Lee H. Hamilton

One of the more striking political developments of the last few years has been the partisan sorting of American voters. It used to be that both the Republican and Democratic parties covered some ideological ground. Now, it’s so habitual for conservatives to make their home in the GOP and liberals in the Democratic Party that […]

Each of the great politicians and legislators I’ve known over the course of my career in Congress was very different. They were masters of the rules, or unassailably knowledgeable about a given issue, or supremely watchable orators, or consummate students of people. But they also shared key traits that I wish more elected officials possessed. […]

 Looking back at 2018’s weather-related news, it seems clear that this was the year climate change became unavoidable. I don’t mean that the fires in California, coastal flooding in the Carolinas and drought throughout the West were new evidence of climate change. Rather, they shifted the national mindset. They made climate change a political issue […]

Tell me: What does it actually mean to be an American? In the press of day-to-day events and amid the ongoing tumult of politics, we don’t think about this much. Yet it’s a crucial question, one that each generation in this country is called upon to answer for itself. Despite our differences, there are some […]

 If you take a dim view of our political parties, you’re in sterling company. So did George Washington. In his famous Farewell Address, he warned us against “the baneful effects of the spirit of [political] party.” A political party, he wrote, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one […]

 You know these words, but how often do you stop to think about them? “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” They […]

Every so often, I jot down a list of the things that discourage me about our country. There’s the widespread disregard for our core values of tolerance and mutual respect, for instance. Our declining national optimism. Our relaxed attitude toward fixing our election machinery, overseeing financial institutions and making sure that our key democratic institutions […]

I was chatting with a group of students the other day when one of them looked me in the eye and commented, “You’re very tough on journalists.” I had to plead guilty. Of course I’m tough on journalists. Maybe even as tough on them as they are on politicians. Our representative democracy depends on journalists […]

You could choose any number of marquee dilemmas to illustrate how broken congressional politics has become. Guns, Russian interference, climate change – Americans want progress on all of them and get little from Capitol Hill. But to my mind, nothing illustrates the dire state of our politics better than how we act on the federal […]

Because we live in such tumultuous political times, it’s easy to believe that today’s intense public focus on the Trump presidency is something new – an obsession like none we’ve ever seen before. Yet to one degree or another, the president has always been at the center of the public’s attention. This is because the […]

This was an interesting year that’s just concluding, wasn’t it? And here’s the thing: I suspect 2018 will be just as intriguing. Let’s start with some good news. The economy had a good year in 2017, seeing overall growth, subdued inflation, progress on wages, and even some signs that economic growth is reaching the poor. […]