Having completed the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign cycle, it's tempting to focus on minor but perhaps momentarily decisive details, such as whether Ron DeSantis was wise to outsource strategy to a committee that he's legally barred from communicating with or whether it was wise for Trump campaign spokesmen to not be allowed in the Fox News spin room.
America's political parties are the oldest and third-oldest in the world, and they have competed for votes among a population that has been diverse since colonial times.
Let's take a time out from reports of indictments and threats of impeachment, from nostalgia for the 1940s days of American scientific creativity and ability to get big things done fast ("Oppenheimer") and the 1950s days of American popular culture appealing to every cultural subgroup without the trigger warnings and apologies for past national misdeeds.
"We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
Have we gotten to the point that it's politically necessary to defend the principle of free speech? Apparently so.
News stories have reported that despite the Supreme Court's decision in cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, those and other selective schools still want to employ racial quotas and preferences in admissions.
"This is not a normal court." So said President Joe Biden last week as the Supreme Court was handing down its rulings in big cases decided since its current term began last October.
No one knows whether last weekend's Wagner Group uprising means the end of President Vladimir Putin's control of Russia, just as no one knew before the last few weeks of 1999 that Putin would replace Boris Yeltsin and become Russia's leader for the next quarter-century.
Are America's 45th and 46th presidents politically invulnerable? That's a conclusion you might come to from the response to the indictment of Donald Trump on June 8 and the guilty plea by Joe Biden's son Hunter announced on June 20.
Some observations on special counsel Jack Smith's indictment of former President Donald Trump:
Gov. Chris Sununu (R-N.H.) is not running for president. In his state's first-in-the-nation primary, "I can be more effective for the Republican Party in ways few other leaders can," he wrote in the Washington Post.
The Wollman Rink episode, or, rather, the unduly optimistic conclusion I drew from it, explains a lot about Donald Trump's presidency and why he may not do as well against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) in the contest for the Republican nomination, as current poll numbers suggest.
A conservative, to paraphrase and slightly alter Irving Kristol's saying, is a liberal who has been mugged by reality -- especially by a reality that is plain to the vast bulk of ordinary people but remains inexplicably invisible to liberal intellectuals and politicians.
The report of special counsel John Durham is, or ought to be, devastating for anyone who has put any credence in what has now been definitively revealed to be the Russia collusion hoax.
Getting words right can clear up a lot of confusion about politics and public policy. Example: "segregate" is a verb that requires a subject. "Segregate" is not an impersonal verb, nor is "segregation" a mere accidental result of unrelated outside processes.
Reports of the death of the Republican Party continue to be premature.
Lies beget lies. That's one way to summarize nearly the past decade of presidential politics, as well as the potentially dismal presidential race underway.
Are we watching a replay of King Canute commanding the waves to recede? That thought occurred to me while reading about the Biden administration's latest step in advancing the president's 2021 goal of having half of all new autos be electric by 2030.
It's just one poll, conducted by SSRS Research for CNN, but it provides interesting evidence about where voters are on issues, and it isn't glaringly inconsistent with other survey research.
What do you do to win an election when your candidate is universally known and unpopular with a majority of voters? That's a question both major parties have had to face in the last few years. Both look like they're going to face it for some time longer.
