Karzai's Last Chance
Elise Jordan served as a director for communications in the National Security Council from 2008-2009. A former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, she lived and worked in Kabul, Afghanistan for most of the last year.
As he was sworn in for a second term as president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai's inaugural address sought to appease the critics-and keep nationalism alive.
Obama's Bad Trip
Richard Wolffe is Daily Beast columnist and an award-winning journalist, and senior strategist at Public Strategies. He covered the entire length of Barack Obama's presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine. His book, Renegade: The Making of a President, was published by Crown in June.
He bowed to Japan. He treaded lightly with China. And then Israel thumbed its nose at Obama's calls to freeze settlements. Richard Wolffe on why the president can't wait to come home.
Just Another Politician
Monica Crowley is a radio and television political commentator based in New York. Since 2002, she's had her own nationally syndicated radio show, The Monica Crowley Show and is a regular commentator on The John Batchelor Show. She is a panelist for The McLaughlin Group, and she blogs at MonicaMemo.
Once perceived as transformative, Obama now looks more and more like a regular politician, ensnared by petty squabbles, obsessed with politics instead of leadership, and often paralyzed by decision-making.
A Bush Goes to War
Bryan Curtis is a senior editor at The Daily Beast. His story about his grandfather’s softball career is in The Best American Sports Writing of 2009.
The Bush family's fourth-generation standard-bearer, Jeb's son George P., talks exclusively with The Daily Beast about his new deployment overseas-and plots his political future in Texas.
Iran-Contra's Scary Sequel
Art Levine, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, has written for Mother Jones, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate.com, Salon.com, and numerous other publications. He also blogs regularly on labor, health, and other reform issues for In These Times and Huffington Post.
Conservatives are mounting an attack against Obama over his support for the deposed Honduran president. Leading the charge: ex-Iran-Contra operatives and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
Why We Must Stay
Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the co-author of Grand New Party.
America is in danger of abandoning Afghanistan for the second time in 20 years. Reihan Salam on the real reasons we belong there on why that would be a grave mistake.
Obama's George Bush Problem
As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono. McKinnon is co-chair of Arts & Labs, a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers.
Obama ran for president on a pledge to change the tone in Washington. The right's reaction to the Olympic setback proves he's failed-just like Bush before him.
What Dubya Can Teach Obama
Nicolle Wallace served as a senior adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign from May to November 2008. She served President George W. Bush as an assistant to the president and director of communications for the White House, as well as communications director for President Bush's 2004 campaign.
The president's sagging poll numbers aren't his real problem, says The Daily Beast's Nicolle Wallace. It's that his White House is out of touch, just as the Bush team was sometimes.
Arnold's Debt to Eunice
Joe Mathews is a journalist, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and a contributing writer at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as Justice Department reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as a city desk reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver might be known for her famous relatives-and founding the Special Olympics-but it was her political savvy that got Arnold Schwarzenegger into the California governor's office.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's Chief Investigative Reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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