While the presidential candidates were debating in Nashville on Tuesday night, the Asian stock markets were selling off by 10 percent. Earlier in the day, the U.S. market plunged by 500 points. These were big-time drops, yet presidential debaters never talk about the stock market. Nashville was no exception.
All season, political observers have been speculating when, if ever, the Electoral College and the state and national polls would reflect the basic pro-Democratic fundamentals of the presidential election year.
I'm happy to give my friend Madeleine Albright credit for the line, as Starbucks apparently has. But the truth is I've been using it for years in speeches to women about how we need to help each other get ahead in business, politics and academia.
There was a joke going around conservative circles during the mid-1960s that we conservatives were warned that if we voted for Barry Goldwater, America would get deeper into the Vietnam War. The punch line was that we did vote for Goldwater and America did get deeper into Vietnam.
Political independents now rank health care second among the issues they most want the presidential candidates to discuss, according to a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll for September. The No. 1 issue for independents, as well as for Democrats and Republicans, is the economy.
The only way Congress could pass a $700 billion economic bailout package last week was to spend an extra $110 billion that the federal government does not have.
As reform measures go, Proposition 11 -- the redistricting reform measure -- is hardly a transformational law likely to supercharge activists (of any political stripe) eager to make Sacramento more effective and more accountable to the public.
Politics ordinarily has a certain predictability. Yet presidential politics this year has often seemed to resemble what science writer James Gleick described in his book "Chaos."
She passed. He passed. Palin fared better going against Joe Biden than Katie Couric.
For all the Republicans' complaints about Gwen Ifill, the moderator's questions were softballs compared to what Sarah Palin faced from Katie Couric. Ifill did not demand that Palin list (OK, how about just name more than one?) Supreme Court decisions. She did not push on the issue of foreign policy experience.
The presidential debate season is just underway. The polls are in flux. The issue agenda--which has already shifted in the last month from the Sarah Palin effect to "lipstick on a pig" to the nation's worst economic crisis since the Depression--may shift again before Election Day.
On the morning after Senate passage of the Treasury rescue bill stocks are down 200 points. So there is no silver bullet to our economic woes.
Accomplished Googlers can probably find the original talking points off which dozens of conservatives made essentially the same case: The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the financial crisis.
The initial failure to pass bailout legislation reflected a political system as bereft of confidence as the financial markets. President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had no credibility to match the arrogance of their initial demand for absolute power in distributing $700 billion of public assistance (the old synonym for welfare).
You know what? Hank Paulson may not be the most powerful financial person in the country right now. That honor goes to Sheila Bair, the chairman of the FDIC.
Who do I blame for this financial disaster? Let me count the villains. Start with President Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
There are a few changes to report in the nation's Senate races since we last reviewed them in July-almost all of them in favor of the Democratic candidates. Yet the fundamental outlook hasn't changed terribly much. The Democrats will pick up a fair number of seats to pad their slim 51-to-49 margin. They are defending a mere 12 seats, and all their incumbents are running again. The Republicans have drawn the short straw, trying to protect 23 seats with five incumbents retiring in a tough political environment for the GOP.
What we've all witnessed this week was more than a failure of Wall Street or of Washington, it was a catastrophic failure of branding.
Trailing six points in Rasmussen’s poll, having fallen four points since he suspended his campaign last week, the question for John McCain is: Haven’t you learned anything?
There is nothing new under the sun. The United States has endured major financial panics in 1837, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1929, 1933 and now
