Columns

Several years ago I had a philosophical conversation with my good friend and Cabinet colleague Bob Rubin over lunch in the White House mess. Cabinet members rarely talk philosophy. There isn’t time. Mostly, they talk about how to put out the next fire. But on this rare occasion, Bob and I found ourselves talking philosophically. […]

In discussions of “judicial activism,” almost everyone focuses on how often Supreme Court justices vote to strike down acts of Congress. These discussions neglect a question that is, in terms of the Court’s actual workload, much more important: How often do justices vote to strike down acts of the executive branch? We attempted to answer […]

One lesson of the 2006 vote was so obvious that Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times was able to write about it two days before the election: the return of the swing voter. Karl Rove’s strategy of mobilizing a conservative Republican base while ignoring the flippable voters in the middle “lay shattered in pieces,” […]

When I talk to myself, I sound like an old Jew. This is not because I am all too quickly actually becoming an old Jew, mind you. It’s that the voice I use to argue with and amuse myself is my grandparents’ — all of them Russian Jews who came to America about 100 years […]

The most important lesson to be learned by Democrats from recent events in both the real and political worlds is that economic growth alone is not enough. Expansion of gross domestic product is a good thing, but 4 percent annual growth does not guarantee that Americans will see significant improvement in their own economic positions; […]

In novels, films, or real life, there’s really only one Washington story: Newcomer comes to town, full of idealism and ready to change the country, but soon encounters the permanent government that defines what you can’t do and whom you have to deal with if you want to try. The permanent government might be octogenarian […]

As our cover package of articles suggests, the Democrats triumphed in 2006 not just because of Iraq and Republican blunders running the gamut from Katrina to macaca, but because Democrats at last ran as economic populists. Although the economy was not considered Topic A by the pundit class, nearly every Democrat who picked up a […]

I was intrigued to read in early October about the sale at auction, for nearly $4 million, of a map. It wasn’t, naturally, just any map: It was the first atlas of the world ever printed, from 1477, based on the cartographic calculations of Claudius Ptolemaeus, the chap we call Ptolemy, who lived in Roman […]

Republican government during the past six years has been a study in dissipation. No, I’m not referring to the Mark Foley scandal. I mean the dissipation of American power and influence in the world — the latest consequence of which is North Korea’s explosion of a nuclear weapon. Rather than deterring Pyongyang from going nuclear, […]

Remember Title IX, the federal legislation that guarantees equality by sex in education? It was passed in 1972, on the heels of racial integration, and with a rather similar rationale: Separate was not deemed to be equal either in law or in educational outcomes. By 1995, only three sex-segregated public schools remained. Fast forward to […]