In Michael Kinsley’s famous formulation, a gaffe is what happens when a politician says what he actually thinks is true. As the latest skirmish in the Outrage Wars shows, Kinsley’s formulation now applies to political strategists as well. When asked by Fortune Magazine how a terrorist attack on U.S. soil between now and the election [...]

In choosing to forgo public financing for the general election campaign, Barack Obama calculated that the upside of being able to vastly outspend John McCain would outweigh the downside of being hit with charges that he had broken his word and was behaving like a typical pol. He’s betting that most voters won’t pay attention [...]

As several bloggers have rightly noted, I erred yesterday on MSNBC when discussing Karen Tumulty’s piece about the Obama campaign’s efforts to combat rumors and smears. I said the rumor about Michelle Obama making a derogatory comment about whites was started by conservative bloggers. That was a mistake. As Tumulty wrote in her piece, the [...]

Michael Scherer has a must-read story on the gotcha game that got Jim Johnson today. So much righteous indignation to express, so little time before Election Day to express it all. The McCain camp’s statement reacting to Johnson’s resignation is a classic of the genre: “Jim Johnson’s resignation raises serious questions about Barack Obama’s judgment. [...]

As a rule, political candidates have more success when they’re telling people what they’re for and who they are – rather than defensively explaining what, and who, they are not. Which is why you might have found the first two national salvos of the general election from the McCain campaign a bit puzzling. First, in [...]

The Los Angeles Times has a powerful video interview on its website with David Steiner, who was a young campaign aide to Robert Kennedy in 1968 and was in the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel 40 years ago tonight. To Steiner, RFK’s death “was like the death of baseball and Thomas Jefferson and Betsy Ross [...]

Very interesting post by Jake Tapper over at ABC about the “private and friendly” conversation (that, apparently, was neither) between Barack Obama and Joe Lieberman on the Senate floor yesterday. Democrats will almost certainly add to their numbers in the Senate this November, which means they will no longer need Lieberman, the self-described “Independent Democrat,” [...]

Reports of Budge Sperling’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In a post yesterday about Rep. Tom Davis, I erroneously referred to “the late Budge Sperling”, who created and for years hosted the Sperling/Monitor newsmaker breakfasts that are a Washington institution. As David Cook of the Monitor kindly informed me this morning, Budge, 92, retired from [...]

In the competition among despairing Republicans to sound the loudest alarm about the party’s prospects in the fall elections, retiring Virginia congressman Tom Davis has his eye on the prize. There’s something about retiring that transforms some politicians into non-stop truth-telling machines. Davis, who ran the National Republican Campaign Committee from 1998-2002, appeared before reporters [...]