Columnist | The New York Observer

The Schumer Option: A Short-Term Winner

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:34:00 -0400

We still don’t know for sure what the final Senate health care plan will look like, but the most likely resolution to one of the stickiest issues has been obvious since early May. That’s when Chuck Schumer outlined his own compromise vision for an optional government-run insurance package. His proposal, a “level playing field” public option that would be subject to the same rules that govern private insurance plans, was vintage Schumer, reflecting his...

Change or Bust: In Prime Time, Obama Makes Things Stark

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:11:00 -0400

Near the top of his latest primetime news conference, President Obama acknowledged that “Congress is still working through a few key issues” as it seeks to produce a unified health care plan. That meant that there wasn’t any specific proposal for Obama to point to and rally support for. We still don’t know how whatever plan emerges will fund expanded access and we still don’t know whether it will include a public option—and Obama...

Obama's Grim Choice on the Public Option

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:22:00 -0400

A moment of choosing is fast approaching for Barack Obama and his party’s congressional leaders: to sacrifice the public option that the Democratic base holds so dear, or to stick with it, damn the consequences. Their decision looms as the difference between (almost) sure-thing passage of a compromise health care plan and an ugly, protracted legislative fight that could end up sinking all hopes of meaningful health care reform and severely wounding Obama. But...

What Is Jeff Sessions' Agenda?

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:56:00 -0400

How many candidates for Congress—Democratic and Republican—have you heard loudly insist that they don’t believe in party labels, just in doing the right thing? And how many of them, once elected, end up voting with their party pretty much all the time? It’s an absurd dance. Voters like hearing about “independence” and “bipartisanship,” so candidates indulge them, only to take office and immediately morph into the party-line loyalists they just spent a year swearing...

Obama's Dusk, Obama's Morning

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:43:00 -0400

High unemployment is the domestic equivalent of an unpopular war--an overpowering drain on presidential popularity that can’t be countered with policy achievements in other areas, personal charm, or any other conventional political weapon. Barack Obama may soon offer the latest affirmation of this. A few weeks ago came news that the unemployment rate for June had climbed to 9.5 percent—a slight uptick that silenced wishful suggestions that the economy had bottomed out and that...

Palin's Exit Prompts Really Bad Punditry About Palin's Future

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:47:00 -0400

Sarah Palin is a living, breathing Rorschach test. It doesn’t really matter what she says or does: her fans and critics will see whatever they want to see. So when she suddenly quit as Alaska’s governor on Friday, the analyses about what it all meant were decisive, predictable and mostly wrong. The critics, when they weren’t speculating that a massive scandal would soon be unearthed to explain Palin’s hasty exit, proclaimed Palin’s move an...

Obama Stays With Engagement, at a Cost To Be Determined

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:17:00 -0400

The White House made clear on Sunday that Barack Obama will proceed with his push for diplomatic engagement with Iran, no matter the outcome of the current upheaval in the Islamic Republic. Appearing on several Sunday morning talk shows, Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and David Axelrod, one of the president’s top advisers, stressed the same basic theme: that this month’s election shouldn’t dissuade the U.S. from trying to resolve the...

Last Southern Candidate Standing

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:20:00 -0400

Besides Andre Bauer, the South Carolina lieutenant governor who may soon luck into his state’s top job, the biggest beneficiary of Mark Sanford’s sudden fall from grace could actually be the governor of Mississippi. That would be 61-year-old Haley Barbour, who chaired the Republican National Committee in the mid-1990s and who is plainly interested in seeking the presidency in 2012—which explains why, as news of the Sanford scandal spread yesterday, Barbour was in New Hampshire...

The Last Thing the Iranian Reformers Need

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:55:00 -0400

It’s not a stretch for Americans to look at the scenes of mass protest in Iran and think back to 1989, when popular uprisings toppled one Soviet-backed regime after another in Eastern Europe. That mental association is one that Barack Obama’s critics have seized upon, arguing that the same presidential bully pulpit that hastened the liberation of those nations from Moscow 20 years ago should now be used to spur on the women, men...

As Tehran Roils, Obama Refuses to Pander

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:26:00 -0400

Rudy Giuliani used to like to tell the story about how, at the height of the panic and chaos of 9/11, he supposedly turned to Bernie Kerik, his then-police commissioner, and exclaimed: “Thank God George Bush is our president!” This was back when memories of the disputed 2000 election were still fresh, so the sentiment that Giuliani, who typically mentioned the anecdote to Republican crowds, was really conveying was more like: “Thank God Al Gore...

The New Teflon President

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:00:00 -0400

Flummoxed by Ronald Reagan’s enduring popularity in the face of a string of unsettling foreign and domestic developments, Pat Schroeder, then a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, took to the House floor in 1983 and said of the first-term president: “He has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency: He sees to it that nothing sticks to him.” Her comment was meant to be disparaging, but in coining the term “Teflon president,” Schroeder actually identified a significant phenomenon...

Can Mark Green Really Be a Front-Runner?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:16:00 -0400

Whatever you may think of him, you’ve got to hand it to Mark Green: The man just will not give up. He has spent the better part of three decades trying to be someone—someone big—in politics, and usually coming up short. Some actually believed we’d seen the last of him (as a candidate, at least) on that September night three years ago when, digesting his 20-point loss to Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for...

How to Invent Facts About the Iranian Election

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:01:00 -0400

Even when the evidence for something is overwhelmingly compelling, a small but noisy chunk of society will still resist it. The debate over evolution is an example of this. So is the present discussion of the Iranian election results. The clear consensus in the West is that the fix was in—that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supposed re-election landslide is a sham sloppily cooked up by the Islamic Republic’s conservative, change-resistant clerical elites. This isn’t simply because most...

The Year of the Senate Primary

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:57:00 -0400

Since 1980, there have been just eight serious primary campaigns mounted against incumbent U.S. senators (five of which succeeded and three of which didn’t). But next year alone, we could be looking at as many as six. The incumbents most vulnerable to serious intraparty competition in 2010 include four Democrats—Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, Chris Dodd in Connecticut, Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Roland Burris in Illinois—and two Republicans, Kentucky’s Jim Bunning and Arizona’s...

Time to Yank the A.M.A.'s License

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:30:00 -0400

Campaigning to build the widest possible consensus for reform of the nation’s health care system, Barack Obama told the delegates of the American Medical Association that he wants their support, too. Persuasive and always polite, the president did not mention the embarrassing truth about his hosts—namely, that the A.M.A. has undermined universal care with mindless zeal for more than 70 years. The real question is not what the A.M.A. will support or whether the...

All the Democrats Have to Do Is Wait

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:46:00 -0400

The coup instigated last week by Republicans in the State Senate has (at least until Hiram Monserrate changes his mind yet again) landed in a bizarre, unexplored no-man’s land—one seat removed from both failure and success, a 31-31 kiss-your-sister tie in the chamber. Granted, this denouement isn’t technically final. A lawsuit, which Democrats hope will void the coup and reinstall them as the chamber’s majority party, is still pending, while Republicans, with Pedro Espada still...

Why the Iranian Election Disaster Is Really Bad for Obama

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:40:00 -0400

The anti-Iran hawks will have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a ranting, Holocaust-denying political villain from central casting, for four more...

The Last Thing David Paterson Wanted

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:02:00 -0400

If David Paterson seems particularly anguished by the lunacy unfolding in and around the State Senate chamber, it’s for good reason: His chance for political redemption is slipping away—and there’s not much he can do about it. The governor’s political comeback strategy, to the extent he has one, relies on using his incumbency to showcase his executive prowess and build public confidence in his leadership. This means pushing high-profile legislation through the Assembly and Senate...

Can Iran, and Obama, Break the Cycle of Idiocy?

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:00:00 -0400

It’s often noted that the most hawkish elements in squabbling countries unwittingly enable and support each other. The stand-off between the United States and Iran illustrates this perfectly. Tensions between the countries date back decades, of course, beginning with the U.S.-instigated overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq and his democratically elected government in 1953 and escalating with the Iranian siege of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. But it is only in the last few...

Since When Have the Senate Dems Had a Problem With Thuggery?

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:30:00 -0400

It’s funny what a crafty and flawlessly executed backroom maneuver will do to people. Take the Democrats in Albany: They’ve suddenly discovered morality. The party’s public response to the Monday coup that saw Senators Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate defect to the G.O.P. and hand Republicans control of the chamber has been loaded with self-righteousness and moral indignation. “A thief and a thug,” is how Austin Shafran, the spokesman for Malcolm Smith, the Senate majority until...

Who's Afraid of Public Insurance?

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:07:00 -0400

Within the coming weeks, Americans will begin to consider critical issues concerning the future of health care for themselves and their children, including universal coverage, taxation of benefits, computerized records and the controlling of costs. But before the debate commences in Congress and the media, big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are lobbying frantically (and spending millions of dollars) to foreclose the possibility of the most promising aspect of health care reform: a public insurance...

With Friends Like These, How Long Can the Republicans Hold On to the Senate?

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:27:00 -0400

Democrats waited 40 years to win back the state Senate and now, just five months after finally securing control, it’s been snatched away from them again. So it’s only logical that they’re furious. But they should really take a breath, because—while they will have a clear and profound impact on the workings of Albany through 2010—the surprise defections of State Senators Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate to the Republican conference could end up, in...

The End of the Terry McAuliffe Experiment

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:46:00 -0400

Terry McAuliffe, the unflappably cheery Clinton family confidante, became such a favorite of the Washington press corps last year that they took to referring to him good-naturedly by his nickname, “The Macker.” After the election, the former D.N.C. chairman took his media celebrity, if you can call it that, and set out to exchange it for the governorship of Virginia, where he’s lived for the past two decades or so. But Virginians have apparently been resistant...

Clinton on 'This Week': Like 2008 Never Happened

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:22:00 -0400

Exactly one year to the day after she formally ended her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton appeared on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday on behalf of the man who beat her. Clinton, in her new role as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, presented the administration’s perspective on an array of international hot potatoes, from North Korea’s resurgent nuclear program to Israel’s reluctance to curtail its West Bank settlement program. Unintentionally, though, her performance served as a reminder...

Why McHugh's District Is an Opportunity, and Possibly a Headache, for the Democrats

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:35:00 -0400

On the surface, John McHugh’s decision to abandon his 23rd District House seat to serve as Barack Obama’s Army secretary offers Democrats a promising opportunity to push the state’s Republican congressional one step closer to extinction. Less than three years ago, nine of New York’s 29 districts were represented by Republicans. That number was reduced to six by the 2006 elections, and then to three after last November’s vote—where it remains, thanks to Democrat...

Domestic Terrorism, by Any Standard

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:45:00 -0400

If right-wing broadcasters like Bill O’Reilly don’t want to be blamed when someone murders a person they have repeatedly demonized—as in the case of George Tiller, the doctor shot dead in his Wichita, Kans., church last Sunday by an anti-abortion zealot—then they ought to moderate their rhetoric. No doubt they will choose their words more carefully for a while, as Mr. O’Reilly did in the immediate aftermath of the Tiller killing—and they will whine...

The Extraordinary Indignation of Michael Bloomberg

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:36:00 -0400

It’s hard to remember a major politician, other than John F. Kennedy and John McCain (for a few months in 2000, anyway), actually enjoying and thriving off of the question-and-answer sessions with reporters that are a part of the business. In this sense, the fact that Michael Bloomberg takes a generally contemptuous view of the press corps assigned to cover him isn’t really significant. But what is exceptional and noteworthy is Mr. Bloomberg’s regular failure...

Ask Not What Arlen Specter Can Do for Sonia Sotomayor

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:46:00 -0400

In the fall of 1991, the political right was gunning for Arlen Specter. Four years earlier, he’d infuriated them by lending a critical assist to the successful campaign to kill Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination and he’d done little in the intervening time to make peace with them. Now, with Specter facing re-election in 1992, they were threatening him with a primary challenge. Specter seemed likely to withstand the challenge from Stephen Friend, a...

Don't Hold Your Breath for That Paterson-Cuomo Primary

Thu, 28 May 2009 22:23:00 -0400

Politicians generally hate answering question about internal party politics, so it would be easy to read Kirsten Gillibrand’s response to a questions about a prospective David Paterson-Andrew Cuomo gubernatorial primary next year as an artful dodge. “I really think the politics will take care of themselves,” she said, adding that “because the budget is as difficult as it is, that all our delegation and our statewide leaders will be focused on solving those problems. I...

The Sotomayor Attacks: 2012 Republicans Throw Red Meat to a Shrinking Base

Thu, 28 May 2009 07:59:00 -0400

On Tuesday, the nation’s first black president announced that he would like to place the first-ever Hispanic (and only the third-ever woman) on the Supreme Court. By Wednesday, virtually the entire Republican establishment—including the party’s most likely 2012 presidential candidates—had united in denouncing the move. A “Latina woman racist,” is how Newt Gingrich described Sonia Sotomayor. “Troubling,” was Mitt Romney’s summation. And, of course, there was Mike Huckabee’s cringe-worthy attack on “Maria” Sotomayor and her...

Post-Roe Liberals: Why Sotomayor Is Obama's Ideal Nominee

Tue, 26 May 2009 18:13:00 -0400

Barack Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor for a seat on the Supreme Court confirms both how determined the president is to avoid a national abortion debate and how wise judges and lawyers with high court ambitions are to keep quiet on abortion. In more than ten years as a federal appeals court judge, Sotomayor has never confronted with a case that directly dealt with right to choose enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v....

Obama's Pick Is a Winner, Already

Tue, 26 May 2009 14:11:00 -0400

Choosing Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee to the United States Supreme Court will allow Barack Obama to prove three important things. As a politician, he is not afraid of a fight. As a constitutional lawyer, he is willing and able to defend his conception of that living document. And as president, he is prepared to brush aside the phony consensus of Washington’s gossipy elite. Whatever battle ensues over the nomination of Ms. Sotomayor, a...

WOOD WAR: 05.26.09

Tue, 26 May 2009 09:41:00 -0400

The New York Post: Welcome back, holidaymakers! While we've been away the tabloids have been hard at it: there's been more swine flu and even a giant tiny scary terrorist plot! We will just have to see if we have the opportunity to talk about those Woods in the coming days. Looking at this morning's editions, though, I was reminded of something a big editor at one of the tabloids said to me a...

All the Bloomberg You Can Handle

Mon, 25 May 2009 22:58:00 -0400

Politics, the saying goes, is just show business for ugly people. And as in show business, the Charlie Parker rule applies: Always leave them wanting more. This is not what Michael Bloomberg is doing. Faced with a two-term limit on his mayoralty, he could have opted to ride off into the sunset this year, with no-name successor candidates from both parties singing his praises and trying to out-Bloomberg each other, and with pundits and editorialists...

For Obama, the More Cheney the Better

Thu, 21 May 2009 20:58:00 -0400

Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressman from Maine and an early and outspoken opponent of the Iraq War, used his Huffington Post blog last week to ask in frustration: “How is it that someone as widely discredited as Dick Cheney is setting the terms of debate on national security? The technical answer is easy: Cheney is a huge name and a provocative figure who made his mark in the shadows during the Bush administration. And...

The Dwindling Challenge to Gillibrand

Wed, 20 May 2009 21:52:00 -0400

One by one, Kirsten Gillibrand’s potential Democratic challengers are removing themselves from the race. Steve Israel, who seemed moments away from jumping in just a week ago, pulled the plug last Friday, while Scott Stringer backed out on Tuesday. Their decisions, of course, came under considerable duress, with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer pushing hard to clear the field for Gillibrand. The number of credible prospective challengers is now down to two: Carolyn Maloney and...

The Early Line: Romney in Front, Palin Fading

Tue, 19 May 2009 20:13:00 -0400

It’s Triple Crown season, and time (or just an excuse, maybe) for an early handicapping of the 2012 Republican presidential...

For Related Companies, the City Planning Department Acts Promptly

Tue, 19 May 2009 18:30:00 -0400

If there was a race to get large development projects started in the city’s lengthy land-use review process, Stephen Ross and his Related Companies would be the clear winners. On Monday, May 18, the Department of City Planning launched a long list of projects and initiatives into the seven-month-plus public approval process, two of them—the West Side rail yards and the Bronx’s Kingsbridge Armory—belonging to Related. And based on the maximum length of that process—a...

What Cheney Said, What Cheney Did

Tue, 19 May 2009 13:18:00 -0400

Defending their record in office these past eight years, figures from the last administration seem especially touchy on the subject of torture. Led by the former vice president, Dick Cheney, they have argued that there was no torture, preferring more vague and delicate terms such as “enhanced interrogation” or simply “the program.” They have insisted that any harsh tactics were used only to extract “actionable intelligence” from recalcitrant terrorists in order to save “thousands,...

How Obama Is Taking the Democrats Past Abortion Politics

Mon, 18 May 2009 22:49:00 -0400

There was a day not long ago when a national Democratic leader wouldn’t have gone to the lengths that Barack Obama went to this past weekend to win over—or at least to win respect from—a pro-life audience. The president of the United States never lacks for commencement address invitations, so Mr. Obama could easily have passed on Notre Dame’s offer and chosen to speak at a more secular institution—where the run-up to appearance wouldn’t...

WOOD WAR: 05.18.2009

Mon, 18 May 2009 09:22:00 -0400

The city both explicitly linked Wiener's death to underlying conditions and did a bit of quick policy work, issuing a warning to anyone exposed to the virus who has an underlying condition to be tested even if they have no...

Huntsman Got Obama's Call Because He's Good, Not Because He's a Threat

Sun, 17 May 2009 21:08:00 -0400

There were, inarguably, some very compelling reasons for Barack Obama to choose the Republican governor of Utah to be his ambassador to China. For one, John Huntsman has experience in the region (he was ambassador to Singapore in 1991 and 1992), is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and can make a meaningful contribution to the formulation and execution of Obama’s China policy. Also, he’ll bolster Obama’s effort to give his administration a bipartisan feel—especially in the...

Obama Risks Turning From J.F.K. Into L.B.J.

Thu, 14 May 2009 22:48:00 -0400

Speaking as the 100th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s birth approached last summer, biographer Robert Caro spoke of how Johnson’s presidency managed to be both triumphant and disastrous at the same time. “You listen to the [people] who were concerned with what Lyndon Johnson did on the domestic side, and you say, ‘There never was a surer touch. There never was more of an understanding of what exactly needed to be done to get this...

The Rudy Calculus

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:02:00 -0400

We have now reached the point when it is considered non-news each time another poll is trotted out that shows Governor David Paterson trailing by more than 40 points in a prospective Democratic primary match-up with Andrew Cuomo. Still, the Quinnipiac University survey released on Wednesday, which contained the obligatory Paterson-Cuomo questions (they measured the gap at 45 points, for the record), did produce a surprising finding: Rudy Giuliani now only trails Cuomo...

The Lamest Controversy in Politics

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:37:00 -0400

There are plenty of people who love Rush Limbaugh and plenty more who despise him, but everyone seems fascinated by him. Isn’t time to wonder why? Last Saturday night, Limbaugh was savagely ridiculed by Wanda Sykes, the featured comedian at the nationally televised White House Correspondents Dinner. With President Obama just a few feet away, Sykes said: “Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. You know, so you're saying, I hope America fails…To me, that’s...

WOOD WAR: 05.13.2009

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:20:00 -0400

The New York Post: If you hadn't been following yesterday's National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the crash of Continental Flight 3407 outside Buffalo, in which all 49 people on board and one on the ground died, you'd be looking for a place to read the transcripts that were released there of the conversation in the cockpit in the final moments before the tragedy. It doesn't look good for the pilots, or by extension...

Beware the Bad-Faith Reformer

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:02:00 -0400

Uplifting as it was to see insurance executives, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital officials and doctors gather at the White House on May 11, pledging cooperation toward health care reform, nothing they said or did was inconsistent with precisely the opposite objective. According to the famed pollster who is helping Republicans in Congress to block reform, in fact, the first critical step toward stopping real change is pretending to support it. “You simply MUST be vocally and...

WOOD WAR: 05.12.09

Tue, 12 May 2009 08:40:00 -0400

Somewhere in the mists of editorial strategies past, Post managing editor Col Allan was brought in from down under to run the paper, and installed Victoria Gotti, who had turned herself into a romance-mystery novelist, as a columnist (at Jack Newfield's old...

Why Steve Israel Is Doing It

Mon, 11 May 2009 21:15:00 -0400

You don’t have to like Steve Israel to respect the bold and risky move he’s apparently on the verge of making. The fifth-term Long Island congressman, to believe reports that are now leaking out all over, will soon declare his candidacy for the 2010 Democratic Senate nomination, a slot that most national and some state Democrats would prefer be reserved for Kirsten Gillibrand. Mr. Israel’s odds aren’t exactly good. Hardly anyone knows who he is, he’ll...

WOOD WAR: 05.11.09

Mon, 11 May 2009 08:57:00 -0400

Far more damaging material spews from the witness stand each day than anything in the behavior of these two senior citizens at home on their day...