The premise for these posts is here. This is the fourth entry in the series: three briefer blog posts from 2010:
— On John Yoo, George W. Bush, and the painful history of presidential overreach (with reference as well to the case of one of the Guantanamo prisoners).
— On President Obama’s enthusiastic endorsement of some truly bad-history TV.
— And, very briefly, on Obama’s inexplicable description of the history of progressivism in Supreme Court decisions.
One thing I’m somewhat startled to see going on in the 2008-2010 essays is a quandary over President Obama as a constitutional scholar and “historian-in-chief”– I think I threw up my hands on that one pretty quick.
Also, since we’re talking ’08-’10, I can feel the presence of the financial and foreclosure crises, never referred to directly in these history essays and posts, yet thanks to the Tea Party and Occupy soon to get me into the big discussion of regressiveness in Alexander Hamilton’s founding-era finance policy that I’ve been involved in, on and off, ever since.
Funny to recall now that the Hamilton fetish was already well underway in Bush-Obama economic-policy circles — Henry Paulson, the Brookings Institution, Peter Orszag, etc. — when the musical wasn’t a gleam in anyone’s eye.
(Next item in the collection: here.)
William Hogeland 