Premise 1: Hillary Clinton is willing to do what she says she is going to do–take her campaign to a convention fight. Premise 2: To win at the convention she has to effectively destroy Barack Obama’s perceived electability among superdelegates. Premise 3: Clinton is still in it to win it. Conclusion A: The Democratic race [...]
• “I mean, he’s young and I think people would take us more seriously with Iraq and everything…Personally, I think we’re either going to have a woman president or we’re going to have a black president, which are both amazing. Right now it’s time for change, and I think both of them are great. But [...]
The advent of the Internet and reported blogs has brought a raft of “fact-checking” journalism, the sort where reporters like me try to explain exactly why Surrogate X or Party Leader Y is misrepresenting the record of Candidate Z. And this is all well and good. As I have often argued on this blog, it [...]
John McCain is basing his next “tour” on nostalgia for the Great Depression? During the Great Depression, with many millions of Americans out of work and the country suffering the worst economic crisis in our history, there rose from small towns, rural communities, inner cities, a generation of Americans who fought to save the world [...]
Not horserace so much as spaghetti, really. Check out the chart here. In less than a thousand words, there’s this version: “[T]he margins reported by the four pollsters are scattered from well below to well above the trend line, making their effect on the overall estimate less powerful than it would be if they all [...]
I’ve just spent the day watching McCain and Obama at the Associated Press festivities in Washington, DC–and it was not nearly as much fun as watching them perform out in the bitterlands, although a room filled with hundreds and hundreds of journalists would probably have a deadening effect on anyone (except, perhaps, McCain–about whom more [...]
In separate appearances this morning, John McCain and Hillary Clinton both came hard after their colleague from Illinois, making it clear they both intend to wring as much political advantage as they can out of Barack Obama’s poorly-chosen words about small-town Americans at a recent San Francisco fundraiser. Each came at the task in a [...]
As Ambinder and others have pointed out, Obama’s San Francisco “gaffe” echoed some of the ideas laid out by Tom Frank in “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” An important difference: those ideas sound a lot less condescending at book-length, packed with reporting and supported by historical research. I’m not sure if it should matter or [...]
