Rosebud Winner: This July 4th, Maureen Dowd, With Help from Chernow, Compares Presidents #1 and #47

JULY 2026 - Two-time Rosebud winner Maureen Dowd is a DC native, and sometimes those roots show up in her copy. Like her piece Saturday - the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence - she reflects on visiting Mount Vernon as a child. Then she goes, with almost predictable, head-shaking dismay, with an attempt to compare Trump with George Washington. Adding a certain authority to her piece is her brief interview with Ron Chernow. As Chernow put it: “I just can’t imagine two human beings who are more dissimilar than George Washington and Donald Trump,” Ron Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of our first president, told me, on the occasion of the 250th birthday party for America that Trump has hijacked. “Washington was discreet, reserved, courteous — he avoided any kind of show or ostentation or self-promotion,” Chernow said. “With Donald Trump, it’s nonstop bragging and boasting and self-promotion that would have been, I think, completely alien to George Washington, and very much counter to his idea of the way that a public servant should behave.” It's another case of a columnist adding...

Rosebud Winner: Mr. Steady and Reliable Fareed Zakaria Has His Own Take on Trump Attack on Expertise

JULY 2025 - This piece is still being promoted - seven months later - by The Washington Post, and it still echoes of many of the themes that pundit Washington recognizes in Trump's second term. The key message? The assault on expertise - in government, in policymaking, and in competent project management - is eroding both the US and Washington's authority. It's a column first published in December 2025 - and it's similar to a David Ignatius column from June 2025 that makes many of the same points (and also won a Rosebud). The 62-year-old Zakaria, laden with credentials from Harvard and Yale and Berkeley, began his journalism career at Newsweek in the early 90s, and he's been a reliable contributor to the DC commentariat since then. His work is always well researched, never terribly original yet still carrying a tone of modesty and dignity - not unlike David Brooks's work. In many ways, the Mumbai-born Zakaria speaks to a global audience more effectively than his peers, including Brooks. Zakaria's writing is also generally clean and polished - he edits well or he has a good editor - so he's been able to trot from CNN and WaPo, and...

Rosebud Winner: Robert Doar, High Profile Pundit in DC, Does Some On-the-Ground Reporting in Ukraine

JUNE 2026 - Robert Doar is president of the American Enterprise Institute, so he's both pressured and invited to publish his views with some professional regularity. Recently he made a trip to Odesa, Ukraine, the Black Sea port city that Ukraine has managed to hold on to - and maintain as a vital export hub. Odesa is very much in Russia's line of fire, so Doar's visit there was no ceremonial layover - just going was an act of courage nearly all journalists don't seem to have these days. In a WSJ column published June 7, Doar seemed to capture the vibe of both the weary country overall, as well as living in the Odesa war zone. The war has taken a toll. Odesa’s prosperity was limited to the eight-block radius around the historic center. Everyone over 50 in Kyiv looks exhausted. Security is omnipresent, and the comforts we take for granted in the West can vanish without warning—as when my upscale hotel couldn’t muster a hot shower. As if to compensate, on a drizzly Sunday evening in Kyiv, a crowd gathered in the street beneath an apartment building’s third-floor balcony to hear a makeshift string quartet play concertos. It's not...

Rosebud Winner: NYT Art Critic Holland Cotter Writes Sweeping Obit of The Legendary David Hockney

JUNE 2026 - The British artist, writer and general creative David Hockney died earlier this month, age 88. And quite naturally dozens of obituaries were sent out by media outlets worldwide. But no obituary quite captured the spirit and life of Hockney quite like that penned by the NYT art critic Holland Cotter, who seemed to have a special understanding of his subject. Hockney spent his adult life - much in the late 20th Century, then in ferment of classicism vs. modernism - bridging those divides, an artistic iconoclast who defended or promoted what was out of style. In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1990s art world, this pedigree and Mr. Hockney’s disdainful rejection of the avant-garde felt out of date. But with the return to favor of painting — and figuration — in the early 21st century, he regained some footing. Even if much of his late output looks like busywork, some of his early paintings are lastingly moving. “My Parents,” from 1977, is one of them. In it, his mother sits erect but relaxed, looking attentively and cooperatively toward the artist; his father, though dressed in a suit, bends intently and...