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Wednesday night was John Edwards’ big night. But it was not his best one. After Edwards’ speech, I ran into one of his aides, who reminded me that the first rule of speechwriting is, “First, do no harm.” And by that standard, the text Edwards worked with was a rousing success — moving, direct, colloquial, […]

Who’s clueless? Mr. Fosdick. He’s a gullible, bumbling detective in a new cartoon strip created by two University of Oregon law professors, Garrett Epps and Keith Aoki. Clueless Fosdick, as he’s known, is based on a character called Fearless Fosdick, who was a parody of Dick Tracy, appearing in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner cartoon […]

Ever since Ronald Reagan became president, the Democrats have had a challenge: They’ve needed to reinvent populism. Under Reagan, and now far more so under George W. Bush, the official policy of the U.S. government has been to throw money at the rich. When Reagan ruled, this policy was justified by the doctrine of trickle-down […]

Here I am in so-called “liberal” Massachusetts — the state with a Republican governor who wants to restore the death penalty, ban abortions, and prevent gay marriages, and a legislature that’s among the most conservative Democratic legislatures in America. And here I am at a convention that’s about to nominate a so-called “Massachusetts liberal” for […]

The Democratic Party, as everyone says, has never been as unified as it is this week in Boston and will continue to be through the November elections. Such are the wages of Bushism, where implacable hostility to policy experts and dogmatic adherence to a platform of tax cuts über alles has made it clear that […]

Ted Kennedy and Howard Dean may have fizzled, and Teresa Heinz Kerry cooed cerebrally, but the star of Tuesday night and the Democratic future was clearly Barack Obama. Listening to the speech from the press risers, I was reminded of the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic convention. Like Obama today, Mario Cuomo was the […]

America could well face a constitutional crisis this November over two back-to-back, discredited presidential elections. Nightmare No. 1: Florida Again We’ve already seen another round of crude efforts to purge the Florida rolls of felons, some of whom aren’t felons at all. We will see a lot of intimidation of African-American Florida voters, too. Almost […]

The 2004 Democratic convention is a study in both discipline and in self-discipline. That makes it a refreshing rarity. Not only does the official program offer both consistency of message and a great variety of voices and styles; the restive Democratic base has been admirably, almost eerily, self-restrained. Advocates of universal health care may wish […]

The Washington Post is being roundly ragged by its journalistic counterparts this week for producing a special section headlined “Election 2000,” a mistake made by production staff who used an old template to create the new section. But a more egregious misuse of a 4-year-old template hit the newsstands this week yet received little notice. […]

Once upon an election year, the Democratic and Republican national conventions received near-continuous coverage from NBC, ABC, and CBS. In 2004, though, the networks have all but sworn off the conventions, broadcasting each for just three hours apiece. What’s changed since the days of Hubert Humphrey and Pat Buchanan? And how can political junkies recapture […]