Columns, pieces and posts
I find myself going back, as I review these years, to a crisp, dark evening in December 2016, in Manhattan, where I’d joined a visiting friend, a Catholic activist, for a drink. She had been ardently anti-Trump, was heartbroken at his election and struggling to come to terms, to find some higher meaning. “Maybe this […]
The hour and a half between 9 and 10:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, Oct. 23, at Belmont University in Nashville was the last chance Donald Trump had to turn it all around. Did he? Could he? It’s late in the game, most peoples’ minds are set, and more than 40 million have already voted. But […]
Everyone’s insane now. I mean everyone in Washington. The great challenge of the era is to maintain your intellectual poise under pressure. Washington this week looked like a vast system fail. Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on CNN, let it be known she won’t countenance pushback. At issue was the stalled stimulus deal. Anchor Wolf Blitzer […]
I hear America absorbing. Quietly. Not screeching around and having fun, not stomping and shouting as you’d expect at this point in a dramatic campaign with weeks to go, not acting up and merrily pulling campaign signs from the neighbor’s lawn in the dead of night. It all feels so subdued. As if people are […]
I strongly felt in the winter of 2016 that it was right and wise to hold off on a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia, who’d died in his sleep in February at 79. The court has taken on outsize importance in our lives, the kind of judges Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would choose would […]
Let’s talk about the terrible time America might be in for in the days and weeks, maybe months, after the election. It starts with what is known: On election night we probably won’t know who won the presidency. The event we’ve been hoping would resolve things instead may leave them more mysterious. As in the […]
The polls seem to show Joe Biden sailing forward with a solid national lead, and some tightening in the battlegrounds. Nobody knows what’s going to happen; after 2016 only dopes are confident. I’m thinking of the larger prevailing currents that may have some impact this year. If 2020 turns out badly for the Democrats this […]
FROM: Charles Smith, an ambassador from the Obama-Biden era TO: Joe Biden Boss, happy Labor Day. Hope this finds you well. We’re still in Edgartown and fully recovered from the virus. Betty had it worse than me, but right now I’m hearing the fierce thwack of the ball as she plays doubles and I’m in […]
It was a real insane-a-thon. It was genuinely moving. It didn’t avoid big issues. It led with a lie. It was a success in that it will have pleased the base and done some degree of outreach to others. The parts of the Republican National Convention that were crazy included but were not limited to: […]
To be fair in critiquing certain public events you have to be like a judge in the Olympics and factor in degree of difficulty. No one had ever done a Zoom convention before, so no one knew how to do it. Should there be a host each night? Should it be an earnest actress? Does […]