Columns, pieces and posts
Punditry 101: It’s bad when you don’t write about what you’re thinking about. All week I was taking notes knowing I’d be looking at South Carolina, Super Tuesday and this week’s debate. I was thinking about polls and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s beautiful remarks in support of Joe Biden. They were beautiful because they were highly […]
If you love national politics and follow it closely, there’s always the debate you imagine in your head and the one that later happens on the screen. Before Wednesday’s Democratic debate I made a list of the bare, bottom-line message I thought each candidate had to deliver. Mike Bloomberg: You can stomach me. Bernie Sanders […]
You have to start here: We are immersed in a freakish and confounding political era. Anything can happen. Surprise is built in. Guy on a lark takes an escalator ride down to a rally and the system is changed forever. “Expect the unexpected.” That is the context. Within it, consider this: We are misreading Mike […]
Democrats, when they’re feeling alarmed or mischievous, will often say that Ronald Reagan would not recognize the current Republican Party. I usually respond that John F. Kennedy would not recognize the current Democratic Party, and would never succeed in it. Both men represented different political eras but it’s forgotten that they were contemporaries, of the […]
Here is something small but big that happened this week and speaks of a generation gap within journalism. I write from the perspective of having worked the overnight shift at CBS News when I started out, choosing stories off the wires to lead hourly newscasts. I was young, and I sometimes got it wrong in […]
We must take our satisfactions where we can. It is not terrible for the young that they witness a certain gravity emanating from Congress. There’s a lot to be learned and reminded of when we speak of the genius of the Founders and quote Hamilton, Madison and the others as they created the political arrangements […]
Impeachment is moving forward and going nowhere. There is new information but it doesn’t really tell those who’ve paid attention anything they didn’t know. Putative administration operative Lev Parnas said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Wednesday that the president knew everything about efforts to lean on Ukraine. But this was clear in testimony throughout the […]
So far our recent encounter with Iran looks as if it ended pretty well, or as well as it could have. At the moment it looks like we’re more or less where we were before Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani was killed, only he’s gone and that’s good. There is no particular reason to believe Iran […]
I bumped into a great artist on the morning of New Year’s Eve and he smiled and asked: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the coming year?” We were on the street in a little town and it wasn’t too cold and he and his wife looked beautiful in their wool hats. His question surprised […]
When we think about current history we tend to be expecting or predicting something as opposed to experiencing something. But what we need to understand now is that the 21st century isn’t new. It still feels new, but it isn’t. We are entering its third decade. We have been waiting for the century to take […]