Author: Matt Wolfson

Despite its occasional excitement, the political arena often coasts at a median altitude of boring. How many Americans actually know what a public option is? Or who Max Baucus is? They have lives to live and mouths to feed, plus Angelina Jolie is a lot more interesting than Nancy Pelosi.

One of the extraordinary and confusing aspects of modern democratic societies is that people can spring—almost literally—from nowhere onto center stage. You are a young African-American state senator from Illinois with extraordinary talents, living a relatively ordinary life. No one gasps or turns when you walk into a room; you

We have reached a strange lull in the health care debate. The tumult that arose at the end of July and peaked in the middle of August is still in full flow—recently, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) called President Barack Obama a liar during Obama’s address to Congress, while the Left

The clear and present danger of terrorism, two long wars, and an economic downward spiral have wrought changes, both large and small, in the American fabric of life. One change that I am noticing, and that I find deeply disturbing, is that we seem to be abandoning our sense of

This March I was in Chicago visiting a friend whose aunt works in city government and talk, unsurprisingly, turned to Barack Obama. The aunt is directly connected through her work to one of Obama’s top advisors, Valerie Jarrett. She remembers Jarrett as influential partly because of her excellent connections in

Last month, I was talking about Sarah Palin with an old friend of our family, a staunch conservative of thirty years who voted for Barack Obama in November. He was comparing her to Ronald Reagan. “I remember seeing Reagan come up to the microphone in ’76 at the Republican National