Here’s a thought experiment: What if black America was its own country? We’d be relatively big, with a population roughly the size of the northeastern United States. We’d have an up-and-coming economy, in league with countries like South Africa and Argentina. And we’d be one of the least healthy places on Earth.   Black folks have…

We all know by now that Barack Obama made history last Tuesday night.But so did Victoria Middlebrook. For all the momentous change at the top in this election year, it comes as a result of a triumphant change at the bottom. Obama rode a wave of reform created by millions of people like Middlebrook. Middlebrook,…

John McCain and his Republican henchmen may be down in the polls, but don’t count them out of the election. The Republican Party has been intimidating voters and fostering chaos at the polls for decades, and in the Bush years electoral dirty tricks have become indispensable elements of GOP campaign strategy. So here are the…

If John McCain isn’t the next president, it won’t be for lack of trying—he’s called Barack Obama everything from a terrorist to a socialist. And yet, with a week to go, it is increasingly clear this election is Obama’s to lose. Which leaves McCain with one last tried-and-true tactic: Steal the thing. For all the…

Bob Schieffer opened last night’s debate with a wistful plea. “By now we’ve heard all the talking points,” he said. “So let’s try to tell the people something they don’t know.” Good luck with that. The problem John McCain faced going into the campaign’s final debate is that Americans fully understood the contours of this…

To everything, there is a season. If summer is the time for civil (or close to civil) discourse in presidential politics, fall is the time for blood sport. And if you’re a Republican trailing in the polls, it’s the season for racist fear mongering. No one should be surprised by the assault John McCain launched…

Noxubee County, Miss., occupies a special place in American political history. The abusive power of the county’s storied political machine isn’t so remarkable, nor is the fact that a corrupt black Democrat built it. Plenty of jurisdictions have, through the ages, boasted the same ugliness. Noxubee’s distinction is that this tiny, majority-black town is where…

It has taken a frightening flirtation with global economic collapse, but even George W. Bush seems to have exhausted his blind faith in the almighty market. “I’m sure there are some of my friends out there saying, I thought this guy was a market guy; what happened to him?” the president posited last weekend—while proposing…

The Republican Party has finally found the outer edge of political cynicism; it’s located in Macomb County, Mich. Operatives there have figured out an upside to the foreclosure crisis roiling black neighborhoods: It enables mass voter-registration challenges and thereby offers a powerful opportunity to suppress the vote in Democrat-leaning districts. An enterprising journalist for the…

It’s difficult to remember just how ho-hum the political stakes felt in the 1990s, a time when our country’s prosperity and stability made leadership seem secondary to things like ideology, faith and personality. People who came of age in that era could still debate deep, academic questions like whether history is shaped by the person…