Harold Meyerson

CHICAGO — Loyalty, a virtue largely confined to the working class these days, was alive and well this week among the union presidents gathered for the AFL-CIO executive council meeting here. On Tuesday they not only pledged their support and funding to California Gov. Gray Davis in his effort to stave off his recall but […]

LOS ANGELES — The Republicans here are performing a ghost dance, hoping that through the magic of the pending recall election, the buffalo will again roam the plains and the GOP will regain its status as a player in California politics. They’re dreaming. While it is possible that Gray Davis could be recalled and a […]

Dick Gephardt deserves Howard Dean. In a sense, he created him. If anyone has personified the failure of the Democratic establishment to provide the party with a distinct profile during the Bush presidency, it’s Gephardt. As House Democratic leader, Gephardt clung to Bush’s Iraq policy until it all but unraveled over the past month. Gephardt’s […]

As revolutions go, this one began with remarkably little fanfare. Last Thursday MoveOn.org sent out an e-mail to its members — all 1.4 million of them — asking if they’d like to take part in an online Democratic presidential primary later this month. Candidates would answer questions that MoveOn put to them, and if one […]

Save for the continuing search for its justification, the war in Iraq is over. For the United States, if not yet for Iraq, the consequences are clear. We have established yet again the utter supremacy of our hard power. Unfriendly governments tremble anew at our armed might and our willingness to use it. Some, to […]

There are no stubborn facts in the Bush White House, just stubborn men. This is an administration that will not be cowed by the truth. After all, it’s not as if the president’s baseless assertion in his State of the Union address that Iraq had sought to acquire “yellowcake” uranium from Niger was the last […]

If the House and Senate conferees assembling this week to negotiate a prescription drug benefit and Medicare reform bill do in fact come up with a final product, the only thing certain is that they will have built a house divided against itself. The bills that the House and Senate have sent to the conference […]

Antonin Scalia is raging against the coming of the light. Scalia’s dissent from last week’s epochal Supreme Court decision striking down Texas’ anti-sodomy statute confirms Ayatollah Antonin’s standing as the intellectual leader of the forces arrayed against equality and modernity in the United States. In establishing the deep historical roots of anti-gay sentiment in America, […]

Americans may have divided over the war in Iraq this spring, but one thing that brought them together was their health coverage. It was shrinking. From state to state and sector to sector, job-based health insurance either covered less or cost more or — the insurance companies were loath to force a choice on us […]