Columns, pieces and posts
The president’s State of the Union Address is Tuesday night, and right now his speechwriters are likely still caught in staffing hell, receiving last-minute suggested changes from agencies and offices throughout the government. The speech is probably frozen—writers have been working on it since before Christmas, and this is an orderly White House—but in the […]
I had the odd and wholly unexpected experience of feeling supportive of a troop increase until I saw the president’s speech arguing for it. What a jarring, furtive-seeming thing it was. Surely the Iraq endeavor and those who’ve fought in it and put their hopes in it deserve more than collapse, withdrawal and calamity. But […]
The first instant message of 2007 came up on my screen just after midnight. It said, “Noony there is much love in the world.” I immediately thought this must be a lovely drunken person, but it was from a journalist broadcasting the festivities in Times Square. He’d been watching a live feed in his studio, […]
One of the greatest things about Gerald Ford as a former president was that he didn’t say much. He had no need for the spotlight. He was modest in the old-fashioned way of stepping aside and not getting in the way of the new guy. He kept a lot to himself. This was in part […]
Sunday is Christmas Eve. It feels wrong to speak here of small and sentimental things such as politics. The most passionately committed Americans right now, and the most imaginative, are children waiting for a large laughing man with a full white beard. And so a newscast Brian Williams could give on Sunday evening: Brian Williams: […]
We are getting very excited. Barack Obama is brilliant, eloquent and fresh. He is “exciting” (David Brooks), “charming” (Bob Schieffer), “my favorite guy” (Oprah Winfrey), has “charisma” (Donna Brazile), and should run now for president (George Will). Our political and media establishments, on the rebound from bad history, are sounding like Marlene Dietrich in her […]
He stood there at the podium, the kind of podium he’d stood at 5,000 times in a long political life, and talked to the kind of audience he knew well: supporters and loyalists, old friends and new. He knew how to play them, how to use the old jokes and have fun. And suddenly he […]
We’re going to need grace. We are going to need a great outbreak of grace to navigate the next difficult months. America is turning against a war it supported, for the essential reason that no one is able to promise a believable path to a successful outcome, and Americans are a practical people. It is […]
It is July 10, 1858, a Saturday evening, and Lincoln is speaking in Chicago. The night before his opponent in their race for the U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, had referred to him graciously in his big speech, and invited him to take a good seat. Lincoln seized the opportunity and invited Douglas’s audience to hear […]
WASHINGTON—A postelection stay in the cool, cloudy capital reveals a sober Republican Party attempting every day in conversations throughout Capitol Hill a rancor-free analysis of why the party lost, and in a way that was so killingly close and yet brutally decisive. There is a general sense the loss was not undeserved—this is an unusual […]