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 By common consent one of America’s two or three greatest newspapers, The Washington Post is particularly celebrated for its coverage of American politics. Its opinion pages are home to some of America’s most prominent commentators, including George Will, Robert Novak, and Charles Krauthammer on the right, David Broder in the center, and E.J. Dionne, Jr., and Harold Meyerson on the left. Meyerson began his weekly (usually Wednesday) column there in March of 2003, just as the Iraqi War was beginning.
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GOP debate: Mitt Romney’s night
January 26, 2012
Washington Post
One of the mysteries of Mitt Romney’s campaign until tonight was how could a guy with so much money not buy himself a better debate coach. But sometime between South Carolina and tonight, the private equity investor must have made the right investment. Tonight, for the first time ever in a Republican presidential debate, Romney was extremely effective, particularly in the first half-hour when he took it to Newt Gingrich on the question of the former Speaker’s scorched-earth rhetoric. He had Gingrich on the defensive for the first time since this interminable run of debates began.
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A new vision for America: Restoring a country that makes things
January 25, 2012
Washington Post
So much for post-industrial America. After decades of our leaders and sages assuring us that the United States would thrive as we moved beyond manufacturing, President Obama used his State of the Union address to officially declare post-industrial America an unqualified bust.
Ours has become, he said, a land of “outsourcing, bad debt and phony financial profits.” Reconstructing “an economy that’s built to last,” by contrast, means revitalizing manufacturing, he said. The president proposed ending tax breaks for corporations that move offshore and imposing a tax on their overseas profits, while cutting taxes on domestic manufacturers. He promised a trade enforcement unit to investigate foreign violations of trade law — for instance, China’s massive state subsidies to solar and wind power companies, which manufacture almost entirely for export. So far, U.S. manufacturers and unions that suspect foreign countries of violating trade laws have had to investigate such practices themselves: No agency of government has been empowered to initiate legal actions against trade law miscreants, which speaks volumes about the unquestioning faith that our elites have had in the blessings of free trade and the benefits of corporate offshoring.
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Obama vs. Romney: Who will blue-collar Americans hate less?
January 19, 2012
Washington Post
If Mitt Romney becomes the Republican nominee and faces off against Barack Obama in November, we may finally be able to answer a question that has vexed students of American politics since the heyday of George Wallace: Which elite do white, blue-collar Americans hate more?
Despite Newt Gingrich’s apparent surge in South Carolina, Romney remains the odds-on favorite for the Republican nod. And a Romney-Obama contest would pit the very personification of the two elites that generations of Americans have been brought up to loathe: the paper-shuffling, unfeeling banker, utterly out of touch with most Americans’ concerns, and who comes from inherited wealth to boot; and the cool, academic social engineer who is culturally estranged from the white working class and isn’t opposed to governments helping racial minorities.
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Republican candidates try to assert their blue-collar instincts
January 10, 2012
Washington Post
With attacks on Mitt Romney’s career as a venture capitalist coming fast and furious from his primary opponents, the Republican presidential campaigns have entered strange new territory for the GOP: economic reality, or, more precisely, the economy that most people experience.
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No longer the land of opportunity
January 03, 2012
Washington Post
“Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society,” Mitt Romney wrote in USA Today last month. The coming election, Romney told Wall Street Journal editors last month, will be “a very simple choice” between Obama’s “European social democratic” vision and “a merit-based opportunity society — an American-style society — where people earn their rewards based on their education, their work, their willingness to take risks and their dreams.”
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Gingrich’s miscarriage of justice
December 20, 2011
Washington Post
Between the death of Kim Jong Il and Newt Gingrich’s descent in the polls, it’s been a tough couple of days for fans of tubby megalomaniacs. But Newt, undaunted, is at least carrying on one of Kim’s legacies: He’s gone to war against the principle of an independent judiciary.
The Newtster’s newest harebrained crusade is to strip courts of the right of judicial review, which our republic has managed to live with since the Supreme Court headed by John Marshall (arguably America’s first great conservative) propounded it in 1803. If Congress or the president doesn’t like a court decision, Gingrich told Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, the offending judges should be called before Congress — U.S. marshals could haul them in — to justify their decision. If Congress didn’t like the explanation, the lawmakers could impeach them. It’s as simple as that.
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In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
