Talk Cocktail

There is no more significant issue than race in America. If perplexed our founders, it flies in the face of the notion of American exceptionalism, it clouds our dealing with the other nations, and it's an underlying current throughout American political history...right up to this very moment. The Black lives matter movement, profound and successful as it is at this moment, is simply part of the ar...

Regardless of whether you are for single-payer health insurance, fee for service, a hybridized French system, or the Affordable Care Act, what’s clear is that most of our health care system is broken. It’s left behind from the world of technology and creative destruction and it’s far too expensive. It’s a system that is broken, and that increasingly places barriers to entry for those without knowl...

Every company has its foundational myth. Usually carved out of air by its founder. It becomes the basis of its culture, its marketing and its fundraising. However, often, the reality of running a business is much more mundane. It’s often separated from the myth.  Most people, even charismatic founders of companies can understand the difference. It's like what used to be said of political campaigns...

There was a time when we looked upon Saudi Arabia as the gas station to the world. Certainly to the US. At the time it generated fear and a lack of understanding. It’s tribal structure, our lack of knowledge about its history and the repeated failures of US policy in the Middle East all placed the kingdom beyond our comprehension.   Its effort today to modernize both its culture and its economy, t...

The past four years, really right up to this moment, have been a test for the American republic. Over and over we’ve heard it asked, “can our institutions hold, are the ideas and documents of the framers adequate for the modern age.”  At the same time, we’ve heard over and over again since Nov. 8, 2016, how did we get here? What has driven us to such political and social division, to our appetite...

During our last great cultural and political upheaval in the 60s, music provided the soundtrack. Rock stars were not in Silicon Valley, but in the recording studios of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nashville.   Historically, our culture has been shaped by music and music has shaped by our culture. Additionally music, like sports, has been a way out of poverty for many. Few personify this better,...

Every company has its foundational myth. From the beginning, it becomes the basis of the company’s culture, its marketing, and really its DNA. The same is true for nations. And perhaps not surprisingly no nation has done a better job of that mythology than the United States.  From the ideas of manifest destiny to John Winthrop's shining city on the hill, from freedom and equality to American excep...

With the election just hours away, think about how many Presidents we’ve watched grow into the office. Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Earlier JFK and Jimmy Carter also came to the office unseasoned Compare this to Ike, or Reagan, George HW Bush, or Lyndon Johnson all who arrived, for better or worse as fully formed political and human beings. In this year’s election, policy aside, Joe Biden comes to us...

The United States Senate was once considered the world’s greatest deliberative body. As we witnessed in the first presidential debate, it’s entirely possible that honest debate in America is actually dead. And why should we assume that the US Senate is any different? But rather than coming to mourn what once was, perhaps by summoning up the history of some of those senators who once infused the bo...

Bernie Sanders an avowed Democratic socialist, never a member of the Democratic party, ran two failed presidential campaigns, and yet he has succeeded in moving the Democratic Party to the left. AOC, is a one-term congresswoman with no previous political experience and yet her Democratic Socialist views have gotten attention on a national scale. Particularly among young people, there is a growing...

There was a time when there were things that united us. Through most of the 20th century for example they were things that had nothing to do with politics. They were movies and TV shows and books and sports and one of the three choices for getting our evening television news. We were for a long time part of a commonweal, a kind of national town square that provided our water cooler conversation ar...

Before his massive failure with the Covid crises, someone remarked that Donald Trump may not turn out to be the worst President we ever had, but for sure he will be the worst person ever to be President. In many ways, Jimmy Carter is the opposite. He may not have been a great President, but he may have been one of the best people to ever be President. It’s hard to say if the problems that Carter f...

Fitzgerald got it right. The rich are different. Even in the way they commit crimes. Law and order phrases are shouted from rooftops with respect to street crime, as small time criminals are abused by law enforcement and often overcharged. The reality is that crimes of much bigger significance, and many more victims, are committed in and from the boardroom. While anger is still palpable in many pl...

The world has been through tough times before. Wars, depression, the threat of Armageddon, and racial hatred are all nothing new. And yet something seems different today. Perhaps it’s the result of a generation that focused on the self. The me generation, the culture of selfishness, the enduring power of the work of Ayn Rand and obsessive focus on self esteem. Maybe these things have come together...

Day after day people ask “how we got here?” In fact we don’t need a time machine. All we need do is to look back at the political history of the past 50 years and and we can see exactly how we got here.   With the rise of Reagan in the mid 70’s we can see with almost GPS precision, that map that got us to our tribalism that so deeply divides us today.    We see the meanness, the racism, the quest...

If you picked up the New York Times one day last week, you would have discovered that about half of the stories on the front page were directly related to science. Think about what we are dealing with; public health, vaccines, climate change, fires and hurricanes, technology, privacy, transportation, artificial Intelligence, medicine, the frontiers of space and of our oceans and this is just some...

Back on the 4th of July I saw a hat that said, "Make America Great Britain Again."  A good laugh, even more so when superimposed on the current relationship between the two countries. Certainly there is that much vaunted “special relationship''. Not just between the countries, in an abstract geopolitical way, but between leaders that have been shaping and reacting to the world at similar times and...

CNN's chief media correspondent Brian Stelter takes a deep look at Fox News, its power, and its stars in his new book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. My conversation with Brian Stelter. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe

As the late Richard Ben Cramer so brilliantly detailed in his seminal book “What it Takes.” running for president, as a serious candidate, is one of the hardest, most grueling and challenging things one can do. Cramer wrote about the 1988 campaign, before the internet, before 24/7 news and yet he said even then that politics had become a kind of a public utility, with hot-and cold-running politics...

Imagine a time when diplomacy mattered.  When the arts mattered. And when they could actually work together to project America at its best. Oh how we might long for the days of the Cold War. Clausewitz said that diplomacy was simply war by other means. During the Cold War, that diplomacy took many forms. From Richard Nixon showing Khrushchev around an American Kitchen, to Ping Pong diplomacy with...

Most of you know or have lived in cities with long streets or boulevards and you know that some of the same stores repeat themselves over and over again. Starbucks, CVS, etc. The neighborhoods change, but some of the retail landmarks remain the same. In a way, history is like that. It goes on and on. And while the neighborhoods often change, there are things along the way that repeat themselves ov...

I guess it’s just that we are all getting older, but these In Memoriam programs are coming much too frequently lately…...Over the years I had the opportunity to do five interviews with Gail Sheehy. Beginning in May of 1998 we talked about everything from Men's Passages, to older women, Hillary Clinton, and the changes in middle America.  Our last conversation was in the fall of 2014 upon the publi...

Donald Trump came to power on a wave of distrust. Americans had lost faith in government, it’s institutions, and the ability of their government to be honest with them. It’s a through-line that begins perhaps with the assassination of John Kennedy, runs through the endless lies Americans endured about the Vietnam war, and continues through to the Iraq war; the lies about weapons of mass destructio...

Every generation faces the challenges thrust upon it by the generation that came before. Today the millennials face the challenge of how they pick up the baton and carry it forward Their contribution, their imprimatur is still being written. Will, it simply be too scold those that came before, or as we see millennials doing in silicon valley redefining the very nature of society. This is what Jill...

Over the 200 plus year history of political parties in the US, something our founders advised against, the same parties have, at different times, stood for different sets of ideas. The Federalists, the Whigs, the national Republican Party, the Democrats and others all have been made up of different coalitions at different times We all know for example that Lincoln and his Republicans were once the...