Re “Obama Summons Team From 2008 for Races in Fall” (front page, Jan. 24):

Some recommendations to President Obama about the midterms:

Read less about “Team of Rivals” and Abraham Lincoln, and more about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, whose common touches with “forgotten Americans” gave both of them the popularity and ability to act decisively.

Look straight at the television cameras — that is, at the American people.

Unite the country, as both Roosevelt and Reagan did, on the issue all of us Americans agree on: economic growth and jobs. Reagan didn’t try to advance the divisive social agenda of his “base,” but instead common national goals.

Cultivate a common touch. It is not the more remote Democrats (like Walter F. Mondale, Michael S. Dukakis, John Kerry and Al Gore) who win, but populists like Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

And it is leaders with the common touch, who celebrate America’s common civic and religious heritage, and focus like Roosevelt and Reagan on economic growth and jobs, who will win elections and successfully establish the agenda for the nation.

President Obama was elected to focus on jobs and the economy, and it is still early enough before the midterm elections — if they can get all this right, the common touch, above all — for the president and the Democrats to re-establish their initiative and momentum.

James Adler
Cambridge, Mass.

Meanwhile, the long-term solution to fighting terrorism requires eliminating the excuses to hate the United States. Military actions only multiply motives to loathe America, and make the terrorism problem worse.

Does anyone seriously believe the recent attempt to take down a U.S. commercial airliner would have taken place if, on assuming office, the newly inaugurated President Obama had withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan, shut down Guantánamo Bay, and stopped all partisan involvement in Middle Eastern politics and conflicts?

Isn’t it obvious that military disengagement would make for the most effective long-term improvement in American security? Terrorists are not trying to bomb Swedish airliners. This advice is as old as George Washington’s Farewell Address.

Details of final-status terms and how to get there vary among liberals and conservatives, but the general embrace remains. Hopefully this will help Israel in everything from the gut-wrenching decisions about Gilad Schalit to upholding the rule of law.

JAMES ADLER

Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Nobel Peace Prize only underscores the irony and sadness of President Obama’s Afghanistan policy. On that memorable night a year ago, in Grant Park in Chicago, before an impressed and stunned nation and world, Mr. Obama promised that change would come to America.

We looked forward to change where we could become more disengaged from, and impartial about, the world’s conflicts, since we are not the world’s policeman. Where anti-American extremism and terrorism could begin their gradual decline and eventual disappearance because the swamp would be drained of motivation for them.

But to our disappointment we find the recycled and failed policies of Lyndon B. Johnson, George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

All we can do now is hold out hope that change will come to Mr. Obama himself, that he will reinvent us as a nation newly disengaged from conflict, where hatred against America can become virtually extinct, where we can at last make our peace with the world.

James Adler
Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 11, 2009

Sir, – Thanks for supporting rule of law in Israel and America in your editorial “Crossing the lines” (November 18). Israel is too vulnerable for military refusenik activity on either Left or Right.

Civilian civil disobedience (like Dr. Martin Luther King’s) is sometimes laudable, but never in precarious Israel’s – or any democracy’s – military. Suppose southern states’ National Guardsmen had refused US president John F. Kennedy’s federalization of the Guard to enforce civil rights laws? That would have been disastrous.

But I doubt if “the excesses on the Right were precipitated by bad behavior on the Left.” At best, it seems a chicken-egg question. Rightist extremism led to Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 mass slaughter of Mosque worshipers, Ya’acov Teitel’s attacks on Israel Prize-winner Ze’ev Sternhell and a Messianic Jewish family, and Yigal Amir’s assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The Post deserves congratulations. Social stability, nonviolence and the rule of law should be something about which conservative and liberal Jews can all agree, just as we are all outraged by Palestinian terror.

JAMES ADLER

Cambridge, MA

To the Editor:

Re “Surgical Strikes Shape Afghanistan Debate” (news article, Oct. 6):

My family has not gone to bed feeling as safe as we now do in this country in the eight years since 9/11, and President Obama has already made the country a safer place than President George W. Bush did after fighting two bloody and costly wars.

Let these wars not become President Obama’s. Then this new presidency, with its promise of bold change, will have been all for nothing, and probably without a remotely similar potential for a safe America in a peaceable world for decades.

We won’t indefinitely continue to feel safer, and be seen even more and more as a friend of the world’s Islamic street, unless the president continues to stay the course and sound even more loud and clear rapprochement.

James Adler
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 6, 2009