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Five Silver Linings slate v Dear Prudence: Hermit Husband sports nut Curriculum Vitale Advanced Search Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET sports nut Rasheed Wallace Is a Toaster supreme court dispatches altered states Everything Vibrates Change You Can't Click On technology After one big change, Obama makes a few smaller changes to his Web site. Seven More Things You Need for Your Computer By Peter Bray Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 11:31 AM ET technology You Are Now Friends With Barack Obama Now that the election is over, it's time to break some campaign television promises! Because of the Web's constant hunger for new Trivial Pursuits information, President-elect Barack Obama is in a uniquely the book club difficult spot. He's issued and revised so many white papers and Outliers policy proposals that if he so much as sneezes the wrong way, he risks reversing something published on his campaign Web site. the green lantern Wood, I Wouldn't His transition site, change.gov, isn't helping matters. the spectator Over the weekend, all of the policy pages on the site were The Good Life of a New-Media Guru removed. Their caterpillar-short life certainly suggests that change is coming. Fortunately for Obama, most people don't today's business press take ephemera published on the Web as seriously as, say, "Read Bush Declares Capitalism Accomplished! my lips" statements caught on tape. So it's perhaps not surprising today's papers that the changes attracted widespread notice but not very much The New Workout Plan controversy. Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/82 There are a few smaller but puzzling changes. Like this: Obama defeat the moneyed interests, and, less happily, remove the still believes in community service, apparently, but not enough Cherokees from their ancestral lands. to require students to do it. Nor is he much interested in your "vision" for America if you are not American. For a while, he In a very different spirit, Karl Rove has compared George Bush was seeking comments from folks in other countries on what he to Andrew Jackson: a man of the people who believed in should do as president. Now there's no field for your country— providence and opposed big government. In American Lion, his the form assumes you're American. "President of the world"? new biography of the seventh president, Jon Meacham, the Maybe not. editor of Newsweek, dutifully wrings his hands at all the right places—at Jackson the slaveholder, Jackson the killer, Jackson Finally, Obama's astonishing gain of more than 700,000 new the hothead—but adds his voice to the admiring chorus. Jackson Facebook friends in 10 days has got to be a record. (During the was "a great general and a transformative president," he same period, McCain lost 1,000 friends.) Maybe Obama could concludes, a leader "genuinely committed to the ideal of be president of Facebook, if not the world. democracy," who was "strong and shrewd, patriotic and manipulative, clear-eyed and determined." He was the president who, of all the early presidents, "is in many ways the most like us." architecture There certainly are parallels to be drawn between the incumbent and Jackson, an imperious man who stretched the power of the Renzo Piano's California Adventure presidency, flouted international law, ignored the Supreme Part II: San Francisco. Court, filled government positions with partisan supporters, By Witold Rybczynski relied on an elaborate campaign apparatus, and espoused small Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 6:56 AM ET government while proceeding to expand its size. But that is only to say that Jackson was modern less by virtue of his principles than in his willingness to bend them when it suited his purposes. If he is a model for our times, it is not a very heroic one. Nor Click here to read a slide-show essay on Renzo Piano's was Jackson in fact the decisively formative force in his own era California Academy of Sciences building. Click here to read that the hagiography suggests. As David Reynolds, who teaches Part I, in which Witold Rybczynski reviewed Piano's recent at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. demonstrates in his astute and concise history of the period, Waking Giant, the times defined Jackson as much as he defined . the times. If anything, Jackson belonged to the past, not the future. Barely in his teens, he fought in the Revolutionary War, and he held . dearly to dreams of land and community at a moment when capitalism and individualism felt liberating. He was the first president born (in 1767) in a log cabin, the first not from Massachusetts or Virginia, the first not to attend college. He was an orphan. He made something of himself, and the American books people loved that, but he was also a Mason at a time when an anti-Masonic movement suspicious of the secretive society Downsizing Andrew Jackson gathered support across the nation. He also lived in the Southern Why the warrior president is no hero for our polarized times. world of honor, rooted in loyalty to kin relations and vigilance in By Louis P. Masur defending the virtue of women: It was a world crumbling around Monday, November 10, 2008, at 7:07 AM ET him. Jackson, the president whom people proclaimed as one of their own, was very much up to date in one regard: He liked his Andrew Jackson, the warrior president who simultaneously comforts and introduced a novelty to the White House enjoyed denounced big government and expanded executive power, has only by aristocrats and guests at swank hotels—running water. been riding high recently, a bipartisan hero in polarized times. Historian Sean Wilentz and others, following lines first laid Jackson's election in 1828 did not single-handedly usher in a down in Arthur Schlesinger's classic The Age of Jackson (1945), democratic revolution; as Reynolds points out, he benefitted have heralded Jackson for his assault on privilege and from an expansion in voting rights for white males that occurred aristocracy. In this telling, Jackson served as a powerful during Monroe's presidency. Suffrage expansion came for executive who used the authority of his office to save the Union, different reasons in different places: competition between Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/82 Federalists and Republicans before the Democrats existed, even admirers like Meacham acknowledge. Jackson's economic interests, even the need for bodies to serve in local presidential combat—pressing for passage of the Indian militias. Many new voters in 1828 flocked to Jackson, mobilized Removal Act (1830), having his Cabinet resign over an affair of by a new political style and culture. But it wasn't because of him honor (1831), and destroying the Bank of the United States that they were able to vote. (1832)—hardly makes him worthy of our admiration. Assessing Jackson's character in 1860, James Parton, one of his first Nor was his party the catalyst of a national transformation; what biographers, said he was "a democratic autocrat. An urbane is arguably more notable is how little the Democratic Party savage. An atrocious saint." figured in the seismic shifts under way. It is telling that for all but two terms between 1828 and 1860, the Democrats controlled Jackson's career should caution us about the fallacy of drawing the presidency, but the Whigs shaped the overall direction of simplistic lessons from the past.