That giant sucking sound you hear is the sound of the great debate promised by Rand Paul’s quixotic Senate candidacy slowly circling the drain. After all, why would anyone bother to sort through deficits, taxes and the role of modern American government? They can just go on The Rachel Maddow Show and have a good,…

A year ago, if you had told President Barack Obama that all he had to do in exchange for Sen. Arlen Specter’s decisive votes on the stimulus, healthcare, and what he thought would by now be a done deal on cap-and-trade was one quick press conference to tepidly “endorse” Specter’s return to the Democratic party—and…

Memo to the tea partiers, et al: We’ll be cool—really—if you just stop using that phrase. You know what I’m talking about. The five words that you deploy accidentally on purpose to tell the president and a whole lot of other Americans that they’re not really Americans: “I want my country back.” What’s more insulting…

True story No. 1: I have an old friend with a Confederate Battle Flag tattoo—an African-American woman born and raised in South Carolina. She’s a JAG officer and a decorated Iraq war vet. Her sorority pledge nickname just happened to be “Rebel,” but the tat is also a proud symbol of her Southern birthright. Like…

When President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney square off at the debate podium in the fall of 2012, it might be harder than you think to tell the two of them apart. They’re both Harvard lawyers. They’re both millionaires and devoted family men. As a college student, Romney completed a requisite Mormon…

Being a U.S. senator is arguably the best political job in the country. It has most of the prestige and almost none of the accountability of being president of the United States. But Sen. Evan Bayh—age 54, with solid poll numbers and a helmet of hair straight out of central casting—is stepping down from his…

As Vince “Double Down” Vaughn might have said to President Barack Obama: “You’re money, baby—and you don’t even know it.” No sooner did Obama joke to a Nashua, N.H., crowd Tuesday that “You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college,” than a bipartisan chorus of Nevada politicians…

When Senator-elect Scott Brown becomes president, odds are some reporter will write a political tell-all called Game Change – Part Deux: The Race of a Lifetime…Again. It’ll be a behind-the-scenes look at Brown’s trailblazing campaign to “transcend” Obama and become the first “post-Obama” president—with firsthand insider accounts from people on the ground who made it…

Any Massachusetts voter who pulled the lever for Sen. John McCain in 2008 and Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown in 2010 is on pretty firm ground. They didn’t want Obama then—and they don’t want him now. Voters who chose President Barack Obama but went for Brown in this week’s special election just canceled out their own…

Leading into the 1960 presidential race, John F. Kennedy’s aide, Ted Sorensen, wrote that “assuming that his personal appeal, hard work, and political organization produce as before, Senator Kennedy will win in November, unless defeated by the religious issue.” Sorensen’s recognition then about the nation’s only Catholic president amounts to an inverse and clearly more…