FEATURED STORY

State of Distress

These days, as he pleads with New Jersey voters for a second term as governor, even moments of satisfaction in Jon S. Corzine’s world seem to extract their small humiliations. In early September, for instance, on the day that President Obama delivered his heralded (and controversial) televised pep talk to public-school students, Corzine traveled to Camden, one of the country’s poorest cities, his government-issue black S.U.V. weaving through a postapocalyptic landscape of overgrown fields and shuttered row houses. The neighborhood was celebrating the opening of the sparkling new H. B.  

FEATURED ESSAY

The Great Unalignment

This time last winter, Democratic Washington was crackling with confident talk of a progressive re-awakening in the land and an enduring Congressional majority. “Realignment” was the word of the moment, as in the kind of demographic and ideological shift that shaped the nation’s politics for some 60 years after the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Now Democrats are trying to figure out how they lost what was presumed to be the safest Senate seat in the country — it belonged to Ted Kennedy for 46 years — and how to avoid hemorrhaging others. A year after George W.