Columns, pieces and posts
I can’t shake a feeling of peace. As I said, we’ll get through it. No one knows what’s going to happen Tuesday and Wednesday, or what will follow a close election in the weeks and months to come. But yes, I believe our institutions will see us through, not because they are strong—they’re battered old […]
It’s exciting out there but enervating. People are spun up, nerves at a breaking point, and there’s an undercurrent. Whatever the outcome of the election, at least half the country will feel crushed. Voters feel they are faced with a bad choice, and many millions will vote against, not for. Everyone is afraid the other […]
‘Let us go forth to lead the land we love . . . knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.” Those are the last words of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. To me they mean do your very best within your area to make things better. My world has turned […]
We have been thinking about disasters, about Hurricane Helene and North Carolina, about Milton and Florida. It sent me back to the great classic on American disaster, “The Johnstown Flood” by David McCullough, published in 1968. I hadn’t remembered it contains information pertinent to the current moment. Johnstown, Pa., in the western part of the […]
For the love of God, Madam Vice President, reverse your decision and come to the Archdiocese of New York’s Al Smith dinner. There’s still time, schedules free up, and announcing you’ll speak will make you look both humble (“on second thought”) and heroic (into the lion’s den). Why would she snub the famous, ancestral, bipartisan […]
Jump ball, deadlock, coin flip, tossup. We’re running out of election metaphors. Everyone’s texting each other, every interaction turns quickly to “Whaddaya think, what’s gonna happen?” You feel an urgency but also a sincerity: They honestly don’t know. Kamala Harris holds a close lead in the nationwide polls, Donald Trump in several battlegrounds. I think […]
The race is deadlocked with six weeks to go and if you’re an undecided, unsure or wavering voter it looks like Awful vs. Empty. Kamala Harris has made quite an impression. That walk is a stride, and she has appetite—she loves this thing, running for high office. She has sentiments—she loves to say what divides […]
He lost, she won, full stop. Kamala Harris is a political athlete. And she can act—the amused, skeptical squint, the laughing tilt of the head, the hand on her chin. She was more interesting than Donald Trump, not only because she conveyed a greater air of dynamism but because she seemed interested in what was […]
Next Tuesday’s presidential debate will be as important as everyone says. In a close race, a good performance by one candidate could be dispositive. More dramatically one might implode, as Joe Biden did in June. People will watch to see if it happens again. This is so far the only Trump-Harris debate scheduled, and may […]
Kamala Harris’s speech was fine, and delivered with assurance. I prefer “Ask not what your country can do for you” to “Never do anything half-assed,” but tastes vary. Too soon we were hearing phrases like “assure access to capital.” The text didn’t have the feeling of a story being told from some previously unknown inner […]