Mitt Romney has a 14-point Gallup lead among veterans in an otherwise close contest for the presidency, a demographic aberration more understandable to one of them after Monday’s experience in a Memorial Day parade. I was in one of those custom-made 1970s Pontiac convertibles, outfitted for Elvis and other rock stars with bull’s horns on the front bumper, rifles and handguns pasted everywhere inside and out, encrusted with silver dollars and bullets—-a NRA fever dream of a bygone America that...

In early 1945, I arrived at the 317th Infantry Regiment, 80th Division, part of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. “Welcome,” said a corporal, invoking the nickname of our commander, “to the world of ‘Old Blood and Guts.’ Our blood, his guts.” A lieutenant looked at my papers. “This guy can type,” he said to a sergeant. “Put him on the SIWs.” So began a weird two weeks. There was only one typewriter, which the sergeant used all...

Campaign watchers get a double-header of metaphors with reports that Barack Obama is eschewing a Rose Garden strategy and going head to head with Mitt Romney by name, along with a reminder of the President’s fondness for a three-year-old photo showing an African-American boy touching his hair in the Oval Office to compare it to his own. As they were no doubt intended to be by White House aides, symbolism lovers may be wrenched by the distance between that early image of the breakthrough significance...

Presidential campaigns need a pithy phrase to nail the opposition, and the President is edging toward a killer label for Mitt Romney. In 1940, FDR won reelection against a likable corporate lawyer, Wendell Willkie, who was dubbed the Barefoot Boy from Wall Street and easily defeated. Four years later, Thomas E. Dewey, a buttoned-down former prosecutor with a campaign strategy of not being “prematurely specific” on issues, was described as an opportunist who “changes his views from...

Are Democrats swiftboating themselves? Why are Obama supporters so defensive about challenging Mitt Romney’s main claim to the presidency? It started four days ago with a “Meet the Press” gaffe(?), quickly recanted, by Obama supporter Newark Mayor Corey Booker labeling the attacks(?) as “nauseating.” The question marks are for skepticism about Booker’s motives. Those who remember Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, as the Mayor surely must, can testify to the selfish...

The Speaker is back, trying to reprise his Greatest Hit—-last year’s manufactured debt-ceiling crisis that lowered the nation’s credit rating after nearly sending government over a cliff. Like Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, Boehner is ready, willing but fortunately unable to bring America to a standstill again this year to prevent reelection of a Democratic president, but he is eager to make the threat an issue in November. What Boehner has in common with his predecessor, absent the glibness,...

Barney Frank is getting married and Al Gore is going steady as Mitt Romney exchanges air kisses with George W. Bush behind closed doors. With the coming of Spring, not-so-young men’s fancies turn lightly to what passes for love in the body politic. Frank, the retiring Congressman whose name is on Dodd-Frank, the President’s financial regulation law, nonetheless won’t be inviting Barack and Michelle Obama to his gay nuptials in July: “We’re having this in the city I live in, in Newton, Massachusetts,...

Media ghosts hover over Facebook’s I.P.O. with a valuation of $105 billion, raising old questions about how to turn the attention of millions into profit from advertisers. The answers have never been clear, but for someone who spent decades in that search, the past suggests a rocky road to future profits for new bridegroom Mark Zuckerberg’s enterprise. In 1997, when stock of the Internet’s first phenomenon was soaring, in a New York Times OpEd piece, “AOL’s Bottom Line,” I questioned...

Faced with an unlikely quotation of his from the past, Norman Mailer denied it saying, “I couldn’t have said that, it’s not within the range of my character.” That would be a quaint response in today’s political world where SuperPAC blowhards with barrels of money are unleashed by Citizens United to say anything they want without taking responsibility for it. Meet Joe Ricketts, the latest candidate for that old Monty Python title of rich twit of the year. An “up-by-the bootstraps billionaire”...

His rise and fall tell more about politics and politicians in the 21st century—-and the rest of us–than they do about one imperfect man. John Edwards’ saga suggests where America is heading in an age of knowing everything and understanding practically nothing about people brought into our lives by 24/7 media. Covering Edwards’ trial now is like “leafing through a catalogue of the sad and the sordid,” says a New Yorker writer, concluding that it “raises questions about campaign finance,...

Six months from now, the most highly educated Americans in history will have chosen someone to lead them through hard times. In my lifetime, that process has advanced from control by political bosses in smoke-filled rooms to one dominated by media and money across the spectrum. Tammany Hall is gone, but now thanks to Citizens United, we are in the hands of the Koch brothers and George Clooney’s Hollywood friends. If that doesn’t make us feel warm and safe, it shouldn’t. “Freedom of the press,”...

News flash: “Americans Elect, the deep-pocketed nonprofit group that set out to nominate a centrist third-party presidential ticket, admitted early Tuesday that its ballyhooed online nominating process had failed. “The group had qualified for the general election ballot in 27 states, and had generated concern among Democrats and Republicans alike that it could wreak havoc on a close election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.” Buzz Feed now seizes on “7 Very Bad Predictions About...

It’s all a reality show now as the “First Gay President” invites himself to make a graduation speech in the neighborhood where he came of age half a lifetime ago. “This recession has been more brutal, the job losses steeper, politics seems nastier, Congress is more gridlocked than ever, some folks in the financial sector have been less than model citizens,” Barack Obama tells the class of ’12 at Barnard College. The words sound realistic, but are we all in the 1998 movie, “The Truman...

What would the founding father of Time have made of the magazine’s breast-feeding Mother’s Day cover? The model for it, a 26-year-old woman, reacts to the uproar about the photo with her three-year-old son to observe that breast-feeding advocates “are actually upset” because it doesn’t “show the nurturing side to attachment parenting. This isn’t how we breastfeed at home. “It’s more of a cradling, nurturing situation. And I understand what they’re saying, but I do understand why...

No modesty for those who occupy Wall Street seats of power as JP Morgan’s “London Whale” harpoons himself with a $2 billion loss, while his bosses (and the SEC) try to figure out when a hedge becomes a bet. We are back in the land of “They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are,” annals of the clueless steering the mammoth (the captain of the “Titanic,” LBJ running the Vietnam war, W in Iraq) with Morgan CEO admitting the firm was “stupid” over “huge...

Americans are too fat, experts say. The debate on gay marriage suggests we may be growing fat-headed as well. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics predict 42 percent of the population will be obese by 2030, with 11 percent severely obese, at health care costs of $550 billion. How do we set the price of moral obesity, as reflected in the uproar over the President’s conversion into a supporter of gay marriage? Just as we have been stuffing our bodies with too much poor nourishment...

It’s getting French Revolution-y out there. Mitt Romney is facing villagers with pitchforks, restless natives keep decapitating moderates like Dick Lugar and even new idols like Paul Ryan are being pushed toward the tumbrel. Lugar’s downfall is more 2010 Tea Party guillotining of long-time Republicans, but a search for ideological purity is so intense that even Ryan is forced to disavow his political patron saint Ayn Rand for being “an outspoken atheist [who]… felt altruism was...

Did the winner of a year-long Obama bashathon in the Republican debates think it would go away once he won the nomination? Did Mitt Romney think he could swerve back from high-volume hyperbole and turn his rational attention to traditional GOP voters and Independents? Not so easy . He may no longer be battling the likes of those weird Ricks, Santorum and Perry, but he is discovering that right wing crazies won’t go away as a woman in Ohio gushes that President Obama “should be tried...

The magazine that puts Capital Letters on everything and everyone, Vanity Fair, now enters Uncharted Territory in Obamanalysis…the President’s delicacy about former girlfriends in his own two memoirs by conflating his experiences with them into “composites.” Obamographer David Maraniss teases out from the diaries and letters of one in New York and another in Chicago who is who. “I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect...

>Newton Leroy Gingrich goes into history now to join Lyndon Baines Johnson, two men of outsized appetite for power who served as Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives decades apart and in different worlds of heart, mind and spirit. Johnson later passed a civil rights law to free a race from psychological chains after physical captivity and started an ambitious War on Poverty before losing his presidency over an unpopular distant war. Gingrich takes with him a government shutdown and a...