Delegate counts for Democratic presidential candidates are fiction but The Associated Press and newspapers, broadcast stations and Internet sites are reporting who is ahead in the delegate race as though it is fact. If you visit Web sites you will be told, in all seriousness, that – in convention rhetoric – “The Great State of [...]

I got this email today from somenone named Chris in Virginia, referring to my criticism last week of a Des Moines Register poll of prospective Democratic caucusgoers: “So, what do you say now about the DSM poll, which seems to have been right on the money? Is the Sussman column ‘inoperative,’ as Ron Ziegler would [...]

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, allow me to beat a dead horse and repeat a few points to help keep you sane and the news media reports intelligible as we move into 2008 and eventually elect a President. The Republican and Democratic caucus results differ in significant ways that the news media often [...]

I often wonder why most of the mainstream reporters and editorialists don’t make the connection between the first two most basic guarantees in the First Amendment and their own responsibilities for making them whole: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of [...]

A recent Newsweek magazine article examined “The Roots of Fear,” providing scientific evidence of why appealing to our fears works. Apparently, we’re hard-wired to panic first and ask questions later. That comes in handy when you hear a loud noise in a dark alley. But in other circumstances – such as picking a president – [...]

“Close enough” only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and the Democratic Party’s side of the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential caucuses. The wisdom of including horseshoes and hand grenades in “close enough” is self-evident. As for Iowa politics — critics will say that compared to the caucuses the Electoral College is a model of precision and expression [...]

Two one-word questions for presidential, House and Senate candidates are suggested by a Dec. 15 New York Times article. Here’s how David Cay Johnston began the piece, which deserved page A1 but ran on B3: “The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of [...]

The Oprah-Obama show was all over the news this weekend. Sure, Winfrey’s celebrity and clout signaled the perfect blend of pop culture and politics that has become routine. If Barbra Streisand starts touring with Hillary Clinton, expect more of the same. But as someone who was there to witness the crowd of nearly 30,000 file [...]

DES MOINES—“Who you gonna caucus for?” is a common question in Iowa these days. For some reason, perhaps the public declarations we make at our precincts, caucus preferences are fair game in conversations – much more so than “Who you gonna vote for?” is in November. In response to my question, a friend said his [...]

DES MOINES–Did Hillary Clinton make a mistake by not skipping Iowa’s caucuses? She was advised last May to pass them up by campaign aide Mike Henry. He wrote in a memo that Clinton should quit wasting time and money on Iowa and go “where the delegates are.” Henry argued that the New York Democrat would [...]