Harold Meyerson

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, the high point of modern American political discourse was reached during an exchange between the Veep and the W. in Wednesday night's presidential debate. W. was sneaking away from the topic of gun control, to which his opposition hurts him among moderate women voters, by......

For Los Angeles, it‘s 1946 all over again. In the 18 months following the conclusion of World War II, America experienced a massive wave of strikes, much larger than anything it’s experienced since. Auto workers and longshoremen, elevator operators and truckers, everybody walked. America had known only one comparable outbreak......

”Thirty-five of the most progressive cities in the United States have passed living-wage laws,“ the mailer begins, and, in smaller type, there’s an imposing list of left-leaning or heavily unionized cities: Cambridge, Boston, New Haven, Portland, New York, Chicago, L.A. Then you turn the page, and there, in large letters,......

THEY CAME, THEY SAT, THEY ACTED LIKE GROWN-UPS. This must have been how it was in the old days, when Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson could stroll across the aisle and invite Everett Dirksen, his GOP counterpart and grandmaster of Senatorial bombast, over for a bourbon. The aisle's grown wider,......

Good thing this isn‘t an election for student-body president. If it were, W. would win in a walk. In matters of manner -- and in student-body elections, little matters except manner -- Al Gore is the smartest kid in the class, who never lets you forget it. He not only......

Photo by Jack Gould At the next meeting of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), local president Neil Silver will, one assumes, have the good sense not to lead his members — the mechanics who service the MTA’s buses — in a chorus of “Solidarity Forever.” Not after he announced this......

Having pulsated subliminally over the airwaves, the rats are now leaving the sinking ship. At first glance, the news that a Republican National Committee ad for George W. Bush flashed the word ”RATS“ on the screen for a 30th of a second while the voice-over narrator was attacking Al Gore’s......

To visualize Al Gore’s dilemma, picture him bowling. The image itself is just the sort of thing the Gore campaign is trying to implant in our craniums: scenes of Regular Guy Al. These are an integral part of the campaign‘s GHP (Gore Humanization Project). But here’s the problem: When Al......

Photos by Slobodan Dimitrov (top) and Anne Fishbein , I. L.A. 1960 Forty years ago, when the Democrats assembled here to nominate John F. Kennedy, Los Angeles was a city on the verge of enormous change. Republican Norris Poulson was mayor, a position for which he’d been drafted seven years......

It‘s nap time in America. In this, the summer of our content, the nation seems blissfully oblivious of the presidential campaigns, and the candidates themselves are doing little to disturb our rest. In the case of W., a quiet candidacy makes perfect sense. His calling card is his affability, which......