The Smithian

Mary Ann Vecchio [is]…the girl in the haunting photo—crying, kneeling over the student’s body. That was Kent State University, May 4, 1970, a few days after Richard Nixon, who’d campaigned for president on an implicit promise to end the war, widened it by invading Cambodia…At Kent State, where two days earlier the ROTC building was burned down, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd and killed four unarmed students, the closest of whom was nearly a football field away

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Ryan’s nomination represents…the completion of a fifty year struggle. Starting in the early 1960s, conservative activists set out to seize control of the Republican Party. At the time the party was firmly in the hands of establishmentarians who had made their peace with the New Deal, but the activists regarded the…development of the modern regulatory and welfare states as…bound to lead to…societal collapse…the conservatives slowly advanced—nominating Goldwater, retreating under Nixon, nominating Reagan, retreating as Reagan sought to govern, and on and on through Gingrich, Bush and his successors…Ryan’s nomination represents a moment when the conservative movement ceased to control the politicians from behind the scenes and openly assumed the mantle of power…

more at NYM.

Barack Obama achieved more significant change in domestic policy during the first two years of his presidency than any president since Richard Nixon has over the course of four or eight. That’s because in 2010 Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We don’t know how this story will end, but there’s now a law on the books that, for all its many shortcomings and unpopularity, will extend health coverage to most of this country’s uninsured…

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