Latest news with #Dunkelman
Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Nesi's Notes: March 8
Happy Saturday! Here's another edition of my weekend column for — as always, send your takes, tips and trial balloons to tnesi@ and follow me on Twitter, Bluesky and Facebook. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now 1. Governing Rhode Island and Massachusetts is, today, almost entirely a Democratic Party project; for the first time in over a century, no Republican holds high office in either state. So Democrats need to look in the mirror and reckon with why they can't seem to make major headway on the big problems that hold back the region: unaffordable housing, anemic population growth, bloated project costs, high energy bills, perennial budget deficits, and more. That's why every elected Democrat should pick up a copy of 'Why Nothing Works,' the new book by Brown's Marc Dunkelman that is getting a lot of national buzz. 'We Democrats are the party of government. Government isn't working. And that is a reason for people to vote against us,' Dunkelman said on this week's Newsmakers. '[W]e need to focus on what is our product, which is a functioning government that improves people's lives in ways that they can see, touch and feel.' Dunkelman's book is partly meant as a corrective to 'The Power Broker,' Robert Caro's immensely influential 1974 Robert Moses biography, which showed how Moses wielded nearly unchecked power in New York to bulldoze entire neighborhoods. 'We don't want to go back to the mistakes of that age,' Dunkelman said. But he argues the pendulum has now swung too far, making it nearly impossible to efficiently build things like housing, power lines, or high-speed rail. 'We should be, as progressives, the government efficiency folks,' he said. 'We should be the ones calling out bureaucracies that aren't delivering.' 2. Marc Dunkelman's book is one of a trio of high-profile new releases that all examine why Democratic elected officials, particularly in blue states, struggle to execute these days. The others are 'Stuck,' by Atlantic deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum, and 'Abundance,' by the NYT's Ezra Klein and the Atlantic's Derek Thompson. All three focus heavily on housing as a prime example of governmental failure in the modern era. Appelbaum was in Providence this week to speak at Brown, and before the event he laid out his argument during a roundtable with reporters. Noting that blue states' stagnation is also shrinking their political relevance in national elections, Appelbaum said, 'Blue jurisdictions are waking up to the fact that they have become their own worst enemies.' 3. Governor McKee made his 2026 reelection bid official on Monday with a two-minute campaign launch video — released a full 18 months before next year's gubernatorial primary. To put the timing in perspective, his predecessor Gina Raimondo waited to launch her reelection bid until barely three months before the primary. The kickoff was so low-key that the R.I. Democratic Party's email newsletter made no mention of it Friday. But our political analyst Joe Fleming sees a clear rationale. 'I think a lot of people have not been convinced that he was going to run again,' Fleming said on this week's Newsmakers, adding, 'I think it's hurt him as far as raising money.' Still, Fleming doesn't count McKee out, noting that he could conceivably win the Democratic nomination in a two-way race with just 60,000 votes, based on typical turnout. Only a week ago, Fleming released a poll commissioned by the Rhode Island AFL-CIO that showed 48% of voters think the state is headed in the wrong direction, a clear red flag for the incumbent. But the governor had a more positive spin on that number, telling my colleague Kate Wilkinson, 'When you start to get less than half the state of Rhode Island saying we're headed in the wrong direction, that's progress.' Regardless, with 18 months to go before the balloting, there are a host of unknowns that could still affect next year's race for governor. One is House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, who up to now has mostly been a McKee ally, but who could certainly make the incumbent's life more difficult if he wants to help nudge him out of the race. (It didn't go unnoticed that Shekarchi put more distance than usual between himself and McKee at Tuesday night's Rhode Map Live event.) Another wild card will come June 6, when RIDOT is scheduled to announce how much the new Washington Bridge will cost and how long it will take to build. Will voters have sticker shock? 4. Speaking of the Washington Bridge, an increasingly pressing question is whether the Trump administration will actually agree to provide the $221 million in federal grants that Pete Buttigieg awarded for the project during his final months in office. We learned this week, via a letter from Governor McKee to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, that federal officials still haven't put their signatures on the award documents. 'We've already been in contact with [Duffy],' McKee told my colleague Alexandra Leslie on Thursday. 'I'm setting up a call, a direct call with him, and I'll be able to fill in a little bit more information after that call.' Asked Friday if the call had taken place yet, the governor's office would only tell Tim White, 'This is in process.' Stay tuned. 5. The dais at the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce legislative luncheon will be missing some familiar faces next Wednesday. Senate President Dominick Ruggerio remains in rehab at Fatima Hospital following his recent bout of pneumonia, and as of Friday was scheduled to be released on either the day of the luncheon or the day after. Finance Committee Chair Lou DiPalma will join Majority Leader Val Lawson in representing Senate Democrats, alongside Senate GOP Leader Jessica de la Cruz. But the House will only be represented by Democrats — Speaker Shekarchi and Majority Leader Chris Blazejewski — after GOP Leader Mike Chippendale announced the House Republicans would all skip the annual event, a perennial on the State House calendar. Chippendale described the Chamber's leadership as 'an incestuous group of top-level executives at the largest companies in the state, whose main goal is to not offend the Democratic leadership so they can get whatever legislative crumbs might get tossed their way.' Laurie White, the Providence Chamber's longtime president, called the decision 'unfortunate' in an interview with the Current's Nancy Lavin. 'The legislators tell us all the time (and rightfully so): 'Show up. Let us know what you think. Don't sit on the sidelines. Get involved,'' she said. 6. Mayor Smiley is again warning Providence residents to brace for a tax hike. 7. There is so much news coming out of Washington that it's challenging to quickly summarize it all, even if you try to keep the focus local. … An agency posted a list indicating plans to sell federal buildings in New Bedford and Fall River, then deleted it; some local leases are also being cancelled. … U.S. District Chief Judge Jack McConnell again ruled in favor of the states in the court fight over the funding freeze, drawing praise from AG Neronha, who is among the leaders on the plaintiff side. …. Senator Reed has so far voted for only two cabinet nominees, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll; Senator Whitehouse has voted for five, most recently U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. … Reed also signed an unusual bicameral statement from eight top Democrats in Congress that accused President Trump and Elon Musk of imperiling national security. … Congressman Keating and Congressman Amo both tried to redirect a Europe subcommittee hearing about Turkey to discuss the war in Ukraine. … Congressman Magaziner filed legislation he says would bar Trump from seizing Canada, Panama or Greenland. … The status of federal funding for Rhode Island-based nutrition nonprofit Edesia led to a fight on social media between Musk and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau. … The president's address to a joint session triggered a mostly party-line vote to censure Congressman Al Green for interrupting; the region's four congressmen all voted no. … Governor Healey got a national spotlight from the NYT over her response to the new administration. … What will next week bring? 8. There's a lot of news about local newspapers at the moment. The biggest development is at The Providence Journal, where Gannett is shutting down the Kinsley Avenue printing plant this weekend and shifting production to New Jersey. (TV cameras won't be allowed inside to document the final press run, Gannett told us Friday.) Another change is happening in the Blackstone Valley, where the Call & Times announced it is ending its Monday edition and will only print five days a week going forward; the paper was created less than two years ago by the merger of the Woonsocket Call and the Pawtucket Times. The Call & Times' corporate owner, Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers, is also now merging the North Kingstown Standard-Times and the East Greenwich Pendulum into one paper, the Standard-Pendulum. On a more positive note, new Beacon Communications publisher Joy Fox just finished a major technology upgrade that helped the company refresh the design of the Warwick Beacon, Cranston Herald and Johnston Sun Rise. 9. People in the news … former Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Zach Cunha is now practicing at Nixon Peabody … Congressman Amo is in Texas today to speak at SXSW … Joe Powers easily won reelection as Rhode Island GOP chairman … Housing Secretary Deborah Goddard removed 'acting' from her title after winning Senate confirmation … Tom Kane is finishing his term as president of the R.I. Association of Democratic City & Town Chairs; Erich Haslehurst is running to succeed him … Providence's Timothy J. Walsh has been named the new chairman and CEO of audit giant KPMG … the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence is still waiting for the Vatican to announce a new bishop, so former Bishop Thomas Tobin celebrated the cathedral's Ash Wednesday Mass … Roger Williams University School of Law's David Logan is a main character in this New York Times deep-dive about the future of American libel law … the AP has named Kimberlee Kruesi as the wire service's new reporter in Rhode Island; she's currently stationed in Nashville … condolences to the family and friends of former state tourism director David DePetrillo, who has died at age 78. 10. The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has always stood out for its Brutalist architecture; if you've never been there, picture Boston City Hall. At a time when the president is targeting Brutalism from the White House, what lies in store for the Dartmouth campus? Ben Berke has a great piece examining that here. 11. Time's Jamie Ducharme investigates why more young adults are getting cancer. 12. We are gearing up for a big celebration at the end of the month, when WPRI 12 will mark our 70th anniversary on the airwaves. As part of the preparation, we've been spending a lot of time digitizing old news footage from our archives — my fellow Attleboro natives will get a real kick out of this video of the city in 1986. From the same year, Rhode Islanders may also enjoy this newly unearthed Jack White story covering the late Bruce Selya's swearing-in. 13. Speaking of WPRI, have you downloaded our new 12+ smart TV app yet? You can watch our newscasts live and find all our latest stories on demand. It's really slick — try it out today. 14. Set your DVRs: This week on Newsmakers — 'Why Nothing Works' author Marc Dunkelman. Watch Sunday at 5:30 a.m. on WPRI 12 and 10 a.m. on Fox Providence, or listen on the radio Sunday at 6 p.m. on WPRO. You can also subscribe to Newsmakers as a podcast via Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you back here next Saturday. Ted Nesi (tnesi@ is a Target 12 investigative reporter and 12 News politics/business editor. He co-hosts Newsmakers and writes Nesi's Notes on Saturdays. Connect with him on Twitter, Bluesky and Facebook. Download the and apps to get breaking news and weather alerts. Watch or with the new . Follow us on social media: Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
When did the media go wrong? A new book blames Robert Caro.
Every election prompts months of media handwringing — which tweet, which interview, which embarrassing question really made them hate us this time? In a new book,, the author Marc Dunkelman goes a bit further into history to pinpoint where American media lost its way — and lands on the glorious summer of 1974, when the Washington Post took down Richard Nixon and the New Yorker published four parts of a monumental biography of New York's great builder, Robert Moses. And his media villain is a man Dunkelman described to me as 'Abbie Hoffman in a tweed suit': Robert Caro, the revered, now 89-year old author of The Power Broker who is now working on the fifth volume of his biography of President Lyndon Johnson. The 1,246-page is a legend of American biography, and sits on the shelves of most journalists. (Mine, I noticed this week, was leaning dangerously toward the sofa, and so I moved it and weighed it — 3 pounds, 3 ounces by my kitchen scale.) By the time I read it in the late 1990s, it was received wisdom — detached from any time and place, and from any sense that it advanced a political agenda. It was both a brilliant exploration of the inner workings of mid-20th century government power and a cautionary tale of how The Establishment used that power to drive highways through neighborhoods, replace 'slums' with apartment buildings, and, well, build a lot of very nice parks. Dunkelman puts the book back into context: 'When, during the Watergate summer of 1974, Robert Caro published his voluminous takedown of Robert Moses, the spellbinding narrative mirrored what was, nay then, an entirely familiar worldview. Moses had been a progressive … a man who believed unerringly in the wisdom of experts,' he writes. The exposé, 'released within weeks of Nixon's resignation, was yet more evidence of power gone awry.' Earlier journalists had 'made a practice of taking public officials at their word.' (Muckrakers, like the consequential Jack Anderson, who broke much of the Watergate story but has largely been erased from its high-minded history, were confined to the margins as problematic gossip-mongers.) But there had been a cultural change: 'Boomers entering the news business in the 1960s weren't inclined to accept government claims so uncritically, and for good reason.' Dunkelman argues that Watergate, and embodied a new sort of negative naivete: a reflexive skepticism of the use of power. The role of journalism became, as you'll often hear, to hold power to account — hardly to celebrate its successes, or even to recognize them. 'The individual has to yield in matters of this kind to the entire country, to the advantages and needs of the majority of the people,' Moses protested, after people stopped listening to him. 'If not, we wouldn't build anything!' Caro didn't respond to an email inquiry about Dunkelman's line on him, or the broader reconsideration of Moses. Dunkelman's book captures a rising tide in Democratic politics that sometimes goes under the 'YIMBY' ('yes in my backyard') heading. This pro-growth liberalism has been brewing for years. The blogger Matt Yglesias proposed in in 2020 that the United States dominate its global competitors by tripling its populationa premise that was (obviously) not immediately embraced by either political party. A wing of the Democratic Party, beginning in San Francisco, has made a crusade of killing restrictive zoning regulations, sometimes pushing conservatives skeptical of an influx of big buildings into opposing growth in favor of a regulatory state. The case has continued to develop, though, and its proponents are trying out a new label: the 'abundance agenda.' Ezra Klein's and Derek Thompson's much-anticipated new book Abundance is likely to focus the conversation around these arguments this spring. They make the case that a successful Democratic Party — and its cities — must rally around an idea of a future in which the price and quality of housing falls the way it has for consumer goods like flatscreen TVs. And they argue that Democrats' doctrinaire insistence on restraining the private sector in the first instance — through a blind embrace of regulations on business and technology — has cost them the ability to govern. Dunkelman came to this subject in a familiar way: reading as he took the train into New York City, and disembarked in Penn Station. 'I would close the book, gather my belongings, and climb up into the daylight through the dingy, fetid basement corridors that serve as the city's front door,' he recalls. My weekly trips to Washington take me through the gorgeous, airy Moynihan Train Hall, jammed to completion by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (The media coverage of its opening was mixed. Architecture critics called it 'glorious' and 'stunning.' 'Homeless feel unwelcome' without benches to sleep on, The City reported. The New York Post broke the news that the pressure of finishing the project had contributed to an executive's suicide.) New York's government is, again, at a low, and a mayor's race is underway. Cuomo is likely to run, and he's long expressed a theory of government that harkens back to the progressive era: that in an age of public distrust, the best way to restore faith is to build and fix big, literal, public works — Moynihan, La Guardia Airport, the former Tappan Zee Bridge, now named after his father. I asked him last week about whether New York should reclaim the title of the biggest building in the world: 'Al Smith, [in the] midst of the Depression, [built] the Empire State building in one year. Yes, we can.' A Brooklyn state senator, Zellnor Myrie, is running as the YIMBY candidate, proposing that the city put 85,000 apartments in whole 'new neighborhoods,' part of a plan for a million new homes that could add millions in populationHe'd also like the height title back: 'We shouldn't be beat by Dubai,' he told the New York Editorial Board, of which I'm a member, Thursday. 'New Yorkers just like to be inspired.' Is it the job of the media to cheerlead such things, which bring — as Moses said — terrible tradeoffs? Generations of journalists would tell you: absolutely not. I suppose that's why the tallest building in the world is in Dubai, where they don't have these problems. Moses was the embodiment and the arm of The Establishment. We live at a moment when all politics is populism and the public consensus is to tear down the elites, the Niskanen Center's Soren Dayton notes, while the original progressives were focused on crushing urban machines and putting power in the hands of wiser leaders. 'In a re-celebration of Robert Moses and the [Tennessee Valley Authority], you blow past public participation and celebrate a technocratic depoliticization. And, again, these same people explicitly tried to drive down public participation,' he wrote on X. 'Does that sound like a match for today?' to can be read online, with this epigraph from Sophocles: 'One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.' 'The author and publisher do not comprehend the obligations of leadership,' Caro wrote in his typewritten 23-page response to the book's four-part New Yorker excerpts. Moses's legacy for City Journal, and found him a less sinister — and monumental — figure: 'Moses survived not through Machiavellian machinations to subvert political will but by smoothly delivering what the state and city's governing class, business leaders, and editorial boards wanted him to accomplish.' What is American journalism if it isn't focused on holding power to account, our profession's loose and perhaps self-important mission in recent decades? President Theodore Roosevelt raised that question back in 1906. 'The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor,' he said.
Boston Globe
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
America used to be able to do big things. Why is it struggling now, R.I. author asks.
Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up Q: It seems like you have pretty good timing with this book. Tell us how to apply it to the moment we're seeing in Washington right now. Advertisement Dunkelman: Right now many Democrats feel lost. We've spent the last several years trying to convince the country that Trump was bad – and all that effort seems for naught. I'm arguing in 'Why Nothing Works' that, to restore our political fortunes, we need to grapple with a contradiction within our governing agenda – a contradiction that has made it hard for government to make decisions and drive progress. We're the party of government, and government doesn't work. If we want to win, we need to have a plan to fix that. Q: In the synopsis on the back of the book, you write: 'there's nothing wrong with progressivism that can't be fixed by progressives.' Expand on that for a second. What's a tangible example you would use? Dunkelman: Progressives want two contradictory things – and those things need to be kept in balance. We want to empower public authority to solve big problems like climate change – to have some big bureaucracy tell polluters to curtail their carbon emissions. At the same time we're pretty skeptical of big government institutions; we certainly don't want them telling women what to do with their bodies. My argument is that we've become so focused on the latter of these impulses – the desire to protect individuals from coercive government power – that we're rendered government impotent in the places where it needs to work well. We need to rebalance our two impulses. Advertisement Q: It seems like we have a trust crisis when it comes to our institutions right now. Is there a specific institution or two that you are especially concerned about? Dunkelman: You're right. Trust in institutions of all sorts has fallen through the decades – and not just government. That was actually the focus more of my first book, Q: I feel like the country is divided on whether emerging technologies like AI are going to fix a lot of problems or make things worse. Where do you fall on that debate? Dunkelman: Brother, I thought Tim Scott was going to be a viable candidate for the GOP nomination last year, and I was pretty sure Scott Walker was going to be strong in 2016. So don't trust my powers of prediction. But I'm generally optimistic about technological change, and my hope is that AI allows those doing work they don't like to have opportunities to find more meaningful and satisfying ways to earn a living. Advertisement Q: What's next for you? Do you have another book project in mind? Dunkelman: I have lots of projects 'in mind,' but I'm not entirely sure what's next. For more than a decade I've been perplexed about why it is that train service between Rhode Island and Boston is so slow, when for a pretty miserly amount of public investment, all those biotech jobs in the Seaport could be easily commutable from places like Warwick and Seekonk. If I can find a way, I'd like to figure out why we're not making infrastructure investments in the projects that could have more impact, while simultaneously investing in many projects that don't have a lot of upside. This story first appeared in Rhode Map, our free newsletter about Rhode Island that also contains information about local events, links to interesting stories, and more. If you'd like to receive it via email Monday through Friday, . Dan McGowan can be reached at
