Patrick O'Hannigan
In an election where pilots face off against lawyers, one major party thinks we citizens are gifted, and the other thinks we are afflicted. Consider the commentary rising like marsh gas from the swamps of Salon, where Cintra Wilson harbors…
Even the dimmest Democratic strategist now realizes that beating a “lifelong” Yankees fan with roots in Illinois may not have been enough of a tutorial in how to stop real agents of change. But campaign operatives spend years honing political…
Ralph Waldo Emerson was only half right: While foolish consistency moonlights as the hobgoblin of little minds, it is also the Holy Grail of varsity-level democratic politics, because voters want to know where a candidate stands, especially when he or…
Avoiding chaos and deferring to mature judgment are worthy strategies for any party seeking to govern a freedom-loving country, but I’m beginning to think that in spite of the back-room deliberations that their “superdelegate” rules are supposed to support, Democrats…
With only three years in the U.S. Senate on the federal portion of his resume, Barack Obama’s legislative record would be short work for any origami class in the country. He has never won a national election, and competes for…
Being an American of Irish and Mexican heritage has certain advantages, and one of them is that I do not usually fret about the pronouncements of Anglican leaders. John Henry Newman had it indelicately but indubitably right some 120 years…
Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton have coasted in one important respect so far this election season: none of them has had much practice fielding challenging questions about the policy implications of their religious beliefs. No such respite has…
In a November 11 speech to 3,500 delegates attending the General Assembly of United Jewish Communities in Nashville, Tennessee, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean asserted, among other things, that “The Democratic Party believes that everybody in this room ought…
Lightning strobes the gray sky and thunder booms like artillery over parts of North Carolina as I write this, but my gratitude for the rare morning storm is tempered by the thought that friends in Southern California need straight-down rain…
Naomi Wolf has diplomas from Yale University and New College, Oxford, but as another feminist once noted, she is “an intelligent woman ill-served by her education.” If Wolf is a serious thinker, then Terry Pratchett has never written a great…
