Columns, pieces and posts
Have you been watching Joe Lieberman? Did you see him on Conan last night, singing “My Way”? Did you see him on Imus this morning talking about religion and culture and Hollywood? He was masterly—interesting and funny and solid. He has the authenticity and self-command of the secure, mature adult, of a man who has […]
Has George W. Bush bottomed out, and is he starting to come back? There is reason to think so, and not only because every newspaper in America has “Bush Done For—GOP Panics” stories on the front page which, considering your usual journalistic time lag, suggests his comeback is well under way. Mr. Bush’s campaign this […]
Memo to: Hillary Clinton, Rick Lazio From: Lee Atwater Re: Tonight’s debate OK, listen up. Where I am you don’t root for Reps or Dems, you root for the truth and hope for a show. With you two I’m still waiting on both. This whole campaign you’ve been waging has been kind of . . […]
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; […]