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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Published July 21, 2009
New York Times Magazine
We’re hurtling down a wide boulevard in suburban Washington, the kids strapped expertly into their regulation car seats, my wife and I breezily discussing open houses and interest rates, when we hear a plaintive cry from the back seat. “Help, it hurts,” my 3-year-old son says. Glancing at the space directly behind me in the rearview mirror, I recoil. Ichi has absently grabbed hold of the S.U.V.’s middle shoulder strap and wrapped it around his neck. His eyes are popping slightly, as in a cartoon — from suffocation or fear I cannot say.
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Published July 19, 2009
The New York Times Magazine
Like romantic comedies and superhero blockbusters, the modern presidency has evolved into a reliable form of dramatic narrative. A candidate comes into office brandishing a broad theme — a vow to clean up government, perhaps, or to fearlessly prune it back — and then lays out one or two big proposals to make it real. In time, of course, a presidency tends to sprawl as events intrude. Bill Clinton couldn’t have imagined he would spend so much of his two terms fending off resurgent Republicans, just as George W. Bush didn’t envision going to war.
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Published June 21, 2009
New York Times Magazine
Even before he ran for re-election to the Senate, Norm Coleman saw more than his share of ignominious elections. First he lost the Minnesota governorship to a former pro wrestler who called himself the Body. Then he just barely managed to wrest a Senate seat from an opponent, Paul Wellstone, who had recently perished in a plane crash. So can you really blame Coleman for having spent the last eight months furiously trying not to have to concede defeat to Al Franken — a man who once acted alongside a gorilla on the set of “Trading Places”?
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Published June 7, 2009
New York Times Magazine
Sometime in the next few weeks, Congress and the White House will descend into the labyrinthine politics of comprehensive health care reform. For Barack Obama, this signals the end, in a sense, of the eventful prologue to his presidency. Impressive as they are, Obama’s legislative victories to this point — most notably the $787 billion stimulus bill and a stunningly ambitious $3.6 trillion budget resolution — have been relatively easy lifts for a popular new president installed at a time of economic crisis and buffered by comfortable majorities in the House and Senate.
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Published April 26, 2009
New York Times Magazine
I’ve been thinking lately about poor Bob Graham, as decent a man as any who ever entered politics. A presidential hopeful in 2004, the courtly Florida senator, who will be remembered for having the foresight to oppose the invasion of Iraq, was generally dismissed as a little too flaky to be taken seriously, and the chief evidence of this flakiness was his 20-plus years of personal diaries, in which he meticulously recorded the most mundane acts of his daily life: the content of his meals, the color of his shorts or tie, the application of his scalp medication.
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Published March 29, 2009
New York Times Magazine
Of all the various forms of corporate subsidy that the American taxpayer is now being asked to shoulder (bailouts for swaggering investment bankers and insurers, lifelines for overextended homeowners and the mortgage lenders who took advantage of them), perhaps none evoke such complicated emotions in Washington as the comparatively modest plea of General Motors. This is not simply because of its size, but also because G.M. is bound up with our collective identity, both national and personal.
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