Oct 24, 2006

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

by Cliopatria

Michael Kazin,"Rising Star," Washington Post, 22 October, reviews Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Kazin and Robert McElvaine challenge the obvious reservations about an Obama presidential candidacy in comments here. See also: Frank Rich in the NY Times, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, nonpartisan at Progressive Historians and TWF at Is That Legal?.

This excerpt, Tom Bower,"Conrad the Barbarian," London Times, 22 October, from Bower's forthcoming book, Conrad and Lady Black, helps to explain a lot. Perhaps we'll learn more from it about who actually wrote the 1280 page biography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom.

When we last heard about John Lott, the peripatetic pro-gun economist and sock-puppeteer, he had left the American Enterprise Institute and was suing HarperCollins and the University of Chicago's Steven Levitt for defamation in Freakonomics. Now, it appears, he turns up at SUNY, Binghamton, as Dean's Visiting Professor of Economics. Cat's got at least nine lives.

More Comments:

Nonpartisan - 10/25/2006

Ah, my first post at HNN...

Ralph, I greatly enjoy reading Cliopatria and am thankful for the opportunity to finally be able to comment here. Thank you as well for the link above. I want to emphasize, though, that I haven't read Obama's book yet. So far I've read Michael Kazin's review and Cass Sunstein's at TNR's Open University. I find the two oddly discordant -- Kazin's could just as easily be a description of John Edwards, while Sunstein's could be a comment on the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

I don't know what Obama has to say for himself yet, but I guarantee that he defies characterization. Rick Shenkman has a point that Obama likely is no Lincoln, but he definitely shares with the 16th President an almost unfathomable complexity. More than that, I can't say -- I'll have to reserve judgment until I read the book.