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He may not have been entirely happy about it, but on Monday, Andy Stern had his John L. Lewis moment. Addressing roughly 3,000 delegates at the quadrennial convention of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Stern, who’s been the SEIU’s president since 1996, certainly had plenty to be happy about. While the vast majority of […]

Assume you are John Kerry. You’ve just been elected president in a close race. One House of Congress has gone narrowly Democratic, but not enough to give you a working legislative majority. The other has stayed narrowly Republican. By now, it has dawned on you that you lack either the votes in Congress or the […]

Harry Thomason, an Emmy-nominated producer and director, spoke recently about his new movie, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill Clinton, on a mobile phone while driving along California Highway 1. The film opens in Washington, D.C., on Friday, June 25. What is the main message of your movie? The media […]

It was during the national stock-taking and spiritual inventory accompanying the obsequies for Ronald Reagan that I finally figured out how the war in Iraq differs from the one in Vietnam. The Iraq War’s champions have always insisted it’s different, of course. Before the first shot was fired last year, they assailed “deja-vu” dissenters who […]

After four decades of tireless crusading for consumer’s rights and against corporate influence over government, Ralph Nader has developed an unblemished luster of integrity. However, as Nader forges ahead with his long-shot, independent presidential candidacy in an especially heated election season, he appears to be shedding the conviction that has formed the core of his […]

A polemicist who draws on the techniques of investigative journalists. A director who unleashes the broadest comedy on the darkest subjects. A baseball cap–wearing Everyman, champion of minorities and the working class, who is really a rich white man — Michael Moore is all these things, a contradictory figure who elicits many conflicting emotions, often […]

Should the United States, for reasons of military necessity or basic fairness, return to an idea it abandoned 30 years ago after Vietnam — a military draft? This idea has become more popular, or at least more frequently discussed, as the open-ended mission in Iraq has required more service from our active-duty forces, the National […]

At first, I have to admit, I was a little worried about the gun. Not long ago, it was revealed that the president of the United States had taken as a souvenir the pistol found on Saddam Hussein when American forces pulled him, blinking and bearded, out of the earth. It was reported further that […]

Chris Bell will tell you frankly that one term in Congress has hardened his politics. “I am a more partisan Democrat that I was,” he says. “The place makes you more partisan.” But he will also tell you that this deepened sense of partisanship is not what caused him to file an ethics complaint against […]

Colorado. The Colorado GOP establishment settled long ago on beer heir Pete Coors as their favored nominee for this fall’s tight Senate race, but the religious right is making some trouble for him in the primary. The concern is less about issues (Coors hews to the conservative orthodoxy on gay rights, abortion, guns, and other […]