There 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 FrankThe revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.
Thomas FrankThe pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation's city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration's economic recovery strategy for the nation.
Thomas FrankAcknowledging class was always difficult for 'New Democrats' - it was second-wave, it was divisive - but 2008 made retro politics cool again.
Thomas FrankWe have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.
Thomas Frank