Michiko Kakutani

Former President Bill Clinton is making headlines again, this time touting his liberal prescriptions to fix the economy. Those remedies are laid out his new book Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy. The news media is doing their part to promote Clinton's work and his economic legacy, portraying him as the economic savior of America.

This should come as no surprise, since Clinton is still beloved by liberal journalists. New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani called Clinton's book "a lucid one-man rebuttal of the Tea Party's anti-government agenda." Kakutani also summarized Clinton's plan, saying "Mr. Clinton serves up a succinct common-sense argument, why both spending cuts and increased tax revenues are necessary for addressing the debt problem."

New York Times lead book critic (and avowed political liberal) Michiko Kakutani does the expected demolition job on Sarah Palin's new memoir, "Going Rogue." But in her rush to bash Palin as having an image of "an easily caricatured ignoramus" (a caricature in itself), Kakutani unwittingly made an anti-Obama argument.

"Going Rogue," the title of Sarah Palin's erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family. In fact, the most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the press, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet -- someone who could command a reported $5 million for writing this book.

New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani may have sent heads spinning on Tuesday with a book review of Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Age of the Unthinkable. In summarizing Ramo’s thesis, Kakutani constructs this strangely amoral universe:

Today’s world, he suggests, requires resilient pragmatists who, like the most talented Silicon Valley venture capitalists on the one hand or the survival-minded leadership of Hezbollah on the other, possess both an intuitive ability to see problems in a larger context and a willingness to rejigger their organizations continually to grapple with ever-shifting challenges and circumstances.

Ramo, a former Time reporter, is declared "astute" by Kakutani for realizing the disastrous rigidity of Bush’s war on Iraq:

In the run-up to Barack Obama's inauguration, the New York Times has run several articles praising the President-elect's "eloquence," the most visible being Monday's front-page story by the paper's lead book critic (and prominent Bush-basher) Michiko Kakutani, "From Books, New President Found Voice," who praised Obama for...reading:

In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, "that people had begun to listen to my opinions." Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power "to transform": "with the right words everything could change -- South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world."

Much has been made of Mr. Obama's eloquence -- his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

After dedicating nearly 10,000 words over two months to promoting feminist author Susan Faludi's bizarre screed "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America," the New York Times finally ran into some opposition: its own book reviewer.

Clay Waters described the paper's September 27 interview with the author here. It was one of five articles the paper dedicated to the book, which argues that the reaction to the 9/11 attacks amounted to little more than an attack on feminism.

Today, the paper's book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, cuts right to the chase: "This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name."

Keep in mind, the review totaled little more than 1,000 words. That leaves the Times dedicating about 9,000 words to sloppy reasoning on a very important subject. But, given the paper has great influence over how history is written, this dissent -- the shortest of the five pieces on the book, including an October 22 reprint of the whole first chapter -- should be noted, especially because Kakutani's effective shredding of Faludi's theory stands in such contrast to the four, earlier puff pieces.