Columns, pieces and posts
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 […]
Kamala Harris just won her third week in a row of the first three weeks of the hundred-day campaign. She kept everyone in the political class wondering who her vice-presidential nominee would be, made a surprising choice, and unveiled him at a Philadelphia rally that was boffo. Now the runup to the convention, which has […]
Those who think about politics and history as a profession can’t resist comparing presidential years. “This is 1968 all over again.” “We’re back to the dynamics of ’72.” We do this because we know political history and love it, and because there are always parallels and lessons to be learned. But it should be said […]
To the president’s speech explaining his decision to step aside: I wanted to be moved and informed and wound up impatient. It was a speech that carried a high degree of difficulty. A president of the United States with six months to go can’t declare to the world, “I’d love to stay longer but let’s […]
I will make something clear before sharing some honest, perhaps startling thoughts. I did not support either of the major party presidential candidates in 2016 and wrote about it here. I could not endorse either in 2020, and explained why here. I fully expect my third consecutive write-in this November, for the same reasons as […]
Oh no, not again. I got that feeling you get of chaos and horror and no one in charge. That terrible, cratering feeling you’ve had before. I was watching it live, on television, as I readied to go to dinner. Donald Trump was in a red MAGA hat, talking about the border. I turned away […]
Everything is about to change. It won’t stay stuck. We don’t know exactly how the change will come but it will come, because what we have now can’t continue. Joe Biden can’t sustain a demanding campaign and is incapable of functioning for 4½ more years as the American president. We all know this. Only three […]
We are living big history. We do that so often we don’t always notice. But a proud president is hunkered down in the White House, and his party is frantically trying to decide whether to press him to step aside from his bid for re-election after a catastrophic 90 minutes revealing that he is neurologically […]
In the weeks before CNN’s presidential debate I was skeptical of its significance. I didn’t see a dramatic, high-stakes, pivotal showdown coming, only a moderately sized, pro forma moment in a long, drawn-out campaign. The format had too many prohibitions—muted mics, no open discussion, no live audience, no opening statements, no talking to aides during […]
We are talking about journalism this week, about newspapers and warring newsrooms and lost readership and what to do. At bottom, though this gets lost, all the arguments are really about what journalism is. Here is what it is. It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric […]