Standing up comics
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Dec. 5, 2011

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Amy Lago and Ann Himmelberg share a lot of laughs on the job. You might call it a condition of employment.

Lago is comics editor for The Writers Group; Himmelberg is her assistant. Together, they edit and distribute the output of five editorial cartoonists and nine comic-strip artists to newspapers and websites worldwide. Nice work if you can get it.

Actually, tough work. Listen to how Deborah Solomon, writing in The New York Times Book Review, describes why Vincent van Gogh possibly became the genius the world now acknowledges him to be: "He was, of course, a master letter writer, and many of his early drawings were landscapes inserted like so many illustrations into the body of his letters. His instinct for combining texts and images is fascinating, because you might say that the chief struggle of his art was to integrate the two forms. How do you inject the immediacy and charisma of your personal letters into a painting?"

Those who draw editorial cartoons or comic strips inject immediacy and charisma into their work every day. Wise editors guide them along. As editorial director Alan Shearer has noted when asked why The Writers Group syndicates cartoons and comic strips, it is because the authors are writers too. Acturally, writers first.

Lago came to The Writers Group in 2004 after a career at United Media, where she handled the work of a who's who of artists. Since joining us, she's been building a new who's who, working with editorial cartoonists Nick Anderson and Signe Wilkinson along with Darrin Bell ("Candorville"), Thach Bui and Bill Lombardo ("Cheap Thrills Cuisine"), Brian Crane ("Pickles"), as well as bringing new talent aboard - Lisa Benson, Clay Bennett and Mike Lester joining the editorial cartoonists; new strips by Steve Borman ("Little Dog Lost"), Paul Jon Boscacci ("Fort Knox"), Donna A. Lewis ("Reply All"), Steve Sicula ("Home and Away"), Cory Thomas ("Watch Your Head"), and Gene and Dan Weingarten and David Clark ("Barney and Clyde"). Next year, Lester will launch a strip in addition to his editorial cartoons.

Himmelberg came to The Writers Group in 2006 as a production assistant, then moved over to comics central in 2009, where she is in charge of daily operations. Or, as Lago puts it, "I am Ann's assistant."

The two make a terrific team, adding value to our journalistic mission. Just as importantly, they add value to the mission of the artists, serving as strong and convincing advocates for those who boil life's complexities down to a daily drawing - and make us laugh or at least smile at the absurdity of it all.

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With this concluding look at the professionals who make The Writers Group tick, Groupblog now goes on hiatus until after the 2012 presidential elections. I have previously blogged about the new blog undertaking, which we will call The Road to 270, a roundup of what our columnists and cartoonists are saying about the campaign to reach 270 electoral votes - and become the next president of the United States. See you on The Road, next week.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

A new blog coming soon
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Nov. 21, 2011

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Groupblog, which began in April 2006, is going on sabbatical. Its author is not.

Sometime next month, The Writers Group will launch a new blog - working title, The Trail - and publish it up to and probably beyond the November general election. The Trail aims to provide a compromise roundup of what Writers Group columnists and cartoonists are saying about the political year. We have a lot of varied voices, and we thought it might be interesting to see what themes they are pursuing, and what these themes are telling us, as the race for the White House evolves.

In addition to posting The Trail here on our website, we also plan to share it with about 700 editor clients from around the country who receive a daily synopsis (budget, in journalism-speak) of what columns and cartoons we are transmitting. The budget was begun two years ago in order to share with editors what we were already distributing internally to editors here at The Post and our Writers Group marketing staff, and it immediately had an unintended but very welcome consequence. It became a vehicle of communication.

Editors wanting to know when a certain column would move, or concerned that they hadn't received one, began hitting the reply button with their inquiries. Not only were we able to increase our client service but we've made quite a few new friends.

With The Trail, we aim to take this client service to the next level. In addition to the columnists roundup, we will feature the work of each of the five editorial cartoonists we syndicate - Nick Anderson, Clay Bennett, Lisa Benson, Mike Lester and Signe Wilkinson. There's a two-pronged approach behind this: One, they are all great cartoonists, and we want editors to see their work concerning the most important civic decision that Americans make every four years; and also, editors can pick up all five as a package deal. So yes, there is a bit of marketing to The Trail as well.

We're hoping that The Trail will also be useful for editors in making their choices of what columnists to run as part of their campaign coverage, in addition to expanding the reach of our Washington Post journalism. The columnists who will be featured include Esther J. Cepeda, Richard Cohen, E.J. Dionne Jr., Michael Gerson, David Ignatius, Charles Krauthammer, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Ruben Navarrette Jr., Kathleen Parker, Neal Peirce, Eugene Robinson, Robert J. Samuelson, George F. Will and Fareed Zakaria.

We will post The Trail each Monday, and other days as events - important primaries, conventions, debates - dictate. We'd be thrilled if you'll follow.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Couldn't do it without them
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Nov. 14, 2011

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Karen Greene knows how to pick out a birthday card. Lots of them, in fact.

Since she joined The Writers Group in 1996 as a production administrator, Greene - who became operations manager in 1999 -- has made it part of her routine to select cards, send them around the office for all of the staff to sign, and then distribute to members of the extended Writers Group family on their special day.

Being in charge of the birthday cards is not part of Greene's job description. But making sure that The Writers Group runs in an orderly and efficient manner is, and what better way to achieve this than random acts of kindness?

Washington is a political town and I often resort to political metaphors to describe the functions of those who make this operation tick. In Greene's case, she's definitely our chief of staff. Among other things, she maintains a calendar of who is on vacation or traveling on business, she oversees all of the clerical functions that need to be performed, makes sure licenses are up to date, audits billing procedures, and serves as our emergency coordinator. She also edits Jane Horwitz's Family Filmgoer feature and prepares Book World reviews for distribution.

Where once we needed people to handle such functions as mass mailings and a variety of paper-centric jobs, digital publishing and electronic delivery are shifting the ways in which we operate. Greene now gets assistance from Athena Collins-Turner, who has the title of customer accounting administrator but is really our secretary of the treasury. "Follow the money" is not just a slogan to Collins-Turner, it's her marching orders.

Ben Peisch, client services administrator, and Claudia Mendez, client services coordinator, comprise our national security agency. Their roles are pretty much as their titles suggest - they put out the fires and keep things running smoothly with our more than 1,000 client newspapers or websites worldwide. They also perform crucial assistance to our marketing staff, as I noted in the post from a few weeks back.

Greene, Collins-Turner, Peisch and Mendez provide the support that frees Editorial Director Alan Shearer and me to devote our time to editorial matters, and the marketing staff to selling our features.

Richard Aldacushion, is our backstop. As manager/editorial production, Aldacushion has the final say before the columns go out the door. But it's a bit more complicated than that.

Together, Shearer and I edit each column, then one of us clears the proposed changes with the individual writers. Once this process is finished, we send a paper version of the column to Aldacushion for copy editing and fact-checking. If he has concerns with wording or factual questions, he will either take it up with one of us or with the writer. It's a demanding job, and this is why I call him our secretary of defense.

Truth is, all of these functions I have described are demanding jobs - ones that require both skill and commitment. In the rush to downsize or otherwise make accommodation with the new, Internet-driven journalistic environment, many news organizations have cut back on what should always be essential services. Just last week, the highly respected Poynter Institute announced it was terminating its relationship with Jim Romenesko, who basically rewrote the way the news industry was covered with his aggregator website, because of concerns that he was appropriating the words of others as his own. Among the most startling admission from Poynter was that Romenesko had been posting on their site for years without being edited.

Having people do the jobs that need to be done is just one way in which we try to fulfill our journalistic mission. That they get us there every day is proof of their commitment as well.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Mitt Romney, meet George F. Will
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Oct. 31, 2011

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Just in time for Halloween, George F. Will presented the Republican establishment - at least the part of the establishment that thinks Mitt Romney just has to be the GOP standard-bearer -- with something of a nightmare: "conservatives correctly believe it is important to defeat Barack Obama but unimportant that (Mitt) Romney be president."

Ouch. Not that it wasn't already evident. As Will noted, the former Massachusetts governor remains stuck at about 25 percent in the polls - not a good sign for someone who entered the 2012 sweepstakes as the presumed front-runner.

More important is the why. Will has a one-word answer: straddle. "A straddle is not a political philosophy," he wrote. "It is what you do when you do not have one."

What's interesting here is that Will's column comes at a time when there is something of a rally-round-the-Romney movement afoot. Writing a week ago Sunday in The New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat said, "barring an unprecedented suspension of the laws of American politics, Mitt Romney has this thing wrapped up."

Perhaps he does. This might also explain the recent rash of endorsements, the one from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie being the top catch, or news stories reporting Romney's big lead in fundraising, including money brought in by lobbyists.

But Will was not looking at these traditional metrics that political reporters turn to in order to confer front-runner status on a certain candidate. Rather, he was looking at ethanol. Or more specifically, Romney's views on the ethanol subsidy.

Let Will tell it:

"In May, in corn-growing Iowa, Romney said, 'I support'-- present tense - 'the subsidy of ethanol.' And: 'I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution for this country.' But in October he told Iowans he is 'a business guy,' so as president he would review this bipartisan -- the last Republican president was an ethanol enthusiast -- folly. Romney said he once favored (past tense) subsidies to get the ethanol industry 'on its feet.' (In the 19th century, Republican 'business guys' justified high tariffs for protecting 'infant industries'). But Romney added, 'I've indicated I didn't think the subsidy had to go on forever.' Ethanol subsidies expire in December but 'I might have looked at more of a decline over time' because of 'the importance of ethanol as a domestic fuel.' Besides, 'ethanol is part of national security.' However, 'I don't want to say' I will propose new subsidies. Still, ethanol has 'become an important source of amplifying our energy capacity.' Anyway, ethanol should 'continue to have prospects of growing its share of' transportation fuels. Got it?"

To Will, this sort of muddled thinking represents what he calls a pretzel policy - twisted. And the point of his column, not so much to bury Caesar, is to note what those who want voters to jump on a bandwagon even if there is no parade can't seem to acknowledge:

"Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable, he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate: Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the tea party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming."

Regular readers of George Will's column will appreciate that this is not the first time the nation's pre-eminent conservative columnist has put "conservative" ahead of "conventional wisdom." It's been a staple of Will's writing dating back to the time he provided cover to Republicans who had had quite enough of Richard Nixon.

Yet those who say Republicans should unite behind Romney perhaps have short memories. And they have been reminded.

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Robert J. Samuelson, whose clear thinking and keen analysis on matters economic have been syndicated weekly by The Writers Group since 1996, is now filing twice weekly. With so much of the news dominated these days by financial developments, Samuelson's increased output couldn't have come at a more opportune time.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Credit where credit is due
Posted by James Hill on Friday, Oct. 21, 2011

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Perhaps our politics have always been to rough up opponents and make them tumble. Only don't tell that to Michael Gerson.

A practitioner of the art of reasoned persuasion, Gerson is not one to see politics as a blood sport. He thinks through his positions, building his case in a manner more fitting the scholar that he is rather than a talk-show brawler.

Yet what makes his blood boil are the injustices of the world - many of which he has witnessed personally - and the inability too often of our political system to come to grips with them. Which brings up the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, a particularly vicious band of killers who have brutalized parts of central Africa for two decades now.

Gerson knows that on most priority lists, the LRA hardly registers. Western leaders and their foreign policy advisers have condemned its practices, most notably the shanghaiing of boys to be its soldiers and girls to be sex slaves, but that's about as far as it goes. Like too many things that happen in Africa or other wretched parts of the world, better to look the other way.

And so the LRA continues to wreak its havoc, especially in Uganda, where it was formed, but also in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. Late in President George W. Bush's tenure, U.S. military advisers in Uganda provided support for a failed attempt to hunt down LRA leader Joseph Kony in eastern Congo. Last week, President Obama announced that he was deploying 100 military advisers to take up a more proactive mission.

Then politics tried to poison policy. Some conservatives who really should have known better jumped at the chance to score points against the president. As Gerson noted, one was Rep. Michele Bachmann, a GOP presidential contender, who "criticized 'unnecessary foreign entanglements' while admitting, 'I do not know enough about it to comment on it.'"

Gerson's retort? "It is remarkable that public figures feel no hesitancy - no internal check of propriety or shame - about offering opinions while admitting ignorance."

The crux of the column wasn't to take head-in-the-sand office-seekers to the woodshed but to justify and support the president's decision. And here, Gerson makes a compelling argument that Obama's action was both reasonable and prudent.

"Obama is not sending in troops to hunt Kony as we did Osama bin Laden - though it must have been tempting," Gerson wrote. "He is sending in 100 mostly special-operations forces to help coordinate the efforts of regional governments in protecting civilians and 'removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony.' Unlike Bosnia or Libya, this is not an American humanitarian intervention. It is American aid for an African humanitarian intervention. The goal, one senior administration official told me, is 'to support regional forces, to help make them more effective.'"

There are those who might say that's a slippery slope to broader intervention, but the odds of this happening would seem to be somewhere set in the astronomical level. As Gerson concluded:

"Some critics insist that military force should be used only to secure the narrowest definition of national interests. But it is the president, not his critics, who must live with the ethical consequences of inaction. And most presidents conclude, as Obama has done, that a broader national interest is advanced when America aids its friends and shows its decency."

So there you have it, a conservative praising a liberal president for doing what Gerson clearly thinks is the moral thing to do. Our politics may be broken but our discourse needn't be.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Our Diplomatic Corps
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Oct. 10, 2011

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A couple of weeks ago, in an email sent to the staff here at The Writers Group, I gave the title of ambassador to the members of our marketing staff - Jennifer Ferrell, Sally Ragsdale, Maria Gatti, Brian Patten and Jim Toler. It was done for levity, but there's no joking that what they do requires the skills and stamina of a seasoned diplomat.

Believe me, they have them, along with a close knowledge of the products they sell. They can talk up George Will as easy as they do "Pickles," and throw in a crossword puzzle to boot. As representatives of The Washington Post Co., they extend our brand into more than 1,000 markets worldwide.

Just as important, they serve as our eyes and ears, alerting Editorial Director Alan Shearer and me to issues to watch out for, what's playing the best and where, and personnel moves that may affect our relationships with a client.

It's not a job for stay-at-home types. Even though many newspaper syndicates have cut back on travel in these unsettled budgetary times, The Writers Group still believes that one-on-one contact is the best way to introduce our journalism to editors and publishers. Ferrell, Ragsdale, Patten and Toler cover the country, and rack up a lot of frequent flyer miles and rental car rewards doing so. Ferrell's territory is the South, Ragsdale handles the Midwest, Patten the Western states plus Canada, and Toler has the Northeast. Gatti works with international clients, and is on her way as I write this to Spain and Italy. All of them are supported by Ben Peisch, client services administrator, and Claudia Mendez, client services coordinator.

The travel produces some unexpected opportunities. Patten, on a call to the Vancouver Province, got into a discussion about an iPhone app the newspaper was developing. He suggested that it add comics to the app. The Province did, and they've been well-received by readers. Now Patten is working with other papers to make their apps more meaningful.

Sometimes it's reversed. A few years ago, an editor at the Daily Press in Victorville, Calif., told one of our marketing reps about an artist who would drop off political cartoons - sometimes slipping them under his door. He thought she was good, and would we look at her work. She was better than good, she was great. Lisa Benson now has more than 120 clients nationwide through her Writers Group syndication.

I raise all this because of a discussion I was having with Toler the other day. He's the newest member of the marketing staff, joining us three months ago, but has decades of experience in this business. We were talking about the way it used to be, and how it has changed.

Indeed, there really was a time when editors could spend an hour or two with a syndicate sales person, buy up a bunch of features, send the bills to whoever processed them, and not think much about it until the next call, usually a year away.

That was also a time when we all thought there was a wall between those who reported the news and those who sold the product, and editors maintained an arm's-length distance from anyone who smacked of commercialization.

Reality hit us up against the head about as fast as you could say "Internet." As the newspaper business started shrinking, syndicated material was almost always among the first to go. Then editors started noticing that the cutbacks were turning off readers. Slowly, and with a lot of effort, we developed a strategy to work with editors on ways to keep our journalism in their papers while also protecting their bottom line. It hasn't always been successful - especially when you are fighting the bean-counters.

Yet in more cases than I could have imagined, it's been rewarding for both us and our client papers. That's deft diplomacy, and The Writers Group - along with millions of readers -- has a gifted corps of ambassadors to thank. They are an integral part of our journalistic mission.

In a Funk Over Work
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Oct. 3, 2011

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Besides a strong writer-editor relationship, Michelle Singletary and I share one other bond: We both love our jobs.

So does just about everyone I know in the newspaper business. Perhaps it's the nature of the beast. Despite being a troubled industry for most of the post-World War II era, newspapers still attract an eclectic collection of amazingly talented people who delight in gathering facts and being able to tell others what they know. We journalists consider ourselves lucky that such good fortune smiled upon us.

This can't be said of all workers, or all professions. As Singletary, who writes the Color of Money personal finance column, noted recently, "I meet a lot of people who don't like what they do. They complain and yet do little to change their situation."

As she also reported, today's financial climate is not the best one to tell an employer "so long" (or something stronger) and seek another line of work. Still, Singletary found research from an outplacement firm indicating that half of all U.S. workers are unhappy on the job, with one in three considering quitting.

Singletary used this material to introduce "48 Days to the Work You Love" by Dan Miller, her October selection for a feature she calls the Color of Money Book Club. (I blogged about the club in 2009.) She uses Miller's work to make a greater point - that job satisfaction often comes by "building a life plan that will bring you spiritual and financial peace."

Most of us who are happy in our work cite good teachers, or even better mentors, who encouraged us along. Could we say the same thing if we were students today? Columnist Kathleen Parker has her doubts. "We often hear lamentations about declining educational quality, but the focus is usually misplaced on SAT scores and graduation rates," she writes. "Missing from the conversation is the quality of what's being taught. Meanwhile, we are mistakenly wed to the notion that more people going to college means more people will find jobs."

Parker cites a book by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," and calls it "one of the most damning indictments of higher education." Arum and Roksa's point: that colleges and universities have reduced the core curriculum so much that students graduate lacking basic skills and the ability to think critically. Could this be a reason that half of all workers are unhappy with their jobs?

I raise all this at a time when our unemployment rate is way too high, our national debt is in the stratosphere, our politics are polluted by rancor and our economy appears on the verge of tanking again.

We are haunted by the specter of decline, a word that was reserved for Britain only a quarter-century ago. Rabble-rousing writers such as Patrick J. Buchanan produce books with titles such as "Suicide of a Superpower" and ask: "Will America survive to 2025?"

Buchanan lives too well as a professional polemicist to be taken too seriously, but other writers and analysts note disturbing trends that the country needs to address - yesterday.

As Robert J. Samuelson wrote in this column: "Americans see themselves as go-getters and risk-takers. Our optimism will ultimately rescue us. So it's said. But the folklore increasingly collides with reality. The 2008-09 financial crisis traumatized millions. It swelled the ranks of risk-avoiders, worrywarts and victims. Of course, this was mainly a reaction to overborrowing, inflated home values and lost jobs. But now the fear factor is feeding on itself -- and it's smothering the recovery."

Could the fact that so many workers don't like what they are doing, or so few colleges are actually educating anymore, have something to do with this funk as well? It's a thesis that certainly begs more study.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Teachable Moments
Posted by James Hill on Friday, Sept. 23, 2011

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For journalists, any time you're fortunate enough to hear former Rep. Lee Hamilton and Sen. Richard Lugar discuss national security and foreign policy, that's a teachable moment.

Likewise, hearing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels speak about what he has tried to accomplish running the Hoosier State, that's a teachable moment.

Or listening to syndicated columnists Esther J. Cepeda and Connie Schultz discuss writing in the digital age, yep, that's a teachable moment.

All of this education, and much more, took place last week in Indianapolis as the National Conference of Editorial Writers held its annual convention. Pity the fact that not many editorial writers showed up. Low attendance at conventions has been a problem now for several years as newspapers struggle with declining circulation and advertising revenues amid an economy that stubbornly refuses to improve and may be heading back into recession.

Nor is it confined to NCEW alone - most of the major journalism organizations have been suffering similar problems. The American Society of News Editors, once the profession's premier association, had to cancel its 2009 convention because too few editors committed to attend. (An exception seems to be the Online News Association, an organization begun in 1999 and gathering in Boston this week.)

Yet for NCEW, the trend is distressing because the organization tries so darned hard. Case in point: Seeing the writing on the wall, NCEW's leadership began looking for ways to make the conference, and thus the convention, more relevant, especially to editorial writers in smaller shops. A host of initiatives have been tried, including one called the Civility Project, of which anyone who observes public life today should be shouting "hear, hear" in approval. Old standbys, such as the annual briefing in Washington at the Department of State, were given added emphasis.

The convention, however, is NCEW's lifeblood, and the association has put quite a bit of creative energy into making it a showcase event where participants could return home and say they really had learned something. Besides beefing up the programs, NCEW also condensed the schedule, getting in as much in three days - I'd say even more - than it previously did in four.

Thus the gathering was already well under way when Daniels delivered his keynote address at the Indiana History Center - and gladly fielded questions after. Last year's convention in Dallas was notable because Texas Gov. Rick Perry stiffed the group when it came time for the traditional Q&A. Perhaps it says something about presidential aspirations. Perry has them, Daniels doesn't. But I talked to a lot of writers and editors who thought the order should be reversed. Call that a teachable moment too.

The Hamilton-Lugar seminar, staged appropriately enough at Butler University, was a tour de force that ranked with anything you'd get in graduate school, by two gentlemen who know the meaning of civility and respect - Hamilton is a Democrat; Lugar a Republican - and have worked together for years for the good of the country. Seeing these wise men share their knowledge was to realize our politics need not be so polluted, that there are other ways to solve our differences and protect our way of life. That's another teachable moment.

Next year, NCEW will move deeper into the teachable moment business when it partners with the University of Central Florida to host the convention on the UCF campus in Orlando. This is a new approach, proposed by John Bersia, who directs the Global Perspectives Office at UCF and knows a thing or two about editorial writing. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 in that category when he was with The Orlando Sentinel.

It would be nice if the bean-counters of newspaperdom would stash something away in their budgets so that more editorial writers and editors could attend this event. If they can't find it in themselves to put it under "conventions," they could file it as "continuing education."

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Journalism's Finest Decade
Posted by James Hill on Friday, Sept. 9, 2011

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There are some people, quite a few perhaps, who would question the thesis behind the above headline. Let them.

American democracy was built on the premise of a vigorous debate among its citizens. The terrorists who slammed hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania had only contempt for our governing principles. They hated our Bill of Rights. They despised our checks and balances. They deplored our freedom of religion and our tolerance of other faiths, and other peoples.

That we are still the same nation a decade after that darkest of days should tell us what we all couldn't know on Sept. 11, 2001, and that was whether America could survive the most brutal attack since the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. We couldn't answer that question on Sept. 12 either, but as the country continued to pick itself up, to resume life's patterns, we began to realize we could prevail. Vigorous debate was already pulling us through.

Ten years on, many Americans still question how we have prevailed. They wonder about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the thousands of service members killed and the many more maimed, the bleeding of our national treasury with record deficits and record debt -- all valid issues to raise in a world that at too many times still doesn't feel right.

Others question the questioners. Patriotism seems defined by how well one salutes: How dare challenge the motives of those who are pledged to wipe out terrorism?

Again, vigorous debate. Few imagined that 9/11 would ever happen; millions wonder how we can keep it from ever happening again. Our cranky citizenry might be suffering collective indigestion, but at least we keep talking.

Whither journalism amid all this argument? Why, where it should be. Despite a decade that has seen the industry suffer huge losses in revenue due to declines in circulation and advertising, competition from new media, especially the Internet, and the rise of a 24-hour news cycle that is more favorable to cable television, print journalism, most noteworthy the newspapers and periodicals in the very markets that bore the brunt of the terrorist attacks, has done a remarkable and often thankless job of telling the story of 9/11 and its consequences to a nation that stood shell-shocked on that fateful day.

There were stories of unbelievable sadness. And of quiet and heartwarming heroics. As the military response unfolded, there were reports of battlefield victories and, in Iraq, the shame of an occupation gone bad (Abu Ghraib). On the home front, journalists explored the questions of how we would bring to justice those responsible for unspeakable acts, and if we would do so in ways that were in keeping with our tradition as a nation of laws.

Reporters took assignments in some of the deadliest places on earth. Some, like our colleague Michael Kelly, willingly sought to be embedded with the invading U.S. Army on its march to Baghdad. He paid with his life.

Why such an outpouring of journalistic excellence? I have a theory, and it is that my generation of journalists, which spent the late 1960s to 9/11 covering momentous stories, did so with such a surreal detachment that it seemed we had no skin in the game. News was news, but it was someone else's problem. The Cold War was a high-stakes strategic exercise that we had little or no control over. Vietnam was a war most of us took great pains to avoid. Watergate and Iran-contra were, constitutional questions notwithstanding, events of great political theater. Even the civil rights movement had a distance to it that most journalists could not fully comprehend.

There was nothing surreal about 9/11 -- for journalists or anyone else. Everyone knew who had been attacked, and everyone immediately knew what was in store. Another colleague, Richard Cohen, was trying to reach the World Trade Center when the South Tower collapsed. His column, which ran on Sept. 12, is still, to me, the best explanation for why we took this so personally:

"Up ahead is the smoke. To the west, a car or two is ablaze. All around me, firefighters and cops and U.S. marshals wait for something to do. Little by little, our perimeter is pushed back for fear of yet more explosions and more building collapses. Our army of rescue workers suddenly has no one to rescue. The victims are in the advancing cloud."

Journalists had a story to tell a grieving nation. As you will note in special 9/11 anniversary sections in many newspapers this Sunday, The Washington Post included, we're still doing it.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Gone, and Good Riddance
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2011

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By most accounts, Moammar Gaddafi should have had the good sense to purchase some one-way tickets out of Tripoli around March 1, when it became obvious to everyone except the dictator and his inner circle that his days were numbered.

Tyrants don't see things the same way, especially once they've convinced themselves of their indispensability. Charles de Gaulle was right when he said the graveyards are full of indispensable men, but try telling that to a goon who has the levers of state power in his hands.

Once he chose to fight, Gaddifi used that state power with brutal efficiency -- his troops, mostly mercenaries recruited from sub-Saharan Africa, storming to the gates of Benghazi, the eastern city that had become the capital of rebel-held Libya. He promised a bloodbath. What he got instead was a bloody nose.

European leaders, aghast at what was happening across the Mediterranean, had been lobbying for a military response, one that was taken up largely at first by the United States, France and Britain under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The military activity, technically called a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians, was instrumental in saving Benghazi and, later, in giving the rebel fighters the time, supplies and coordination to relaunch their assault on Tripoli. It didn't hurt that NATO had taken out Gaddafi's air force, most of his command and control structure in Tripoli itself, and a good deal of Gaddafi-held real estate.

Still, he held on. Americans seemed to sour on the operation almost immediately, questioning what interests we had in taking up arms against another Islamic regime. The Obama administration itself dithered, with the president arguing that the country was only playing a secondary role in what was essentially a European operation under NATO command.

And, truth be told, there probably would have not been much outrage had Gaddafi beaten back the rebellion. But you can know with certainty that the outrage would have been directed at Barack Obama, telling him he shouldn't have gone there in the first place.

This is all hindsight today, however, for the simple fact that Gaddafi's rule has imploded, a victim of both its own hubris and NATO's relentless campaign of providing support for the rival forces. The dictator's wife and three of his children have surfaced in Algeria; the mad dog of the Middle East and his other sons are surely looking for an exit as well -- they know their fate should they be captured alive.

In his more than 40 years in power, Gaddafi was a sponsor of Islamic jihad, a willing and commanding figure in the terrorism that has come to define our age -- as well as a buffoon who was taken seriously by the international community only because he sat on so much oil. But whatever you call him, to the Libyan people he was a killer -- of individualism, of spirit, of a nation bound by his chains.

As my colleague Richard Cohen has written in a moving essay: "Libya under Moammar Gaddafi was not Germany under Adolf Hitler. But lives were at stake, mass murder was threatened and the man doing the threatening was capable of unspeakable acts of terrorism. Did any of this have anything to do with our vital national interests? Not really. But we had the wherewithal to avert the killing. That gave us the moral obligation to do so.

"U.S. policymakers now grappling with the question of America's role in the world ought to look to the past as well as the future. We were once an uncaring nation, not selfish by any means, but tone-deaf to the cries of victims elsewhere. We defined out national interests narrowly and dismissed morality as the preoccupation of amateurs or special-interest pleaders."

There is a moral here, and in celebrating Gaddifi's demise, we need to think long and hard about it.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2011

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The debt-ceiling debacle we have just come through was a reminder to all would-be politicians to be careful what you wish for. Facing the specter of the nation defaulting on its debt obligations, members of Congress and the White House put on a spectacle of gamesmanship that at most times rose to the level of a seventh-grade food fight.

Then, with the deadline fast approaching, they pieced together an agreement that the right and the left don't think much of, but one in which the center should hold. Which is what most people thought would happen anyway.

Yet if you buy too much into the caricature of this all being an exercise of spoiled children not playing well with each other -- and there is some justification for that -- you've missed what is fundamental in battles such as this one, and this is democracy at work.

Contrived as the crisis was, it put real issues on the negotiating table and forced lawmakers to confront something that has long been their own making: the runaway spending of the federal government. As it slowly dawned on the American people that the world's largest economy was being endangered due to political inaction, the court of public opinion opened. And for opinion journalists, that court proved to be a remarkable and bountiful venue.

"We're in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state," wrote Charles Krauthammer. "The distinctive visions of the two parties -- social-democratic versus limited-government -- have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama's inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide."

On Krauthammer's calendar, "debt ceiling" replaced "July" for the name of the month just passed, as all of his output focused on the gathering storm. Dana Milbank was equally prolific on the issue, filing 11 columns after taking vacation the first part of the month.

George F. Will came back from vacation a week early to weigh in. Vintage Will: "Inordinate self-regard is an occupational hazard of politics and part of the job description of the rhetorical presidency, this incessant tutor. Still, upon what meat doth this our current Caesar feed that he has grown so great that he presumes to command leaders of a coequal branch of government? He once boasted (June 3, 2008) that he could influence the oceans' rise; he must be disabused of comparable delusions about controlling Congress."

Eugene Robinson saw the whole issue as something out of "The Three Stooges."

"Those who would chronicle events in Washington can find no richer source of analogy and metaphor than the Three Stooges. These days, I'm thinking of the times when an exasperated Moe, having suffered the indignity of an accidental spritzing or clobbering, turns to Larry or Curly and demands, 'What's the big idea?'

"The premise of the debt-ceiling fight is too far-fetched for a Stooges film, since no audience could imagine leaders of a great nation stumbling into such a mess. Moe's trademark line is still relevant, however, even if it's not followed by the two-fingered poke in the eyes that our elected officials richly deserve."

Yet Robinson had a much-more serious point -- the Democrats were losing this one, precisely because they lacked a big idea to counter Republicans and their demands to reduce the deficit and trim the federal debt.

E.J. Dionne Jr. saw centrism, as opposed to moderation, as being part of the blame as the issue stalemated: "Because centrism is reactive, you never really know what a centrist believes. Centrists are constantly packing their bags and chasing off to find a new location as the political conversation veers one way or another.

"Right now, this sort of centrism is enabling our irrational, dangerous and decidedly immoderate debt-ceiling conversation. Pushed by the tea party, Republicans have created an unprecedented situation by tying an increase in the debt ceiling, once a routine matter, to sharp cuts in spending. And their most conservative members have blocked any new tax revenue."

And so it went, a great debate on Capitol Hill, and a great debate among commentators. In all, 12 Writers Group columnists contributed dispatches on the debt-ceiling issue. Besides those already mentioned, columns were filed by Richard Cohen, Michael Gerson, David Ignatius, Ruth Marcus, Kathleen Parker, Robert J. Samuelson and Fareed Zakaria.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

The Marcus Touch
Posted by James Hill on Monday, July 25, 2011

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In her career as a reporter, editorial writer and now columnist, Ruth Marcus has developed a reputation for being fearless in her questioning of public officials, dogged in her attempts to get to the bottom of any story she takes on -- and wickedly funny as well as commonsensical when she points out life's absurdities.

To which humankind never fails to provide enough examples, such as over-the-top playhouses now being offered for a king's ransom to parents worried about their children's self-esteem.

"How over the top?" she asked in a recent blog posting. "They come with features such as vaulted ceilings, faux fireplaces, sponge-painted walls and, of course, central air. They can cost as much as actual houses, if not more. For $52,000, you can have 'Red Beard’s Revenge ... a playhouse in the shape of a 12-foot-tall, 18-foot-long pirate ship, complete with a crow’s nest, upper and lower decks made of mahogany and leather benches in the captain’s quarters that double as beds.'”

Marcus, who often weaves in her experiences as a working mother in her columns, thought there was a better way to raise kids than by cleaning out the family savings account to satisfy juvenile whims.

"You can keep an eye open for the appliance delivery truck and ask for a leftover refrigerator box or two," she advised. "Invest in a set of markers and a roll of duct tape. Send the kids out to design their own magical cottage. After it rains, throw away and repeat. They will, I’m confident, have learned to socialize just fine."

In an earlier blog posting on getting her house tee-peed, Marcus showed her appreciation for the fact that kids will be kids, even if adults can't quite accept this premise: "Actually, we woke up to the jarring sound of insistent doorbell ringing, followed by even more insistent knocking. The police were at the door, summoned by a concerned neighbor who apparently managed to miss high school."

I wonder if the neighbor read the column. But this item wasn't really about clueless grown-ups. It was about letting kids have some space -- all the while bringing the parents in on the prank.

Serious journalism requires serious practitioners, and Marcus is with the best of them, always on top of her game. But her light touch columns and blog posts convey an added dimension that seriousness comes attached with a reality that says we sometimes shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

And they give readers a welcome break from politicians who, as we are reminded time and time again, never seem to get this message.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Our Columnist in Juba
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, July 12, 2011

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Michael Gerson's intellectual curiosity leads him to some interesting observations -- and interesting places.

He may be the only writer of the modern era to begin a column with a reference to the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and he is certainly one of a few to observe the birth of the new nation of South Sudan last weekend up close and personal.

It's not just a fleeting interest, either. Since Gerson joined The Writers Group in 2007 after six years as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, he has traveled and written extensively on South Sudan's efforts to break away from the Sudanese regime in Khartoum, as well as on the restive Darfur province and the genocide going on there.

He's well-aware that the chances of this newest of nations are not very good.

Out in the bush, accommodations tend to be spartan. Michael Gerson's hotel room is the blue tent in the foreground. (Photo courtesy of Michael Gerson.)

"Sudan's north and south have been at war, nearly without respite, since 1955 -- imagine America's Civil War lasting half a century," Gerson wrote in a column just before South Sudan's Independence Day on Saturday. "Millions have died from fighting and famine. (The) area of Northern Bahr el Ghazal was subject to frequent raids to capture slaves -- many of whom are still held in captivity by northern tribes. Armed conflict continues along the border. Elements of the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) are fighting in the Nuba Mountains and Abyei, where northern forces (as is their habit) employ violence and terror bombing against civilians.

"And yet the ruler of northern Sudan, Omar al-Bashir -- under indictment by the International Criminal Court -- is scheduled to speak at South Sudan's independence celebration. If he comes, it would show a boldness on Bashir's part. It would also demonstrate the Sudanese paradox of deep hatreds and unavoidable ties."

In a second column, Gerson noted the obstacles that South Sudan's rulers now must confront, chiefly, rampant corruption, and concluded: "The independence of South Sudan is a large, unlikely achievement. But now it faces among the hardest of historical tasks: The liberators of a nation must become the founders of a nation."

That's a pretty tall order, as Gerson acknowledges, and perhaps one reason why so many news organizations took a pass on South Sudan's independence celebrations. Rupert Murdoch, after all, was shuttering his scandal sheet The News of the World after its phone-hacking reporting became a scandal itself, and congressional and White House negotiators continually hinted at, but couldn't quite get close enough, to a deal to raise the nation's debt ceiling -- once a routine day-at-the-office matter.

Yet Sudan, and now South Sudan, backwaters that they might be, also figure in geopolitical calculations. The Khartoum regime once harbored Osama bin Laden before he fled to another backwater, Afghanistan, where he struck terror in the hearts of all Americans and took the lives of so many of our fellow citizens. Khartoum's rule has been one of terror as well, directed in horrifying violence toward those it purports to call its own.

Reason enough for Gerson to go -- and be a witness.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Popping Assumptions
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, July 6, 2011

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Since the advent of the Internet, and particularly since broadband access, plenty of commentators have been quick to write off the newspaper business. Perhaps too quick.

The industry still struggles, more the result of the dismal economy that has seen advertising revenues plummet. And print circulation numbers, which as recently as the late 1990s were healthy and still growing, will most likely never return to their heady peaks.

Yet newspapers continue to adapt. And as they do, some assumptions that were taken as gospel just a few years or even months ago are now having to be rethought. Thank goodness.

Assumption No. 1, of course, was that we no longer needed newspapers as our information resources. Rubbish. We need newspaper journalism, truly our first draft of history, more than ever. It leads to second drafts such as "Reckless Endangerment," the hot new best-seller about the genesis of the financial meltdown by New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson and housing finance expert Joshua Rosner. As George F. Will noted: "The book is another cautionary tale about government's terrifying self-confidence. It is, the authors say, 'a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.'"

But muckraking journalism isn't the sole reason newspapers continue to survive. Popping Assumption No. 2 -- that readers would abandon their local newspapers because higher quality national brands were available just a mouse click away -- has been relatively easy. It hasn't happened.

Indeed, since the demise of the Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2009, both in two-newspaper markets, no major American daily has closed its doors (and the Post-Intelligencer still publishes as a website). True, plenty of smaller titles went under as the economy worsened, and plenty of papers still look threatened -- especially those that have amputated both staff and content. Doomsday postponed, however, gives one a better chance that Doomsday will not arrive.

Assumption No. 3 -- that readers would simply go to aggregator websites to find their favorite writers -- is where The Writers Group comes in. We've no problem with aggregators but we still believe, especially in such areas as commentary, that a well-rounded opinion page is the best way for an individual paper to attract and keep online readers.

We also wanted to see if there was something more we should be doing to make it easier for our clients to present our award-winning writers and editorial cartoonists. In mid-June, we sent out an email survey to editors around the country asking questions about how they displayed columnists and cartoonists. The survey most definitely was not intended to be scientific, and the results are still coming in (there is no deadline), but the responses received so far tell us a few things that, not surprisingly, pop a few assumptions as well.

Namely, editors get it. Most said they are already using many tools to draw readers to syndicated columnists, including an opinions button on their site's home page and buttons on the opinions page that call attention to "columnists," "syndicated columnists," or simply list the name of the authors.

Most also said they use the headlines that accompany the columns, and also a photo image of the columnists.

We allow early posting to the web, but what was surprising to me, at least, was the number who said they did not put a column on their websites until it had run in the paper. Many said they did not run columns web-only. Again, somewhat of a surprise given how the Internet gives you the opportunity to skirt the space restrictions of an actual (and in most cases, shrinking) paper edition.

Running editorial cartoons online seems to be a 50-50 proposition; about half of the survey respondents said they published on the web. Same for a question about hyperlinks in columns.

And while most said they thought their transition to digital was very advanced, a question about apps for electronic reading devices such as an iPad indicated that, as an industry, we're not up to speed on this technology -- and thus may be falling behind.

Folks, these apps are revenue streams. You can pack your entire product on one -- and get paid for it, like selling a subscription.

That's a quibble, however. I'll leave it others to make assumptions.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

The Coming Medicare Meltdown
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, June 7, 2011

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You'd have to be living in a cave to not be aware of how Medicare has come to dominate our domestic political debate. And yet, even those who are keenly following the issue sense that there is something Neanderthal about it all.

Let's backtrack a bit. Medicare, a government health care plan for the elderly, is a relatively recent creation of America's post-World War II expansion of the state to serve the greater good. It was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., with former President Harry Truman looking on. That was a year when most of the front line baby boomers born in 1946 were about to become sophomores in college.

Life expectancy then was 70.2 years, only about five years out from what was often the expected retirement age of 65. Today, life expectancy is 79.1, retirement is no longer an option for many workers, and the baby boomers, as they have with just about everything their demographic has touched, are about to swamp the system.

From its inception, Medicare has never been exactly a monument to either good governance or quality health care. Its cost overruns and waste have been legion, and better-off seniors have turned to supplemental insurance programs to move ahead in the line and be assured they can see the same doctor next time they make a visit.

So it's not too surprising that something has to be done. What's surprising, or perhaps alarming, is that we're only now coming around to this reality. We should have been doing something about Medicare, and its companion Medicaid for the poor, years ago. Yet like all entitlements, Medicare has become in less than a half-century so sacrosanct as to be radioactive. Touch it at your peril.

Which is just what Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin did with his alternative federal budget that House Republicans have endorsed.

As columnist Robert J. Samuelson explains, "Beginning in 2022, new (not existing) Medicare beneficiaries would receive a voucher, valued initially at about $8,000. The theory is simple. Suddenly empowered, Medicare beneficiaries would shop for lowest-cost, highest-quality insurance plans providing a required package of benefits. The health care delivery system would be forced to restructure by reducing costs and improving quality. Doctors, hospitals and clinics would form networks; there would be more 'coordination' of care, helped by more investment in information technology; better use of deductibles and co-payments would reduce unnecessary trips to doctors' offices or clinics." Now, Ryan's plan is never going to please everybody. None ever does. Yet when 77 million baby boomers (exempt from the Ryan reform, remember) have finally made it through old age, Medicare will indeed most likely be a spent force and America closer to, if not already in, bankruptcy.

So where does the debate stand now? Pure demagoguery, especially from the left. Much as they rode opposition to Social Security reform to election gains during the George W. Bush years, liberals have graffitied "status quo" all over the wall in this debate. Conservatives have pounded that wall but mostly to score cultural war points, not actually reform Medicare.

As Samuelson notes: "This predictably partisan reaction -- preying upon the anxieties of retirees -- must depress anyone who cares about the country's future. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that unless we end Medicare 'as we know it,' America 'as we know it' will end."

His analysis of the Ryan plan and how it would deliver, as he calls it, "shock therapy," is one of the finest and clearest I have seen on the subject. If you haven't already, add it to your list of must-reads ASAP.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Curiosity in Perspective
Posted by James Hill on Thursday, June 2, 2011

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When Esther J. Cepeda tells you "I didn't know that," pretty soon she will. Her limitless curiosity helps her produce columns that are both informative and entertaining about subjects that normally do not make their way into the inside-the-Beltway dialogue. And she shines in a category we look for in every writer -- originality.

The fact she is based in Chicago, far away from the capital's stampede to command the 24-7 news cycle, gives her the luxury of exploring subjects that she was not previously aware of but that most readers didn't know about either. Such as Adolf Hitler's dogs. No, not Blondi, the German Shepherd who met her end in the bunker. Hitler, Cepeda discovered, was quite a believer in canine intelligence, so much that he actually proposed an "Animal Talking School" where Third Reich canines could be trained to become an army of "talking, reading and writing dogs." It never panned out, no doubt civilization's good fortune.

Speaking of Nazis, Cepeda also recently wrote about a 10-year-old boy charged with the murder of his father, the leader of a chapter of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement. Cepeda used this as her hook to offer up a moving column on youthful offenders and how our system of juvenile justice is ill-equipped to take care of the root causes of such violence.

This week, Cepeda interviewed a California couple who had hit it big in the lottery -- $266 million big -- and are busy turning some of their winnings into a jackpot of sorts for first-generation college students.

"The couple knows how important -- and challenging -- it is to be the first in the family to graduate from college, so they're aiming to go beyond just funding scholarships," Cepeda noted. "They want to create a community culture where going to college is not merely a real possibility but a concrete expectation with the supports to make it all happen."

Cepeda writes eloquently about everyday people and their struggles to cope with everyday life. And in doing so, she amplifies conversations that go on in households all across America -- how to scrape up the money to send the kids to college, what to do about the obesity epidemic, dealing with No Child Left Behind, the problems immigrants face trying to fit into a foreign land.

Opinion-page editors say they want as wide a range of voices as possible to grace their pages and complain, with some justification, that too much of what dominates the news is Washington-centric. What Cepeda offers is a chance to break that mold, and the fact her client list has grown so well since the column was launched last October is a testament that editors like what they see.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Timing Is Everything
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, May 25, 2011

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If you've been following events in Pakistan since the killing of Osama bin Laden and have questions concerning what seems to be Pakistani complicity in hiding the terrorist mastermind in an oversized house near the country's version of West Point, then David Ignatius has a useful guide for navigating your way through the maze.

His "Bloodmoney," a just-released novel featuring the CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, warring factions in Pakistan's ungovernable tribal areas and a host of other characters, is a good, suspenseful read, made all the better by the fact the aforementioned Mr. bin Laden is no longer with us and all the attention his passing has received.

"This book has such a contemporary ring that you expect to come upon a description of Osama bin Laden living in a safe house in Abbottabad," wrote The Economist in reviewing Ignatius' tale.

It doesn't, but Ignatius covers just about everything else we are learning about the tortured relationship between Washington and Islamabad -- "allies" who really don't trust each other. And for good reason. Who could really trust a country that sold nuclear weapons technology to rogue states, that has a weak government at the mercy of a domineering military, and that provides Taliban insurgents a safe harbor before they return to Afghanistan to kill American soldiers? Or, turning the tables, feel a pawn in Washington power games, its allegiance purchased with billions each year in U.S. aid but its loyalty always in doubt -- witness the fact Americans did not bother to inform their Pakistani counterparts about a raid on their turf?

Ignatius weaves these themes of intrigue effortlessly into "Bloodmoney," with the confidence of someone who has witnessed the cat-and-mouse game up close -- and took good notes. A longtime observer of the Middle East, he has paid particular attention the last couple of years to what U.S. diplomats refer to as Af/Pak -- the belated acknowledgement that the hot war in Afghanistan can't be won without winning the cold war in Pakistan.

He has traveled to the region numerous times, sending back columns chock full of news and analysis. More so, he has worked Washington masterfully, accumulating a who's who of sources and drawing on them to break the code of the national security universe.

That he finds time to write an entertaining thriller such as "Bloodmoney" is remarkable. More remarkable is that this is his eighth novel. An earlier one, "Body of Lies," was turned into a pretty good movie.

Does he ever sleep? Yes, he assured me the other day. But he finds it important every now and then to set his reporting aside and let his imagination roam, and this is how his novels are conceived and executed. The pieces fit because his journalistic inquiry has already produced a broad canvas from which to draw upon.

And it sure doesn't hurt if your book comes out when so much of the news is concentrated on Pakistan. "Bloodmoney" will take you there.

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James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Crown Jewels
Posted by James Hill on Monday, May 16, 2011

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This is what the crown jewels of journalism look like once they've been put on display: yellowed with age, stained by food or drink spills, a little tattered yet still hanging on to their space on the refrigerator door, sometimes having to share their honored spot and magnet with a medical appointment card or a snapshot of the kids.

Or the jewels have been shipped around the block, the country or the world, emailed to friends or associates, usually under the notation of "read this."

These jewels sparkle for what they convey -- a feeling that a writer's message has connected with readers in the most personal of ways. They become treasures to be savored, and what better way than on the door of the most important appliance in the house?

George F. Will has been a master at jewel-crafting, but the column "To Be 70" certainly ranks as one of his Hope diamonds. "The Bible, with the thumping certitude for which it is famous and sometimes tiresome, asserts that 'the days of our years are threescore years and ten.'" Will writes. "If so, after turning 70, one has, ever after, the pleasure of playing, as it were, with house money. For what, exactly, would one now give up red meat and dry martinis?"

Crown jewels arrive when you least expect them. Will's column ran in a week when most of the world was having a great debate over the killing of Osama bin Laden, a murderous monster whose contempt for human life will be forever captured in the iconic images of orange-red fireballs blowing out from the World Trade Center.

In such, Will had this to comfort those among us who have felt imprisoned this last decade by bin Laden and his rabid followers: "To be 70 is to have been born shortly before Pearl Harbor, to have lived through the war that was already then raging, and the Cold War, and to have arrived at the sunny uplands of today. Yes, of course, man is still, and ever will be, born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. But never before in the human story has the risk of death by violence been smaller for such a large portion of humanity."

Bin Ladin's death also prompted Ruth Marcus to pen one of her crown jewels, this time set in a place of rebirth, her garden.

"A proud yellow poppy will be my silent reminder of Afghanistan," she notes. "And a showy white peony, with its wedding dress layers of petals, will stand testament to the fact that a world capable of producing an evil like bin Laden also contains instances of such improbable splendor."

Sometimes a crown jewel announces itself like a 100-yard kickoff return to start a Super Bowl. Consider this opening from Dana Milbank: "From China this week came the rare news that twin girls had been born with a single body and two heads.

"Here in America, though, we have an even more unusual case: Two people conjoined in the body of a 64-year-old man. His name is Mitt Romney."

As they say, read on.

And while you're at it, be sure and check out this gem from Robert J. Samuelson, contending, as he has plenty of times in the past, that America's elderly are much better off financially than stereotyped.

"I have been urging higher eligibility ages and more means-testing for Social Security and Medicare for so long that I forget that many Americans still accept the outdated and propagandistic notion that old age automatically impoverishes people," Samuelson writes. "Asks one reader: Who are these 'well-off' elderly you keep writing about? The suggestion is that they are figments of my imagination, invented to justify harsh cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare on the needy."

Samuelson's column won't please his correspondent, but you can wager a Social Security check that if the reader has a computer, he's sending the article along to his friends. Jewels have a way of making the rounds.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Farewell, Alvaro Vargas Llosa
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, May 10, 2011

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Groupblog was only a month old when I posted an item in May 2006 with the headline "Welcome Alvaro Vargas Llosa." Like everything in the newspaper business, the blog has changed a lot in format and presentation over five years, but Vargas Llosa's columns never did.

They were always informative, yet even more so, they were always interesting. Vargas Llosa was at the top of his game whether discussing Latin American politics, European Union bailouts of member-country economies, the rise (and sometimes fall) of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and Spain), U.S. fiscal policy and any number of other subjects that caught the attention of his considerable and curious intellect.

The column he didn't get to write was one I imagined would be his greatest -- the end of Fidel Castro. The Cuban dictator, citing illness, had handed power over to his younger brother Raul in late July 2006, and Vargas Llosa began preparing for the eventuality. Castro so far has escaped the Grim Reaper but you only need to take a look at this Vargas Llosa column from last month to get an idea of what he would have said about the bearded one and his communist revolution that, over a half-century, reduced his countrymen to either being serfs or refugees.

"The real purpose (of a recent Communist Party congress) was to maintain the way in which power is allocated," Varga Llosa wrote. "The Castro brothers, ever the cunning tacticians, are ready to make concessions in many areas. But not on the definitive issue: the monopoly of power."

Nor did Vargas Llosa ever buy into the thinking, often popular in academic circles, that a little bit of autocracy was sometimes good for the masses. Examining the mess that Ivo Morales has made of his five-year rule in Boliva, Vargas Llosa noted: "What has happened in Bolivia holds two essential lessons for the rest of Latin America. First, the populist socioeconomic model is untenable. Second, the logic of authoritarian populism points toward ever-greater radicalization precisely because that socioeconomic system is untenable."

Vargas Llosa's belief in free people and open markets drove his writing in every area he touched, including a blistering critique of the attempt by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other central bankers to keep the economy afloat by essentially printing more money. Vargas Llosa called it as he saw it -- a return to stagflation.

In addition to his column, Vargas Llosa has authored numerous books in both English and Spanish, and has produced documentary films. Politics and prose come naturally to the Vargas Llosa family -- Alvaro's father, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, is both a former candidate for the presidency of Peru and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.

But for now, Alvaro, a graduate of the London School of Economics, has decided to seek a new career path. We wish him our best.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Killer of Innocents
Posted by James Hill on Monday, May 2, 2011

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Any journalist who was working on Sept. 11, 2001, can vividly recall, almost 10 years later, what it was like to cover a story of almost 3,000 Americans killed because they had reported to their jobs or were traveling west for business or pleasure.

It's the years in between that seem a blur -- first the national mourning, then the attempt to assess the threat against the country, the anthrax scare, the attack on Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq. Weeks turned to months, and months into years, and yet for every day since 9/11, we have lived with the specter that, God forbid, something singularly awful could happen again. Will be attempted again, as national security and counterterrorism officials remind us.

Looking back, it is amazing to consider the barrels of ink and tons of newsprint consumed to tell this story. Considering the changes that were already under way in the news business -- declining circulation and advertising revenue -- the achievement of such journalistic excellence is stunning. Reporters and photographers have embedded with U.S. troops in order to be closer to the action and to chronicle the sacrifices of those in uniform, many of whom said they were drawn to service by the attacks of 9/11. Investigative reporters and editors have spent years delving into every facet of what we used to call the War on Terror, presenting accounts to readers of both the complexity of such an operation and the predictable yet still unacceptable capacity for abuse. On the opinion pages, the debate has raged on everything from military tactics to the political ramifications of doing nothing.

A war like no other, and the results have often been frustrating. We have been fighting in Afghanistan almost since the terrorist attacks, and in Iraq we paid a horrible price as an occupying force. Yet observers have been able to note progress of sorts in the mission to decapitate al-Qaeda's command and control, especially in the number of high-level operatives captured and sent to the U.S. military prison at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, or killed by Predator drones hunting them down in the tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On Monday (Sunday in Washington), this effort was rewarded with its biggest catch when highly trained U.S. forces stormed a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and delivered a promised bullet to the head of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's founder and personalized picture of evil.

That bin Laden is now in Davy Jones' Locker is no assurance that the war against terrorists begun under President Bush and continued by -- even though his critics say reluctantly -- President Obama is even far from over. After Palestinian terrorists took Israeli Olympic athletes hostage during the 1972 Munich games, The Economist ran a grainy picture of one of the ski-masked perpetrators on its cover with the headline that went something like: "He and his type will be with us for the rest of our lives." Sadly, this has been the truth of our times.

But bin Laden's death, as our colleague Eugene Robinson noted, does represent closure. He will no longer have the smug satisfaction of witnessing the mayhem he unleashed on American innocents, while we will have the satisfaction of knowing he got just what he deserved for doing so.

Besides Robinson, see these columns on the killing of Osama bin Laden by Richard Cohen, Michael Gerson, David Ignatius and George F. Will.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Duck and Cover
Posted by James Hill on Thursday, April 28, 2011

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Call Richard Cohen an anarchist who delights in throwing hand grenades. Most of them hit their marks. The one he lobbed earlier this week may have started Civil War II.

Just in time for the opening of festivities to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the War Between the States, Cohen presented a novel thesis -- retire the myth of Robert E. Lee.

Whoa. Them's fighting words in the parts of the Washington, D.C., metro area on the southern bank of the Potomac River, where Lee's mansion overlooks Arlington National Cemetery, where thousands of students have attended Washington-Lee High School, and where drivers daily navigate Lee Highway.

Which was Cohen's point: "All over the South, particularly in his native Virginia, the cult of Lee is manifested in streets, highways and schools named for him. When I first moved to the Washington area, I used to marvel at these homages to the man. What was being honored? Slavery? Treason? Or maybe, for this is how I perceive him, no sense of humor? (Often, that is mistaken for wisdom.) I also wondered what a black person was supposed to think or, maybe more to the point, feel. Chagrin or rage would be perfectly appropriate."

Marse Robert would be happy to know he still has his defenders. As of this writing, more than 800 people have posted comments about the Cohen column on washingtonpost.com. I can't wait to see the letters to the editor come in.

Maybe one of them will be from someone who identifies with John Galt. Ayn Rand's fictional hero certainly wouldn't have cared for Michael Gerson's column about the movie version of Rand's classic, "Atlas Shrugged."

"A work that lectures us endlessly on the moral superiority of heroic achievement is itself a model of mediocrity," Gerson writes. "In this, the film perfectly reflects both the novel and the mind behind it."

That's just for starters. Gerson goes after Rand as well.

"Rand's novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism," he notes. "Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible."

Then the hand grenade: "If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others. Rand's achievement was to turn a phase into a philosophy, as attractive as an outbreak of acne."

Dana Milbank, too, can be a bomb thrower, although usually with tongue planted firmly in cheek. After consulting with three academics who specialize in psychology and behavior, he thinks he has come up with an answer to why everyone finds President Obama such an enigma -- "There's too much going on in the poor guy's head."

He adds: "One type of thinker isn't necessarily better or smarter than the other; it depends on the circumstances. A simple thinker such as Winston Churchill, for example, was a better answer to Adolf Hitler than the complex Neville Chamberlain. ... Obama was simple enough during his campaign, but, as president, became submerged in subtlety."

Or in other words, this might be the difference between running and governing.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Open for Business
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, April 13, 2011

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My hunch is that not many Americans get too excited about the possibility of a government shutdown. Yet in a company town such as Washington, where the federal government is the only reason for the city's existence, the thought of such an action produces at least two reactions: panic, and the potential for relief from the area's traffic congestion.

As last weekend approached, panic was winning hands down. Here at The Washington Post, reporters and editors were scrambling to cover a story with two possible outcomes and not much time to change directions -- the clock would run out (at midnight, no less) about the same time deadline arrived for the Saturday print edition. So editors doubled down, preparing stories that would acknowledge either that the talks had failed or a deal had been reached.

On the opinion pages, there was a bit more breathing room, but only because columnists were writing either for Sunday or Monday. Some, including Dana Milbank, Kathleen Parker and Robert J. Samuelson, chose the more general approach, offering thoughts about the overall situation that had brought the government to this point. A little tweaking and the columns could be fresh regardless of which outcome prevailed.

Others, including E.J. Dionne Jr., went for full rewrite. Either way, a consensus quickly developed that showdowns of this nature were not in the interest of serious governance, and that if politicians were to be taken seriously, they should start scoring points with voters and not among themselves.

Which, it seemed, was a message heard at the White House -- and acted on with alacrity. President Obama's Wednesday speech to the nation embracing the fiscal path set out by a debt commission he had appointed but largely ignored was a remarkable admission that the administration had allowed itself to be fiscally run off course.

And, just in time for a re-election run, it proved to be good politics too. As Milbank pointed out in another column, "Obama blessing the debt commission's bipartisan product of spending cuts and tax increases confirms him as a born moderate."

Not the best of both worlds for those who wish to unseat him, either. "For Obama's would-be challengers, the president's embrace of former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming could mean the loss of one of the last few issues on which they could best the incumbent," Milbank wrote. "The economy has begun to improve, GOP views on foreign affairs have become scattered, and antipathy to health care reform has been compromised by the fact that the most serious front-runner, Mitt Romney, championed legislation very similar to Obama's."

Liberals weren't exactly jumping for joy. Richard Cohen sees Obama's approach to both the Libyan revolution and the budget fight as a failure of leadership.

"Now, though, it is past time to move on and lead. Slogans such as 'win the future' are rhetorical cotton candy," he writes. "They melt in your mouth and leave nothing behind. The president needs to say explicitly what he wants and how he's going to get there. 'Change' won't do anymore. It's leadership we need."

Ruth Marcus says Obama and his administration were late to the game: "If the argument is framed solely in terms of budget cuts, Republicans always win: They are willing to out-cut Democrats. That inescapable tilt was exacerbated by the virtual absence of a White House message about the impact of a shutdown or the cuts themselves. "

Eugene Robinson, meanwhile, puts Republicans in the driver's seat: "There's no question who won last week's showdown. ... That Democrats were able to save a few pet programs is something but not much. You really don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."

In a company town, however, it helps to know that at last, the politicians may have indeed decided to get serious.

Congratulations to our colleague E.J. Dionne Jr. for winning the Hillman Award for Career Achievement presented by the Sidney Hillman Foundation. Dionne joins a Hall of Fame of distinguished journalists going back to Theodore White and Edward R. Murrow.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

What Made Broder So Special
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, April 5, 2011

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He once sent a postcard from Houston to his 5-year-old son in which he asked if the boy knew why the puppies on the picture looked so sad. Because they weren't going to get the oil depletion allowance.

On another occasion, he took all four of his sons to the U.S. Capitol one Saturday to share with them his knowledge of how Congress worked. The boys sat down in chairs on the front row of the Senate visitor's gallery and heard their father explain the workings of the upper chamber. As he was finishing, he told them that once a bill had passed the Senate, it still had to go through the House of Representatives, and they would go there next to hear him explain that chamber's workings. The sons rose, and so did about 15 other visitors who apparently thought they had stumbled into a guided tour. He reached his hand out and introduced himself one by one as "Dave Broder." And off to the House they all went.

There is no doubt that the late David S. Broder was Washington's pre-eminent political reporter. And at his memorial service on Tuesday, it was obvious why he had earned such distinction. Broder was eulogized as the best in a demanding business. The overflow crowd that came to honor him at the National Press Club found out just how demanding he was of himself.

His own commitment to excellence set a standard that defined political reporting for the decades that Broder worked -- and for decades to come. He was tireless in his pursuit of the story, yet he was also a student of both his trade and his subject. He befriended younger reporters and helped make them better at doing their jobs. His legacies are all around, as PBS' Gwen Ifill pointed out to the gathering.

He gave good advice. As Don Graham, chairman of the board of The Washington Post Co., noted, Broder was the one person in the newsroom whose counsel he always sought in the 21 years he served as The Post's publisher.

And sometimes when you didn't want to hear it, as Vice President Joe Biden reminded everyone of the times when Broder's commentary could be personally stinging, but deservedly so.

As demanding of others as he was of himself. Post political reporter Dan Balz recalled "the look" that Broder would give when something wasn't quite right. You knew immediately you had not met the dean's standards.

George Broder, Matthew Broder, Mike Broder and Josh Broder shared reflections of what it was like to be Dave Broder's sons. Their father was a world-class reporter, but to them he was a world-class dad.

Biden, who delivered the final eulogy, remarked that in a city noted for it's monuments, Broder "stood tall as a monument to journalism."

Then, in what might be the finest compliment a politician could pay a reporter, the vice president added, "he was a skeptic without being a cynic."

Indeed, that was what made Dave Broder so special.

(Consult C-SPAN listings for rebroadcasts of the Broder memorial service. It is also available online here.)

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Hearts and Minds
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, March 30, 2011

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Back when the Soviet empire began to crumble, Western policymakers couldn't do much but watch in amazement -- first as the Berlin Wall opened, then as the other dominoes fell, finally reaching the Kremlin's door.

The revolution that has been convulsing the Middle East would probably have been treated much the same way had it not been for the intransigence of one Moammar Gaddafi, who not only refused to heed the protesters but promised to slaughter them.

This is a distinction President Obama has been trying to emphasize as his justification for committing U.S. military resources to an allied effort to impose a no-fly zone over the country and put the squeeze on Gaddafi's killing machine. Critics, with some justification, have been scattershot quick to counter Obama, contending his rationale for action has been confusing, poorly conceived and too little, too late. His speech to the National Defense University was an attempt to clear the air.

As David Ignatius, an astute observer of all things Middle East, notes: "Obama's speech Monday was a lesson in how presidencies are a matter of trial and error. A candidate who came into office partly on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War has ended up committing more American troops on more battlefields. Yet he does it, each time reluctantly, delaying and debating before sending the military."

Further, Ignatius says, Obama's job is not done. "Obama gave a good Libya speech, but soon he needs to deliver a 'Cairo II' speech that will articulate a coherent strategy for the region," he wrote. "As he said, 'history is on the move' from Morocco to Iran -- and yes, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, too. If Obama can connect his AfPak policy with the democratic wave that transformed Tunisia and Egypt, he will solve the core riddle of his presidency."

Ruth Marcus pointed out that the president's speech filled in some important blanks. There are still a lot of blank spaces out there, however.

"Even afterward, as the president was careful to point out, Libya will be no picnic," she comments. "There is no Libyan Vaclav Havel in the wings. Instead, White House officials talk bravely of enlisting shopkeepers in Tripoli.

"I hope they're right. I felt better about the enterprise Tuesday morning than I did a day earlier. Better, but still queasy about how it all ends."

Dana Milbank saw a different tone emerging in U.S. foreign policy: "Maybe the lack of a fixed doctrine isn't such a bad thing. Being doctrinaire, after all, got the last guy into quite a bit of trouble. Everybody knew what the Bush doctrine was -- at least, everybody but Sarah Palin ("in what respect, Charlie?"). Yet that crisp clarity led us into war in Iraq based on false presumptions, draining resources from the war in Afghanistan and antagonizing allies."

Eugene Robinson, meanwhile, thinks the president's critics, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in particular, can't have it both ways concerning the Libyan operation.

"Leave aside, for the moment, whether Obama made the right call," he writes. "At least he tried. Gingrich, by contrast, reflexively shoots from the lip. On any conceivable subject, he's always ready to tell you more than he knows. He is certain that his view is 100 percent right -- until he decides it's 100 percent wrong."

Richard Cohen says that what's really at stake is a matter of conscience: "A better question is: How much will it cost to save lives? That, after all, is what this operation is all about - the prospect that Moammar Gaddafi was going to settle the score in the most horrific way imaginable. Based on his record and the clear indication that he is crazy, a bloodbath was in prospect. What should the world have done? Nothing? Squeeze Gaddafi with sanctions, seize his Swiss accounts and padlock his son's London townhouse? None of these measures would have had immediate impact. Sanctions are a slow-working poison. A bullet was needed."

It is often said of war that you must win both hearts and minds. For the Obama administration, this finally appears to be a domestic priority as well.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Caught in the Fog of War
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, March 23, 2011

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As opening acts go, the weekend bombing of Libya to establish a no-fly zone over that North African country was pretty impressive. The reviews were not kind, nevertheless, perhaps because of the nature of the entire coalition operation.

This was supposed to be one for the "international community." So, a logical first question would be: Why was Uncle Sam, despite Washington's initial hesitation, leading the charge once hostilities got under way? And since U.S. officials were tripping over themselves trying to explain that they wouldn't be doing so for long, a follow-up question might be: So what's the point?

Those explanations didn't quite wash either, which made for a bad couple of days for the Obama administration, and a feast for the commentators.

"America's war aim is inseparable from -- indeed, obviously is -- destruction of that regime," wrote George F. Will. "So our purpose is to create a political vacuum, into which we hope -- this is the "audacity of hope" as foreign policy -- good things will spontaneously flow. But if (Moammar) Gaddafi cannot be beaten by the rebels, are we prepared to supply their military deficiencies? And if the decapitation of his regime produces what the removal of Saddam Hussein did -- bloody chaos -- what then are our responsibilities regarding the tribal vendettas we may have unleashed? How long are we prepared to police the partitioning of Libya?"

Will was not alone in questioning both the competency and purpose of the operation. Richard Cohen, who had written eloquently a week earlier about the blood on Gaddafi's hands, saw the administration as trying to have its cake and eat it too. It reminded him of the late Milton Berle, who, in the early days of television, "used to signal his studio audience to both continue and stop applauding by holding up one hand to wave them on and another to quiet them down."

"The change that Obama promised has settled on us all like an irritating drizzle," Cohen wrote. "His ideas were untested by either age or experience. It is one thing to decry American unilateralism and quite another to await international action when time is of the essence. It is not necessary for America always to lead, but it is sometimes necessary for it to do so -- and always necessary for the president to know when that moment has arrived. Obama seems not to know. He often solves problems by ignoring them."

Michael Gerson was also appalled by the dithering.

"America did not orchestrate the international response," he noted. "Instead, America was dragged toward responsibility by the clarity and persistence of Britain and France. Even then, it was only the prospect that Benghazi would become another Srebrenica that forced the administration's hand. Obama's response to the Libyan revolution fits the pattern of his foreign policy, established during the Green Revolution in Iran and the recent Egyptian uprising: The reaction hesitant, the process chaotic, the outcome late."

And Eugene Robinson found an inconvenient truth. "I have to admit that I, too, would have found it hard to stand idly by as Gaddafi drenched the streets of Benghazi in blood," he wrote. Then, alluding to protests put down by autocratic regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and even Saudi Arabia, Robinson asks: "But what makes it any easier to watch other despots do the same thing?"

It's something that Washington is dealing with by the seat of its pants, as David Ignatius pointed out after a frank interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

"Gates says the unrest has highlighted 'ethnic, sectarian and tribal differences that have been suppressed for years' in the region," Ignatius observed, "and that as America encourages leaders to accept democratic change, there's a question 'whether more democratic governance can hold ... countries together in light of these pressures.' In other words, there's a risk that the political map of the modern Middle East may begin to unravel, too.

"Then Gates says something policymakers rarely admit in crisis, which is that he doesn't know how things will turn out: 'I think we should be alert to the fact that outcomes are not predetermined, and that it's not necessarily the case that everything has a happy ending. ... We are in dark territory and nobody knows what the outcome will be.'"

Not a comforting thought -- and perhaps one that should have been thought out a bit longer.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

The Great Unknowns
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, March 16, 2011

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Not long after it became obvious that the earthquake and tsunami in Japan had created an epic disaster, I started receiving e-mails from editors wondering if anyone in The Writers Group would be commenting immediately.

Had I have been editing an op-ed page, I might have sent one of the e-mails myself. It's the nature of the business to want newsy items on your commentary pages, and in most cases we would have been rushing to see if we couldn't oblige.

Yet commentary pages are meant for reflection and analysis, not reaction or unsubstantiated speculation. You go with what you know. And in the first hours after the disaster struck, we knew very little because the Japanese authorities knew so very little themselves. True, video of the tsunami's destructive force or the shaking in Tokyo office buildings was already being posted on news websites; reports from Japan were dominating both the print and electronic media.

Still, the news was sketchy. Video could be shot from airplanes and helicopters; getting on the ground was an entirely different matter. In some places, the "ground" no longer existed. Other areas were nothing short of total devastation. With so many roads impassable and airports knocked out of service, public safety officials had trouble getting in to rescue the living and recover the dead. It wasn't until late Friday (Saturday in Japan) that the damage to nuclear power plants became evident.

In other words, there was much we didn't know -- and still don't, as the disaster's catastrophic toll continues to mount. Some news organizations jumped for commentary, nonetheless. Newsweek commissioned the respected author Simon Winchester, and he quickly hammered out a well-written essay that suggested the next place along the Pacific Rim to get hit with an equal or worse calamity could be -- you didn't need to guess this -- the San Francisco Bay Area atop the San Andreas Fault. Such doomsday scenarios have been drawn with some regularity since 1906, the year of the great San Francisco quake, but again, we don't know.

What we did know by Monday was that Japan had a potential nuclear catastrophe on its hands, possibly much worse and more widespread than the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in the waning days of the Soviet Union. That tragedy was a direct consequence of Soviet incompetence. Japan's plants, on the other hand, are some of the best engineered and well-regulated on earth. Yet when the earth erupts and then the sea rushes in at the speed of a jet airliner, can anything be that well-built?

This was Eugene Robinson's thesis as he offered up the first commentary The Writers Group put out on the crisis. Nuclear power has been enjoying a renaissance of sorts in the United States, in part because some environmentalists have come to view it as a counter to climate change. Depending on what happens in Japan, and reports are still not convincing that these exploding reactors can be brought under control, nuclear power has suffered another in a long line of setbacks, and for good reason.

In the days and weeks ahead, there will be more for columnists to assess as the consequences of the disaster become apparent. Japan's role in East Asian security, its long-stagnating economy, its continued manufacturing prowess, its significant contributions to human advancement in culture and science all provide a rich tableau to determine how the country recovers.

For now, we should pray that it does.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

David Broder, 1929-2011
Posted on Wednesday, March 9, 2011

David and Ann Broder

Conscience of a Conservative
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, March 9, 2011

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The late William F. Buckley, in defining the mission of his National Review, said "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop."

George F. Will, one of Buckley's intellectual heirs, sometimes finds himself in the position of standing athwart conservatism, yelling Cut That Out.

Which, come to think of it, is what a conservative columnist ought to be doing from time to time. Over the last couple of years, as tea party populism has both energized and revolutionized the Republican Party, Will has had plenty of opportunities to remind conservatives of a batting coach's most important piece of advice -- keep your eye on the ball.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who wrote a best-selling book on losing weight, then jumped into the 2008 Republican presidential sweepstakes and broke early at the gate, didn't get the message and waded, instead, into what Will refers to as the particular crowd of "careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons."

Huckabee's sin was in answering a question from a radio interviewer considering President Obama's birth certificate. Will knew the correct answer: "Huckabee should have replied, 'I've seen paranoia. Goodbye.'"

Huckabee didn't, instead taking the host's bait and asserting that Obama had grown up in Kenya. To which Will says: "Republicans should realize that when self-described conservatives such as (radio talker Steve) Malzberg voice question-rants ... and Republicans do not recoil from them, the conservative party is indirectly injured."

Silliness, however, comes in many forms, and Will doesn't reserve his scorn only for Huckabee. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also on the subject of Kenya, also gets his share.

"To the notion that Obama has a 'Kenyan, anti-colonial' worldview," Will writes, "the sensible response is: If only. Obama's natural habitat is as American as the nearest faculty club; he is a distillation of America's academic mentality; he is as American as the other professor-president, Woodrow Wilson. A question for former history professor Gingrich: Why implicate Kenya?"

Why indeed. It would seem the Obama administration has enough on the plate -- record deficits and debt, an economy that still struggles, and now with the Arab world restless, the conduct of foreign affairs -- to give any potential candidate a feast of serious issues to bite into. So why chase conspiracy theories?

And why even bother? As Kathleen Parker notes, it's only 2011. "President Obama's first term is scarcely half over, and the next election is 20 months away," she writes. "Twenty months! Can you bear this conversation 24-7 for 20 more months?

It's a natural reaction, one assumes, that conservatives would be giddy over their prospects for 2012, giving their performance last fall in the midterms and the fact that they've placed Obama in the same league with Jimmy Carter.

They were just as giddy in 1995 after winning back Congress after 40 years in the minority. But the "my turn" school of picking a nominee produced Bob Dole, who was no match for the incumbent, Bill Clinton.

Will believes the primary field is already pretty much set -- Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels; Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour; former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who recently resigned as ambassador to China; former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

If this holds, then the wannabes are probably wasting their time by floating their potential candidacies.

Or ours. As Parker concludes: "Eventually, assuming we're still cognizant, candidates will declare themselves. We'll rehash their pasts, squirm through debates, and watch glaze-eyed as the pageant plays out. But I for one can wait. Not knowing how it ends may be all that's left to enjoy."

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

You Say You Want a Revolution
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011

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The winds of change are blowing again -- in the Middle East and, of all places, the American Middle West. We are only beginning to come to grips with the significance.

There is at last an acceptance that something bigger is under way than just a government or two failing. Youthful protesters, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt, opened geopolitical fault lines that have left many Middle Eastern countries shaken, some violently, and others nervously watching in anticipation.

Hard to equate what's happening in the (mostly) Arab world with the storming of Madison, Wis., last week by unionized public employees, mostly teachers, outraged because the state's governor had proposed cutting their benefits and their collective bargaining rights.

Yet the Obama administration, which was first slow and then fumbling in its response to events abroad, wasted no time getting into the middle of the Wisconsin dispute -- on the side of the protesters, for sure, but as some observers were quick to note, also in the pocket of big labor, one of the Democratic Party's biggest sources of support.

That may have been a blunder of epic proportions. Wisconsin, as with many other states, particularly those where the manufacturing sector has been decimated, is hovering close to bankruptcy. So despite the fact that the unions turned out in such numbers, you don't need a weatherman to know that either (1) labor absorbs the cuts across the board, or (2) a whole lot of teachers and other public employees are going to end up on the unemployment line.

A country with a 9 percent jobless rate doesn't need more out-of-work legions in the streets. Which exactly is one of the points E.J. Dionne Jr. makes in a hard-hitting column that contends the political conversation has been turned upside down -- to the peril of all American workers.

"We are acting here as if the only real problem the United States confronts is the budget deficit; the only test of leadership is whether a president is willing to make big cuts in programs that protect the elderly; and the largest threat to our prosperity comes from public employees," Dionne writes.

Moreover, he sees one potential talked-about solution -- lifting retirement age for Social Security to 69 and cutting the top income tax rate from 35 percent to 29 percent -- as absolutely loony.

"Only a body dominated by millionaires could define 'shared sacrifice' as telling nurses' aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people," Dionne notes. "I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don't get why Democrats -- 'the party of the people,' I've heard -- would come near such an idea."

Conservatives would do well to analyze Dionne's argument. We may indeed cut government to the very bone and presto, by getting the budget balanced and the national debt on the way to being paid down, prosperity may be just around the country. Still, you have to consider the collateral damage, especially if unemployment, already bad enough, rises.

And if anything has been driving the Middle East revolt, it is the helplessness felt by so many whose futures were blunted because they had no hope of a meaningful tomorrow.

David Ignatius, now on a reporting trip to the region, told me from Cairo after attending the "Victory March" on Friday that to be in Tahrir Square that day was to witness history as it must have been in Paris in 1789. We know how that turned out.

In his columns from Cairo, Ignatius has provided a perspective that we'd all do well to ponder.

"The uprising that toppled (Hosni) Mubarak was one of those Utopian moments that bring a suspension of normal politics," Ignatius wrote. "Differences of class, ideology, religion and gender were ignored in pursuit of the common goal of ending a corrupt and arrogant regime. But given human nature, those moments don't last."

Neither do electoral waves the likes of which we witnessed in this country last November. Voters elect representatives to do something, or suffer the consequences. As governments have learned too painfully at times when the winds of change blow, those consequences are often unintended.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Shouts Heard Round the World
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011

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At this moment, no one can say for certain what will happen in Egypt, where demonstrators continue to demand the removal of Hosni Mubarak's autocratic and sclerotic government. Yet nothing will ever be the same again.

Not for Mubarak, whose tenure has effectively ended, even if he hasn't quite gotten the message.

Not for the liberationists in the streets, whose protest seems driven by one simple word -- enough.

Not for other Middle Eastern despots, who have suddenly added "survival" to their to-do lists.

And not, to say the least, for the United States and other Western nations who have allied themselves with the Mubarak regime in the name of Middle East stability. Everyone is aware that the status lacks a quo.

Historians, given the benefit of time, will someday be able to say with scholarly precision just what these events at the beginning of 2011 accomplished. Were they cataclysmic, on par with other upheavals -- the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and its corresponding implosion, only 70 years after it began? Or were they just another in a much too-long list of repressions, brought to bay through the use of lethal force, the change put off for another day?

We don't, can't, know. But we can try to make sense of what is happening, if nothing less than to prepare ourselves for the change that is already occurring.

David Ignatius explains the stakes: "It's an easy revolution to like, and U.S. officials have wisely endorsed the protesters' goals of openness and reform. But in truth, there's little America could do to bolster the octogenarian Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, even if it wanted to. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may endorse reform ... but this is a post-American revolution, encouraged in part by a recognition of the limits of U.S. power."

Eugene Robinson says the Obama administration needs to start pushing.

"Cherished ideals of democracy and cold exigencies of realpolitik both demand that U.S. officials do whatever is in their power -- which, frankly, may not be much -- to hasten Mubarak's departure," he writes. "Help him fuel the presidential jet and load the gold bullion, if necessary. Send him a postcard from the French Riviera saying 'Wish you were here.'"

Noting the many pitfalls, including the fact that Egypt may fall under the sway of Islamic fanatics, Robinson nonetheless also notes: "There's another reason to give Mubarak a mighty shove: We believe in freedom and democracy."

Michael Gerson draws a moral: "The lesson from these events is that America should be anticipating democratic traditions long before a crisis makes them urgent -- trying to encourage the leadership and institutions that will make eventual change less traumatic. These efforts in Egypt were halfhearted and inconsistent. Someday, absent a shift in policy, we are likely to say the same of China. In the modern world, it is a short distance from Tahrir Square to Tiananmen. An active democracy promotion strategy -- engaging authoritarian regimes while cultivating the leaders and parties that may replace them -- is alternately criticized as paternalistic, unrealistic and hypocritical. Until a moment such as this, when it is revealed as the essential, practical work of American diplomacy."

And Richard Cohen is, frankly, worried: "The next Egyptian government -- or the one after -- might well be composed of Islamists. In that case, the peace with Israel will be abrogated and the mob currently in the streets will roar its approval."

Cohen urges a path of caution.

"Those Americans and others who cheer the mobs in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities, who clamor for more robust anti-Mubarak statements from the Obama administration, would be wise to let Washington proceed slowly," he writes, adding: "Egypt and the entire Middle East are on the verge of convulsing. America needs to be on the right side of history. But it also needs to be on the right side of human rights. This time, the two may not be the same."

In the days and weeks ahead as this fascinating, history-making story continues to unfold, much will be written and analyzed about the contagion effects of what we are now seeing on the ground in Cairo. However it plays out, keep in mind that this clock will not be turned back.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.


Thought Provocateurs
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Jan. 10, 2011

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Opinion columns are just that; they give you the writer's opinion, but they also help you form your own. Often they don't take much persuasion. Sometimes, though, they can produce an epiphany.

Take the WikiLeaks case as an example. When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his band of cyberanarchists got hold of thousands of secret State Department documents a few months back, thanks apparently to a disgruntled low-grade U.S. serviceman with a security clearance and an ax to grind, the early reaction was one of great concern that a security breach of unimaginable proportions had taken place. Yet when newspapers around the world began publishing the material, a general consensus seemed to develop that Assange and crew had put out the equivalent of diplomatic gossip. In other words, much ado about nothing.

Leave it to Michael Gerson to challenge that notion. But also leave it to Gerson to challenge us all to reconsider our laissez-faire reaction to Assange's perfidy.

Granted, America has not been damaged all that greatly by WikiLeaks reading and then distributing our diplomatic mail. But in faraway places too often off the radar of most Americans, specifically the hellhole of misery that is Zimbabwe, the leaks are having a devastating effect.

As Gerson noted, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, an aging tyrant who never misses an opportunity to drive his nation deeper into penury, has used the leaks to ratchet up his oppression.

"Most of the disclosures have eased the life of the dictator," Gerson wrote. "The ruling party is now hunting for traitors, based on information from the leaks. Party-controlled media have played up American criticisms of (opposition leader and now Prime Minister Morgan) Tsvangirai, even while accusing the opposition of being American puppets. And the Mugabe-appointed attorney general has named a commission to consider legal action, perhaps including charges against Tsvangirai."

But even more to the point, what does this mean for us? Gerson has an answer: "Those who enthuse that information should always be free -- like oxygen and butterflies -- should consider the situation in Harare, where the breaking of confidences has strengthened a despot. Secrecy is often the precondition for political opposition in an oppressive society. And secrecy can also be a necessary protection for honesty. The quality of disclosures in the confessional would be diminished if confessions were posted on YouTube. What ruling-party figure in Zimbabwe will now quietly talk to U.S. officials about the inevitable transition beyond Mugabe?"

Indeed, we sometimes think we are powerless to do anything about life's cruelties beyond our borders, lest we get too involved in fights in which we should have no quarrel. Yet when U.S. diplomats are quietly and diligently working to peacefully alter a humanitarian tragedy of the first order, we need to provide them with assurances that their efforts will not result in betrayal.

With Zimbambwe, Assange and WikiLeaks have appointed themselves the betrayers. And as Gerson so well points out, we should think about that.

Another thought-provoking column by Eugene Robinson appeared in The Washington Post on the same day as Gerson's, and it too should produce an epiphany for many readers.

Robinson's subject was the exoneration of prisoners thanks to DNA testing, but his greater point was one we tend to hide in the corner until forced to confront it. Or, as he put it in beginning his column: "Race still matters in American, and justice is not completely blind."

And now that Robinson had our attention, he told of the work of Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins to reopen cases and apply DNA testing to the evidence that was used to convict them. White's record so far? Twenty-one inmates from the Dallas area, almost all of them black, have been cleared of their crimes.

Again, we like to tell ourselves that justice works -- that people serve prison time because prosecutors have made a rock-solid case and convinced a jury of a defendant's guilt. And as White told Robinson, in many of the cases he has examined, guilt is upheld.

But for Cornelius Dupree Jr., who was convicted of rape and a carjacking based on being picked out of a photo lineup by the rape victim, justice was never served. He spent 30 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.

And as Robinson so well points out, we should think about that.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

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For those who enjoy political theater, last week's deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans on a series of extended tax breaks, jobless benefits and a payroll tax cut was "Gone With the Wind"-level classic.

Oh, Ashley.

Liberals could not believe their betrayal. Conservatives could not believe the price tag. And in the great center, that high ground presidents and other political leaders must occupy if they are to govern successfully, tomorrow became another day. This could get even more interesting.

David S. Broder certainly thinks so.

"After a shaky period in which his leadership image became hazy, (Obama) has begun to regain focus as the pragmatic liberal that he is -- not the hard-line socialist Republicans make him out to be but a president far more practical and down to earth than his critics on the liberal flank of the Democratic Party," wrote Broder, Washington's most experienced political observer.

"He has set the stage for follow-on proposals that can convert the cumbersome tax system into a growth-spurring mechanism -- and force Republicans to explain and defend their preference for serving their wealthiest business backers."

But back to the fireworks that began exploding almost the minute the deal was announced. What had the left in such a snit was the fact that tax cuts passed in the administration of George W. Bush, including those for the super rich, would be extended another couple of years. In return, Republicans put their seal on an extension of jobless benefits, and both sides threw in the payroll tax reduction for good measure.

What Obama seemingly overlooked was just how much Bush Derangement Syndrome still affects his liberal base. And did he get an earful of it -- so much that, a day after the compromise was announced, you had the spectacle of a Democratic president unloading on "sanctimonious" liberals for wanting gridlock while he was trying to get the traffic moving.

Ruth Marcus admitted she would be part of the take-no-prisoners camp, except ... "This is not the move I would have chosen, but it simultaneously creates space for a broader discussion of the tax system and forces action. The White House could seize the moment to shift the argument away from the stale question of whether rates should rise, and toward the more attractive playing field of how they can be lowered -- and more revenue raised in the bargain."

E.J. Dionne Jr. questioned whether the president was being too clever by half: "Obama's comments make you wonder: Whom does he think he can count on when conservatives try to repeal the health-care law, force cuts in programs he supports, investigate his administration down to the last pencil and continue to denounce him as an un-American socialist?"

And Eugene Robinson, reluctantly, became resigned to the deal. "Congressional Democrats have no real choice but to hold their noses, approve the thing and live to fight another day," he wrote. "The opportunity to shape a better deal -- one without those unnecessary, unfair and supremely galling tax cuts for households making more than $250,000 a year -- is long gone."

Dana Milbank saw a lesson in the making: "Liberals, if they can see beyond their pique, should realize that the emergence of forceful leadership by Obama could be good for them. This time, he stood against his Democratic colleagues, but there's reason to hope that he'll show his newly discovered spine to the Republicans the next time."

But in all good theater, it's what you don't expect that makes the show so interesting. And with liberals ready to eat their young over the package, no one expected Charles Krauthammer to come out of right field and say essentially: The deal stinks. He called it "the swindle of the year."

"Obama is no fool," Krauthammer noted. "While getting Republicans to boost his own re-election chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, tea-party, this-time-we're-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility."

So here's the deal: compromise is back in vogue. Sequels are sure to come. Let's hope they are just as classic.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

On Top of Their Game
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Dec. 6, 2010

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Given the midterm election results, 2010 has been a good year for conservatives. Even without the electoral romp, it was a greater year for conservatism's two most eloquent voices: George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer.

But then, it always has been. Since the 1970s, when Will's column began in The Washington Post, and the mid-'80s, when Krauthammer started his column in the same newspaper, the dynamic duo has set the bar high for a vigorous, intellectual debate on the essential questions of American democracy -- and consistently cleared it with ease and grace.

They're still at it -- soaring, in fact -- as conservatism, a political philosophy liberals attempted to write off for dead two years ago with the election of Barack Obama, has come roaring back.

Make no mistake, Will and Krauthammer have not built their sizable reputations following conservative talking points. They write the talking points, often to the chagrin -- as when Will called for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan -- of mainstream conservative leaders.

More often the chagrined are officials who, in their zeal to implement policies that would turn America's rugged individualists into wards of the nanny state, do the indefensible and then do back flips attempting to defend it. Enter the Transportation Security Administration.

Having flown over the Thanksgiving weekend, I can vouch that going through security was not as bad as many had been predicting. Yet it was also pretty silly or, as the kids say these days, lame.

Here's how Will put it, as concerns over full body scans or aggressive pat-downs put a nation already on edge in a fairly grumpy mood just as the holidays were getting under way:

"The theory -- perhaps by now it seems like a quaint anachronism -- on which the nation was founded is, or was: Government is instituted to protect pre-existing natural rights essential to the pursuit of happiness. Today, that pursuit often requires flying, which sometimes involves the wanding of 3-year-olds and their equally suspect teddy bears.

"What the TSA is doing is mostly security theater, a pageant to reassure passengers that flying is safe. Reassurance is necessary if commerce is going to flourish and if we are going to get to grandma's house on Thursday to give thanks for the Pilgrims and for freedom. If grandma is coming to our house, she may be wanded while barefoot at the airport because democracy - or the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; anyway, something -- requires the amiable nonsense of pretending that no one has the foggiest idea what an actual potential terrorist might look like."

Think about this. Or think about the Thanksgiving leftover that will have high government officials reaching for the antacids for weeks to come: the document drop of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables by the bizarre self-described protectors of open government, a website known as WikiLeaks.

For the most part, if you've been reading the papers with any regularity, WikiLeaks didn't exactly tell us much we didn't already know. Some of the leaked cables were even slightly amusing, in that strange sort of way that slips on the ice are often depicted as being funny.

So U.S. officialdom put up a pretty good front arguing that the nation's security hadn't really been harmed so much. And Krauthammer wasn't buying a bit of it. "What is notable, indeed shocking, is the administration's torpid and passive response to the leaks," Krauthammer wrote. "What's appalling is the helplessness of a superpower that not only cannot protect its own secrets but shows the world that if you violate its secrets -- massively, wantonly and maliciously -- there are no consequences." Here at the Writers Group, we like to note that you wouldn't want to get in an argument with Krauthammer. You'd always lose. Same with Will.

Yet these two conservative thinkers, still very much at the top of their game, also give us something to contemplate with every column. And thankfully, you can't argue with that.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

A Cut Above
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Nov. 22, 2010

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Michelle Singletary is one of journalism's angels.

And secretary of the Department of Tough Love. Her personal finance column, The Color of Money, doesn't advise readers on how to get rich; it focuses mostly on telling them how to stay out of the poor house.

For the last couple of years, she has also been advising people who are just about to get out of the Big House. It has produced some of the most memorable, and heartbreaking, reporting of her career.

But it didn't start out that way. In fact, Singletary's visits to the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women to conduct financial literacy classes, documented throughout 2010 in her Color of Money Challenge series, began not as a journalistic endeavor but as part of her volunteer outreach as a member of the First Baptist Church of Glenarden, Md.

She had been asked to go to the prison because inmates about to be released had few clues about how to handle financial matters once they were no longer inside, where life is regimented to the nth degree. And Michelle being Michelle, she answered the call.

One day, in a conversation about anything and everything, she casually let me in on what she was up to. It was an epiphany moment. "You've got to write this story," was my response.

Singletary wasn't so sure. She has been doing her outreach for years, working with both church members and others about pocketbook issues such as savings and getting out of debt. This wasn't any different, she protested, except that these seminars were being conducted behind bars.

So I enlisted some allies, including editors on the financial desk of The Washington Post. I at first envisaged a long feature that could either run as the cover piece in the Sunday Business section or, perhaps, on Page One. Kelly Johnson, who edits the Sunday section, came up with the idea to make it this year's Challenge, which traditionally runs in three installments and looks at how well participants do in getting their monetary affairs in order.

Normally, Singletary hasn't had much of problem getting folks to participate in the Challenge. In past years she has written about military families and the newly unemployed. But there is nothing normal about prisons or inmates, so the Challenge started off a challenge indeed.

First there was the matter of getting volunteers. And then there was the prison bureaucracy to deal with. But by March, when the first installment was published in the Post and sent to her syndicated clients nationwide, Singletary had lined up two participants who were willing to have their attempts to reintegrate into society profiled. One, a former drug dealer, was going to be cleaning streets in Baltimore. Another, from Maryland's Eastern Shore who was incarcerated for stealing from her employer, was trying to line up a full-time job in the data entry field.

After the second installment ran in May, the woman from the Eastern Shore dropped out of the challenge. As Singletary was preparing for the final installment, the Baltimore street sweeper was nowhere to be found. (She was still checking in with her parole officer, however.)

Singletary went looking for another ex-inmate to profile, and found her in Kelly D. Brown, a Baltimore woman who had served six years for attempted murder. Brown had learned hair styling while behind bars, and was working at a salon in her hometown, earning both a check and the respect of her employers and customers. Then the floor dropped out.

When the Post sought permission to photograph Brown at work, the request went up the chain of command at the Ratner Companies, which owns the Hair Cuttery brand, and Brown was promptly dismissed. The company has a blanket ban on hiring convicted felons, although this apparently was overlooked by those who hired Brown, including a recruiter.

So Singletary's final installment of this year's Challenge was not of redemption but of a dream shattered. Singletary did a follow-up column a week after first describing Brown's predicament, yet despite reader outrage the facts remain: Ratner's policy is unchanged, and Brown for a time was unemployed, all because she was willing to share her attempts to go straight with a newspaper columnist.

I'm pretty sure we haven't heard the last of this, however. Angels never shun a challenge.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Chance of a Presidency
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Nov. 15, 2010

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Expectations were pretty low -- somewhere between slim and nil -- when President Obama appointed a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform earlier this year. Buckpassing is also a word that comes to mind. But when Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the two co-chairman, unveiled their proposal to get the federal budget back in balance, the most immediate reaction was more along the lines of "you've got to be kidding me."

Bowles, a White House chief of staff under President Clinton, and Simpson, a former senator from Wyoming, stated the obvious and prescribed the medicine needed to restore fiscal health. And so they would administer large doses of cod liver oil to Social Security, Medicare, the Pentagon, while sticking an entitlement-addicted public with a bigger service bill.

Remember, this is not the full commission's report. Yet it might as well have been because it has so completely changed the discussion. Prior to Bowles-Simpson, the assumption was that no matter how high the deficit or how deep the debt, Washington would likely dither and do nothing. Now, the message is to do something. In this capital, that constitutes a sea change.

Over the weekend, Washington Post columnists David S. Broder, Ruth Marcus and Dana Milbank sketched out just what an opportunity it had given the president and the new Congress.

Broder picked a perfect metaphor to describe what had happened. Bowles and Simpson, he wrote, had given the country "the equivalent of a cold shower after a night of heavy drinking. It’s sober-up time."

Marcus put the nation in the classroom and Obama at the lectern. "The country is, I think, mature enough to grasp that message," she noted. "Voters’ anxiety about the fiscal picture signals their receptiveness to considering that solutions will not be pain-free. But their learning curve is going to have to be steep. ... Which is where the president should come in, wearing his Professor Obama hat and channeling his inner Ross Perot, complete with charts."

And Milbank saw a return to the future. "The outline released by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson also presents an opportunity for Obama -- if he’s willing to triangulate," Milbank wrote, recalling Bill Clinton's way of reinventing his presidency after he lost Congress. "He’ll have to take the perilous path of turning against his liberal base, but it just might work."

All three writers acknowledged the road ahead would be mined with special interest IEDs, but saw an opportunity for Obama to make his mark in presidential history. Indeed, it would seem the president has been given an early Christmas gift by Bowles and Simpson, and it is now his chance to unite the Great American Middle in a cause that really is vital to the nation's security, not to mention its future. I'm betting he'll go for it.

Speaking of Milbank, I was going to let ride the nasty things that Fox News' Bill O'Reilly said about the columnist and Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on the prime-time show "The O'Reilly Factor." Milbank said it well enough himself in this remarkable column published last week.

But my self-interest in the subject notwithstanding, I think O'Reilly and his sidekicks made fools out of themselves by taking one line from an opinion column Milbank had written about Fox News' midterm election coverage and blowing it up into an indictment of mainstream media and its so-called arrogance.

There was a time when television journalism was also considered mainstream media --and it was a pretty damn good product. 

Take a look at this article that appeared in The Post's Outlook section Sunday by Ted Koppel, who knows a bit about the golden era of television news (he helped create it), and what it has become. The perspective is stunning.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.



Conscience of the Conservatives
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2010

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One great thing about elections is that they finally produce a political scorecard. No longer does one have to read tea leaves or consult polls to ascertain voters' intent.

Sometimes, however, the scorecard is blurry. Taken as a whole, the midterm vote has to stand as a rout for the Democrats, coming just four years after regaining their congressional majority. Yet with Democrats still in control of the Senate, it's no wonder that so many commentators are having a difficult time trying to reach conclusions about what actually transpired on the first Tuesday of November.

On election eve, the conventional wisdom held that Republicans would need a miracle to gain a Senate majority. But after the votes were counted, had Delaware (at one time considered a GOP shoo-in), Nevada (a Senate majority leader fighting for his political life), Colorado and one other state gone Republican (assuming Alaska stays red), the so-called repudiation of the Obama/liberal agenda would have been pronounced complete. As it is, most political forecasters see gridlock continuing at least until we vote again.

What's interesting to note is that the tea party's superstar, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, had endorsed primary election candidates in three of the crucial lost states over the objections of GOP leaders who wanted more established, and thus electable, people on the ballot.

George F. Will, you might say, saw it coming. Writing on Feb. 18, the nation's most well-known conservative columnist sought to dampen enthusiasm then building for a Palin presidential bid in 2012: "Conservatives, who rightly respect markets as generally reliable gauges of consumer preferences, should notice that the political market is speaking clearly: The more attention Palin receives, the fewer Americans consider her presidential timber. The latest Post-ABC News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans -- including 52 percent of Republicans -- think she is not qualified to be president.

"This is not her fault. She is what she is, and what she is merits no disdain. She is feisty and public-spirited, and millions of people vibrate like tuning forks to her rhetoric. When she was suddenly forced to take a walk on the highest wire in America's political circus, she showed grit.

"She also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning. She has been subjected to such irrational vituperation -- loathing largely born of snobbery -- that she can be forgiven for seeking the balm of adulation from friendly audiences."

She found such adulation in Nevada, where primary voters picked Sharron Angle, and Delaware, where Christine O'Donnell knocked off Rep. Mike Castle, who was considered to have a virtual lock on election in November.

Charles Krauthammer was flabbergasted.

"O'Donnell, a lifelong activist who has twice lost statewide races, is very problematic," he wrote on Sept. 17. "It is not that the Republican establishment denigrates her chances -- virtually every nonpartisan electoral analyst from Charlie Cook to Larry Sabato to Stuart Rothenberg has her losing in November.

"Nor is opposition to O'Donnell's candidacy a sign of hostility or disrespect to the tea party. Many of those who wanted to see Castle nominated in Delaware have from the beginning defended the tea party movement from the mainstream media's scurrilous portrayal of it as a racist rabble of resentful lumpenproletarians. Indeed, it is among the most vigorous and salutary grass-roots movements of our time, dedicated to a genuine constitutionalism from which the country has strayed far."

Michael Gerson, who in August had warned that the tea party could be a toxic brew for the GOP, returned to that theme in his post-election analysis.

"Even a vast political victory does not change an iron law of politics: The quality of candidates matters," he noted. "Serious, mainstream Republican Senate candidates could have won in Delaware and Nevada. But Christine O'Donnell was not serious. And Sharron Angle -- warning of "Second Amendment remedies" in case of political loss -- was not mainstream. Weak, poorly vetted Senate candidates were the main reason that while Republican gains in the House were historic -- the largest in 72 years -- gains in the Senate were not."

Sometimes people vote their hearts. What Will, Krauthammer and Gerson were telling conservatives was that it's better to vote you conscience. Looking at the Senate results, I'd say they had a point.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Surf's Up
Posted by James Hill on Friday, Oct. 29, 2010

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A lot of words have been expended on the midterm election, but some of the best were these 42 from David S. Broder, who knows a campaign when he sees it.

Closing out a recent column, Broder wrote of Bob Dole and Gerald Ford, two great legislators of their time: "It helped that they came to Washington as young military veterans, survivors of a war against an implacable enemy. They knew the difference between the Nazis, who were truly evil, and the Democrats, who were simply fellow Americans with different political beliefs."

Think about that one for a while. As we prepare to hold what appears to be another "wave" election, the fourth in 16 years, much has been made of the anger factor in American politics today. Granted, voters do seem grumpy. But as I write this, looking out my window, downtown Washington doesn't seem to be besieged by militants ready to storm the Capitol and take back the country. In fact, the most anger I have seen was the guy in the car with a loudspeaker berating The Washington Post for the way we published his letter to the editor, which I blogged about a few weeks back (he came back for a second round too).

Reporters and columnists who cover politics know that elections don't really produce immediate change. True, they rearrange the deck chairs. But to really have an impact, you have to enact legislation that is acceptable to a majority of the people and can pass constitutional muster.

Yet, this said, elections still have consequences. One need look back only two years to see just how consequential they can be. Barack Obama achieved an electoral landslide, and his wave brought in an expanded congressional majority that should have made it comfortable enough for him to govern by mandate. But it didn't.

His signature reform -- health care -- squeezed through with legislative sleight of hand. And a rapidly collapsing economy led to an unpopular and expensive stimulus program, which added billions more to an already ballooning budget deficit and the national debt.

Throw into this hot-house atmosphere the tea party movement, which didn't even exist at the time of Obama's election, and little wonder this midterm vote has become to some a referendum on the Obama presidency itself.

Waves can rush out as fast as they come in, and one has to look only as far back as 1994 to see how oversized expectations can lead to bitter disappointment. As the late columnist Robert Novak noted in his autobiography, "The Prince of Darkness," he had been waiting all of his professional life for a change election.

This is a point some columnists, both conservative and liberal, have been making in the run-up to Tuesday's vote. Michael Gerson has been quite eloquent in his caution about expecting too much from a Republican majority, especially if go-it-my-way-or-the highway tea partiers such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sharron Angle of Nevada should find themselves as senators-elect come Wednesday morning. Richard Cohen has been equally eloquent and remarkably contrarian in putting the blame for a liberal collapse squarely on the president and his approach to governance.

What's most remarkable about such a highly charged election as this one is how very civil the debate has been on the op-ed pages. True, there are bomb-throwers out there. But The Writers Group doesn't do anarchy. Our columnists who write often about politics -- Broder, Cohen, E.J. Dionne Jr., Gerson, David Ignatius, Charles Krauthammer, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Ruben Navarrette Jr., Kathleen Parker, Eugene Robinson, Robert J. Samuelson and George F. Will -- have all vigorously defended their positions but have done so in the spirit of the debate hall, not a beer garden.

Or, as Krauthammer asked in this column the Friday before Election Day: "What is the point of a two-party democracy if not to present clear, alternative views of the role of government and, more fundamentally, the balance between liberty and equality -- the central issue for any democracy?"

Head to the polls. It's the American way.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

The Local Conundrum
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010

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In his column Sunday, Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander raised the question that editors have wrestled with since the invention of movable type: How much of a newspaper's resources should be devoted to local coverage?

By Alexander's account, The Post has given a definitive answer strictly by the numbers. "Necessary cost-cutting has shrunk the Metro desk by about 40 reporters, and its editing ranks have been reduced by more than half," he wrote. "Only a small number of reporters remain in the suburbs. Most work out of The Post's downtown newsroom."

Numbers don't quite tell the whole story, however. Every desk at The Post has taken the hits that came with three early retirement buyouts and other cost-cutting measures as the newspaper industry has struggled with an amazing and alarming loss of advertising because of the recession. Priorities in news coverage also figure in.

The Post has long been called the local newspaper for the nation's capital (or, more colorfully, the local newspaper for the capital of the free world), but in this case "local" is a matter of definition. While Alexander was addressing complaints from suburban readers who think the cutbacks have given their areas short shrift, most readers turn to The Post because its biggest local stories come from opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and its coverage of government -- both politics and policy -- often leads and carries the national debate.

Yet the question -- how local? -- is still valid, especially at a time when many publishers have determined that a strong local emphasis is a survival strategy to counter and hold off losses to the Internet, where larger news organizations, The Post included, can dominate web traffic. The contradiction, of course, comes back to that definition of local.

In the case of most newspapers, local is synonymous with circulation area. Fair enough. But for editors at large metropolitan newspapers, circulation area can also include not only geography but jurisdiction. Take Kansas City for example. (Or more appropriately, the two Kansas Citys.) The dominant newspaper, The Kansas City Star, must cover as a local story not only news from Kansas City, Mo., but also from Kansas City, Kan., at least six counties and two statehouses.

In Louisville, The Courier-Journal covers Kentucky as well as Southern Indiana. In Cincinnati, The Enquirer covers Ohio but also Northern Kentucky. The pattern is similar across the country.

Editors looking inward often come face to face with the realization that there is more there than meets their eye, particularly when it comes to the one great staple newspapers have long used to build and maintain local circulation -- high school sports coverage. Suburban sprawl has produced a tremendous number of high schools nationwide, and trying to collect just line scores and short game summaries from a far-flung network of "correspondents" gives sports editors fits.

But news is news, and what's important usually rises to the top. What seems myopic in this debate is when opinion journalism gets included in the local vs. national mix.

Don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with soliciting and presenting local opinions; The Post has an excellent page devoted to just this subject every Sunday. Yet exclusion of national and international commentary for the sake of going local comes across as shooting yourself in the foot.

Journalists prefer to justify our existence and First Amendment protection as part of a mission to bring about an informed society that will make the necessary choices in order for our democracy to thrive. So why deny readers the very tools they need to stay informed?

Too often the answer seems to be "they can get it elsewhere." And that's true -- but it's also shooting yourself in the other foot. Coverage of local news has long been an expected commodity that readers want to consume -- some more than others -- whether they are scanning the newspaper at the breakfast table or online. Opinions, however, transcend borders and become the foundation for a state of mind. Their exclusion on editorial pages, regardless of whether the newspaper is regional or local, invites irrelevance.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Welcome, Esther J. Cepeda
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010

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One of my weekly tasks here at The Writers Group is to go through a stack of manuscripts gathering in the in-box, looking for potential talent that could join our lineup of award-winning columnists.

On occasion, I'll write a personal letter asking the writer to submit more material. Other times I explain why a proposed column wouldn't be a good fit, and suggest the writer try another, more general-purpose syndicate than The Writers Group, which lives off of Washington's bread and butter -- politics and policy.

Yet a couple of years ago after reading a package of clips submitted by Esther J. Cepeda, I picked up the phone. Cepeda was one of several journalists let go in a round of cost-cutting at the Chicago Sun-Times, and I first wanted to know if she had other work lined up (she did). Then, because she was going to be employed by the state of Illinois, I wanted to know what she was going to do about her writing career. That's when I discovered that losing a newspaper job wasn't going to stop Esther Cepeda.

She had a lot of ideas she was going to pursue, including a blog to be called 600 Words, a weekly collection of her thoughts and comments, and she also hoped to place a column somewhere (she did, in the Sun-Times no less, in 2009).

I wished her good luck and said we would keep an eye on her work. We did, which was not too difficult since Cepeda added me to her e-mail list to receive the 600 Words blog each Thursday. I also began to notice links to it on various websites.

This past summer, editorial director Alan Shearer and I were thinking out loud about everything in general and new columnists in particular. We wondered if it wasn't time to approach Cepeda and see if she thought she was ready to write for a nationwide audience.

Don't need to tell you how long it took for that e-mail to come back.

Cepeda was already in the process of leaving her state job to devote full time to writing, and was eager for the chance to possibly join The Writers Group. But wanting to write a column twice a week and actually doing it are two very different things, so we asked her if she would be willing to go through an audition, in which she would file on deadline, we would edit and make suggestions, then clear changes with her (the same steps all of our columnists go through before publication).

During this trial period, Cepeda showed us that she could deliver columns on breaking news, hot-issue subjects such as education, and pieces that focused on the offbeat and the unpredictable. She was also a joy to work with.

One Sunday in August, Shearer visited Cepeda at a Starbucks outside Chicago and offered her a contract. Her column makes its debut next week and I, for one, think Cepeda can be a game-changer much as Ellen Goodman was when her column first went into national syndication back in the 1970s.

Esther is the daughter of immigrants (from Ecuador and Mexico) who took blue-collar jobs to raise their family with the hope for a better life. Her first language was Spanish, yet she self-taught herself English by watching "Sesame Street" and looking at the many newspapers her parents kept around the house.

Cepeda is a journalism graduate of Southern Illinois University, and has taken graduate courses at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, where she studied in the Integrated Marketing Communications program. She also spent two years as a public school teacher, and holds a master's degree in education.

In everything she has done, Esther J. Cepeda exemplifies the American experience. She's got a great story to share with her readers, and I think she'll make quite the contribution -- in ways that surprise you -- to the great American debate. We're excited. Welcome aboard, Esther.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.



Connections and Commitments
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010

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"The Social Network" is this week's movie fave, and no doubt it will enjoy a pretty good run in theaters before going to On Demand and DVD. But if you're itching to see the flick to discover how you can be the next Mark Zuckerberg and create a network that will revolutionize communications, spend some time first with Malcolm Gladwell.

He might pop your balloon. Not that Gladwell has anything against Zuckerberg or Facebook -- or any of the other social networks proliferating on the Internet. He just thinks they're not really very revolutionary.

Not in the sense that four young students at North Carolina A&T were when they entered a Woolworth's in Greensboro, N.C., in the 1960s, sat down at the lunch counter, and one of them ordered a cup of coffee. Ezell Blair's request was denied -- and a revolution that shook America to its very moral core was under way.

As Gladwell reports in the current issue of The New Yorker, what began that February in a dime store in Greensboro soon spread to other towns throughout North Carolina, then into Virginia, South Carolina and Tennessee -- and eventually throughout Jim Crow Dixie.

"Some seventy thousand students eventually took part," Gladwell writes. "Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade -- and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook or Twitter."

Imagine that. Would it have been even bigger, faster, more effective if social networking tools had been in existence? Gladwell serves up some serious doubt when he probes the revolutions of our recent past, many of them peaceful, for clues to what they had going for them. Commitment looms large.

"Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations -- which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement -- are high risk strategies," Gladwell notes. "They leave little room for conflict and error. ... Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that (Martin Luther) King's task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King Jr. had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight percent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham -- discipline and strategy -- were things that online social media cannot provide."

Add grit to the list. Gladwell, discussing the close relation the Greensboro four had with one another, notes that the sit-in had long been in the discussion phase, usually over beers late into the night. One of them, Joseph McNeil, thought it was time to act. Another, Franklin McCain, puts the question bluntly: "Are you guys chicken or not?"

In addition to being highly entertaining and notion-bending, Gladwell's article is appropriately timed, coming out almost simultaneously with the release of the movie and, only coincidently, the death of a Rutgers University student who announced his pending suicide with a posting on Facebook.

While Gladwell looked at the big picture and found it to be oversold, Kathleen Parker looked at a smaller picture and found a troubling trend -- that we have, through social media, declared nothing off-limits.

"Especially poignant was (Tyler) Clementi's final note to the world, a Facebook status update saying that he was going to kill himself -- an electronic adieu to his 'friends,' those random and often anonymous folks who sign up to follow one's life online," Parker wrote.

"Friend, the noun, has become meaningless in world where 'friending' is a verb. And privacy, I keep hearing, is dead forever. I don't buy it."

Perhaps another revolution is in order.

Speaking of Parker, our colleague has made her debut with Eliot Spitzer on CNN's "ParkerSpitzer" talk show. You can catch it at 8 p.m. (Eastern) Mondays through Fridays, and we wish her well.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.



Texas Two-Step
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Sept. 27, 2010

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When Jerry Jones, the oft-vilified owner of the Dallas Cowboys, comes off as a genuinely nice person, and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who cultivates a good guy image, comes off as a jerk, something's got to be up.

And indeed, it was all up at this year's convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, a testimony itself to the resilience of a journalistic organization that refuses to throw in the towel. As I blogged recently, this convention in Dallas was shaping up to be an outstanding one. It lived up to its billing, and then some. (For details, go to NCEW's website, or its Facebook page.)

More to the point -- and here's where Messrs. Jones and Perry come in -- NCEW not only made a case for its own relevance but also journalism's relevance in the digital era. The business model of mainstream media may be changing. Yet the mission never will.

So what in the world does this have to do with Jerry Jones? In a word, availability. Jones is one of those people who probably has more important things to do with his time than meet with a bunch of out-of-town editorial writers and editors. He owns one of the National Football League's top franchises, along with a new $1.2 billion stadium that really is a game-changer as far as NFL venues are concerned. He's got a bunch of multimillionaires in his employ, and he expects nothing but excellence from them. When they don't meet his standards, Jones is the first to let them know. For all this, he has often been called one of the more despicable owners in American professional sports.

Could be. But as NCEW members taking a tour of the Cowboys' palace (where the Super Bowl will be played in February) walked out an end zone tunnel and back onto the field, there stood Jerry Jones. After a round of introductions, Jones gave off-the-cuff remarks about the stadium, about the Cowboys, about the financial risks he had personally taken both to buy the team (then losing $1 million a month) in 1989 and building the stadium, particularly when the economy was going into a deep tank.

Then he fielded questions. My guess is that everyone in that group came away with a different appreciation of Jones than they had before going in. And that's a lesson in itself. Journalists are not immune to preconceived notions; in fact, it's a job hazard. Yet in face-to-face encounters, letting someone have their say and then following up with questions, different pictures often emerge. Pro football is a complicated business run by complicated people. What you see is not always what you get. Sometimes it is serendipitously surprising.

To which Gov. Perry might want to consider. A natural-born politician, he worked the room effortlessly before his speech to the editorial writers. But when it came time for him to field questions, the governor was suddenly pressed for time. Now true, there's no rule that says a governing official has to take questions from the press and many find it about as welcoming as a trip to the dentist, the current occupant of the White House being no exception.

Perry, however, was told when the speaking invitation was extended that he would be put on the hot seat, so to speak, and so his ducking out strategy made him look small in stature. (At least it put the NCEW participants in the same league with their Texas brethren, who have been stiffed by the governor throughout his campaign for a third term in Austin.)

NCEW President Tom Waseleski fired off a letter of protest to Perry. It got picked up by Romenesko and other journalism blogs. Try to spin that. Moral of the story: Governor, pay a visit to Jerry Jones.

Conventions are supposed to be battery chargers. This hasn't always been true with NCEW, especially the last few years as industrywide cutbacks took their toll on morale, membership and attendance. Membership is still down, but 2010 attendance was better than '09 and morale is definitely on the upswing. Gone were the long faces and the fears that there might not be a next year. In Big D, thinking big returned to the realm of possibilities.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Delaware Crosses Washington
Posted by James Hill on Monday, Sept. 20, 2010

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Every now and then, Delaware -- aka The First State -- reminds the nation that it is more than a toll plaza on Interstate 95.

Mark down Tuesday, Sept. 14, as one of those days. Republican voters, given the chance to choose a U.S. Senate candidate, decided a "can't miss" could indeed miss and went instead with an "unelectable" perennial office-seeker (if two previous races makes you the new Harold Stassen) who possessed bad credit, questionable collegiate credentials and, oh yes, the blessing of Sarah Palin and the tea party movement.

Political earthquakes don't rise on the Richter scale unless they have national implications, and starting somewhere around 10 p.m. Tuesday evening, this tremor started climbing rapidly -- 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.5. On Nov. 2, we'll get a final reading on the reverberations.

Meanwhile, it's a journalist's dream.

Each election season, ink is spilled by the vat-load trying to imagine certain scenarios that would make the campaign worth the verbiage attached to it. For any number of reasons, elections -- particularly midterm elections -- tend to disappoint.

What has reporters and editors salivating is the prospect that the November midterm vote will be even bigger than the hype. And in politics, that is something. Yet Christine O'Donnell's victory over long-serving Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware also has the Beltway commentators wondering what's going on.

David S. Broder, who has seen an election or two in his storied career, was positive that the nation's sour mood, reflected in the Delaware vote, was all because of the bad economy.

"A year ago, it was not clear which party would be more damaged by the fallout from the economic catastrophe," he wrote. "But now it is evident that, somewhere along the way, (Barack) Obama and the Democrats lost control of the dialogue, and the populist backlash focused on big government, rather than big business."

Charles Krauthammer, on the other hand, sees it even bigger than the economy. Like, maybe, disaster.

"Bill Buckley -- no Mike Castle he -- had a rule: Support the most conservative candidate who is electable," noted Krauthammer.

"A timeless rule of sober politics, and particularly timely now. This is no ordinary time. And this is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious. It is determined to use whatever historical window it is granted to change the country structurally, irreversibly... .

"That's what makes the eleventh-hour endorsements of O'Donnell by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Sarah Palin so reckless and irresponsible."

Michael Gerson crunches the numbers.

"Particularly in smaller Republican electorates -- Delaware's 60,000 Republican primary voters or the few thousand Republican delegates who sent Utah Sen. Bob Bennett into retirement -- intensity can overwhelm judgment," he observed. "As a rule, the smaller the Republican electorate, the larger the tea party influence. The larger the electorate, the more off-putting that influence becomes."

Dana Milbank throws cold water on a civil war within the GOP: "The Republican establishment of popular imagination, like the Georgetown salon, no longer exists. If there is a Republican establishment, the tea party is it."

E.J. Dionne Jr. believes it's the end of an era, if it wasn't over already.

"After two decades in which moderates fled a party increasingly dominated by its right wing, the Republican primary electorate has been reduced to nothing but its right wing," he wrote from Wilmington, where he had spent the day before the election making the rounds with Castle. "O'Donnell, boosted by a last minute anti-Castle spending spree from the California-based Tea Party Express, pulled off her revolution with a little more than 30,000 votes. That's all it took to seize control of a once Grand Old Party in which the center no longer has the troops."

And even though the general assessment wasn't going O'Connell's way, Eugene Robinson warned Democrats to stop thinking the tea party movement was turning the country off.

"Tuesday was the best day Democrats have had in a long time -- but only in relative terms," he cautioned. "Republicans invited the tea party into the GOP tent and now have to worry about being devoured. But at least the party is full of passion, energy and resolve -- which can't be said of the Democrats, at least not with a straight face."

Got all that? I'm not sure what the folks in Delaware would call the run-up to the midterm vote, but I'm pretty certain in Iowa they'd proclaim this one a "barn-burner."

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Deep-Fried Journalism
Posted by James Hill on Friday, Sept. 10, 2010

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My e-mail in-box has been filling up of late with comments about fried foods. As in, beer-filled pretzel pockets, deep-fried frozen margaritas, fried club salads, fried chocolates, fried lemonade, fried caviar with black-eyed peas and fried Frito pie.

Those are just some of the delicacies members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers can sample if they take a side trip to the Texas State Fair on Sept. 24 while attending their annual convention in Dallas. By then, they will have already chewed on some pretty tasty morsels -- from homeland security to immigration policy to emerging media to how to put together editorial page projects worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. Dig in.

That such a feast of a convention is taking place says much for the persistence and perseverance of NCEW's board; its president, Tom Waseleski of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; convention host Keven Ann Willey of The Dallas Morning News and her hardworking staff, including Michael Landauer and Colleen Nelson McCain, and those on the planning committee including J.R. Labbe and Linda Campbell of the nearby Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

But it also says a lot about the members of the organization -- editorial writers, editorial or opinion page editors and broadcasters -- who have kept this group afloat during journalism's most turbulent time since the Great Depression. Simply put, facing changes most thought unthinkable only a few years ago, the membership decided NCEW was too valuable a professional tool to let it wither away.

Last year's convention in Salt Lake City exposed the cold, hard truth. Attendance was down significantly, thanks to vanishing travel budgets and other austerity measures. Yet it also showed the organization's can-do spirit. Many members paid their own way, using vacation time to justify their absence from work. I suspect this will be the case again this year in Dallas.

That's what I like about NCEW, its spirit. The Writers Group has had a long association with the group and its members, and we count all as friends. In addition to holding a membership and attending the conventions, we've also hosted dinners here in Washington when NCEW comes to town for State Department briefings. Most of those who served last year as contributors for our Editorial Roundtable project are NCEW members, and I've written articles for NCEW's publication, The Masthead.

One cannot put too rosy an outlook on the future, however. Journalism, in all forms, is still facing a lot of turbulence, and will for some time as news organizations struggle to find their place in an Internet-driven information society that provides instant access to what you are looking for, at a price you don't have to pay. Still, the fact that more than 200 people have registered to attend this year's convention offers the glimmer of hope that, as I wrote about following the convention of the American Society of News Editors last spring in Washington (The Optimism Summit), the worst may be over; that we are finally getting a grip on the digital era, and making the most of it.

It certainly will provide us with plenty to hash out both in the sessions and at the watering holes. Don't suppose one could find a deep-fried martini, shaken not stirred?

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

The Battle for November
Posted by James Hill on Friday, Aug. 27, 2010

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We routinely hear just how important an upcoming election is going to be, usually from reporters who cover political beats with a self-interest in ensuring that their copy gets better play.

Yet when America does vote on Nov. 2, the election might indeed live up to the hype. It's been gaining steam for months now -- some would contend the buildup began on Nov. 5, 2008 -- and the possibility that Barack Obama might lose his majorities in one or both houses of Congress long ago ceased to be a fantasy.

Neither is it a foregone conclusion, which is why political junkies get such a rush when these epic elections loom. (Think more of 2006, when Democrats won back their majority, for comparison. Oddly, the 1994 midterms didn't generate such a feel. So entrenched had the Democrats become that Republicans were skeptical of their own polling until just days and even hours before the vote; the hype followed the election, with "tsunami" and "tidal wave" becoming the operative and overworked words.)

No doubt, many issues are spinning in voters' heads, and there is certainly no better way to send a message than to mark your choices in a voting booth. But the hot button topics of this summer, magnified by the debate over the merits of constructing a mosque and Islamic cultural center not far from the site of the worst act of terrorism this country has ever endured, only seem to be a reflection of voter unease, not the cause of it.

One of the best sources I have found for figuring out what ails us politically is the reporting of Robert J. Samuelson, an apolitical observer of the dismal science whose power of analysis I've admired for years. Samuelson is not an economist, but his ability to understand what economists are saying gives perspective that explains the national mood. In our season of national grumpiness, such perspective can tell us why elections matter.

"The weak labor market is clearly a powerful psychological poison." Samuelson wrote in June. "Almost everyone knows someone who is or was unemployed -- a jobless recent college grad, an idle construction worker, a fired manager. ... Unemployment and prolonged joblessness hover near postwar peaks. Once lost, a job is hard to find. Almost half (46 percent) of the 15 million unemployed have been jobless six months or longer. Nearly a fifth of the labor force is unemployed, working part time involuntarily or so discouraged they've stopped looking for work."

In the same column, Samuelson reached a conclusion that anticipated the country's condition heading into Labor Day: "What's missing are 'animal spirits,' in the famous phrase of economist John Maynard Keynes. In the boom, surplus animal spirits spurred speculation. Scarce animal spirits now hinder recovery. Given the magnitude of the housing and financial carnage, most of today's cautiousness and risk aversion -- by both businesses and households -- were unavoidable. But the Obama administration's anti-business rhetoric and controversial health 'reform' may have compounded the effect. These policies created uncertainties and fanned partisan rancor. In the case of health 'reform,' they raised the cost of future full-time employees.

"The administration believes these various policies don't hamper economic recovery. It ignores contradictions and inconsistencies. Historians, more detached and better informed, may conclude otherwise."

Time and again, Samuelson explains what is not happening. Take jobs. "So far, history be damned," he wrote in late July as corporate profits were starting to register impressive gains. "The contrast between revived profits and stunted job growth is stunning. From late 2007 to late 2009, payroll employment dropped nearly 8.4 million. Since then, the economy has recovered a scant 11 percent of those lost jobs. Companies are doing much better than workers; that defines today's economy."

Or parenting: "Our society does not -- despite rhetoric to the contrary -- put much value on raising children. Present budget policies punish parents, who are taxed heavily to support the elderly. Meanwhile, tax breaks for children are modest. If deficit reduction aggravates these biases, more Americans may choose not to have children or to have fewer children. Down that path lies economic decline."

Not the most comforting words, for sure, and certainly nothing a politician could use for a sound bite. But Samuelson, one of the better explanatory journalists around, does not mount his soap box in order to tell you how to vote. The information and interpretation he provides, however, should be enough to make you want to.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

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When it comes to the immigration debate, you might say that Ruben Navarrette Jr. and Edward Schumacher-Matos have each spent a lifetime preparing to cover it. And you would be absolutely correct.

Navarrette, a native of Central California, is the grandson of an immigrant from Mexico. Schumacher-Matos, a native of Colombia, earned his U.S. citizenship by joining the Army and serving during the Vietnam War.

Both columnists have built their professional reputations exploring a wide range of topics -- Navarrette on education, politics, and responsibility issues; Schumacher-Matos on Latin America and other foreign policy subjects. And now, they own the immigration story.

What's so amazing to me is that, amid all the heat being generated, Navarrette and Schumacher-Matos are coming across as two of the more sensible voices in the immigration debate. To read their columns is to find reasoned arguments, reasonably debated.

Columnists don't ask you to agree with them; they offer, instead, fuel for the fire. It's up to readers to determine how much they want to pour on. In the cases of Navarrette and Schumacher-Matos, that fuel has been in the form of perspective and context that counters both the left and the right extremes now driving this discussion.

Or, as one of Navarrette's readers put it in a recent e-mail correspondence: "I want to note that I do not always agree with you but you always force me to think, which is exactly what I want someone to do."

There's certainly plenty to think about concerning immigration, especially illegal immigration. Having lived in both California and Arizona, I'm acutely aware of some of the problems law enforcement and social service agencies face. Yet I've also seen first-hand what illegal immigrants do once they've crossed the border: they go right to work. And at jobs I'm pretty certain I'd never want to touch. Try picking broccoli eight hours a day or longer. No thanks.

It would seem that if there really is a crisis with illegal immigration, then policymakers could pretty much deal with it by issuing work permits to those who want to come into the country to fill jobs waiting for them, while allowing the undocumented already here to be legitimized and put them on the path to citizenship. If we could assimilate millions of Cubans over the 50 years of the Castro brothers' reign, it should be a no-brainer to assimilate immigrants from countries we're not at ideological war with.

But nothing in politics is quite that easy, and certainly not so clear-cut. As Navarrette noted in a column written from Phoenix shortly after a federal judge ruled some parts of Arizona's new immigration law to be unconstitutional: "(Arizonans) weren't prepared for the demographic side effect: the gradual sense that they were losing control, and the fear that whites would eventually become a statistical minority in Arizona just as they are in California, Texas and New Mexico."

And, as Schumacher-Matos pointed out in an open letter to President Obama and congressional Democrats, elections can get in the way. Urging a stronger approach on the immigration issue before this fall's midterm vote, he asked the president to "find your inner Margaret Thatcher. As she taught Ronald Reagan, half the trick in politics is to take command by framing the issues. The policy, morality and politics of illegal immigration are all aligned in your favor, a rare opportunity if only you break out of an outdated mindset about enforcement and go on offense. Even Latinos will support you."

With that last sentence, Schumacher-Matos was referring to the fact that of the estimated 47 million Hispanics in this country, most are here legally, the majority are U.S. citizens and many are native-born. Now the country's largest minority group, the influence and political impact of American Latinos will only grow -- as it has with other fields such as business, academe, popular culture and the law.

Still, the political stalemate remains, with Republicans seemingly intent on freezing out the Latino vote with every "immigration control" idea they embrace (see this E.J. Dionne Jr. column on abolishing the birthright provision of the 14th Amendment) while Democrats sit on their hands, paralyzed to do much of anything for fear of what awaits them come November.

Which gives Navarrette and Schumacher-Matos plenty of time to keep chasing one helluva story. It's an exciting and challenging one indeed. But in truth, it's the story of their lives.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Lowering the Volume
Posted by James Hill on Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2010

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A few days ago, a gentleman with an ax to grind pulled his car into a parking space in front of The Washington Post building and, using loudspeakers he had rigged to the roof of the vehicle, proceeded to harangue about an injustice he had suffered -- for almost three hours.

Turns out he was unhappy with the way a letter to the editor that he submitted had been edited. Now normally, most folks voice their gripes when their letters are not run. This guy was complaining that his had actually been published. (You can watch video here.)

Fair enough, it's a free country. Yet something about his endless shouting brought to mind the political climate we are now in, which seemed at boiling point under the summer sun. It's as if too many of us have been given loudspeakers, and the noise has made us unable to think.

Certainly, the Obama administration wasn't thinking when it moved with dispatch to throw an African-American employee of the Department of Agriculture under the bus because it feared her comments about an exchange with a white farmer, made at an NAACP gathering, captured on video and posted by conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, would be fodder for Fox News' Glenn Beck.

But closer inspection proved that the woman, Shirley Sherrod, had actually been making quite a different point in her parable about the farmer. And while Brietbart momentarily had been hoisted on his own petard, it was the White House that was suffering the public relations disaster.

The incident, which might rate a footnote 50 years from now, became a running story for a few news cycles, then tapered off almost as quickly as it tapered on. Still, the fallout continues to settle.

E.J. Dionne Jr. thinks the media had something to do with it -- and no, not that media disguised as partisan cable television networks blasting "opinion" seemingly throughout the day and long into the night. Dionne's complaint was with the fourth estate.

"The mainstream media ... must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that 'fairness' requires treating extremist rants as 'one side of the story,'" he wrote in a column that was shared more than 6,000 times by Facebook users, a remarkable figure.

In a follow-up column, Dionne set down what he thinks is at stake: "I'm a chronic optimist about America. But we are letting stupid politics, irrational ideas on fiscal policy and an antiquated political structure undermine our power."

Dionne is a liberal, a thinking person's liberal, but his thoughts here are not all that different from Michael Gerson's, a thinking person's conservative. Commenting on the NAACP's resolution condemning what it called tea party racism (what got Brietbart started off in the first place), and an ensuring racist parody posted to the Internet by a tea party advocate, Gerson found cause for hope.

"Beneath this depressing controversy, the facts are more encouraging," he wrote. "The NAACP resolution did not conclude that the tea party movement as a whole is racist; it called upon its leadership to repudiate racist elements."

Then noting that the National Tea Party Federation has expelled the advocate and his organization over the blog posting, Gerson added: "These developments are small but significant signs of sanity."

What Dionne and Gerson are accomplishing here is to add perspective -- beyond the noise. It's one thing to watch video clips of some outrage over and over again (although why you would want to has always been beyond me), another to critically examine means to achieve a better discourse and government.

More civility wouldn't hurt, as David S. Broder discovered when he ventured to Delaware to view first-hand the U.S. Senate campaign between Republican Mike Castle and Democrat Chris Coons.

As Broder noted, "I spent the weekend with two Senate candidates who will restore your faith in representative government."

While we're talking civility, let's take politics out of it for a moment and just enjoy this thought from Kathleen Parker about her "small town" neighborhood she is leaving for new things in a bigger city.

"Families come in many configurations," she wrote. "And small-town values have nothing to do with small towns."

And somehow, I think, if we all just lower our voices, we'll conclude that American values -- and our First Amendment right to defend them -- are too precious to be left solely to the province of those with loudspeakers.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Against the Grain
Posted by James Hill on Friday, July 9, 2010

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Michael Gerson is pretty good at dishing it out to Democrats, much as E.J. Dionne Jr. gives it to Republicans. Solid political commentary. Turn the tables, however, as both did this week, and the commentary becomes remarkable.

Gerson's come-to-Jesus message -- warning the GOP to be wary of extremism in the pursuit of a congressional majority -- may well be one of the most important polemics of the midterm election season, arguing as it does for conservatives to maintain a high ground at a time when the low road seems to be the preferred path most traveled.

Dionne's defense of the gaffe-prone Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was in itself a defense of the right of dissent, and he reminded Democrats that they were making calls to silence Steele at their peril.

My hunch is that neither columnist won many fans among their customary audiences. But they sure should have won lots of respect.

Let's start with Gerson, whose service as a Capitol Hill aide and speech writer for President George W. Bush gives him principled credibility with conservatives.

Looking at the potential for extremism to damage the gains that the GOP is likely to score in this fall's midterm elections, Gerson took particular umbrage with Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle's contention that "if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."

Mike was having none of it. "Mainstream conservatives have been strangely disoriented by tea party excess, unable to distinguish the injudicious from the outrageous," he wrote. "Some rose to Angle's defense or attacked her critics. Just to be clear: A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt -- a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of 'Second Amendment remedies' is a light-weight Lexington, a cut-rate Concord. It is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory."

And this was just for starters. He goes after libertarians such as Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, and those who are feasting on anti-immigration hysteria.

"The response of many responsible Republicans to these ideological trends is to stay quiet, make no sudden moves and hope they go away," Gerson wrote. "But these are not merely excesses; they are arguments. Significant portions of the Republican coalition believe that it is a desirable strategy to talk of armed revolution, embrace libertarian purity and alienate Hispanic voters. With a major Republican victory in November, those who hold these views may well be elevated in profile and influence. And this could create durable, destructive perceptions of the Republican Party that would take decades to change. A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them."

Dionne, consistently one of the most respected voices among American progressives, thinks Democrats should lower the volume over Steele, who got himself in hot water -- again -- for saying that Afghanistan had become "a war of Obama's choosing." Republicans were the first to pounce, many calling for Steele's head. Democrats soon joined in.

Step back, Dionne urged the Democrats. "The issue here is less about Afghanistan than about dissent in time of war. Even if Steele was just popping off, he had a right to offer his opinion without being accused of undermining our troops or 'rooting for failure.'"

Columnists are valued for their independence. It separates them from the ideologues and propagandists, and is absolutely necessary for critical thinking. Commentators who speak for right or left are utterly predictable, and thoroughly boring.

But there's another moral to remember. Journalists often overwork the phrase "speaking truth to power," usually because they don't. By going against the grain, Gerson and Dionne certainly did.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Nothing but Net
Posted by James Hill on Monday, June 28, 2010

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Enough has been said about David Weigel, who resigned as The Washington Post's blogger covering the conservative movement after derogatory comments he made on a listserv before he was hired by the newspaper showed up on other websites, including the much-viewed Drudge Report.

Not enough has been said about the www.culture now firmly embedding itself in newsrooms around the world. But maybe it should be, so perhaps we can start a conversation.

Despite the fact that most newspapers got into electronic publishing in the mid-to-late-1990s, many in our industry treat it as a field that clearly remains stuck in infancy. The most often cited excuse for this state of affairs is that the Internet was regarded as an afterthought.

This hasn't been true at The Washington Post, which has devoted a huge chunk of resources in developing washingtonpost.com. Nor has it been the case with several other newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in particular. But yes, you could make a good argument that most newspapers are falling far behind when it comes to harnessing the Net. Or, rather, trying too hard to catch up, which is where I'd put my assessment. But what, exactly, is up?

Newsroom veterans often shake their heads, because a lot of things that were "up" turned out to be nonstarters. Not too long ago, for instance, the rage was to have a reporter shoot video while working a story. Only the video turned out to be not very well done, and editors came to realize that if readers wanted to watch television, they would usually turn on their TVs.

Blogging, however, has not been one of those false starts. Newspaper websites have largely embraced the concept, and blogs are being used to produce fine and cutting-edge journalism. One of the pioneers, Keven Willey, the editorial page editor at The Dallas Morning News, now features six blogs on her opinion pages at dallasnews.com. Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor, began the PostPartisan blog during the 2008 political campaign. It is now a regular feature on washingtonpost.com and postpartisan commentaries also show up on the print edition op-ed page.

Yet here again, most editors might be guilty of treating blogs as an afterthought. Clearly, you probably can't check out everything a writer had posted to a listserv before he was hired by your news organization, but it wouldn't hurt to look carefully at a blogger's copy before it goes public. And even the top news organizations have suffered embarrassments because they didn't.

Because the Internet is in a state of hyperevolution, it has become trendy to accept that a wired culture is something far different than the newsroom culture that existed when print was king. But here's a thought: Newspapers have always existed as the public record because they were archived, not only by the newspapers themselves but by libraries and historical societies. Now that the archiving is electronic -- and close to instantaneous in one's ability to retrieve -- doesn't it make sense to get it right when you put your name and your newspaper's name on that record?

The Internet's very immediacy would seem to demand vigorous editing, fact-checking and, yes, caution. This should never be an afterthought.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.




Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Posted by James Hill on Friday, June 11, 2010

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Throughout his long career, David S. Broder has distinguished himself with his objectivity, the strength of his analysis, and his easygoing way of communicating with his readers. To borrow from an old advertising line, when Broder speaks, people listen.

So if you are getting a little sick and tired of all the partisan bickering that passes for national discourse these days, you might want to heed a little advice from the dean of Washington political correspondents -- and take in a ball game.

That's what Broder did Tuesday evening, along with more than 40,000 others, to watch the pitching debut of Stephen Strasburg, a young man who seems to invite superlatives because, so far at least, his pitching has been nothing short of superlative.

It wasn't lost on Broder that this could be just what Washington needs, a baseball team with the horses to become a contender.

"Much as Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 spurred hopes that a new era was opening, so long-suffering fans fantasized that with Strasburg pitching and this year's No. 1 choice, junior college slugger Bryce Harper, on the way, the Nationals were destined for better things."

Maybe. But the point of Broder's column wasn't so much about Strasburg -- who, by the way, was absolutely stunning in striking out 14 batters, one short of the record for a rookie making his first start -- as it was getting our collective minds off of the problems, many real, many imagined, that surround us.

Broder should know. He's covered Washington since the Kennedy years, and anyone who follows his writing knows that the divisiveness, which really got cooking during the Bill Clinton administration, went thermonuclear under George W. Bush and remains that way with Barack Obama, pains him for what it is doing not only to the American character but our ability as a society to get things done. Representative government doesn't work when the representatives won't work with each other.

This is not to say that partisanship is particularly bad, or a relatively new phenomenon. People take sides because they believe something is worth fighting for, and we've been fighting for political causes since, no, make that before, the birth of the republic.

What makes it seem so hostile today, however, is that partisanship has become instantaneous. Look how long it took for that open-microphone comment by California Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina to go, as they say, viral. About a nanosecond.

But back to baseball, or more particularly, sport. As Broder noted, "A fascinating test of the curative power of sports has been unfolding this week on both sides of the Atlantic, as Washington and Johannesburg look to athletes to lift the gloom surrounding their political leaders."

That the World Cup can transfix the attention of most of the world for four weeks every four years indeed does say everything about the power of a game -- excuse me, the beautiful game -- to be the great unifier. Too bad America isn't as hooked on soccer (or, really, too bad the rest of the world isn't hooked on the National Football League).

Broder tossed some cold reality onto South Africa's coming out party, noting that the Cup will not solve the many problems that the beautiful but star-crossed nation faces. But at least it can enjoy its party and if it pulls it off like China did the Olympics, maybe it can get back to work with a better appreciation of itself.

And maybe the U.S. Congress might too if, taking an idea that Broder tossed out a few years ago when it became obvious that baseball was coming back to Washington after a 33-year drought, members would take in a game or two and get their minds off trying to destroy each other. Like dreams of October glory, one can always hope.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

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Even though the Washington Nationals are vastly improved this year, politics still retains its claim as the pastime of preference in the nation's capital. And what a season it is turning out to be.

Tuesday's primary elections in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Arkansas provided a snapshot of what the playoffs might look like come November, while a race to fill a House seat in western Pennsylvania offered Democrats a glimmer of hope that perhaps the tea party movement might have peaked too soon (alternative view: the White House really has got some game).

Voting was only the half of it. The best drama was playing off the field. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal got caught in a lie; Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana got caught in a tryst and resigned from Congress; Kentucky ophthalmologist Rand Paul got caught dissing some provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and spent his second full day as a Republican Senate nominee on a treadmill -- backtracking.

As Ruth Marcus noted: "Politicians excel at trying on costumes, assuming identities (the angry populist, the slayer of pork), delivering lines written by others. Is it any wonder that the division between fantasy and reality starts to blur for some of them?"

Yet the childish behavior of some couldn't cloud over the fact that something -- perhaps not a Thai-level protest but nonetheless a lot of anger -- was in the air. E.J. Dionne Jr., however, isn't buying it.

"Pennsylvania's 12th District (where Democrat Mark Critz won by nine points over Republican Tim Burns) is precisely the sort of seat Republicans will need to win this fall if they are to take over the House. It is, for example, the only district in the country that switched from Democrat John Kerry in 2004 to John McCain in 2008," wrote Dionne.

"Even though Obama's standing in the region is lower than it is nationwide, Burns' rote Republican campaign against Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi failed miserably. Democrats, in the meantime, believe they have found a formula to keep some of the more conservative districts they now hold."

George F. Will found this an interesting, if slightly odd, strategy: "The candidate who on Tuesday won the special election in a Pennsylvania congressional district is right-to-life and pro-gun. He accused his opponent of wanting heavier taxes. He said he would have voted against Barack Obama's health care plan and promised to vote against cap-and-trade legislation, which is a tax increase supposedly somehow related to turning down the planet's thermostat. This candidate, Mark Critz, is a Democrat. And that just about exhausts the good news for Democrats on a surreal Tuesday."

But as these things go, Democrats found some good news nevertheless. Paul, the son of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, quickly succumbed to that most dreaded of all political ailments -- foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Even before that development, Eugene Robinson wasn't too sure the GOP should be high-fiving just yet.

"The stunning result (in Kentucky) should telegraph two warnings to Republicans," he wrote. "The first is a reminder that while voters' ardor toward the Democratic Party might have cooled, this has not led to a passionate embrace of the GOP. There's a splash-back effect from unceasing attacks against the evil empire known as Washington: Voters notice that Republicans live there, too.

"The second warning is that the Tea Party movement does not intend to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. Strategists who hoped to use the movement's energy and passion as weapons against the Democrats in the fall should realize that many Tea Party types see the GOP as fundamentally no different."

Michael Gerson, a conservative, could be read as endorsing liberal Robinson's second point.

"Paul and other libertarians are not merely advocates of limited government; they are anti-government," Gerson wrote. "Their objective is not the correction of error but the cultivation of contempt for government itself. There is a reason libertarianism has never been -- and probably will never be -- a national political force: because too many would find its utopia a nightmare."

David S. Broder kept his eyes on the ball while speculating what the action in late spring could mean in the fall.

"We saw the anti-Washington sentiment Tuesday in Kentucky, where Rand Paul ... easily defeated Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's handpicked candidate for the Republican nomination for a vacant Senate seat -- and credited his win to the tea partyers," Broder commented.

"The same sentiment carried to Arkansas, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a runoff by her labor-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

"And it claimed its largest victim of the year so far in Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter. Run out of the Republican Party last year by a GOP challenger, he fell embarrassingly to a less-known younger congressman in a bid for the Democratic nomination. His failure showed the Obama White House once again to be a toothless tiger -- with its endorsements now having failed in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. No good news for the president there."

What does it all mean? Let George Will have the last words: "Has American politics ever been this entertaining?"

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

Brave News World
Posted by James Hill on Friday, May 7, 2010

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Many were the obituaries when The Washington Post Co. announced it was putting Newsweek up for sale. This won't be one of them.

For one, it's a bit premature. And for another, it's not like the magazine hasn't been in this spot before. As Benjamin C. Bradlee relates in his 1995 autobiography, "A Good Life," he began hearing rumors of Newsweek's demise almost from the day he joined its Washington bureau -- in 1957.

"I dreaded these stories, not so much because I admired the management (I did not), but because I felt the bastards I knew were bound to be better than the bastards I didn't know," he wrote.

By 1961, with the magazine then in the hands of the Vincent Astor Foundation, Bradlee -- "after a bad day of brooding, and a few shooters" -- picked up the phone and called Philip Graham, then the publisher of the Post, and suggested that he should make a bid for the publication.

"It was the best telephone call I ever made -- the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding, totally rewarding," Bradlee noted.

When Jon Meacham, Newsweek's editor who reportedly is trying to line up a bid to purchase the magazine from Phil Graham's son, Post Co. chairman of the board Donald E. Graham, writes his memoirs, here's hoping he can say much the same about his experiences.

Yet this posting is only marginally about Newsweek, a magazine I have read for years, and more about the news industry's exciting possibilities -- if we get the technological changes right.

Let Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson explain what's going on. Celebrating Apple's next big thing, the iPad (or perhaps bemoaning the fact his wife thinks the device is an extravagance he can do without), he writes: "The combination of the Internet and the iPad has changed our relation to the written word forever. The Information Age is now affordable, portable, intuitively organized and infinitely customizable. All future content, including books and newspapers, will need to assume the shape of this innovation."

That's quite an admission coming from an admitted book junkie like Gerson ("I surrounded myself with books on shelves, books in boxes, books in random stacks that caused visitors to trip"). But it also underscores what even we luddites who long for the days when big cities had multiple newspapers surely know deep within out hearts: We adapt to change when change becomes useful and friendly to us.

Think of cellular phones. When they were the size of Maxwell Smart's shoe phone, most of us vowed we'd never be caught dead with one.

That's a little bit of what the news industry has been doing the last couple of decades while wrestling with technological changes no one could even imagine when Ben Bradlee made that call in 1961. The industry first pretended it was no big deal, then changed gears but still didn't quite know where it was going. Today's fad is page views. Tomorrow's? Who knows.

It seems obvious, however, that if a device comes along that allows users to access information much as they would if they were visiting a bookstore or buying a newspaper or magazine, and have that information presented in a more orderly fashion than currently is the case on most computers (in other words, not having to print out lengthy texts you really want or need to read), then this presents a huge opportunity for news media to concentrate on core competencies rather than constantly trying to escape the trap they fell into.

Gerson is not the only one enraptured by the new Apple wonder. So is his son (who spent his own money to buy the device Mike plays with) and so is my sister, a charter member of the gadgeterrati who is passing along to me her MacBook because she loves her iPad so much more.

And Gerson offers a clue as to where this is going: "We know that even bibliophiles like me will purchase books that arrive via the Internet because it represents a quantum leap in convenience. We know that people will consume both good and unreliable news on the Internet when it comes free. Because of the iPad (and its eventual competitors), we will be able to test whether people will pay for excellent news content delivered on a platform that multiplies its usefulness and enjoyment."

A word of caution: You should probably read this column by Daniel Lyons in Newsweek (there's that name again) on Apple's pricing strategy.

But you also better start thinking that with this type of device taking off, Newsweek and other publications might just have a better future than any oddsmaker was willing to offer them just months ago. In other words, not dead yet.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.