17 Results

Despite Republicans maintaining the line that Obama is fiscally irresponsible, figures reveal his government is more conservative with government spending than Ronald Reagan’s, writes Andrew Sullivan.

Like Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama is regarded as a great communicator. But to what extent do political speeches make a real difference in terms of passing policy and gathering public support? asks Robert de Neufville.

Obama is now a foreign policy president, a war president. Having knocked the wannabee Republicans out of the park, he is now aiming to take out Gaddafi, at which point, in the American imagery, he will join seamlessly with Reagan.

The Republican Party has launched so far to the hard right that none of the modern Republican presidents — not Reagan nor Nixon nor Dubya — would be able to be elected today.

Barack Obama is well known as a “reader” — but he’s hardly the first US President to bury his nose in a book: Nixon loved Tolstoy, Reagen studied the ideas of Milton Friedman, and Clinton liked the “cheap thrill” of a mystery novel.

From President Truman’s summer wardrobe — mainly Hawaiian shirts and pastel shorts — to Reagan surrounded by 80s supermodels and LBJ singing to his dogs, take an inside peek inside the secret world of US presidents.

Though neoconservatives came to most people’s attention during the Dubya era, their imperial purple was undoubtedly the Reagan years. The death of Irving Kristol rules a line across one era of the American intellectual right.

Goldman Sachs’ over-the-top profit results highlights the hypocrisy haunting Wall St, writes the venerable Paul Krugman.

Obama has been quite generous in his praise of Ronald Reagan of late, while Republicans have suddenly begun reassessing whether Reagan is the best role-model to follow as they seek a path back to power.

How could Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of generally excellent columns in The New York Times, get it so wrong? asks Robert Scheer.

The more you look at it, the more it’s clear that Ronald Reagan is to blame for the global financial crisis.

President Obama continues to be the biggest drawcard in US apart from the Super Bowl. He’s certainly a bigger drawcard than Fox TV’s American Idol, writes Glenn Dyer.

With no strong third party this time, a simple ‘doing of the math’ tells you that if Obama beats McCain by anything more than a few points, he will get over half the vote, writes Peter Brent.

A Crikey expose with George Clooney

On Sunday, Senator Bill Heffernan called for random testing of politicians for illegal drugs. Heffernan claimed that the tests would send a message “that we are fair dinkum serious about stamping out drug use”.