The selection of a vice president is not only an exercise in political handicapping but also a national rite of statecraft. Candidates, advisers, pundits and assorted experts try to calculate the ethnic, geographic, gender and ideological characteristics of potential running mates, but what this choice actually reveals is the character of a presidential nominee.
A remarkable thing just happened in the people's party. Democrats have chosen a candidate, in the year 2008, who does not have a plan for universal health coverage.
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke made big news Tuesday by singling out the weak foreign-exchange value of the U.S. dollar as the principal culprit in "the unwelcome rise in import prices and consumer price inflation."
John McCain needs to go on the offensive against Barack Obama over the Iraq war. Polls tell us that his support for the Iraq invasion is one of voters' chief problems with McCain. Obama's chief credential, on the other hand, is his early, consistent opposition to the war.
As I write this, the last voters in the last states in this seemingly endless primary process are heading to the polls, even as various news organizations have already announced that Barack Obama has reached the shifting magic number to claim a majority of the delegates.
The woman who shouted "McCain in '08" at the Democratic rules committee was speaking for a multitude. After mounting for months, female anger over the choreographed dumping on Hillary Clinton and her supporters has exploded -- and party loyalty be damned.
In Scott McClellan's purported tell-all memoir of his trials as President George W. Bush's press secretary, he virtually ignores Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's role leaking to me Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA employee.
"It's the economy, stupid," James Carville famously said during the 1992 campaign, when a young Bill Clinton was running against the other President Bush. The same could be said during this presidential campaign. The headlines are full of economic bad news -- mortgage foreclosures, the collapse of an investment bank, higher gas and food prices and lower home prices.
Republican insiders see the bitter criticism in Scott McClellan's memoir, "What Happened," as a payback for his abrupt firing as White House press secretary in the spring of 2006.
Tuesday's Wall Street Journal strongly editorializes against the Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade plan that allegedly will solve our alleged problem with global warming -- now called climate change.
Put disadvantaged teens into summer jobs. Hook them into the world of work. They'll come home with new skills, discipline, contacts and, yes, money.
Maybe one of the most intriguing - and nefarious - aspects of this long-running Democratic presidential campaign is that the legitimacy of the system itself has come into question.
With the long and contentious Democratic nomination race finally winding down, the attention of the media and the public is beginning to shift to the general election. In November, voters will face a choice between two rather atypical presidential candidates.
When the Democratic Party's Rules and Bylaws Committee meets on May 31 to determine the status of the votes cast in the Michigan and Florida primaries, its members should try to look past self-serving campaign arguments and silly attempts to save face by bumbling party leaders.
When Hillary Clinton last Friday said, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June (1968) in California," she was not saying anything she had not publicly declared earlier.
There is a very easy way for Barack Obama's team to avoid floor fights at the Democratic National Convention.
The recent loss of formerly deep-red congressional districts to Democrats is supposed to be awful news for John McCain. Actually, the opposite could be true.
Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann, whose Roman Catholic archdiocese covers northeast Kansas, on May 9 called on Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to stop taking Communion until she disowns her support for the "serious moral evil" of abortion.
As Barack Obama makes his slow but steady way toward the Democratic nomination, the assumption in the admiring precincts of the press corps is that voters have dismissed as irrelevant his longtime association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a strong favorite to be elected to the Senate this year, has told associates that he is being considered as Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate. He did not indicate whether he would be receptive to such an offer.
