Ramatuelle, France. Here in my tiny medieval village in the south of France I have to hike up the hill into the center of town to borrow some wifi. This morning, after buying some croissants and a Herald Tribune, I was passing through the town square when I saw...

It's not a presidential election until Reverend Jackson makes an unfortunate slip of the tongue. Look, I'm a fan of the reverend and was a volunteer for his presidential bid, but the more he talks the more I'm convinced that he is hopelessly old school while Obama represents the nation's...

What if Obama isn't tacking to the center just for the general election as all us good progressives would like to think, but instead he genuinely believes his positions? What if he meant it all along when he said he didn't see red states or blue states but the United...

Here in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I'm seeing first hand that all those reports about how excited Africans are about Obama have not been exaggerated. The customs agent in the airport, upon seeing my U.S. passport said, "Obama! Do you really think he can win?" I told him that I thought...

I welcomed Obama's Father's Day speech chastising the legions of black absentee fathers, a number, he points out, that has doubled in a generation. He's hardly alone in his criticism. Besides Bill Cosby's now famous crusade, Chris Rock back in 1996,...

Even before writing movies ever since I was a kid I have seen the world through the lens of film and TV. And as a writer I can't help but sometimes see the world metaphorically. So when Clint and Spike were recently spatting it depressed me because their...

In this "post-racial" world this latest dust-up between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee seems decidedly old-fashioned. I cringed when I read about it and sincerely hope that the next big fight between a legendary but crotchety old white guy and a brash younger black guy remains much more civil.

Finally triumphant but battle-scared, it's hard to believe that Obama's real race is only now beginning. Hillary and Rev. Wright certainly stripped him of all that shiny Teflon that armored him through the first half of the nomination battle, but in the long run they both did him a great...

As Hillary starts negotiating the terms of her surrender it would be so surprising and so uplifting if she would take the high road. Surely her last-ditch message to superdelegates cannot be an argument that America is too racist to elect a black president. That just cannot be...

Perhaps because it is through telling stories that I pay my rent, but I think that humans reason via analogy and storytelling. We attempt to get a handle on the present and predict the future through comparisons to stories of the past. If someone is trying to sell us some...

The encouraging lesson from Obama's huge win in North Carolina and near-win in Indiana is that perhaps the fear card no longer trumps all others. The Bush presidencies were fueled by what Jonathan Alter of Newsweek recently called, "underinformed voters," explicitly voting against their own economic interests, often for reasons...

Certainly Spring has been unkind to the Obama campaign and his supporters can't just blame Hillary's bottom-feeding anymore. The only bright side to Jeremiah Wright's twisted, egomaniacal schadenfreude is that the media so overplayed it that I can't believe that it will still be news in the fall (even though...

She had her chance at being part of the Dream Team, although not at the top of the ticket as she had hoped, however her Swiftboating of Obama with her "bitter" new ad campaign sank any hope she might have had of rescuing her campaign from abject defeat. I'm not...

Barack Obama isn't an ordinary candidate running an ordinary campaign. He has made it his mission to upend the status quo in Washington so it is not unfair to demand of him a higher standard of integrity than we ask from the other candidates. The danger of optimistic...

I was a kid during Vietnam and my dad, then a captain in the army, a psychiatrist stationed in Detroit, was the guy other guys would beg and act crazy to to avoid the draft. I also grew up on shows like Combat! and The Rat Patrol and on my...

You have more delegates, much more money, you're John McCain to her Mike Huckabee.

So why act as if she's on equal footing?

Because the Clintons are acting as if they are and the Obama camp is letting them. Her floating the idea of him working for her...

Obama's speech just now was magnificent not because he relied on soaring rhetoric but because he eschewed it. He spoke simply and directly about one of the third rails of American politics from his unique vantage point as a black man with white ancestors and the child of an immigrant....

The Clinton campaign is playing the Obama campaign like a fiddle. What makes this all the more amazing is the fact that they are driving the debate from the passenger seat. Obama's handlers should have told him not to take the bait and answer her VP offer. Just ignore it....

He secured at least the VP spot months ago and until Hillary hit back hard he was poised for total victory and is still the odds-on favorite. The 3am spot has gotten way too much ink and didn't run in Ohio at all. Obama's media team handled it brilliantly,...

Look, I voted for Senator Obama here in New York. He's a wonderful man and will make a dynamic and powerful President, but Senator Obama and the Hillary haters out there can cover their ears and shout, "I'm not listening! I'm not listening!" like my six-year-old does when...