Richard Nixon
The Hillary Clinton Movie: The Winners and Losers
A Hollywood screenplay is full of political notables. Who comes off looking best?
Hillary Rodham Clinton may or may not be starring in presidential election season TV ads come 2016. But there’s also a good chance that Clinton—or at least a celluloid depiction of her back when she answered to Hillary Diane Rodham—will be featured on the big screen before then. READ MORE >>
In Washington, it’s almost a rite of passage for a president to be compared to Richard Nixon, and this week the current occupant of the White House got his. The lawyer who represented the New York Times during the Pentagon Papers ordeal wrote a piece comparing the president’s dealings with the press to Nixon’s, only to conclude that Obama is worse. READ MORE >>
Why America Never Had Universal Child Care
In 1971, a national day-care bill almost became law. Therein lies a story.
The fix for “The Hell of American Day Care,” described in Jonathan Cohn’s heartrending cover story, is obvious: a universal, federally financed and regulated, quality child care system.The aggravating fact is we almost had it. More than forty years ago. READ MORE >>
What the Jackie Robinson Film Leaves Out
'42' doesn't touch on his conservative politics, which are widely misunderstood
The 24-hour news cycle yielded one of its better sitcom interludes last week when Rand Paul went to Howard University, the historically black college, to tell its student body why it needed the Republican Party. The libertarian junior senator from Kentucky, at one point, asked for a show-of-hands from those who knew that most of the African Americans who founded the NAACP more than 100 years ago were Republican. READ MORE >>
The Captive of San Clemente
THAT FAINT CLANKING SOUND, arriving through the open window of his home office: Was it coming from the courtyard? Was it being made by the pulley they’d attached to the house’s outside wall? READ MORE >>
Can You Really Watch a Debate and Tweet It at the Same Time?
On September 26, 1960, nearly 70 million people tuned in to the first televised presidential debate in the United States. The candidates were Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. The winner was the senator from Massachusetts. He was the winner, that is, according to those who watched the debate on television. The people who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won. READ MORE >>
How the GOP Destroyed its Moderates
Mitt Romney has been running for president as the Republican nominee, de facto or de jure, for eight months now, and the grand historical joke of it has not yet worn off. A party that has set itself to frantically, fanatically expunge its moderates, quasi-moderates, suspected moderates, and fellow travelers of moderates chose as its standard bearer the lineal heir, biographically and genealogically, to its moderate tradition. It entrusted its holy crusade to repeal Barack Obama’s hated health-care law to the man who had inspired it and run, four years before, promising to do the same for the rest of America. The man and his historical moment could not be more incongruous. It was as if the Mongol tribes of the thirteenth century, setting out to pillage their way across the Asian steppe, had somehow chosen Mahatma Gandhi as their supreme khan.Romney’s capture of the nomination required an incredible confluence of good fortune. Any one of several Republicans—Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—could have outflanked Romney in both grassroots enthusiasm and establishment support but chose not to run. The one candidate with the standing and financial reach to challenge him who did grasp for the prize, Rick Perry, performed his duties with such comic, stammering ineptitude that his final oops-de-grace by that point was not even startling. What remained to challenge Romney was a gaggle of third-raters lacking the money or the rudimentary organization even to get their name on the ballot everywhere. Still, running even against the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum (which is to say, running essentially unopposed), Romney still trudged laboriously to victory after endless weeks.But there is another way to make at least some sense of the Romney nomination. READ MORE >>
