Published January 29, 2006
The New York Times Magazine
If previews are to be believed, President Bush will devote a significant portion of his State of the Union address this Tuesday - the sixth of his presidency - to the issue of health care in America, pushing for modest, market-driven solutions like targeted tax breaks and expanded health savings accounts. This is not the most comfortable terrain for a Republican president. For the last decade, Republicans have overtaken Democrats at the federal and state levels and nearly pulled even in voter registration, wiping away some 60 years of minority status in the space of several elections.
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Published December 18, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
In recent weeks, looking toward next year's midterm elections, leaders of both parties have engaged in highly charged arguments about withdrawal from Iraq, Medicaid shortfalls and allegations of Republican corruption. Anyone bothering to peruse the rest of the front page, however, might have noticed a few items that seemed tangentially related, but that, together, tell a story that is far more consequential for the next 50 years of American life.
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Published November 27, 2005
The Los Angeles Times Magazine (adapted from the book "I Married My Mother-in-Law")
Only as I sat in rush-hour traffic on Interstate 5, on my way to Garden Grove, did it occur to me that I might have conveyed the wrong impression to Ellen's parents. Since I was spending the week in Los Angeles on business, I had called her folks and invited myself down for dinner.
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Published November 13, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
Last August, in Beverly Hills, I stopped in to see the actor, director and producer Rob Reiner, who has emerged in recent years as a highly articulate spokesman for Democratic causes and an acid critic of the president and his war in Iraq. There was a time, decades ago, when studio executives were the main political players in Hollywood, and like the heads of other profitable American industries, they spent their capital on their own parochial interests, things like intellectual property rights and access to foreign markets.
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Published October 2, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
If Hillary Clinton is re-elected to the Senate next fall and runs for president in 2008, she will be the first New York Democrat to make a serious bid for the White House since Robert F. Kennedy, who used the same Senate seat as his springboard 40 years earlier. The parallels and contrasts between the two candidates are considerable. Like Clinton, Kennedy was accused of trading on his famous name when he moved to New York and ran for the Senate, his first elective office, in 1964.
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Published August 21, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
If you needed any more proof that Democratic politics were in a profound state of upheaval, consider this: on the eve of the 2004 election, there were three especially powerful groups, aside from the Kerry campaign itself, working to turn out votes for the party in critical states, and those were the Democratic National Committee, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a lavishly endowed start-up known as America Coming Together. Nine months later, not one of these institutions has emerged entirely intact. First, Howard Dean staged a hostile takeover of the D.N.C.
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Published July 17, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
After last November's defeat, Democrats were like aviation investigators sifting through twisted metal in a cornfield, struggling to posit theories about the disaster all around them. Some put the onus on John Kerry, saying he had never found an easily discernable message. Others, including Kerry himself, wrote off the defeat to the unshakable realities of wartime, when voters were supposedly less inclined to jettison a sitting president. Liberal activists blamed mushy centrists. Mushy centrists blamed Michael Moore.
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Published June 26, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
If you watch a lot of cable news, by now you've probably heard someone refer to a bloc of voters known as '' 'South Park' conservatives.'' The term comes from the title of a new book by Brian C. Anderson, a conservative pundit who adapted it from the writer Andrew Sullivan, and it refers to the notion that Comedy Central's obscene spoof of life in small-town America, with its hilarious skewering of liberal snobbery, is somehow the perfect crucible for understanding a new breed of brash and irreverent Republican voters.
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Published April 24, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
You can forgive Democrats in Washington for feeling somewhat vindicated by the way the controversy over Terri Schiavo played out. For years, after all, they waited in vain for the moment when Republicans might trip over their own arrogance while crusading for moral values, and finally, if polls are to be believed, it happened.
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Published February 27, 2005
The New York Times Magazine
Two weeks ago, on the eve of Howard Dean's election as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, his old rival John Kerry -- the same John Kerry who had once been caught hissing ''Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean'' into an open microphone, in what sounded like an imitation of Jan Brady's ''Marcia, Marcia, Marcia'' -- sent an e-mail message to his supporters. ''Let's welcome Howard Dean and give him the groundswell of grass-roots support he needs,'' Kerry wrote enthusiastically, urging his followers to contribute to the party.
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