Harold Meyerson

Not since Sydney Greenstreet’s Casper Gutman strode onto the screen in The Maltese Falcon, extolling the virtues of "clear speaking" while speaking himself in deliberately meaningless abstractions, has a fat, bald patriarch had as much trouble with the truth as Dick Cheney had during his debate with John Edwards last......

Up until Thursday night, when John Kerry and George W. Bush met in debate at Coral Gables, the race for president had settled down, in one particular way, to a contest between Hemingway and Faulkner. Bush spoke in a fairly sparse prose, garbled, to be sure, but nothing hifalutin about......

NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON, John Kerry has found his voice. Since the earliest days of the Bush presidency, when Bush was airily dismissing the Kyoto Accords and the International Criminal Court, Kerry exuded a clear disdain for Bush’s truculent provincialism. That disdain grew even stronger during the run-up to......

Photo by Ted Soqui The president, I suspect, is already descending. The Time and Newsweek polls, taken during (and, in the case of Newsweek, a few hours following) the Republican convention, had Bush bouncing up to an 11-point lead; the CNN/USA Today poll taken over the weekend had that lead......

I. THE STATE OF PLAY It’s the halfway point in the Republican convention, and the Democratic nervousness is palpable. It’s not that the Republicans have much of a message, but they’ve been playing it over and over since the Democratic convention. The message has come in two parts. For most......

Photo courtesy Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc./Sharon Farmer CANTON, Ohio — When Alice Carrington shuffles onto her front porch to answer Dave Leasure’s question — does she prefer Kerry, Bush, Nader or somebody else for president? — she’s cautious at first. “Nobody does us much good,” she mumbles. But as she warms......

BOSTON — The Democrats had themselves one whale of a Republican convention last week, and not just on the podium. The remarkable thing at the party’s quadrennial gathering wasn’t that John Kerry came off as a credible commander in chief. It was that the Democratic convention delegates took orders, rose......

BOSTON — This is one upbeat convention, but at the point at which I came in, it was getting off to a near-funereal start. The occasion was the AFL-CIO’s Sunday convention-eve caucus of labor delegates — there are roughly 900 union members among the 5,000-plus delegates here — and it......

Silence and commotion: These are the defining attributes of the Democrats as they journey to Boston next week for their quadrennial national convention. Those who listen for the party’s internal debates — the very essence of the Democrats’ existence for as long as anyone can remember — will hear only......

What was it that the dying Lenin, in his “last testament” to the comrades, called Bukharin? “The rightful favorite of the whole party,” as I recall (a line that Stalin made sure none of the comrades actually saw for decades thereafter). That appraisal pretty much sums up John Edwards as......