George W. Bush is yesterday, the Texas version of the arrogant world power. Obama is all about today: the “everybody really just wants to be brothers and save the world” utopia. As for us, we who sometimes admire and sometimes curse this somewhat anemic, pragmatic democracy, we will have to quickly get used to Barack Obama, the new leader of a lofty democracy that loves those big nice words —

TNR’s Gabriel Sherman suggests that the establishment media is “breaking up” with Barack Obama  — he treats them so bad! HotAir’s Allahpundit, focusing on a quote near the end from a reporter claiming, “They’re terrified of people poking around Obama’s life,” writes: After reading it, I can’t decide if the takeaway is (1) that the press is a bunch of whiny, self-entitled five-year-olds, per the comically overwrought reactions from Adam

The funniest report of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin comes from the NYT‘s Caucus blog: “Senator Barack Obama began his speech first by declaring that this was not a political speech.” Substantively, I welcomed his call for more support from Germany to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.  However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday she would make clear to Obama that there were limits to Germany’s military engagement in Afghanistan.  Merkel

Memorandum: To: The proggosphere, the Opinionated Press, New York Times, et al. Re: Attempting to claim John McCain is wrong about the counter-insurgency in Iraq At the risk of sounding rude, how dumb are you, anyway?  Starting an argument with John McCain over the timeline of the counter-insurgency in Iraq, e.g., the relationship between the Anbar tribes turning against al Qaeda and the “surge,” attempting to paint this as some

As almost always seems to happen after writing a post about taking pre-election polling with the requisite amount of salt, a poll arrives that raises a relatively undiscussed topic. In this case, some are interested in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finding that Barack Obama’s six point lead (unchanged from the same poll last month) expands to 13 points when third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Bob Barr are added

Yesterday, I noted that the current polling trends were not showing any sign yet of a significant “bounce’” from Barack Obama’s world tour.  At almost the same time (accounting for time zones) TNR’s Jonathan Chait was noticing the same tightening of the race, under the title “Maybe Pundits Need to Spend More, Not Less, Time Following the Polls,“ juxtaposing the current trend with this lede: I see that John has already beaten me