Columns, pieces and posts
We approach Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the American political season. Labor Day of course used to be a holiday with parades and picnics at which politicians celebrated the virtues of the working man who for once was getting a day off. There are still parades, but Labor Day now is mostly a matter […]
Everyone seems to have something to say about “Survivor,” and I don’t see why I should be any different. It seems to me the popularity of the show rests on two things. The first obviously is that it’s kind of fun, or at least not without interest, to watch sandy people in shorts squabble, scheme […]
I left the Philadelphia convention two weeks ago thinking George Bush would probably win. I left Los Angeles fairly certain of it. In tone and feel the Philadelphia convention was like that of 1980, the Reagan convention of spectacular unity in the face of high stakes. Philadelphia too was unified, and not only by hunger. […]
Al Gore’s acceptance speech was a rhetorical failure and, in my view, a strategic blunder of significant proportions. It failed as rhetoric not, as his defenders quickly claimed, because it lacked “poetry” and “song,” but because it lacked thought. It was relentlessly banal and formulaic, its sound shaped not by the simple speech of the […]
Watching Bill Clinton at his big speech Monday night, and seeing him in the big campaign handoff in Michigan Tuesday afternoon, I realized that though he always wishes to be likened to John Kennedy, he is really like another famously successful operator in American political history. He is like Huey Long, the Kingfish, “the friend […]
On Monday night you deliver the last big speech of your presidency. Or rather the last big political speech in front of a huge crowd, with the whole country listening. There is in truth one other big speech after Monday night, your farewell address, in December. That, by tradition, is a sober address from the […]
Imagine him running around the huge circular Olympic track, jumping hurdle after hurdle. And at each one the crowd makes a noise as if they are exhaling, which they are, because they’ve been holding their breath. He’s a good runner but he’s not really known as a guy who makes it over hurdles with ease; […]
The choice of Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as Al Gore’s running mate is so smart, so clever, so good, so satisfying, so striking that it just may turn this election a bit on its head for a while. Certainly its most immediate effect is going to be a successful Democratic convention next week in Los […]
George W. Bush’s speech was good, and a success. It did what it had to do with verve and persuasive power; it was more full of policy content than had been signaled by the campaign; and the policy was solid Bushian conservatism: pro-missile defense, for tax cuts, for abolishing the death tax and banning partial […]
And so it begins. Everything up to now has been winning the nomination and meeting America. Next week the campaign proper starts. Just about every voter in the country will, even if just for a moment, tune in to watch your big speech Thursday night at the convention. It’s been on your mind in a […]