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It was a beautiful moment when Barack Obama, with his election, drew the left and right together in one powerful conviction: that he was a raging lefty. It didn’t last long, of course. For the right, every day now brings exhilarating proof of his secret socialist mission; for the left, each day brings more disillusion: Afghanistan; Guantánamo; rendition; no prosecution of Bush officials; immigration; Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; a health-care law that, okay, might be the most ambitious social legislation in 45 years, but didn’t create a single-payer system and was heralded by a truckling executive order on abortion. Promises broken, promises deferred—and also promises inferred. How could he not be a lefty, given that he makes such poetic speeches, given that (and here’s another assumption shared with the far right, an uglier one) he’s black? Yet deep down, of course, the purists always suspected him, and are as titillated as Tea Partiers to remain in righteous opposition. To what? A wintry pragmatism joined to a novel (for our time) seriousness about applying government to make life better in a nation that, sure, might be willing, even eager, to elect an Indonesian-educated black Hawaiian with an unsettling name, but that finds the full agenda of the unforgiving left, like that of the unhinged right, a bit of a stretch.
| 14 3/4. Reefer Sanity by Joshua Green |
7. Information Wants to Be Paid For by Walter Isaacson |
| 14. It’s Too Easy
Being Green by Kai Ryssdal |
6. The Kids Aren’t All Right by David Leonhardt |
| 13. Teachers Are Fair Game by David Brooks |
5. Bonfire of the Knuckleheads by Jeffrey Goldberg |
| 12. The Rise of the Drones by Martha Raddatz |
4. The Power of No by Michael Kinsley |
| 11. Obama Is No
Liberal by James Bennet |
3. Boredom is
Extinct by Walter Kirn |
| 10. The Triumph of
Free Speech by Jeffrey Rosen |
America Is No. 2 by James Fallows |
| 9. The Catholic Church Is Finished by Ross Douthat |
1. The End of Men by Hanna Rosin |
| 8. Deficits Matter by Megan McArdle |
PLUS: More Ideas of the Year From TARP to sleeping with Tiger Woods |
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Browse back issues of The Atlantic that have appeared on the Web. From September 1995 to the present, the archive is essentially complete, with the exception of a few articles, the online rights to which are held exclusively by the authors.
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