While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied - and to some extent overshadowed - by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future.

You want a political culture that works to create conditions under which an economy can thrive? Since signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Israel has spent two decades working to unshackle its economy from its socialist roots, with remarkable results.

For Obama to save himself, he should be thinking about the example of an unlikely Republican predecessor: Richard Nixon.

As a matter of policy, increasing taxes on the most economically productive group, which already generates 60 percent of the nation's federal revenues, during a sustained period of economic doldrums is a wretched idea.

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

It has never made any sense to argue that, unique among the people of the world, Arabs are more concerned on a day-to-day basis about the treatment of people they don't know than they are about how they're going to put food on their own tables, or whether their sons will ever find a job.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.