2008 Election

It started with a phone call.

In the 1960 campaign, when Martin Luther King was jailed for protesting segregation, Jack Kennedy picked up the phone and reached out to Coretta Scott King.

Martin Luther King, Sr., a lifelong Republican (as many African Americans were at the time) was so...

299 superdelegates on the wall,
299 superdelegates.
If one of those superdelegates should happen to fall,
298 superdelegates on the wall.

My apologies. Whoever created the song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" shares some of the blame (along with John Yoo) for redefining the word "torture" for the...

Suddenly, being articulate, polite, and well-educated is snobbery. Prefering a glass of orange juice to coffee and doughnuts is effete. Dressing formally in...

Each week the blogs, cable-fests and Sunday shows overanalyze a new mime... and post-Pennsylvania, it's the angst that Democrats will splinter and hand the election to McCain. Among other topics, this one came up on this week's 7 Days in America, with Headliner (and Clinton surrogate) Bob Kerrey arguing that...

Sen. Barack Obama's latest fundraising drive -- own a "piece of history."

And by history, the campaign means a DVD copy of his speech on race.

It's an interesting tactic, since the speech was...

In a just-unearthed 1995 interview, Barack Obama describes America as "a land of strangers" where, despite all the rhetoric about the "browning of America," the melting pot remains a far-off dream for most -- with different communities as foreign to one another as distant countries. He discusses how white executives...

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bill Clinton has taken a larger role in his wife's campaign, and is now serving as a de facto chief strategist. For Hillary and much of the media, such a move makes quite a bit of sense. For more than a...

Now we come to it: the real fight for Obama in the harsh light of day. What Obama is up against is essentially the jeering section of the national lunatic asylum. What America is up against is the very real possibility that this jeering section will out shout the rest...

Bill and Hillary Clinton's not-so-secret argument that Barack Obama cannot win in November -- swallowed as a legitimate question by too many TV bloviators -- is based on a false assumption: that how Obama performs in primaries against Clinton in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania is a measure of how...

Jim Clyburn makes a very good point in the Washington Post today:

"We keep talking as if it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote, because since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he's in trouble," Clyburn said. "Well,...

It was a telling sign that neither Democratic candidate saw fit to visit Punxsutawney before the Pennsylvania primary. Nobody wanted the press to remember Bill Murray's Groundhog Day in any way, shape or form. But even without stump speeches next to Punxsutawney Phil, it's hard not to think of living...

Political jujitsu at its best.

You take the opponent's best issue and flip it. . When you see the force coming at you, you redirect your opponent's momentum. His best issues are heartbreakingly turned against him. It takes the wind out of a campaign.

Obama's ambivalence about playing...

It's not very often that I'll compliment John McCain, but his campaign's strategy over this now-infamous North Carolina GOP ad hitting Obama is one shrewd move.

Some pundits have caught on, but only half-way.

It's true that the damage has been done by the ad just being out there...