Columnist.
Kennedy took on U.S. Steel and won. But economic nationalism can lead to abuse of power.
He has to abandon his company in order to deal on the country’s behalf.
We are the world’s oldest democracy, we are good people, and we’ve been through shocks before.
President-elect Trump needs to reassure the country, including those who opposed him.
After Tuesday, life will go on, and things are so bad they almost have to get better.
‘Raise your hand if this describes you: ... I don’t like either candidate.’ All 12 hands went up.
It is quite dreadful and a showing of the gravest disrespect that, if U.S. intelligence agencies are correct, Russia's Vladimir Putin has inserted himself into America's presidential election. And it could not have deeper implications. If Russia is indeed behind the leaks of the emails of Democratic Party operatives Mr. Putin may have many reasons, as he often does, but the most frightening would be that he views the current American political leadership class as utterly decadent and unworthy of traditional diplomatic norms and boundaries. And, thinks, therefore, it deserves what it gets.
You know he’s a nut. What if he weren’t?
America needs seriousness, sincerity, normality. How could he not have known that?
What ails American democracy? Too much information and too little thought.
People seem to feel that if they express a preference, they’re inviting others to inspect their souls.
The question came up this week at a political panel: Why don't people like Hillary Clinton? Why do they always believe the worst? Why, when some supposed scandal breaks and someone says she's hiding something, do people, including many of her supporters, assume it's true? The answer is that Mrs. Clinton has been in America's national life for a quarter-century, and in that time people watched, observed and got an impression of her character. If you give the prompt "Clinton scandal" to someone under 30, they might say "emails," or Benghazi" or "Clinton Foundation," or now "health questions." But for those who are older, whose memories encompass the Clinton era, the scandals stretch back further, all the way to her beginnings as a national figure.
What do I think about when I think about that day? The firemen who climbed "the stairway to Heaven" with 50, 60 pounds of gear. The people who called from Windows on the World and said: "I just want you to know I love you." The men on the plane who tried to take the cockpit of Flight 93 before it went down in a Pennsylvania field: "Let's roll." And I think about Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandanna.
Trump inches up in the polls. Perhaps the reason is not him but Hillary.
With the campaign proper about to begin, on Labor Day, a last August thought, a very simple one: *War is terrible.* It is my impression our candidates for president don't really know this. They never say it, not in formal speeches or in thinking aloud, in reveries in friendly interviews. I would say of most of America's political class that they have their heads all screwed up about war, that they approach the subject coolly, as a political and geopolitical matter, and that they see it through prisms of personal political need and ideological gain. They are missing the central fact of it — that it is terrible. Before the election is over it would be good if someone said it.
The Danish series ‘Borgen’ speaks to the growing detachment between leaders and the led.
