-
More than any other recent U.S. president, Barack Obama has succeeded in puzzling the pundits.
-
A specter is haunting the affluent societies of the West. Across the rich countries, and across the political spectrum, there is an unstated but palpable longing for a return to the 1950s.
-
Barack Obama's campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism.
-
-
With a narrow edge in the popular vote and a decisive victory in the Electoral College, President Barack Obama has secured a second term.
-
If a president finds himself in the role of a political scientist, he has a problem -- even when his political science lesson is 100 percent accurate.
-
President Obama got roughed up by the pundit class last week. The question is what lessons he draws from the going-over.
-
"Lead from behind" may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate's wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him...
-
The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year's best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to...
-
To say that the Belle Harbor neighborhood on New York City's Rockaway Peninsula was slammed by Hurricane Sandy understates the case. Like many other parts of the region, it has suffered the kind of devastation we usually associate with wars.
-
Rebranding is trendy in the Republican Party.
-
Do conservatives still believe in American greatness?
-
More illegal immigrants have been deported under President Barack Obama’s administration than during any other three-year period in the nation’s history. Obama has also devoted more resources to “securing the border” than any of his predecessors.
-
Over the long run, the most important impact of an election is not on the winning party but on the loser. Winners feel confirmed in staying the course they're on. Losing parties -- or, at least, the ones intent on winning again someday -- are moved...
-
Human nature and politics being what they are, Republicans will underestimate the trouble they're in, and Democrats will be eager to overestimate the strength of their post-2012 position.
-
The cheering supporters at his victory rally may still be hoarse, and his inauguration is three frosty months away. But Barack Obama has already secured the most important achievement of his second term: Winning it.
-
This year's elections may exacerbate the difference between our two political parties, but not in the way most people are talking about.
-
Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?
Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans...
-
Think back to the battle over health care reform. Can you imagine Republicans, upon hearing that President Obama was about to offer his own proposals, would want to rush ahead of him to put their own marker down -- and take positions close to his?
-
President Obama is a freer man than he has been at any point in his presidency.
-
In this week's debate, Mitt Romney has too much to do. President Obama has a great deal to lose. Romney's is the most difficult position. Obama's is the most dangerous.
-
The Obama Democrats who gather in Charlotte this week have a big advantage over Tampa's Romney Republicans: Last week's GOP convention gave President Obama a peek at Mitt Romney's playbook. Combining the lessons of this highly public briefing with...
-
President Obama's re-election was at once a deeply personal triumph and a victory for the younger, highly diverse and broadly progressive America that
-
The National Rifle Association is facing attacks from Gun Owners of America for being too soft on gun control. This is like a double cheeseburger coming under severe criticism for lacking enough cholesterol.
-
To understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don't look to Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan -- and that is just what Obama told us before he was first elected.
-
Breaking the law is a terrible thing, except when it isn’t. Listening to politicians call for the criminalization of today’s illegal immigrants, one would never guess that the forebears of some of those same politicians, and of many of their...
-
Rather than shout, I'll just ask the question in a civil way: Dear Republicans, do you really want to endanger your party's greatest political legacy by turning the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution into an excuse for election-year ugliness?
-
In an election, a solid "no" usually beats an uneasy "yes, but." That's the heart of the problem Democrats and President Barack Obama face this fall.
-
Let us contemplate the joys of being in the political opposition when unemployment in your state tops 10 percent. Kevin DeWine, the affable chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio, has a transparent board behind his desk at state headquarters...
-
Olga sings softly while working in the field, stooped over and stuffing onion plants into small holes that were made a few minutes earlier by a tractor. She places two or three plants in a hole, sweeps in a little dirt, takes a step, and does it...
-
Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court.
He'd have a lot of things to do. He's a fine public speaker and teacher. He'd be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician -- and that's the...
-
Finally, Mitt Romney shook the Etch A Sketch.
Having given conservatives everything they had asked for -- from switching his positions on abortion and immigration to picking their favorite as his running mate -- Romney turned Thursday night to his...
-
What is the point of Barack Obama's second term?
A president who has been pondering that question for a while might find the best answers by consulting what just went on in the campaign.
-
Barack Hussein Obama can begin his second term liberated by the confidence that he is already a landmark figure in American history.
-
The political response to the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that we live in an age of shrink-wrapped, prepackaged opinions.
When something new comes along, we hasten to squeeze it into whatever frameworks we were carrying around with us a day, a...
-
Nobody claimed it was the best of times. Either it was the worst of times, as the Republicans insisted in Tampa, or it could have been even worse, as the Democrats replied in Charlotte. Each nominating convention competed to present the more...
-
Paul Ryan is known for his devotion to a fitness regime called P90X, which involves "working out 6-7 days per week, with each workout lasting about 1-1½ hours," according to WebMD.
-
In the upcoming presidential election, the defining issues for the Democrats seem to be the economy, health care, and Iraq; and, for the Republicans, the economy, taxation, and immigration. Turn these into a single list and immigration might seem to...
-
Rep. Paul Ryan has long enjoyed a reputation as a wonk’s wonk. Here was a Republican politician happy to engage in substantive conversation about tax policy, debt, and the future of entitlement programs.
-
In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward Latin America and the developing world. In...
-
-
Immigration has been in the news, and the questions of how to deal with illegal immigrants and how to guard our borders are an important and complicated ones. I will not deal with them here. What worries me is that so much of the language...
-
For over a century the challenge of immigration has vexed organized labor. In the late nineteenth century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), led by cigarmaker Samuel Gompers (himself an immigrant from Europe who, in his own words, “...
-
Despite the bitter political divide in Congress over the solution to the nation’s illegal-immigration problem, a sensible consensus already exists: our boundaries must be secured and the massive flow of immigrants across the Mexican-U.S.
-
Before Hurricane Katrina hit, an estimated twenty to thirty-five thousand undocumented immigrants lived on the Gulf Coast. In the weeks following the disaster, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refused to provide assurance that...
-
The past six months have seen three of the largest workplace immigration raids in U.S. history. In May, the rural Iowa town of Postville was convulsed when 900 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stormed a kosher meatpacking plant and...
-
Throughout recorded history, people have migrated in search of a better life. They have walked jaw-dropping distances, across ice and desert, mountains and valleys, jungles and plains, hoping to find easier ways to survive. They have gotten into...
-
In mid-November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops discussed a report detailing an extensive “review and renewal” of its domestic-poverty program, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
-
President Barack Obama’s June 22 speech announcing his plans for eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan has prompted debate about troop numbers and timetables. But beyond those specific judgments, there was in the speech an implicit challenge to the...
-
Is it morally acceptable for agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—or local police, for that matter—to station themselves outside places of worship in order to identify and capture illegal immigrants?
-
-
Everywhere you turn, President Obama is accused of not offering a clear second-term agenda. It's not surprising that Republicans say it, but you also hear it from quarters sympathetic to the president.
But how true is the charge?
-
It was unthinkable, only three short months ago, that Washington’s long-estranged lawmakers would suddenly find themselves entranced by feel-good bipartisanship, especially on an issue as divisive as immigration.
-
We interrupt this highly partisan and ideological moment with some contrarian news: President Obama is not the only politician who thinks that expanding access to pre-Kindergarten is a good investment.
-
They first arrived from Oaxaca, Ixtapalapa, Tzintzuntzan, and Mexico City. Some had green cards and visitors’ permits; others didn’t. They lived in barrios and worked in meatpacking houses and steel mills.
-
-
At the very end of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which governor Jan Brewer signed into law on April 23, there is a hopeful suggestion: “This act may be cited as the ‘Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.’”
-
For the past few months, I’ve been doing some research in New York newspapers on the anti-Catholic vitriol the Irish faced in the nineteenth century. It’s been hard to avoid noticing how similar those attacks are to the biting comments being made...
-
When Abraham Lincoln defined democracy by contrasting it to the relationship between masters and slaves, he took for granted that the type of polity he was dealing with, and hoped to reform, was a republic. The first modern republics were supposed...
-
“I don’t see how the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century.” A Republican
-
Just when our politics seemed destined to freeze into a brain-dead brand of partisanship, party lines started cracking up.
It is common in politics to assume that whatever has been happening will keep happening. But a series of events last week...
