COMMENTARY BY JEFF
Book Review: “Coolidge” by Amity Shlaes
Shlaes’ monument to the 30th president is less an economist’s brief or a historian’s appraisal than a Puritan’s parable. What Coolidge’s aide C. Bascom Slemp said of his president could also be said of Shlaes: that his fervor for budget-cutting was “based on the stern judgment of the moralist.”
Review in the Washington Post
Acknowledge the Divisions
To make his second inaugural address meaningful, President Obama needs to acknowledge the very real and deeply felt differences between the parties.
Essay in the New York Times
Book Review: "The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist" by John A. Jenkins
John A. Jenkins traces a life’s journey and concludes that Rehnquist never traveled far from where he began — that he was “flash frozen” early on.
Review in the Washington Post
Book Review: “The Price of Politics” by Bob Woodward
The book is a highly detailed dissection of the debt-limit negotiations and how the hope of a “grand bargain” to reform the tax code and reduce runaway entitlement spending — a shared ambition of President Obama and Speaker John Boehner — ended, as so many hopes do in Washington, in recriminations and retrenchment.
Review in the Washington Post
The Mystery and Mystique of John Roberts
Why we should leave as little as possible to the chief justice to decide.
Essay on Slate
John Roberts Is No Hero
Why our crush on the chief justice is silly — and undeserved.
Essay on Slate
Why Obama Shouldn’t Campaign Against the Supreme Court
Whether the court upholds or strikes down President Obama’s health-care law, the justices’ work for this term will be done, and the argument over the Affordable Care Act will shift to the presidential campaign trail.
Essay in Newsweek
Jim Lehrer’s “Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain”
In the two decades since his first walk “down the blade of a knife,” as he describes the experience, Lehrer has set both the standard and the record for moderating presidential and vice presidential debates.
Review in the Washington Post
Should Justices Keep Their Opinions to Themselves?
Virtually everything the nine do and say — whether in robes, suits or leisure wear — has potential bearing on the reputation of the court. Which helps explain why the justices’ activities have aroused so much controversy during this past term, perhaps more so than in recent years. As much as any string of decisions, this has been a central story line of the term.
Op-ed in the New York Times
An Illustrated History of the Funny Papers
Brian Walker’s book The Comics: The Complete Collection makes clear how much the comics once mattered and why. The son of Mort Walker (creator of “Beetle Bailey” and other strips) and a cartoonist himself, Walker is one of the comics’ greatest enthusiasts, and there is plenty here to be enthusiastic about.
Review in the New York Times
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Repealing Common Sense
The conservative mission to destroy the Constitution in order to save it.
Essay, with Dahlia Lithwick, on Slate
Review: "Revival," Richard Wolffe's look inside Obama White House
In "Revival," Wolffe, a cable news commentator and veteran journalist, zeroes in on the first few months of 2010, a brief but, he contends, "defining period" in which President Obama "was forced to reexamine himself and his team" and emerged wiser and stronger.
Review in the Washington Post
Purpose-Driven Prose
Political rhetoric has a bad rap. Except in certain college courses — where the speeches of Lincoln and Churchill are pinned down like dead frogs and inspected for signs of logos, elocutio, and aposiopesis — rhetoric is held beneath contempt. And not without cause.
Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal
Evolving Circumstances, Enduring Values
“If my fellow citizens want to go to hell,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “I will help them. It’s my job.” This, for much of the last century, has stood as the purest (or at least the most pungent) distillation of “judicial restraint” — the idea that judges should, for better or worse, leave the business of governing to the people’s duly elected representatives. As practiced by the jaundiced Holmes, restraint was often a shrug of the shoulders: lawmakers, in his view, were predisposed to foolishness, and the Constitution entitled them, in most cases, to be fools.
Review in the the New York Times
Joy Behar Was Right
The co-hostess of The View faulted Obama for failing to tell the country where he was leading us. Jeff Shesol on what the president could learn from FDR about vision.
Commentary on the Daily Beast
Populist Interest in the Constitution is Nothing New
The Constitution is getting a lot of attention these days. Depending on your perspective, our national charter is being trampled, twisted, shredded, protected, upheld — everything, it appears, but neglected.
Commentary for the History News Network
For President Obama, Many Gaps to Fill on the Bench
There ought to be a place on the bench for judges who understand, as President Obama put it, "how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives."
Op-ed in the New York Times
Activist Judges, Class Is in Session
The professor-in-chief held an impromptu seminar in constitutional law last night on Air Force One, and he drove home a powerful lesson. In a conversation with reporters, President Obama attacked conservative judges for cloaking their activism in "legal theories" like "original intent," and called for "judicial restraint" -- which means, in the President's book, that courts should give greater deference to the actions of legislatures, state and federal, "as long as core constitutional values are observed."
Essay on the Huffington Post
Justices Will Prevail
In his State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito shook his head, scowled and mouthed a two-word dissent: “Not true.” Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, smiled serenely, apparently untroubled by the president’s attack. Now we know what Chief Justice Roberts really thinks.
Essay in the New York Times
Judging the Justices
"Judicial temperament," according to the American Bar Association guidelines for selecting judges, is an elusive quality, easier to identify than to define. It has been spotted frequently in John G. Roberts Jr., the new chief justice of the Supreme Court; less often in Justice Antonin Scalia, who, last year, gave what he called a "Sicilian gesture" in response to a reporter's question (and whose dissents often read like the textual equivalent).
Review of The Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Rosen
The Washington Post
The Legacy Project
Just about one year ago, as millions of television viewers watched the sun set in Simi Valley, Calif. — the terminus of Ronald Reagan's cross-country funeral procession — the late president's advance men called an end to Operation Serenade, their code name for this national farewell. In a manner that recalled Reagan's time in the White House, every move had been carefully choreographed. This was no ordinary funeral. ''This,'' as one former advance man said, ''is a legacy-building event.''
Essay in the New York Times
“When Trumpets Call”: Not Speaking Softly
“The American presidency,'' John Updike once wrote, ''is merely a way station en route to the blessed condition of being an ex-president.'' Taking the other side of the argument — emphatically so — is Theodore Roosevelt. In 1917, eight years out of office, he delivered this verdict: ''I am having a horrid, unimportant time.''
Review of When Trumpets Call, by Patricia O'Toole
The New York Times
Let's Put This Speech to Bed
The rebuttal is a dog of a speech. If it achieves anything it is a lightness of being, an instant irrelevance. Or worse: the State of the Union response has a long record of diminishing anyone who delivers it. It's time either to reform the rebuttal — or retire it.
Essay in the New York Times
Behind the Cigarette Holder
In the decade after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in 1945, Washington was noisy with the earnest clatter of typewriters. Public servants of all stripes labored to publish their recollections of Roosevelt. Soon Hemingway and Steinbeck were yielding space on America's shelves to F.D.R.'s cabinet secretaries, speechwriters and sons, as well as his Secret Service agent, his physician and, for good measure, his cook.
Review of That Man, by Robert H. Jackson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Roy Jenkins
The New York Times
The “Axis of Evil” Guy
The problem with White House speechwriters, from a president's point of view, is that they tend to take good notes. Even more worrying, they sometimes turn those notes into candid memoirs of their White House years. For this reason, speechwriters move through the West Wing under special clouds of suspicion.
Review of The Right Man, by David Frum
The New York Times
Adams Family Values
As any visitor to Washington will note, the surest guarantee of immortality is not an enduring accomplishment or even a sympathetic biographer; it is a large and strategically located block of marble on the Mall. By that measure, John Adams, America's second president, may finally receive his due. President Bush recently authorized a national memorial to Adams; Abigail, his wife; and their son John Quincy Adams, the sixth president. After two centuries of neglect and occasional ill repute, the Adams stock has been surging.
Review of America’s First Dynasty, by Richard Brookhiser
The New York Times
A Light That Failed Completely
If the time seems right for a reappraisal of Woodrow Wilson, as two insightful new books suggest, that in itself is nothing new: the time has always seemed right for a reappraisal of Wilson. That is because the struggle he waged over the creation of a League of Nations was at its core a debate over the terms of America's engagement in the world. This struggle, so central to our national purpose, has been perpetually replayed.
Review of Breaking the Heart of the World, by John Milton Cooper Jr., and Edith and Woodrow, by Phyllis Lee Levin
The New York Times
Lighting the Way
In Pillar of Fire, the second volume of Taylor Branch's civil rights trilogy, Martin Luther King Jr. is nothing quite so simple as a man or myth. To Branch, King is a metaphor — "the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years."
Review of Pillar of Fire, by Taylor Branch
The Washington Post |
