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 …
“Now, it’s not productive, given the history of the U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling – the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections.” President Obama, June 16, 2009 Responding to Iran’s fraudulent Presidential election and subsequent protests “America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal. We will bear witness to …
Continue reading “Letter From Washington / Obama and Human Rights: Hitting the “Reset Button””
Though he did not coin the phrase, the influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith popularized the notion of “conventional wisdom,” describing it more than a half-century ago as “the ideas which are esteemed at any time” for both their “acceptability” and “predictability.”i Such ideas, he might have added, become “conventional wisdom” when they gravitate from the …
Continue reading “Letter From Washington / Adventures in Engagement”
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. …