This will be a brief post. I’m in New Hampshire, waiting for Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman to engage in a 90-minute Lincoln-Douglas style debate about national security–which should be fun. Meanwhile, though the news of the day is the contretemps between Mitt Romney and Gingrich.
Romney slammed Gingrich for taking $1.6 million from …
It is difficult, given his demeanor, to imagine Mitt Romney as a creature of the playground, but he must have been once. And last night, to his misfortune, an elementary school recess version of Romney suddenly burst forth. “$10,000!” He said, extending his hand to Rick Perry, demanding a bet on the subject of the Romney health care …
Well, we are down to it now–down to the most intense month in any presidential campaign, the month before the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. Some would argue the month before the general election is equally intense–sometimes yes, often no: by the time October rolls around, the nominees are familiar characters and the voters usually …
Ah, class warfare! Here’s my favorite example, so far, of right-wing Soviet-style agitprop. It comes from the minimally talented, but maximally gaseous, Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. He writes that Obama’s was a speech that could have been delivered in Caracas, by Hugo Chavez presumably. He actually writes this, although I …
My print column this week, which can be found here by TIME subscribers, is about Newt Gingrich–who is, without doubt, one of the more interesting specimens in American politics, a combination of vile rhetoric and occasionally interesting policy ideas. What can you make of a guy who, on the one hand, called President Obama the purveyor …
Christopher Hitchens is attacking his terminal illness with the same intellectual rigor he has applied to every profound moral problem and stray annoyance that life has tossed his way. It is an exhilarating spectacle.
As part of my yearlong crusade to purge this space of any mention of a certain sleazeball, self-promoting real estate developer who doesn’t really develop any real estate but mostly makes money by selling his name to actual, if …
When he’s having a tough time–as he is this week–Mitt Romney’s first instinct is to attack President Obama. This is not a bad political instinct, if deftly done. But Romney’s execution is usually clunky. Last week, we had the Romney ad that pretended Barack Obama was saying something that John McCain had actually said–McCain wanted to …
The Jon Huntsman campaign limps along, despite the candidate’s unwavering sanity and his bold plan to address the core, long-term economic problems, which I wrote about last week…and also despite the hilarious antics of his three daughters, who are following in Meghan McCain’s footsteps, as the superstar outlaw family-members of choice …
Mitt Romney isn’t having a very good week. He gave a testy interview to Fox News. Newt Gingrich is surging–and actually shows signs of uniting the conservative anti-Romney vote. He shows signs of becoming a Potemkin …
My friend and colleague, the great war photographer Lynsey Addario, has been through a lot this year–kidnapped by the Libyans, difficult assignments in Afghanistan, Somalia and Gaza, and a much less taxing three weeks hanging with me on my annual road trip, all while pregnant…and now she has been utterly humiliated at a checkpoint by …
I knew Barney Frank before he was gay–at least, before he said he was gay. He was Boston Mayor Kevin White’s chief of staff. I was a reporter for the Cambridge Phoenix, an underground newspaper. I hadn’t even grown my beard yet. I mean, we still used typewriters. It was a long time ago, neo-pleistocene or thereabouts, the turn of the …
The New York Times reported today that Gingrich was uncharacteristically downbeat in Iowa on Tuesday, despite his surging poll numbers. Perhaps this, first reported by Bloomberg, is the reason why:
