Not much, in my experience, if you're a presidential candidate. The speechwriter gives the candidate the speech for the next stop on the flight. He marks it up, or not, and out come the words, like magic. Original means he's never said it before. Usually he has, albeit in a different way. Original doesn't mean he wrote it, but that he's the first one to say it.
Like Michelle Obama, I am a "woman of color." Like Michelle Obama, I am a working mother of two young children. Like Michelle Obama, I am a member of the 13th generation of Americans born since the founding of our great nation.
Despite the hard contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, party leaders keep telling Democratic-leaning voters that they have two good candidates. They are right, but one of them may well be a Republican.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A closed-door caucus of House Democrats last Wednesday took a risky political course. By four to one, they instructed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call President Bush's bluff on extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to continue eavesdropping on suspected foreign terrorists. Rather than passing the bill with a minority of the House's Democratic majority, Pelosi obeyed her caucus and left town for a 12-day recess without renewing the government's eroding intelligence capability.
Who was it that defined neurosis as repeating the same mistake again and again, and expecting a better outcome each time?
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Strategists for Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign believe it is imperative to identify her high-flying opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, with the "McGovern wing" of the Democratic Party -- but they want to keep their candidate's fingerprints off the attack.
It's appropriate that our two major political parties are depicted as different animals. Forty days and forty nights out from the Iowa caucuses, the elephant and the donkey seem very different indeed. The Republicans have been split on attitudinal lines, between varying strains of conservatism and moderation.
My friends who are also Hillary's friends, many of them classmates and fellow Wellesley women, keep e-mailing me about their concerns, not so much with the campaign, but with the outright meanness and hostility the media seem to be heaping on our friend.
NEW ORLEANS -- The imposing presence of Robert A. Cerasoli as the city's first inspector general is the clearest sign that Hurricane Katrina's changes wrought on New Orleans in 2005 were not limited to physical devastation. By declaring war on municipal corruption, Cerasoli has signaled that life in the Big Easy no longer will be so easy.
During the push to privatize Social Security, the idea's foes were accused of not trusting the American people to manage their own money. The naysayers prevailed, and aren't we glad.
The most anti-conservative rhetoric against conservative talk radio these days is coming from supposedly free-market conservatives. It's disgusting.
For the next month or so, the conservative valentines will arrive every day at the headquarters of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
Some things in life are quite simple. Here's one of them: Sen. John McCain is going to be our next president.
Hillary Clinton has blown an almost sure shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. Having surrendered the lead to Obama, she is not likely ever to regain it.
A century ago, actually about 26 years ago, the powers in the Democratic Party decided it was time to take back control of the nominating process from the often derided crazies who had been leading the Party straight down the tubes with their choices of McGovern and Carter. Of course, Carter did win, but that was in 1976.
Attendance has been falling at America's National Parks since 1987. Blame videophilia, says a Nature Conservancy report.
I believe that Barack Obama will defeat Hillary and win the Democratic nomination. I think that this weekend's victories in states as diverse as Washington State, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Maine illustrates his national appeal and demonstrates Hillary's inability to win in states without large immigrant and Latino populations.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Which Democrat really won Super Tuesday? Thanks to the Democratic Party's proportional representation, it is not easy to say a week later. Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama ran a virtual dead heat for delegates that day in 22 states clearly stacked in Obama's favor. But the way Obama lost California raises the specter of the dreaded Bradley Effect.
Well, Super Tuesday is over, and now we have two major party presidential nominees. That's the lead sentence I thought five weeks ago I'd be writing for this column. But the 33-day round of caucuses and primaries that seemed likely to produce decisions after 23 states voted on Super Tuesday have failed to deliver.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sen. John McCain's managers, fearing an unfavorable reaction at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Thursday, wanted to precede his speech with a video of Ronald Reagan praising McCain.
