The New Republic

On February 27, 2001, George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. When the president had last ventured to the Capitol for his inauguration 37 days earlier, he had delivered a homily urging the nation to move past the sting of the Florida recount. This time, he dispensed with the magnanimity and unveiled his agenda, delivering a speech filled with promises to cut taxes, pay down the national debt, study Social Security privatization, and deploy national missile defense.  READ MORE >>

High school reunions are inherently unkind. But, for John Kerry, the fortieth gathering of the St. Paul's class of 1962 was particularly bad. The key episode took place in a Concord, New Hampshire, restaurant, not far from the school itself. Kerry wasn't at the dinner. That, however, didn't prevent him from looming over the evening. Toward the meal's end, the class president, a Boston lawyer named Lloyd Macdonald, rose to give a toast. He wanted to celebrate his classmates who had devoted their careers to public READ MORE >>

By the time John Kerry's father, Richard, published his only book, The Star-Spangled Mirror, in 1990, he should have been a mellow man. Nearly 30 years had passed since his retirement from the Foreign Service, where he'd filled mid-level posts in Washington, Berlin, and Oslo. His central issue, the cold war, had followed him into retirement with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and rise of glasnost in Russia. When the 75-year-old Kerry wasn't working on his book, he could be found building model ships and sailing off READ MORE >>

With John Kerry cruising to victory, these are supposed to be healing days for Democrats, when they embrace old adversaries and apologize for vicious attacks launched during the primaries. But now that Howard Dean has fallen, some in Washington can't resist kicking the corpse one last time. Last week, I called Ivo Daalder, an alumnus of Bill Clinton's national security team, at his Brookings Institution office. And, while etiquette might dictate that Daalder lavish praise on the vanquished candidate, he spent READ MORE >>

Talk to sensible Howard Dean supporters these days, and they’ll tell you that the former governor’s campaign to date has been a grand sleight of hand. Sure, it has harnessed Bush hatred and antiwar fervor. But the real Dean isn’t a frothing lefty like his supporters; he’s a closet centrist. Once he finishes exploiting the left’s anger to seal the nomination, he will reveal his true self, elegantly pivoting to the middle. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei put it in early December, “[Dean] has provided [himself] ample room to modify his image.” READ MORE >>

In early 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to President George W. Bush from the heart. The war in Afghanistan had been an astonishing display of U.S. strength. Instead of the bloody quagmire many predicted, CIA paramilitary agents, Special Forces, and U.S. air power had teamed with Northern Alliance guerrillas to run the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of their strongholds. As a new interim government took power in Kabul, Cheney was telling Bush that the next phase in the war on terrorism was toppling Saddam Hussein. READ MORE >>

Steven Soderbergh's new cable series "K Street" goes to great lengths to achieve perfect verisimilitude. The director wrangles cameos from Washington honchos, he crafts dialogue replete with lobbying jargon, and he films each episode at the last minute to assimilate the week's political events. But, as students of Soderbergh's oeuvre will recall, "K Street" isn't his first foray into the genre of Washington vrit. In the director's Oscar-nominated film Traffic, Michael Douglas plays an incoming drug czar. Between READ MORE >>

On April 6, a C-17 transport plane unloaded Ahmed Chalabi in Nasiriya, the Iraqi heartland. For years, Washington conservatives had fantasized about this moment. They hadn't just touted the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) as a potential player in postwar Iraq but as a world historic figure. In meetings, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti described him as the "George Washington of Iraq." Others suggested he could become a George Washington for the entire Muslim world. Writing in National READ MORE >>

The death threats began shortly after September 11, 2001. Every few days, for about four months, Khaled Abou El Fadl would receive an angry, anonymous phone call at either his San Fernando Valley home or his UCLA office. In his e-mail inbox, he found ominous messages from obscured sources with warnings such as, "You know what we're capable of." At first, the pudgy, 39- year-old professor of Islamic jurisprudence dismissed the calls as harmless outbursts at a tense moment. READ MORE >>

If the bombs begin falling on Baghdad, a broad swath of the TV- viewing world will quickly become intimate with Jane Arraf, CNN's Iraq correspondent for the past four years. Arraf files her reports from the third- floor landing of a blocky white building a few hundred meters from the Tigris River, with the ancient city's minaret-filled panorama behind her. CNN shares the building with the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, and the handful of other news organizations that have a permanent presence in Baghdad. But there's READ MORE >>