Political campaigns are strange animals. Most of them move linearly, in purely predictable ways.  Others – at least the competitive ones – can be dramatically altered by almost imperceptible occurrences – just as typhoons, hypothetically, can be caused by the flutter of butterfly wings on the other side of the globe (although I don’t really […]

http://youtu.be/3ujaix6ya54 Here’s an ad from President Carter’s successful ’76 campaign.  As with virtually all his spots, Carter is portrayed as the populist candidate — he is jacket-less, humble, and made to look as though he is speaking off-the-cuff to a small audience, which is never shown (contrast that to the Obama stadium rally images three decades […]

Great ironies are playing out in Washington over congressman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisconsin) call to reform entitlement programs.   Conservatives, including Ryan, are arguing that the wealthiest Americans should see deep cuts in their Social Security and Medicare benefits — or outright elimination of them — while Democrats are arguing that even the richest of the rich should receive their share of those programs. […]

Congressman Weiner is in a pickle.  And I don’t mean that to be metaphoric.  He is in an indefensible position. The New York Post and others are demanding that he go to law enforcement to report the said “hacker” of his Twitter account — the one who Weiner says sent an explicit photo to a […]

http://youtu.be/PU0nNAXDIuc The 2012 presidential campaign has hardly begun, but I thought it might be instructive and entertaining to post some classic presidential televisions ads on this site going forward.  This 60-second ad is from the successful Nixon-Agnew ’68 campaign. Comments welcome.        

The situation involving Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn) has big implications for the 2013 New York City mayoral race. Weiner, the front runner for the Democratic nomination for mayor, is now “clamming up,”  according to news reports. He refuses to say why he won’t ask law enforcement to look into the alleged “Twitter” hack over the weekend that sent an […]

I am loath to write more about the silly Anthony Weiner situation — I could care less whether he Tweeted racy pictures of himself or not — but in accusing political enemies of hacking his account in an attempt to “distract” him from his good work in Washington, the Brooklyn congressman and his staff have elevated […]

“Weinergate” is much in the news today.  In case you’ve somehow missed it, the thin-skinned New York congressman Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn) is denying that a shot of his — it’s just too easy — was sent transnationally this weekend to a 21-year-old Washington State college student whom Weiner, for some inexplicable reason, follows on Twitter. I would […]

When did everyone riding a bike start looking like they are trying out for the Tour de France? It’s embarrassing.  For everyone. It needs to stop. This afternoon my 14-year-old daughter burst out laughing as we drove past a 50-something-year-old man head-to-toe in sheer yellow…stretchy-stuff.  He had on wrap-around mirrored sunglasses that made him look […]

I told a friend on the political Left some months ago, someone who posts on these pages regularly, that I was willing to make a big concession to him on a philosophical point. But events overtook it, and I quite forgot what it was I was willing to concede. Until today, when a story in […]