-Cold War overwhelming US military dominance which the neo-cons anointed as the "unipolar moment".
Bold ambition The main characteristics of neo-conservatism are: Critics of neo-conservativism have sometimes sought to portray it as an exclusively Jewish phenomenon. High-water mark Polar opposite. Blair's whips fooled by West Wing plot. The Choice: The New Yorker's Endorsement of Barack Obama. Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals? The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W.
Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The Republican disaster begins at home. At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right. What Obama Needs to Do in the Debates. It was Tuesday afternoon last week, and I was heading back from San Diego to the East Coast when I caught a piece of a speech on the economy by Barack Obama.
I almost missed my flight because I couldn't walk away from it. My immediate response: This was a game-changer, and we ought to see a five-point shift in the polls if he keeps this up for the rest of the week. I was wrong. The shift was bigger. He leapt from 2 points behind John McCain to 6 points ahead at one point by the end of the week.
His newfound voice in fact yielded dividends. Indicting McCain Mark Sept 16, 2008 as the date Obama may have turned the election around. What had he just done? He went on to compare and contrast what he and McCain had done that might have prevented the collapse of the housing market (and with it the largest asset most middle class Americans have, the equity in their homes) and the tumbling of seemingly rock-solid financial giants like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. How does he do that? 1. 2. Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet. Obama Nails the Winning Message: "Honor Comes with Honesty." Finally, the Obama campaign has articulated the winning message to counterpunch the shameless lying from McCain-Palin.
They have raised the issue of McCain's (lack of) honor. Following Senator Claire McCaskill's catchy "Honor comes with honesty" rhetoric on ABC's This Week, Obama has released an excellent new ad titled "Honor" that explicitly quotes The Washington Post on McCain's "disgraceful and dishonorable campaign. " You'll know that Obama is serious about winning if he and Biden, their surrogates, and their ads use this devastating line of attack on McCain's dishonorable campaign over and over again, including the debates, through November.
I would especially urge all of team Obama to memorize and repeat McCaskill's memorable attack lines whenever they debate a McCain surrogate, like Carly Fiorina, who repeats the various lies about Palin or Obama: This is a good example of what I'm talking about. Character trumps all. McCaskill did four crucial things here: On Sunday, the St. Damon Condemns Palin. Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage.