Harold Meyerson

Welcome to the Fourth Way. Or is it the Fifth? Bill Clinton, we know, was the Third. Between the traditional Roosevelt/Truman/Johnson big-government liberalism and the traditional Coolidge/Reagan anti-government conservatism, Clinton built a Halfway House he called the Third Way. The era of big government was over, but pick-your-shots activism —......

For better and worse, things happen here — in California — first. Three years before Ronald Reagan’s 1981 landmark tax cut, Howard Jarvis began the right’s revolt against government with our own tax-cutting Proposition 13. Two years before the 1996 welfare-reform act cut off legal immigrants from federal food and......

Photo by Jack Gould Enlarge image It was a moment Miguel Contreras had been planning for years. On Monday evening, the head of the L.A. County Federation of Labor looked out over a hall packed with his legions — the janitors and hotel housekeepers, the studio techs, the teachers, the......

A Playlet (adapted, loosely, from Thirteen Days, Fail-Safe and Gray Davis‘ response to the state’s energy crisis) What if the lights had gone out? burton: RICH PEDRONCELLI, apwide world; villaraigosa: virginia lee hunter; kennedys: apwide world Scene: The Cabinet Room, the White House, October 1962. A few days previous, the......

For the people who pass their time making Los Angeles a better place to live -- winning a living wage for janitors, building houses that the poor can afford, asserting civilian control over the cops, keeping the crap out of Santa Monica Bay -- Antonio Villaraigosa has always rocked. Now,......

As our new president and vice president see it, California‘s power crisis is simply what happens when government meddles with the iron laws of supply and demand. If the lamps are going out all over Eureka, if Silicon Valley is flickering at twilight, it is simply because Californians have been......

“Let the word go forth from this time and place that the torch has been passed to an old generation -- my Old Man‘s handlers, tested in the Cold War, tempered in the board rooms, schooled in the oil bidness, steeled on the links and on the yachts . ......

Alan Cranston was always an organizer, one of the best of the post--World War II generation. Soon after the war ended, he founded and built the United World Federalists, an expression of postwar one-worldism that valiantly battled the Cold War Zeitgeist. During the past eight years since he left the......

To all appearances, Gray Davis delivered two speeches in his State of the State address Monday night. The second -- the latter half of his address, in which he called for lengthening the middle-school year and expanding health coverage for the working poor -- was the plodding, straightforward Davis: no......

Photo by Michael Powers Don’t look now, but Al Gore is starting to run away with the election. On Monday, as the Electoral College was ratifying the verdict of the Supreme Court, the Washington Post checked back with the various state election officials to see how Gore’s 337,000 popular-vote lead......