Gwen's Take

The Politics of Panic

Posted: May 6, 2010 at 6:53 pm

It felt as if everyone was rushing to the ramparts this week. From Times Square to the Gulf Coast to Greece and Wall Street, the world has seemed positively out of breath.

Part of the reason, of course, is the pace of events. If you weren’t already terrified by the idea of hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil gushing toward New Orleans, you were certainly rattled by the panicked shouting on CNBC Thursday afternoon when the Dow suddenly plunged nearly 1,000 points.

Washington Rhetoric: The Decoder

Posted: April 29, 2010 at 6:54 pm

Emotion. Fear. Guilt. Racism. These drivers, according to former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, are the four horsemen of a rhetorical apocalypse that stops things from getting done in Washington. “Those are the four things I find in my time here either passed or killed a bill,” Simpson said.

Remembering Dorothy Height

Posted: April 20, 2010 at 5:00 pm

I was always thoroughly intimidated in Dorothy Height's presence.

It's not because she was regal or holier-than-thou. It's that she was neither of those things. And somehow, she should have been. Could easily have been.

Debating the Debate

Posted: April 15, 2010 at 4:14 pm

I got a lot of mail this week, almost all of it online, and much of it angry. The reason? I tried to tell both sides of a story.

The occasion was our PBS NewsHour “Spotlight Series” in Tampa, Florida. Periodically, we try to break out of the Beltway to make the connection between the stories we cover here in Washington and the effect they have on peoples’ lives.

Gwen reviews "The Bridge: The Life & Rise of Barack Obama"

Posted: April 8, 2010 at 1:30 pm

When The Washington Post asked me to review David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” I quickly said yes.

As someone who spends my days trying to peer inside, through and around national and global events, I possess a bottomless well of curiosity about people who aspire to lead.

You will see in the review that follows that I admired Remnick’s final product, all 600+ pages of it. This is in part because I spent so much time (and sweat and tears) trying to write a far more narrowly focused book of my own in 2008.