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Walter Shapiro
Walter Shapiro, Yahoo! News’ Character Sketch columnist, has covered the last nine presidential campaigns by working for newspapers (USA Today and the Washington Post), newsweeklies (Time and Newsweek), monthlies (Esquire and Washington Monthly) and online magazines (Salon and Slate).
Yahoo NewsMy first plane flight, to mourn JFK
A Yahoo News columnist recalls his journey to Washington in November 1963.
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Election Day 2013 tells us little about 2014 and even less about 2016
Tuesday night’s results provided fodder for everyone’s political talking points.
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The poll pols just can't read: Americans need more jobs
The greatest problem facing America is an undernourished economy that just can't create enough jobs to get unemployment below that economically key 7 percent threshold.
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Why Republicans should be very, very afraid
Rarely has a political party lost so much so rapidly from a series of strategic blunders.
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6 lessons of the government shutdown
The first days of Shutdown October have taught us some things about politics.
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Obama has 40 months left in office: Nine scenarios on his future
In April, with his domestic agenda stymied in Congress, Barack Obama tried to channel Mark Twain when he declared, “Rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point.”
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Obama’s message on Syria: Look the other way or accept moral duty?
In many ways, Obama redeemed himself Tuesday night with a powerful invocation of American exceptionalism.
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Dream for the 21st century: An America that is truly defined by equality
For all the grainy black-and-white television replays and the smoothed-by-time recollections of the living participants, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington has inevitably taken on a sepia glow.
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What Martha's Vineyard means to Democratic presidents
What explains the island's allure? For Democrats, it's an idealized version of how the American meritocracy is supposed to work.
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Congressional gridlock: Could it be that the NSA is bringing it to an end?
Those who care about a functioning government have long wailed that life on Capitol Hill cannot go on like this. Maybe, just maybe, we have just seen the first signs that these unsustainable trends in partisan warfare in Congress are coming to an end.
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Nice speech, Mr. President. You still can't do much to help the economy
President Obama wants to boost the slow-growing U.S. economy. But choices he made in 2010 have diminished his chances of doing so.
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Senate avoids ‘nuclear option’ and retains arcane rules, but what’s in it for voters?
As the world survived the nuclear-tipped 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Secretary of State Dean Rusk said with relief, “We’re eyeball-to-eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”
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Spitzer, Weiner and the New York City road to redemption
NEW YORK – Why have this city’s once-sleepy municipal elections suddenly become the nation’s most high-profile halfway house for sexually addled politicians?
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Hold the Champagne: Immigration reform is so easy that only Congress would find it hard to pass
Washington is in the grips of an aren’t-we-all-wonderful mood rarely glimpsed since the heyday of the self-esteem movement.
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The fierce urgency of $$$: Obama aides cash in
When Robert Gibbs was preparing to step down as White House press secretary in early 2011, Barack Obama stressed to The New York Times that he understood the life pressures weighing heavily on his loyal aide. After all, the president said in a revealing comment, Gibbs has been “going 24/7 with relatively modest pay.”
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Obama, all but declaring V-T (Victory Over Terror) Day, hits reset button on national security with drone and Guantanamo speech
Barack Obama has hit the reset button with the most far-reaching national security address of his presidency
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From Benghazi to Syria: Obama’s Bush-league mistakes in foreign policy
Most second-term presidents become fixated on global affairs because the world beyond our shores, with all its strife and misery, often seems more malleable than life in Washington, with its fractious Congress and waning electoral mandate. The trick, though, for a foreign policy president, is to be good at it—and these days those skills appear to be eluding Barack Obama.
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From Boston to Newtown to Aurora and beyond: Obama’s sad role as national grief counselor
Grief counseling is not mentioned in the Constitution nor does it ever come up in presidential debates. But part of the job of any president in this already tear-stained century is to channel our collective sadness, to speak for all Americans at a time of national tragedy.
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For Obama, gun control is more than just a feel-good gesture
For Barack Obama, like any second-term president, the most valuable political commodity is time. Every day brings Obama closer to that chilling moment of semi-irrelevance when Americans are more fixated on the 2016 elections than on the man finishing out his eight-year lease on the Oval Office.
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Republican disarray on full display at CPAC
In politics, nothing is as fascinating as a party in disarray, uncertain about its future and bitterly divided about whether and how to change. That’s why for the next few years, Republican agonies offer an infinitely more compelling narrative than the arrogance of the puffed-up Obama Democrats.