The Londoner

One fascination in a presidential race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant, and weirdly overfamiliar e-mails that emanated from the Obama campaign. Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from Barack Obama with subject lines such as “Join me for dinner?” “It’s officially over,” “It doesn’t have to be this way,” or just “Wow.” Jon Stewart mocked them on the Daily Show . The women’s website the Hairpin likened them to notes from a stalker. But they worked. Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails. During the campaign, Obama’s staff wouldn’t answer questions about them or the alchemy that made them so successful. Now, with the election over, they’re opening the black box. The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts. “We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for,” says Amelia Showalt

In 1902, journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote a book called "The Shame of the Cities." At the time, Americans took pride in big cities, with their towering skyscrapers, productive factories and prominent cultural institutions. Steffens showed there were some rotten things underneath the gleaming veneers -- corrupt local governments and political machines, aided and abetted by business leaders. In recent weeks, two books have appeared about another of America's gleaming institutions, our colleges and universities, either of which could be subtitled "The Shame of the Universities." In "Mismatch," law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor expose, in the words of their subtitle, "How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It." In "Unlearning Liberty," Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, describes how unive

It was soon after the job of running CNN Worldwide became available that Jeff Zucker got a text message. Phil Kent, the president of Turner Broadcasting, told him that since everyone already believed that they were talking about the job, perhaps they should get together. They did, and continued to meet periodically in New York, even as Kent also huddled with others on his short list for the high-profile post. By the time the company announced Thursday that Zucker had been chosen to lead the cable network (where I host a weekly media program), the two men were on the same page about CNN’s future direction and a belief that more than mere tinkering was needed. Zucker said in an interview that CNN programs need “more differentiation” and “more variety, and I don’t mean that in the entertainment sense.” With CNN’s ratings rising and falling with the news cycle, Zucker said “the overriding issue is what do you do beyond the 25 days a year when the

Here's just how stubborn the growth of government is: Even after a Democratic president wins office by campaigning until Election Eve on a " net spending cut ," even after he gives his first proposed budget the humblebragging title of " A New Era of Responsibility ," even after both Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke describe the country's long-term budget outlook as " unsustainable ," even after a populist, anti-government backlash sweeps the land for a year and a half, culminating in the Republican re-taking of the House of Representatives and the rise of a new type of limited-government politician embodied by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.); even after those forces collide in a series of high-profile debt-ceiling showdowns...after all this stomach-churning sturm und drang over the size and scope of government, the federal bureaucracy still has yet to be cut. And no matter what anyone tel

By David Gergen Forgive me, but haven't we seen this movie before in the aftermath of national elections? Usually, it doesn't end well. In the weeks since his victory, President Barack Obama has argued -- correctly -- that voters are demanding that high-income Americans pay higher taxes as a way to reduce deficits. Some 60% in exit polls endorsed that proposition, and a Pew/Washington Post poll released this week found that 60% still support it. The president, then, has good reason to push the idea. In a breakthrough, House Speaker John Boehner quickly lined up behind the idea of the wealthy paying more. He still disagrees with the president on how to get there, of course, but critics are losing sight of how far Boehner seems prepared to go. In private negotiations with Obama last year, the two men first agreed on raising $800 billion in new taxes over 10 years. When Obama pushed to see whether Boehner would go up another $400 billion to $1.2 tril

By Ronald Brownstein The same dynamic that powered the Democrats’ unexpected Senate gains this fall could also give the party more leverage to drive its legislative agenda through the chamber in the months ahead. At the core of the Democrats’ surprising pickup of two Senate seats was a consistent pattern. In almost every major contested Senate race, exit polls showed that the Democratic candidate won more support among voters who also backed President Obama than the Republican nominee did among voters who backed Mitt Romney. In two sides of the same coin, that means almost all major Democratic Senate candidates did a better job than their Republican rivals of unifying their base and attracting more crossover voters. That pattern allowed Democrats to virtually sweep the Senate races in the states Obama that won and to triumph in four states that Romney carried decisively— Indiana , Missouri , Montana , and North Dakota . This ele

By RICHARD E. RALSTON   Seven years in the Army provided me with a rather useful education. On one occasion, at age 19, a few minutes after being admitted to an Army hospital with strep throat and a fever of 104 degrees, I was told by a hospital orderly to get out of bed and sweep the floors. I came to learn that government medicine always serves another government agenda. I also learned some unique turns of phrase from my sergeants that are apropos of such situations. I cannot repeat most of them here, but one term has immediate relevance: "