Michael Tomasky

In the immediate aftermath of John Kerry’s defeat, the two broad factions within the progressive umbrella (liberal-left and neoliberal-center) seemed to agree that Kerry’s loss was not the other side’s fault. This was a big switch from 2000, when dueling pollsters Stan Greenberg (liberal-left) and Mark Penn (neoliberal-center) released warring surveys, each blaming the other […]

One of the longstanding criticisms of liberalism going back to its heyday involved the extent to which it relied on the courts to gain victories that could not have been achieved legislatively. School desegregation, abortion rights, and less well-remembered anti-miscegenation laws, struck down by the Warren Court in its Loving vs. Virginia decision of 1967, […]

The great values debate has commenced. Four camps have emerged thus far. There’s the camp that says, essentially, change the subject — Democrats have to win back values voters by fighting the morals argument with economic populism. Second, there’s the triangulation camp, which says Democrats have to win them back by closing the “culture gap,” […]

As of Monday, November 1, it’s been exactly 1,146 days since Osama bin Laden struck the United States. I put it that way for two reasons. First, it’s a number you probably don’t know. And second, it’s a number that, if Al Gore had been president, you and every other American certainly would know. What’s […]

Wednesday on the campaign trail, responding for the first time to the Al-Qaqaa story, President Bush said that John Kerry, in using the story as he has, was “denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field.” It’s an old tactic: Charge the liberal with not supporting the troops. So who went on […]

Now we know, via the stunning front-page report in Monday’s New York Times, that the Bush administration’s incompetence and arrogance has in all likelihood killed American soldiers. The questions now are: Will the media in general push this shocking story in the campaign’s final week? Or will they cave yet again to administration pushback (which […]

There’s no point in doing a little political punditry in the October of an election year without going way out on a limb, so here goes: As I smelled it, the most important thing that happened in the second presidential debate is that George W. Bush lost a good chunk of the women’s vote. He’s […]

The Democratic National Committee and operative Howard Wolfson certainly took a lot of heat for “Operation Fortunate Son,” the tough public-relations campaign they initiated to put the questions about President Bush’s National Guard service on the front burner. Wolfson was repeatedly denounced by the usual suspects on cable television, The Weekly Standard criticized the operation […]