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Why Not Eat an Eclair?

David Runciman: Why Vote?, 9 October 2008

Free Riding 
by Richard Tuck.
Harvard, 223 pp., £22.95, June 2008, 978 0 674 02834 0
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... Why would anyone vote for Barack Obama? Not why would anyone want to see Obama elected president rather than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton for that matter), but why would anyone who desired that outcome think that his or her individual vote could make the slightest difference in helping to bring it about? General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no one’s vote is ever going to be missed ...

I love grass

Christian Lorentzen: ‘Bewilderment’, 21 October 2021

Bewilderment 
by Richard Powers.
Heinemann, 278 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 78515 263 4
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... funding for manned space exploration away from Mars back to the Moon (already a trend under Obama) and initiating a Space Force of dubious utility. The one area where they gutted Nasa’s efforts was in the investigation of climate change, which Powers and his characters would certainly protest against. A development he ignores is the private pursuit of ...

The Vision Thing

Eyal Press: Paul Krugman, 19 June 2008

The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America from the Right 
by Paul Krugman.
Allen Lane, 296 pp., £20, March 2008, 978 1 84614 107 2
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... the Great Depression had faded, leaving capitalists less interested in placating their workers). Barack Obama has promised to bring in universal health insurance, and Krugman identifies this as the priority for any Democratic president. But neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton has proposed the solution that every other ...

Short Cuts

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: RBG’s Big Mistake, 8 October 2020

... the ‘advice and consent of the Senate’. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the seat, but the Senate declined to exercise its power of advice and consent. The nomination should be made, they argued, by whoever won the presidential election later that year. Republican members of the Senate ...

The World’s Most Important Spectator

David Bromwich: Obama’s World, 3 July 2014

... The first year​ and a half of Barack Obama’s second term has been preternaturally unlucky. The stymied enrolments for his healthcare plan, the multiple errors of computer co-ordination that forced people to wait days or weeks in front of blank screens, marred the new faith in government the plan had been intended to affirm ...

Diary

David Bromwich: Putin to the Rescue, 26 September 2013

... insurgency in Syria was given an intoxicating vision of triumph by the words President Obama spoke in August 2011 that were translated, correctly, into the headline ‘Assad must go.’ He had earlier conveyed similar messages: ‘Mubarak must go’ and ‘Gaddafi must go.’ Obama may have entertained the idea ...

Warthog Dynamism

David Bromwich, 19 November 2020

... his attorney general to indict Hillary Clinton for the erased emails on her private server, and Barack Obama for spying on him.The alliance between the Democratic Party and the liberal media has become a fact of the political culture so well understood as to short-circuit embarrassment. It now forms an exact counterpart of the alliance between Fox News ...

Responses to the War in Gaza

LRB Contributors, 29 January 2009

... by Olmert as an open secret. To judge by the nomination of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Obama wants to be seen as someone who intends no major change of course. In a televised interview on 11 January, he said he would deal with Israel and Palestine in the manner of the Clinton and Bush administrations. The unhappy message of his recent utterances ...

House-Cleaning

David Bromwich: I met a Republican, 7 March 2019

... Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the nuclear danger was real. (The other half was the fact that Iran was ‘the world’s leading sponsor of terror’ – a misleading Israeli contribution to American ...

Really Good at Killing

Thomas Nagel: The Ethics of Drones, 3 March 2016

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President and the Rise of the Drone 
by Scott Shane.
Bantam, 416 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 8041 4029 4
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... thousands of miles away. Who could ask for more? In Objective Troy, Scott Shane explains why Barack Obama, when he became president, favoured drone warfare as his chief anti-terrorism tactic over the conventional wars of his predecessor: The number of al-Qaida plotters whose aim was to attack Americans was in the hundreds. Yet several hundred ...

Israel’s Lies

Henry Siegman, 29 January 2009

... Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition. If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave them to work out their ...

Closely Observed Trains on a Sea Coast in Bohemia

Christopher Tayler: Rushdie’s Latest, 16 November 2017

The Golden House 
by Salman Rushdie.
Cape, 370 pp., £18.99, September 2017, 978 1 78733 015 3
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... where he seems to have majored in film studies. When the novel opens, in January 2009, with Barack Obama and ‘his exceptional wife’ about to enter the White House, he is in his mid-twenties and in search of a subject for a screenplay he plans to write. René’s subject presents itself on the opening page. In the course of ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: Deepfakery, 5 December 2019

... of the same person. Was it that they accompanied their announcement with real-seeming video of Barack Obama, as president, appearing to speak words he’d actually spoken decades earlier? Or that the work was funded by Google, Facebook, Samsung and Intel? This year another set of scientists devised software, part-funded by Adobe, that allowed them to ...

Melinda and Sandy

Andrew O’Hagan: Oprah, 4 November 2010

Oprah: A Biography 
by Kitty Kelley.
Crown, 544 pp., £19.50, April 2010, 978 0 307 39486 6
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... in America, a billionaire, a hero to tens of millions of people, maybe the prime example, before Obama was Obama, of what strides a black person might have made since Civil Rights. A thousand tiny deceits could flutter around Oprah, or escape like a colony of bats from some subterranean cave, but they would not alter her ...

Like Ordering Pizza

Thomas Meaney: Before Kabul, 9 September 2021

... mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures.President Barack Obama, 15 October 2015When [Afghans] leave, they break the social contract. This is an existential choice. Countries do not survive with their best attempting to flee. So I have no sympathy.President Ashraf Ghani, 31 March 2016He reads books on the ...

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