The biggest loser in this 2008 election is obvious even before the first vote has been counted: conventional wisdom. Remember last year when Hillary Rodham Clinton was considered the shoo-in for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, after which she was supposed to waltz into the Oval Office?
It is time for this election to be over. It is time because it has been going on for what feels like a lifetime, because the final days have been full of noise and fury and very little light, and because we need to start solving problems rather than just debating them.
Do newspaper endorsements influence voters? I refer to the candidate picks printed on the biodegradable news products that digital and cable commentators dismiss as "old media" but talk about nothing but.
Barack Obama has waged a brilliant, disciplined campaign for the White House. To the extent that Obama's campaign demonstrates his strategic and organizational abilities, the junior Illinois senator has the potential to be a great leader.
Writing a post-mortem for John McCain's presidential candidacy would be premature. But if and when that moment comes next week, toxic staff infection will be listed as a primary cause of death.
These are our 2008 election projections as of Thursday, October 30. We will make final adjustments and tweaks on Monday afternoon, November 3, and post them to the website. At that point, we will attempt to call the few remaining toss-ups.
As Obama's election has seemed to become more likely in the past six weeks, a quiet but public debate has arisen among both Republicans and Democrats that wonders which Obama we might get.
I have one word of advice for the fancy folks at the Republican National Committee who shelled out $75,000 at Neiman Marcus and $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue, among other places, to dress Sarah Palin and family: Loehmann's.
With victory in sight, Barack Obama's supporters are predicting that he will give us a new New Deal. To see what that might mean, let's look back on the original New Deal.
The 1949 movie of Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" ends with Patricia Neal elevating to the top of a new skyscraper to greet its godlike architect, Gary Cooper.
I've long considered myself a bad Republican. During the Bush administration, for example, I've felt free to whack George W. and Republicans in Congress for passing big-spending bills, such as their pork-rich 2002 farm bill, the underfunded prescription-drug bill and earmark spending. But in 2008, I find that I'm a piker in the bad Republican department.
Back in early 1981, when I went to Washington to work for President Reagan, one of the architects of supply-side economics, Columbia University's Robert Mundell, visited my OMB budget-bureau office inside the White House complex.
What will an Obama administration and a Congress with increased Democratic majorities do? That's a relevant question, given the Democrats' leads in the polls. And it's a little hard to answer, given the financial crisis that has been raging and the recession that seems to be ahead.
My Democratic friends want to know when they can stop worrying.
Every week it seems to get worse for House Republicans. As we will demonstrate below, we have expanded the number of possible to likely net gains for Democrats from our previous 15 to 20 to a new and rather astounding 22 to 27 seats.
Wherever John McCain appears on the stump in these waning days of the presidential campaign, he is always accompanied by his imaginary friend "Joe the Plumber," but it is the specter of Karl Marx that lurks just offstage.
Back in 2002 and 2004, the Crystal Ball brought misery to Democrats and joy to Republicans, as we projected the solid GOP victories that occurred in those years. The cycle of politics is not to be denied, and so in 2006 and now in 2008, there is a role reversal.
As the election enters its last two weeks, social populism wars with economic populism to become the major outlet for American anger and angst and to satisfy the demand for change. In his book The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin articulates the difference between these two types of populism: economic and social.
Losing a presidential race is not an easy thing. Losing the primary is one thing. But making it to the finals, so close you can almost taste it, and then watching it slip through your fingers is one of those experiences from which few people ever fully recover.
Once again in Ohio, the presidential polls are tied and its 20 electoral votes up for grabs. Such scenarios generally don't lend themselves to gentle politics.
