Columns, pieces and posts
I didn’t include last week what I thought was the most vexing question of 2016. I cut it for space, thinking it was a little off point, or at least not pressing, and could be explored down the road. I had asserted that Donald Trump was a nut but that a sane Trump could have […]
It is quite dreadful and a showing of the gravest disrespect that, if U.S. intelligence agencies are correct, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has inserted himself into America’s presidential election. And it could not have deeper implications. If Russia is indeed behind the leaks of the emails of Democratic Party operatives Mr. Putin may have many reasons, […]
Look, he’s a nut and you know he’s a nut. I go to battleground states and talk to anyone, everyone. They all know Donald Trump’s a nut. Some will vote for him anyway. Many are in madman-versus-criminal mode, living with (or making) their final decision. They got the blues. Everyone does. They’re worried about the […]
We are unsettled. The big thing looms and so many are still groping toward a decision. We would all like it to be over. I think of the farmer who treed a coon and then climbed up to shake it out of the branches. The coon turned out to be a wild lynx, which bit […]
What impact has the modern media environment had on the 2016 campaign? I know that’s a boring sentence, but journalists and politicians talk about it a lot, journalists uneasily and politicians with frustration. The 24/7 news cycle and the million multiplying platforms with their escalating demands—for pictures, video, sound, the immediate hot take—exhaust politicians and […]
The signature sentence of this election begins with the words “In a country of 320 million . . .” I hear it everywhere. It ends with “how’d it come down to these two?” or “why’d we get them?” Another sentence is a now a common greeting among Republicans who haven’t seen each other in a […]
The question came up this week at a political panel: Why don’t people like Hillary Clinton? Why do they always believe the worst? Why, when some supposed scandal breaks and someone says she’s hiding something, do people, including many of her supporters, assume it’s true? The answer is that Mrs. Clinton has been in America’s […]
What do I think about when I think about that day? The firemen who climbed “the stairway to Heaven” with 50, 60 pounds of gear. The people who called from Windows on the World and said: “I just want you to know I love you.” The men on the plane who tried to take the […]
By tradition the presidential campaign begins in earnest on Labor Day. This year I questioned that premise. Its assumption is that normal people don’t start paying attention until September. That’s probably been true in the past. But this time normal people have been paying attention all year. Donald Trump’s candidacy was a sensation—you couldn’t not […]
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 […]