Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity By Samuel P. Huntington • Simon & Schuster • 408 pages • $27.00 Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist and author of The Clash of Civilizations, argues in his new book that America (he calls the United States “America” throughout) cannot continue to open […]
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Think Different
On a steamy Washington night in early June, a moneyed crowd of gay men and lesbians gathered in the vaulted hall at the National Museum of Women in the Arts for a John Kerry fund raiser. The big draw that night was not actress Sharon Gless (Queer As Folk, Cagney and Lacey) but the arguably […]
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Prospects
Think back to last summer. George W. Bush’s approval ratings stood near 60 percent. Iraq, a “mission” the president had famously declared “accomplished” aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that May, was no paradise, but it was also not yet the political disaster it later became. Democratic candidates, portrayed by the media as knock-kneed Barney Fifes, […]
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The Breakfast Crowd
I have two words for our next president: no excuses. You will be facing an angry country frustrated by the serious challenges we confront and hungry for a leader who will actually get things done. I am from a small town in Maine, where I occasionally join in an early-morning breakfast with a few longtime […]
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Build an “A” Team
My advice, President Kerry, is that you assemble a political “A” team, install it in the West Wing, and fight like hell against the right over the next four years. “We ought to have two real parties,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told speechwriter and adviser Sam Rosenman in 1942, “one liberal and the other conservative.” […]
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The Kerry I Know
The first two times I dealt with John Kerry, when he had his initial brush with notoriety many years ago, I didn’t know what to make of him. It was actually a little later, after he had screwed up and taken one on the jaw, that I became intrigued by him. He lost his first […]
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From Bush’s Playbook
Given his lack of mandate, one might have expected moderation and caution from George W. Bush. Instead, Bush moved aggressively to reframe the basic dialogue of American politics and restructure the institutions of American government. What has Bush to teach John Kerry? Bush adhered consistently to three core principles: 1. Vision. Unlike his father, this […]
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Be a Hero
The inauguration of President Kerry on January 20, 2005, will be the beginning of the global post-Bush era. As a young American, I would give President Kerry one central, and simple, piece of advice: Be a hero. His success at recasting the issues in a progressive light can only occur if he takes immediate hold […]
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The Next Generation
“Boy, this is really standing-room only,” complained a man outside the AFL-CIO hall in Peoria, Illinois, on a bright Tuesday morning in late June. U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama was set to start speaking soon to the diverse crowd, and a line of people dozens deep wended its way into the packed union hall. They’d […]