After we heard that AK governor Sarah Palin had been chosen as McCain’s running mate, I wrote that I am “anxious to see how Palin handles the klieg lights of the national media circus.” Well, it seems that the McCain campaign may simply see to it that she doesn’t have to face the national media anytime soon. Marc Ambinder reports that a “senior McCain campaign official” told him “Gov. Sarah Palin won’t submit to a formal interview anytime soon. She...

Well, the campaign continues. Back in January, I never would have thought that the Obama-Clinton race would have gone on this long. Iowa was a mere eight weeks ago, and there are now about six and a half weeks left before the next big contest in Pennsylvania on 22 April. Seems unbelievable when it’s put like that, doesn’t it? My discomfort with the Clinton campaign continues to grow more intense. Their “kitchen sink” strategy against Senator Obama is disheartening, and their...

The field has narrowed a bit since the last time I posted on the presidential candidates’ reading choices (back in May, when they were asked to name the most recent fiction book they’d read). This week, Katie Couric asked the candidates “If you were elected president, what is the one book other than the Bible you would think is essential to have along?” (In fact I should note that the field has even narrowed since she asked the question: Giuliani and Edwards are included). The...

Hillary Clinton’s “Meet the Press” appearance this morning was one of the most overt displays of the old Clintonian attack politics I’ve seen in this campaign. Her blatant and transparent attempts to blame Obama’s campaign for “deliberately distorting” unfortunate remarks she, her husband, and others associated with her campaign have been making in recent days were, frankly, sickening and unworthy of a candidate for high national office. Last Monday, Mrs....

Former OK senator David Boren was on NPR yesterday (audio here) to talk about Monday’s tripartisan conference in Tulsa, where various former and current centrist officeholders will discuss the potential for a “government of national unity.”

As I was watching the Iowa results last night, a friend asked me what the Latin root of the word ‘caucus’ was. I had no idea, but vaguely remembered knowing at some point in the distant past that ‘caucus,’ while sounding vaguely Latin [or Greek] in origin, wasn’t. So off to the OED I went, and found this etymological explanation: “[Arose in New England: origin obscure. Alleged to have been used in Boston U.S. before 1724; quotations go back to 1763. Already in...

From McSweeney’s, “The Lesser-Known Slogans of Political Moderates“.

[I see in things I've been reading since I started typing this post that others are using the same headline, but it has to be done]. The Boston Globe confirms today that Mitt Romney did not actually see (with his eyes, anyway) his father march with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1960s … and now in a bit of grammatical contortion not seen since the days of “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”, Romney says he was using the word “saw” in a “figurative...

On 6 December, Mitt Romney delivered a speech, “Faith in America,” in which he tried to allay certain qualms some may have with his Mormon faith and to lay out his own views on the proper roles of religion and religious expression in American public life. He presented what seemed to me an incorrect and frankly dangerous interpretation of those roles, and trotted out selective readings of our country’s founders to bolster his arguments. And he’s not the only one. Romney said...

In his new book A More Perfect Constitution (Walker & Company, 2007) Larry Sabato, the founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics lays out a series of twenty-three proposals for constitutional revision. These amendments would, he argues, bring the Constitution into the twenty-first century by making the structures of our government more fair, more representative, and more effective. Most of us are instinctively leery of major structural changes to the Constitution,...

D.C. Federal District Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has struck down a narrow portion of Executive Order 13233, a 2001 directive from President Bush which sharply limited future access to presidential and vice-presidential records. The ruling [PDF] came yesterday in the case of American Historical Association et al. v. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Archivist of the United States, which has been working its way through the legal pipeline since 2004. While Kollar-Kotelly...

The power company responsible for much of the Boston area, NSTAR, recently announced that beginning in January (pending approval by state regulators), 1.1 million customers in Boston and beyond will be able to sign up for NSTAR Green and buy half or all of their “power directly from a wind farm in upstate New York and a second under development in Maine.” A report in the Boston Globe notes that while other Massachusetts utilities have offered small-scale green-power options, NSTAR’s...

He appears on the cover of Time with Arnold Schwarzenegger with the headline “Who Needs Washington?” He’s the subject of a BusinessWeek special report, “The CEO Mayor: How New York’s Mike Bloomberg is creating a new model for public service that places pragmatism before politics.” He’s rumored to have recently had a “long, private discussion” with former Dem senator David Boren about the possibilities of an independent run in ’08. On Monday,...

Researchers from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, and School of Cinematic Arts have unveiled The ReDistricting Game, a free online tool which “exposes how redistricting works, how it is abused, and how it adversely affects our democracy. It provides hands-on understanding of the real redistricting process, including drawing district maps and interacting with party bosses, congresspeople, citizen groups and...

Edward W. Brooke, the first African-American to be popularly elected to the Senate, tells the story of his life in a new memoir, Bridging the Divide: My Life (Rutgers University Press, 2007). A committed centrist who worked throughout his career to find solutions to some of this country’s most pressing problems and injustices, Brooke has written a candid political autobiography and offers important insights into the state of contemporary American political discourse. After attending Howard...

I’ve expounded at some length before on the state of coinage in America, but will comment again using David Margolick’s intersting NYT op/ed from yesterday as a starting point (I thought it appropriate to wait until today, Lincoln’s birthday, to weigh in). Margolick’s piece begins as quite an interesting brief history of the Lincoln penny, discussing well the great clamor its introduction caused back in 1909. “Only when you consider the Lincoln penny’s glorious...

In case you missed it, Senator Barack Obama officially announced his candidacy for president this morning from Springfield. It was a good speech; he did himself proud, and he got the crowd fired up on what looked like an awfully cold day out there. The line I liked best, and one I hadn’t heard before, was about how it might seem rather presumptuous of him to announce for president after only having been in the Senate for two years, “I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways...

You can now sign up over at Unity08 to be a “Founding Delegate” for their 2008 national presidential primary. More information here. UPDATE Sam Waterston on Unity08

There is growing buzz and increasing concern that the President’s Iraq speech Wednesday night may have signaled an important and – in my view – incredibly troubling stage in the Iraq War (even beyond the “surge”). Steve Clemons reports significant speculation in the capital that Bush recently “sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.” There was some discussion...

Former Vermont Senator Robert Stafford, a strong voice within the GOP for environmental-protection legislation and support of education (Stafford loans are named for him), has died at age 93. Stafford, who served two years as Vermont’s governor, went on to represent the Green Mountain State for eleven years in the House and seventeen years in the Senate; he retired in 1989. A champion of clean air and clean water laws, Stafford organized a successful override of President Reagan’s veto...