Columns, pieces and posts
Thoughts from an unnamed U.S. senator: “We’re sitting here in shambles. We need a strategy and a game plan. The strategy starts with: The conservative movement must be able to speak to Americans where we’re not scaring them. Hispanics should be a natural Republican constituency, women too, and youth. But without leadership and strategy it […]
Last Tuesday was a promising loss. It should prompt a reckoning that would have come in 2016 anyway—an acknowledgment that the nation’s demographics are changing, its culture is changing, the Republican base is staying in place or shrinking, not growing. The GOP was going to face trouble at some point, why not face it now? […]
In the past week, long talks with distressed Republicans. They will be blue until after Thanksgiving I suppose, or Christmas. The past few days various sayings, quotes and phrases returned again and again, unprompted, to my mind. “You can’t cry in your beer.” An old Irish saying which means, of course, that you can’t just […]
President Obama did not lose, he won. It was not all that close. There was enthusiasm on his side. Mitt Romney’s assumed base did not fully emerge, or rather emerged as smaller than it used to be. He appears to have received fewer votes than John McCain. The last rallies of his campaign neither signaled […]
We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say: Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing. I spent Sunday morning in Washington with journalists and political hands, one of whom said she feels it’s Obama, the rest of whom said they don’t know. I think it’s Romney. I think he’s stealing in “like […]
So where are we? A softly catastrophic storm left us, in the Northeast, shocked at the depth and breadth of its power to destroy. Everyone who could be was hunkered down Monday waiting it out, and at first we hoped it might not be as bad as we’d been warned, because we’d all seen higher […]
We all say Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. But it’s all still Denver, Denver, and the mystery that maybe isn’t a mystery at all. If Cincinnati and Lake County go for Mitt Romney on Nov. 6 it will be because of what happened in Denver on Oct. 3. If Barack Obama barely scrapes through, if there’s a […]
BOCA RATON, Fla.—Nobody’s sleeping. That’s the real political headline now. Nobody working in the campaigns is sleeping. I talk to the press people, I talk to the surrogates, I talk to people running the campaigns and this is what the conversation is: “Are you getting any sleep?” “No.” I ask, “Do you have three different […]
The presidential debates this year have been more consequential than such debates have ever been. They’ve been historic, shifting the mood and trajectory of the race. They’ve been revealing of the personalities and approaches of the candidates. And they’ve produced a new way in which winners and losers are judged. It’s a two-part wave now, […]
has to win this one if for no other reason than pride, and the president’s supporters seem increasingly confident that he will do well. But when I ask them what “well” would look like, what they imagine when they imagine his victory, they’re not sure. They don’t say things like, “The president knocks him out […]