Biography
Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has reported on national and international issues from Washington for more ...
McManus: A campaign bombshell
May 20, 2012
The Supreme Court is about to toss a judicial bomb into the middle of the presidential campaign, and nobody knows what impact it will have.
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McManus: Americans Elect meets reality
May 17, 2012
What happens if you start a political party and nobody comes? Six months ago, a newfangled third party burst onto the scene, full of hope and promise. It was called Americans Elect, and it sought to give voters a choice many said they were looking for: "centrist" candidates who could break the partisan gridlock paralyzing Washington.
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McManus: Lies, damned lies and political advertising
May 13, 2012
The television commercial is designed to spark outrage. "Billions of taxpayer dollars spent on green energy went to jobs in foreign countries," it intones. "The Obama administration admitted the truth — that $2.3 billion of tax credits went overseas, while millions of Americans can't find a job…. American taxpayers are paying to send their own jobs to foreign countries."
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McManus: Obama evolves on gay marriage
May 10, 2012
President Obama's announcement Wednesday that he was done "evolving" and now supports same-sex marriage was, in retrospect, inevitable. Vice President Joe Biden made it so Sunday, when he remarked almost casually that he had grown "comfortable" with gay marriage.
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McManus: Coming clean on drones
May 6, 2012
In recent weeks, a parade of top officials has given sober, underpublicized speeches explaining why President Obama not only considers "targeted killing" drone strikes against terrorists legal but has massively expanded their use, even approving a strike against a U.S. citizen, the New Mexico-born Al Qaeda preacher Anwar Awlaki, in Yemen last year.
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McManus: Bin Laden and ballots
May 3, 2012
We're far enough away from it now that we can probably all agree: It was a mistake for George W. Bushto land on that aircraft carrier in a flight suit to proclaim "Mission Accomplished." And not just because the war in Iraq was far from over at that point.
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McManus: Mitt Romney stays put
April 29, 2012
If you've been holding your breath to see whether Mitt Romney would pivot to the center now that it's a two-man race between him and President Obama, you can exhale; he won't.
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McManus: And Romney's veep choice is ...
April 26, 2012
The "Veepstakes" are on — but the smart money says they're already over.
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McManus: A smaller, smarter military
April 22, 2012
President Obama has called a halt to the decade-long rise in defense spending that began after Sept. 11, and has proposed shrinking the Army and Marine Corps by about 14%.
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McManus: The Iran squeeze
April 19, 2012
The Obama administration faces two dangers in its nuclear negotiations with Iran, which began in a burst of optimism last weekend after the two sides managed to get through a day and a half of talks without anyone walking out.
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McManus: The bottom line on taxes
April 15, 2012
On April 15, everyone's in favor of tax reform.
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McManus: Romney, the worst candidate?
April 12, 2012
In the spring of 1980, the race for the Republican presidential nomination got nasty. The front-runner, Ronald Reagan, said his main challenger,George H.W. Bush, wasn't a real conservative. Bush went on the attack, accusing Reagan of peddling "voodoo economics" and "a list of phony promises."
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McManus: A ticking clock on Syria
April 8, 2012
The interventionist liberals of the Obama administration were a doleful bunch last week. It was the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, when a Bosnian Serb army battered a city full of civilians with artillery while the United States issued ineffective cries of alarm. The comparison with this year's massacres in Syria was painfully apt.
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McManus: Time for a presidential campaign experiment
April 5, 2012
We got our first real glimpse this week of how President Obama and his now-almost-certain Republican rival, Mitt Romney, intend to wage their campaigns in the lead-up to the general election.
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McManus: The nuclear countdown in Iran
April 1, 2012
Not long ago, an astute reader noted that it has been nearly two years since I wrote in a column that "most experts now estimate that Iran needs about 18 months to complete a nuclear device and a missile to carry it."
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McManus: Obama's 'tax' lapse
March 29, 2012
In 2009, President Obama was asked whether the individual mandate in his healthcare plan was really just a tax in disguise. "I absolutely reject that notion," he responded.
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McManus: Fuming about gas
March 25, 2012
When the price of gasoline rises, the supply of hot air expands.
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McManus: Don't close the GOP show
March 22, 2012
We in the mainstream media harbor a dirty little secret: Most of us are rooting for Rick Santorum. It's nothing personal, although Santorum is a reasonably appealing guy. And it's not ideological; most of us aren't yearning for Bible-based social conservatism to become the law of the land. It's worse than that. We're just hoping to see the gaudy spectacle of this primary campaign continue as long as possible.
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McManus: Will Romney be the GOP's Dukakis?
March 18, 2012
There's an old saying in Republican politics: Massachusetts produces only two exports — lobsters and liberals — and neither one travels well.
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McManus: A Plan C for Afghanistan
March 15, 2012
President Obama has long been criticized by Republicans for his purportedly inadequate zeal in pursuing the war in Afghanistan. He was criticized sharply from the right for his plan to draw down troops over three years; too fast, they said.
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McManus: Obama's healthcare albatross
March 11, 2012
There's a seeming paradox in the way Americans view the healthcare law that President Obama and the Democrats passed two years ago this month.
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McManus: No quit in these presidential candidates
March 8, 2012
Poor Mitt Romney. He won six of 10 states on Super Tuesday, including hotly contested Ohio. He lengthened his lead in the count of delegates who will actually choose the Republican presidential nominee. But he's still a long way from claiming victory.
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McManus: Israel's brinkmanship, America's peril
March 4, 2012
Last week, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, confirmed a no-longer-surprising fact: the Pentagon has sent the White House a menu of options for going to war with Iran.
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McManus: Romney won't be a pushover in November
March 1, 2012
Mitt Romney started as the odds-on favorite for the GOP nomination, and he's never really lost that spot. Still, he's had a rough six weeks.
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McManus: Campaign 2012's lessons so far
February 23, 2012
It sometimes feels as if the struggle for the Republican presidential nomination has been going on forever, but if you measure the campaign by the number of delegates chosen so far, we're only about 10% done.
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McManus: Mixing Medicare and mudslinging
February 19, 2012
Don't look now, but the 2012 election is turning into a national referendum on what to do about Medicare.
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McManus: Santorum's surge
February 16, 2012
When this year's presidential campaign began, Rick Santorum looked like a fringe candidate, consigned permanently to the outside edge of an overcrowded debate stage. But as earlier conservative front-runners sputtered, Santorum plugged away, sticking doggedly to his unfashionable message of uncompromising social conservatism.
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McManus: Romney's pain, Obama's gain
February 12, 2012
The rest of the country may be tiring of it, but the drawn-out, high-decibel battle for the Republican presidential nomination is just fine with the Obama campaign.
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Those mudslinging Republicans
February 9, 2012
This was the week Mitt Romney should have sealed the Republican presidential nomination. He was expected to win Tuesday's caucuses in Colorado, to win or tie in Minnesota and to do credibly well in Missouri. Instead, the former Massachusetts governor managed to lose all three contests to Rick Santorum, a candidate who has spent most of the campaign stuck near the bottom of the polls.
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McManus: Who reviews the U.S. 'kill list'?
February 5, 2012
When it comes to national security, Michael V. Haydenis no shrinking violet. As CIA director, he ran the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretaps against suspected terrorists.
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McManus: The Gingrich playbook
February 2, 2012
Newt Gingrich says he's staying in the Republican presidential race all the way to the GOP convention in August, and that he's willing — even eager — to fight for the nomination on the convention floor. But does he have a chance?
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McManus: A Gingrich presidency?
January 29, 2012
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that if Mitt Romney won the South Carolina primary, the Republican presidential race would be over and he would be the nominee. But Romney didn't win, and that means it's time to consider the unthinkable: What would life under President Gingrich be like?
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McManus: Obama's common touch
January 25, 2012
The State of the Union address is a political exercise in the best of times. But when a president is running for reelection and Congress is dominated by his most bitter opponents, there's even less pretense than usual.
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McManus: Is Romney a true conservative?
January 22, 2012
For months, Mitt Romney's rivals in the Republican presidential race have hammered him as a closet moderate, especially on third-rail social issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
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McManus: Red meat for the tea party
January 15, 2012
Mitt Romney isn't a naturally eloquent man. His stump speeches are nearly content-free. They combine exaggerated denunciations of President Obama ("a pessimistic president," "the great complainer") and ardent professions of patriotism. "I love our country," Romney announces at every stop. "I love our national anthem.... I love it dearly. I love putting my hand over my heart." He often closes speeches by reciting lines from "America the Beautiful."
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McManus: Romney's 'electability' is key
January 12, 2012
New Hampshire Republicans are practical people.
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McManus: Obama's modest proposal on defense
January 8, 2012
As he unveiled his administration's new blueprint for U.S. defense strategy last week, President Obama sought to vaccinate himself against charges that he was gutting the nation's military.
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McManus: Oops! That was the year that wasn't
December 29, 2011
A year ago, soon after the Tunisian uprising, I demonstrated my powers of prediction in a column about the democracy movement in the Arab world. The revolution in Tunisia, I wrote, "arose from local circumstances that don't foretell what will happen anywhere else." Three weeks later, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak fell, and the Arab Spring was in full bloom.
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McManus: Change in Saudi Arabia
December 25, 2011
Women in Saudi Arabia won a small but promising victory this year. No, they aren't being allowed to drive; that's still forbidden. Most of the time, they still can't work, travel or even open bank accounts without the approval of a male guardian. But they do have this: Saudi women can now buy lingerie in stores from female salesclerks, instead of the sometimes leering men who used to staff the counters. If this modest wave of liberalization continues, they may even get fitting rooms.
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McManus: A long goodbye to Afghanistan
December 22, 2011
This week, the last convoy of U.S. troops in Iraq drove noisily across the border into Kuwait and shut the gate behind them. The next drawdown comes in Afghanistan, where American forces are scheduled to disengage from most combat by the end of 2014.
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McManus: An elusive victory in Iraq
December 18, 2011
With the final headlong withdrawal this month of U.S. troops from Iraq, President Obama fulfilled a campaign promise to end the war. But was the nearly nine-year mission a success?
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Could Rubio save the GOP ticket?
December 15, 2011
Florida's new Republican senator, 40-year-old Marco Rubio, is handsome, personable and smart. He can talk with intelligence and ease about foreign policy, the federal budget and the aspirations of the American people. And he has a Reaganesque gift for sounding reassuring, even when he's arguing for Tea Party positions such as a complete overhaul of Social Security and Medicare.
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McManus: Obama sides with the 99%
December 11, 2011
Conservatives were quick to accuse President Obama of embracing class warfare in his speech last week in Osawatomie, Kan. And liberal Democrats were thrilled to see a hint of the populist president they had hoped they were voting for in 2008.
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McManus: Tough guys on illegal immigration
December 4, 2011
"I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally."
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McManus: Slugging it out with Gingrich
December 1, 2011
The Romney camp is worried.
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McManus: The super committee that wasn't
November 27, 2011
Here's an assessment from the Republican co-chairman of Congress' unfortunate "super committee" of why the bipartisan panel failed to produce a deficit reduction plan last week:
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McManus: For GOP, it's bland vs. firebrand
November 24, 2011
Republican voters face a choice: Do they want to play it safe, or do they feel like taking risks?
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McManus: Will 'New Newt' prevail?
November 17, 2011
When Richard M. Nixon ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, he faced a daunting problem: A lot of voters just didn't like him. Nixon had made his name in politics as an angry, partisan hatchet man, famous for lashing out against Democrats and the news media. To win the presidency, he needed to find a way to soften that too-harsh image.
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McManus: Facing a nuclear Iran
November 13, 2011
The United Nations report on Iran's nuclear program released last week should end the debate, if any debate remained, over whether Iran is moving toward acquiring the ability to build a nuclear weapon. In cautious but convincing detail, the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency listed evidence that Iran is still conducting research that would lead to an atomic bomb, much of it in secret military laboratories. And Iran has refused to answer the U.N.'s questions or allow U.N. inspectors to see much of what it's doing, the easiest way to refute its critics' charges.
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McManus: Can Barack Obama be more like Bill Clinton?
November 10, 2011
Bill Clinton feels Barack Obama's pain.
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McManus: Presidential crystal balls
November 6, 2011
Unemployment is mired at 9%, and President Obama's poll ratings are mired too. Democrats are dispirited. Republicans are fired up and ready to go. Activists on both the right and the left are demanding change.
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McManus: What about Afghanistan?
November 3, 2011
Republicans usually enter a presidential campaign with a built-in advantage on at least one issue: national security. Historically, voters trust the GOP to be tougher than Democrats on defense and foreign policy.
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McManus: The third-party wild card
October 27, 2011
American voters have fired two modern presidents after just one term, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Both suffered because the economy was in poor shape, and both faced disaffection within their own parties. But there was another thing those candidates had in common: They both faced relatively strong third-party candidates in the November election.
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McManus: Mosque and state
October 23, 2011
At a conference two years ago, I sat in on a meeting between U.S. officials and young Islamist politicians from Tunisia, Jordan and other countries in the Middle East. The Islamists wanted to know: Would the Americans allow them to run in free elections, even if it meant they might come to power? The Americans turned the question back at them: Would the Islamists, if they won, allow free and democratic elections, even if it might mean losing power?
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McManus: Obama in the Occupy Wall Street camp
October 20, 2011
If you're one of the thousands of demonstrators sleeping in parks, carrying signs and banging on drums to protest Wall Street's hammerlock on American politics, President Obama wants you to know he feels your pain.
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McManus: Merkel intent on keeping Eurozone united
October 16, 2011
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's impossible prime minister, has committed almost every sin that modern politics affords. He entertains barely-of-age girls as overnight guests and brags about it. He appoints business cronies and television starlets to government jobs. He's under perpetual investigation for corruption.
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McManus: Mitt Romney and the Not-Romneys
October 13, 2011
There may still be half a dozen contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, but the race has always had room for only two: Mitt Romney and someone who isn't Mitt Romney. After four full-scale debates, that second spot, reserved for a more conservative candidate, is still unfilled; the fiscal firebrands of the tea party haven't found an ideal alternative to Romney, leaving the party's right wing divided. It's beginning to look as if the former Massachusetts governor will win the nomination almost by default — an odd outcome to a year that began with the tea party triumphant.
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McManus: The GOP's hard-right tilt
September 25, 2011
We've now seen three full-dress debates among the Republican politicians who want to be the next president of the United States, and here's what we've learned:
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McManus: Pity the 'super committee'
September 22, 2011
Pity the poor "super committee." Congress' special task force on the deficit already had a mission that looked nearly impossible: producing a plan to reduce the federal government's fiscal gap by $1.2 trillion over 10 years. And then the job got harder.
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McManus: Technology that protects protesters
September 18, 2011
Early this year, as street protests began spreading across the Arab world, a young Internet expert from Germany, Katrin Verclas, asked Egyptian democracy activists what kind of technology they needed most. More laptop computers? Better access to the Web? Tools to evade censorship? Software to post videos?
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McManus: Touching the 'third rail'
September 15, 2011
"We have not had the courage to stand up and look Americans in the face," Texas Gov. Rick Perry said when he was asked about Social Security at the Republican presidential candidates' debate this week. "It has been called a Ponzi scheme by many people long before me. But no one's had the courage to stand up and say, 'Here is how we're going to reform it.'"
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McManus: Obama's new tone
September 8, 2011
We already know the outlines of what President Obama plans to say in his long-awaited jobs speech before Congress on Thursday night. He will propose a list of job-creation measures — tax cuts, infrastructure spending, aid to state governments, training for the unemployed — that will probably add up to about $300 billion worth of economic stimulus.
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McManus: Palin the procrastinator
September 1, 2011
Sarah Palin is giving indecision a bad name.
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McManus: A two-man GOP presidential race?
August 28, 2011
Until a few weeks ago, the race for the Republican presidential nomination seemed wide open. There was a presumptive front-runner, Mitt Romney, but he held first place mostly because he was a familiar face; his support among Republican voters appeared broad but not deep.
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McManus: Will there be a Libya bounce for Obama?
August 25, 2011
Twenty years ago this summer, American cities staged noisy, flag-waving parades to celebrate the U.S. victory in a war we've almost forgotten: the Persian Gulf War against Iraq. The president at the time, George H.W. Bush, saw his poll ratings soar in the war's afterglow. But 18 months later, on election day in 1992, the victory parades were ancient history. The voters, impatient with the economy's slow recovery from a recession, turned Bush out of office after a single term.
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Obama's biggest challenge: Jobs
August 7, 2011
The central question facing Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign is this: Can the president persuade voters to let him keep his job when so many of them have lost theirs?
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McManus: Obama's clarity gap
August 4, 2011
We all know by now that the eleventh-hour deal to raise the federal debt ceiling didn't solve much. Federal debt is still ballooning, healthcare costs are still rising, and we're nowhere close to an agreement on raising tax revenue.
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McManus: The write stuff
July 31, 2011
The news from Washington — bickering over the debt ceiling, poor prospects for the economy — hasn't been uplifting lately. It's time for some beach reading.
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McManus: The political angle of the debt-ceiling debate
July 28, 2011
It's not hard to see what a compromise solution on the debt ceiling would look like. It's just hard to see how we get there from here before the Treasury begins running out of money Aug. 2.
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McManus: A boomlet of Perrymania
July 24, 2011
For a man who hasn't formally decided whether to run for president, Texas Gov. Rick Perry sure sounds a lot like a candidate.
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McManus: Doomsday doubters and the debt ceiling
July 21, 2011
President Obama says that if Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, the consequences will be dire. A long list of economists and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agree. Even the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate agrees.
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McManus: A deal with the Khartoum devil?
July 17, 2011
How do you deal with a genocidal dictator who says he wants to reform?
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McManus: One good debt debate deserves another
July 14, 2011
Republican leaders blinked this week in their standoff with President Obama over raising the nation's debt ceiling. That means we're unlikely to face a financial crisis next month, when the Treasury said it would run short of money to pay the federal government's bills. But it doesn't mean we've solved any of our fiscal problems.
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McManus: A measured U.S. response in Syria
July 10, 2011
When pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria this spring, President Obama offered Syrian President Bashar Assad one more chance to embrace reform. "He can lead that transition [to democracy] or get out of the way," Obama said in May.
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McManus: Team Obama's victory plan
July 7, 2011
President Obama faces an uphill struggle in his campaign for reelection next year. His job approval rating is stuck just below 50%. The unemployment rate appears likely to remain above 8% until election day. And, though it's too soon to mean much, early polling puts the nominal Republican front-runner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, within striking distance.
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McManus: Debt-limit delay in the real world
July 1, 2011
In 2008, as financial crisis threatened the U.S. banking system, President George W. Bush asked Congress to approve an emergency bailout. Leaders of both parties blessed the idea; both presidential candidates — Barack Obama and John McCain — endorsed it. But conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats rebelled, the House defeated the bill — and the stock market plummeted in real time during the roll call. It took the prospect of economic meltdown to get the House to reverse itself and approve Bush's Troubled Asset Relief Program.
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McManus: Obama's popular in Europe, where it doesn't count
June 26, 2011
In a deservedly obscure village among the green hills and dairy farms of Ireland's midlands stands a pub that has been turned into a shrine to Barack Obama. In the back room of Ollie Hayes' saloon, a large and markedly unattractive fake-bronze bust of the president sits on a pedestal flanked by beer glasses; over the fireplace there's a portrait of the great man hoisting a pint of Guinness, and other Obama memorabilia covers the walls.
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Doyle McManus: The West is still waiting for its Libya gamble to pay off
June 12, 2011
Hope isn't a strategy. But it was a major part of NATO's decision to launch an air war against Libya's Moammar Kadafi almost three months ago.
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Doyle McManus: Shifting sands of religion and politics
June 5, 2011
Of the 44 U.S. presidents, all but a handful have been affiliated with a relatively narrow list of traditional Protestant denominations.
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Doyle McManus: Newt takes his shot
May 29, 2011
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker running for the GOP presidential nomination, is trying to put some distance these days between himself and, well, himself.
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Doyle McManus: Middle East hopes and fears
May 22, 2011
We may be the world's only remaining superpower, but we've been a secondary factor in the wave of change sweeping the Arab world.
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Fighting mosques in the name of freedom
May 19, 2011
Last year, a Muslim congregation in Murfreesboro, Tenn., a pleasant college town of about 110,000 people southeast of Nashville, decided that the time had come to build a proper mosque.
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Doyle McManus: Tim Pawlenty's gambit
May 8, 2011
Last week's Republican mini-debate may not have been the most auspicious way for a presidential candidate to introduce himself to a national audience. The stage in South Carolina didn't include most of the party's top names; instead, it boasted former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who wants to focus on gay marriage; Atlanta pizza magnate Herman Cain, who wants to run the government like a business; Rep. Ron Paul, the vinegary Texas libertarian; and Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico who hopes to be the next Ron Paul. "It looked like the bar scene from 'Star Wars,'" said Republican strategist Scott Reed.
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Doyle McManus: Al Qaeda's very bad year
May 5, 2011
Al Qaeda is having a very bad year. And from the terrorists' standpoint, the death of Osama bin Laden isn't even the worst of it. The biggest potential blow is the spread of democratic politics in the Arab world. If it succeeds, Al Qaeda will be deprived of its reason for being.
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Doyle McManus: The right budget battle to watch
April 28, 2011
You've no doubt been hearing the harrowing warnings about what might happen if Congress refuses to lift the federal government's debt ceiling, as some conservative Republicans have threatened.
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Doyle McManus: GOP wannabes
April 21, 2011
Here's a not very bold prediction: Donald Trump won't be the Republican presidential nominee next year. He's not a credible national leader. His strategy for restoring American economic vigor boils down to threatening China with a trade war. It's not even clear that he's a conservative; he once backed Barack Obama, and he appears to favor abortion rights. The GOP can do better, and will.
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Libya's only a part of Mideast equation
April 17, 2011
The eyes of the world are on the battle for Libya. It's undeniably a compelling drama: Spirited but untrained rebels, plus NATO airstrikes, pitted against an eccentric dictator with a cinematic wardrobe.
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Drawing budget battle lines
April 14, 2011
In case it wasn't clear already, we now know what the 2012 election will be about: how fast to cut federal spending, whether to raise taxes and what to do about healthcare, especially Medicare.
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Doyle McManus: The choice between low taxes vs. Medicare benefits
April 7, 2011
Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, won praise from his fellow Republicans this week for proposing a federal budget that would reduce the deficit by slashing spending in almost every domestic program.
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No party for John Boehner
April 3, 2011
For a man who's getting most of what he wanted, House Speaker John A. Boehner looked pretty unhappy last week.
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Doyle McManus: The GOP's Libya dilemma
March 24, 2011
Republican presidential hopefuls have been scrambling to figure out the right vocabulary for denouncing President Obama's decision to launch U.S. planes and ships into action against Libya's Moammar Kadafi.
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Examining torture in the Bush era
April 26, 2009
Dick Cheney is right. President Obama should release any evidence the government has that shows whether torture -- sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- induced Al Qaeda detainees to give up information that saved American lives.
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State officials pan for gold in D.C.
April 12, 2009
Last month, a flock of Californians streamed through Washington's halls of power seeking federal money for the state's slumping economy, gridlocked transportation system and troubled schools. To their delight, they found a Democratic administration with a sympathetic ear for the state's problems -- plus a big bag of stimulus funding to spend.
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Obama's bipartisan moment on foreign policy
April 5, 2009
Don't look now, but the United States is experiencing something unusual in its recent history: a moment of bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.
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Obama's uphill climb at the G-20 summit
March 29, 2009
The last time Barack Obama went to Europe, he was cheered by 200,000 rapturous Germans. This week, he faces a tougher audience.
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Geithner can still pay off for Obama
March 22, 2009
Is Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner becoming a toxic asset for the Obama administration?
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A 'back channel' appeal to Iran
March 15, 2009
President Obama and his aides are preparing to send a secret message to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, inviting him to open a clandestine "back channel" for direct talks between the United States and Iran.
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Fear and loathing in Pakistan
March 8, 2009
Late last month, the chief of Pakistan's army, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, made an unpublicized visit to the White House to meet President Obama's new national security advisor, retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones Jr.
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The power of Obama's oratory
February 25, 2009
Speechmaking has always been good for Barack Obama.
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For Obama, governing isn't campaigning
February 15, 2009
Barack Obama made running for president look easy. As a candidate, he was famously steady and cool, and his campaign team was a marvel of internal harmony. "No drama Obama," they called him.
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Obama the pragmatic idealist
February 8, 2009
Until last week, the nation's late-night comedians were having a hard time coming up with jokes about the Obama administration. The young new president came across as both idealistic and competent, which was nice for the country but a potential disaster for the satire industry.
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New president, new battlefield
February 1, 2009
In his presidential campaign, Barack Obama sometimes made foreign policy sound like a simple matter of changing the tone, turning the page -- and moving 10,000 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
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Great expectations -- by Americans and by Obama
January 21, 2009
Barack Obama has been criticized for being too cool, too aloof, even too serene. But the President Obama who delivered the inaugural address on Tuesday was anything but aloof. He was passionate and pleading, somber and demanding. And he did something his predecessor, George W. Bush, never quite did: He asked Americans to sacrifice for the common good.
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What Bush leaves behind
January 18, 2009
After eight unreflective years, George W. Bush has suddenly turned contemplative, arguing in a flurry of exit interviews that his record (as Mark Twain said of Wagner's music) is better than it sounds. He could turn out to be right -- but his standing in the eyes of history now depends, oddly enough, on the fortunes of his successor, Barack Obama.
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