A gallery of winners (and losers) from the vice presidential vetting process through the years.
Celebrity is not the only area of American life that the media has turned into an ontological head scratcher. Just look at Sarah Palin, Donald Trump and Herman Cain, three political leaders who make headlines just about every day. They are political leaders whose main claim to that title derives only from the successes of their own leadership-selling operations. Take away the reporters, the television cameras, the book deals and the speaking fees, and there is little left.
Now that Sarah Palin has confirmed that she won’t run for President, one interesting question is whether her exit could change the dynamic of the existing field. Even this fall, a non-trivial number of Republican voters have been telling pollsters that Palin is their choice for the GOP nomination. She drew 9% in a late [...]
After a spring of embarrassing ephemera (remember Donald Trump’s painful presidential flirtation/publicity tour?) and a summer of high-octane campaign kickoffs (Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman) that haven’t sustained much momentum, Labor Day marks the real start of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Barring any late entrants into the fray, the GOP field seems set. [...]
Say what you will about the Iowa straw poll. (“Good-natured fraud,” says Walter Shapiro. “Not very predictive,” says Jon Stewart. “Overhyped, underwhelming,” says Michael Crowley.) But no one can deny that the event is consequential. Thanks to Iowa Republican chair Matt Strawn’s vote-buying carnival, more has happened in the past week to change the Republican [...]
With each passing week, Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to be inching closer to a run for the presidency. His supporters have been calling around to social conservatives urging them to keep their powder dry. Conservative kingmakers have begun to discuss Perry as the only one who checks both the “conservative” and “electability” boxes. And [...]
These White House contenders give historical fiction a whole new meaning. TIME breaks down nine egregious examples of the type of revisionist flub you can expect in 2012
Like any group in its infancy, the Tea Party goes through phases. Gone, or at least temporarily shelved, are the noisy rallies, the tricorn hats, the abundant signage that marked its birth in 2009. “We are not a protest organization anymore,” says Matt Kibbe, the president and CEO of FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group that [...]
The amount of money the state of Alaska and news organizations are spending on the Sarah Palin e-mails — copying costs, shipping costs (or flight costs), man-hour costs, and opportunity costs — should inspire some skull-clutching. It’s all the more extravagant considering how much of the content has been redacted, how old the e-mails are [...]
Ed Rollins, a veteran strategist newly attached to Rep. Michele Bachmann, has a deceptively simple LinkedIn profile. Only two jobs are publicly listed: his current position as a fellow for CNN and Hofstra University and a stint as “Assistant to the President” from 1981 to 1987. Unmentioned are the slew of campaigns he’s worked on [...]
