In 2009, the sea-change brought on by Barack Obama in the White House was only part of the story. The world economy underwent a partial meltdown as 2008 came to a close, and 2009 began with a surplus of despair. A man who had campaigned on Hope and Change ran into economic reality....

Fresh from its victory in the mid-term elections of 2006, the Democratic Party actually started acting like an opposition rather than a demoralized faction of collaborators. Indeed, they began voting on resolutions and holding debates over policy in Iraq....

By the first half of 2006, both the war in Iraq and the poor performance of the administration after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana brought into sharp focus the fact that the Bush administration simply didn\"t know how to govern. Mr....

Drawn from the Kensington Review, this volume covers the latter half of 2005, when the City of New Orleans drowned....

By early 2005, it was clear that the Bush administration had found itself stuck in a war it did not anticipate in Mesopotamia, fighting against an insurgency it did not understand, and unable to turn itself around and march out....

This volume contains essays drawn from The Kensington Review, covering the second half of 2003. During this period, the occupation of Iraq demonstrated not only the lack of planning on the part of the Bush administration but also its general incompetence in administration in general....

The second half of 2012 saw the re-election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, defeating Willard Mitt Romney. This was the last chance for the Republican Party to undo national healthcare in the US, a major social reform. In addition, Mexico elected Enrique Pena Nieto of the PRI as its president....

By the second half of 2011, the “Arab Spring” had moved into a particularly violent phase. In Libya, the long reign of Muammar Khadafy came to an end as this own people finally killed him. Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad resorted to ever-escalating force to retain his throne of bayonets. The optimism of the early days had, by now, passed....

The key event of early 2011 was the Arab Spring Like all revolutions, despair sparked hope which sparked actions which eventually went beyond the control of anyone. It is many decades too early to determine their impact....

The year 2010 proved pivotal in American politics. It began with the president signing the Affordable Care Act, giving Americans universal (or so it was claimed) access to health insurance – something proposed first by Teddy Roosevelt a century earlier....

The nomination of Barack Obama for president was the main story in early 2008. Going into the race, Hilary Clinton was the front-runner, but she had hurt herself by voting in favor of the Iraq war. Mr Obama won with organization and strategy. By contrast, the Clinton campaign relied on money and star-power....

By July 2007, the White House had clearly begun to believe its own propaganda. Mr. Bush offered an update suggesting the situation in Iraq was improving, but the same day, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council said things were vastly worse; intelligence sources announced that Al Qaeda\"s strength had hit a post-2001 high....

In the second half of 2004, George W. Bush won re-election over John Kerry, the Beslan terror siege in Russia proved beyond all doubt that the very idea of the modern nation state was under attack while Mr....

By the beginning of 2004, it was clear that the hoped-for cakewalk in Iraq was anything but that. The Bush administration had run up record deficits, and at the same time, it was becoming clear that the Democrats vying for the White House were having trouble making their criticisms on either international or domestic policy stick....

In the first half of 2012, Willard Mitt Romney secured the Republican nomination for the presidency. The fight was largely a foregone conclusion because Mr. Romney had the money and organization and because the hard right was divided among a few candidates....