It is very hard to get to chat with any president. But any president has to know what is in the big three of American newspapers (or their Web sites): The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. And those papers right now are filled with shouting and whispering to President Obama. The latest shout, a big one, is the leaking to the Times of cables to the State Department from the U.S. ambassador to...]]> Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 LOS ANGELES -- Was George Santayana right when he said that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it?

Well, perhaps the Republican Party can test that thesis for the rest of us. Forty-five years ago the Republicans in convention -- the convention that nominated Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater for president -- tried to boo New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller off the stage when he said:

"These extremists feed on fear, hate and terrorism. They encourage disunity ... The Republican Party must repudiate those people."

It was no tea party, that one. Angry Goldwater delegates began booing and chanting, "We Want Barry!" Many of the people in the hall wanted...]]> Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 AUSTIN, Texas -- A guy walks up to you in a bar here and asks, "Are you a Republican, conservative or independent?" You can't tell if he's kidding. After all, this is the most liberal place in the state. It's also where I first heard about Shona Holmes, the Canadian lady.

Holmes, a 45-year-old citizen of a place called Waterdown in Ontario, has become the Joan of Arc of the battle against health care reform in the United States. As she tells it, OHIP, the acronym for the "free" (taxes pay for it) Canadian health care system, sentenced her to burn at the stake by putting her on a waiting list for analysis and treatment of what she calls a "brain tumor." Actually, it was a benign...]]> Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- Obviously, the world, or at least a heck of a lot of foreigners, love Barack Obama. The Nobel Peace Prize is an impressive, if surprising, symbol of that.

The prize, one hopes, will give American moral standing a boost after revelations of torture and such in recent years. Ironically, though, it will probably increase the xenophobia of the American right. Mouthy conservatives are going to see this as proof that Obama is not one of "us." They're going to say he's one of "them" -- them being most anyone who does not speak English as a first language and some who do.

One right-winger, who happens to be a foreigner, the Israeli legislator Danny Danon, belittled...]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- We do not pay the president by the hour and, I understand, he has some pretty good telecommuting equipment. So if he wants to take a 20-hour trip to Copenhagen, even in a lost cause, the Republic will survive.

Politics being what it is, it is kind of a joke to listen to President Obama's Republican opponents, the loyal opposition -- to everything -- work him over for a day away from the Oval Office, the old-fashioned one in Washington. Suddenly, the health care reform they have been trying to undermine or even blow up is so crucial that the president can't take a nap.

And his Democratic friends and usually friendly pundits are upset that Obama violated a...]]> Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- President Obama told us he was going to walk tall on Afghanistan. Now there are hints he might flip-flop on that one.

I hope so.

"I'm going to take a very deliberate process in making those decisions," he said the other day after a couple of years of saying the battle there was a war of necessity. "There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things that I'm absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make a determination about resources."

Necessary for what? Perhaps we needed to go there eight years ago to try to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. Who do we want to kill now and why? Pride aside, what...]]> Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- Jimmy Carter once promised he would never lie to us. But he has been known to exaggerate a bit. I think he did that in proclaiming that opposition to President Obama and his agenda of change is "overwhelmingly" because of the president's race.

"Change" is the key word here. There are certainly people out there who cannot stand the idea of an African-American living in the White House. But there are a lot more, I believe, who really think this guy is going to ruin the country they love, or the country they imagine or remember.

Some of them are just nuts. But there is certainly nothing new about that. Populism and suspicion (or hatred) of real or perceived...]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- If you grew up in New Jersey, you learned a lot about the Hessians, the German soldiers hired by the British to put down the American Revolution. Most famously, 900 of them were captured by George Washington's ragged troops after they crossed the Delaware River on Christmas 1776 and overran the British encampment at Trenton.

There were 30,000 Hessians brought to the American colonies, most of them billeted in Jersey and in New York. Some were real soldiers, assigned to King George III by his German cousins in the province of Hesse. The others were conscripts and criminals, though the crime of many was just being poor. They were a flashpoint for American recruitment...]]> Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- The United States ranks first in the world in health care, at least if you only count how much we spend on health care. We spend 15.3 percent of our gross domestic product -- all we produce in a year -- according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is something like the accounting office of the world's wealthiest countries.

Behind us on the list of top 10 big spenders are Switzerland: 11.6 percent; France: 11.1 percent; Germany: 10.7 percent; Canada: 9.8 percent; Sweden: 9.1 percent; United Kingdom: 8.3 percent; Japan: 8.0 percent; Mexico: 6.4 percent; Taiwan: 6.2 percent.

Those numbers are the first statistics in a...]]> Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The last time I saw Ted Kennedy he was, in Tom Wolfe's phrase, "A man in full." It was Labor Day 2007, on Cape Cod, and he was singing and laughing hugely through one of the those parody songs that folks compose for friends' birthdays. He was great, lit up the place.

He was free at last, I thought. He had the right job and the right wife. He was free of the presidential ambitions forced on him by others, especially by his dead brothers; he was free of being a Kennedy. He was what he was meant to be, a great senator. The great senators stand for something, and they stay a long time and get things done. He had a mission, making health care an American right, and too many friends to...]]> Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- A year ago, my wife and I went to her physician's office here and the doctor began: "So, I understand you to want to talk about end-of-life issues."

No!!!!

There was a mistake in my wife's records. Happens all the time, but that did not make it less frightening. Fear is always a passenger when hospitals and health are the destination.

But of course we have talked about such things between ourselves: burial or cremation, grave sites, the children and grandchildren, last wills and testaments, "living wills," hospices, pain medication, extraordinary measures to prolong life. It is part of the dialogue of family and health care. So I have real contempt for...]]> Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 NEW YORK -- The headline of the Gallup Poll released last Friday was: "Seniors Most Skeptical of Healthcare Reform -- More seniors think reform law would be harmful, not beneficial, to them."

The Gallup numbers indicate that 23 percent of Americans from 18 to 49 believe they will have less access to medical care if the country's health care system is "reformed." Thirty-four percent of respondents between 50 and 64 say they expect to have less access. Among seniors, those 65 and older, only 12 percent say they think they will have more access, while 36 percent say they will have less access.

Is that because seniors are wiser than everyone else? Yes! Americans 65 and older,...]]> Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- After I turned 40, I wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine called "Breaking Down." It began with a description of me doing push-ups and collapsing because of a terrific pain in my shoulder. Pinched nerve, it turned out to be, between my fourth and fifth vertebrae. Then came back problems, loose teeth ... whatever.

I compared myself to my first car, a 1947 Chevy I bought for a $100. Despite loving care, Pep Boys and junkyard parts, the car broke down most every week. It ended up in one of those junkyards, and I said I would, too. Many people thought it was funny. My mother, however, was not amused.

"You have no idea what you're talking about," she...]]> Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- There was a seal of the Senate of the United States on the marble wall behind the chairman's seat in the hearing room last week where the Senate Committee on the Judiciary questioned Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. They should have taken it down and engraved a Miranda warning: "Anything you say can and will be used against you ..."

Or, if you prefer something shorter: "Let's Pretend!"

To sort of paraphrase Winston Churchill speaking of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, "Never was so much said by so many to such little purpose." Talk about wasting taxpayers' money and media time: How do these people manage to keep a straight face while...]]> Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- In the military, after action or a mission, officers are required to file "Lessons Learned" reports, basically reviewing what worked and what did not. From 1961 to 1968, the most important of those reports were sent to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, possibly the smartest fool ever to serve at the highest level of government in the United States.

What lessons are to be learned from the long life of McNamara, who died last week at the age of 93?

1. Smart doesn't always count. Judgment counts. Honesty counts, with yourself and others.

2. Outlive your enemies. History is easier to spin if there are fewer surviving witnesses to what actually...]]> Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- There is a story about Rep. Henry Waxman during hearings on steroid use in baseball that some say is apocryphal. But I believe it -- and we have been friends for more than 25 years. It is said that after the sensational hearing where Mark McGwire said he did not want to talk about the past, the congressman came into his office the next morning and said he was surprised there was so little coverage in the newspapers.

"It's all over the sports pages," a staffer told him.

"Oh," said Waxman. He has never read the sports pages.

You could say he is some kind of pushy grind. Or you could say he has been the most effective Democratic congressman of his...]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- The word "recession" became part of my vocabulary in 1958, when I dropped out of college to look for a job. It was a tough year, particularly if your resume was as thin as mine. Working as a lifeguard, selling records at a department store or lugging material around at an ironworks did not impress many employers.

I did get a job, though, as a "sales engineer" at an industrial supply business in Hillside, N.J., taking orders and figuring out pump and V-belt systems. The guy who hired me liked my attitude, he said. He liked my "optimism." It turned out my most salable talent was being voted "Class Optimist" at Lincoln High School in Jersey City.

Since then,...]]> Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- The New York Times and CBS News headlined and broadcast last week that their polling indicated Americans have more confidence in President Obama than they do in his programs -- especially when it comes to health care and the federal budget.

I don't find that surprising, and if I worked in the White House I might even think it was pretty good news. No one from Main Street to Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue knows exactly what to do about the wheelbarrow loads of problems being dumped on the doorstep of the White House these days. What those numbers mean to me is most people most of the time still think Barack Obama is the right guy to try to figure out what to do...]]> Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- Growing up in Jersey City in the late 1950s, I thought the United States was an Italian country governed by the Irish. So it was a rather pleasant surprise for me when I moved out into the country and realized that this was a nation of white Protestants, governed by white Protestant men, for white Protestant men.

Those were the days, my friends, we thought they'd never end. But they did, and now we have a black president and he has nominated a "Latina," daughter of Puerto Ricans, to be a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor has led to a national dialogue worthy of "Saturday Night Live."...]]> Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 BERLIN -- On Sept. 14, 1948, Capt. Kenneth Slaker of Lincoln, Neb., was making his sixth flight as a Berlin Airlift pilot, bringing food and fuel to the World War II enemy capital, which was blockaded on land and on rivers by the army of the Soviet Union. The United States Air Force, along with Great Britain's Royal Air Force, was trying to keep alive more than 2 million people in West Berlin, which was surrounded by East Germany and hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Red Army.

Slaker knew the way. He had flown 50 bombing runs over Berlin in 1944. The briefing this day, as the Soviet-American alliance of the war was deteriorating into "Cold War," had ended:

"The...]]> Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- It's just another day in paradise. Sunny, 75 degrees. Also, this news from the morning papers around California last Friday:

L.A. CANCELS MOST SUMMER SCHOOL CLASSES

GOV. PROPOSES 5 PERCENT CUT IN STATE EMPLOYEE SALARIES

AREA'S STATE PARKS ARE ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK

COUNTY RAIDS HOMELESS CAMP

BART FARES GOING UP 6.5 PERCENT ON JULY 1

That's one day's news. Yesterday was just as bad -- and tomorrow will be the same, maybe worse.

California is collapsing. Schools are closing. Teachers are being laid off. Policemen are being laid off. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing shutting down 220 of 279 state parks, including Sutter's...]]> Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- Another year, another graduation. But, of course, this is not just another year. For the graduates themselves, it is one of the most important times of their lives. For many of them, their parents and millions of ordinary Americans, it is a very, very tough time.

My graduation was last Friday -- not as a student, but as a teacher at the University of Southern California. For me it was a great year because I had great students.

I hear I'm in a dying business -- not education, but my field: The things I teach, journalism and writing, are destined to go the way of old flesh. I don't believe that. More important, I don't want my students to believe that....]]> Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 NEW YORK -- This is how they got young men into the military in Honduras in the 1980s: They would show Kung Fu movies in local theaters and then surround the building with trucks, scooping up the audiences, young men, of course, and driving off them to army camps and basic training.

We are more subtle with our volunteer army: We pay bonuses, offer college tuition and run television commercials. Great ones! You see a lot of them if you watch sports on the tube. Watching a professional basketball playoff game last week, I was taken by a U.S. Army ad showing action scenes around the world as young men and women in uniform recited "The Soldiers Creed."

That begins: "I am an...]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 NEW YORK -- Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord that the United States and India have plans to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

I, for one, was badly shaken on Monday when Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a news conference to report on his recent trip to Pakistan and his private meetings with President Obama and the White House's security guys, beginning with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The Associated Press headline was:

"MULLEN SAYS HE BELIEVES PAKISTAN NUKES ARE SECURE"

Believes? That's nice, especially considering Pakistani officials have been lying to the world about those weapons for more than 25 years. They...]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500
DALLAS -- Rush Limbaugh, the entertainer, announced the other day that he was moving out of New York City because New York Gov. David Paterson proposed higher state taxes on the rich. Paterson reacted by saying that if he had known Limbaugh would go, he would have proposed the tax a long time ago.

I had about the same reaction when Texas Gov. Rick Perry began babbling about the Lone Star State seceding from the United States. His rebel yell prompted a scene that may not be remembered as long as the Alamo, but should be. There were a few dozen of Perry's constituents waving "Secede Now" signs in one hand and American flags in the other.

Perry, who had his facts and...]]> Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LOS ANGELES -- As many teachers of history and journalism do, I show my students "The Battle of Algiers," not because it is one of the great films, which it is, but because it is a good way to begin talking about the cultural clash between Islam and the West.

The film, made in 1966, ends in 1960, two years before the French left its greatest North African possession and the country of Algeria became independent. If you remember the ending -- and the movie was not easy to see here as we marched into or against Vietnam -- it showed an Algerian crowd emerging from fog and tear gas to taunt French soldiers, shouting for freedom and independence. The final shot is of a young Muslim...]]> Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Is this a great country or what?

More on that later. But first I checked "The Gene Pool," which is a Washington Post online blog by Gene Weingarten, who posts provocative questions to allow his "members," mostly liberal, to make fools of themselves. Anonymously.

The question of the day on Thursday was preceded by this:

"If you've been following the extraordinary story of the U.S. sailors who re-took their ship from Somali pirates, you've been treated to an amazing tale of excitement and adventure. But if you've been reading the Reader Comments to the story, you learned what this is REALLY about: Barack Obama! And it's not good! Because he's an anti-American wimp, or...]]> Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 I would expand on that. The new president did not wallow in the politics of blaming inherited problems and conundrums on his incompetent predecessor. The Obama strategies, it seems to me, are trying everything at the same time to see what works -- economically at home, militarily and politically abroad.

I hope it works, or perhaps I should say, I hope something works. I suspect Obama will be open to change, even as his congressional opponents call it "flip-flopping," which often means "growth" or "common sense." As Obama said Friday: "After years of mixed results (in Pakistan), we will not provide a blank check ... (nor) blindly stay the course."

The course is enormously...]]> Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In Congress, the best example of bad times ahead is Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who is in headline trouble because he was supposed to know what he was doing. It turns out that he or his staff wrote the clauses that allowed AIG, the insurance monster, to eat taxpayers' lunch. He didn't get it, and there's a reason: The overeaters many Americans would like to see in jail are the people who financed his campaigns.

Dodd is a Democrat who may be headed for involuntary retirement, but Republicans will probably end up in worse trouble. The party of big markets and small government is to blame for a good deal of what went wrong. That makes it painful to watch and listen to those...]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "I remember my own mother giving me a lecture once when she had to wait in Germany two weeks for the neighboring hospital to have a bed. And I said, 'Oh, I can make a phone call and get you in earlier.' And she said I was asocial. She says, 'Then some other lady has to step back. How could this be decent?'"

Dr. Reinhardt, whose work I have followed for a while, was questioned last Wednesday on "Fresh Air" by the estimable National Public Radio host Terry Gross. He also said this:

"What kind of country would you want to live in? Do you want to live in a country where someone who loses their job loses their health insurance? Is that what you want?

"Do you want a system...]]> Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Johnathan Krohn, a talented speaker who could start a religion if he wanted to, defined the Republican Party as a shell and conservatism as the filling -- and added, "The filling is what matters." Yes, but election laws are such that principled conservatives are essentially forced to fill the shell of Republicanism, as liberals are almost forced to be Democrats. We have pretty much eliminated third parties with laws that are really contracts between the two parties to preserve each other.

This is Krohn's definition of the filling: "Respect for the Constitution, respect for life, less government and personal responsibility."

Few at CPAC, convening in Washington, would argue...]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 "The era of big government is back, and Democrats are asking you to pay for it," said a more important Ohio congressman, John Boehner, the leader of the Republican minority in the House.

Oh? I did not realize that fighting two wars, off the budget, and still managing to run up record deficits year after year was a hallmark of small government.

"It is simply a continuation of the misguided notion that America can spend, tax and borrow its way to prosperity," said a Wisconsin Republican congressman, Paul Ryan.

Spend, tax and borrow. It is not nice for Republicans to criticize their great hero, President Reagan. The man from California got to the White House by attacking...]]> Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 The voters? C'mon. Bloomberg the talented billionaire, perhaps the most self-financed candidate in the history of the Republic, pays his own way and governs as he pleases. Except for the fact he does not speak Latin, he could be a Roman emperor. The Roman democracy, by the way, along with ancient Greece, had term limits -- usually one -- on officials below the emperor.

So, barring court action, Bloomberg, whom I will vote for again and who would have been my choice as President Obama's vice president, will be pretty much mayor-for-life. Paying his own way, the mayor has presented himself as a not-very-democratic Democrat, Republican and Independent, whatever it...]]> Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 "I was not allowed to leave without going from bed to bed. Forty beds. At each one, stumps of arms or legs would be thrust at me, or dressings would be lifted away to show a red hole that had been a face. A young man, what was left of him, held my eyes with his until I cried as the blankets were pulled from his wasting body, most of it scar tissue from burns. ... An older man named Abdul Kareem, who said he was a farmer at a place called Baghlan, north of Kabul, proudly showed me the foot-long stumps of his legs."

"Abdul Kareem said, through a translator, that a Russian had thrown a grenade into his house and killed three of his children. "'How do you know it was a Russian?'" I...]]> Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 "There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party's defeat on Nov. 4. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000 -- many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases -- by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South."

The proof of that pudding was dramatized last week in Washington when every single Republican in the House of Representatives voted against the new president's...]]> Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 The 44th president obviously made a decision to project the number and complexity of the challenges he and we, the people, are facing these days, beginning with a fading economy and losing wars. The speech struck me as a mini-State of the Union Address, a laundry list touching all the bases. Unfortunately, the address that reverberated in my head was President Gerald Ford's message on Jan. 15, 1975, in which he said:

"I must say to you that the state of the union is not good: Millions of Americans are out of work. Recession and inflation are eroding the money of millions more. Prices are too high, and sales are too slow. This year's federal deficit will be about $30 billion; next...]]> Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 All of that is true and defines Bush's failures. He was too willing to make tough decisions, and the problem was what was in his mind, or rather what was not in his mind: history. We were governed by the uninformed instincts of an intellectually lazy and incurious man who believed that his gut was superior to unfamiliar wisdom. He was ignorant of history. And history will find him ignorant.

Now, he, or at least his people, are making their pitch to that bitch goddess. The case is direct and simple. In his own words:

"There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without...]]> Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 In September of 1994, I was interviewing President Bill Clinton, thinking we might ramble on for hours as we had in the past. The Clinton White House was like that. After 25 minutes -- I had asked for a half-hour -- his new chief of staff came in with a big smile, a few words of greeting, and I was out of there. Suddenly, the White House did not feel like a fraternity house or an Internet startup anymore.

In last Thursday's Los Angeles Times, under the headline, "Obama Takes the State's Best Bet," the paper's veteran Sacramento columnist, George Skelton, wrote: "Thanks a bunch, Mr. President-elect. You've just taken away California's best hope for government and political reform --...]]> Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 "I've worked some with him, and as far as I can tell, he's the real deal," she said. "He is what he says he is."

In politics, that is saying a lot. But will that be true when he is the most powerful (and most challenged) man in the world after Jan. 20? So far, it seems, it will be true.

Obama, as I keep thinking and saying, represents a new generation. As well as he speaks, he actually communicates his ideas and thoughts in the multimedia/new media mix of the day. It is a day my daughter understands better than I do.

Exhibit A is his transition Web site. It is an amazing political document, a transparent document that might come back to haunt the 44th president because...]]> Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 "2. Economic Meltdown; 3. Oil Prices; 4. Iraq; 5. Beijing Olympics; 6. Chinese Earthquake; 8. Mumbai Terrorism; 10. Russia-Georgia War."

No. 1, of course, was the best news -- about a man preaching hope: the election of Barack Obama.

The AP list was compiled by interviewing 150 newspaper editors and news directors. One of them, Linda Grist Cunningham of the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star, said: "As far as I am concerned, there were only two stories this year. Global economy collaspses (sending every country into financial, political and personal chaos) and Obama elected U.S. president, changing the way America does business -- financial, political and personal."

The AP...]]> Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Never missing a chance to rough up a Democrat, the News played my piece across the bottom of Page One. So, that year Frankie gave the money to St. Mary's Hospital and did hold a party in a restaurant out on Route 4. He invited me. I walked in the door and this huge fist moving at about a hundred miles an hour came at my face and stopped about a quarter-inch from my rather large nose. At the other end of the fist was Rocky Marciano, the heavyweight champion of the world, who turned out to be a friend of Graves.

Frankie was standing behind him, laughing like hell.

Twenty years later, I flew into Newark Airport -- now we say Newark International Airport -- and picked up a copy...]]> Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 There was a wonderful example of that written by Hector Tobar, a Los Angeles Times correspondent returning home after seven years covering and living in Latin America. "Coming Home to a New America" was the Times headline, although Tobar also recognized some of what is enduring in these United States.

Tobar began: "In Argentina, Mexico and other places I lived and visited as a foreign correspondent, people asked me if my country had gone crazy.

"I listened to taxi drivers in Buenos Aires rail against 'the imperialist Bush.' In Mexican villages, farmers asked me: 'Why does everyone over there hate us so much?'

"And yet, from thousands of miles away, I pined for the...]]> Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 I concluded then that: "My own feeling is that only a strong president with a mandate for governing through a universal crisis -- a necessary war or devastating climate change -- can bring any bipartisanship or, better, nonpartisanship to Washington."

There is no doubt that we do now have that "universal crisis," though it is economic rather that climatological or military. The question then is whether President-elect Barack Obama will prove to be a strong enough leader to embrace and encourage bipartisanship. So far, I would say cautiously, that maybe he is, as his opponent jibed in debate, "That one."

The two obvious pieces of evidence that that might be true are his...]]> Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Or, as Mort Kondracke, the executive editor of Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, put it:

"How can the Republican Party rebound? The first step would be to quit letting Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham set its agenda."

Ronald Brownstein of the National Journal added:

"As George W. Bush's presidency winds down, the Republican Party's greatest problem is that it doesn't appear to be reaching much of anybody who isn't already watching Fox News. Bush leaves behind a party that looks less like a coalition than a clubhouse. ... Until Republicans restore their ability to speak to voters in the Philadelphia suburbs and to their counterparts outside Detroit and...]]> Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 The quote is from the introduction of a new book by a remarkable historian (and former political operative), Harold Holzer, who has written more than 30 books on Lincoln. The new one, published this month, is titled "Lincoln: President-elect." It is pure, well-researched and well-written revisionist history because the conventional historical wisdom is that Lincoln mishandled and misused those months, saying little and doing less. Holzer disputes that in more than 600 pages, arguing that Lincoln made some small mistakes, but brilliantly used what the author calls "confident silence" to build the base for his monumental presidency.

Now, of course, another man of little high-level...]]>