Several months ago, my good friend Bill Simmon, a terrific filmmaker (and blogger), came to me with an idea: he wanted to do a short film about blogging, starring … me. Now, I’ve never been entirely comfortable in front of a camera — I’m more of a behind-the-keyboard kind of guy — but Bill is […]
Since Sam Brownback withdrew from the presidential race nearly four months ago, John McCain has been the only sitting senator in the large Republican presidential field. Given this, it stands to reason that he’d have the support of practically the entire GOP Senate caucus. After all, he’s been on the Hill for a quarter-century, and […]
When California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced his support for John McCain last week, it came as a bit of a surprise. The governor had just said, a couple of days prior, that he would remain neutral in the race, but the results of the Florida primary, coupled with Rudy Giuliani’s departure, led to the […]
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 […]