Jerome Karabel

With Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich now the leading contenders for the Republican nomination, the doctrine of "American exceptionalism" -- or, more precisely, President Obama's alleged lack of belief in it -- has become a key battleground in the 2012 presidential election. At a November debate in South Carolina, Romney...

This is a watershed moment for the American labor movement. Drastically weakened by decades of a corporate offensive against workers in the private sector, the labor movement is now being frontally attacked at its last stronghold: public-sector unions. If the current assault on labor -- now being spearheaded by...

With the 2010 election less than three months away, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' finger-in-the-eye remarks about the "professional left" could hardly have come at a worse time. After all, it is the first lesson of Politics 101 that successful politicians energize rather than alienate their base. Yet here...

"Those who do not learn the lessons of history," George Santayana famously said, "are condemned to repeat them." But those who overinterpret the lessons of history may also draw erroneous - even catastrophic - inferences about their meaning. As Democrats contemplate the implications of their defeat in the Massachusetts...

In a recent interview on Fox News, Senator Joseph Lieberman threatened to derail health care legislation, asserting that "as a matter of conscience, if proposed Senate legislation includes a public option, I will not allow the bill to come to a final vote." Note that Senator Lieberman is not simply...

The fate of health care reform may well now rest in the hands of a small group of Senators, three Republicans and three Democrats, who have come to be called the Gang of Six. Hand-picked by Senate Committee Finance Chair Max Baucus (D-MT), they have been assigned the elusive task...

"I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Facing what is likely to be the defining political struggle of his presidency -- the battle for health care reform -- President Obama emphasized in a town-hall meeting earlier this...

Over the past one hundred years, there have only been two presidential elections that fundamentally changed the course of American politics -- Franklin Roosevelt's victory in 1932, which ushered in a generation of Democratic rule, and Ronald Reagan's triumph in 1980, which marked the beginning of 28 years of Republican...

John McCain's surprise choice of Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee for vice president puts into sharp relief two simple questions: just how likely is the vice president to be called upon to occupy the Oval Office? And how likely is it, in particular, that Sarah Palin would become president...

Though the media is now full of chatter about whether Barack Obama will select Hillary Clinton as his running mate, the betting markets say that Jim Webb is about as likely a choice for Vice President. There has been heated discussion about whether Webb would be a wise or disastrous...

As go the young, so go the futures of political parties.

In the fierce and seemingly endless battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the enthusiastic involvement of an unprecedented number of young people -- roughly 14% of Democratic primary voters, up from 9% in 2004 -- presents...

A gaffe, someone once said, is when a politician tells the truth. By this definition, Barack Obama's provocative remark that "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that... Bill Clinton did not," qualifies as a quintessential gaffe. For however unwelcome this observation may have been among...

Lost amidst the shock of Hillary Clinton's upset of Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary and the ensuing debate about why the polls were so very wrong was a remarkable statistic. By a margin of more than two to one (58 to 27 percent), those who voted for Hillary...

Over the past several days, there has been much discussion -- both in the Senate and the media -- about the meaning of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's membership in a group called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP). But the larger significance of Alito's affiliation with CAP has been...