Obama's "American Promise" - Goldberg / Beinart Debate October 21, 2008

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2008/10/02/Peter_Beinart_and_Jonah_Goldberg_in_Political_Debate

New Republic Editor-at-Large Peter Beinart gives his take on Barack Obama's "vision" for the United States, and discusses its relation to American liberalism as a whole. This excerpt is taken from a debate on the 2008 Presidential election, featuring the New Republic's Peter Beinart and the National Review's Jonah Goldberg.

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Jonah Goldberg of the National Review debates journalist and editor-at-large for The New Republic Peter Beinart in a clash of leading political experts.

The debate format frames the two as proxies for the McCain and Obama campaigns. Watch and decide.

Peter Beinart is an editor-at-large for the The New Republic. He is a 1993 graduate of Yale University. Beinart won a Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at Oxford University and received a master's in international relations in 1995. He has been the editor of The New Republic since 1999.

He has been a vocal supporter of the war with Iraq, often chastising liberals and Democrats for failing, in his eyes, to adequately recognize the threat from Islamic fundamentalism and develop an alternative response to conservative and Republican policies. At the same time, however, Beinart has been critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war and its aftermath.For the December 13, 2004 edition of The New Republic, Beinart wrote an article entitled "A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism," in which he compared the situtation facing liberals and Democrats to that faced by their counterparts in the early years of the Cold War. He argued that liberals should advocate a tough-minded foreign policy like that embraced by Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, including increased federal spending on military personnel and foreign aid.

Beinart's first book, entitled The Good Fight : Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, will appear for sale on June 1, 2006. He wrote the book, expanding on "A Fighting Faith," while serving as a guest fellow at The Brookings Institution.