Harold Meyerson

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 […]

The old order still governs here; the future will not be rushed. Considering all the changes Los Angeles has gone through in just the past decade–white flight and immigrant influx, the displacement of the business elite, the rebirth of the union movement, the rise of a labor-Latino alliance–the idea that a new urban progressive coalition […]

T his 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 […]

A lan 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 […]

T hinking about how Democrats should treat the new Bush administration, let’s consider what Bob Dole would do if he were in our shoes. A scant eight years ago, after all, Bob Dole was in our shoes. As the Senate minority leader, he headed the opposition to a newly elected president. Bill Clinton chugged into […]

To those of you who’ve been feeling socially inadequate because your mind goes blank whenever the subject of Who Should Be Al Gore’s Running Mate comes up at barbecues or on white-water rafting trips: relax. The American Prospect‘s poll of the experts conducted in late June has uncovered a similar dearth of suggestions among the […]

Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, is perhaps the only one of America’s thousands of political strategists who genuinely has armies to deploy. And as Rosenthal sees it, the time to elect Al Gore is now. “The campaign is going to be won or lost between now and August, not after Labor Day,” he […]