Ever worry that millions of your fellow Americans are walking around knowing things that you don’t? That your prospects for advancement may depend on your mastery of such arcana as who won the Iraqi war or where exactly Europe is? Then don’t watch Fox News. The more you watch, the more you’ll get things wrong. […]
Harold Meyerson
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.
Posted inFeatures
Not Quite the Big One
So, is it a wrap for progressive California? According to many political observers, largely but not entirely on the right, the recall of Democrat Gray Davis and the election of Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger mark a tectonic shift in California’s political makeup. Over the past decade, as Latinos have voted in greater numbers and independents have […]
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Gray Matter
LOS ANGELES — In the end it came down to touching. No, not Governor Arnold’s three decades of alleged sexual harassment; that seemed of little moment to California voters. The touching problem in this election was all Gray Davis’. “You’ve got to touch people, relate to them, tell them what you care about,” one Democratic […]
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Immigration Nation
“Being a foreigner, being an immigrant,” Elia Kazan, the great Turkish-born, Anatolian Greek director who died this week, once mused. “I mean, I wasn’t in the society. I was rebellious against it.” The irony, of course, is that Kazan virtually defined our national culture at the midpoint of the 20th century, directing such quintessentially American […]
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New Balance
In the presidential candidacy of Wesley Clark, the Athenian party in American politics may just have found its Spartan. The meteoric ascent of the former NATO commander is scrambling all the normal alignments within the Democratic Party and some of those without. Whether Clark can sustain his initial momentum is anybody’s guess; his first week […]
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Justice Deserts
There’s separation of powers for you. Just when Democrat Gray Davis looks like he might survive the October recall, along come three Democratic-appointed judges to postpone the vote. Monday’s decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit didn’t merely scramble the already jumbled electoral situation in California. It […]
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Recalling the Future
I. Hiram Johnson’s Mess The land may have been ours before we were the land’s, as Robert Frost wrote, but not in California. The Progressives saw to that. When people arrived in my home state, there were no political institutions to reach out to them or provide an orientation; there was nothing they could join. […]
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Candidate Conan
At summer’s end, after Conan the Conqueror had confounded all his foes and slain them on Leno, he came back to his fortress and was told he would have to debate. “I crush my tormentors,” snarled Conan the Victorious. “I psych them, I smash their bones. When my own people are jaded and bored, I […]
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Labor Lost
If you had to pick a time and a place where the 20th century (as a distinct historical epoch) began in America, you could do a lot worse than 90 years ago in Highland Park, Mich. It was there, in 1913, that Henry Ford opened his new Model-T plant and announced, a few months later, […]
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First Offense
What’s wrong with this picture? California’s Democratic congressional delegation, meeting behind closed doors, decides that the state’s lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamante, should be the Democrat whose name appears down-ticket on the pending recall ballot. Party leaders successfully lean on the state’s Democratic insurance commissioner, John Garamendi, to withdraw from the race. Meanwhile, over on the […]
