Politics

According to Erica Werner of the Associated Press, President Barack Obama, visiting the world’s most populous Muslim nation, expressed deep concern Tuesday that Israelis and Palestinians aren’t making the “extra effort” to secure a breakthrough for achieving Middle East peace. Obama said he hasn’t seen the kind of progress in negotiations that “could finally create…

Every campaign season brings its own share of frustrations. This one is no different. So now I get to vent. The polls are closed. The outcomes are known (mostly). And the spinmeisters have done what they do. Yet I feel entitled to one final campaign postmortem. In three big ways, I found this campaign season…

When President Obama spoke at a White House press conference the day after the midterm elections, among his most salient points was his statement that our country must embrace civility again. No truer words could have been spoken. We witnessed a veritable slugfest among candidates leading up to Election Day, everything from a plethora of…

Women are almost invisible in civil rights storytelling, and hardly present in the civil rights canon. What they did and who they were in the Southern freedom movement of the 1960s remains barely understood. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a new book by 52 women who worked for the…

1. A Power Shift That Will Last a Decade There’s often too much hype surrounding midterm elections, but there’s never enough hype to cover a midterm election that happens right before state legislatures throughout the country take on the task of redistricting. As the U.S. Census Bureau completes its once-in-a-decade count, state legislatures will pull…

In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s midterm elections, the narrative of choice among the pundit class is that the GOP victories — 60 House seats, six Senate seats — indicate a “referendum on Obama’s policies.” Not only is this a theme all over the cable news networks, but on Thursday morning, Ohio Congressman John Boehner,…

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has a horrible reputation for “gaffes” that highlight Republican missteps in the glare of the media. But there was a nugget of truth in his election night comments that many in the mainstream media missed or ignored. American voters are not merely displaying Republican tendencies in 2010 after siding…

Say what you will about President Barack Obama, but his ability to be self-reflexive was on display during a taping of CBS’s 60 Minutes. In the segment, the president acknowledged that in the wake of this week’s election debacle, he hasn’t been able to successfully promote his economic-rescue message to worried Americans. According to the…

Colorlines’ Kai Wright lets President Obama know that he’s going to have to fight for his base with the same vigor that he pursues bankers. Wright states that what’s missing from Obama is reciprocity to those who put him in office in the first place. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: President…