Word: roosevelt
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There is a moment in every White House tenure when you can practically see the President walk away from everyone he's known, everyone he's been, because he now has thoughts and fears and hopes that no one else can fathom. Franklin Roosevelt faced a collapsing economy. Harry Truman had to decide whether to drop the atom bomb. John F. Kennedy found himself invading Cuba. I wonder when Obama's moment came, as he splashed into office through a sea of red ink, ended his first year with a national-security nightmare and in between set out to pass...
...lesson of the past year is that mistakes made on Wall Street can have real bad side effects on the rest of the economy," says Robert Johnson, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a former chief economist of the Senate Banking Committee. "And that's adequate grounds to put in restraints before we have to have the next bailout." (See award-winning pictures of the fallout from the financial crisis...
...Johnson, of the Roosevelt Institute, says the single most important reform would be to force unregulated financial products, such as credit-default swaps (CDSs) and collateralized-debt obligations (CDOs), onto government-watched public exchanges. CDS contracts are widely blamed for the demise of insurer AIG. Johnson says that making the CDS, CDO and other markets like them more transparent would limit the ability of financial executives to take the extreme risks that can cause their firms to fail when markets go awry...
Well, Barack Hussein Obama sure passed the Teddy Roosevelt test in the first year of his presidency. We don't know yet if the results will be triumph or failure, but he has dared greatly at a moment of multiple crises for the U.S. Even his critics must acknowledge that. He has not sidled up to the issues facing the country but has confronted them directly - pumping billions into an economy in free fall, putting 50,000 more troops in Afghanistan, pushing toward a universal system of health insurance, beginning the fight against climate change, reactivating government regulatory agencies, transforming...
Across the aisle, in Teddy Roosevelt's Republican Party, courage - and comity - was hibernating. But Senator Lindsey Graham's intelligence and independence have won him Teddys in the past, and he was never more deserving than this year, when he faced down his home-state party on climate change and the need for civility in politics. He also showed creativity in his efforts to come up with a legal code for terrorist detainees, and personal courage by spending his annual three-week Air National Guard stint in Afghanistan, studying the prison at Bagram. Usually, journalists don't qualify for Teddy...