Like Boiling a Frog

David Runciman: The Future of Wikipedia, 28 May 2009

The Wikipedia Revolution 
by Andrew Lih.
Aurum, 252 pp., £14.99, March 2009, 978 1 84513 473 0
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... are going to have a hard time keeping up. Really they have no idea. 1993 wasn’t so long ago; Bill Clinton was president, a fact that the Columbia editors boast about having been able to include at the last moment (the last moment here meaning the weeks or months between the book’s being set and its arriving in the shops or in the hands of ...

He shoots! He scores!

David Runciman: José Mourinho, 5 January 2006

Mourinho: Anatomy of a Winner 
by Patrick Barclay.
Orion, 210 pp., £14.99, September 2005, 0 7528 7333 4
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... to call it ‘presence’, comparing Mourinho to charismatic but hardly swoon-inducing men like Bill Shankly and Brian Clough. What he has in common with Clough and Shankly is that the players appear desperate to do whatever it takes to win his approval, like schoolgirls fighting for an approving glance from their favourite teacher. Barclay turns to Desmond ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
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... joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency. ‘People can take an ounce of truth and turn it into a gallon of lies,’ she says. ‘I’m a truth-teller, and I’ve been crucified for it many times.’ Like Jesus, Streisand exists mostly as the subject of other ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: Homo Trumpiens, 3 November 2016

... and student votes, and more than $4 billion in tax cuts. All of them disparaged Hillary Clinton but avoided mentioning Trump by name. Most of the crowd was docile, happy to be served a lunch of pulled-pork sandwiches and crisps, but a vocal minority was incensed at Trump’s absence. The rally was a fundraiser – I had purchased a ticket for the ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... by Reagan’s dog-whistles about ‘welfare queens’, and then came under intensive attack by Bill Clinton, America’s ‘first black president’. An approving chorus was provided by the New Republic, once the main organ of American progressivism, as well as the National Review and the New York Times. After the collapse of communism, and the moral ...

One Grave, Two Bodies

Tom Stevenson: Pakistan’s Political Future, 23 May 2024

... during his failed return this year he would coo at audiences and ask whether they truly loved him. Bill Clinton once said that talking to Sharif on the phone you could practically hear him sweating. The Sharif brothers have kept any mutual acrimony far from public view, but there must be some. Nawaz Sharif’s daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif, who cultivates ...

What Happened to Obama?

August Kleinzahler: The Rise and Fall of Barack Obama, 18 October 2007

Dreams from My Father 
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 442 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 1 84767 091 5
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The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream 
by Barack Obama.
Canongate, 375 pp., £14.99, May 2007, 978 1 84767 035 9
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Obama: From Promise to Power 
by David Mendell.
Amistad, 406 pp., $25.95, August 2007, 978 0 06 085820 9
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... or presidential campaigns, and Obama needs all the friends he can get: he is trailing Hillary Clinton nationally by nearly 20 per cent and is 30 points behind in California. You’d think Obama would be doing better, particularly out here in California, one of the more progressive of the blue states, and where youth, good looks and fast celebrity count ...

The Cattle-Prod Election

David Runciman: The Point of the Polls, 5 June 2008

... The BBC, whose coverage of British politics looks increasingly lame, has been hopeless at Obama v. Clinton. It’s not enough any longer for a correspondent to paint some local colour about the weather or the quirks of the voting system before asking a seasoned observer from the New York Times or Washington Post to explain to a British audience what it all ...

The Great US Election Disaster

Hal Foster, 30 November 2000

... you had to acknowledge his charisma, or at least that others felt its sway. It’s the same with Clinton today: even if you loathe him for his duplicity, you have to admit his intelligence. Media puff-pieces aside (why is it that so many journalists are soft on Bush? Do they still cower before the accusation of liberal bias? Where are the liberal media? Will ...

Washed White

Michael Rogin, 10 June 1993

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America 
by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, November 1992, 9780415900140
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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 315 pp., £17.99, April 1993, 0 671 76956 1
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... poverty and while racism that undergirded the Reagan/Bush regime. Garry Wills is a partisan of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Lincoln at Gettysburg is authentic history, and also political allegory. Speaking to the present, it wishes that nationalism and war had not been the instruments of ending slavery, that words ...

Like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader

John Lloyd: Globalisation, 2 September 1999

The Lexus and the Olive Tree 
by Thomas Friedman.
HarperCollins, 394 pp., £19.99, May 1999, 0 00 257014 9
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Global Transformation 
by David Held and Anthony McGrew.
Polity, 515 pp., £59.50, March 1999, 0 7456 1498 1
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... Friedman regards himself as an integrationist safety-netter, a position he says is occupied by Bill Clinton. The argument he advances in its favour is essentially a globalisation of one of the old arguments for social democracy: I believe that you dare not be a globaliser today without being a social democrat (that is, a safety-netter), because if ...

Beyond the Ballot Box

Tim Barker: Occupy and Bernie, 8 September 2016

Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt 
by Sarah Jaffe.
Nation, 352 pp., £20, August 2016, 978 1 56858 536 9
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... Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign targeted Mitt Romney’s background in private equity, while Bill de Blasio came from behind to become the first Democratic mayor of New York in two decades running against the legacy of the three-term mayor, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Thomas Piketty’s unexpected blockbuster made talk of class conflict safe for ...

Strait is the gate

Christopher Hitchens, 21 July 1994

Watergate: The Corruption and Fall of Richard Nixon 
by Fred Emery.
Cape, 448 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 224 03694 7
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The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House 
by H.R. Haldeman.
Putnam, 698 pp., $27.50, May 1994, 0 399 13962 1
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... being said for the very first time, that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Bill Clinton’s eulogy at Nixon’s graveside was the most sickly and lenient of his performances thus far; not exempting the one in which he welcomed Italy’s fascisti back into the democratic fold on the eve of the D-Day commemoration, for all the world ...

Short Cuts

Mike Davis: Rio Grande Valley Republicans, 19 November 2020

... refused to learn the lessons of 2016. Biden’s campaign was only a tweaked version of Hillary Clinton’s failed playbook. This was illustrated most forcefully by Republican gains among Latino voters in several states. It is not particularly surprising that wealthy Cuban and Venezuelan exiles, screeching about communists on the doorstep, managed to cut ...

Was it like this for the Irish?

Gareth Peirce: The War on British Muslims, 10 April 2008

... afford to ignore. It is said that on the night before he decided to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton watched a film about the catastrophic injustice inflicted on one Irish family by the British state. Here, Lord Scarman and Lord Devlin, retired law lords, joined Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic Church in England, in educating themselves ...