Published January 31, 2010
The New York Times Magazine
If we learned anything about Barack Obama during the now-distant campaign of 2008, it was that he was a man who valued stoicism and self-possession in himself and others. And so it was significant, in an understated way, to hear Obama’s press secretary describe him, on the day of the election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat, as “surprised and frustrated” by the collapse of the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, and then to hear Obama’s closest aides heaping scorn on her campaign.
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Published January 24, 2010
New York Times Magazine
This time last winter, Democratic Washington was crackling with confident talk of a progressive re-awakening in the land and an enduring Congressional majority. “Realignment” was the word of the moment, as in the kind of demographic and ideological shift that shaped the nation’s politics for some 60 years after the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Now Democrats are trying to figure out how they lost what was presumed to be the safest Senate seat in the country — it belonged to Ted Kennedy for 46 years — and how to avoid hemorrhaging others. A year after George W.
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Published January 3, 2010
There was something discordant, even tinny, about Barack Obama’s attempt to castigate Wall Street last month. No doubt the president was trying to acknowledge and channel the resentments in his own party — and in the country — when he told CBS’s Steve Kroft during a “60 Minutes” interview, “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street.” Yet the rhetorical slap felt a little flat.
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Published December 6, 2009
New York Times Magazine
After Walter Cronkite died earlier this year, Frank Mankiewicz, the onetime Democratic operative, recalled in The Washington Post how he had proposed that George McGovern select the CBS anchorman as his running mate during the 1972 presidential campaign. Cronkite was, of course, one of the most admired men in America and a known skeptic of the war in Vietnam.
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Published November 22, 2009
New York Times Magazine
Earlier this month, almost a year from the day when Barack Obama rode the wave of history into Grant Park, he had one of those weeks that makes his presidency seem, at times, so confounding. First Obama endured an electoral embarrassment, watching his party lose off-year gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, in part because many of the voters he had so successfully engaged in his presidential campaign, particularly younger voters, stayed home and made popcorn for “Dancing With the Stars” instead.
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Published November 1, 2009
“Are we going to give up in South Vietnam?” That was the question President Kennedy posed, then tried to answer, in what would be his final news conference in 1963. “The most important program, of course, is our national security. But I don’t want the United States to have to put troops there.” Kennedy was killed eight days later, giving rise not just to 40 years of grassy-knoll conspiracy theories but also to a lingering debate over whether he might have averted his successor’s tragic plunge into the jungles of Southeast Asia.
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Published October 25, 2009
These days, as he pleads with New Jersey voters for a second term as governor, even moments of satisfaction in Jon S. Corzine’s world seem to extract their small humiliations. In early September, for instance, on the day that President Obama delivered his heralded (and controversial) televised pep talk to public-school students, Corzine traveled to Camden, one of the country’s poorest cities, his government-issue black S.U.V. weaving through a postapocalyptic landscape of overgrown fields and shuttered row houses. The neighborhood was celebrating the opening of the sparkling new H. B.
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Published September 20, 2009
New York Times Magazine
How successful was the recent government giveaway known as “cash for clunkers”? The answer, I suppose, depends on how you want to look at it. In a sense, the program, which enticed jittery motorists to replace their old cars with more fuel-efficient models, was one of Washington’s more obvious triumphs in its effort to defibrillate a fading economy. Thousands of Americans rushed out to buy new cars that were better for the environment; high-polluting vehicles were taken off the road forever; some auto sales surged.
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Published August 30, 2009
New York Times Magazine
For all the shouting that has dominated these town hall meetings on health care lately, they have yielded a few important insights. The first is that the town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship. The second is that we now have a visual sense of the kind of voter who is militantly opposed to Obama’s health care agenda and, more broadly, to the president himself.
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Published August 9, 2009
New York Times Magazine
It’s hardly fair, this thing we do to our politicians: when they refuse to depart from their carefully worded scripts, we deride them as wooden, fraudulent, synthetic. When they dare to reveal genuine passion or irreverence, though, we pound away at them for displaying insufficient self-control. Such was the case with Barack Obama’s recent and calamitous news conference, when the president plunged headlong into a debate over race relations.
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