Joe Biden has a lot to say for himself. I spent a rainy 12-hour day with the vice president on Monday and from beginning to end, I don't think there was any period when he was not talking to people. The man is determined to carry the burden of his work. He wants to show you what he knows. Ohio is a state that the Democrats must carry. This day was devoted to Gov. Ted Strickland,…
October 8, 2010
The Democrats seem determined to teach us the price of vacillation, while the Republicans are bent on instructing us on the rewards of obstruction. What a helluva choice awaits in the November election. This is my sour reflection on the two months of travel ahead of me on the campaign trail - a search for candidates who may lift the gloom and restore some faith in the principled…
August 20, 2010
Earlier this week, as the U.S. Senate went through the motions of debating Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court seat, readers of The New Yorker across the country could review journalist George Packer's masterful article "The Empty Chamber," tracing the decline and fall of that same Senate. Packer shares with thousands of citizens what every reporter who covers the Capitol…
August 6, 2010
Buoyed by a 13-6 vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Elena Kagan is on her way to the Supreme Court. The talk in Washington is what the impending elevation of the former Harvard Law School dean and solicitor general will mean for the capstone of the judiciary. Seated next to a former attorney general at a dinner party last weekend, I put the question to him - and received what…
July 22, 2010
Sometimes you can see events in Washington more clearly when you get out of town. Before I came to Boston last weekend to cover the annual summer meeting of the National Governors Association, I shared the general Beltway view that the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is an exercise in futility. After all, it was almost strangled at birth, when a half-dozen…
July 15, 2010
On June 30, the Congressional Budget Office issued its long-term outlook, predicting that deficits would come down for the next few years as the need for counter-recession spending eases and revenue improves. But then, it warned, "unsustainable" red ink would flow again, creating debts not seen since World War II. The very next day the House of Representatives passed a one-year…
July 8, 2010
A fascinating test of the curative power of sports has been unfolding this week on both sides of the Atlantic, as Washington and Johannesburg look to athletes to lift the gloom surrounding their political leaders. On Tuesday night, Washington took a grateful respite from the oil spill, the congressional primaries and the endless debates on Capitol Hill, and adjourned en masse to…
June 10, 2010
Many in the media have written powerful and appropriate columns decrying the action of the Arizona Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer in passing and signing a punitive law aimed at illegal immigrants. If the law goes into effect despite promised constitutional challenges, the local police in Arizona will be able to stop people they suspect may not belong here and require them to produce…
April 30, 2010
With every passing day, it is becoming clearer that next year the issue of paying for the government will be back at the center of political debate. There will be a head start on the discussion this summer or fall, because some of the expiring Bush tax cuts must be extended. But the hangover from the Great Recession and the lagging unemployment numbers will make it impossible to…
April 12, 2010
On the very same day this week when the Congressional Budget Office warned that the succession of previously unimaginable trillion-dollar-and-more budget deficits could inflict ruin on the United States, the Senate faced a moment of truth. For the first time, a truly bipartisan proposal aimed at averting such a calamity came to a vote. By 53-46, the senators approved the measure…
January 28, 2010
