How Coarse Can You Get?
Walter Mondale laments the “coarse” tone of contemporary political discourse. He would have a point if he was talking about this. But that, of course, was not the sort of “coarseness” he had in mind. He meant disagreement with President Obama on health care, which, like his old boss Jimmy Carter, he [...]
Ted Kennedy’s Checkers speech
I was working as an intern in the office of then-Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale in the summer of 1969. Senator Kennedy’s office was down the hall and around the corner from Mondale’s on the fourth floor of the old Senate Office Building, if I remember correctly, but his cramped mail room was next door [...]
What’s In a Name? Well, Everything!
Shakespeare notwithstanding, a rose by any other name would not, in fact, smell as sweet; “seeing is believing” is a much less accurate saying than “believing is seeing” — especially in politics, the art of the image. “What a fool believes, he sees.”
The winner of the race to define one’s opponent typically wins the [...]
