Political Asylum

Obama’s data-driven approach may decide today’s race—and determine the future of the G.O.P.

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An election-eve elegy for the country’s former guardians of sanity

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A New York Times op-ed writer nods his head along with Mitt Romney.

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On a narrowly defined, narrowly argued foreign policy presidential debate.

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The right’s strange new trope: bloodless regime change in Libya was bad; bloody, useless regime change in Iraq and everywhere else is good.

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Recapping Mitt Romney's most blatant and risible falsehoods at the second presidential debate.

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On the genteel Republican Party of David Brooks's imagination

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"Who knew it was going to be the Skypilot himself, Flight Chief Obama, scrambling for the eject button while the rest of us tried to batter down the cockpit door…

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After watching the first presidential debate, it’s hard not to wonder whether Barack Obama genuinely wants to remain in office.

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"The presidential debate in Denver this evening is supposed to be exclusively about domestic policy. But in today’s New York Times, we read that 'advisers said he would try to…

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A sampling of topics we're not likely to hear discussed at the first, "domestic" presidential debate. These are the questions that, if they are somehow asked, we can expect both…

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Mark Lilla says he's a centrist Democrat who was "relieved" to observe Obama's "political liberalism and instinctual conservatism." But which of the social programs generated by the Great Society's legislative…

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"Some have begun to detect a literary current in Mitt Romney’s seemingly mindless ramblings—a stream-of-consciousness that reflects, perhaps, the romantic wistfulness of the middle-aged man facing his own mortality."

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How do the two presidential candidates stack up in the eyes of America's investment class?

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"There’s little point now in trying to suss out whether Mitt Romney is at heart as much a thoroughgoing, Social Darwinist creep as the one he plays for rich donors.…

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The South is, perhaps, the last romantic place in America, in all the best and worst senses of that word. It is a region where the wail of a freight…

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“There was music in the cafés at night/ And revolution in the air . . .”—Bob Dylan Some may conclude from reading this blog that I believe downtown Tampa to be a soulless,…

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I was struck, attending the Republican and Democratic political conventions, by how woefully inadequate the two southern host cities were to the task. I completely understand the political calculations that…

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President Barack Obama’s speech to the 2012 Democratic Convention was one of the best he has given, and one of the best in recent history. It was an almost word-perfect…

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Just as it was for the Republicans, Day Two of the Democratic Party’s convention was a serious work day, one in which speaker after speaker went about making the case…

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For political hacks at modern party conventions, the answer to the Reagan Question—Are you better off than you were four years ago?—should be knee-jerk, no matter the party, no matter…

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For the last four years, it has been painful watching Democrats struggle to coordinate a single message amid the millions of tiny medialets misting around us. Typically, watching a Democrat…

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The delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, are absolutely delightful. Taken all together, they make the Republican convention look like a convocation of especially dreary MBAs.…

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One irreducible fact to come out of the towering slagheap of falsehoods that was the Republican convention is that Mitt Romney can win, and is likely to do so, if…

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I hate to ever mention the name Donald Trump. But I feel obliged to do so now, following his recent near-descent upon Tampa, Florida, and the Republican National Convention. Like…

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“The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it.”—Apocalypse Now We wrote about all of the outrageous lies perpetrated by Republican speakers on the…

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Now that the Republican Convention has ended, can we move on to the one bedrock but unspoken truth underlying all the accepted distortions of closed factories and $716 billion cuts…

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How do I lie to thee? Let me count the ways. There were so many last night at the Republican National Convention—and I don’t mean just the usual convenient, half-apologetic,…

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