In 2006, voters in California's 11th Congressional District, which meanders from San Ramon to Stockton, fired Rep. Richard Pombo, once a highly popular congressman first elected in 1992. Pombo got caught up in a wave that cost the GOP 31 seats and its control of the House.
It was one of those moments. My son, a would-be engineer, saw it as a triumph of the very spirit of engineers: the can-do, we-can-solve-anything guts and genius that could figure out how to keep 33 men alive for two months while forging a plan to hoist them up from half a mile underground in a bullet-shaped device linked to a pulley.
Californians do not face an easy choice in the race for governor -- as was clear in Tuesday night's debate at Dominican University in San Rafael.
I've been in campaign meetings. Sometimes the atmosphere is grim. Your side is down, and you're looking to turn things around.
No public official has been more integrally involved in the federal government’s “Great Intervention” than U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Polling, independent expenditures, and the general intensification of campaigns across the country provide us with new clues about the November outcome that is in store. Our overall view of the Republican wave remains the same, at a GOP net pick-up of 47 seats, but we now know more about which seats are truly endangered and where each side was just tilting at windmills.
Believe it or not, with jobs falling for four consecutive months and unemployment stubbornly high near 10 percent, President Obama is out on the campaign trail bashing businesses and promoting class warfare. Huh? (Oh my gosh is he off message.
When American politicians talk about the legacy we are leaving to the next generation, their usual theme is financial deficits, as if there were no other kind.
As alert readers of the Crystal Ball will note, we have not changed our projection of +47 Republican net House seats in many weeks.
Based on the recent appointments of the two most powerful staff positions in the White House, and on various statements, it would appear that the White House is descending deeper into the bunker in anticipation of the expected shift in congressional majorities next year.
There's an old joke in California that if you want attention, stage your event on the freeway.
Those orange fireballs you see in the news are NATO oil tankers exploding along the Khyber Pass.
Even though America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp.
It's an ornate office in Indiana's beautifully maintained mid-19th century Capitol, but the 49th governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, is not dressed to match the setting.
There aren't a lot of walls around Carly Fiorina. While politicos have marveled at the missteps of Meg Whitman's $140 million Titanic of a campaign for California Governor, Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, has made herself accessible to journalists in her bid to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer.
If there were one contest Meg Whitman didn't need to win in her bid to become governor of California, it was the race to collect the most money from individuals and businesses that do business with the state of California.
As the infamous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) winds down this week, Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C. are patting themselves on the back for a job well done. Not only are they claiming to have saved the nation from a “Second Great Depression,” this so-called economic miracle was apparently purchased at a bargain basement price.
President Obama killed the climate change bill. That's the brunt of the article "As the World Burns, How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change" by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker. Lizza tells the tale of how Washington's erstwhile "Three Amigos" -- also known as K.G.L., for Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. -- cobbled together a cap-and-trade climate-change bill that had "the support both of the major green groups and the biggest polluters" -- until the deal fell apart.
With the Crystal Ball shifting 21 House race ratings in their direction last week, the national picture looks bright for Republicans, both from a birds-eye view and also from a race-by-race perspective. This week we nudge three more Democratic-held House seats into more competitive categories, as we hone in on where exactly the GOP gains we have long projected will come from.
In every election cycle there are contests that one party “should” win but does not, usually because its partisans have chosen unwisely in the party primary.
