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Meacham's book American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House was published in 2008
It was a headline long in coming. On the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, accompanying a story datelined Camp David, Maryland, there was a clear signal that President Obama recognizes the great political and cultural realities of the nation he leads. “World Leaders Urge Growth, Not Austerity,” wrote the editors of [...]
For me, perhaps the most striking tactical story of the 2008 presidential campaign was the surprising reaction to Barack Obama in the American South. As a native of the region, I was long skeptical about the Illinois Senator’s viability in the Old Confederacy and thus about his national viability. (PHOTOS: Inside Barack Obama’s World) He [...]
The future is unknowable, Winston Churchill once wrote, but the past should give us hope — or at least a clue about what might happen next. Sometimes history is instructive; sometimes it isn’t. But one thing is certain: it’s the only totally tangible thing we have to go on as we assess how we got [...]
He learned it early. Barack Obama is many things; among them, he is a tough and even ferocious political warrior. In his book Dreams from My Father, Obama vividly describes how his stepfather taught him to box in Indonesia, and how he himself still remembers the feel and smell of the Everlast gloves they wore [...]
The emerging Democratic strategy of painting Mitt Romney as a rich and secretive flip-flopper is not new: it’s a line of argument thoroughly rehearsed by the parade of GOP challengers whom Romney managed to defeat for the nomination. (MORE: Is Romney Using Mormonism as a Shield?) Around this time every four years, the political class, [...]
The general-election campaign has begun, and some Republicans and members of the LDS church are saying that an early line being advanced by the Obama camp — that Mitt Romney is overly secretive about his campaign and personal finances and his gubernatorial years, among other things — is actually a coded assault on Romney’s Mormon [...]
Education is one of those subjects where importance and genuine public interest are usually out of proportion. It’s a vital national concern with every kind of implication you can think of—moral, economic, you name it—that consumes a great deal of political oxygen to little real effect. A word of disclosure: my wife has long worked [...]
A century ago, on an April night in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, a world came to an end. When RMS Titanic, the largest ship on earth, struck that iceberg and sank, killing 1,500 people (and a very high percentage of the poorer passengers), the disaster became one of those few truly landmark [...]
Runners-up in presidential nominating races usually represent forces that are formidable but not dominant. (Which isn’t surprising, given that they’re the runners-up.) George H.W. Bush’s performance in 1980 indicated that there was still something of a moderate wing in the modern Republican Party. John McCain’s showing in 2000 suggested a GOP affection for bluntness and [...]
As the world’s Christians prepare to commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a debate over heaven is not as sexy or politically charged as other familiar battles in the American culture wars. It’s hard to argue for more air time for eschatology than contraception, but the theological and cultural conflict over heaven [...]
With the Supreme Court weighing the constitutionality of a central element of President Obama’s comprehensive health care reform, there’s a lot of talk (in the places where people talk about such things, usually unburdened by responsibility or firsthand knowledge) of making the court an issue in the campaign if it were to rule against the [...]
At Easter 1966, millions of Americans picked up what would become one of the most notable magazine covers in the history of the genre: TIME’s stark question asking “Is God Dead?” In retrospect, the cover—and the much-less-remembered actual piece that ran with it—represented a mainstreaming of the spirit of dissent and debate that characterized the era. The [...]
There is a new piece of must-reading for Americans, and the good news is it’s clear and concise enough to be that rarest of compositions: an accessible document about big things. (The Gettysburg Address had concision on its side, too; so does the Sermon on the Mount.) The letter is dated March 2, 2012; its [...]
We live by rituals, by commemorations and commencements. We always have, it seems, from our earliest forays out of our caves and across savannas. In such cultures, springtime is special, for the season itself is one of rebirth, of the return of green. For Christians, the coming of spring brings the penitence of Lent, the [...]
We have been here before. In 1908, the Unitarian William Howard Taft ran against the evangelical William Jennings Bryan. Bryan supporters attacked Taft’s faith; that year a Pentecostal newspaper wrote: “Think of the United States with a President who does not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but looks upon our immaculate [...]
In the ways Washington measures time, it took too long, but in the end President Obama got it right. The controversy over whether Roman Catholic institutions such as hospitals or schools (not churches, which are already exempt) would be required to provide employees insurance plans that covered contraception offered us a telling election-year culture-war skirmish. [...]
The crowd was 80,000 strong. At the University of Michigan’s 1964 commencement, President Lyndon B. Johnson stood in the campus’s Michigan Stadium and unveiled one of the most significant political programs in modern American history. “For in your time,” he told the graduates, “we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society [...]
As ever, Newt Gingrich minced no words. “I understand that there’s a war against religion,” Gingrich told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody last week, “and I am prepared to actually fight back.” In the same conversation, Gingrich claimed that most journalists simply could not understand people of faith given the media’s purported secularism. And [...]
He won with a glower. After Newt Gingrich in the Jan. 19 Republican debate fought off a totally reasonable question about an ex-wife’s account of his acknowledged adultery with an attack on “the elite media,” there was little doubt about what would happen. South Carolina is the rawest of GOP states, the political embodiment of the [...]
P. D. James, perhaps the greatest living writer of mysteries in the world, is a courageous woman. Now Baroness James of Holland Park, she has done something that makes the writing of the sequel to Gone With the Wind (remember that? Much sound and fury…) seem like just another day at the keyboard. James has [...]
