We’re Still Puzzled

Kwame Anthony Appiah

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The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House
by Edward Klein
Regnery, 277 pp., $27.95

The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era
by Michael Grunwald
Simon and Schuster, 518 pp., $28.00

You know the joke. A psychiatrist shows a patient a series of inkblots. Each time, the patient sees an erotic episode. “You seem to be preoccupied with sex,” the psychiatrist concludes. The patient protests: “You’re the one with all those dirty pictures.” Ask people to read the inkblots of American political life and that result, too, is likely to tell you more about them than it does about what is really going on.

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