Thanks to the media circus swirling around the governor of Illinois and his schemes to fill President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat, little attention is being paid to the race to succeed Rahm Emanuel as he moves from the House of Representatives to White House chief of staff.

That's a shame,...

As I read the last tranche of disastrous news stories from this catastrophic year, I found myself thinking back to the old days when it all seemed to work, when everyone agreed what made an economy go and the stock market raced and the commentators and economists and politicians of...

In little more than a month, the mainstream media tells us, the city of Chicago has plunged from the proud heights of victory to the depths of shame. Barack Obama, its favorite son, captured the presidency with high-minded talk of reform, only to have Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois,...

At long last, our national love affair with the rich is coming to a close. The moguls whose exploits we used to follow with such fascination, it now seems, plowed the country into the ground precisely because of the fabulous rewards that were showered on them.

Massive inequality, we have...

Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it.

For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose...

It is possible, I suppose, that the pundits are right and the public didn't really mean it when it elected a liberal Democrat president and gave Democrats even larger majorities in both houses of Congress. Maybe America really wants the same nice, reassuring, centrist thing as always.

But it is...

I was never a fan of Barack Obama's bipartisanship routine. His famous plea at the 2004 Democratic convention for an end to the red state/blue state divide, I thought, sounded noble but overlooked the obvious: that a unilateral display of brotherly love from the Democratic Party had no chance of...

Maybe it's unfair to dwell on the story of the College Republican in Pennsylvania who faked a politically motivated crime against herself. Then again, maybe it's not. The woman who came before the world last week with a backward B scratched in her cheek had, according to the Pittsburgh newspaper,...

On the first night of the Republican convention, back in September, the theme was "Service." Speaker after speaker mounted the rostrum to tell about their volunteer work for charitable foundations, the inventive ways they have helped out the poor, the need for everyone to lend a hand to their fellow...

Sunday's New York Times featured a quotation from Newt Gingrich, Republican paladin, dilating on the subject of Democratic enthusiasm for what the paper called "new government programs": "You have to convince a country that watched Katrina, that watched Baghdad, that watched Fannie and Freddie, now the answer's going to be...

The next battle in the political war is going to be assessing responsibility for the destruction of the financial industry. At first this seemed like a no-brainer to me: capitalism had been deregulated and freed to do its thing, and its thing happens to be boom-and-bust, euphoria-and-panic.

But conservatives are...

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat--to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their...

A seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout plan? Weren't Republicans supposed to be opposed to deficit spending? Weren't they the party that was all about balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility?

That's what Republicans say, of course. And now they tell us they wish they didn't have to take this course; that the bailout violates...

The story seems designed to repel your attention, like the wrong end of a magnet; the story is, at the same time, exactly what this election ought to be about. It is a perfectly formed artifact of conservative misrule, a little gem of market-based merde.

It seems that, over the...

This review originally appeared in the New York Observer

Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day. He's a man who...