Features

Sometime between now and March 15, 2007, everything you know about the Iraq debate will change. It won’t be because of any dramatic shift in the fortunes of a disastrous war: If current trends continue, the five coming months offer the escalation of the Iraqi civil war, the 3,000th American service death, and more disgraceful […]

In politics, we tend to think in terms of issues and policies. And as the dust begins to settle on the midterm elections, pollsters and pundits have begun to settle on the meaning of the elections: “Voters were angry about Iraq,” or “Voters were disgusted by corruption in Washington,” or the economy finally mattered. Just […]

Nearly four decades after it happened, the assassination of Robert Kennedy still presents us with the greatest might-have-been of the past half-century of American politics. In the months before his murder, campaigning across the country in 1968’s tumultuous presidential primaries, Kennedy did something that no Democrat after him has been able to do: He won […]

Just about everyone understands the importance of Iraq to the Democrats’ success in the 2006 midterm elections. Far fewer, we suspect, understand that the Democrats owe a good chunk of their 2006 success to an issue that has historically been one of their strongest: the economy. Throughout the campaign, polls regularly indicated that the economy […]

The revolution is over. After 12 years of GOP control of both chambers of Congress and a majority of American governors’ offices, the Republican era has finally imploded. And while it was accelerated by self-inflicted wounds from bribery and a child-predation scandal, the Republican demise was chiefly caused by a congenital self-denial about the growing […]

As right-wing politicians and pundits call us stooges for Osama bin Laden, Tony Judt charges, in a widely discussed and heatedly debated essay in the London Review of Books, that American liberals — without distinction — have “acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy.” Both claims are nonsense on stilts. Clearly this is a moment […]

Joern Skov Nielsen surely qualifies as one of the more obscure government ministers in the world. Head of Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, he operates out of an office in Nuuk, capital of Greenland, a semiautonomous region of Denmark with fewer than 60,000 people living on a landmass that covers more than 800,000 square […]

Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, is an odd place to discover the possible fate of Iraq. But the fort, a 90-year-old Army base in the midst of suburbia, plays host to the Army’s communications command, which has quite a lot invested in that country’s future. For the moment, the United States has 140,000 troops stationed in […]

It was a summer of odd political valedictories. On the night of August 8, Joe Lieberman bade farewell to his career as a Democratic senator, kicking off of his independent bid by blaming the “politics of partisan polarization” for doing him in. He asked citizens “fed up with the petty partisanship in Washington” to support […]

Per our agreement with the publisher, we are unable to post the excerpt from “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Guiliani” by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins after September 30, 2006.