Barack Obama is a young president in a hurry. He is a man of preternatural self-confidence and soaring ambitions. That combination, tethered to a liberal worldview, is inflicting considerable damage upon his presidency. Like most presidents, Obama took office intending to bend history to his liking. This impulse, while understandable, leads to overreach. In the

President Obama remains in a fairly strong — but no longer commanding — political position. The RCP poll average of Obama's job approval rating is 56 percent. But if one carefully tracks the evolution of public sentiment since Obama assumed office, one would notice several trends — nascent but discernible — that should concern Obama

While I realize my efforts to decode Barack Obama may turn into a never-ending task, I want to focus on another of his rhetorical habits: his ceaseless attempts to portray himself as America's philosopher-king, the person standing not only above country but above politics itself. Obama is, he would have us believe, uniquely able to

Today marks the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi urban areas, the result of a deadline contained in the Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) that the Bush administration negotiated and the Obama administration embraced. It is a milestone on the road to Iraqi sovereignty and a useful moment, I think, to consider three widespread

In the course of only five months, President Obama has reached into his bag and pulled out a dazzling number of misleading rhetorical tricks. Let's begin with his much-touted claim that his Administration is responsible for having “saved or created” at least 150,000 American jobs, even though we have shed well over a million jobs

The best way to view President Obama's speech in Cairo is to understand the way Obama views himself and the rhetorical devices he employs. In this case, the key to unlocking Obama's speech may be Aristotle's golden mean, the search for a mid-point between extremes. Obama's rhetorical template is an increasingly familiar one: he gives

A lot of controversy has been generated by Judge Sonia Sotomayor's statement “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” In an effort to repair the damage, President Obama's press secretary,

There is much joy in liberal circles these days about the plight of the GOP and conservatism. Democrats now control the presidency, the House, and the Senate. President Obama's approval ratings are above 60 percent in most polls. The public is much more optimistic than it was at the end of last year. Meanwhile, the

The issue of the Bush Administration's enhanced interrogation techniques involve several inter-related questions. There is, first of all, the matter of morality. Critics of enhanced interrogation techniques have taken to saying that Americans don't torture, period — meaning in this instance that we do not engage in coercive interrogation techniques ranging from sleep deprivation to

President Obama, who over the weekend continued his overseas effort to, among other things, apologize for supposed American misdeeds from both the recent and distant past, held a press conference on Sunday. He made several statements that are, I think, worth examining. On explaining his apologies for America, President Obama said this: If we are