Death Race

By Marc Ambinder, GQ

After eleven years living in Washington, D.C., part of me is just sick of this swamp. The superficial commentary, the power-driven egoists, the fake smiles, the obsession with image. That's why I'm moving to Los Angeles.

But seriously: I've think I've learned a bit about...

By Marin Cogan, GQ

"[W]e will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted. Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have," Paul emailed supporters in a campaign statement this...

By Marin Cogan, GQ

For the last hour, students stood or sat on the floor playing on their cell phones under blue and red balloon clusters in the gym at Bowie State University, just outside of Washington. Maryland's governor, Martin O'Malley, former Lakers star A.C. Green, and members...

By Marin Cogan, GQ

Hogan Gidley bows his head over three egg whites scrambled dry with cheddar cheese and prays. It's been less than 48 hours since his boss, Rick Santorum, dropped out of the race, and he's had an intense two days, trekking from South Carolina to...

When I was a kid, tagging along with my mother to Democratic presidential candidate fundraisers in Florida, I wanted to be a Secret Service agent. I created lapel pins that matched the ones I saw the agents wearing. I remember, at age 14, standing in awe of an agent guarding...

By Marin Cogan, GQ

"I had been watching [him] speak all spring. He has held elective office ... so he has an enormous amount of experience at this. Still, it obviously doesn't come naturally to him." The New Yorker is giving...

By Walter Kirn, GQ

Despite the fact it was spoken in annoyance, as part of an effort to quiet and embarrass a heckling AIDS activist at a campaign stop, Bill Clinton's most famous line, "I feel your pain," has been regarded for 20 years now as the perfect...

By Reid Cherlin, GQ

It so happens that I'm packing up my apartment and moving out of Washington today after eight years of residence, most of which were spent in politics and government. One of the items I just bubble-wrapped is a framed copy of the L.A. Times...

By Walter Kirn, GQ

"I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon," the movie critic Pauline Kael once said, "Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.'"...

By Marc Ambinder, GQ

They are the best kept secrets of any presidential campaign -- until someone overhears a whispered shout into a wrist microphone. Candidates who get Secret Service protection get to choose the code word that they'll be called -- perhaps for the rest...

By Marin Cogan, GQ

Senador Puertorriqueño has a lovely ring to it, and it's just the kind of moniker a presidential aspirant would love to tout if he's trying to pull off another upset in Sunday's primary. The only problem? I was born in Pennsylvania; Rick...

By Dayna Clark, GQ

GQ's resident Mormon, Dayna Clark, weighs in on media misrepresentations of Mitt Romney's religious faith.


The most recent religious controversy in the Romney campaign cropped up late last month when it was reported that some Mormons were posthumously baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims. Elie...

By Marc Ambinder, GQ

Rick Santorum would give Iran a "clear ultimatum." Newt Gingrich calls for covert action inside the country and pre-emptive strikes if that doesn't prevent the Iranian government from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And Mitt Romney simply, unsubtly predicts that if Barack Obama is re-elected, Iran will...

by Lisa DePaulo, GQ


On February 3, 2011, right-wing firebrand Andrew Breitbart, who died early Thursday morning in Los Angeles at the age of 43, gave me an extended interview on the eve of the publication of his book, Righteous...

By Marin Cogan, GQ

Just before 10 p.m. last night in Grand Rapids, at the hotel where Rick Santorum was getting ready to deliver his Michigan primary concession speech, I left the grand ballroom to look for a friend. I made my way down a spiral staircase to...

By Walter Kirn, GQ

On my neighbor's vast new high-definition TV set, with its jarring, medical-imaging-level clarity, human faces look strange, as in The Doors song, but the face of Ron Paul looks stranger than most. When we sat down to watch him debate the other night in...

By Mark Byrne, GQ


When his normally docile listening sessions across the state turned into heated, vitriolic affairs, people calling Obama a socialist, calling him a "Washington insider," tea bags hanging from the brims of their hats,...

While conservative bloggers Erick Erickson and Melissa Clouthier were complaining that young people at CPAC were behaving like a bunch of frat boys and "whores," Samuel Martin, the president of the Fordham College Republicans, was thinking about another social issue that's lately troubled the GOP: gay marriage....

By Marc Ambinder, GQ

What can one possibly add to the hill of hype that now surrounds the glorious Jeremy Lin, New York Knickerbocker?


We are fascinated by his rise, but instead of focusing on his talent, which is raw and untested, we fixate upon his race...

By Reid Cherlin, GQ

I'd seen Mary Willison in the dusty parking lot outside the Ron Paul event, fishing a homemade END THE FED sign out of the trunk of her red BMW convertible. She was tall and blonde and...