Slogging his way through Washington over the past couple of years has certainly demystified Barack Obama. The thoughtful writer with a complex identity and exotic upbringing has gradually morphed into just another an embattled president caught up in tedious Capitol Hill battles with the capital’s usual suspects. But Obama’s remarks up …

DHS announced new restrictions on air freight Monday. Cargo from Yemen and Somalia will be blocked, and large printer cartridges will be banned from domestic passenger flights and from international passenger flights coming into the U.S.

I wrote a news story for the current print and IPad editions of the magazine on the Yemen-based …

The hardest part of covering the White House is portraying the banality of the human being presiding at the heart of the sprawling executive branch of American government. In the case of George W. Bush, the caricature of incompetence accepted by much of the country by the end of his second term obscured as much about the daily work of …

Two weeks ago I blogged here about one Georgia town’s loss of faith in government and the economy after its hometown bank failed. The full article is now available online here.

It’s no secret that the American people are exhausted, disappointed and turned off by Congress. But consider this sentence, which helps to define the current wreckage that is the political landscape:

[F]or close to 15 years now, all major congressional actions have basically been giveaways.

This is just a fact. Republicans have given …

International diplomacy is amazingly messy up close. One would think that with hours of planning, and mutual pledges of cooperation, shout fests and shoving matches could be avoided. But they seem almost inevitable on international trips of the president (I recall shoving and shouting in Ankara, verbal threats in Beijing’s Great Hall) …

It is a sign of how desperately Democrats are searching for a silver lining to the Nov. 2 midterm elections that some have suggested President Barack Obama, facing two years of implacable opposition on domestic policy, may be able to score some foreign policy victories to boost his accomplishments as he heads into the 2012 reelection …

More states may sign on to the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. I spoke to Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, today and she said, “I’m sure with the turnover, there will be more states joining the lawsuit.”

Sebelius also said she still expects “pragmatic” governors to …