After strongly supporting his candidacy for the Senate, I have spent much of the past two years resisting the idea of a Barack Obama Presidency. A few weeks ago, however, I decided to vote for Obama.

Ironically, my decision was based upon considering the proverbial "3:00 a.m. call" that was...

I've been receiving a lot of e-mail lately from friends on both sides of the aisle urging me to vote for either Obama or McCain. Most of the e-mails include words like "terrifying" and suggest the end of the world if the other candidate is elected and they typically contain...

From graduate school I remember a simple framework that we learned to help categorize voters into two camps. First, there are people who vote for someone because they represent their position on a key issue like abortion, national defense, immigration or taxes. For that type of voter, their elected official...

The old saying is that politics makes for strange bedfellows. I would modify this to say that political parties make for stressful marriages... and we are seeing one marriage fall apart before our very eyes. More and more, the Democratic presidential primary is like watching years of frustration boil over...

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s the buzzword amongst policy geeks and on the political campaign trails was "reinventing government." When running for president, Bill Clinton declared that the "era of good government is over" and quoted from the David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's best seller, Reinventing Government:...

Conventional wisdom today is that Barack Obama is the new JFK. Yet, that comparison underestimates the magnitude of what Obama is trying to accomplish. While Obama may remind many of JFK rhetorically, they differ in a very fundamental way that reveals itself in their policies: Kennedy succeeded by moving the...

As a Presidential candidate, Barack Obama offers a compelling vision of change, promising to "take back our government" and to lead "in the fight for open and honest government". Recently, he boldly stated, "Part of my job in this race is to restore people's sense that you say what you...