Published March 4, 2010
New York Times Magazine
Plaintiffs’ lawyers must be holding their heads a little higher when they walk into P.T.A. meetings and neighborhood parties these days, knowing that corporate lobbyists have overtaken them as the most despised professionals in America. Lobbyists have never been especially popular, of course; even their most sympathetic pop-culture portrayal, in the book and better-known movie “Thank You for Smoking,” focused mostly on their moral depravity. As a candidate, Barack Obama made a point of vowing to banish them from the White House.
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Published February 21, 2010
New York Times Magazine
Republicans are feeling buoyant these days, having managed to cut their deficit in the Senate down to 18 seats, which means they can now be a genuine irritant to the Democrats who run the country. And yet there are still those glass-half-empty Republicans who insist on reminding their colleagues that the party is beset by serious problems. It has no discernible governing agenda, for one thing.
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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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