president obama

In two books on Afghanistan, Anand Gopal and Carlotta Gall each point to the absurdity of America's longest war.

President Obama is furious that legislators lack the will to address gun violence. But there are steps he could take without them.

In a forceful speech, President Obama laid out in a few words the best argument for the deal with Iran: there is "no plausible alternative."

Perhaps the real lack of faith in modern society comes down to a lack of reverence for the people around us.

It’s easy to imagine health-care reform that does more than the ACA. It's almost impossible to see it getting enacted, as Steven Brill's book reminds us.

This past Saturday, President Obama spoke in Selma, Alabama, marking the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday"—the assault by Alabama state troopers on marchers from Selma to Montgomery for equal voting rights for African Americans.

His speech is remarkable for many reasons, but one of the things I find really remarkable is that it ranks as a singular example of presidential exceptionalist rhetoric.

Obama's budget includes more money to detain undocumented children. At the largest family detention center, the average child is age six.

U.S. churches have long sought better relations with Christians in Cuba. The political thaw will make this much easier.

The United States is back at war—that didn’t take very long. One might argue we never really stopped fighting, or, frankly, that the country has been in a perpetual state of war since World War II. Religious as well as the more generic popular responses to America’s various wars often boils down to a tension between revulsion and obligation. Not surprisingly, that dualism relates directly to the simple formula presidents have used over the years (and through every war) to justify military actions in strategic and moral terms. The threats change—fascism, communism, terrorism—as do the locations, but the moral rationale rarely does.

Many aspects of governing exist outside the president's control, via rhetoric or anything else.

In 2008, both enthusiasts and enemies of a new New Deal misjudged Obama. They also misjudged the circumstances he faced.