Politics

Barack Obama’s address to the NAACP convention was unspectacular, as these things go. It’s just that we’d heard all his material before, as good as it is. Repeat tomorrow.What made the NAACP speech significant wasn’t what Obama said and it didn’t happen in the convention hall. Its significance was in a crowd thousands-deep, two blocks…

Poor John McCain. He must be asking himself, “How am I supposed to follow that?” That, of course, is Barack Obama’s rousing appearance at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati Monday night. When McCain delivers his own speech to the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization on Wednesday morning, the ovation Obama triggered may still…

Are you laughing yet? If not, you’re probably joining the growing chorus of jeers that has assailed the July 21 The New Yorker magazine cover illustration by artist Barry Blitt, dubbed “The Politics of Fear.” In it, a turban-wearing Barack Obama gives his Afro-wearing, machine-gun gripping wife Michelle a pound as they stand in the…

You gotta admire, on some cynical level, a crook who can steal your money and make you believe it’s your own fault for getting jacked. That’s perhaps the most galling part about the con-job banks and lenders are still running on America. They spent a decade creating the “mortgage meltdown”—knocking down prescient state-level safeguards, dreaming…

As the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor get under way this week on Capitol Hill, some members of the Senate have a major decision to make about their identity and their future. Will they continue to advance divisive politics rooted in America’s sad history of racism and exclusion? Or can they…

I hate to say this, but unless President Barack Obama toughens up pretty soon, his presidency could be in trouble.  It’s too early to be sure, but the warning signs are beginning to accumulate. If unemployment, now at 9.5 percent, keeps rising, Democrats could lose House and Senate seats in the midterm elections next year, and, though…

As confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor begin before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, it’s probably best to keep some perspective on the significance of the proceedings. Unless there’s a violent crime in her past, Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Given Al Franken’s recent seating as…

On one level, it is easy to dismiss the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.’s crudely worded metaphorical threat to castrate Barack Obama for supposedly talking down to black people as the raving of an increasingly irrelevant, former big shot suffused with resentment at the rising star who pushed him off stage. That, after all, is the…

Political scientists investigating why the Republican Party attracts so little support from black voters don’t need to look farther than the extraordinary fashion in which GOP leaders have reacted to the death of former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms on the Fourth of July. The possibility that a black man might actually be elected president…

You’d think after Beatrice Vance of Illinois and Edith Isabel Rodriguez of California both died on the ER waiting room floor while hospital staff just looked on, that maybe hospitals would be on red alert to avoid this type of bad publicity—not to mention the loss of human life. But now there is the story…