Roman Polanski was on his way to a film festival in which he was to be honored for his life's work when he was arrested last weekend. Some 100 European big shots have released a statement in protest: "Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers,...]]> Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Rep. Barney Frank, the first member of Congress to be re-elected after coming out, is right in telling gays not to abandon the president. As Frank put it, ``The notion that if someone doesn't agree with you 100 percent, then you shouldn't be supportive of him -- versus someone who disagrees with you 100 percent -- is very bad politics.''

But it's hard not to share the disappointment of gay activists who worked so hard to elect this president and now feel sufficiently frustrated that at least a handful publicly withdrew their support for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser next week featuring the vice president.

Since President Obama took office, more than 250 men and...]]> Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Matt Drudge obviously is not happy. "ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE," his headline screams.

I don't blame ABC for agreeing to spend a day next week broadcasting from the White House. You tell me which network would turn down an opportunity to anchor its news and prime-time special from the home of the most popular guy in the world.

Lesley Stahl tells a great story of doing a critical report on President Ronald Reagan's environmental record in connection with his visit to some spectacular backdrop. She expected the White House folks to be furious, but instead they thanked her for the great shots.

Few of the viewers...]]> Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 'What I have no interest in doing is running GM," President Obama said Monday as he assumed ownership of the beacon of free enterprise.

"The era of big government is over," then-President Bill Clinton famously declared in 1996, and even if no one believed it, virtually everyone thought it a very politic thing to say for the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan.

When GM emerges from bankruptcy, the U.S. government will own 60 percent of it and Canada 12.5 percent. That's a lot of government.

Could Americans have changed that much? How do you get from Reagan to Obama in a generation?

In 1984, Democratic presidential nominee Walter...]]> Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Republicans don't want him. The Democrats do. They would have booted him out. We'll do everything we can to support his re-election. It's a tough day when you leave your party, but being a hero certainly beats being reviled. The truth is that by the time he left the Republican Party, Arlen Specter was a man without a Party. As my friend Brian Goldsmith points out, "forty-nine states do not have a moderate Republican senator." Forty-nine down, one to go, I guess.

My first campaign was for a man who went on to be a moderate Republican senator. Ed Brooke was running for attorney general when I worked for him. It was a long time ago. I was truly a girl. My father had gone to law...]]> Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Maybe the most impressive thing about this president, who is, of course, very smart, articulate and well-spoken, is just how cool he is.

I don't mean cool in the teenage sense of fist bumps or style or whatever. I mean cool in the grownup sense of being disciplined and projecting confidence. I mean cool in the sense of a person who is challenged but not overwhelmed, who looks bigger in the big job, not shrunken by it. President Barack Obama is in charge.

A president's job is to come up with policies, make decisions and get legislation passed. That part of the job obviously depends on things like ideology, judgment and competence. I don't know if Obama's budget is too big or...]]> Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If there actually were a Republican Party, they'd be having a field day right now. Not a Glenn Beck field day, but the Washington-politics kind, where you hold hearings and press conferences and announce alternate legislation; where you run ads in key districts making clear what's wrong with their approach; where you do radical things like unify to oppose earmarks, renounce all of your own and become a party that stands for something. Imagine that. Beck's popularity derives not only from his talent, but also from the vacuum of any other way -- like involvement in politics -- to voice passionately felt concerns. God knows, you wouldn't write to your congressman.

The Republicans in...]]> Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Everyone is affected by this economic freefall, even if you don't work for an automaker or a failing financial institution, even if you're still employed and didn't buy a house you couldn't afford, even if you're still paying your bills and putting food on the table.

I know lots of people who thought they'd retire in the not-so-distant future, and now they can't. "Safe" investments turned out not to be so safe after all, and money set aside for kids to go to college or for health care costs just isn't there. Seniors who thought they would be fine aren't. Kids who thought they'd have money for college don't. People whose biggest investment is their house -- and that's the case for...]]> Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 How do you live like that? How do you raise your children knowing that, when they graduate from high school, they will go to war against those who do not place the same value on human life as you do, fighting people who send their children to be suicide bombers?

Amid the violence in Gaza, Israel stopped shooting for three hours yesterday to allow the people to get food and supplies, to allow trucks with medical supplies to deliver them in safety. Imagine Hamas doing the same thing to help Israeli civilians. I cannot. Not for a minute.

I do not always like everything Israel does. I do not always like everything my own country does. But I love Israel for the determination and...]]> Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Right now, the race is somewhere between clobbered and landslide, somewhere between 1988 (seven points/clobbered) and 1980 (nine points/landslide). Not close. Not pretty.

Wednesday night was John McCain's last big chance to change things. It was the last moment that a significant percentage of Americans will tune in to see the two candidates. It was the last chance for McCain to take on Barack Obama on an even playing field.

Starting Thursday, and for the 18 days that follow, Obama will be outspending McCain everywhere that matters by 2-1 or 3-1 - or more. Starting Thursday, Republicans everywhere will be covering their rear ends, trying to make sure that they are not swept...]]> Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 It is, of course, true that Michigan has gone Democratic in the last four elections. But it's been close, especially in the last two. What's more, Michigan was not an Obama stronghold. Hillary won it handlily in the contest that wasn't; McCain himself won it in 2000, even as Bush was steaming toward the nomination.

Michigan is full of the sort of lunch bucket white Democrats who started off this summer with more questions than affection for Barack Obama. It is the home, historically and ideologically, of the so-called Reagan Democrats. It represents precisely the sort of sate that a victorious McCain would have liked to win, or at least force Obama to spend money to beat him there....]]> Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 On the other hand, if you're for McCain, you can point to his strong performance in the last hour of the debate, his mastery of foreign policy, his repeated references to the leaders he knew and the places he'd been, and argue that in a dangerous world, competence on foreign policy and national security is a threshold test. If you're for McCain, you say he seemed vigorous and engaged, which is to say, not old; that he drove home his message that Obama just didn't know and didn't understand the things a President needs to know and understand, and that McCain scored with the point that he wouldn't need on-the-job training.

This much is almost certain: if you were for Obama going in,...]]> Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The story is about how that happened. Hewitt, who produced the debate for television, had hired a makeup artist to do makeup for both candidates. Backstage, in advance of the debate, he introduced her to the two contenders, and asked them if they wanted her to do their makeup. "No," Jack Kennedy immediately said.

What could Nixon do? It was one of those moments, man to man. If Kennedy was going to turn down makeup, so would Nixon.

So there was Nixon, with his shiny 5 o'clock shadow, looking vaguely sinister in the unforgiving light of television. And Kennedy? When he came out, Hewitt immediately noted that he was, indeed, wearing makeup. He'd put it on himself. He carried it...]]> Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The sucking sound we hear out here is the vacuum cleaner coming in to raise money here to spend in places like Ohio and Michigan.

Public-funding idealists, myself included, once thought that giving each candidate $84 million might free them from the need to spend hours having their pictures taken with rich people (which is what Obama did for the first half of his "dinner" in Beverly Hills), but we have learned better.

Obama chose not to take public funding (a decision that may or may not look smart in retrospect) so as to be able to control directly more of the spending on his behalf. Whether that control is worth $84 million depends on how many events he has to do like last...]]> Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The Vice Presidency obviously has the potential to matter a great deal, since the VP becomes President if something happens to the man we elect. But the Vice Presidential nominee, history suggests, doesn't make much of a difference at all. Obviously, choosing someone with serious health issues in his past (as George McGovern did, when he picked Tom Eagleton, unaware of the latter's history of electric shock treatments), can prove to be a real embarrassment, and call into question the judgment of the one doing the picking. But the fact is that McGovern moved quickly to replace Eagleton with the much-respected and Kennedy-related Sergeant Shriver, who was unable to help the nominee from...]]> Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Of course, by the end of next week, even if Obama has made a mistake in giving half his convention to my friends Bill and Hill, and going for the roll call vote (instead of just taking the debt) and even if his football stadium speech does play right into the hands of the McCain "He's just a rock star" message, the senator from Illinois should still be ahead. And then, by the end of the next week, barring any speeches about Holy Wars by the likes of Pat Buchanan, McCain could be up again.

There's an old saying in show business: No one knows anything. Movie executives, at least the honest ones, will tell you that if they'd given green lights to half (actually way less than half) of...]]> Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 "Heinous," one woman wrote to me, in describing my thoughts, and me. Heinous? Oh, of course, and racist and stupid. Thanks. Such comments came not from conservatives who oppose Barack Obama but from true-believers who are ready to condemn anyone who has not joined the revival.

Hold on a minute.

I've been out there fighting to elect Democrats for the better part of three decades. I know what it's like to win, and I know what it's like to lose, and winning is definitely better. And believe me, you don't win by denouncing people on your own side (or even the other side), by questioning their motives, impugning their integrity, and making clear that there is no room for anyone...]]> Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 But, will it make any difference in terms of who is going to win this election? I'm not sure.

The point of the trip, of course, was to give Obama gravitas on foreign policy issues, to help voters forget that he is only six years removed from the Illinois State Senate and only eight years from having his credit card declined when he tried to rent a car at the 2000 Los Angeles convention (a story he used to tell on himself). So there he was, looking, acting, being treated, like he is already president, walking in the footsteps of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in Berlin, even borrowing their words. Every Obama supporter I know was in heaven.

Problem is, there aren't enough...]]> Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 I certainly understand exactly why it is happening. Right now, Obama is bigger than any rock star. Right now, every reporter wants to be close to him, on his good side, at the front of the bus, or at least the front of the line for an interview. They are reporting what they are getting, which in many cases means what they are given, not exactly reporting by any definition. But who's to complain? No one wants to offend a guy who just might be President. No one wants to be on the "bad" list, the list of the last to know, of people who don't get the invites or the leaks or the tidbits that their editors and bosses back home are reading in somebody else's blog or watching on someone else's...]]> Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 So here's the bottom line. The polls make me nervous. Not desperate, not hopeless, not resigned, but nervous. Barack Obama should be ahead right now. Way ahead. Not even close is how it should look, even though I wouldn't for a minute tell you that if it were that would seal the deal. But the fact that my old candidate Mike Dukakis was running better 20 years ago against George Bush than Obama is today against John McCain makes me nervous. It should be a sign to some of the whiners on my side, still worried about whether Obama is liberal enough or whether he's doing enough to help Hillary, that it's time to stop whining and start working. Otherwise, it will be hello President...]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 He drove some of my liberal friends somewhat crazy, to say the least, as President Bush's press secretary, not because he was in any way more dishonest than his predecessors (hello, Scott McLellan) but because he was so much better at it, more appealing, so much more likable, that he could almost make die-hards sympathize with positions they didn't take. He was great at the job, and he loved it. It was a gift, and he knew it.

Tony learned early about loss. His mother died when he was a kid, and she was only 37. He took good care of himself, but he understood that cancer could be lurking, as it was, and when it hit him, hard, he was as aggressive as you could be in fighting back. He...]]> Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 As for NASCAR, the only Democratic candidate who I know of to campaign there was Bill Clinton - and he won! Somehow, it's hard to imagine Mike Dukakis or John Kerry at NASCAR, which is, of course, the point.

And while it certainly occurred to me to move Dukakis' convention speech outside the hall in 1988, and I even suggested it to the Gore people in 2000, there are all kinds of reasons to think that Barack Obama may in fact be the first Democratic candidate since John Kennedy in 1960 who can pull off a speech to a football-size crowd.

None of these moves is without risk, of course, which is always the case when you push the envelope. There's a good argument to be made that...]]> Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500