Roundup: Media's Take

John Steele Gordon: Gingrich and the History of Negative Campaigns

Mr. Gordon is the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins, 2004). There are only two ways to win an election: Persuade people to vote for you or persuade them to vote against your opponent.And while negative campaigning is routinely decried, it is also routinely practiced and has been since nearly the beginning of politics in this country. The reason is simple enough—it usually works. As Newt Gingrich discovered in Iowa, negative TV ads can drive down poll numbers alarmingly fast.The negative ads these days are often tough, but they're nowhere near as vicious as early examples, when opponents were routinely "drenched in calumny," to use Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen's memorable phrase about the ordeals of Richard Nixon.George Washington was twice elected president unanimously, but the election of 1796, between Vice President John Adams and former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, was a mudfest. The candidates themselves did not campaign at all, as was then the custom, but their surrogates in the party press knew few restraints.

Michael Young: Can Mideast Make Peace With the Past?

Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and author of The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon's Life Struggle.As Arab revolts began last year, it was inevitable that people would compare them to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.And that comparison suggests that the emancipation of Arab societies will likely stumble on the matter of memory, as did the former communist societies.A useful keyhole into that recent past is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1995 book by Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism.Ms Rosenberg focused on three countries; Czechoslovakia (before its break-up into two states), Poland, and the German Democratic Republic. She examined how each came to terms with its oppressive communist legacy, and concluded that the process in each country was wanting, causing discord rather than the desirable closure initially anticipated... 

Moon Chang-keuk: Does North Korea Want Reunification?

Moon Chang-keuk is a senior columnist of the JoongAng Ilbo.As I observe the North Korean people in news reports about the death of Kim Jong-il and his funeral, I feel so pitiful for them. They cried so hard, and some even collapsed. In an outdoor plaza in bitterly cold winter weather, they bowed their heads deeply. I don’t want to talk about whether their tears were real or not. They were slaves, they were robots. Is there any other regime in the world where humanity is so completely abused and ignored?The so-called North Korean leaders up on the podium were also pitiful. What were they really thinking? They were probably also desperate looking for a means of survival. They all knew very well that their status would simply disappear if the regime was not sustained. They were also slaves of the system.North Korea was a gigantic stage last week and everyone on view was playing his or her part. The world media was almost dumbfounded at the unique scenes. What can the world think of the Koreans? Because my brother’s weakness is also mine, we should also feel embarrassed to the point of shame.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Ray Takeyh: Triumph of the New Wilsonism

Nikolas K. Gvosdev, a senior editor at The National Interest, is a professor of national-security studies at the U.S. Naval War College. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Michael Barone: New Deal Appeal Grows Stale

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner....To understand the lessons of the 1930s, you need to read the election returns. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s big victory in 1932 was a massive rejection of Republicans across the board. Republicans lost huge ground in urban and rural areas, even in their few redoubts in the South.In 1936, FDR won re-election by a slightly larger margin, but with a different coalition. The rural and small town North returned to its long Republican allegiance, while Democrats made further big gains among immigrants and blue-collar workers in big cities and factory towns.The New Deal historians attributed these gains to Roosevelt’s economic redistribution measures. The problem with the historians’ claims is that the shifts in the electorate apparent in 1936 also are apparent in the 1934 off-year elections. Democrats won big that year, but compared to 1932, they lost ground in rural areas and small towns and gained much ground in cities....So why should voters be leery of economic redistribution in times of economic distress? Perhaps because they realize that they stand to gain much more from a vibrantly growing economy than from redistribution of a stagnant economic pie. Redistribution edges toward a zero-sum game....

Kevin A. Sabet: Overdosing on Extremism

Kevin A. Sabet, a drug-policy consultant, was a senior adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2009 to 2011....[M]oderates have historically been key contributors to both the debate and the practice of effective drug policy. In 1914, Representative Francis B. Harrison, a New York Democrat, worked with Republicans and President Woodrow Wilson to pass the first major piece of federal anti-drug legislation, in response to a surge in heroin and cocaine use.Other moderates, from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, made drug policy an important part of their domestic agendas. President Bill Clinton worked closely with Bob Dole, the Republican Senate majority leader, on sensible measures like drug courts and community policing. And Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the reason there is a drug czar in the first place, having pushed the idea for years before President Ronald Reagan approved it.

James Kirchick: Ron Paul's conspiracy-minded views

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Myra MacPherson: The Real Newt Gingrich Is Only an Archive Search Away

Reporters, listen up: Stop calling Newt Gingrich a “scholar.” In fact, spend some time learning about his real history.Yes, Gingrich calls himself a “historian,” but there was a time when reporters went to the clips to check things like that. Now, ironically, even with great Internet access, looking up yesterday to help explain today is too often a lost exercise.Gingrich has been getting the smartest-horse-in-the-race treatment from the media in the roller coaster ride of surging, then fading presidential polls. The “scholar” and “historian” adjectives aren’t just used by cheerleading conservative pundits, but by reporters who state it as fact.The Washington Post just published an embarrassing gusher regarding Newt’s smarts — with no examination of  his decidedly more street slugging than scholarly record and use of smears and gutter language against opponents. The piece raved about how he led his children in reading at night. Imagine that....

Jonathan Chait: Barack Obama, Bad Presidential Historian

Liberals are dissatisfied with President Obama because liberals are dissatisfied with pretty much every president. That was the argument in my piece from last month about the history of liberal disillusionment. Unsurprisingly, President Obama agrees. CBS has released a transcript of Obama’s interview with Steve Kroft from a week ago referencing it:Look, Steve, you know, there was actually a good article written a while back, taking a look at the old press clips from every Democratic president, dating back to Franklin Roosevelt, including Roosevelt. And, you know, nobody was happy with them. Nobody was happy with them. You know?...That’s a pretty accurate summation. But then, later in the interview, Obama’s historical interpretation takes a pretty strange turn:As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history....

David Treuer: How Do You Prove You’re an Indian?

David Treuer, an Ojibwe Indian, is the author of the forthcoming “Rez Life.” AMERICA’S first blood quantum law was passed in Virginia in 1705 in order to determine who had a high enough degree of Indian blood to be classified an Indian — and whose rights could be restricted as a result. You’d think, after all these years, we’d finally manage to kick the concept. But recently, casino-rich Indian tribes in California have been using it themselves to cast out members whose tribal bloodlines, they say, are not pure enough to share in the profits.What is surprising is not that more than 2,500 tribal members have been disenfranchised for apparently base reasons. (It’s human — and American — nature to want to concentrate wealth in as few hands as possible.) What is surprising is the extent to which Indian communities have continued using a system of blood membership that was imposed upon us in a violation of our sovereignty.

Victor Cha: Kim’s Death is Watershed Moment for North Korea

Victor Cha is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).and professor at Georgetown University. He was director of Asian affairs at the White House from 2004-07. His book, The Impossible State: North Korea’s Past and Future, will be published in 2012.Until this weekend, any expert assessment inside or outside the US government would have stated that the most likely scenario for a collapse of the North Korean regime would be the sudden death of the isolated leader Kim Jong-il. After Monday’s revelation by North Korea’s state television, we now face that uncertain scenario.This is a watershed moment. It is not at all clear that the plan to hand power to Kim’s youngest son, Kim Jong-eun, can be carried out successfully. Kim Jong-il had 14 years to prepare to take over from his father, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994. Kim Jong-eun has had just three years since his father had a stroke. He is not even 30 years old.

Ronald McKinnon: Oh, For an Alexander Hamilton to Save Europe!

The writer is a professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institution for Economic Policy Research.To stem the unfolding sovereign debt crisis and save the euro, European summits seem to provide too little, too late. A look back to the late 18th century could provide insights into what can be done to resolve a sovereign debt crisis. The solution to an American at least is clear: Europe needs not just a centralised finance ministry; it need its own Alexander Hamilton.

James Warren: The Gingrich Dichotomy ... Those Who Know Him Best Like Him Least

At the height of Newt Gingrich's political power as House Speaker, Republican congressmen began reporting back that their constituents were passing along a simple message: "Tell Newt to shut up!"The same advice is being given now, though this time the message is coming from a distinctly elite group of apparent ideological confreres and former associates. But there seems -- until recently, at least -- to have been a significant disconnect between their views and those of likely voters in charge of the Republican nominating process, who have turned Gingrich into a top-tier candidate in early states. Said Robert Dallek, a prominent presidential historian, "There is a certain unprecedented quality to this which should give people pause."

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: Why the 21st Century Now Looks Like the 19th

Former president of Chicago Theological Seminary (1998-2008), Thistlethwaite is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.The 21st century is becoming a mirror of the 19th. The 19th century, due to rapidly expanding industrialization, saw an appalling rise in poverty, and the exploitation of poor children, some as young four years old, who were often forced to work in the rapidly expanding factories.In 1843, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol , his indictment of 19th century industrial capitalism and the horrors it visited upon the poor and working classes, especially children. Dickens himself had fallen into poverty as a child when his father was arrested, and at the age of 12 he had to go to work in a factory. His own experience of child labor and his first-hand witness of the terrible injustices suffered by the working poor framed this complex story. A Christmas Carol tells the story of a greedy businessman, Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by the shade of his dead business partner, and then three ghosts who force him to face all the harm he has done through his exploitation of the poor, and his desire only for riches.

Jay Kirk: End the Circus of Cruelty

Jay Kirk is the author of the just-published "Kingdom Under Glass: a Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals."

Amir Taheri: America's Iraq Achievements

Amir Taheri is an Iranian-born conservative author based in Europe.The last American troops in Iraq will fly home by month’s end; whatever the shape of future relations between the two nations, the US withdrawal marks the end of a chapter, if not a whole volume.In one of those ironies that add spice to history, the end of the American military presence, negotiated under President George W. Bush, is happening under Barack Obama, who built his presidential campaign on opposition to the liberation of Iraq.Was the war worth fighting? What kind of Iraq do the Americans leave behind? These questions still divide those interested in the Mideast’s complex politics.A speech by Vice President Joe Biden in Baghdad earlier this month pretended that the war was not worth the cost and the effort, making much of the administration’s desire to end "physical and financial bleeding." He sounded as if he was ending a war started not by America but by some other, unnamed, country.Biden also insisted that he and Obama aren’t claiming victory. But was Iraq a defeat for the United States? A draw? In any case, who is the other side?

George Galloway: Last Post in Iraq ... This is the Death Knell of the American Empire

George Galloway was an MP, for Labour and later the Respect party, from 1987 to 2010. He helped found Respect in 2004 after he was expelled from the Labour party for his opposition to the Iraq war.So the Yanks are going home. Apart from the thousands of their servicemen and women whose lifeblood they are leaving in the sands of Iraq, and the tens of thousands too maimed or otherwise damaged to make it back to home and hearth. And minus the trillion-plus of dollars in treasure they have expended on destroying an Arab country (which may have lost a million souls and seen three millions off into exile), fanning the flames of fanaticism, making Iran more powerful, and unleashing a wave of sectarianism throughout the Muslim world. Nice work, but hardly "Mission Accomplished", as the melancholy valediction delivered by President Obama at Fort Bragg this week made clear to the discerning.

Michael Williams: Turkey’s Stance Will Seal the Fate of Syria’s Ceausescu

The writer is a former UN undersecretary general in the Middle East. He is Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Chatham House.When the leader of the rising power in the Middle East reminds a neighbour, and former close friend, of the fates of Adolf Hitler and Nicolae Ceausescu, that is a health warning to be heeded. So what are the chances of Bashar al-Assad taking the advice of his erstwhile friend, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan? In my experience, slim indeed.In meetings with Syria’s president in recent years I was struck by his Manichean outlook. After almost nine months of protests there is no indication that Mr Assad has any intention of introducing meaningful reforms. Indeed it would be entirely out of keeping with his character which, in the classic totalitarian mould, brooks no opposing views. If there is an East European leader he resembles it is Ceausescu.

Gar Alperovitz: Worker-Owners of America, Unite!

Gar Alperovitz, a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founder of the Democracy Collaborative, is the author of “America Beyond Capitalism.”THE Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system.But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing....

Barbara and John Ehrenreich: The Making of the American 99% and the Collapse of the Middle Class

Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch regular, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword).John Ehrenreich is professor of psychology at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. He wrote The Humanitarian Companion: A Guide for International Aid, Development, and Human Rights Workers.This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print at the Nation magazine. “Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”