Columns, pieces and posts
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 […]
In a way they never tell the truth until the concession speech. That’s when nothing they say can hurt them anymore. They’re worn to the bone and they’ve been in a struggle and it’s over, and suddenly some basic, rock-solid, dumb knowledge of what they’ve been involved in—a great nation’s life—comes loose and declares itself. […]
It has been hard not to experience the election as a brute-force clash between two armies struggling over terrain their soldiers have come to see, inevitably—they are at war, they are exhausted—as the location of the battle, but not its purpose. The nation is where the contest takes place; you can forget, in the fight, […]
A year ago I wrote a column called “A Separate Peace,” in which I said America’s leaders in all areas—government, business, journalism—were in some deep way checking out. They saw bad things coming in the world and for our country, didn’t think they could do anything about it, and were instead building a new pool […]
Everyone is focusing on the polls and spreadsheets, on the scandals and negative ads. This in fact may be the year negative advertising reached critical mass. Voters are no longer running from the room saying, “Smith is dishonest, I must vote for Jones!” They’re slouched in front of the TV thinking, They’re all bums, I’ll […]