Dispatches

For a life-and-death debate about the future of the labor movement, the current conflict over the structure and role of America’s unions got off to a singularly inauspicious start. A week and a day after John Kerry’s — and the unions’ — defeat at the hands of George W. Bush, the Executive Council of the […]

Late last December, in a particularly dim installment of end-of-year political punditry, the assembled talking heads on the Sunday-morning Chris Matthews Show were debating who deserved the title “biggest noisemaker of 2004.” The choices Matthews offered them were Mel Gibson, Jon Stewart, and Michael Moore. Andrew Sullivan mused a bit about Gibson. Then Cokie Roberts […]

When Colin Powell announced his resignation as secretary of state on November 15, he didn’t just take away the remaining vestiges of foreign-policy centrism from the Bush administration. He also eclipsed the departure of his deputy and best friend, Richard Armitage. With Powell out, hard-liners inside and outside of the administration found themselves victorious, wrote […]

For decades, Social Security was called the “third rail” of American politics. Suddenly, privatization sounds like a done deal. Not so fast.

Leaders of the religious right are demanding a hard-line conservative Supreme Court as payback for their contribution to the re-election of President George W. Bush. Liberals, meanwhile, are seeking consolation in a roll call of justices, past and present, who have demonstrated the annoying independence fostered by elevation to a job with lifetime tenure. The […]

At midnight on December 31, Americans will toast the new year with a drunken round of “Auld Lang Syne.” On the other side of the globe, China will be celebrating by opening new factories — more than 3,000 new textile and apparel factories that will begin their work as decade-old quotas are lifted on China’s […]

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — Yasir Arafat’s death is a historic milestone in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a new starting point in the efforts to resolve the decades-old holy-land feud. It presents an opportunity to resolve the conflict, but lots of political determination and skill are needed from the dueling sides, the United States, and the international […]

One of John Kerry’s stronger moments in the first presidential debate came when he explained that, contrary to what George W. Bush would still have had inattentive viewers believe, Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States. To this cold reminder, Bush snapped back defensively, “Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I […]

Iraq, it’s true, isn’t precisely Vietnam: Vietnam is hellishly hot and humid, whereas Iraq is infernally hot and dry; Americans aren’t dying as quickly in Iraq as they did in Nam; the justifications used to pull the United States into Iraq have proven false even more quickly than the arguments for fighting in Southeast Asia […]

LORAIN, OHIO — The Steelworkers hall here is a musty monument to American labor’s glorious past. On the walls are photos of Franklin Roosevelt signing the Wagner Act in 1935, and of Philip Murray, president of the United Steelworkers of America from its inception in 1937 until his death in 1952. Newer images are nowhere […]