Roundup: Media's Take

Clive Crook: The Seeds of the EU’s Crisis Were Sown 60 Years Ago

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist.The arc of Europe’s postwar history is turning toward tragedy. It isn’t just that much of the continent has fallen into a new Great Depression, or that in some countries things will get worse before they get better. It isn’t even that the whole mess was avoidable. It’s that the crisis is dividing Europe along the very lines the European project was intended to erase. Decades of cliches about European solidarity and the European idea are being held up to ridicule. The argument that Britons, Germans, Greeks, Italians and Spaniards are instinctive cultural partners whose commonalities transcend their obvious differences and historical enmities -- that “Europe” is a real community, not just a heavily worked-over Brussels blueprint -- turns out to be, let’s say, disputable. Ancient stereotypes frame conversation about the crisis. Germans are bossy and severe. Italians are idle. Greeks are corrupt. Brits are arrogant. The French are vain. So much for 60 years of European unification...

Harry J Enten: What Are the Chances of a Bush/Gore-style Tie in 2012?

Harry J Enten blogs about political and electoral statistics at Margin of Error.It's the election night scenario some fear: one candidate wins the popular vote, while the other wins the electoral college. Our founding fathers in their genius or lack thereof decided against Americans directly electing their presidents. As Al Gore learned, a popular vote victory without a coinciding electoral college win is worthless. There have been efforts to end, or at least to limit, the electoral college through such proposals the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. But the system remains in place. When you glance at the electoral vote dashboards of HuffPollster and Real Clear Politics, you might believe that there is a high probability of another 2000. Barack Obama seemingly holds a large edge in the electoral college vote – even as Mitt Romney closes in on him nationally. But we shouldn't rush to assumptions about dead heats and tied results yet...

Daniel Allott: Ted Kennedy's Anti-Mormon Moment

Daniel Allott is senior writer at American Values, a Washington, D.C. area public policy organization.Those looking for hints about what role faith might play in the presidential election campaign would do well to recall Ted Kennedy's bitter and bruising 1994 Massachusetts Senate campaign against Mitt Romney. Facing the prospect of losing his well-worn seat to the political novice, Kennedy and his surrogates unleashed a broadside against Romney's Mormon faith. The episode may offer a preview of how the Obama re-election campaign will address Romney's faith, and how Romney will respond. Sen. Kennedy was the weakest he'd ever been as he sought re-election in 1994. In his six terms in office, Kennedy had never trailed a general election opponent in a poll, and he'd never won by fewer than 14 percentage points. But 1994 was different...

Katrina Trinko: For Mitt Romney, It’s 1994

Katrina Trinko is an NRO reporter.Nearly two decades ago, Teddy Kennedy placed attacks on Bain Capital at the centerpiece of his senate campaign. His prime target was Ampad, a Bain-owned company that had bought an Indiana plant. According to a recent biography, The Real Romney, “the day Ampad bought the factory, SCM [the former owner] fired the workers. Many were rehired, but at lesser wages and reduced benefits.” Kennedy’s campaign, the authors claim, seized on the opportunity to cast Romney as the villain, and made “six thirty-second TV spots featuring nine Ampad workers” that were “withering” in their criticism. Now, the Obama campaign is hoping that the Ampad saga — including the follow-up story that around 200 employees lost their jobs when the plant closed in 1995 — will turn voters against Romney. Yesterday, the campaign released a six-minute video about Ampad, featuring interviews from angry former employees. A sample quote from a former employee: “To me, Mitt Romney takes from the poor and middle class  and gives to the rich. It’s just the opposite of Robin Hood.” This isn’t the first time Team Obama has attacked Romney’s Bain record...

Leonardo Clausi: Violence in Italy Does Not Signal the Return of the Red Brigade

Leonardo Clausi is a freelance Italian journalist, based in London and Rome.

Robert Costa: Nobody Called Jimmy Carter a 'Vampire'

Mr. Costa is a political reporter for National Review.Listening to President Obama malign Mitt Romney's private-sector career this week brought to mind a presidential candidate who once ran and won on his record as a successful businessman. A few months after Jimmy Carter's father died in 1953, the future president was honorably discharged from the Navy. He moved home, to Plains, Ga., to manage his family's peanut farm, which had fallen on hard times. During the first year, Mr. Carter struggled to keep the warehouse humming. He went into debt. He applied for a loan, only to be denied. But Mr. Carter didn't quit. He didn't blame the local bank for his troubles or occupy the town's square. He simply rolled up his sleeves and went to work on the floor, hoisting bags of peanuts alongside his employees. These days, Mr. Carter, a global community organizer, shares many traits with President Obama, including a penchant for idiosyncratic intervention and tax hikes. But during the decades before he ran for president, he was a tough and ambitious entrepreneur—more like Mitt Romney at Bain Capital than Mr. Obama on the streets of Chicago...

Lee Ruddin: The Anglo-American (Intelligence-Sharing) Relationship in the War Against Islamist Terrorism

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.Anglo-American relations are, not for the first time during the Obama presidency, strained: reports of aides to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticising David Cameron’s recent White House ‘love-in’ with Barack Obama can be brushed off as election talk; news that neither President Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has backed the self-determination of the Falkland Islanders is less easily so.The Foreign Office did not take too kindly to the State Department coming out in support of direct negotiations between Great Britain and Argentina over the sovereignty of the Falklands and yet, three years on, Obama continues to ‘remain neutral’ in the dispute between London and Buenos Aires and a relative ignoramus when it comes to events 30 years ago and the liberation of British folk from Argentine occupation.

Kevin D. Williamson: The Party of Civil Rights

Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review and the author of The Dependency Agenda, which will be published by Encounter Books on May 29. This article appears in the May 28, 2012, issue of National Review.

David Graham: The Proposed Auction of Ronald Reagan's Blood Isn't Surprising

David Graham is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he writes and edits for the Politics Channel.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: Reinstating an Old Rule Is Not a Cure for Crisis

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a financial columnist for the NYT.Call it the Glass-Steagall myth.Since JPMorgan Chase announced its surprise $2 billion, and growing, trading loss there have been renewed calls from economists, pundits and politicians to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities.Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Massachusetts, sent an e-mail to thousands of her constituents, pressing to bring back the law, which she said, “stopped investment banks from gambling away people’s life savings for decades — until Wall Street successfully lobbied to have it repealed in 1999.”...

Ramesh Ponnuru: Romney Is About to Make Bush’s Health-Care Blunder

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review. 

Matthew Goodwin: Why the Eurozone Crisis Doesn't Spell a Return to the Well of Nazism

Matthew Goodwin is a lecturer at the University of Nottingham whose forthcoming book, The New British Fascism: Rise of the BNP is published by Routledge. 

Frank Bruni: Second Acts for First Ladies

Frank Bruni is an op-ed columnist for the NYT.One of the things I love best about political commentary is how quickly it gets ahead of itself. I speak of the Michelle 2016 drumbeat.I don’t mean Bachmann; hence, two l’s. I mean Obama. And in truth it’s less drumbeat than flute warble, but still. It’s out there: a vague murmuring about whether the first lady might, for example, seek a United States Senate seat from Illinois.And it’s interesting, not for its plausibility — by most accounts she’s repulsed by the rough-and-tumble of Washington — as for a question it raises about political dynasties:Why don’t and why shouldn’t they extend to spouses as often as they do to siblings and children? Could Hillary Clinton, initially derided as a two-for-one upstart, turn out to be something of a harbinger?...

David Rothkopf: History Won’t Be Kind to Obama's AfPak Policy

David Rothkopf, CEO and editor at large of Foreign Policy, is author of Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government -- and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead.

Jonathan Steele: The Soviets Showed the Way to Leave Afghanistan

Jonathan Steele is a Guardian columnist, roving foreign correspondent and author.

Marcus Miller and Robert Skidelsky: How Keynes Would Solve the Eurozone Crisis

The writers are respectively professor of economics and emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Warwick.

George Packer: L.B.J.’s Biden Moment

George Packer became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and has covered the Iraq War for the magazine.In one of those coincidences that get you thinking in historical analogies, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage just a few days after the publication of Robert Caro’s fourth volume on the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, “The Passage of Power.” Obama arrived at his position in very much the way that John F. Kennedy decided to put the force of the White House behind civil rights: slowly, reluctantly, and with a big assist from his overlooked, often ridiculed Vice-President.I spent the summer of 1980 as an intern at a legal-aid office in southern Alabama, and in the houses of poor black people I got used to seeing a sign on the wall that said, “The three who set us free,” beneath pictures of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. It always struck me as unfair that Johnson had been erased from history, not just in those homes in Alabama, but in the judgment of liberal-minded Americans all over the country. After all, it was President Johnson who got civil rights and voting rights passed, along with the entire program of social-justice legislation known as the Great Society.

Minxin Pei: The Myth of Chinese Meritocracy

Minxin Pei is Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA – Political scandals sometimes perform a valuable function in cleansing governments. They destroy the political careers of individuals of dubious character. More importantly, they can debunk political myths central to the legitimacy of some regimes....In many ways, Bo [Xilai] personified the Chinese concept of “meritocracy” – well-educated, intelligent, sophisticated, and charming (mainly to Western executives). But, after his fall, a very different picture emerged. Aside from his alleged involvement in assorted crimes, Bo was said to be a ruthless apparatchik, endowed with an outsize ego but no real talent. His record as a local administrator was mediocre.Bo’s rise to power owed much to his pedigree (his father was a vice premier), his political patrons, and his manipulation of the rules of the game. For example, visitors to Chongqing marvel at the soaring skyscrapers and modern infrastructure built during Bo’s tenure there. But do they know that Bo’s administration borrowed the equivalent of more than 50% of local GDP to finance the construction binge, and that a large portion of the debt will go unpaid?...

Jeffrey Rosen: Obamacare Isn’t the Only Target of Conservative Judges

Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. This article originally appeared in the May 24, 2012 issue of the magazine....IN 2005, IN AN ARTICLE for The New York Times Magazine, I described a nascent movement of pro-business and libertarian federal judges and think tank activists who hoped to resurrect what one judge called “the Constitution in Exile.” The term referred to a series of legal doctrines that have been dormant since the New Deal but which judges could use to dismantle the post–New Deal regulatory state, including economic regulations, health and safety laws, and environmental laws.Janice Rogers Brown has long been sympathetic to these goals. A daughter of sharecroppers, she denounced the New Deal in a series of speeches before her confirmation to the D.C. Circuit in 2005. She called 1937—the year the Supreme Court began to uphold the New Deal—“the triumph of our own socialist revolution.” In the same speech, she argued that “protection of property was a major casualty of the revolution of 1937.” During her first years on the federal bench, however, Brown was mostly quiet about her anti-regulatory views.

James S. Rosebush: From a Ride in Ronald Reagan's Limo, Lessons on Authenticity

James S. Rosebush was a deputy assistant to President Reagan and also chief of staff to first lady Nancy Reagan.Early one morning, in Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, I walked briskly with him from the Oval Office to the motorcade on the circular drive of the South Lawn. I was scheduled to take my first limousine ride alone with the president as a senior aide. The trouble was, I had no idea which door of the limo to enter....One thing about Reagan was that people always knew what he stood for and where he stood on the major issues of his presidency. In the current political climate, many voters may have a difficult time finding that kind of rock-solid set of beliefs in either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.So it’s worth looking at Reagan’s leadership, and three key ways in which authenticity defined it – all on display in that motorcade ride....