If you thought the Republican primary field was a bit of a joke, wait until you get a closer look at the front runners for the vice presidential slot: the names most mentioned include a failed VP candidate from another party, a "business leader" who was fired for poor performance,...

When John McCain clinched the GOP nomination, it was widely believed that his relative popularity among moderates and independents may well save the party from a Bush-caused bloodbath in November. Things, however, do not quite seem to be working out like that: Texas, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Alaska, Mississippi,...

The near-annihilation of John McCain by the Bush clan in the 2000 presidential GOP primary left him with one critically important asset: his reputation as an unconventional and principled Republican. This, of course, was precisely what the hard-core conservative crowd wooed by George W. Bush disliked about him. But it...

John McCain's insistence that Americans know so much more about him than they do about Barack Obama echoes Hillary Clinton's "tested and vetted" rhetoric, and is an equally misleading preemptive strike to convince the media there is nothing more to see.

Like Clinton, McCain has his share of

Obama's vice-presidential pick will not be the most important decision of his campaign. It pretty much never is, as illustrated by the complete futility of such past choices. For instance, it is hard to see what John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Jack Kemp or Lloyd Bentsen brought to...

Were Hillary Clinton the great rural white savior that her campaign is depicting, she would have had this thing wrapped up in, say, Iowa, or a couple of weeks after that. Her inability to dispatch a presidential neophyte such as Barack Obama in a Democratic primary is precisely because, after...

Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton was back in Michigan, a full two months after its "primary," pleading with the state legislature to allow a revote in the state. As she stood in downtown Detroit, it was becoming increasingly clear that there would be no do-over and she looked for the...

Barack Obama's church-related quandary is just the latest example of American politicians' perilous dance with religion. In a presidential campaign infused like never before with the candidates' efforts to sell their religious beliefs as best-fitting an illusory mainstream, Obama hasn't quite pulled it off, although he is in a far...

After a week in which the Clinton campaign has sunk yet further into the gutter with its aggressive manipulation of Geraldine Ferraro's mad comments, the time feels about right to send a clear message to our superdelegates, specifically those whom we elect to public office. To start with,...

On the surface, it is easy to dismiss the Democratic Party's current nomination struggles as a mix of incompetence and bureaucratic procedure gone mad. There is some of that, of course, but it is mostly there to hide the fact that Democrats, like Republicans, have designed a system that will...

Of the many strange spins the Clinton campaign has sold the media, few are as troubling as the idea that she is the stronger general election candidate: pretty much all polling, sound judgment and anecdotal evidence point to the contrary, but we are led to believe that New York...

Hillary Clinton has convinced the media that it is biased against her, one of the great (and rare) successes of her presidential campaign, akin to her creation of the vast right-wing conspiracy responsible for conceiving a string of sexual and other disgraces in her husband's White House.
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Recently asked by Chris Matthews about Barack Obama's accomplishments, Jim Doyle, the governor of Wisconsin and an Obama supporter, listed his candidate's presidential campaign among various achievements. Lanny Davis, the Clintons' pitbull du jour, predictably scoffed. But why? Surely the way a campaign is run, especially one as long and...

Hillary Clinton single-mindedly contrasts her health care position with Barack Obama's, which clearly means that her campaign believes it is a winning issue for her, as opposed to, say, the Iraq war.

Not one Clinton endorser fails to mention that she is "for universal health care" and Obama is not:...

It all started in Iowa: Hillary Clinton was the underdog, her husband told us as the polls were tightening, because she wasn't as well known in the state as John Edwards and Barack Obama. Clinton, one of the most famous women in the world (including Iowa), had an awareness...

Seventy-eight year-old Rep. Charlie Rangel calls him "stupid," BET mogul Robert Johnson, 62, compares him to Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (not a good thing, intimates Johnson), Rep John Lewis, 68, calls him "no Martin Luther King Jr," and former ambassador Andrew Young, 76,...

Iowa's remarkably race and gender-neutral caucuses, in which Barack Obama received a majority of women's votes in an overwhelmingly white state, were a historic breakthrough. The result was a win for Obama, a third place finish for Hillary Clinton and an accelerating poll movement from Clinton to Obama...

One of the creepiest early campaign moments was eBay CEO Meg Whitman dialing for dollars at Mitt Romney's fund-raising telethon last January, a farce created to showcase the Romney campaign's organizational skills and potential financial might (it raised $6.5 million). "You won't believe where I am! I'm at the...

With her campaign in tatters and her husband becoming unhinged, it is time to get real with Hillary Clinton: she hasn't found a way to connect emotionally with us, let alone given us a reason to vote for her, and the cold, hard truth is that we are just not...

The world may not quite be watching Iowa and New Hampshire this week, but the initial presidential contests are drawing significant interest in Europe, thanks in no little part to celebrity candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani.

After a couple of years of political transition...