Watching President Obama’s speech at the University of Arizona Wednesday night, I couldn’t help wondering how it will be remembered a year, or a decade, from now. I sensed in it a defining moment of his presidency. I am not for a minute forgetting the plight of Congresswoman Giffords or the other victims of the Tucson tragedy. Surely they deserve our thoughts and our care. But, like it or not, this was a national event, not a local one, and it will have national repercussions beyond the death and destruction in a shopping mall.
Read moreThe Mad Tea Party →
They’re proud; they're loud; they are selfish in the extreme, and simple in their thinking. And none of those traits is inherently bad or stupid. Within the extremely generous confines of American political discourse, at least when it comes to the rightward end of the spectrum, the Tea Party Movement is just another outbreak of self-righteous me-first I-want-my-country-back ideology. It’s the thinking of people who believe a mild and flawed health care reform law imperils their very way of life.
Read moreRoad Kill and Rapture on the Interstate →
Along with my partner Heidi, I recently completed a 14-day, 4,638-mile road trip from New York to Boulder, Colorado and back. (We drove out in separate cars, delivered one, and returned together.) Since writers and bloggers should never use the term ‘indescribable,’ and should avoid superlatives generally, I’ll simply try to summarize what I learned along the way.
Read moreThe Road Just Taken: What the right doesn't get about health care reform →
The health care reform bill that passed the House of Representatives last night is flawed and adulterated; but for millions of Americans who aren’t stockholders of insurance companies, failure to pass it would have been disastrous. That failure would have led to the continued spiraling out of control of health-care costs (and perhaps, ten or 15 years from now, a better solution, a single-payer system). But the bill is a start on the right road, not the wrong road.
Read moreA Ford in Our Future? →
When Governor David Paterson appointed Rep. Kirsten E. Gillibrand as New York’s junior U.S. Senator last year to replace Hillary Clinton, most New Yorkers had never heard of the upstate Congresswoman. They were just glad the ordeal was over. The selection process, which included a lengthy and undignified public dangling of Caroline Kennedy, was a disaster for both the unqualified Ms. Kennedy and the inept Governor. Now the power elites are scrambling to keep Gillibrand in office in the face of a new challenge: Harold E. Ford Jr., lately of Tennessee, who has suddenly discovered that he is an ambitious New York pol.
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