Harold Meyerson

I. Kerry the Conquerer ST. LOUIS — “To defend every place is to defend no place,” Frederick the Great once cautioned, but John Kerry was every place over the past week, and emerged from the process with the Democratic presidential nomination all but wrapped up. Kerry was the only Democratic......

I. Kerry: When He’s On, He’s Very, Very Good . . . NASHUA, N.H. — The great poets don’t imitate, T.S. Eliot famously observed, they steal. By that standard, John Kerry has emerged as the great poet of the 2004 Democratic presidential field. He has appropriated Howard Dean’s savage indignation......

GOFFSTOWN, NEW HAMPSHIRE — Near the end of Thursday night’s Democratic presidential candidate debate, I realized that I had been taking notes all wrong. Naively, I had been writing down the candidates’ answers, which really hadn’t amounted to much. None of them had attacked their rivals, none had broken new......

NASHUA, NEW HAMPSHIRE — So much for organization. The shock troops of the Democratic Party — Dick Gephardt’s aging industrial unionists and Howard Dean’s teen phenoms — turned out their vote on Monday, only to discover that their targeted voters had shifted allegiances. John Kerry carried Howard Dean’s college towns......

“I am a strong believer that increasing taxes will hurt our economy,” Arnold Schwarzenegger declared while laying out his new budget for the state last week, and in this, he is not alone. Back here in Washington, George W. Bush has his folks hard at work at his own forthcoming......

Lieberman is loose again. The lockup of Saddam has unchained Joe, who is now whacking away furiously at Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and Democrats with the temerity to have opposed the war. Connecticut’s contribution to calumny has all but obviated the need for Karl Rove to go negative on Dean......

Photo by Leor Levine The janitors’ strike in the spring of 2000 may have blindsided Los Angeles, but once it began, Angelenos understood it soon enough. A Dickensian morality play was unfolding on the city’s streets, and choosing to side with the janitors — a thought that had crossed hardly......

Photos by Ted Soqui Much of the Weekly ’s staff clustered around the TV set in the conference room of the paper’s old Silver Lake office when the verdicts in the Rodney King beating case came down, and the shock and rage in the room were palpable. There was fear,......

Photo by Ted Soqui A number of mysteries and if-onlys still hang over the 2000 Democratic National Convention, held, of course, in Staples Center in downtown L.A. The first is why the Democrats selected Los Angeles at all. Mayor Richard Riordan had invited both parties to hold their conventions in......

Forget about rolling back the ’60s. The story in Washington this week is rolling back the ’30s. The right-wing’s 65-year-old war against the New Deal — old enough to collect Social Security itself — has finally begun to pay off. Medicare, of course, wasn’t enacted until 1965, but unlike other......