The National Enquirer's bid for recognition of its Edwards coverage is undeserved. Not because of the quality of the publication, but because of the relevance of the story.
Rielle Hunter leaving the Terry Sanford Federal Building and Courthouse in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds)
It's easy to mock Rielle Hunter's Q&A with GQ. The interview, posted online this week, is the first time she has spoken to the press about her affair with John Edwards. "Before I met Johnny, I had a lot of judgment about infidelity," she told Lisa DePaulo. "Now I have a much deeper understanding and acceptance of people's processes. It's hard and complicated for a lot of people to pull the Band-Aid off." Most postmortems were particularly unforgiving about the accompanying photos, which show Hunter without pants, lounging amid her daughter's stuffed animals. "If you're gonna involve Kermit, Barney, and Dora, put your pants on!" scoffed Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View.
Anton Gunn's e-mail promises I won't have a hard time picking him out in the Starbucks in Richland County, South Carolina.
He's right.
Easily the biggest guy in the room, the former offensive lineman looms over an older man in an American Legion baseball cap with whom he's chatting about local business. We're just northeast of Columbia, South Carolina's capital, in the heart of Gunn's state House district.
Gunn is used to standing out. An African American representative in a majority-white district, a Democrat in a Republican-dominated state, and a 36-year-old surrounded by career politicians, he makes a fitting messenger for Obama's campaign--trail message about the need for a new kind of politics that moves beyond traditional divisions.
The Supreme Court might be on the verge of overturning the very foundation of campaign-finance law. But even if it doesn't, the old model has to change.
David Bossie, leader of Citizens United and producer of "Hillary: The Movie," is seen in his office in Washington on March 20, 2009. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
There aren't too many Supreme Court cases that can be called "truly momentous" even before they are decided. But when the Court asked to rehear the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in a rare preterm session this fall, it became clear that, even though the case itself is minor, the Court might use it as the opportunity to make a big change in the law regarding money in politics. But as week after week passes without a decision, the community of campaign-finance reformers becomes ever more anxious that some of their most basic assumptions about what's constitutional and what isn't will be wiped out.
Sarah Palin is running for president. At least, that is the conclusion that leaps from the pages of her mawkish and mendacious blockbuster book. Going Rogue: An American Lifeis an extended justification of her performance in the 2008 election and an attempt to claim her crown as queen of the tea partiers.
"We campaign in poetry. But when we're elected we're forced to govern in prose," said Mario Cuomo, then-governor of New York, in a 1985 speech. "And when we govern -- as distinguished from when we campaign -- we come to understand the difference between a speech and a statute. It's here that the noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality."
Sarah Palin is not running for president, and it's because she, like most Americans, knows she should not be. But she's not leaving the spotlight yet.
We are about to see the flowering of a bright celebrity media career. We will likely to learn, in the next few weeks, that the soon-to-be former governor of Alaska has signed a big television contract with a cable network that will make her rich enough to meet all important financial demands for the rest of her life.
I find it interesting that a woman whose failures as a national politician were based in her inability to establish credibility with voters, could find success by reinventing herself as a media personality, convincing millions of us that she has something interesting to say every night.
If you were watching the leaders of the G-20 nations speak to the world at their recently concluded summit in London, you might have noticed something familiar. Something modern yet comforting, authoritative without being stern, confident but not showy. I'm not talking about President Barack Obama or any of the other assembled presidents and prime ministers. I'm talking about a typeface. More than a few people probably said what I did when they looked at the G-20 logo: “Isn’t that Barack Obama’s font?”
The Obamas' visit to Britain has caused a stir at Britain's fanciest addresses. On Downing Street, Barack Obama boosted Prime Minister Gordon Brown's spirits by referring to Brown by his first name. Later, in Buckingham palace, Queen Elizabeth II and Michelle Obama broke protocol by embracing each other at an evening reception.
The freshman leader has expressed admiration for Brown's mastery of global finance, but it is Brown who looks on with appreciation at Obama's historic campaign. The British general election due at some point in the next year will be a tough fight, and British progressives are keen to learn everything they can from the U.S.
Darcy Burner won the love of Internet activists but lost her 2008 campaign for Washington state's 8th Congressional District. Maybe the new politics can't write off the old just yet.
Burner leaves a pamphlet in the door of a home Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2006 in Puyallup, Wash. (AP Photo/Karie Hamilton)
To understand how invested online activists were in the campaign of Darcy Burner -- the bright, tech-savvy, and ultimately failed candidate for Congress in Washington state's 8th Congressional District -- consider what happened in February of last year, when the University of Washington's student newspaper, not normally a major player in national politics, published excerpts of an interview with Burner campaign spokesman Sandeep Kaushik.
Speaking to a student reporter about the nationwide army of liberal bloggers and online activists who have become a force at all levels of politics in recent years, Kaushik said: "They're not at the point yet where they can really swing a race. Part of my job is making sure people know the blogosphere is not the campaign."
On Tuesday the Minnesota state canvassing board will begin examining challenged ballots in what hopefully is the final round of deliberations in the Senate race between GOP incumbent Norm Coleman and comedian Al Franken, the Democrat.
The last undecided election of 2008 may well be the first one decided in 2009. On Tuesday the Minnesota state canvassing board will begin examining challenged ballots in what hopefully is the final round of deliberations in the Senate race between GOP incumbent Norm Coleman and comedian Al Franken, the Democrat.
As of Monday, Coleman officially led by 188 votes of the almost 3 million cast. The Franken team, however, believes that they are actually ahead by four, yes four -- more than three and less than five -- and they believe that when all the counting and shouting is done, Al Franken will become the 2,006th person to serve in the United States Senate.
We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that's what we are now. And it's a beautiful thing.
In a provocatively titled op-ed for The Washington Post last Sunday, Marie Arana declared that President-elect Barack Obama is "not black" because he's also "half white." Arana argues, using a naïve and idealized evaluation of how race operates in Latin America, that identifying Barack Obama as black is "racist," and "racially backward," and pleads with the reader to stop "using labels that validate the separation of races."
We will continue to lose battles like Prop. 8 until we can successfully relabel LGBT rights a civil-rights issue, rather than an issue mired in the culture-war swamp of moral controversy.
As the election-night results rolled in -- and even before that, as the polling leaned heavily toward Barack Obama -- some liberals gleefully declared the end of the so-called culture war. This war's two most reliable weapons, demonizing same-sex marriage and decrying abortion rights, failed to propel Republican candidates to victory -- supposedly indicating that so-called cultural issues had lost their bite. Wrote Peter Beinart in The Washington Post, "Culture war no longer sells."
Obama's success proves that there's no turning back from the reality that states, their governors, legislators, and parties will play a central role in our country's political future.
On election night, our eyes were glued to the "battleground states" that would decide the presidential election -- not just the traditional swing states of Ohio and Florida but Virginia and Indiana as well, on this new electoral map where all things had become possible.
Conservatives say that America remains a center-right country and Obama won only because of special circumstances, while some liberals claim that the election marks a historic realignment. Neither is the right way to read the returns.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, two interpretations began circulating about its implications. The first came from conservatives who insisted that America remains a "center right" country and that the voters gave Barack Obama and the Democrats a majority only because of the financial panic and the limitations of the McCain campaign. The second interpretation came from some liberals who promptly declared this to be one of those critical elections that mark a historic political realignment. Neither is the right way to read the returns.
is an extended justification of her performance in the 2008 election and an attempt to claim her crown as queen of the tea partiers.