Whether in Chicago last week or Milwaukee last month, the obscurity of American politics these days makes one turn to illuminations from the past. Trump expatiating lengthily on his injured ear during his speech at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee …
The Democrats have pulled off a miracle
Making an elephant disappear is a notoriously difficult test of the magician’s art. Turning a flower girl into a duchess might be even harder to pull off. Convincing the world’s most powerful man to agree to give up his job …
The Hollywood liberals who rule America
My father told me that those who work in Hollywood are America’s aristocrats. Everyone else is a civilian. It was a concept that said less about how the world perceived my father than about how he perceived himself. After all, …
How Kamala avoided the Clinton trap
Does America care that it is once again on the cusp of voting for its first female president? So confident was Hillary Clinton at the DNC in 2016 that she appeared triumphantly on screen to images of breaking glass. She …
After Chicago, Kamala Harris is now exposed
Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech was so well-written and so well-delivered that it could have won her the Presidency all by itself — if the election were held today. But there are still more than 70 days left until voting closes, …
Will we survive the sex war?
Throughout history, the happy convergence of men and women — and their by-product, children — has driven human civilisation. No less than Freud saw this need for family as intrinsic: “Eros and Ananke [love and necessity],” he writes in Civilisation …
Kamala’s undemocratic convention
We are stuck with the French phrase coup d’état because nothing else describes so well the sudden removal of an old ruler by secret manoeuvrings — and their replacement with a chosen successor who happens to be endowed with every …
The speech Kamala owes America
In March 2008, in the heat of his campaign for president, Barack Obama suddenly found himself at the edge of an abyss. The former black pastor at his Chicago church, Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama had known for 20 years, was …
The march of Kamala’s brides
In a recent appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump caused a furore by questioning the racial “identity” of Democrat Kamala Harris. “Is she Indian or is she black?” Trump wondered. “I respect either …
Is the Kamala honeymoon over?
In 2016, mainstream analysts were virtually certain that Donald Trump would not win the GOP nomination. Then, when he did, they claimed that it was nearly impossible that he would win the presidency. They were convinced they were able to …
Learning to Walz won’t save Kamala
Safe yet shrewd is how Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as her running mate has been described. An energetic, disciplined communicator who can appeal to moderates and progressives, the Minnesota Governor is likely to boost the ticket’s momentum heading …
Kamala’s ‘coup’ is a MAGA decoy
Reactionaries react, so it was only to be expected that as millions of fired-up Kamalamaniacs poured kabillions into Democratic coffers in the first week of the Vice President’s candidacy, a primordial strain of American politics reared its ugly head.
It …
Welcome to the Taxi Driver election
In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle (“You talkin’ to me?”), a disturbed cabbie who plans to shoot presidential candidate Charles Palantine before chance intervenes to steer him away from irrevocable catastrophe. The film serves …
Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady
For all the firsts that Kamala Harris represents as a presidential candidate, there’s one part of her identity that seems to both inflame her opponents and energise her supporters like none other. If elected, Harris will be not just the …
Will Kamala have the last laugh?
One thing you often hear said about Vice President Kamala Harris is that she has a terrible laugh. Indeed, if you believe its critics, you’d think her laugh is a big reason why she was such a poor candidate for …