We probably all have some personal anecdotes about conservative friends or family members who don’t usually like Democratic candidates, but they kind of like that Obama guy. The “trend,” if there is such a thing, first became apparent to me last summer, when Mark McKinnon, the former chief media adviser to George W. Bush, and […]
American journalists are citizens, too, and if they want to contribute financially to political campaigns, there’s nothing especially wrong with that. But in most cases, a little disclosure would go a long way. Last December, conservative author and CNN election analyst William J. Bennett gave several thousand dollars to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, a […]
In his NYT column today, Nicholas Kristof returns to a subject he’s covered before: the unwarranted deriding of evangelicals. At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s […]
Quite a few people emailed me yesterday morning to let me know about a new video put together by popular entertainers on behalf of Barack Obama. Initially, I just shrugged my shoulders. I’m not especially interested in celebrity culture, and there’s already been a few too many viral campaign videos — “Obama girl” comes to […]
John McCain’s position on abortion hasn’t always been especially consistent, and by all appearances, he doesn’t even like to talk about it on the campaign stump. It’s what made this development yesterday rather interesting. [B]arnstorming today through three conservative Southern states that will hold primaries on Tuesday, McCain is touching on abortion. And I do […]
Political observers have seen quite a few major contests over the last month, but they’ve largely happened one at a time. It makes it easier for news outlets to conduct polls in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, which in turn gives us some sense of what to expect. (I say “some,” of […]
A couple of weeks ago, David Corn had a really interesting item about Barack Obama’s highest hurdle on Feb. 5. It’s not necessarily Hillary Clinton, it’s the way in which the timing of Super Tuesday moves the campaign away from his strengths as a candidate. “With Obama, it’s not about his career highlights, it’s about […]
Bush’s abuse of signing statements has been a constitutional mess for several years now — with more than 151 signing statements challenging 1149 provisions of laws, Bush is without rival in American history — but this week, matters grew particularly ugly. After a bizarre and unexpected veto, Congress passed a defense authorization bill, funding, among […]
Joe Lieberman aide Dan Gerstein has been ridiculed quite a bit about bloggers in recent years — he’s not quite the target Jonah Goldberg is, but during the Connecticut Senate race in 2006, it was close — but he doesn’t usually poke the bear with a stick quite as blatantly as he does today. His […]
Over the last year or so, when John McCain was struggling to get his presidential campaign back on track, one of his more notable challenges was reinventing himself — again. When he got to Congress, McCain was a rather conventional conservative Republican. After his role in the Keating Five scandal, McCain took on a reform-minded […]