Stocks are up over 700 points today, a record-breaking one-day rally. Good news is coming from the four corners of the world as the U.S., G-7, and G-20 are all working to stem the global banking crisis and credit freeze-up.
John McCain needs a couple breaks if he's going to make the presidential race competitive down to the wire.
The race card is back. After Tuesday night's debate, Washington party-crossover dean David Gergen announced it was "too early" to declare victory for Democrat Barack Obama, not because the election is a month away, but because "Obama is black."
"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors," Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. "I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face." Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people's faces. They seem determined to shut people up.
With one month remaining in the 2008 presidential campaign, national and state polling data indicate that Barack Obama holds a clear lead over John McCain.
There are just eleven governorships up for grabs from coast to coast, six currently held the Democrats and five by the Republicans.
Nothing in the presidential campaign so far has been as instructive as its swift descent into the politics of personal destruction. Although voters have probably heard little lately that they did not already know about Sen. Barack Obama, they have learned something very important about Sen. John McCain.
Take a great nation with a fabulous work ethic and inventive people. Turn its $236 billion budget surplus into an estimated $482 billion deficit, and nearly double the national debt to $10 trillion. In the meantime, fuel economic growth with a consumer-led borrowing binge that makes America beholden to China.
Two important questions were asked at Tuesday night's presidential debate.
While the presidential candidates were debating in Nashville on Tuesday night, the Asian stock markets were selling off by 10 percent. Earlier in the day, the U.S. market plunged by 500 points. These were big-time drops, yet presidential debaters never talk about the stock market. Nashville was no exception.
All season, political observers have been speculating when, if ever, the Electoral College and the state and national polls would reflect the basic pro-Democratic fundamentals of the presidential election year.
I'm happy to give my friend Madeleine Albright credit for the line, as Starbucks apparently has. But the truth is I've been using it for years in speeches to women about how we need to help each other get ahead in business, politics and academia.
There was a joke going around conservative circles during the mid-1960s that we conservatives were warned that if we voted for Barry Goldwater, America would get deeper into the Vietnam War. The punch line was that we did vote for Goldwater and America did get deeper into Vietnam.
Political independents now rank health care second among the issues they most want the presidential candidates to discuss, according to a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll for September. The No. 1 issue for independents, as well as for Democrats and Republicans, is the economy.
The only way Congress could pass a $700 billion economic bailout package last week was to spend an extra $110 billion that the federal government does not have.
As reform measures go, Proposition 11 -- the redistricting reform measure -- is hardly a transformational law likely to supercharge activists (of any political stripe) eager to make Sacramento more effective and more accountable to the public.
Politics ordinarily has a certain predictability. Yet presidential politics this year has often seemed to resemble what science writer James Gleick described in his book "Chaos."
She passed. He passed. Palin fared better going against Joe Biden than Katie Couric.
For all the Republicans' complaints about Gwen Ifill, the moderator's questions were softballs compared to what Sarah Palin faced from Katie Couric. Ifill did not demand that Palin list (OK, how about just name more than one?) Supreme Court decisions. She did not push on the issue of foreign policy experience.
The presidential debate season is just underway. The polls are in flux. The issue agenda--which has already shifted in the last month from the Sarah Palin effect to "lipstick on a pig" to the nation's worst economic crisis since the Depression--may shift again before Election Day.
