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Harold Meyerson

Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large at The American Prospect and a columnist for The Washington Post.

Recent Articles

Race Conquers All

Harold MeyersonDec 19, 2001

New York, like Los Angeles, now has its new mayor; that's the bad news.
Seldom has a city elected a leader about whom it knew less or who seemed to know
less about his city. Their mutual ignorance--New York's of Michael Bloomberg,
Michael Bloomberg's of New York--seems almost total. In the course of his
campaign, Bloomberg said nothing whatever to indicate how he'd govern, save that
he'd try to follow in Rudy Giuliani's footsteps. And in Los Angeles, new Mayor
James Hahn most certainly knows L.A., but L.A. knows less about him now than when
he was a candidate. Five months into his term, ducking decisions and staying
largely out of public view, Hahn has done virtually nothing to indicate how he's

Democracy Deadlocked

Harold MeyersonDec 19, 2001

This is a dispatch from purgatory--the purgatory to which we've all been condemned until this business about the identity of our next president is cleared up. I'd never realized until quite late on election night just how nervous purgatory can make a person. This particular purgatory is finite, endless though it may seem; you know that something either better or worse awaits on January 20. Unless you voted for Ralph Nader, however, exactly what awaits is a matter of some moment. (If you voted for Nader, the fate of mere people and nations--indeed, the effect of your vote on mere people and nations--is as naught next to the eternal verities that Nader proclaimed and that won 2.6 percent of voters' support on election day.)

Indentured Public Servant

Harold MeyersonDec 19, 2001

Alan Cranston was always an organizer--one of the best of the post-World War II generation. Soon after the war ended, he founded and built the United World Federalists, an expression of postwar one-worldism that valiantly battled the Cold War zeitgeist. After he left the U.S. Senate eight years ago, he founded and built the Global Security Institute, a group dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons, in which cause he enlisted such notables as Jimmy Carter and, improbably enough, onetime cold warrior Paul Nitze. When Cranston died on the final day of last year, he'd been planning an initiative campaign for nuclear abolition.

City of Tomorrow

Harold MeyersonDec 19, 2001

Even by the fast-forward standards of California politics,
where term limits bump off the entire state legislature every eight years,
Antonio Villaraigosa has had a meteoric career. In the early 1990s, he was an
organizer for the teachers' union, a county supervisor's delegate on the L.A.
transit board, and president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern
California--none of these particularly promising starting points for a career in
politics. By 1998, astonishingly, he had become speaker of the California
Assembly--and today, he is the great progressive hope in the upcoming election
for mayor of Los Angeles.

California's Progressive Mosaic

Harold MeyersonDec 19, 2001

Pa Joad: Ain't you goin' with us?


Casey: I'd like to. There's somethin' goin' on out there in the West, and I'd like to try and learn what it is.


--The Grapes of Wrath



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