In response to Michelle Cottle’s complaint about Barack Obama’s devotion to golf, Paul Krugman quotes H. L. Mencken’s comment about former Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith: “The Al of today is no longer a politician of the first chop. His association with the rich has apparently wobbled and changed him. He has become a golf player…”
WASHINGTON--It's now official: So in vogue are attacks on President Obama that even his proclamation calling the nation to a day of Thanksgiving has become the focus of criticism.
Presidential Thanksgiving messages are a routine bit of executive prose that most attentive citizens happily ignore in this moment of national gratitude. But the sky-is-falling mood that now pervades Obama commentary couldn't let this 435-word document pass without a few sniffs of disapproval.
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City
By Anthony Flint
(Random House, 256 pp., $27)
For urbanists and others, the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was the great titanic struggle of the twentieth century. Like the bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, their conflict has magnified significance, as the two figures have become symbols. Jacobs is the secular saint of street life, representing a humane approach to urban planning grounded in the messy interactions of the neighborhood. Moses is the icon of infrastructure established by power, the physical reconstruction of cities with great bridges and wide expressways and tall apartment buildings. The actual projects that fueled their acrimony may now be curiosities of urban history, but the ideological conflict embodied by Jacobs and Moses continues to rage in every growing city in the world. The growth of Shanghai may be described as Moses on steroids, whereas the land-use restrictions in Mumbai honor a central element of Jacobs’s legacy.
When the discussion turns to John Edwards, the cable news pundits call him “angry” and a “class warrior.” But, in conceding his third-place showing, Edwards was more the “happy warrior” (as Franklin D. Roosevelt described Al Smith in 1924). Far from packing it in, Edwards delivered the latest, best version of his stump speech--an upbeat populist message that, if he’d delivered it several months earlier, might have appealed to a wider swath of the electorate.
At first glance, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy--the millionaire Caucasian war hero for whom Iworked for eleven golden years--seems notably different from themost interesting candidate for next year's nomination, Senator Barack Obama. But when does a difference make a difference? Different times, issues, and electors make any meaningful comparison unlikely. But the parallels in their candidacies are striking.
