One of the things that I’ve started noticing is that some Democrats are starting a meme that states that John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, is a racist. John Henke, guest blogging over at Megan McArdle’s blog notes that two Democratic bloggers are starting the line that McCain is playing from a racist playbook. Of course, then there is this last paragraph in today’s Washington Post: Later this spring, McCain will embark on a two-week tour of places where, his advisers...

Just when you think this election season can’t get any stranger, well, it does. Two news publications are floating the idea of former Vice President, former 2000 Presidential candidate, and Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore could become the compromise Democratic nominee. Joe Klein explains why this doesn’t seem so outlandish: Let’s say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let’s also assume—and this may be...

Around 1977 or so, my dad and I started going to this barbershop on Detroit Street in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. It was called Eddie and Earl’s Barbershop and it was your typical African American barbershop, if such a thing exists. Black men from all walks of life would come to this shop to get their hair cut, especially for church on Sunday. While I was waiting my turn and reading copies of Jet and Ebony magazines, I remember seeing a poster that caught my attention. It read: BLACK...

Well, considering that I am an African American pastor, I should say something about the whole affair concerning the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Barack Obama’s church. I have to state, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am an ordained pastor in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and also have standing in the United Church of Christ, the denomination that Rev. Wright and Trinity belong to. Now, that I’ve got that out of the way,...

John McCain, the maverick Senator who was left for dead a few months ago, is now the Republican nominee. So, now comes the hard part for McCain: trying to keep moderates and independents attracted to him and not bug the hard right too much. There is a temptation among those of us who are moderates to say that it’s time for the conservatives to “sit down and shut up.” Their candidate did not win, John McCain did, and they aren’t going to vote for the Dems anyway. Indeed,...

A few bloggers and other media folk have noticed that this presidential campaign seems to strangely follow the last two seasons of NBC’s The West Wing, where a fictional presidential campaign took place. According to Slate, the similarities of the character Matt Santos, an idealistic Latino congressman from Texas and Senator Barack Obama is not by accident. Check out this video from Slate to learn more. I feel the need to go to a store and buy those last two seasons.

It’s been nearly seven months since the bridge collapse here in Minnesota. Right or wrong, it has become a symbol of our crumbling transportation infastructure. For several years, transportation has been a burning issue. We were slow to light rail transit, and our freeways, built when the Twin Cities was a much smaller metro area, are full. Governor Tim Pawlenty (a potential VP candidate for John McCain), has taken a strong “no new taxes” pledge to the delight of hard core conservatives....

Emily Yoffee has an article up about the personalities of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. If you’ve ever done Myers-Briggs, you will understand it. For the record, my personality type is INTJ.

Barack Obama fascinates me. He can give speeches like no one else in a long time. As I’ve said before, he reminds me of many a black preacher I heard growing up. He’s a black man that seems to appeal beyond African Americans to persons from various walks of life and states that have low concentrations of African Americans. But he also troubles me. Not in some sinister way, but in the way Centrist, including a few Republicans are falling in love with him. He seems to be picking up...

You want to know why moderate Republicans are dying? It’s not because conservatives have run them out (which they have). It’s because we lack stamina. We lack backbone. We are more interested in our own wants and needs than in looking at the bigger picture. We see politics more as enterainment instead of hard work. The far right got to where they are because they had passion. They had a vision for the country and saw the GOP as the vehicle to get them there. They weren’t just...

As I was coming home tonight, I listened to some of John McCain’s victory speech after winning today’s Potomac Primaries. I found the speech interesting, because it seems to offer a window into John McCain’s philosophy and character. I could be totally wrong, but he seems to offer a more decent and civil conservatism that is far different from the stuff we are used to hearing. He does go after the Democrats, but he seems to express what is wrong with their ideas instead of saying...

Howard Fineman has an excellent piece on the folly that was Mitt Romney’s campaign. The thing is, if he had run as the fiscal conservative, social moderate that he did in the past, he might have been a contender. I certainly would have considered him. But his willingness to throw gays under the bus in order to get the GOP nomination made him untouchable for me and probably for many other moderates who might have liked his managerial experience. But he gave up trying to woo moderates and...

Barack Obama seems to invoke two feelings in me: one of extreme pride and one of a growing doubt. Let me explain. Speaking not as a Republican, but as an African-American, I am extremely proud to see a black man running as a serious candidate for President. This isn’t Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, who ran campaigns that were basically protest campaigns, but this is a real candidate with a real, bona-fide shot at the White House. Only a generation or two after the civil rights movement, this...

Looking at some of the exit polling from the South Carolina and Florida primaries, I’ve noticed that John McCain is winning the few GOP moderates and liberals still left (like me) as well as pro-choicers and the like. It seems that the Senator from Arizona has been able to make the long-forgotten moderate wing of the party a factor in his path to the GOP nomination leaving the conservative wing to either follow or get out of the way. In Friday’s Washington Post, EJ Dionne spells it...

Even though I’m a Republican, I’m not a big fan of David Frum. That said, he is starting to make some sense lately about the future of the GOP. In his op-ed found in Friday’s New York Times, he sets up an interesting conversation among the three wings of the party. And what an interesting chat it is. There is a lot of meaty stuff to glean from this op-ed, but what struck me was his take on the social conservatives: Of course you can’t understand why we care about the marriage...