Americans seem mesmerized by the emerging list of potential cabinet members being interviewed for jobs. Brilliant! Assertive! "The Genius Cabinet" gushes Slate writer Jacob Weisberg. Larry Summers? Wow! Joel Klein? Whew!

Calm down, folks. What's wanted in anyone's cabinet is not brilliance but judgment. Not genius but...

Here is the irony of this endless Presidential campaign, and the reason why Senator Obama is likely to win with an electoral landside: the election has been pitched to the world as a transformative moment in which the old, conservative, white establishment is finally overtaken by the new multicultural, post-racial...

Economic remedies for the fiscal crisis continue to frustrate their political backers. On that black Monday when the U.S. Congress refused to pass the 700 billion dollar bailout, the market plummeted 477 points. A few days later, after Congress reversed itself and passed the 700 billion dollar bailout, the market...

QUESTION: What's the difference between capitalism and socialism according to Henry Paulson?

ANSWER: Socialism is when big government steals from the banks to bail out the people; capitalism is when big government steals from the people to bail out the banks.

At the bottom of the over-leveraged credit tower (where...

I participated last Monday night in the BBC "Economist Debates" on the economic meltdown broadcast from the heart of the City, London's financial district. Nearly all of the CEOs, financial consultants and bankers on our over sized debate panel echoed the media coverage, treating the crisis as a technical problem,...

It seems forever since the Democrats completed their triumphant Convention in Denver with its Obama/Biden/Clinton/Kennedy unity ticket and its intoxicating sense of take-it-to-the-finish line momentum. What happened? Not Sarah Palin. How could a small-time Alaska mayor and first term Governor derail the Obama freight train? No it was not Sarah...

Hey kids! Time to be thinking about summer camp! Tired of sailboats and archery? Drama camp too much like school? Weight loss camp too depressing? I have just the ticket for you and your anxious parents!

Worried your kid can't get into sports camp? Listen to Becky Ross of Louisville,...

I have just returned from two weeks in Europe and Istanbul, where, as is apparent to all American travelers, the world is watching the US elections with fervent hope, if also some trepidation. A possible Obama presidency is seen everywhere as a potentially transformational moment for American leadership in the...

The presidential candidates in the endless primary go on about leadership and unity and change and experience, but meanwhile in Congress its politics as usual. i.e., bipartisan pandering to special interests.

That's right, here comes the Farm Bill -- a whopping $300 billion plus dollars, passed over President Bush's...

If you've been watching the John Adams chronicles on HBO, you know that the birth of the young American Republic was accompanied by enough controversy, bitterness, infighting and rage to sink the project before it ever got off the ground. If it hadn't been for the fact that democracy, rough...

Senators Obama and Clinton are competing in the Senator Edwards sweepstakes to prove who can be more hostile to free trade and critical of NAFTA - although neither has been notably critical in the past. Obama says he is going to bring jobs back to Wisconsin; Clinton is making protectionist...

Like most of us, I have been impressed and energized by the way in which the Obama "movement" has inspired young people, independents and the skeptical, drawing back into politics many who seemed weary of their citizenship. In a country where only a bare majority vote in Presidential elections (far...

I like Hillary. And I like Obama. If they don't drive each other's supporters into angry corners of resentment and fatally divide the Party, either one will have a pretty good chance to prevail in the fall. But that requires that voters remember the election is neither about Bill Clinton...

In the 1960s, when the peace movement called for reductions in arms spending, otherwise 'neutral' economists would say "you can't cut back on armaments without destroying the domestic economy!" As President Eisenhower had said in his farewell address, we had become dependent for our prosperity on the arms race and...

It took me almost a week to gather my thoughts - have you gathered yours?

Looking back, it feels like we survived two media coronations and are back to an election contest worthy of our democracy. The pollsters lost, the voters won. The pundits looked stupid, citizens looked smart. In...

Like many Democrats (I suspect), I am "decided" only in that I have decided I will support any Democrat nominated. Otherwise, I am undecided and unwilling to jump on any bandwagon in an election crucial to America's future. Here then are key questions I would pose to each of the...

The intelligence bombshell that came with the revised estimate of Iran's nuclear weapons program - oops, sorry, they seem to have given it up in 2003, so maybe World War III is not around the corner after all! - is another nail in a lying President's career coffin. But it...

On this blue Monday following Black Friday, can anyone remember Thursday? Thanksgiving, once America's holiday of gratitude and family solidarity, has become the staging area for Christmas shopping. It is no longer just the day after Thanksgiving -- Black Friday (as in "in the black, or profitable") -- that is...

John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, the authors of the ever controversial Israeli Lobby, continue to insist that the U.S. government is in the pocket of the American Jewish lobby. No, they are not anti-Semites. But yes, they are wrong - not because the Israeli lobby isn't powerful, but because Middle...

Pick your poison -- and it's not just Ahmadinejad at Columbia University! Faculty at Stanford say the Hoover Institute has no business inviting former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld as a visitor.

The Board of Regents of the University of California rescinds a speaking invitation to former Harvard President Larry...