Columns, pieces and posts
A U.S. senator from the West talking about Paul Ryan: “I think Romney was challenging himself.” Romney knew he had to become a better candidate, knew he needed someone who played a higher policy game, knew he needed someone who prompted him. “It was a self-challenge. And that was smart.”
On the floor of the convention, I was introduced to a guy who’ll be speaking later this week. He isn’t in politics, he has never spoken to a convention, and what he is afraid of is this: He’ll be up there trying to speak, and the crowd will be bopping a big beach ball back […]
Ground Zero, the floor of the convention, Monday afternoon, 3 p.m. A thousand people mill about and interview each other. Local TV crews interviewing delegates, network stars doing standups in bright lights. Camera flashes. Politicians standing at the podium to see where the prompters have been placed. Scanning the room from left to right: Diane […]
This isn’t a good sign. I have seen the set. It is handsome and spacious. But programmers are going to manipulate images on 13 LED screens “looming over the floor”? LED “ribbons” will carry tweets and Facebook posts? Running clouds? 1. It sounds Orwellian. 2. Too much slickness gives an air of . . . […]
So, Tampa. Last weekend I walked onto the floor of the convention for the first time, and it was beautiful—all the lights and the dazzle and the sound checks, all the bustle. We forget how exciting it is, some of us, because we’ve been here before, we’ve seen the huge cavernous stadium dressed up in […]
Seven years ago I wrote a column on blogs. At the time they were new, and mainstream journalists were deriding bloggers. I defended them. I said everyone should have a blog. I now take my own advice.
It is good that Joe Biden is going to the Republican National Convention to hold high the flag of his party. People make fun of his gaffes, of his embarrassing verbal forays, but he’s no fool and he knows how to take it to the other guy. The speech he is working on, to be […]
Americans are not ideologues. They think ideology is something squished down on their heads from on high, something imposed on them by big thinkers who create systems we’re all supposed to conform to. Americans are more interested in philosophy, which bubbles up from human beings, from tradition and learned experience, and isn’t imposed. Lately we […]
It’s been a week marked by mistakes, some new and some continuing. The pro-Obama super PAC ad that essentially blames Mitt Romney for a woman’s death from cancer is over the line, and if it’s allowed to stand the personal attacks that have marked the presidential campaign will probably get worse. If the president rebukes […]
From a friend watching the Olympics: “How about that Michael Phelps? But let’s remember he didn’t win all those medals, someone else did. After all, he and I swam in public pools, built by state employees using tax dollars. He got training from the USOC, and ate food grown by the Department of Agriculture. He […]