Longreads

The candidate's former prep school classmates recall a bullying incident that still troubles them to this day:

"A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

"'It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,' said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was 'terrified,' he said. 'What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.'"

By his own account, Philippe Reines has been “hired, fired, forgiven, benched, promoted and promoted again.” He is currently Clinton’s deputy assistant secretary for strategic communications and has been the caretaker of her public image through her iterations as rookie senator, front-runner presidential candidate, sore loser and resurgent secretary of state. ... The counterweight to Reines’s reputation for disinformation and dining out on the Clinton name is his profound loyalty to his adoptive clans. For that, he is Clinton’s favorite son and the life of his perpetual D.C. party.

Dispensing with any elaborate pretense about being in a competitive re-election contest, Mr. Bloomberg's handlers have begun to use the mayor's public appearances to address what happens after 2009. Their political task: to figure out a way of avoiding the historic curse of the complacent, unfocused and regrettable third term.