Not sure if this was expected or known in advance, but the announcement today that Elizabeth Edwards is joining the Center for American Progress as a senior fellow is striking in two ways. First, it’s great for CAP. Think tanks don’t often get the benefit of having famous and well-liked authors or thinkers on their staffs. Hers will be a …
Senator Hillary Clinton just wrapped up her turn asking questions of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. In tone, demeanor and command of the facts, she was – I thought – very impressive. Without grandstanding, she fufilled her oversight role and made some soberly effective points about the failures of the surge and the problems …
In the current print issue of Time, Massimo Calabresi has a smart piece about the rivarly between the principal foreign policy advisers to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and how their different styles and world views reflect and shape the policies of each candidate. Check it out here.
We have known for some time the general contents of the 81-page memo offering a legal rationale for extreme interrogation techniques that John Yoo of the Justice Department wrote and sent to the Pentagon’s top lawyer on March 13, 2003. We’ve known that it proclaimed the President of the United States to be almost entirely above the law …
My email inbox yesterday contained a surprising — even ironic — twist to the narrative about John McCain’s press relations and how they form the foundation of his campaign. Sent from the Republican National Committee’s server, the email “From the Desk of John McCain” begins with a paragraph about the candidate’s upcoming “Service to …
Here’s my take on Obama’s exceptional speech, which defied the usual conventions dictating how candidates should manage a crisis in their campaigns. In addressing the controversy over some of the language in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Obama put a new twist on his message of hope about a post-racial politics in America: he said …
He’s started. Here’s the text. Obama seems to be speaking with deliberate, almost forced calm. But it’s a remarkable speech on paper. And my guess is that he will be amping up the emotion toward the end.
You know things are bad in the economy when what passes for good news is the hope that we’re probably not on the verge of the second Great Depression. “I think we know more than we did then, and just the fact that we have a big federal government is a stabilizing factor,” Paul Krugman of Princeton (and the New York Times) tells Fortune …
A major figure in 20th century American political culture has died. William F. Buckley, Jr., godfather of the modern conservative movement and founder of National Review, was 82. We can expect abundant metaphors in the obituaries pointing out how Buckley’s death coincides with the waning and, in some views, the collapse of the movement …
Hillary Clinton missed some opportunities tonight. Her complaint at the beginning about the format of the debate seemed to fall flat. She might have done better with a brief lament about the consequences when the press goes soft on a presidential candidate by arguing, as Democrats do, that George W. Bush received far gentler handling …
There were contrasting columns in the nation’s leading newspapers today. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne agrees with Clark Hoyt, the New York Times’ public editor, that the Times disastrously and unprofessionally injected unproven allegations of a sex scandal into its quad-authored story about John McCain’s ties to a telecom …
I did a Q&A with the titan of talk radio this morning. We discussed his not-so-secret plan to assist John McCain, his complaint that the MSM don’t understand what motivates him and what his show might be like if a Republican he doesn’t support were to win the White House.
One of the meta-themes of the Democratic race has been the inability of either candidate to poach heavily from his/her opponent’s most reliable voting blocs. Virginia — a primary, mind you — seems to be ending that narrative. Exit polls show Obama won majorities of women voters, white male voters, voters earning under $50,000 and …
