For many of us, 2008 will mark the last time we vote for a candidate who does not favor same-sex marriage. Hopefully, this will be because at least one candidate from a major party will support those rights, but we should also be prepared that, as in this year's presidential...

In a clear-cut case of wearing too many hats, Jeff Larson, until now mostly known as a guy who knows Karl Rove way too well, has been exposed as the man behind Sarah Palin's red leather top, and another $140,000+ of wardrobe changes for the vice presidential...

Senator Charles Schumer was on to something when he said a couple of weeks ago that John McCain is not "the most likable fellow." Schumer, whose hard work and salesmanship make up for his own likability challenges, was referring to one of McCain's now infamous debate performances. In truth,...

During John McCain's particularly erratic last couple of weeks, he turned into a 21st century Che Guevara, lashing out at Wall Street greed and falling just short of denouncing internationalist plutocrats. This newfound populism is so off the wall that even the Wall Street Journal has given up...

Less than five weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama is taking the fight to scarlet red Republican territory, adding several states won by George W. Bush to his list of potential takeovers. In the process he is contradicting both conventional wisdom and the many pundits who assumed the fight would...

Weeks of erratic behavior by John McCain were sealed by Friday's turning-point debate during which Barack Obama succeeded in reassuring voters that he is presidential, just as doubts about McCain's ability to run the country were rapidly growing.

This is a sea change in an election in which it...

In 10 days Sarah Palin's standing has crashed an awesome 24 points, with a clear majority now having a negative opinion of the Alaska Governor. This kind of free fall is more reminiscent of, say, Tom Cruise's cratering popularity after jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey's...

The current economic meltdown, along with the energy, health care and transportation nightmares in the US, are not so much an indictment of a capitalist society, as they are of Republicans' duplicity in advocating for free markets when their main purpose is precisely the opposite: to ensure that economic power...

On a recent trip to Europe, I was asked several times how John McCain could get away with lying repeatedly about facts that were easily verifiable. Each time, I was stumped, realizing that the moral corruption that has settled on the McCain campaign appears invisible to about half the American...

After two weeks of party conventions which included The Maverick's bold, audacious cave-in to the religious right, we find ourselves in exactly the same place: Barack Obama leads John McCain slightly in national polls and more significantly in electoral college projections.

This is not surprising: McCain has been...

Asked about his position on same-sex marriage a year ago, John Edwards said that he "personally [does] not"support gay marriage, citing his religious beliefs as basis for his opposition. Even without the hindsight we have recently acquired about Edwards' own marriage, this was the response of a bigot.

Much has been said and written in the past six months about Barack Obama's need to attract white voters in sufficient numbers to be elected, first in the primary (done) and now in the general election. It is a truism that somehow got twisted into Obama having a "problem with...

When Barack Obama started running for president, he was widely described as arrogant for daring to take on the Clintons after just two years in the Senate, despite the fact that polling at the time showed him to be the only threat to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

If you thought the Republican primary field was a bit of a joke, wait until you get a closer look at the front runners for the vice presidential slot: the names most mentioned include a failed VP candidate from another party, a "business leader" who was fired for poor performance,...

When John McCain clinched the GOP nomination, it was widely believed that his relative popularity among moderates and independents may well save the party from a Bush-caused bloodbath in November. Things, however, do not quite seem to be working out like that: Texas, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Alaska, Mississippi,...

The near-annihilation of John McCain by the Bush clan in the 2000 presidential GOP primary left him with one critically important asset: his reputation as an unconventional and principled Republican. This, of course, was precisely what the hard-core conservative crowd wooed by George W. Bush disliked about him. But it...

John McCain's insistence that Americans know so much more about him than they do about Barack Obama echoes Hillary Clinton's "tested and vetted" rhetoric, and is an equally misleading preemptive strike to convince the media there is nothing more to see.

Like Clinton, McCain has his share of

Obama's vice-presidential pick will not be the most important decision of his campaign. It pretty much never is, as illustrated by the complete futility of such past choices. For instance, it is hard to see what John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Jack Kemp or Lloyd Bentsen brought to...

Were Hillary Clinton the great rural white savior that her campaign is depicting, she would have had this thing wrapped up in, say, Iowa, or a couple of weeks after that. Her inability to dispatch a presidential neophyte such as Barack Obama in a Democratic primary is precisely because, after...

Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton was back in Michigan, a full two months after its "primary," pleading with the state legislature to allow a revote in the state. As she stood in downtown Detroit, it was becoming increasingly clear that there would be no do-over and she looked for the...