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Harold Meyerson

Harold Meyerson is the executive editor of The American Prospect. His email is hmeyerson@prospect.org.

Recent Articles

Eternally Rumsfeld

Harold MeyersonDec 09, 2004
Rumsfeld faced calls for his resignation this summer over the abuses at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq. Republicans close to the White House said the decision to retain him was driven by the calculation that replacing him would appear to be a concession that the administration made mistakes in Iraq. Moreover, some Republicans have speculated that Rumsfeld wanted to stay on with the hope that security conditions in Iraq would improve, leaving him with a better legacy. -- from a Dec. 4 Washington Post story on President Bush's decision to retain Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. WASHINGTON, Dec. 8, 2016 -- President-elect George P. Bush announced today that he would reappoint Donald Rumsfeld to another term as secretary of defense. Rumsfeld has served in that position since he was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001. After serving two terms in George W. Bush's administration, Rumsfeld served an additional two terms in the subsequent administration of President Jeb...

Wal-Mao

Harold MeyersonDec 02, 2004
Wal-Mart has finally found a union it can live with. Up to now America's largest employer has opposed every effort of its employees to form a union. Wal-Mart doesn't recognize unions; it doesn't even recognize "employees." The proper Wal-Mart name for its workers is "associates," a term that connotes higher status and collegiality and that actually means lower pay and workplace autocracy. For the privilege of associating themselves with Wal-Mart, its employees are paid so little that many can't afford the health insurance the company generously allows them to buy. One study of health care in Las Vegas revealed that a plurality of that city's employed Medicaid recipients worked at Wal-Mart. But that was the old Wal-Mart. Last week Wal-Mart announced that if its associates wanted a union to represent them, that would be hunky-dory -- as long as the union was affiliated with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a body dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. The official statement...

God and the New Deal

Harold MeyersonNov 21, 2004
So the Democrats are having trouble with the politics of cultural traditionalism? So what else is new? To be sure, the gap in the electorate between the observant and the secular is widening. But it's just one part of a larger cultural rift that the Republicans have long realized (as far back as Richard Nixon) is central to their success. Since Nixon's announcement that he stood with the “silent majority” against the noisy protesters, the Republicans have practiced a form of identity politics, championing the more traditional culture of Middle America against its putative cosmopolitan threats. Indeed, magnifying those threats has become the linchpin of the Republicans' presidential-election strategy. Even before the Republicans learned how to fully exploit it, however, the tension between modernity and tradition had long been a challenge for Democrats and liberals -- as far back, in fact, as the early years of the New Deal. Then, the tension occurred chiefly within the Democratic base...

What Are Democrats About?

Harold MeyersonNov 18, 2004
"I sought a theme and sought for it in vain." -- William Butler Yeats , “The Circus Animals' Desertion” Once more, the theme of themelessness. Cover the Democrats for any length of time and you become expert in campaigns that don't seem to be about anything. They have policies; Democrats are good at policies. But all too often the campaigns lack a message -- a sense of what the candidate's about and what he aims to do. Democrats don't have a monopoly on such campaigns; if anyone can remember the theme of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential bid, he's probably got it mixed up with some other campaign. But John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis -- three of the last four Democratic standard-bearers -- never really delivered a compelling message to American voters. And there were times during each of their presidential campaigns when the candidates knew it, when they sensed they weren't connecting, brought in new advisers and asked what it was they stood for. In the waning days of the Dukakis...

Divided Land

Harold MeyersonNov 05, 2004
"All right," John Dos Passos wrote in a rage over the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, "we are two nations." Oh, are we ever. And 77 years after Dos Passos penned those words, his two nations and ours bear an almost spooky resemblance. The most striking, the most overwhelming fact about the 2004 vote is how closely it resembles the 2000 vote. Think of it: Since November 2000, the twin towers have been obliterated, we've gone to war preemptively and under erroneous pretenses in Iraq, George W. Bush has become the first president since Herbert Hoover to have jobs shrink on his watch, our standing in the world has diminished nearly everywhere. And how did all this affect the electoral map? A shift of 17,000 votes turned New Hampshire (four electoral votes) from red to blue, while a shift of 12,000 votes turned New Mexico (five electoral votes) from blue to red. The battle lines of the cultural civil war that emerged in the 2000 contest have shown themselves to be all but impermeable to...

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