election 2008

Scandals, voting trends and helpless leadership portend electoral defeat for the GOP in the upcoming election.

A Republican Senate candidate is embroiled in the Jack Abramoff scandal. A Republican congressman is caught up in a tawdry sexual affair. And across the country, from Illinois to Louisiana to last night's special election in a deep-red district in Mississippi, which Democrat Travis Childers won handily, Republicans are losing races they expected to win. The 2008 election may be all about "change" -- but it has an awfully familiar feel to it. For the GOP, is this 2006 all over again?

John McCain delivered a speech on his judicial philosophy on Tuesday.

It's no surprise that liberals hated John McCain's speech on the judiciary on Tuesday, while conservatives (mostly) liked it. But it's disappointing that the speech didn't break any new ground in the debate over judicial nominations. McCain can be refreshingly clear when it comes to subjects that our political debate tends to constrict. Not this time.

Barack Obama won a resounding victory in the North Carolina primary, and Hillary Clinton barely edged him out in Indiana.

In a different, bygone era, Hillary Clinton's loss in North Carolina last night probably wouldn't have inspired the pundit class to pronounce her campaign finally and officially toast. After all, there's still no plausible way for Barack Obama to assemble the 2,025 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination without persuading at least a hundred or so of the famously uncommitted superdelegates to leap on board his bandwagon. And there's nothing in the Democratic Party's rules that promises the nomination to the candidate who's merely leading in the delegate count or the popular vote. If anything, it's the reverse: A system that requires the winner to marshal a supermajority of delegates rather than a mere majority, and that throws a slew of superdelegates into the mix, would seem to be designed to have close races decided at the convention, rather than by a whisker-thin majority in a voting system that, were it designed differently, might have Hillary in the lead instead.

Jeremiah Wright's recent media blitz has complicated Barack Obama's efforts to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.

To describe Jeremiah Wright as charismatic is to understate his extraordinary magnetism, which drew Barack Obama to Christianity twenty years ago. Sure, Wright is a divisive figure, but he's a uniter as well -- embracing gays and lesbians as well as militant Black Muslims, and building a kind of rainbow coalition of the excluded, which inspired Obama (and countless others) to go forth and perform good works. In turning on his pastor, Obama claims that Wright has changed. Could it be that Obama has changed?

Barack Obama addressed a rally at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one week before that state's Democratic primary.

It was a college crowd: young women with Kool Aid-dyed hair, mop-topped men in novelty bow-ties, kids wearing t-shirts that advertised ironic slogans ("Super Jew!") and summer holidays to Angkor Wat -- all grooving to "Big Yellow Taxi." But it was also more. A scan of the seats revealed lots of normal people as well, including a robust and enthusiastic contingent of African-Americans, thrilled to be in an Obama coalition, and by all evidence grooving to the Joni Mitchell just as to the Motown.

The coalition looked broad and deep. It did not, however, look like America, or even North Carolina. MORE

While his Democratic rivals continued their battle, John McCain spent last week on a tour of America's "forgotten places" - most of them Democratic strongholds.

Was McCain's tour, which took him to Selma and Appalachia, the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and Youngstown, Ohio, a serious play for constituencies (the working poor, black and white alike) that go reliably for Democrats? Was it a cynical attempt to woo white suburbanites by burnishing his image as a different kind of conservative? Or was it just another play for free publicity - like his "biography tour" earlier in April - by a campaign that's short on funds and looking for ways to get the media to stop obsessing over Obama-Hillary long enough to give their candidate some airtime?

Hillary Clinton wins the Pennsylvania primary with 55% of the vote.

Does Hillary Clinton represent the future of the Democratic party? At first glance, the idea seems laughable. As Ruy Teixeira has observed, the white working class - the core of Clinton's support in Pennsylvania and in the Democratic electorate writ large - is shrinking as a share of the U.S. population, while the mass upper middle class, a crucially important of Obama's base (and one that enjoys outsized cultural and political influence), is expanding at a rapid clip. And though Clinton has won a large share of the growing Latino vote, it's possible - as a number of Obama partisans have suggested - that this could be a function of some combination of '90s nostalgia and a reluctance on the part of new immigrants and second-generation Americans to embrace a politics of hope and change, both effects that will presumably erode over time.

Even with the Democratic Party locked in a fierce civil war, John McCain still hasn't pulled ahead of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in national polls.

The Democratic primary campaign - divisive, bitter, and seemingly endless - has made many Republicans optimistic about their party's prospects for retaining the White House this November. But the numbers still seem to tell a different story -- and not just secondary indicators like the enormous gap between McCain's fundraising and the dollars his Democratic rivals are raking in, or the underlying economic realities that will make this a tough year for the GOP no matter what. The polls themselves aren't running McCain's way, or at least not to the extent that would justify the current wave of conservative optimism about November.

Barack Obama's remarks concerning the supposed bitterness of working-class Pennsylvanians have caused considerable controversy.

Was Barack Obama wrong to suggest that a sense of bitterness and disappointment has driven working-class voters to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"? Note that Obama was making a number of discrete, subtle points. First, he was offering an implicit critique of the Clinton Administration, which made promises that were left unfulfilled. Second, he was trying to offer a rationale for holding views that his audience of affluent liberals might find distasteful. And third, he was making the eminently defensible and almost banal observation that people who are disappointed by high politics will often turn to primary loyalties -- the traditional, familiar truths of faith and family that endure when all else changes.

Bill Clinton's blunders on the campaign trail have tarnished his reputation as a political virtuoso.

After he made yet another campaign-trail blunder, Hillary Clinton has told her husband to back off. Many in the Democratic party, even those in Bill's corner, would like him to back off, too. The debate about his political legacy is effectively over, and no one but a handful of prominent Democrats will argue that his presidency was salutary for the Democratic party. Present circumstances reinforce that judgment. Bill has been pilloried for his conduct in this campaign. We've seen his bad side -- temper tantrums, parochialism, arrogance, promiscuity with the facts -- and none of his good side. His post-presidency cocoon, gilded in no small part by the American taxpayer, seems to have left him ill-prepared for the modern news cycle. He's certainly no longer his party's best political strategist.

Campaigning for her mother on college campuses, Chelsea Clinton has faced repeated questions from students about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Chelsea's answer has evolved since the question was first posed at Indiana's Butler University late in March. On that occasion, she replied with a terse: "I do not think that is any of your business." At N.C. State, her response was more elaborate. "I think that is something that is personal to my family; I'm sure there are things that are personal to your family that you don't think are anyone else's business, either," she told the questioner, but then added: "On a larger point, I don't think you should vote for or against my mother because of my father." At Purdue this week, she had a "let's talk about the issues" answer ready that was worthy of her Dad: "If that's what you want to vote on, that's what you should vote on. But I think there are other people (who are) going to vote on things like health care and economics."

Michael Bloomberg decides against running for president as an independent.

So who cares, right? Isn't Bloomberg just a rich dilettante? Actually, no. He was, by a wide margin, the best qualified of all the imaginable presidential candidates. Granted, he's not the kind of political figure who sends reporters into crazed reveries, and as a mouthy lower-middle-class kid from Medford, Massachusetts he doesn't embody America's changetastic post-ethnic future. He is simply the best mayor New York has ever had. Bloomberg's two terms have been marked by impressive improvements in the city's fiscal health, the crime rate, education, and environmental quality. And he accomplished all this by charming and disarming the same entrenched interests his predecessors failed to break through direct confrontation.