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Walter Shapiro

Walter Shapiro

Roll Call

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Avoid hot takes on Trump’s supposed trial of the century

The unmourned death of O.J. Simpson last week provided a timely reminder that a criminal trial can galvanize a nation. The political question hovering...

tuesday 4

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Mayorkas impeachment is a portrait in partisan posturing

Impeachment was once considered the most serious and solemn constitutional obligation of Congress. Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy, in his Pulitzer-Prize...

09.04.2024 4

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Party of Reagan? Please. This GOP Is the Appeaser Generation.

Forty years ago, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a hawkish former Democrat who was Ronald Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, electrified the 1984 Republican convention by...

09.04.2024 10

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

The election-year dance over ByteDance and TikTok

There are many compelling reasons to recoil at Chinese ownership of TikTok, starting with the quashing of political freedom in once freewheeling Hong...

19.03.2024 4

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Why Gaza Won’t Cost Biden the Presidency

Slowly, but inexorably, Israel is losing the leaders of the Democratic Party over its brutal war in Gaza.  Kamala Harris , getting ahead of her boss...

17.03.2024 10

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Katie Britt and the folly of fake fearmongering

If someone had told Katie Britt on election night 2022 that she would someday by portrayed by megastar Scarlett Johansson, the newly elected Alabama...

12.03.2024 7

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Biden Needs to Stop Hiding

White House leaks in advance of the State of the Union Address have telegraphed Joe Biden’s intention to stress how age and experience have made him...

07.03.2024 2

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

President to deliver ‘State of Joe Biden’ address as he seeks reelection

On the cusp of the third State of the Union address of his presidency, Joe Biden is confronting subterranean approval ratings, two wars (Gaza and...

05.03.2024 3

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

The Media Is Overhyping the “Uncommitted” Threat to Biden

Finally, Democrats have a presidential contender who can appeal to the most disaffected voters in the party’s sprawling and sometimes unwieldy...

29.02.2024 4

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Don’t Panic, Democrats!

This is shaping up as a presidential election designed to Donald Rumsfeld’s specifications. At a 2002 press conference during the run-up to the...

27.02.2024 6

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

A tour of the Capitol Hill ‘Hall of No Shame’

During a televised hearing 70 years ago that brought down demagogic Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, patrician Boston lawyer Joseph Welch...

27.02.2024 20

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Why Nikki Haley Should Stay in the Race

Waging a race against Donald Trump that even Don Quixote might consider not worth the gamble, Nikki Haley gives the impression that, at long last, she...

23.02.2024 4

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Finally, a glimmer of hope on Ukraine aid — maybe

The line is widely, but incorrectly, attributed to Winston Churchill. In truth, it is probably a modification of a remark made by 20th century Israeli...

13.02.2024 2

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Joe Biden’s Historically Selfish Decision to Run for Reelection

From his earliest days in politics, more than a half-century ago, Joe Biden has understood the potency of the age issue.  When the 29-year-old Biden...

12.02.2024 8

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

The best politics on immigration is to forget about politics

The Senate immigration bill, finally released just in time to roil Congress on Sunday night, offers more political angles than a high-school...

06.02.2024 4

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Trump makes a bull in a china shop look tame on immigration and other matters

When he wasn’t having temper tantrums in a Manhattan courtroom, Donald Trump — the one-man wrecking ball destroying political norms — turned his...

30.01.2024 7

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Nikki Haley Just Lost Her Best Chance to Beat Trump

Nikki Haley will always have Dixville Notch whose six midnight votes in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary she carried unanimously. The former South...

24.01.2024 10

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Will voters punish total incompetence? House Republicans are about to find out

The cheering is still echoing in my ears and bits of brightly colored confetti are stubbornly clinging to my head. Not since the raucous celebration...

23.01.2024 8

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

What Have We Learned in the Republican Presidential Race? Almost Nothing.

Campaign reporters have been breathlessly chronicling the 2024 Republican primaries since Donald Trump prematurely launched his third presidential bid...

22.01.2024 10

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Congress at Christmas: A debacle of democracy

Sixty years ago, fashionable liberal opinion was in despair over congressional dysfunction.  In 1963, eminent political scientist and Democratic...

12.12.2023 3

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Five Ways Biden Can Win in 2024

Picture a happy Democrat.  C’mon. Concentrate. You can do it.  Maybe you can recall the momentary joy on the Saturday after the 2020 election...

11.12.2023 10

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Let’s Admit It: “Bidenomics” Has Failed

The 60-second TV spot begins with  a series of brief shots: a lobster boat setting out just after dawn, a man exiting a taxi at a crowded downtown...

01.12.2023 3

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Coupling Ukraine aid with border security is like juggling flamethrowers

Charles Peters, the founding editor of Washington Monthly and one of the most important people in my life, died on Thanksgiving at the age of 96....

28.11.2023 2

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley Have One Chance to Stop Trump

No other event on the political calendar boasts the storied history of the New Hampshire primary: antiwar crusader Eugene McCarthy stunning Lyndon...

27.11.2023 7

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

The Real Reason Why Biden Shouldn’t Drop Out

Panicked Democrats, vibrating with anxiety over the polls, continue to nurture an unlikely fantasy: Joe Biden looks at his family across the...

20.11.2023 8

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

After Wednesday’s Debate, the GOP Primary Is a Three-Horse Race

In the late 1960s, another turbulent era in American history, jazz singer Peggy Lee had a hit with her dancing-on-the-brink rendition of “Is That...

09.11.2023 3

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Forget Jimmy Carter. The President Biden Most Resembles is Harry Truman.

As Joe Biden grapples with an unforgiving world, an indifferent electorate, and panicking polls, it is comically predictable that right-wing...

07.11.2023 2

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Enough with ‘gotcha votes’ in Congress — they just don’t work

Mike Johnson last week, in one of his first substantive moves as House speaker, paired $14.3 billion in aid to Israel with what would have been a...

07.11.2023 7

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Democrats can demonize Johnson, but should they in 2024?

After 16 days of bitter wrangling during the steamy summer of 1924, the exhausted Democrats — deeply divided over Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan...

31.10.2023 2

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

Speaker race: Crossing the river Jordan with advice for House Democrats

Nearly a century ago, the rope-twirling humorist Will Rogers cracked, “I am not a member of an organized political party — I am a Democrat.”...

17.10.2023 4

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

The Stop Trump Summit: The Brave Never-Trump Republicans

The Republican Party could have stepped away from the abyss in 2024. But three months before the Iowa caucuses, it is looking like GOP voters have...

09.10.2023 5

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Why Biden Should Make Democracy, not the Economy, the Centerpiece of his Reelection Message

A year from now lawn signs will be vying for attention with Halloween skeletons and pumpkins. Political analysts will be again grappling with the...

09.10.2023 6

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Forget the high-fives — Congress just sold out Ukraine

Not since the heyday of Athens nearly 2,500 years ago has there been such a stirring triumph of democratic self-government. Over the weekend, the...

03.10.2023 4

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

The Case for Being Skeptical of Trump’s Huge Lead

It is a come-on long beloved by carnival barkers, casino billboards, and lottery ads: “You can’t win if you don’t play.”  But this obvious...

28.09.2023 2

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

The Real Worry About a Second Biden Term Isn’t His Age

The raging—and entirely hypothetical—debate over whether Joe Biden should seek a second term has been framed by right-wing claims of a doddering,...

19.09.2023 2

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

House Republicans marching toward ‘Cloud-Cuckoo Land’

This is the month when House Republicans decide whether they want to march off a cliff with bands playing and flags flying. By any rational...

12.09.2023 2

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

The Next Republican Nominee for Vice President Probably Isn’t on the Debate Stage

“They’re just running for vice president.” That may be the most common putdown of the White House dreamers who are languishing in the...

11.09.2023 4

New Republic

Walter Shapiro

Nine ways the 2024 campaign could go haywire

Imagine: Without warning and with barely enough time for makeup, you are thrust onstage to have your say on a cable television pundit panel about the...

11.09.2023 9

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

The trials and tribulations of Trump’s Capitol Hill enablers

It is a scene that is probably as old as the world’s first restaurant in China more than 900 years ago.  Diners, frustrated by dirty plates or...

11.09.2023 40

Roll Call

Walter Shapiro

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