Kennedy

So Tom Hanks has endorsed Barack Obama, comparing him -- according to the clip I just saw on Hardball -- with FDR, HST, JFK and RWR (that last would be Ronald Reagan -- apparently the Dems have the monopoly on names that can be reduced to catchy three-letter-initials, though...

Words do matter and few presidents knew this better than JFK (who of course also understood that rhetorical power has its limits).

How JFK came up with his memorable words and why they matter -- from "ask not" to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- is the subject of

April 30, 1968

With billy clubs swinging, bloodying heads, a phalanx of riot police stomped their way through the crowd of faculty supporters standing outside Fayerweather Hall. No one was given a chance to walk away.

The police then proceeded to smash in the main doors of...

The above quote is from Bill Moyer's interview with Rev. Wright which is to air tonite. Rev. Wright, referring to Obama's disavowal of Wright's more controversial comments, said "He does what politicians do."

Sometimes...

Obama's ambivalence about playing the political game is how the Clinton's have successfully blunted his...

They are about: Who Is the Best Candidate? Who can Win?

Ever since the first televised debate between Kennedy & Nixon, voters have often judged candidates on inconsequential issues... Nixon lost the 1960 debate, and election, because of such trivia as how much did he sweat?...How...

Thus endeth another Petraeus week on Capitol Hill.

I have to say, I was impressed at the caliber of the questions asked, but severely disappointed at the caliber of the answers given. The latter is no real surprise, but the former is indeed an improvement.

Before I begin handing out...

As a journalist I have always practiced a form of history from below. My career coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the continuing break-up of the old World Order (the New World Order is still not in place). I preferred to report from the street rather...

Before Vietnam; before JFK, MLK and RFK went down; before we started beating up on one another; before we starting hating one another; before we all became cynics -- there was a moment when all seemed possible. At the time of the 1960 Democratic Convention, I was twelve years old....

The resignation of Fidel Castro is more promising for the burnishing of his legacy than the mostly septuagenarian Cuban hard-liners in Miami and their fawning allies in the Bush administration would like to believe. After all, Mao Tse-tung is still honored in communist China, the fastest-growing capitalist power in the...

If President Bush has his way, the US military will be forced to stay in Iraq indefinitely -- regardless of who wins the presidential election in November. I wanted to draw your attention to an op-ed I wrote in today's Boston Globe, laying out President Bush's worrisome plan:

The...

It should mean a great deal to progressives that in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination Sen. Ted Kennedy favors Sen. Barack Obama over two other colleagues he has worked with in the Senate. No one in the history of that institution has been a more consistent and effective...

I'm headed to the Senate floor right now to speak about startling news from today's newspapers:

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal...

Mitt's speech on his Mormonism today was meant to echo Kennedy's on Catholicism--was it?

In his address--to a groomed audience--Mitt used the term MORMON, how many times?

Once.

Kennedy, in his speech to an audience of Baptists, definitely not home turf, used the term CATHOLIC how many times? Here's the...

: When speaking at the memorial service for Arthur Schlesinger Jr. a while back, Mailer made the odd comment that he was really just an acquaintance of Arthur's. This led many in the audience to presume that he had been invited merely for his celebrity. The funny thing is that...

When you ask parents what they want to accomplish in life, their answers always include opening doors of opportunity for their children, so they can grow up healthy and safe, graduate from high school and college, and achieve the American dream.

Head Start was enacted as...