So Much for Bush's 'Ownership Society' | Newsweek Business

POINT OF VIEW
How Big Government Never Left
Sunder Katwala 11/15/2008 12:00:00 AM
Rolling back the state has been the dominant idea in western political debate for 30 years. The "big idea" of the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher revolution was that less state equals more freedom. But in the midst of the financial crisis, it now seems that big government is back—and that citizens are glad to have it. The most telling finding from the election-night exit polls is that for the first time since pollsters began asking the question in 1994, a majority of Americans believe that government should do more to solve problems, not less.
HOW HE DID IT 2008
Obama’s Third Way
Fareed Zakaria 11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama has won more than a presidential victory. He has gained a chance to realign the national landscape and to create a new governing ideology for the West. Since the end of the cold war, two great political trends have coursed through the Western democracies. The first —led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the early 1990s—was the left's steady progress toward greater comfort with free markets and traditional values, in order to appeal to mainstream voters. The second was the ideological decline of conservatism, a movement now riddled with contradictions and corruption, as personified by George W. Bush's big-government, Wilsonian agenda. These two trends have intersected in 2008.
POINT OF VIEW
What If McCain Wins?
Denis MacShane 11/1/2008 12:00:00 AM
If John McCain becomes the next U.S. president, it will send europe into a fit of despair not seen on the old continent in decades. After all, Barack Obama is Europe's candidate, so much so that French President Nicolas Sarkozy—so happy to spend a vacation day with George W. Bush—turned Obama's fleeting summer stopover in Paris into an orchestrated photo op, to milk maximum publicity from the Democratic candidate. In Britain, Conservative M.P.s seem to have forgotten that McCain had been the keynote foreign speaker at the Conservative Party
INTERNATIONAL
The World Hopes for Its First President
Stryker McGuire 11/1/2008 12:00:00
The world has never watched any vote, in any nation, so closely. In country after country, polls show record-high fascination with the outcome of the U.S. elections this Tuesday. In Japan, according to one poll, there's more interest in the election than there is in the United States. The Voice of America, which broadcasts in 45 languages to a worldwide audience of 134 million, is seeing "unprecedented interest." In Pakistan there was so much interest in the first presidential debate, the VOA changed its initial plans and broadcast the next two as well. Indonesians and Kenyans, are of course fascinated and somewhat astonished by the fact that Barack Obama, a man with ties to both places, should be the front runner, and in Vietnam, there is much discussion over John McCain, a man who returned home from Hanoi in 1973 a wounded man and spent the rest of his life in dedicated service to the United States.
WORLD AFFAIRS
We Need a Bank Of the World
Jeffrey E. Garten 10/25/2008 12:00:00 AM
If George W. Bush's upcoming global summit on how to fix the world's broken financial system—an event proposed by several European presidents and prime ministers—is to be a serious effort, the leaders should begin laying the groundwork for establishing a global central bank.
Obama Won’t Meet Everybody’s Expectations
Adam B. Kushner
America's allies got the candidate they overwhelmingly preferred, but that doesn't necessarily mean America's relationships with the globe will warm instantly. In fact, history is strewn with rock-star presidents whose first years were terrific disappointments for U.S. allies.