A Tale of Two Fine Roosevelts | Newsweek Politics

HOW HE DID IT 2008
The Age of Obama
Jon Meacham 11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
He was, once, the consummate outsider. The first time Barack Obama saw the White House was a quarter century ago, in 1984, when he was working as a community organizer based at the Harlem campus of the City College of New York. President Reagan was proposing reductions in student aid. The young Obama, just out of Columbia, got together with student leaders—"most of them black, Puerto Rican, or of Eastern European descent, almost all of them the first in their families to attend college"—to take petitions protesting the cuts to the New York delegation on Capitol Hill. Afterward, Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope," the group wandered down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument and then to the White House, where they stood outside the gates, looking in.
THE REPUBLICANS
Palin's 2012 Playbook
Karen Breslau 11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
When conservative leaders gather in Virginia on Thursday to assess the fallout from the presidential election and start planning their comeback, they will also be taking a closer look at their new potential standard-bearer, Sarah Palin. Most national conservatives have never met the Alaska governor selected as John McCain's running mate on Aug. 29. Says longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie. "She doesn't know us and we don't know her."
CAMPAIGN 2008
It’s Not Easy Bein’ Blue
Jon Meacham 10/18/2008 12:00:00 AM
It was a grand evening. On Thursday, Dec. 5, 1985, at the Plaza Hotel, William F. Buckley Jr. rose to toast the president of the United States on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of National Review. Charlton Heston was the master of ceremonies; the audience included William J. Casey, Nancy Kissinger, Roy Cohn and Tom Selleck. Thirteen months earlier Ronald Reagan had been re-elected, carrying every state in the Union except Walter Mondale's Minnesota. "As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels," Buckley said to the president. "As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you." Buckley was 19 when America dropped the bomb at Hiroshima, he said, and he had just turned 60. "During the interval I have lived a free man in a free and sovereign country, and this only because we have husbanded a nuclear deterrent, and made clear our disposition to use it if necessary. I pray that my son, when he is 60, and your son, when he is 60 … will live in a world from which the great ugliness that has scarred our century has passed. Enjoying their freedoms, they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong."
CAPITAL SOURCES
Gender on the Trail
Pat Wingert 9/15/2008 12:00:00 AM
Republican nominee John McCain's poll numbers have soared and his crowd sizes have surged since he announced he was adding Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to his ticket. But Geraldine Ferraro, the nation's first female candidate for vice president, says all the post-convention hoopla over Palin sounds very familiar. NEWSWEEK's Pat Wingert, who covered Ferraro for a Chicago newspaper when the New York congresswoman made her historic run in 1984, spoke with Ferraro late Friday. Excerpts:
POLITICS
A Penchant For the Politics Of the Poke
Jonathan Darman 8/30/2008 12:00:00 AM
In 1986, a young Arizona Congressman committed an act of great presumption: he announced his candidacy for the Senate. At 49 years old, John McCain had been a member of Congress for less than four years, a resident of his state for less than six and an active member of the Republican Party for less than 10. And yet what made McCain's gambit truly audacious was the senator whose shoes he believed he could fill: Barry Goldwater, a man whose name was not only the greatest in Arizona politics, but the most hallowed in modern conservatism. Any Republican seeking Goldwater's seat in the Senate couldn't help but think of himself as a steward of the great revolutionary tradition of the American conservative movement.
POLITICS
Hope vs. Fear
Jonathan Alter
With the exception of such all-Anglos as Monroe, Fillmore, Pierce and Coolidge, none of America's 43 presidents has ever borne a name that ends in a vowel. We traditionally like 'em not just white and male, but plain vanilla. President Barack Hussein Obama would pose a shock to that system.