John McCain is taking his lumps for the decision to make Sarah Palin his running mate. The Washington Post said its endorsement of Barack Obama was simplified by McCain’s “irresponsible selection” of Palin “who is not ready to be president.” The New York Times declared that McCain’s choice of someone “so evidently unfit for the [...]

The Washington Post’s Oct. 17 editorial endorsing Barack Obama was no shocker. Surprising, though, was its barely-breathing treatment of the Supreme Court as an issue. Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 and Justice Ruth B. Ginsberg 75, so who gets to name successors in the next four years is critical. The Post’s lengthy overall appraisal [...]

So sad, and so predictable. Retired general Colin Powell makes a detailed and reasoned case for his support of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. He praises his friend John McCain, but laments the direction of the Republican Party, the negative tone of its campaign and the readiness of Sarah Palin. The Republican military [...]

In true Halloween spirit, the latest message from the McCain campaign to voters is this: The goblins will get you if you don’t watch out. And the biggest goblin of all is socialism. What in blazes is socialism, and why should we be afraid of it? In its extreme form, socialism means total government control [...]

I’ve written several times recently about how the press, including the leading news organizations, has been running away from damaging stories about John McCain, hiding them. The response is mixed: In emails today and yesterday, a former colleague thanked me but a Naval Reserve lieutenant commander said I was writing drivel. Interestingly, several people took [...]

John McCain doesn’t seem interested in dealing with very serious questions about his years as a Navy pilot, his time as a prisoner of war and why as a U.S. Senator, according to writer Sidney Schanberg, he “has worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike [...]

George J. Esseff, Sr., who describes himself ” as one of the world’s most successful Titanium entrepreneurs,” bought a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize his “sincere recommendation” to the heads of the three largest television networks. “If you truly want to restore the credibility of your News Bureaus by getting back [...]

It can’t be easy for Joe Biden. After all, how can years of Senate experience match up against the biggest celebrity on the political scene? When Biden came to Charlotte, N.C., Sunday night, his tone sometimes veered toward the dramatic, but his message was meat and potatoes. Even the crowd’s chant of “Let’s go, Joe!” [...]

Fact checking the presidential candidates is so 20 minutes ago. The fact is, facts don’t seem to matter anymore. Certain political apparatchiks have learned over the years that the effectiveness of a given statement has remarkably little to do with whether it’s true or not. How much it gets repeated by others is a much [...]

Few questions Charlie Gibson may ask of Sarah Palin when he interviews the Republican vice presidential nominee for ABC News this week could be more fundamental than this one: Is the Office of the Vice President fully part of the Executive Branch? Palin’s answer—or non-answer—could tell voters whether she views the office she seeks in [...]