Columns, pieces and posts
Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is not a great film, and people shouldn’t feel muscled, in the general approbation, into saying it is. But it’s a good one, which is always a surprise and delight these days, and it is good it’s being so widely appreciated. This is Hollywood taking history seriously, taking political history seriously, and […]
“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.” That was the acute observation of Dr. Johnson, to Boswell. It does say something about us as a people that our Pilgrims invented, Washington formalized, and Lincoln normalized the putting aside of one day each year simply to be thankful […]
We are becoming a conceited nitwit society, pushy and self-aggrandizing. No one is ashamed to brag now. and show off. They think it heightens them. They think it’s good for business. It used to be that if you were big, you’d never tell people how big you were because that would be kind of classless, […]
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 […]