In the 1967 blockbuster film Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman takes his final stand by telling the prison warden, "what we have here is a failure to communicate!" Little did he know that he could have been speaking in part about the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

After all, in...

Over the coming months pundits will slice and dice polling data, census information and the unemployment numbers of soccer moms to see whether President Obama has a clear path to victory. While I agree it's important to understand the electoral math, and it appears that the 2012 map will be...

Conventional wisdom has it that people don't start paying attention to campaigns until Labor Day; that is Labor Day next year. But in three easy steps Obama's campaign could save a lot of headaches by simply winning the election right now. How is this possible?

Step One: Help establish...

May this be the year that Democrats finally figure out branding -- and see how effectively Republicans have been using it against them.

As Marilyn Serafini notes in the Washington Post, much of the difficulty of passing health care reform had nothing to do with its merits, and...

In the weeks following Republican gains in Congress the left has made much ado about something -- just what that something is, though, is up for interpretation. Blaming the Obama Administration for everything from triangulation to compromise to what OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers asked recently: "Isn't there ever...

What do enhancements to food safety, paycheck equity and small business lending have in common? Hard as it is to believe, they've been targeted by the Republican filibuster. If the GOP had its way, the country would have nothing to show for the first two years of the Obama presidency.

As we've noted before, the market-driven Republican Party wants to make reality itself negotiable. But in the race for California's Attorney General, reality is proving stubbornly simple: Kamala Harris has won. Overcoming the opposing campaign's best efforts to game the vote count, plus a million dollar...

Ben Franklin said that nothing is certain except death and taxes -- but then Ben lived before there was a Republican Party to make the political dirty trick every bit as predictable.

We predicted what would happen as the race for the California attorney general took a swing...

Reporters, pundits and even some Democratic leaders are starting to adopt as conventional wisdom that there must be some policy lesson in the results from November 2.

But the Democratic record didn't actually matter much in the mid-terms. It couldn't have, because most voters don't actually know what that record...

As we watch the final vote count in the oh-so-close contest between Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris, watch for a California replay of Bush-Gore 2000. Already, Cooley consultant Kevin Spillane has promised to fight any supposed "manipulations of the ballot counting process by the Harris campaign."

There is...

And now, the empire strikes back.

So far, the story of the 2010 election has been dominated by the Tea Party and its imitation of the grassroots organizing techniques of Obama for America. But in the late stages of the battle, raw corporate power is revealing itself, aiming to win...

Written by Spencer Critchley and Zach Friend

It would be easy for someone to think, as they are inundated with TV and radio ads, yard signs and precinct walkers, that Meg Whitman is actually running for California's governorship. Such a quaint idea. But $120 million of self-financed glory really portends...

No ballots have been cast for November's election, but apparently the outcome has already been decided: it isn't whether Democrats will lose seats, it's how badly they will be creamed. The talking heads have declared it so. But you know, political pundits and have a lot in common with stock...

Time after predictable time, Republicans roll out a new set of bogus talking points. And time after time, Democrats argue the facts -- and lose. That's got to change.

Here's how the script goes:

Republican: I'd like to begin by making an outrageous assertion. It's obviously false, but boy, is...

Article written by Spencer Critchley and Zach Friend

We knew this was coming. The media have finally noticed the gap between Barack Obama's extraordinary achievements -- health care reform, financial reform and preventing a depression, to name a very few -- and his seeming inability to win credit for them....

I've been watching Fox News so I am well aware that the Democratic apocalypse is near. Beginning with Scott Brown's improbable victory in Massachusetts, it was just a matter of time before the complete repudiation of the president's agenda that these commentators prophesized would come true. After all, according to...

Meg Whitman has proven that, all else being equal, it sure is nice to be rich. After spending $68-per-vote to win the Republican nomination she is now turning her sights, her $90,000/month campaign manager, and her platitudes on Jerry Brown. Her win was impressive, if not predictable considering the over...

Money can't buy you love, but it can buy you a California gubernatorial primary. A just-released Field Poll shows Meg Whitman holding a better than two-to-one lead against Steve Poizner in her primary race. This after spending nearly $81 million dollars, or a little over $15 for every registered Republican...

There are times in California where it is easy to ask yourself why you even bother voting for state elected officials. After all, over 40 percent of the state's discretionary funding is already allocated due to ballot measures and if you don't like something the electeds do, well, you can...

It must be nice to be a billionaire. Over the last few weeks, GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has inundated California airwaves with an unprecedented media blitz working to eviscerate her primary opponent and debut the "softer side of Meg." One of her ads leads with the poll-tested "I will...