About 20 years ago, I was talking to an advertising executive who had just started work at National Journal, the weekly magazine for which I wrote, when she asked with a smile, “So, are you going to write some good stories for my advertisers?” I was, of course, appalled – as would be any journalist …
Although Washington is poised to enact what he calls “a genuinely epochal expansion of health care,” Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson laments the absence of a vibrant progressive movement that could fuel the enactment of a broad-scale public agenda to rival FDR‟s New Deal or LBJ‟s Great Society. “[W]ithout left pressure from below,” Meyerson writes …
“Now, it’s not productive, given the history of the U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling – the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections.” President Obama, June 16, 2009 Responding to Iran’s fraudulent Presidential election and subsequent protests “America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal. We will bear witness to …
Continue reading “Letter From Washington / Obama and Human Rights: Hitting the “Reset Button””
Though he did not coin the phrase, the influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith popularized the notion of “conventional wisdom,” describing it more than a half-century ago as “the ideas which are esteemed at any time” for both their “acceptability” and “predictability.”i Such ideas, he might have added, become “conventional wisdom” when they gravitate from the …
Continue reading “Letter From Washington / Adventures in Engagement”
Every American president eventually faces a defining question – whether to assuage his supporters by telling them what they want to hear or challenge them by telling them what they need to hear. John Kennedy sought to educate the nation about civil rights, which won him no friends among his fellow Democrats in the South. …
In his latest blast at the United States, one that will receive far too little attention, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the United States this week of trying to block the return of the “Hidden Imam” (or “Mahdi”), the messianic figure of Shia Islam who supposedly will bring Islamic justice to the world. Referring to …
“In America, anyone can become president,” Adlai Stevenson Jr., the two-time Democratic presidential nominee said, adding with his characteristic high-brow humor: “That’s one of the risks you take.” The quote comes to mind with news that Lou Dobbs, the controversial former CNN anchor, is exploring not just a U.S. Senate bid from New Jersey but …
Continue reading “Beware of Lou Dobbs and the politics of anger”