One year ago, Barack Obama was elected captain of the Titanic — er, I mean, president of the United States.

By one estimate at least, Barack Obama has had the most successful first year of any president in recent history. According to Congressional Quarterly, Obama scored a 96.7 percent success rate in getting his agenda through Congress. Only Lyndon Johnson came close, with 93 percent in his first year. Although Republican opposition to the president was cohesive and frequently strident, the president was able to take advantage of sizable Democratic majorities in Congress — as well as the arm-twisting of Rahm “Art of the Possible” Emanuel — to push through measures to stabilize the economy and extend health care coverage. The president didn’t just rely on Congress. As Politifact points out, Obama fulfilled a large number of campaign promises through executive order.

Without sufficient street-heat, according to the new conventional wisdom, President Obama is not going to implement progressive policies. His health care package reeks of insurance company influence. His bailouts favor Wall Street. Climate-change legislation rewards polluters through the shell game of “cap-and-trade.” Without strong social movements pulling Obama to the left, the new administration’s reforms resemble the pale liberalism of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, rather than the robust and transformative domestic change promoted by Lyndon Johnson and FDR.

Hillary Clinton is a commie symp.

That’s a familiar line from the rabid right, which hasn’t yet gotten the news that the Cold War is over. Google the secretary of state’s name and “communist,” and you’ll get over a million links, some of them to neo-Nazi websites. Folks say the craziest things on the Internet. I just didn’t expect The Washington Post to make the same argument.

Richard Nixon was the greatest peacemaker in U.S. history. He orchestrated the historic opening with Beijing. And he presided over the most significant arms control treaties of the détente period: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the ABM treaty.

Back in 2003, when Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) put together the collection of essays Power Trip on the emerging foreign policy of the Bush administration, our big debate was over continuity versus change. Was the aggressive unilateralism of George W. Bush and his cohort a wholly new creation? Or was it simply business as usual for the most powerful country in the world?