Columns, pieces and posts
With the campaign proper about to begin, on Labor Day, a last August thought, a very simple one: War is terrible. It is my impression our candidates for president don’t really know this. They never say it, not in formal speeches or in thinking aloud, in reveries in friendly interviews. I would say of most […]
Let’s look at last week’s theme—the growing detachment between Western leaders and the led—in a different way. I have spent much of my downtime the past year watching and re-watching the three seasons of the Danish drama “ Borgen.” It is the fictional story of the surprise election and government of the first woman elected […]
This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist. Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, […]
I think this week marked a certain coming to terms with where the election is going. Politics is about trends and tendencies. The trends for Donald Trump are not good, and he tends not to change. All the damage done to him this week was self-inflicted. The arrows he’s taken are arrows he shot. We […]
The showbiz headline from the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia is that they did fine. They have their nominees; they had good speeches and glamorous celebrities; the cameras panning the audience often caught glistening faces, not angry ones. It did not look unified but it did look alive. So the impression was of relative success. The […]
Cleveland Two headlines on the week, and some speeches. Donald Trump effectively won the Republican primary in the first week of May, meaning the GOP has had 2½ months to do what it has always done, even under duress, such as in 1964 and 1976: come together. They have not. From day one of the […]
The best question from a journalist for the man and woman running for president is this: In the area of race relations, why can’t we get it right? All your life, Mr. Trump, all your life, Mrs. Clinton, we have been trying to solve what divides America. Why can’t we? Give them time to breathe, […]
Let’s start shallow and try to end deeper. The shallow thought is about campaign theatrics, or, better, the mood with which candidates present themselves to the public. Part of how Donald Trump connects with his audience, those in the hall and those watching at home, is that he tells them how he experiences things. It […]
The leaders of the world aren’t a very impressive group right now. There’s a sense with some of them of playing out a historical or cultural string, that they’re placeholders in some way. Many are young, yet so much around them feels tired. Which has me thinking, again, of the concept of the genius cluster. […]
It was at dinner a month ago in a Manhattan restaurant. Old friends who live far apart had come together on a leisurely spring night. But it turned testy fast. I note here that the style of anti-Trumpers is often highhanded and manipulative, while the style of pro-Trumpers can be brutalist and patronizing. One couple, […]