We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?
Thomas FrankThere is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Galleryโs version of the Barack Obama โHopeโ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obamaโs Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyistsโ Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.
Thomas FrankPeople getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.
Thomas FrankThe great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
Thomas FrankAs you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.
Thomas Frank