Illinois Senate candidate and Democratic national convention keynote speaker Barack Obama sent his supporters, the Barack Brigade, an update around 1 p.m. Monday announcing that they’d get to preview his Tuesday-night floor speech at 4 this afternoon on his blog. “Please be sure to post your thoughts, because I can’t be your voice if I […]
Garance Franke-Ruta
Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.
Posted inDispatches
The Next Generation
“Boy, this is really standing-room only,” complained a man outside the AFL-CIO hall in Peoria, Illinois, on a bright Tuesday morning in late June. U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama was set to start speaking soon to the diverse crowd, and a line of people dozens deep wended its way into the packed union hall. They’d […]
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No Tie — Cobb!
MILWAUKEE — For Ralph Nader campaign spokesman Kevin Zeese, the map explains it all. Hand drawn in black ballpoint pen, the rough state-by-state depiction of the United States is covered in hatch marks and polka dots. Florida, California, and New York are filled in with diagonal lines. The middle of the country is a blotchy […]
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Alternative Universe
MILWAUKEE — Last night the Green Party of the United States held a raucous hour-and-a-half presidential candidate forum in which one of the two top contenders for the spot was absent, two candidates admitted that they grew up “without a flush toilet,” and self-proclaimed compromise candidate Kent Mesplay staked a claim to being the only […]
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See Dick Run, Part II
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that John Kerry and Dick Gephardt met as part of Kerrys soon-to-be concluded vice-presidential search. The reasons for the meeting may well have been cosmetic — sending a signal to Gephardt’s union backers in the Teamsters and elsewhere — but the outcome of the meeting is of […]
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McCainiacs
It’s McCain-mania season again, and this time the man beating the drum for the iconoclastic senator from Arizona isn’t an opinion journalist. It’s the presumptive Democratic candidate for president. “I’m not the president today,” John Kerry told Don Imus last week, but “I have any number of people that I would make secretary of defense, […]
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Mission Semi-Accomplished
So far the Democrats’ magic bullet seems to be falling short. Ever since the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation passed, Democrats have looked to so-called 527 groups — named after a part of the tax code that allows groups to raise unlimited sums and make independent expenditures on issues — to save them from cash shortfalls (specifically […]
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This ’70s Show
My first political memory, from sometime in the early to mid-1970s, was of the big painted signs the Partido Revolucionario Institucional splashed across boulders and cliffs along Mexican roadways. My second political memory dates to 1977, when I was watching a Mexican TV show and realized that women were treated differently than men. Later, in […]
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Separated at Birth
When I met with George W. Bush’s campaign spokesman, Terry Holt, in January, he couldn’t stop talking about the importance of grass-roots organizing and running a person-to-person campaign that focused on getting people talking to people in their neighborhoods. I thought this sounded a lot like the sort of thing that Howard Dean’s campaign manager, […]
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Tangled Web
After Richard Clarke spoke under oath before the September 11 commission, the single most powerful person in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, had no qualms about slicing into him and virtually accusing him of perjury. On two occasions in a late March speech on the Senate floor, Frist accused Clarke of lying, saying that […]
