As a grandfather of eight inquisitive kids, 14 and under, I’ve had my share of squirmy moments. “Pop, what’s Viagra?” I hope now that none of my grandkids quiz me about Levi Johnston and what exactly he did that led to his warm greeting by John McCain at the Republican convention. Some in the media [...]

A staple of so-called “gotcha” journalism — in which news reporters seem to celebrate the missteps of politicians — is the gaffe, the wrong words spoken at the wrong time, the off-base comment, the politically insensitive offhand remark. So it is that talkative people like Sen. Joe Biden are called gaffe-prone by the news media, [...]

Boy, that was a close call wasn’t it? What with Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama selecting Sen. Joe Biden as a running mate, and Mitt Romney and Sen. Joe Lieberman in the wings — awaiting a nod from Republican nominee Sen. John McCain — it looked like the news media might have to knuckle down [...]

A couple of months ago, in the seniors column I write on my day job for Newsday, I rejected age as an issue in the presidential campaign. But I added, “if age is to be a factor in the coming race… perhaps the most important issue may be whom Sen. John McCain, 72, chooses as [...]

Politics and government nowadays are as much about stagecraft as statecraft. The “hurricane-disrupted” Republican national convention is a recent example. Gustav was more than a thousand miles away and no threat to St. Paul. The threat was to the possibility of Republicans coming across as doing politics as usual while Americans were being battered. Irony [...]

One of the problems with modern political journalism is that when something manifestly absurd takes place, as long as there are people willing to argue both sides, our top reporters feel obliged to treat it as deserving of serious debate. Case in point: John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. [...]

I guess 72-year-old John McCain thinks he’s immortal. Why worry – if elected – that old age or cancer might shorten his tenure and leave the nation in the hands of a singularly ill-equipped replacement? Maybe McCain doesn’t care what happens after he’s gone because he believes he’s not going. The man who says he [...]

Forty-five years ago, when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his `I Have a Dream` speech at the March on Washington, four members of my family witnessed history. On August, 28, 1963, my mother boarded a bus with other members of our Catholic Church, dressed as though she were headed to Sunday Mass instead [...]

I happen to like my Scotch straight up, unadulterated by ice or water. And I like my Convention coverage the same way. That’s why on the first two nights of the Democratic Convention I turned to C-Span, which offered without interruption what was going on at the stage level and also down on the floor. [...]

DENVER – Coming off her Monday speech at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama didn’t pause to wait for the reviews, although she admitted the day after that she had heard about positive comments from friends. She stopped listening to reports — good and bad — sometime after the Iowa primary, she said, when so [...]