Last October I flew to Sarasota, Fla., and arranged to stay at the home of a friend who was traveling at the time. She mailed me keys and an address.

I landed late and took a cab. When we pulled up in front of the house, which I'd never seen...

"All politics is local," the late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil opined famously. And New Yorkers have been getting a large dose of the maxim in recent weeks, one out in the open; one not so obvious at all.

Evidently enjoying all the fanfare, New York City politicians and...

Long Island's daily Newsday invited me to write a piece about the local (and now national) controversy over the Mets' new ballpark being named for an incompetent bank in which taxpayers have invested $45 billion. Here's the piece, which turned into some thoughts about populism, politics, and the public...

There are far too many reasons to feel distress, sadness, and anger about Israel's massive air bombardment and invasion of Gaza--its shortsightedness; its counterproductive lethality; the self-righteousness of the so-called "friends of Israel" who have leapt to its defense; tasting the final, spoiled fruits of the Bush Administration's reign of...

Like many of you, since Election Night I have found myself frequently moved by the new reality we live in, now that the astonishing words "President-elect Barack Obama" have become commonplace in our media. These are not the kinds of feelings aging academics are supposed to have. So, prompted by...

5 PM Tuesday, November 4, 2008

I think Barack Obama is in the process of winning today -- so it's worth taking a moment to reflect on what his extraordinary campaign has already meant, and will continue to mean for American politics in the future.

Most simply...

For me the second-worst part of Wednesday night's Obama-McCain debate was realizing that my guy was never going to tear into his opponent, never even going to break a sweat as he explained good policy after good policy. Ok, I figured, he and his campaign must know what they're doing,...

Finally! No longer can anyone--from Friedmanite ideologues to the lords of the Federal Reserve, to GOP hacks, to neoliberal free-traders--say the words "free market" and U.S. economy in the same sentence with a straight face. It's going to cost the American people several trillion dollars, in lost pension funds, lost...

At first I was worried, when a friend wrote me that John McCain's VP choice Sarah Palin was a conservative anti-choice Christian, with a union-member husband, a son going to Iraq, and membership in the NRA. "A deeply cynical choice," I wrote back. "Sure," he agreed, but "she is going...

Ok. I'm 57 years old and cast my first vote in 1972--proudly, I will add--for George McGovern, but in the intervening 36 years I have rarely felt proud of my votes for Democrats, no matter how necessary they have been. There have been wonderful political moments: watching Geraldine Ferraro come...

My father spent more than a quarter century on active duty in the United States Navy, beginning in the last year of World War II, and ending in 1973. Proud of his service, fiercely loyal to the Navy and the country, most of his closest friends served in the military....

By now Alessandra Stanley's condescending, vicious attack on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on the front page of yesterday's New York Times--neither news nor fit to print--has become a scandal in its own right.

Why a television critic, of all people, gets to carry the heavy political water at the...

Many of you will be at Passover Seders tonight. Those of you that won't, well, chalk it up to bad planning. A Seder features good stories, classic family arguments, a rich liturgy, four cups of wine--required by the service!--and often terrific food. Next year get started early finding Jews with...

This is just too delicious. An alert reader sent in this tidbit. At Harvard Law School's 2005 Class Day, the speaker was . . . . . none other than New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who, according to the webpost, "warned graduating 3Ls [that's 3rd year law...

I've begun to agree with my sociologist friend and colleague Doug Eichar at the University of Hartford who told me the other day that he thought Hillary Clinton had "crossed the line" by first, implying that John McCain had better credentials to be President than did Barack Obama; and second,...

Like most New Yorkers, I've been watching the news over the past few days with a mixture of astonishment and, well, astonishment, as Eliot Spitzer has completed the Tri-State Trifecta of disgraced gubernatorial resignations. That's right -- you forgot about John Rowland, right? So here's a prediction: voters and pols...

So most of last night, as I watched the returns, I couldn't shake the feeling that I wanted my guy to just flat-out win, even though I knew there was something wrong with that. It took me till this morning to figure it out. (What can I say? I was...

Forty-eight years ago, on the playground of Crown Elementary School, in Coronado, California, I knew that Richard Nixon should be the next President of the United States, and campaigned vigorously for him among my classmates. He'd been Vice-President for eight years, for goodness' sake, and John F. Kennedy hadn't run...

Roger Clemens

Roger Clemens' performance in his news conference the other day offers yet more evidence about how removed he is from the world that most of us live in, and how little he understands about how fans think about baseball and the world.

He doesn't really understand that...

As I've written before, I don't think there's any reason to think that the Mitchell report snared most of professional baseball's juicers. Just on logical grounds, if a couple of accidental low-level distributors looking for a deal implicated so many players, think about what a real investigation -- with subpoena...