Published September 23, 2007
The New York Times (Week in Review)
WHEN MoveOn.org attacked Gen. David H. Petraeus, resorting to the schoolyard tactic of rhyming his name with something mean, leading Republicans must have felt like a band of desert-wanderers who had just stumbled onto an Olympic-size swimming pool. One by one, top Republicans lashed out at the now infamous advertisement, shifting the attention away from General Petraeus’s depressing testimony and branding the administration’s opponents as a bunch of radical, pierced-nose pacifist thugs.
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Published September 9, 2007
The New York Times Magazine
There are at least half a dozen reasons that a lot of political prognosticators, including many inside his own party, will tell you that Rudolph Giuliani will never be the Republican nominee for president, no matter what the polls say. They are, in no particular order:
1. As New York’s mayor, he was pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-gay rights.
2. He has demonstrated an odd propensity over the years for publicly dressing up in women’s clothing, proof of which is now readily available online, including a disturbing clip of Donald Trump nuzzling the mayor’s bosom.
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Published July 15, 2007
The New York Times Magazine
Of all the campaign themes that will emerge leading up to the 2008 primaries, one you probably won't hear a lot about is experience. That's because the candidates who are at the moment best positioned for the nominations of their parties have surprisingly little of it.
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Published June 10, 2007
The New York Times Magazine
In April 1964, when Lyndon Johnson sought to rally public support for his new War on Poverty, he did it while sitting on a pile of two-by-fours on a front porch in Inez, Ky. — an appearance that helped establish the Appalachian South as a national symbol of economic deprivation. And so it was fitting that John Edwards, announcing his candidacy for president at the end of last year, chose as his setting not his hometown, Robbins, N.C., where he unveiled his first presidential campaign four years earlier, but the front yard of a mangled brick house in New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward.
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Published March 18, 2007
Key (The New York Times real estate magazine)
For most of us, buying a house is about reconciling the life you envision with the life you have. We all carry around in our heads little movie reels of the scenes we imagine ourselves playing out in some ideal future—the birth of a child or the celebration of a big promotion, a reunion of family members long estranged. Shopping for a home is like searching for just the right Hollywood set, the place that most closely resembles the scenery in our minds.
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Published November 19, 2006
The New York Times Magazine
Back in February 2002, some colleagues and I sat down to lunch with Tom Daschle, who was then the Democratic majority leader of the United States Senate. This was in the months just after the fall of the twin towers and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, when most of America -- and at least publicly, most Democrats in Washington -- seemed eager to support the president. On this day, however, Daschle, a mild South Dakotan whose idea of being confrontational is to interrupt without saying ''excuse me,'' seemed to have lost patience with George W. Bush and his entire administration.
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Published October 1, 2006
The New York Times Magazine
Not all states are equal on an election map, and Alaska is one of those less populous states — like Kansas or Idaho or Alabama — that national Democrats almost never bother to visit. For one thing, just getting there presents a logistical ordeal: the journey from Washington takes as long as it would to reach, say, Nigeria, and even then you sometimes need a hydroplane to get around. And more to the point, there aren’t a whole lot of people to see once you get there.
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Published August 20, 2006
The New York Times Magazine
A few days before Joe Lieberman, who was very nearly vice president of the United States, was effectively vanquished from his party by Ned Lamont, an affable cable executive who once played a minor role in governing the town of Greenwich, Conn., I happened to talk with Jeffrey Bell. A political consultant who is as cordial a man as you will find in Washington, Bell isn't as famous as some of his fellow Republicans, but he owns a storied place in the history of the conservative movement.
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Published May 28, 2006
The New York Times Magazine
Las Vegas, as the ad campaign likes to remind us, is a place people go to untether themselves from reality — to become, if only for a weekend, anonymous and uncensored. It's odd, then, that Vegas is about to play host to a gathering of ordinary Americans whose objective is precisely the reverse. Next week, 1,000 devotees of the liberal blogging universe — people who know one another only as pseudonyms on a screen, connected by only their running commentaries — will descend on the Riviera Hotel in hopes of affixing names and faces to their online personas.
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Published March 12, 2006
The New York Times Magazine
If you harbor serious thoughts of running for the presidency, the first thing you do — long before you commission any polls or make any ads, years before you charter planes to take you back and forth between Iowa and New Hampshire — is to sit down with guys like Chris Korge. A real-estate developer in Coral Gables, outside Miami, Korge is one of the Democratic Party's most proficient "bundlers." That is, in the last two presidential elections, he bundled together more than $7 million in campaign checks for Al Gore and John Kerry from his friends and contacts.
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