While the clown-car that is the Republican presidential field seemed headed over a cliff, Democratic primary voters enjoyed a generally high-minded debate among candidates they generally liked. That is, until the New Hampshire primary. Now, the simmering feud between the Clinton and Obama campaigns over supposed racial politics is casting a pall over what had […]

While George W. Bush may be a recovering drinker, he apparently has now developed a gambling problem. Just 10 days into 2008, the Bush White House has placed big bets on everything from a Middle East peace treaty to the prospects for a U.S. recession, even his own popularity and legacy. Unfortunately, the odds are […]

Two days after Hillary Clinton's stunning comeback victory in New Hampshire, the imbroglio over the pollsters' dismal performance continues unabated. But while the speculation centers on the potential impact of latent racism or a feminist backlash among New Hampshire Democrats, the exit polls suggest a more simple explanation. In a nutshell, Hillary's voters originally made […]

The jaw-dropping results from New Hampshire may be in, but they produced more heat than light. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama's brief flirtation with inevitability is now over. While the Democratic nomination is firming up as a race between Obama and Clinton, chaos reigns for the GOP. There, the race to identify the anyone-but-Huckabee […]

The Supreme Court today will hear a set of voter identification cases which could well determine the outcome of the 2008 election. In a narrow legal sense, the cases will address the constitutionality of new voter ID laws in Indiana and other states that purport to address what most experts deem a non-existent problem. But […]

In his campaign of gymnastic flip-flops and mind-bending distortions, Mitt Romney topped himself Monday with his hilarious claim that he's just "a guy from Detroit." While Detroit and Romney's suburban childhood home in tony Bloomfield Hills might be separated by just a few miles, his privileged life there was light years away from Motor City. […]

Riding an evangelical wave to victory in Iowa, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee by necessity has taken a decidedly more secular line in New Hampshire. Without the religious right base to tap into in the Granite State, Huckabee had focused instead on taxes, immigration and other more mundane issues of this world. But on Sunday […]

As the New Hampshire primary approaches, a desperate Mitt Romney has emerged as a vocal defender of the foreign policy of George W. Bush. On Sunday, Romney developed a full-blown case of Bush envy, echoing the President's 2001 spaghetti western threat by saying, "I want to get Osama bin Laden dead or alive." To be […]

As Perrspectives detailed here and here, the ever-charming GOP frontrunner and surprise Iowa winner Mike Huckabee is probably the most alarming extremist thrown up by either party in a generation. But while his most dangerous pronouncements involve his zealous determination to save souls for the next life, his radical tax proposals would surely impoverish them […]

It was only a matter of time before the conservative chattering classes extended the Republicans' perpetual "criminalization of politics" defense to the exploding CIA tapes scandal. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal obliged, claiming the Justice Department's probe into the spy agency's destruction of detainee interrogation videos was the equivalent of "criminalizing the CIA." Following […]