Dispatches

The most important election in determining the future of U.S. policy in the Middle East may not be the one happening on November 2. Sometime in the 10 days after the victor takes the presidential oath of office on January 20, another election will take place in Iraq. This will determine the composition of a […]

Unless you spent the summer orbiting with the Genesis space capsule, you know that John Kerry had a lousy August and a brutal early September. Thanks to the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the masterfully orchestrated Republican national convention — aided and abetted by the right-wing media’s power to keep stories […]

The stakes could not have been higher for John Kerry as he appeared before the NAACP’s 95th annual convention in Philadelphia on July 15. In the few months prior, his campaign had been the subject of sharp criticisms from prominent black leaders throughout the country. In May, Donna Brazile chided Kerry for not including enough […]

CORNING, N.Y. — Samara Barend, a 26-year-old congressional candidate in New York state, is barreling along in a Buick Rendezvous on a recent Friday when “an even bigger SUV,” as her campaign spokesman-cum-driver, Don Weigel, put it, nearly sideswipes her car. Barend looks shaken, but it’s not the first time she’s had a mishap on […]

The Iraq war has quietly but fundamentally changed the course of the European Union. If in recent years Britain, France, and Germany — the EU’s three most important states — had created a delicate and unprecedented harmony over Europe’s future, Britain’s decision to join the war destroyed it. This dissension is playing out all over […]

The Cuban independence hero and poet José Martí lived in New York from 1880 to 1895. He was a New Yorker, and easily the most important literary figure then residing in the city (after Walt Whitman’s departure to rural New Jersey). During most of those years he made his living as a journalist, writing about […]

On a blustery march day, Peter Schurman, the executive director of MoveOn.org, stands next to a Win Without War poster at a press conference on Capitol Hill. Schurman is a 34-year-old Yale School of Management graduate with a high forehead, blue eyes, and razor-sharp features who doesn’t like to talk about himself. He’s not a […]

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 […]

“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 […]

Six months ago, the question on the lips of most critics of the occupation of Iraq was one that the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had posed: Why not hold elections by June 30? At the time, the U.S.–led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) claimed that it was just not possible. The United Nations agreed. And so […]