By Nitasha Tiku 1/10/12 10:16am

The Real Mad Men of New York City

12 Photos

Don Blauweiss, second from left, and Sid Meyers, far right.

Veteran Mad Men Reunite to Sell the Senior Set

Picture Don Draper a few years down the road, gripping an AARP card instead of a tumbler of Canadian Club, and you’ve got Don Blauweiss.

On a recent Friday morning, the 78-year-old Mr. Blauweiss was in a green Jeep stick-shift waiting for The Observer at the Metro-North station in Bronxville. He was sporting a black leather jacket, black turtleneck and a full head of curly white hair. “My red BMW is in the shop,” the self-described New Yorkquino apologized in a laidback Queens cadence.

As we stuttered through the sloping streets of the tony Eastchester suburb, Mr. Blauweiss described the AMC drama as “meticulous down to every detail—the princess telephones, the wardrobing.” He should know. In the sixties, Mr. Blauweiss got his start as a twentysomething art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency credited with setting off a “creative revolution” that transformed Madison Avenue, upending the Sterling Coopers of the world in the process.

It’s a trick he’d like to pull off again. With several compadres from the old days, Mr. Blauweiss has just launched a new advertising consultancy, Senior Creative People, targeting an overlooked demographic: his own.

“The only thing that’s somewhat different from my experience was the amount of drinking that they did,” he went on, pivoting the jeep up the hill of his driveway. “There was plenty of drinking going on. There were even a couple who might keep a bottle in the desk. But nobody, at least not at DDB, had a bar in their office. Now don’t forget! Sterling Cooper was the antithesis of Doyle Dane, so who knows . . .” Read More

By Steve Kornacki 5/15/09 2:54am

Obama Risks Turning From J.F.K. Into L.B.J.

Speaking as the 100th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s birth approached last summer, biographer Robert Caro spoke of how Johnson’s presidency managed to be both triumphant and disastrous at the same time.

“You listen to the [people] who were concerned with what Lyndon Johnson did on the domestic side, and you say, ‘There Read More

By Matt Haber 11/19/08 5:04pm

Daily Show’s LBJ ‘Piss’ Take

Last night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the host did a segment about President-elect Obama’s Lincoln-esque ‘Team of Rivals’ (good topic!), in which he stitched together footage of pundits commenting on the prospect of a Hillary Clinton cabinet appointment.

One of the clips was of ABC News’ Sam Donaldson saying, "It’s Read More

By Steve Kornacki 11/13/08 3:18am

The Party of the South and Nowhere Else

In the middle of the 20th century, the national Democratic Party was being pulled in two radically different and fundamentally incompatible directions, the most loyal components of its coalition divided by racial politics.

Since the Civil War, the party’s most reliable base of support had been in the South, where voters were known to boast Read More

By Steve Kornacki 11/11/08 3:04am

Democrats Still Can’t Win the South, But It Doesn’t Matter

After affixing his signature to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Lyndon Johnson famously quipped that he’d just signed away the South, a prophecy that was affirmed in that year’s election – when Republican Barry Goldwater won five historically Democratic states in the deep South while suffering blowout losses everywhere else – and in elections Read More

By Damian Da Costa 7/25/08 3:02pm

One Brief Shining Moment

The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s
By G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot
The Penguin Press, 422 pages, $27.95

These days "liberal" is a word rarely used as anything but a pejorative in American politics. In the 1960s, however, it was the dominant political philosophy in Washington. President Lyndon Read More

By Steve Kornacki 6/09/08 6:45pm

Rick Davis Vs. Rick Davis on Virginia

The McCain campaign has posted an on-line "strategy briefing," in which campaign manager Rick Davis uses a series of charts and maps to paint a rosy picture of the G.O.P. candidate’s fall prospects.

About five minutes into the slideshow, Davis turns to the electoral map and highlights what are matter-of-factly labeled the "solidly Read More

By Michael MacDonald 3/13/06 12:00am

Glossing Over King: What About the Poor?

A few weeks ago, when the nation celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, many Americans forgot the role King played as a Jeremiah who sought economic justice for all. As excerpts from the famous “Dream” speech comforted us about racial progress, our class gaps were the widest since the Depression.

While racial sideshows play on Read More