Feeds
The federal debt limit is a triumph of false advertising.
While Democrats were shaping and delivering health care change, Republicans waged a skilled and largely successful campaign to demonize the whole business.
For a president in political trouble, the State of the Union address seems the ideal launch site to get past it and get going. But that seldom has worked as planned. Now President Barack Obama is trying to make a go of his "we don't quit" campaign for change.
There may be a lesson plan for grown-ups in the contrived controversy about Barack Obama's back-to-school pep talk to students. It would be to do your homework, just as the president told the pupils.
President Barack Obama's campaign for a health care overhaul is an intense installment in a long-running story, dating to Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Once Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed to the Supreme Court, all those hours of predictable questions and cautious replies at her Senate confirmation hearings will be filed and forgotten as she judges the way she sees fit. Nobody can hold her to what she's said.
In political debate, the side that keeps its arguments simple and repeats them again and again is likely to gain the advantage. It is an easier sale, especially when the topic is as scary as terrorism.
In this crisis, there's no man on a white horse who could inspire trust and confidence to ease financial fears. At first, the government couldn't even find a horse to start dragging the system out of the ditch.
Weary and recovering from illness, Richard Nixon looked so bad in his TV debate with John Kennedy that his mom called afterward to see if he was all right. Forty years later, Al Gore loudly sighed, shrugged in exasperation and got in George W. Bush's face in a display of pique and impatience.
Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York during the Sept. 11 attacks, said Wednesday night that Barack Obama and the Democrats "are in a state of denial" about the threat of terrorism against the United States.
National political conventions have gone on in time of war and with rioting in the streets outside.
It was, indeed, a last hurrah.
Log In | Register
