Columns, pieces and posts
This will be unpleasantly earnest, but having witnessed the atmospherics the past 10 days it’s what I think needs saying: Everyone, get serious. Democracy is not your plaything. This is not a game. The president of the United States has produced a building crisis that is unprecedented in our history. The question, at bottom, is […]
Donald Trump’s tax-reform plan strikes me as daring. Whether it’s the daring of bright children or the daring of shrewd professionals who’ve gamed it out with the Hill remains to be seen. The simplification part is good and will be received as a balm by the taxpayers. Ronald Reagan once said even Einstein was driven […]
No sooner do you remember never to join a pile-on than you wonder if you shouldn’t start one. Bill O’Reilly’s departure this week from Fox News is a real blow to piggishness, and I believe that must be said. He has denied all allegations, but the number of them over the years, and the $13 […]
My late friend Bill Safire, the tough and joyous New York Times columnist, once gave me good advice. I was not then a newspaper columnist, but he’d apparently decided I would be. This is what he said: Never join a pile-on, always hit ’em when they’re up. Don’t criticize the person who’s already being attacked. […]
I want to think aloud about the American dream. People have been saying for a while that it’s dead. It’s not, but it needs strengthening. We should start by saying what it means, which is something we’ve gotten mixed up about. I know its definition because I grew up in the heart of it and […]
Washington What politicians, those hardy folk, don’t understand about health care is how anxious it makes their constituents. Not suspicious, not obstinate, but anxious. Because unlike such policy questions as tax reform, health care can be an immediate life-or-death issue for you. It has to do with whether, when, and where you can get the […]
Near the end of the campaign I wrote a column called “Imagine a Sane Donald Trump,” lamenting that I believed he was crazy, and too bad. Too bad because his broad policy assertions, or impulses, suggested he understood that 2008 and the years just after (the crash and the weak recovery) had changed everything in […]
All the emphasis seems to be on cutting. We will cut CPB, NPR, NEA. Why aren’t we talking about growing and building and knocking down barriers? Why aren’t we talking about jobs and a boom and reforming regulation and taxes so people can build and invest? Is cutting the absolute No. 1 priority right now? […]
Washington It is challenging for important Republicans on Capitol Hill now. They are leading their party at a time when it is changing and the country has changed. There are fissures in terms of what they believe and what they want. There is no shared, overarching sense of the meaning and purpose of the Republican […]
The president’s speech has been broadly, justly praised. Here, a look at particular aspects of the joint session address, and why it had power. First, the baseline accomplishment. Much has been said in the press about the sin of normalizing Donald Trump, but with this speech—by being there at the podium in the august House […]