On March 19, 2007, Mark Penn wrote a memo to Hillary Clinton saying: "Every speech should contain a line [saying that] you were born in the middle of America to a middle class family in the middle of the last century."
From the time Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president, his campaign realized it would benefit from what came to be called the enthusiasm gap. "In most campaigns, it's a challenge to drag people out," Western States Field Director Buffy Wicks told a group of volunteer organizers gathered in San Francisco last summer.
It's hard to recall a political burial as fast and cold as that of John Edwards. After all, the former North Carolina senator had been a serious contender for president until a few months ago and possibly for VP until last week. Had his cheesy affair not surfaced, he would have commanded a choice speaking slot at the Democrats' convention.
When political reporters run low on topics to write about, they often turn their attention to third parties--the "lovable losers" of American politics. They never win at the presidential level but often are called upon to add color to campaigns that are sometimes badly in need of it.
You can blame John Edwards for a lot of things, but the last thing anyone should be blaming him for is the nomination of Barack Obama.
John McCain has zero charisma. Next to the excitement of Obama, he looks like an old man defending the status quo. Ironically, his career has embodied exactly the opposite. He is what Obama symbolizes – a person who rises above party, confronts the special interests, and wants to change the way Washington works.
I'm not a big fan of the nanny society's limits on freedom, except when I am. That's the dilemma for me, and for everyone.
To understand changes in the political map, we naturally tend to look for contemporary explanations. But American political alignments are not written on an empty slate. Beginnings matter, and the civic personalities of states tend to reflect the cultural folkways of their first settlers.
You won't hear me straining to defend Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican whose penchant for grating commentary sunk his 1996 bid for the presidency before the New Hampshire primary. It was really just a matter of time before the former senator, serving as John McCain's economic advisor, put his foot in it: Gramm opined that Americans complaining about the economy were "whiners."
Touring America's oilrigs and nuclear plants, John McCain sometimes sounds as if he'll produce enough wind to power the nation all by himself. So strongly does his current rhetoric smell of methane -- the gas emanating from manure -- that he might even qualify for an alternative energy tax incentive.
Leave the presidential contest aside for the moment. At other levels of politics, the Republicans may eventually file the 2008 campaign under the Double Jeopardy category of "It Just Keeps Getting Worse". Surely, GOP House strategists are asking themselves whether they are cursed this year.
As Sen. John McCain and the GOP leadership nationalize the drill, drill, drill message, the Republican Party might conceivably be riding a summer political rally. The question of offshore drilling, along with expanded domestic energy production, has suddenly become the biggest political and economic wedge issue of this election. Is there a Republican tsunami in the making?
The conventional wisdom has it down pat: A bad economy works against the candidate from the party in power as voters take out their rage and fear on the president's party and back the challenger, just like they did in 1992.
The knives are out for my friend Bill Clinton. Again.
Barack Obama had it half right when he said that the McCain campaign would focus on raising voters' fears about him.
In a rare burst of bipartisan consensus, Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have agreed on a dreadful proposal: Open more of America's fragile coastlines to offshore oil drilling.
Just when you think you've got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions.
When is the McCain campaign going to get serious? It seems to be marking time with softball ads, more appropriate to the soundbites campaign media spokespeople exchange with one another than to strategic paid media hits.
What does Barack Obama have to do with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. A mentally unstable party girl and an heiress/party girl? Did I miss the part where Obama's father was a hotel magnate, where he couldn't be trusted to take care of his children, where he literally partied till he dropped?
There will be no more business as usual for housing lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if John McCain is elected president. That's McCain's clear message in a recent hard-hitting op-ed in the St. Petersburg Times and in various straight-talk media interviews.
