Columns, pieces and posts
When I was new in the Reagan administration, a colleague would worry aloud to me about the bad things he was hearing about the budget negotiations on the Hill. We’re giving away the store, the negotiators aren’t tough enough, they’re throwing in the towel. I tried to study up so I could be alarmed too. […]
You have to hand it to Time magazine for managing to drum up interest in their Person of the Year choice. There was a time, I suppose up to about 15 years ago, when people really cared who Time put on the cover as Man of the Year. It meant something. But the media landscape […]
We’re not a year into his leadership, but it’s Christmastime and the pope has been much in the news. Let’s look at how he’s doing. He continues to capture the imagination. When he says something, people look and listen. His approach is not to lecture on the finer points but to embrace, and through the […]
The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart. They think he’s in command, aware of pitfalls and complexities. That’s his reputation: He’s risen far on his brains. They think he is sophisticated. That is his problem in the health insurance debacle. People have seen their prices go up, their choices narrow. They […]
I had a lot of jobs in a somewhat knockabout youth—waitress, clerk, temporary secretary, counter girl in a bakery (nice—no one’s ever sad in a bakery) and in a flower shop (hard—for hours I removed the thorns from the tough, gnarly roses we sold, which left my hands nicked and bloodied). All the jobs of […]
I’m off this week but wanted to join in on some last JFK thoughts. I write just a few minutes before the 50th anniversary of that moment the shots rang out. The television coverage has been excessive, and some have found it grating. Fair enough, but we’ll never do it like this again. There won’t […]
I am on my way from Los Angeles to Dallas, where tomorrow I will appear on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which will come live out of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. I can’t believe I’ll be inside that place, from which, 50 years ago next week, at a corner window on the sixth floor, Lee Harvey […]
Congress right now has a historic chance—really, it could wind up in the history books next to the stopping of FDR’s court-packing scheme in 1937—to hold back ObamaCare. Congress can delay it, or pass a law mandating or allowing insurance companies to continue insuring everyone they just threw off coverage. Heck, they could try to […]
Republicans should stop taking the boob bait of the press. The story of the day is ObamaCare and the pain it is causing the Democrats. That story is not being fully explored. We are not seeing pieces on Captol Hill Democrats rethinking their four-year-long lockstep backing of a program that is failing massively and before […]
All my friends in politics on the Republican side are feeling dour, angry, frustrated, furrow-browed. That’s understandable. Progressivism may look tottery at the moment, but Republicans don’t know how to knock it down and are at odds over what to replace it with. Interparty friction is high: The GOP is a bird with a lot […]