What's a girl to do?

She's young, full of energy and dreams, and has her eyes on adventurous horizons. But even in the 2012 world where she is coming of age, her culture is laying out frilly dresses, shiny pumps and lip gloss that have the potential to turn her...

During my high school years up in Michigan, George W. Romney was our governor. The man who told his son Mitt not to run for public office as long as he had to worry about a mortgage also presided over the booming economy brought about as the result of auto...

Rick Perry has always been just smart enough to know what he can do and what is a waste of his time. When he was asked to sponsor bills during his days in the legislature, he told proponents not to bother leaving him analysis or draft copies because he would...

Iowa, again, will not be about who wins. The caucuses are about the person who does well enough to be taken seriously as a potential nominee beyond the fuzzy field of dreams that hides here in "the land between two rivers." In this case, Iowa is about who becomes the...

When listening to Rick Perry campaign in Iowa, the question that occurs to those of us who have watched and reported on him since 1985 is simple: How in the hell can this be happening? There is a bright shining light on the Texas governor's ignorance and hypocrisies and yet...

How does Rick Perry avoid smirking at himself? Is he completely without a sense of irony or what constitutes hypocrisy?

He talks about budget management and fiscal austerity and then puts the state in a position of spending like a fool on his security. While he decries the Congressional revolving...

Romney's problem is still that he's Romney. Don't expect better than third out of him in Iowa. The reasons are many and manifest and have been talked about and written about until they are likely carved into tablets of jade somewhere. Evangelicals, and there are a lot of them in...

There is really only one person on the planet who can make Karl Rove seem a benign and likable character and that is Donald Trump. In every conceivable manner, Trump epitomizes the traits that so much of the world is beginning to mistake for the character of the rest of...

Rick Perry appears politically doomed. But so did Newt Gingrich when all of his staff left in in the middle of last summer to head back down to Austin and work for the Texas governor. Regardless, there is no really believable scenario for Perry to recover that doesn't include an...

John Lawrence remembers the porcelain birds shattering as the sheriff's officer shoved him down on the couch. They had been a gift from his mother. An anonymous caller, who had told cops there was a screaming man with a gun in the building, had summoned the lawmen to Lawrence's apartment....

If the Republican presidential nominating race wasn't actually intended as a serious endeavor, it could be mistaken for a comedy routine. As one more woman makes up another story about Herman Cain's sexual proclivities, Rick Perry struggles to understand who is eligible to vote in the democracy he wants to...

On August 6, 2011, he was billed as just Rick Perry from Austin, Texas. He didn't want it to look too obvious that he was using his office, the state's image and authority to promote his particular brand of religion. It was kind of hard to hide, though. The 32,000...

Americans love a good story.

A nice, inspiring narrative makes our presidential politics slightly less vinegary. Herman Cain's stature has more to do with his humble background and rise to corporate success than with anything he has said regarding policies. He sounds like he rolled out of bed one morning,...

A friend is fond of saying, "There is no truth in politics, there is only winning." He's only partly correct. Politics does have one truth in the modern era and it is simply that candidates will smear each other and do whatever is necessary to win. Of course, they don't...

The most important unresolved question of CNN's GOP debate in Las Vegas may be how to tell an apple from an orange. Herman Cain's use of a hackneyed metaphor actually helped him to avoid offering an explanation of how his nine percent national consumption tax doesn't double the sales tax...

Rick Perry knew.

If the polls suggest that there is a particular vulnerability in your campaign opponent's resumé, you make a calculated risk by ignoring the weakness. In the south, it is not a secret that evangelical Christians view Mormonism with a wary eye. According to a 2007 survey...

The people who manage Rick Perry's communications are really, really bad. Because of their aggregate incompetence, Perry is digging out of a policy hole that makes him look like that hiker in the Utah badlands who had to saw off his arm to survive. Perry has the same challenge.

His...

Rick Perry is looking wobbly. But he has been politically staggered before and recovered to win the fight. If he falters in his current effort, it will be the first time in his 26-year career of public service.

Analysts are busy writing obituaries for Perry's presidential aspirations and there...

Mitt Romney is emerging as the grown-up in the GOP primary process, which is too bad. He will not win the nomination. He would make the strongest candidate for the Republicans in 2012 but he cannot win the primaries. The primary process does not require sanity and moderation in the...

(Houston) - The devout can be deceptive. But sometimes they are just blatantly hypocritical. And because the attendees of Rick Perry's and the American Family Association's (AFA) The Response event in Houston are human, there was an abundance of contradiction in Reliant Stadium. A lot of good comedy...