While four years ago the illusion of fundamental change, bearing the label "hope," hovered over the political landscape, today that illusion is painfully naked. The path to change is not a political one. Or is it?

In 2005, I had the good fortune to interview former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern for Venice Magazine. McGovern was thoughtful, direct, and kind-hearted; a gentleman and a gentle man.

Presidential election results have led us to think that the American people were a bit more liberal than they really were. In the same way, the mythic tale of George McGovern and the "youth vote" led us to think that the baby-boomers of "the '60s" were a bit more liberal than they really were.

George McGovern, who died Sunday, was prescient about America. When he ran for president 40 years ago, he well-understood what the federal government of the United States had become, among other national dysfunctions.

As new polls show President Barack Obama widening his margin in Paul Ryan's home state of Wisconsin and Mitt Romney's stomping ground of Massachusetts...

The notion of debating policy in the public forum of a convention became a quaint relic of the era before television and before the Vince Lombardiazation of American politics, before winning wasn't everything but the only thing.

BETHESDA, Md. — A medical center spokeswoman says former Peace Corps director and vice-presidential nominee R. Sargent Shriver has been hospital...

"I didn't leave the Democratic Party, they left me," disaffected Dems told themselves in 1972. Now how many sensible Republicans are looking at the sudden rise of the Tea Party and thinking exactly the same thing?

Like Nixon, Palin draws stark lines: her paeans to the good people grown in small towns, to the pro-America part of America, is just a reiteration of Nixon's famous "silent majority."

Many commentators have said that Obama's coalition has many similarities to the McGovern campaign. But there is a key difference. Demographics have shifted strongly away from Nixonland.