Getting the nod as the black consensus candidate for next month’s Chicago mayoral election worked like a charm for Carol Moseley Braun — the third time around. The first time the coalition of the Windy City’s self-appointed black power elites met to bless one of the half dozen or so African Americans vying to replace…

(The Root) — The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished…

(The Root) — If you’re a strong believer in maintaining the status quo, the outbreak of voter-identification laws across the nation just might make sense. If you’re a student of American politics and history, on the other hand, you see it slightly differently. In that case, what you see is what we’ve got: voter suppression.…

(The Root) — President Barack Obama walked a narrow line in his speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans Wednesday night, attempting to fire up his most enthusiastic base while giving his most rabid enemies as little ammo as possible to fire back at him. It was no easy task. There has…

(The Root) — When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last week, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen. As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the “14 words” motto of white supremacists was running…

(The Root) — When the Grand Old Party gathers this week in Tampa, Fla., during the peak of hurricane season, the politicians’ sound and the fury on the inside of the Convention Center may well match the wind and the fury of tropical storm Isaac on the outside. For three days, one blowhard Republican after…

(The Root) — Witnesses to this week’s DNC or last week’s RNC conventions could easily come to the same conclusion: African-American issues were about as invisible as the imaginary President Obama in Clint Eastwood’s staged chair. During the Republican National Convention’s truncated three-day conference, there was Obama-bashing galore, with frequent mentions that the unemployment rate…

(The Root) — Even the dullest knife in the drawer could predict that when the mayor of a big city drops the f-bomb on the president of the teachers union during one of their earliest meetings, subsequent strike negotiations might not go as smoothly as possible. No, they didn’t. So as Chicago schoolteachers returned to…

(The Root) — Gwen Ifill was sorely missed during the first of the presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Had she or Candy Crowley or even Diane Sawyer moderated Wednesday night’s debate, my guess is that one issue that was completely AWOL would have been called into duty: women’s rights. Don’t get me…

(The Root) — It has been a long and tortuous two weeks since the Republicans first began doing the happy dance and attaboying each other after the first presidential debate. Their guy, Mitt Romney, had whipped that other guy like he owned him. The polls were indicating that Big Mo was on their side. And…