It will come as no surprise to anybody reading this blog that I’m deeply fascinated by American politics. So of course I skipped all the dreary British politics in today’s Times and jumped directly to an article about what’s facing Obama in the next 100 days. Author Paul Kennedy is a British history professor at Yale, who’s spent the last 25 years in the US. Another article took an anthropological view of the footage from the inauguration day – very entertaining! Did you notice, for instance, that Michelle Obama took her shoes off at one point?
Later on I read an article in the online edition of the New Yorker about Caroline Kennedy and why she has withdrawn her candidacy to the senate (where she had made a bid for her uncle Ted Kennedy’s seat only a few weeks earlier). If you wan’t an exact reason, don’t hold your breath… The article gives fantastic insight into American politics at a level below what we usually hear about. And it gives insight into the only royalty America has – the Kennedys. For more of that, read the excellent article in Vanity Fair’s November issue about Jacqueline Kennedys intellectual “flirt” with France’s then minister of culture, André Malraux, over Mona Lisa.
