President Obama yesterday in Oslo delivered the memorable speech of his first year in office, eleven months marked by overexposure in appearances and speeches, as well as a public rhetoric that has become too familiar. Now one great speech a year is no small accomplishment. And surely the president was...

"I was really depressed when I learned he [Obama] was going to say it's all about al Qaeda," Marvin Weinbaum said. Weinbaum is a scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute and an Afghanistan expert who visited the White House during the months President Obama was crafting his new AfPak policy....

President Obama did not enlighten me about his Afghanistan-Pakistan plan last night. Nor from the expressions on their faces were the captive audience of the West Point cadets given much guidance beyond the inevitable conclusion that many of them will eventually be landing at Bagram Air Base. These fine-looking young...

Barack Obama owns Afghanistan. If our President said it once he said it a hundred times in 2008 on the campaign trail: "We have to win in Afghanistan." He did not hedge. He did not say "do better" or "shape a clearer policy." We have to win in Afghanistan. Did...

Yesterday I read David Plouffe's book and was struck by a sentence in his explanation of Bittergate -- Barack Obama's notorious campaign remark at a San Francisco fundraiser in early April, 2008, where he said that "bitter" Pennsylvania blue-collar voters "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who...

As Afghanistan and Pakistan grabbed the world headlines for the last week in October, in one breaking story after another, we could discern, at last, the structural and strategic underpinnings of the Obama administration's foreign policy. In this regard, Hillary Clinton's trip to Pakistan was a landmark occasion, obscured somewhat...

Bent with age, Senator Edward Kennedy hobbled out on the stage of Laurie Auditorium at Trinity University in San Antonio and burst into song. It was February 21, 2008, and Kennedy was stumping across Texas for fellow Senator Obama. Laurie Auditorium was one-fifth full, and so few people heard Kennedy...

Except for soldiers and caregivers, Americans don't know much about death. The question President Obama took from Mary in North Carolina at the AARP Tele-Town Hall on Health Care Reform July 28 dramatizes this innocence. "Everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told to decide how they wish to...

Lieutenant Colonel Brian Mennes, U.S. Army, commander, 1st Ranger Battalion, has recently returned from Afghanistan, where he has served for fourteen months in eight provinces. One evening last week he spoke over after-dinner drinks to a few reporters about the frustrations of command in Afghanistan.

"My men can clear the...

At the News Xchange international broadcast conference in Valencia before Thanksgiving, I talked with Salim Amin, a Kenyan and the founder of A24 Media, Africa's first online agency for video and photography. We spoke at length about the continent, which Salim has covered widely as a journalist, about Africans' expectations...

The italicization is the last line of W.S. Merwin's poem "History," which is much about autumn and endings, about consciousness and its place in the universe, about the turnings of history and the inadequacy of language to capture them. And yet the first line, Only I never came back, perfectly...

"This hangar, or one of these along here -- that's where they brought the alien bodies," says John Pierce, a reporter for KBIM radio in Roswell, New Mexico. We're whiling away the hours at Great Southwest Aviation, waiting for Palin, and John has been talking about the latest coup for...

"Pray -- Fast --Vote." So Brady Boyd tells his flock at New Life Church in Colorado Springs the Sunday before voter registration closes in the Centennial State. "Be a good citizen," Pastor Boyd admonishes. "If you don't vote, you're worse than a puppy kicker." Volunteers are waiting in the church...

A Saturday morning encounter with some anti-Palineers enlivened my trek up and down the Front Range in search of the Colorado election story. Sarah Palin herself was speaking at a breakfast fundraiser in a jet hangar at the old Centennial Airport, just south of Denver. Perhaps because...

"Without votes in El Paso County, Obama won't win Colorado," says Michael Merrifield, the county representative to the Colorado General Assembly. He is speaking to the small band of Obama volunteers gathered in CJ's Bar & Grill to watch the second presidential debate. Everybody knows what Merrifield means, for they...

A bloodcurdling roar rises from the throng of women, as if they were a herd of elephants scenting Democratic lion in the bush, when one of their number stands to ask Senator John McCain, "When are you going to take the gloves off?" It's been a good town hall meeting...

ESPANOLA, N.M. -- Following canvassers Mary and Ellen out the door of the Obama field office here on a bright Sunday morning, I'm already full of wry reservation. The office has brought together about thirty people to go door to door, many of the volunteers from Santa Fe. But I...

It's Indian summer and New Mexico highway 448 is punctuated with campaign signs for McCain and Udall. This anomaly -- for John McCain is the Republican nominee for President and Tom Udall the Democratic nominee for the open Senate seat in New Mexico -- makes perfect sense along this narrow...

LEBANON, Ohio -- If a day can be a year in politics, then Friday, August 29, when John McCain introduced his running mate in Dayton, is one such. The following Wednesday, when Sarah Palin delivered her wowzer of an acceptance speech in St. Paul, is another. It hasn't been a...

The Democratic Party celebration at INVESCO field was only a week ago tonight, but it seems like a season past. It was supposed to be a hard act for the Republicans to follow. Barack Obama was supposed to get a Mile-High bounce from Denver. Bush and Cheney were going to...