Salon

The Administration is coming up to that magical 100-day mark, at which point measures are taken of how a new president is doing. As a university professor I'm accustomed to giving grades. So here's my report card on Obamanomics so far:

Two presidents for the price of one? That was the joke when Bill and Hillary Clinton made their respective presidential bids. In the case of Barack Obama's victorious quest for the presidency, the joke became reality. There are two Obamas. One is the foreign policy president whom America needs at this moment in history. The other is a domestic policy president who has yet to find his way.

Is America a Christian nation, as many conservatives claim it is? One American doesn't think so. In his press conference on April 6 in Turkey, President Obama explained: "One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

If the debate over the global economic crisis seems confusing, it's because the debate is confusing. Proponents of different cures can't even agree on the diagnosis of the disease.

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital,

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12, 1809. President Barack Obama will celebrate it by speaking at a banquet in Lincoln's adopted hometown of Springfield, Ill. Obama has consciously and consistently sought to identify himself with his fellow Illinois politician, by launching his campaign in Springfield and taking a train, like Lincoln, to his inauguration.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, he sought a truce in the Cold War, a breathing spell that would provide time for reformers to engage in "perestroika," or "restructuring," of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the Bush administration's hyperactive militarism and manic overextension, the U.S. needs a similar breathing spell in foreign policy that will permit concentration on rebuilding, not just reviving, the U.S. economy and its social contract. The Soviet Union

On January 11, 1944, in his annual State of the Union Address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for an economic bill of rights. The rise of totalitarianism, he said, had taught the lesson that "necessitous men are not free men" because the miserable and the desperate "are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made." According to Roosevelt, "In our days these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of

The inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, along with the deepening of the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, marks more than a shift in the pendulum swings of partisan politics. In these pages I have suggested that it marks the dawn of a Fourth American Republic, in the way that the New Deal marked the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's Third Republic of the United States and the Civil War and Reconstruction began Lincoln's Second… more

Michael Lind is director of the American Infrastructure Initiative at the New America Foundation.  

There are worrying signs that what may end up being a stimulus package of a trillion dollars or more is being turned into an ordinary piece of legislation, with its content to be determined by politics, special interests and ideology.