In the days before the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy appeared before an adoring, cheering throng at the old Boston Garden. “I do not run for the office of the Presidency after fourteen years in the Congress with any expectation that it is an empty or an easy job. I run for the Presidency …
Since the summer, I’ve pretty regularly been watching Joe Scarborough and his crew on Morning Joe on MSNBC. He’s pretty good–a middle-of-the-road, non-doctrinaire conservative–although he does have a tendency to overtalk his guests and especially his co-host, the long-suffering Mika Brzensinski. Joe has been pretty hard to take the last couple of weeks, as though …
Finally got around to reading Jane Mayer‘s excellent article in the October 27th issue of The New Yorker in which she reports on how Sarah Palin came to be selected as John McCain‘s running mate. She says that one of the key moments came when one of her backers realized that The Weekly Standard and …
Writing about last night’s debate on newsweek.com, Richard Wolffe focused on John McCain‘s physical presentation: “He paced up and down in fits and starts as he spoke. He leapt from subject to subject, sound byte to sound byte. Between answers, he sat down and scribbled page after page of notes, then jumped up and paced …
TURN OUT THE LIGHTS, MY FRIEND, THE PARTY’S OVER Read More »
At Politico.com, Roger Simon asks a panel of Republican war horses if John McCain can still win, and die-hard loyalists to a man, they say “Hell yeah!” Gregg Muller, an advisor to Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan, says “McCain can definitely win the race. . . . He needs to define Obama’s agenda as dangerous …
Here’s what’s happening with five weeks until election day. Obama‘s lead is moving beyond measurable to solid. He is achieving in some polls the talismanic mark of 50 percent. He is opening leads in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Missouri. Two days ago, a GOP House of Representatives, egged on by phone callers roused up by right …
The first Obama-McCain debate was held late on a Friday–a weird time. Both men did well, but I scored it a narrow win for McCain–he seemed to drive the discussion more. Obama was learned and reasoned in his responses, but never–has never yet–wheeled on McCain and gone from defense to offense in a response. He …
Sarah Palin looked great last night, but the best bet is to short the stock. As Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. pointed out on Morning Joe, she proved that she could give a speech in a big hall, a skill which is now useless to her. She may well face an audience as admiring and enthusiastic, but …
The other shoe dropped last week. Senator McCain appeared before a group of students at Wake Forest and vowed to appoint judges “strictly faithful to the Constitution’’ who would not engage in “the common and systemic abuse of our federal courts.” As The New York Times noted, “The issue is of enormous importance to conservatives, …
December seems like an eon ago, but it’s really been less than six months since everyone was feeling misgivings about the front-loaded primary season we were about to enter. You remember what was being said—that things were going to happen with lightening speed, that the front-runners possessed overwhelming advantages in name recognition and money and …