I found Buckwheat in the woodworking shop of the Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes, chiseling something on the face of an elaborate oaken plaque. “What are you making?” I inquired. “I is here carvin’ de trophy we gonna give George W. Bush if Bro’ Barack Obama wins de ‘lection,” squeaked the famous Our Gang character.…

Geraldine Ferraro was a far better qualified candidate than Sarah Palin. But the Alaska governor does have one thing in common with the first female vice presidential candidate for a major political party: the ability to tap into a noxious strain of populist resentment that has been one of the most powerfully corrosive forces in…

If  you have not made up your mind about whom to support for President, last night’s debate about foreign policy and the ongoing economic crisis may not have helped you. Neither Republican John McCain nor Democrat Barack Obama committed a major gaffe or landed a knockout punch. Neither expressed a new idea. So I suggest…

I don’t know why anyone—myself included—ever let themselves think that a black man could run for president of the United States without igniting the sort of racial backlash we’re witnessing in the current campaign. I don’t know why anyone—myself included—ever believed that the Republican Party would forego its time-tested, coded appeals to prejudice and character assassination…

“For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him.…

Who in the heck is Pastor Rick Warren, and how did he get so much clout? Where did he get the power—and gall—to dragoon Barack Obama and John McCain into his mega-church this past Saturday night and submit them to back-to-back, hour-long, televised grillings about their moral and religious beliefs? This is the kind of…

Thanks to the digging of The Atlantic Monthly’s Joshua Green, we now have a sense of what a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been like. And, Lord knows, it would not have been pretty. The most eye-catching detail to emerge from The Atlantic’s reporting, thus far, is the battle plan devised by Clinton’s chief strategist…

Why, with the election less than three months away, is Barack Obama still embroiled in negotiations with his supposedly defeated rival for the nomination over how much of the limelight she and her husband will hog at the Democratic National Convention? Sure, John Edwards unwittingly stole the spotlight this weekend, with his forced admission of…

CINCINNATI—The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will be 100 years old next year, and judging from the 3,000 or so folks who showed up for the organization’s convention in Cincinnati last week, so will many of its members. Though the nation’s largest and most important civil rights organization now boasts about 35,000…