Harold Meyerson

Behind the Stogies

Harold Meyerson
George Brown sure looked like a pol — and not one of those new-age, blown-dry, news-anchor types. The Brown Look was classic old-style congressional baron — wreathed in cigar smoke, clothes rumpled, as if he’d just spent the night sipping bourbon and cutting deals with Sam Rayburn and Tip O’Neill......

Irrational Exuberance

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Anne Fishbein Move over, Amazon.com. Yield, Yahoo. There’s a new start-up out there that makes you guys look as old-school, blue-chip and safe as GE, GM and GTE. Price-to-earnings ratio? All the "earnings" are projections — and yet, this is the hottest stock in years. To be sure,......

The Difference Between the Democrats

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Michael PowersAl Gore and Bill Bradley — the entire Democratic presidential field — passed through town last week, officially kicking off the 2000 primary season. And I miss Bill Clinton already. And Dick Gephardt, Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy . . . What I miss, that is, is a......

Meanings of Kosovo

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Luca Bruno, AP/Wide World I. For the East For a war fought in and over an area not much bigger than L.A. County, the Kosovo conflict managed to have some fairly far-reaching effects. Some of the war’s most menacing tremors were registered in Moscow and Beijing. In both......

Richard Riordan, Pol

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Ted Soqui For the past couple of years, the specter haunting Richard Riordan has been that of James Buchanan. Buchanan, you may recall, was the president before Lincoln — the guy on whose watch the Union came unstuck. And for most of his second term, Riordan has had......

The Irked and the Jerked

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter The most striking thing about both the mayor’s campaign for the new charter and the campaign of many City Council members against it is how narrow are the bases of support on which each side relies. The mayor has turned to his latter-day Committee of......
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In the Skies and in the Streets

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov It’s been a bad week for the war and a bad week for what passes for our peace movement. In Belgrade, the military’s bombs demonstrated — as they demonstrated last year in the Sudan — that they are no smarter than the intelligence agents who identify......

Why Are We in (or Anyway, Over) Kosovo?

Harold Meyerson
AP/Wide World The two things at which man cannot look unblinkingly, said the 17th-century French writer La Rochefoucauld, are death and the sun. To which, I think, we have to add a third: radical evil. Even now, after a decade in which the Holocaust has become a major subject of......

Capital 1, Labor 1

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Election Day was a good day for Richard Riordan, which is news, since he wasn’t running. Until this Tuesday, the mayor had managed to get himself elected twice, but when it came to helping other candidates, he’d had the coattails of a nudist. Two years ago,......

Outbreak of Accountability

Harold Meyerson
Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov When it came time for him to speak, Patricio Palacios got up and, in halting English, talked about his political involvements in Mexico, where he had been an early member of the opposition PRD party; about coming to L.A., where he’d worked his way up from......