Columns, pieces and posts
We have been thinking about disasters, about Hurricane Helene and North Carolina, about Milton and Florida. It sent me back to the great classic on American disaster, “The Johnstown Flood” by David McCullough, published in 1968. I hadn’t remembered it contains information pertinent to the current moment. Johnstown, Pa., in the western part of the […]
For the love of God, Madam Vice President, reverse your decision and come to the Archdiocese of New York’s Al Smith dinner. There’s still time, schedules free up, and announcing you’ll speak will make you look both humble (“on second thought”) and heroic (into the lion’s den). Why would she snub the famous, ancestral, bipartisan […]
Jump ball, deadlock, coin flip, tossup. We’re running out of election metaphors. Everyone’s texting each other, every interaction turns quickly to “Whaddaya think, what’s gonna happen?” You feel an urgency but also a sincerity: They honestly don’t know. Kamala Harris holds a close lead in the nationwide polls, Donald Trump in several battlegrounds. I think […]
The race is deadlocked with six weeks to go and if you’re an undecided, unsure or wavering voter it looks like Awful vs. Empty. Kamala Harris has made quite an impression. That walk is a stride, and she has appetite—she loves this thing, running for high office. She has sentiments—she loves to say what divides […]
He lost, she won, full stop. Kamala Harris is a political athlete. And she can act—the amused, skeptical squint, the laughing tilt of the head, the hand on her chin. She was more interesting than Donald Trump, not only because she conveyed a greater air of dynamism but because she seemed interested in what was […]
Next Tuesday’s presidential debate will be as important as everyone says. In a close race, a good performance by one candidate could be dispositive. More dramatically one might implode, as Joe Biden did in June. People will watch to see if it happens again. This is so far the only Trump-Harris debate scheduled, and may […]
Kamala Harris’s speech was fine, and delivered with assurance. I prefer “Ask not what your country can do for you” to “Never do anything half-assed,” but tastes vary. Too soon we were hearing phrases like “assure access to capital.” The text didn’t have the feeling of a story being told from some previously unknown inner […]
Kamala Harris just won her third week in a row of the first three weeks of the hundred-day campaign. She kept everyone in the political class wondering who her vice-presidential nominee would be, made a surprising choice, and unveiled him at a Philadelphia rally that was boffo. Now the runup to the convention, which has […]
Those who think about politics and history as a profession can’t resist comparing presidential years. “This is 1968 all over again.” “We’re back to the dynamics of ’72.” We do this because we know political history and love it, and because there are always parallels and lessons to be learned. But it should be said […]
To the president’s speech explaining his decision to step aside: I wanted to be moved and informed and wound up impatient. It was a speech that carried a high degree of difficulty. A president of the United States with six months to go can’t declare to the world, “I’d love to stay longer but let’s […]