Barack Obama

David Bromwich writes: Compare what Barack Obama said in Jerusalem on March 21 with what he said in Cairo on June 4, 2009 and you find many similarities. Both were greetings by a recently-elected American president to a people who had come to doubt the worth of such a communication. In both cities, the improbable [...]

Glenn Greenwald writes: When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his pledges of openness and transparency were not ancillary to his campaign but central to it. He repeatedly denounced the Bush administration as “one of the most secretive administrations in our nation’s history”, saying that “it is no coincidence” that such a secrecy-obsessed presidency [...]

On September 11, when President Obama authorized a series of drone strikes over U.S. soil, only this much was clear: four passenger aircraft had been hijacked and were being piloted by the hijackers. After the aircraft had each been shot down within the space of 30 minutes and 246 casualties been identified, President Obama said [...]

David Bromwich writes: It looks as if Barack Obama is about to withdraw the idea of nominating Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. To stick with Hagel against substantial (though at the beginning, surmountable) resistance would mean declaring one of his own apparent commitments to be unshakable. The pattern of Obama’s career and character, however, [...]

Shadi Hamid writes: One of the great mysteries of the past four years is how Barack Obama — who rose to the presidency, in part, on his promises to fundamentally re-think and re-orient U.S. policy in the Middle East — has instead spent his term running away from the region. It is difficult to remember [...]

Ali Abunimah writes: As soon as news came of a bomb attack that killed Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on 18 July, US President Barack Obama condemned it in the most strident terms – even though, then, as now, the perpetrator and his motive remain unknown. Obama’s statement left no room for ambiguity: I strongly condemn [...]

Haaretz reports: U.S. President Barack Obama told a delegation of the U.S. Orthodox Jewish community at the White House on Tuesday that his administration is decidedly more attentive to Israel than it is to the Palestinians. Obama was speaking at a meeting between White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew and leaders of the Orthodox [...]

First the headline. If I propose to explain why President Obama finds it easy to kill people, don’t I first need to substantiate the assertion that he does indeed find it easy to kill people? The New York Times provides the evidence and a direct quote: William M Daley, Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, [...]

The Financial Times‘ Anna Fifield has lunch with Cornell West: West says he lost faith in Obama when the president brought people with close ties to Wall Street and the financial crisis into his administration. West names the president’s former economic adviser Larry Summers, his current Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, and his budget chief, now [...]

Conor Friedersdorf points out that, contrary to the reporting of the New York Times, President Obama does not straddle “the precarious line between hawk and dove” — he’s a hawk. Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars. He committed American forces to [...]

Vanity Fair shares some of the revelations from Barack Obama’s youthful love life. Nothing here that would interest National Inquirer, but this caught my attention from the recollections of Alex McNear, a young woman from Occidental College, California, who had enchanted the 20-year-old Obama: Obama was obsessed with the concept of choice, she said. Did [...]