A version of this article first appeared in The Washington Monthly on April 21, 2013.

Apparently on Friday, before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended, Sen. Lindsey Graham was already torquing up the hysteria by taking the position that Tsarnaev not receive his Miranda warning before being interrogated. Graham—who, not to imply anything from this, is one of those lucky men who can go into any barbershop and the get the exact look he wants simply by saying, “I’d like the Adolf Hitler haircut”—tweeted “If captured I hope [the] Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as [an] enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes.” He then added “The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to ‘remain silent.’”

The Brothers Tsarnaev will never be known as anything but terrorists, but Boston certainly doesn’t look a town that has been terrorized to me. Defiant? Sure. Inspired? Definitely. There’s a kind of a civic euphoria arising from the realization that town came through this blow with strength and intelligence and courage. From the first responders on Monday, to the individuals who opened their homes to stranded runners, to the full-throated expression of patriotism that infused the way Bruins fans sang the national anthem, to an exemplary performance by the law enforcement authorities, Boston has a lot to be proud of. “This is our fucking city, and nobody’s going to dictate our freedom,” said David Ortiz, the Red Sox’s Big Papi, before a roaring crowd at Fenway Park. They didn’t look terrorized to me.

It’s the Lindsey Grahams who are terrorizing people by suggesting that this threat maybe might possibly be so enormous that we have to deny Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his rights as an American citizen. This is a page straight out of the Bush-Cheney playbook, the idea that we have to start throwing away our most important values and traditions in order to be secure.

It’s nonsense. Denying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his rights won’t improve my safety. Let’s face it: if I really wanted to improve my safety, I would lose twenty pounds.

This piece was originally written for The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog on April 20, 2013:

This is a true story. Thirty years ago, my wife and I visited her family at their home in Sundance, Wyoming. Ginny’s brother Rick and his wife Sue took us out for a drink at what passed for the young person’s bar. In the process of catching up, we began talking about their grandfather, who was about 90 years old, and whose longtime partner, whose name I forget, but let’s call her Joan, had recently died in the local hospital. “Yeah, Grandpop’s real upset,” my brother-in-law confided. “Last week he got drunk and took his shotgun and went over to the hospital and demanded to see Joan. When they told him she was dead, he began to shoot up the waiting room. They had to call the sheriff to come take him home.” No charges were preferred.

That was Round One. When Round Two arrived, we were joined by another young couple, Tom and Patty. The four locals began talking about a recent incident in the neighboring town of Belle Fourche, South Dakota (neighboring—as in forty miles away) where a young man had walked into a Hardee’s fast food restaurant and tried to hold up the place at gunpoint. “Fifteen guys went out to their trucks and got their rifles,” Tom said, “and came back and blew him away.” (I’m not vouching for the accuracy of the story, only Tom’s telling of it. But Rick and Sue and Patty supported his account.)

At that point another customer walked past, a man with a badly disfigured face. “That’s Don,” Sue explained. “One night he got depressed and decided to kill himself, but his gun slipped, and he only blew off his jaw.”

At that point, Patty thought to try to bring the out-of-towners more into the conversation. “Where are you folks from?” she asked.

“New York,” we said.

“New York?” she responded with astonishment. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

Priceless, right? The story came to mind this morning when I heard about this pinheaded Arkansas State Senator named Nate Bell, who tweeted “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”

Bell’s inexcusably snide, ignorant tone aside, it’s a fair question. It’s also fair to wonder how many senators would have changed their votes on gun control had the Tsarnaev brothers set off their bombs and killed one cop and wounded another on Sunday instead of Monday. It’s also a fair question to wonder how many dogs, cats, racoons, guys sneaking a smoke on their patios and police officers involved in the manhunt would have been shot if everybody in Watertown had an AR-15 by his bedroom window.

This piece was originally written for The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog on April 20, 2013:

Well, not really revise, but let me go on for a minute about the pro-minority biases that affect our democracy. We were all schooled about the genius our Founding Fathers exhibited when they loaded up the Constitution with checks and balances, but when you stop and think about the sheer number of non-democratic institutions and rules that are central to our government, it’s clear why we get so little done. The states, of course, are inherently unequal. So is the senate and the electoral college. Throw in congressional redistricting, the filibuster, closed primaries, the disappearance of the open rule—and we’re not even talking about twisted, Lewis Carroll type formulations like `money is speech’ and `corporations are people.’ Sure, I’m unhappy that the Senate did not pass the gun registration provision, but what everybody should be screaming about is how in the hell is it that you can’t pass legislation when you have 54 votes? In last February’s exciting Super Bowl, the Ravens beat the 49ers 34-31. How would it have gone over if at the end of the game, the ref said “Sorry, but in order to win, the Ravens needed 39 points, or three-fifths of the points scored. No decision.” Kind of ridiculous. Fundamentally unfair. What’s wrong with that nincompoop Harry Reid that he has allowed this suicide rule to continue to undermine democratic government and Democratic policies?

This piece was originally written for The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog on April 20, 2013:

In the aftermath of the gun control vote, Joe Scarborough and others who favored the measure could be heard maintaining with steely resolve, “This issue is going to backfire on the opponents in the 2014 election.” Well, maybe. I hope so. I hope Michael Bloomberg’s money has an effect. I hope Jim Messina’s Organizing for Action makes an impact. But what I really hope is that somebody takes a very pessimistic long term view and concludes that maybe very little legislative progress can be made until we begin to make the world safe for moderate Republicans. What does that mean? Simply that money and organizational muscle and educational intelligence needs to be invested now in the long, hard process of working state-by-state to adopt non-partisan redistricting processes. We need to maximize the number of politically competitive districts in each state, and to minimize the number of safe seats that are over once the dominant party chooses its general election candidate. It’s all about Free Market politics. Unless elections are actually competitive, majorities don’t rule, minorities do, and we’re going to beat our heads stupid until we change the fundamental structures that block progress. It’s good to work for the 2014 elections; it might be better to work for the 2020 census and redistricting.

This piece was originally written for The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog on April 20, 2013:

Good morning, ardent Washington Monthly fans. I am pleased to be among you. A bit daunted, too; compared to the news-gorging, policy-devouring flamethrowers who usually occupy this spot, I’m a old spitballer trying to get by on craft and guile. But I’ll do my best.

As Mr. Peabody used to say to his boy Sherman, let’s turn the Wayback Machine to last Monday, and visit a story that took place before the onslaught of news events became so torrential that poor Matt “Losing Streak” Lauer found himself in West, Texas at the fertilizer factory explosion while everybody outside of West, Texas was gripped by the events in Boston. The story I’m referring to, of course, is the Senate’s refusal to pass the new gun control legislation.

The story has already been well-masticated, but even at this late date, I was especially struck by a comment by Stuart Stevens in The Daily Beast the other day:

“It was not lost on many of those paying attention that the provisions of the Manchin-Toomey legislation would have done nothing to prevent the Newtown massacre. The lack of such deprived this very logical president from making a logical case of support based on the Newtown tragedy and instead forced him to push the emotion of Newtown further and further. On a certain ironic level, this placed Obama in the same position as President George W. Bush making the case for the invasion of Iraq based on mushroom clouds rather than on hard data.”

A Bush comparison? Yikes!

Put me down as one of those who believes that the anti-gun forces don’t really have a good psychological insight into what’s driving many gun owners. I think it’s fear, not of black helicopters coming to take away everybody’s hunting rifles in the middle of the night, but an animal fear, not entirely irrational, that things are headed in the wrong direction. The economy is not producing enough jobs, and nobody feels secure. The housing market has not recovered, and nobody feels secure. An education doesn’t guarantee a job. A lifetime of work may not guarantee you Social Security. And though I pull Paul Krugman’s columns up to my chin like a security blanket, I don’t like the size of that debt. Throw in teenage terrorists, a juvenile North Korean dictator, and an ethic of individualism that excuses all sorts of selfish behavior. There’s a low grade fever of fear infecting the country that in some places is building to panic, and no one is really addressing it. You can’t expect people to live under the constant threat of unemployment, let alone be unemployed for months and years at a time, and expect them to feel secure and that others are looking out for them. I don’t think buying a gun is an answer; I don’t think owning a gun will bring relief. But do I think that someone who wants to own a gun to enhance a sense of security is crazy? No, I don’t, not really. An improved economy may not ensure for gun control, but there’s no hope until things get fundamentally better.

Having spent all that (mostly enjoyable) time in graduate school reading The Prince, I was delighted to see that Professor Stephen J. Milner of the University of Manchester has discovered the arrest warrant for Niccolò Machiavelli hidden away in a state archive. The 500-years-old document was the catalyst for Machiavelli’s writing The Prince. When the Medici family returned to power in Florence in 1512, chiavelli was booted out of his post in the city’s chancery He was later linked to a conspiracy to overthrow the returning rulers, and this warrant for his arrest was issued in 1513. “On the same day, he was imprisoned, tortured and later released and placed under house arrest outside the city,” Milner told The Telegraph, “The Prince was written in the vain hope of gaining favor and employment with the Medici — but there’s no evidence to suggest they even read it.”

Ed Koch died last Friday at the age of 88. In retirement, he became a beloved figure, a loud, opinionated uncle, unhip in his easy gracelessness, comfortable in his blotchy skin. But in his prime, he was a large figure, with a great intellect and enormous confidence, vain, nasty, ebullient, fun. One of his greatest moments was during the transit strike of 1979, when Koch, who had no responsibility for making the deal, stood with quasi-Churchillian courage and roared encouragement to straphangers-turned-pedestrians (like me) who had walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. But he relished the spotlight too much, and took too much pleasure in ladeling like schmaltz his jokes and his insults and his self-regard on the tough, grind-it-out management of a broke city, at which he also excelled. When the Donnie Manes scandals broke, and Koch was revealed to have to have been goofballing around while the thieves connived, Koch was embarrassed, and never quite the force. Still, he was a remarkable figure and to have been a lowly aide to a City Councilman during the Koch reign was a rich and memorable and highly educational experience. At his memorial yesterday, Michael Bloomberg eulogized him: “No mayor, I think, has ever embodied the spirit of New York City like he did, and I don’t think anyone ever will. Tough and loud, brash and irreverent, full of humor and chutzpah — he was our city’s quintessential mayor.” That sounds about right. (Above: my moment with Ed, in February 1981, when he appoints me Executive Director of the Citizens Committee for Water Conservation. When days later a massive nor’easter ended the drought that occasioned the appointment, my career in government came to an end.)

As my friend James Rosen of Fox News has reported at Greta Van Susteren‘s blog, in the aftermath of the Newtown mass murder, NRA membership actually increased. “A source at the NRA tells Fox News, based on his access to an internal memo prepared by the organization’s membership division, that since the Newtown massacre, the organization registered an average of 8,000 new members a day” in the week after the bloodbath. Rosen tells us that this shouldn’t be surprising, since “this broadly mirrors trends seen after similar incidents in the past, (although) the surge in membership this time is said to dwarf trends discerned in previous years.” But what is surprising is the number of people who belong to the NRA. As The Atlantic recently reported, “One NRA website says it’s `approximately 4.3 million.’ On another, it’s `nearly four million.’ A `sponsorship prospectus’ for the group’s 2012 annual meeting offers ad placements in e-mails that will be sent to the `house file of 2 million NRA members.’

So here’s my question: why don’t 4.5 or so million of us join the NRA, and then take over the organization? We could vote Wayne Lapierre and the gun nuts out, and vote a slate of moderate, compromise-minded gun owners in?

It’s not hard to join the NRA. All it costs $25, and in exchange for that you get stuff: a membership card; a decal; free admission to NRA’s Annual Guns, Gear and Outfitter Show; invitations to NRA special events; your choice of one of the NRA’s four award-winning magazines; $7,500 worth of insurance; and a free gift (currently your choice among a Rosewood Handled Knife, a Black & Gold Duffel Bag, and a Digital Camo Duffel Bag.

The first thing we could do is change the organization’s slogan. Maybe to something like “I’m NRA, and I’m not unreasonable.”

Over the last twenty years or so, you could talk with people about great political books, like Game Change or what have you, and then somebody would remember that Richard Ben Cramer had written What It Takes, and that ended the conversation. None was better, and none would ever be better. Working on a big canvas-his topic was the presidential election of 1988, and in the 1000-plus pages that the book ran, Cramer covered six of the candidates in depth, including George Bush, Bob Dole and Joe Biden–Cramer took anything and everything there was to learn from the Making of the President books of Theodore H. White, the brilliant political writing of Norman Mailer, and the exhaustive, energetic journalism of Tom Wolfe, and added to it his own prodigious intellect and talent. Richard was a patient journalist who never forced or rushed his story. He was also that rarest of writers, one who actually liked people, and allowed his subjects to show their best sides to the reader without shying away from foibles and follies and utter ridiculousness of being a high elected official. The result was something far better than anything of its kind–insightful, sympathetic, gimlet-eyed, hilarious. You could watch a hundred episodes of Veep and not laugh as hard as you will reading a two-page account of George W. Bush, son of the THEN-vice-president, realizing that a White House staffer had been given seats at a baseball game at the Houston Astrodome that were much closer to his father than his. Here’s Richard, inside the mind of a smoldering future president:

“Junior was now standing. . .watching to see who sat behind Barbara Bush and the seat reserved for his father. There was Jeb, and his boy P. They got seats with the old man. . . Wait a minute! There was Fuller, the new Chief of Staff, and one of his paper-pushers. Are they sitting DOWN? Well, wait just a goddam minute! Fuller! There he was, with every damn oily hair in place, and his Washington suit stretched across his back like aluminum siding. . . .Tell you one thing: that sonovabitch doesn’t know the old man, if he thinks he can move family out. The old friends were right. This guy’s an asshole! I’ve been replaced by STAFFERS!”

It kills me today to read in Richard’s obituary in The New York Times that “What It Takes received poor reviews, and sales were initially poor. Fellow journalists were also slow to see its value. Disappointed, Mr. Cramer never again wrote as prodigiously about politics.” I hadn’t known about the poor reviews and sales. Perhaps the sheer length of the thing discouraged readers. The one time I met him, in the offices of Esquire in 1994, I gushed about the book, telling him that I had read every word. He said, “You’re the only person who has ever told me that.” I took him to be joking. Now I wonder how much.

Richard went out to lunch with my fellow editor David Hirshey that day, and when he came back, he was making his good-byes, and he said to me, “There was something I wanted to tell you.” He punctuated the phrase with finger wags: “There was something I wanted to tell you.” I was thrilled–flattered, even. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember. I later made a couple discreet queries through Hirshey to see if Richard may have remembered, but nothing had clicked, and I could see I was becoming a pest.

What could it have been? Stop wasting your time? Buy Apple? Lose twenty pounds? A wet bird never flies at night?

Oh well. Such was my encounter with one of the giants of my era.