Columns, pieces and posts
This fact marks our political age: The pendulum is swinging faster and in shorter arcs than it ever has in our lifetimes. Few foresaw the earthquake of 2008 in 2006. No board-certified political professional predicted, on Election Day 2008, what happened in 2009-10 (New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts) and has been happening, and will happen, […]
Eight weeks out and you don’t have to be a political professional to feel what’s in the air: The Republicans have a big win coming. The question in the House races is: Will they get to 218? Will Republicans pick up the 39 seats they need to win control of the 435-member chamber? Another way […]
All presidents take vacations, and all are criticized for it. It’s never the right place, the right time. Ronald Reagan went to the ranch, George W. Bush to Crawford, both got knocked. Bill Clinton even poll-tested a vacation site and still was criticized. But Martha’s Vineyard—elite, upscale—can’t have done President Obama any good, especially following […]
It’s high summer and we’re all out there seeing each other. We’re not hidden away in our homes and offices as we are in winter’s cold. We’re part of a crowd—on the street, in the park, on the boardwalk, on the top deck of the ferry to Saltaire. And we can see in some new […]
Why has the JetBlue flight attendant story captured everyone’s imagination? Because the whole country wants to take the emergency chute. You know the story: A steward named Steven Slater, after a difficult flight, apparently got fed up, grabbed the intercom, cursed out passengers, and made a speedy and unauthorized exit, activating and sliding down the […]
It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year’s day, 1994. America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But […]
Back when the rather radical and ill-thought-through movement known as the John Birch Society—they thought, among other things, that Dwight Eisenhower was perhaps a communist—was still famous and controversial, conservative Ronald Reagan was running for office. A group of Birchers, surveying the field, said that of all those running his stands seemed most congenial, so […]
She was smeared by right-wing media, condemned by the NAACP, and canned by the Obama administration. It wasn’t pretty, what was done this week to Shirley Sherrod. And maybe something good can come of it. The thought occurred to me after reading her now-famous speech, which is about the power of grace and the possibility […]
We start with the president’s dreadful numbers. People in politics in America are too impressed by polls, of course, and talk about them too much. In this we’re like a neurotic patient who constantly, compulsively takes his own temperature. We are political hypochondriacs. But polls offer the only hard quick data there is, and when […]
Much has happened in the dense and shifting political landscape of the past 18 months—the quick breakdown along partisan lines in Congress; continuing arguments over spending, the economy and immigration; the big Republican wins in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts; the Gulf oil spill; falling poll numbers for the president and his party. But the […]