Politics

Hollywood drove Dave Chappelle out of his gourd. He bounced on a multi-million-dollar contract, went to Africa, got his mind right and realized that at the end of the day, hamming it up for The Man wasn’t what he wanted to do. Here’s the problem: Although it was great for Dave’s state of mind, it…

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…

Historians may look back at this election and decide that the outcome was never really in doubt. The political fundamentals were so clear and so unchanging long before the real contest began, throughout nearly the entire second-half of the Bush presidency. The war, the economy and the GOP mismanagement of their congressional powers and an…

A lot of people say they don’t understand undecided voters. But perhaps undecideds view politics the way I view football. Every year, I show up at a Super Bowl party with a bucket of chicken and no one to root for. I like football, love going to games, but I don’t have a “team.” People…

Comparing politicians to Adolf Hitler is a tired, cheap trick that has been used to demonize George W. Bush, John McCain and even Barack Obama. The problem with the comparison is that it makes blanket generalizations of who is good and who is evil, while overlooking the historical conditions that allowed a nation to be…

Are you an Obama supporter who feels a certain amount of unease with your candidate’s occasional bouts of schlockiness? This is not to say you don’t appreciate his speaking skills. You cheered at the Philadelphia race speech, but had to dredge up the patience to get through some of his others. At times, Obama can…

Does anyone else think Sarah Palin deserves a smackdown? She has lately boasted that the “heels are on and the gloves are off,” but she knows that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would look less than gentleman-like and risk offending women voters, if they took her on using some of the tough talk and loaded…

Recently, at a forum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one participant directed a query at me: “Did you read the article on The Rootthat talks about how the Republicans are planning to steal the election? How do you feel about that?” the young woman asked. My response was that I found…

On a recent Saturday morning in the heart of North Carolina, it was threatening rain, and I was standing in line with thousands of others in downtown Greensboro to do something I’d never done before—be part of the cheering crowd at a Barack Obama rally. Until just weeks ago, my engagement with politics had always…

At this moment in history when we may need it most, “Kumbaya,” a folk song that started its life as a quiet prayer and became a spiritual rallying cry for millions during some of this nation’s grimmest days, has morphed into something that couldn’t have been imagined during your Boy or Girl Scout days: a…