NEW YORK — Hillary wore white.
Stepping into the klieg lights, she was — finally! — the blushing bride of the Democratic Party. Smiling, waving, tilting her head, clutching her fist to her chest as she surveyed her adorable fans. She stepped to the lectern and gazed lovingly into the teleprompter.
Finally! Voters have another choice. The Libertarian Party nominated two socially tolerant but fiscally conservative former governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld.
While Hillary Clinton still leads Donald Trump in most national polling, her margin is not what it once was: She’s up about five points in the HuffPost Pollster average, down from nine points in mid-April, and she’s up just two points in the RealClearPolitics average, also down from nine points seven weeks ago. Now that she’s the presumptive nominee, Clinton will hope to restore those numbers to their prior luster.
"How is your daughter doing?" is one of the most complicated questions I've had to answer.
As we find ourselves at the end of the primary season, we can all look back in wonder: What hath the voters wrought? Last summer when he announced a candidacy, almost no political professional picked Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee — yet here he is. And no one we know thought that the big, complicated GOP field of contenders would sort itself out many weeks before the small group of Democrats — but Trump has been in general election mode for some time while Hillary Clinton has had a devil of a time shaking off a persistent foe.
Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge?
No contemporary political issue has been more controversial, or has been subject to more dubious analyses, than immigration.
Among the many disturbing signs of our times are conservatives and libertarians of high intelligence and high principles who are advocating government programs that relieve people of the necessity of working to provide their own livelihoods.
Let's look back on the primary campaign -- completed for Republicans, still ongoing for Democrats -- and see if we can identify what Sherlock Holmes referred to as dogs that didn't bark.
"Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order."
On June 7, five states — California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota — will hold primary elections. It is the last major day of primaries of 2016, and with the Republican race already decided, almost all of the attention will be focused on the Democratic side, where 676 pledged (elected) delegates will be at stake in those five states.
President Obama and GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan want to expand it. Tax preparation companies and illegal immigrants are cashing in on it. Fraudsters have found bottomless ways to exploit it.
Politically speaking, nobody ever went broke beating up the media.
Add this truism to the long, long list of techniques and tactics that Donald Trump instinctively understands at a deep guttural level that nobody in media or politics seems to grasp. Even now, a year into Mr. Trump’s Presidential Spectacular.
The first step in inventing something shouldn't be waiting for government approval. What would ever get done?
"Regulators like to see new types of law and regulation imposed upon the internet and emerging technologies," warns Adam Thierer, author of "Permissionless Innovation."
Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.
Nearly a century ago, in 1920, the Census Bureau caused a ruckus when it announced that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in cities -- even though its definition of a city included every hamlet with a population of 2,500 and above.
In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union -- in terms Americans can understand.
It was conventional wisdom among the political cognoscenti during most of the primary season that Donald Trump could not win the general election. The evidence seemed strong.
Over 12 months of polling from May 2015 to April 2016, Hillary Clinton ran ahead of Trump in 63 national polls, while Trump led her in only six and tied her in three. Polls in the dozen or so 2012 target states showed similar results.
"Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group ... death rates in this group have been rising, not falling."
The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata in The New York Times of a stunning study by the husband-wife team of Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case.
With only a few weeks left in the 2016 primary campaign, a lot of liberal pundits and Democratic Party leaders are getting very nervous about the outlook for the general election. To almost everyone’s surprise, Donald Trump has secured the Republican presidential nomination while Hillary Clinton is still locked in a contentious battle with Bernie Sanders. Although Clinton holds a nearly insurmountable lead over Sanders in pledged delegates, Sanders continues to attack Clinton and win primaries.
