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Last fall, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel remarked, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before." That quote has become part of a rallying cry for conservatives, that those currently in power are trying to create the perception of a crisis to force things through the legislative process that couldn't be done otherwise. That has been dismissed by those on the left as fear-mongering and the party in power is acting in good faith based on what their constituents want. But on...

In the rose garden last Friday, Barack Obama, with a deep sense of humility and in the name of all mankind, reluctantly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize committee's decision proclaiming him president of planet Earth. He will be sworn in at a glittering ceremony in Oslo in December. In the meantime, Obama has decided to retain the title and the powers of president of the United States, commander in chief of land, sea, and air forces, and team captain of pickup games behind the South Portico. OK, I'm joking. Obama isn't going to be sworn in as planetary president. But...

Another installment from the It's Not Just Me Dept. If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He's a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked "done." This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to...

How do the party leadership and the president square this circle? They can't entirely, but they can go a long way toward doing so by using the so-called "reconciliation" procedure in the Senate, a budget-related mechanism that would allow the Democrats to pass much, though not all, of Obama's shifting wish list with a mere 50-vote simple majority. With that as the operative target, Senate leaders could move considerably leftward, while allowing butt-covering Senate Blue Dogs to shout "no" in the crowded theater. The leadership couldn't get the "public option," but they could sweeten the pot with generously-defined expansions of...

The Obama White House may see political advantage in exposing the 'Birthers.' But they shouldn't discount the dangerous sentiment of the radical rejectionists. In politics, dogs that don't bark make the loudest noise. I was reminded of that on Monday at the White House as I listened to Robert Gibbs, the presidential press secretary. Even discounting for his ever-present mordant calm, Gibbs was noticeably laid back when asked about the blogospherical hysteria over the question of whether President Obama is a U.S. citizen. More in sorrow than in anger, he lamented the need to discuss the topic—and then went on...

Obama delivers lackluster health care message President spends an hour recycling old patches of rhetoricAnalysis By Howard Fineman msnbc.com contributor updated 4 minutes ago Howard Fineman WASHINGTON - I’ve been covering Barack Obama for a few years, and it’s usually crystal clear what he is up to. Not last night. This is the first time I’ve asked myself: what was THAT all about? His prime time press conference was worse than a waste of time. He spent an hour (with the aide of a soporific White House press corps) pouring sand (one grain at a time) into the already-slowing gears...

Dick Cheney hadn't planned to speak, but others at the dinner in Manhattan noticed him growing a grimmer shade of grim. He was listening to Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official in Cheney's own Bush administration, wax eloquent about the virtue of diplomacy: how a new joint effort with France, Britain, Germany and even Russia and China could prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and terrorizing the Persian Gulf region and the world. In other words, President Barack Obama's position. The host asked if the former vice president wished to respond. Yes indeedy, he did. Cheney rose to his...

Surfer that he is, President Obama should know a riptide when he's in one. The center usually is the safest, most productive place in politics, but perhaps not now, not in a once-in-a-century economic crisis. Swimming in the middle, he's denounced as a socialist by conservatives, criticized as a polite accommodationist by government-is-the-answer liberals, and increasingly, dismissed as being in over his head by technocrats. Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK's. But, in ways both large and small, what's left of the American establishment is taking his...

Surfer that he is, President Obama should know a riptide when he's in one. The center usually is the safest, most productive place in politics, but perhaps not now, not in a once-in-a-century economic crisis. Swimming in the middle, he's denounced as a socialist by conservatives, criticized as a polite accommodationist by government-is-the-answer liberals, and increasingly, dismissed as being in over his head by technocrats. Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK's.But, in ways both large and small, what's left of the American establishment is taking his measure...

Corruption to the left of him. Corruption to the right of him. Corruption right in front of him. Yet in spite of all this, Howard Fineman of Newsweek maintains that Barack Obama has been somehow hermetically sealed off from Chicago corruption throughout his political career. Fineman is merely echoing the premise currently being promoted by much of the media in his Newsweek article about Illinois governor Rod Blagovech and Jesse Jackson, Jr.. Fineman starts out by hinting that Jesse Jackson, Jr. was corruptible (emphasis mine): What I know about the South Side of Chicago I know not from Barack Obama,...

Here’s all you need to know about Sen. Barack Obama and his campaign. He taped the video portion of his half-hour TV special, which airs across your dial at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight, last week. Now, a week is a year and a year is a lifetime in presidential campaigns. But it is characteristic of Obama to plan ahead in the heat of the battle. The cool, collected senator has known from the start (nearly two years ago) pretty much what he has wanted to say. He kept his eyes_on_the prize. The small stuff didn’t distract him. That is why...

At the zenith of his presidency, George W. Bush wore a flight suit— but now he's leaving his successor in a straitjacket. As the presidential candidates tout their plans for the future, it's easy to overlook the dismal reality: there's a colossal mismatch between the problems we face and the next president's power to deal with them. Either Barack Obama or John McCain will have to lead a country crippled by debt—and that was before the $700 billion federal bailout of private lenders—and burdened by an array of practically inescapable military commitments. "It's close to an impossible situation," Leon Panetta,...

Sen. Obama, You're No Muhammad Ali Newsweek Howard Fineman In his Senate office, on a wall near his desk, Barack Obama has a framed copy of a famous boxing picture. It is of young Muhammad Ali standing in triumph over the prostrate hulk of the aging Sonny Liston. Ali has just leveled the supposedly fearsome champ. Ali is shouting, exulting in his conquest. Well, I know Ali a bit--have shaken his mammoth hand, chatted with him and been around him in my second hometown of Louisville. I watched him fight. He liked to say that he floated like a butterfly...

A Gift from Jesse Reverend Jackson's slam helps Obama's centrist cred.

I'll never forget a frigid morning in Springfield: Sen. Barack Obama, elegantly Lincolnesque in a long wool coat, launching his presidential candidacy in the shadow of the old Illinois State Capitol. The echoes of history were almost deafening—not just of Abraham Lincoln, who, like Obama, had been a legislator there, but of the argument over slavery and race that Lincoln had joined there. On that sunny February day in 2007, Obama seemed to radiate uplift and glorious possibility. He was making a statement: that his candidacy would be the exclamation point at the end of our four-century-long argument over the...

Want to see how the mainstream media views Fox News? Look no further than Newsweek's Howard Fineman and the way he thinks the Bush administration uses the network. Fineman, who is Newsweek magazine's senior Washington correspondent and a regular on MSNBC, told an audience at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. on May 1 that if you want to know what the Bush administration has in store for Iran, keep your eye on Fox News. "Now about Iran," Fineman said. "I think there's no doubt they're [the Bush administration] looking to see what can be done there and...

Senator Obama, you stand accused of being an out-of-touch, arugula-eating Ivy League elitist who couldn't convert a one-pin spare if the presidency depended on it. I don't have a dog in this fight (despite what Hillary Clinton supporters sometimes think of me) but here are my suggestions for how to reach, and be seen reaching, the "the real America" as you continue to grind toward the Democratic nomination. Obviously, you've got to talk in more meat-and-potatoes terms about how your economic proposals will help working people. But that's only part of what you need to do: TELL US IN CONCRETE...

The essence of Howard Fineman's Newsweek column about the demise of Mitt Romney's campaign is the glorification of authenticity, and Mitt's perceived lack of it. Ironic, then, that Fineman would resort to one of the oldest, and least authentic, journalistic dodges: suggest the worst about someone, then slyly slink away. To wit [emphasis added]: [M]aybe the campaign revealed what his closest friends never imagined him to be. They thought he was a decent classy guy. But maybe he really is a soulless throat-cutter who would do and say anything to win.

Here lieth the campaign of Mitt Romney, victim of the mistaken belief that the only way to succeed in national Republican politics was to turn yourself into something you are not. Or maybe the campaign revealed what his closest friends never imaged him to be. They thought he was a decent classy guy. But maybe he really is a soulless throat-cutter who would do and say anything to win. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was a good fellow who didn't know enough about national politics and listened to people who gave him bad,...

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WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is teetering on the brink, no matter what the meaningless national horserace numbers say. The notion that she has a post-Iowa “firewall” in New Hampshire is a fantasy, and she is in danger of losing all four early contests, including Nevada and South Carolina – probably to Sen. Barack Obama, who is now, in momentum terms, the Democratic frontrunner. On the Republican side, meanwhile, the race is shaping up in an even more unexpected way: a contest between two former Northern moderates (Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney) for the right to take on a...

How far can Mike Huckabee take this thing? That's the question after the debate here. Rudy Giuliani and John McCain insiders tell me they'd be glad if the former Arkansas governor won the Iowa caucuses, because that would humiliate Mitt Romney, who has invested so much time and money there. Well, after the debate and a chat with Huckabee, here's my advice to the mayor and the senator: be careful what you wish for. In a breakout performance, Huckabee matched his surge in the Iowa polls, and elsewhere, with a confident, easygoing performance at the CNN YouTube debate. He shrewdly...

The GOP hustled the Idaho senator off the stage as soon as news of his arrest in a Minneapolis airport men’s room came to light. But Craig isn’t going gently. The fallout could help the Dems win the White House next year.

WASHINGTON - Though I’ve never heard him use the term, my guess is that George W. Bush sees himself as a hacendado, an estate owner in Old Mexico. That would give him a sense of Southwestern noblesse, duty-bound not just to work “his” people, but to protect them as well. His advisor, Carlo Rove, has explained that a system called “democracy” now gives peasants something called “the vote.” It would be shrewd, Rove said, for hacendados to grant their workers’ citizenship.

As an ongoing political enterprise—a machine with genuine admirers, loyal supporters and a legacy to build on—the Bush presidency is perilously close to flatlining. At this point in their tenures, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had job-approval ratings in the mid-50 percent range; in the most recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Bush's hit an all-time low of 28. Established GOP figures in Blue States shun him, even when he comes to raise money in closed-press events. The invites aren't piling up from Red States, either. Since Bush never cultivated real allies in Congress, no one there feels guilty that he has none...

When she hits the presidential campaign trail next year, 2008 White House hopeful Hillary Clinton is planning to sell herself to the nation as a common sense, iron-willed, family values candidate. So says Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who says he uncovered the daring strategy during a recent conversation with longtime Clinton advisor James Carville. He writes: "As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton looks for a basic sales pitch after what is likely to be a sweeping reelection victory in her New York Senate race this fall, she’s going to play a part that comes naturally to her: hard-eyed realist in a world...

If you want to get ratings with the action drama that is the American presidency, you need a compelling plot and a hero with a stirring image. Since 9/11, George W. Bush has topped the charts with GWOT (bureaucratese for the “global war on terror’), in which producer-director Karl Rove features his leading man as commander-in-chief on the global battlements. It's a mix of Ike at Normandy, Ronald Reagan in Berlin and Tom Cruise in “Top Gun.” But ratings for “Bush, the War President” have collapsed (something to do with the loss of blood and treasure in Iraq). And Americans...

But those who say he'll fold may not know the man, his history—or what he is really up to. Decades of jousting with the New York press have left him with a hide of titanium. Without much national notice, he's worked the rubber-chicken circuit, making 140 appearances in the last two years. He's been smoking cigars with Ahnold in California, and is slated to do fund-raisers for him, as well as the big GOP Senate dinner in Washington this spring. A few weeks ago in Florida, he did the drop-by of all drop-bys as the "surprise guest" at the annual...

WASHINGTON - Forget the black hat. Everybody here is obsessed with Jack Abramoff’s gangster-like attire as he came out of the federal courthouse. But the thing that jumps out at me is the figure $20,194,000. If I read the fed’s plea-agreement papers correctly, that’s the amount of cold cash that the Republican lobbyist siphoned from Indian tribes and stashed in his secret accounts. You may not believe this, but in this city, that is an unheard of amount of money for a lobbyist to haul in — and the number itself signifies a troubling change in the nature of life...

by Mark Finkelstein January 2, 2006 - 07:48 Much as the folks at Today revel in reporting soaring gas prices and, when it comes to President Bush, falling opinion polls, sometimes those pesky facts get in the way. But that was not about to stop Katie Couric this morning. The Perky One, tan and blonder-than-ever in her return from vacation, spun Bush's recent poll bump solely and exclusively as the result of his mea culpas. Katie's guest was reliable all-purpose talking head Howard Fineman. Couric: "His poll numbers started to tick upward before the holidays, Howard because it was sort...

Democrats are struggling to reconcile the differences between party leaders in D.C. and independent activists on the Net If I am hearing Simon Rosenberg right (and he is worth listening to), a nasty civil war is brewing within the Democratic Party, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton—the party’s presumptive 2008 nominee—needs to avoid getting caught in the middle of it. “It’s not a fight between liberals and conservatives,” Rosenberg told me the other day. “It’s between our ‘governing class’ here and activists everywhere else.” In other words, it’s the Beltway versus the Blogosphere. What’s interesting is that Rosenberg is himself a...

For months now, I have been getting e-mails demanding that my various employers (Newsweek, NBC News and MSNBC.com) include in their poll questionnaires the issue of whether Bush should be impeached. They used to demand this on the strength of the WMD issue, on the theory that the president had “lied us into war.” Now the Bush foes will base their case on his having signed off on the NSA’s warrant-less wiretaps. He and Cheney will argue his inherent powers and will cite Supreme Court cases and the resolution that authorized him to make war on the Taliban and al-Qaida....

Dec. 21, 2005 - In the first weeks and months after 9/11, I am told by a very good source, there was a lot of wishing out loud in the White House Situation Room about expanding the National Security Agency’s ability to instantly monitor phone calls and e-mails between American callers and possible terror suspects abroad. “We talked a lot about how useful that would be,” said this source, who was “in the room” in the critical period after the attacks. Well, as the world now knows, the NSA—at the prompting of Vice President Dick Cheney and on official (secret)...

The Virginians Want to know how the campaigns ahead will unfold? Look to the Old Dominion, where two rising stars offer competing models for how to succeed with Southern voters. As young men in law school in the 1970s, neither Mark Warner nor George Allen set the legal world on fire. At Harvard, Warner founded a group called the Somerville Bar Review—that's "bar" as in drinking studies, not professional ones. "I was the only guy I knew who didn't get law-firm offers after summer internships," he says. At the University of Virginia, Allen lived in a cabin on the mountaintop...

Fineman Calls Bob Woodward 'Court Stenographer' By E&P Staff Published: December 13, 2005 10:55 AM ET NEW YORK Put reporters on the lecture circuit and they sometimes say things they might not even utter on a cable new roundtable. This may have happened Monday night at Drew University in New Jersey when Howard Fineman, Newsweek's chief political correspondent, said that the Washington Post's celebrated journalist Bob Woodward had become a "court stenographer" for the Bush administration. Fineman told a crowd of about 300 that Woodward had gone from being an outsider "burning the beltway" under President Nixon to being, "an...

A hawkish Democrat calls for an Iraq withdrawal, setting off a bitter fight in Washington over how, and when, the troops should come home. As friends describe it, Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania had been searching his soul for months, seeking guidance on what to do in Congress about Iraq. "I think he was going through what we Catholics call a 'long night of the soul'," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. (snip) Which was precisely what the Democratic leadership wanted Murtha to do. A close ally, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, was anxious to open a second axis of attack...

Nov. 7, 2005 issue - The mood in the White House last Friday afternoon was grim, but eerily quiet. Dick Cheney was gone, off in Georgia giving yet another apocalyptic terrorism speech to yet another military crowd. The president, just back from his own rally-the-troops address, was eager to chopper to Camp David for the weekend. But, in the small dining room adjoining the Oval Office, he was doing something uncharacteristic: watching live news on TV...

Newsweek magazine reporter Howard Fineman, who's been at the forefront of recent media speculation that top White House official Karl Rove would be indicted, has pronounced Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's decision to indict only Cheney aide Lewis Libby "a victory" for the Bush White House. "Given the expectations that have evolved around here in the last week or so, if it turns out that this phase of the grand jury ends with only Scooter Libby being indicted," Fineman told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough last night, "that will be seen as almost be seen as a backwards kind of victory here." Scarborough...

President George W. Bush may have no military exit strategy for Iraq, but the “neocons” who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own—a political one: Blame the Administration. Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues. The flight of the neocons—just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about —is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.

Who's Cracking Up? Liberals everywhere are convinced that their hour is at hand. The latest voice of left-wing triumphalism is Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who announced "The Conservative Crack-up" today: The “movement” – that began 50 years ago with the founding of Bill Buckley’s National Review; that had its coming of age in the Reagan Years; that reached its zenith with Bush’s victory in 2000 — is falling apart at the seams. Fineman's theory is that one by one, the "constituent parts" of the conservative coalition are "going their own way," which is to say, turning their backs on the Bush...

The flight of the neo-cons--just read the recent Weekly Standard-- is one of the many indication that the long predicted 'conservative crackup' is at hand. In 1973, Karl Rove met George W. Bush, and became the R2D2 and Luke Skywalker of Republican politics. At first, neither was plugged into 'The Force'--the conservative movement.But over the years they learned how to use its power. By the time Bush was in his second term as governor, laying the groundwork for his presidential run, he and Rove had gathered all of the competing and sometimes contradictory strains of conservatism into one light beam....

Liberals everywhere are convinced that their hour is at hand. The latest voice of left-wing triumphalism is Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who announced "The Conservative Crack-up" today: The “movement” – that began 50 years ago with the founding of Bill Buckley’s National Review; that had its coming of age in the Reagan Years; that reached its zenith with Bush’s victory in 2000 — is falling apart at the seams. Fineman's theory is that one by one, the "constituent parts" of the conservative coalition are "going their own way," which is to say, turning their backs on the Bush administration. He goes...

<p>Delay's Public Denials on Knowledge of Handling of Campaign Cash 'May Have Some Holes In It'</p> <p>NEW YORK, Oct. 2 -- Last week DeLay proclaimed his innocence of the charge leveled against him: that he had funneled streams of laundered corporate cash into legislative races in Texas. When it came time to discuss precisely what would happen next, discipline broke down. Members demanded full-scale elections sooner rather than later for a new permanent leadership, and if DeLay doesn't escape his legal problem by January -- hardly a certainty -- that vote will occur and he won't be in the race report Chief Political Correspondent Howard Fineman and Contributing Editor Eleanor Clift in the October 10 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, October 3).</p>

Dems Are Dead Men Walking Written by Evan Sayet Sunday, October 02, 2005   Howard Fineman has an editorial in the current issue of Newsweek entitled "Demoralized Dems." While Fineman is to be praised for recognizing the reality that the Democrats know themselves to be in big trouble (after all, these are the same folks who brought you as "news" the impossibility of a square peg--the Koran--being flushed down a tiny round hole) he undermines his points by tippy-toeing around the realities.             What follows is my letter to Fineman. Howard: The Democrats are demoralized because they recognize the party is...

With George W. Bush’s presidency mired in the muck of hurricanes and doubts about the war, you’d think Democrats would be bursting with energy, eagerly expecting to regain power. But, in a roomful of well-connected Democrats the other night, I was struck by how gloomy they were. They can’t stand Bush, but didn’t have much faith in their own party’s prospects.

Sept. 14, 2005 - If I am hearing Simon Rosenberg right (and he is worth listening to), a nasty civil war is brewing within the Democratic Party, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton—the party’s presumptive 2008 nominee—needs to avoid getting caught in the middle of it. “It’s not a fight between liberals and conservatives,” Rosenberg told me the other day. “It’s between our ‘governing class’ here and activists everywhere else.” In other words, it’s the Beltway versus the Blogosphere. What’s interesting is that Rosenberg is himself a Beltway creature, a preternaturally self-assured young insider with a cherubic face and a cold...

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Howard Fineman Newsweek Updated: 6:48 p.m. ET July 20, 2005 July 20 - George W. Bush keeps surprising the wise guys. They keep thinking that he’s going to be something other than what he is and that he will do something other than what he says he will do. Well, he and Karl Rove built his career on West Texas Bible Belt conservatism, with deep ancestral ties to the Establishment “up East.” And it was that president—half Cambridge, all “Come to Jesus”—who chose John G. Roberts Jr. for the U.S. Supreme Court. In the words of the...

Ever loyal, President Bush is rewarding conservatives with his choice of John Roberts—a man that liberals will have difficulty blocking. George W. Bush keeps surprising the wise guys. They keep thinking that he’s going to be something other than what he is and that he will do something other than what he says he will do. Well, he and Karl Rove built his career on West Texas Bible Belt conservatism, with deep ancestral ties to the Establishment “up East.” And it was that president—half Cambridge, all “Come to Jesus”—who chose John G. Roberts Jr. for the U.S. Supreme Court. In...

George W. Bush keeps surprising the wise guys. They keep thinking that he’s going to be something other than what he is and that he will do something other than what he says he will do. Well, he and Karl Rove built his career on West Texas Bible Belt conservatism, with deep ancestral ties to the Establishment “up East.” And it was that president—half Cambridge, all “Come to Jesus”—who chose John G. Roberts Jr. for the U.S. Supreme Court In the words of the old Texas cliché, President Bush is the kind of leader, and person, who “dances with the...

George W. Bush keeps surprising the wise guys. They keep thinking that he’s going to be something other than what he is, and that he will do something other than what he says he will do. Well, he and Karl Rove built his career on West Texas Bible Belt conservatism, with deep ancestral ties to the Establishment “up East.” And it was that president — half Cambridge, all “Come to Jesus” — who chose John G. Roberts Jr. for the U.S. Supreme Court. In the words of the old Texas cliché, President Bush is the kind of leader, and person,...