Columns, pieces and posts
According to polls, Hillary Clinton holds an early and significant lead among Democratic voters (43%, compared with 22% for Barack Obama in a Fox News poll 10 days ago). She is of course the killer fund-raiser of the race, with one of her contributors crowing this week that she’ll raise more money than all the […]
Next Tuesday would have been Ronald Reagan’s 96th birthday, which is amazing when you consider he is, in a way, more with us than ever: his memory and meaning summoned in political conversation, his name evoked by candidates. I remember 10 years ago when there was controversy over the movement to name things for him—buildings […]
We all complain, and with justice, about the falseness of much that is said in Washington, and the cowardice that leaves a great deal unsaid. But I found myself impressed and grateful for the words of Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, in a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. Because his […]
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 […]