Senator Evan Bayh’s surprise announcement that he won’t seek re-election has generated another bout of Washington’s current ailment – whining about a broken Senate, a paralyzed political system and huge unaddressed problems. “We’ve got a lot of good people in Congress, but they’re trapped in a dysfunctional system,” Bayh, the Indiana Democrat, said in explaining …
With Washington paralyzed by snow and its chattering class focused on President Obama’s changing fortunes, the next phase of a far more monumental story for both the United States and the world will play out this week in the Middle East. Iran’s regime and the opposition Green Movement are bracing for what could prove a …
For Washington, it is, with apologies to Dickens, “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” It is a time of growing power at home but of shrinking influence abroad. They are two sides of the same coin, for they both reflect the economic and fiscal challenges that stand before our nation’s leaders. At …
I speak to you tonight from the Oval Office, from which earlier presidents have come to you in times of crisis. We, too, are facing a crisis. To put it simply, we are living on borrowed time and borrowed money. Here in Washington, we are spending far more than we are raising in revenues each …
Continue reading “The best budget speech that you’ll never hear”
About 20 years ago, I was talking to an advertising executive who had just started work at National Journal, the weekly magazine for which I wrote, when she asked with a smile, “So, are you going to write some good stories for my advertisers?” I was, of course, appalled – as would be any journalist …
Although Washington is poised to enact what he calls “a genuinely epochal expansion of health care,” Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson laments the absence of a vibrant progressive movement that could fuel the enactment of a broad-scale public agenda to rival FDR‟s New Deal or LBJ‟s Great Society. “[W]ithout left pressure from below,” Meyerson writes …
Every American president eventually faces a defining question – whether to assuage his supporters by telling them what they want to hear or challenge them by telling them what they need to hear. John Kennedy sought to educate the nation about civil rights, which won him no friends among his fellow Democrats in the South. …