Obama is still behind nationally but I am not sure that he is beaten. He looks like the future of the Democratic party to me and Hillary looks like the past. Her husband isn’t helping in that regard either. Jay Cost the HorseRace Blogger, the best analyst of polls I have ever encountered, isn’t calling [...]

When I arrived in Australia nearly 32 year ago John Howard was a minister in the then Fraser government. Fraser had just taken over in a constitutional crisis that is still controversial from the then Whitlam labor government. A year later he had been promoted to the number two spot and was commonly referred to [...]

(Down Wombats – I’m not talking about our beloved pace bowler ) When the NY Times Op Ed columnists disappeared behind the Times Select firewall I missed Thomas Friedman the most. He is the newspaper’s ‘mister inbetween’ – viewed by the right as a screaming liberal and in a British publication called Why Do People [...]

Christopher Hitchens speculates in this Slate article on the chances that Al Gore may yet make a run for president in 2008. At the heart of the speculation is the idea that Gore looks like getting a Nobel Peace Prize next month. So, and if I am right, the former vice president will then complete [...]

Blogger Cobb says: “The latest on Obama is that there is a significant difference between his acceptability as a political candidate for President and his electability.” Cobb is referring to a GQ article entitled Above the Fray by Ryan Lizza that points to a gap between “the percentage of Democrats who said they strongly approved [...]

Victor Davis Hanson compares the heyday of the John Birch Society in the 50s and 60s to the extreme American left of today in this essay entitled The Crazed Fringe. While he was growing up on a farm in California, I was dong the same in New Hampshire. We didn’t get the pamphlets that his [...]

When a president gets into trouble in a war – like Truman in Korea or Johnson in Vietnam – the electorate, naturally enough, turns to the other party. Hilary has an interview in the NY Times that I think foreshadows the kind of position any Democratic candidate will have to take if they are to [...]

Norm Geras has a post Broken Lineages, that raises an interesting issue that has subliminally bothered me for some time – the apparent resemblance between the Stalinist left of the past and much of today’s left. Taking up this single point in response to a book review Norm says: I have my reservations about a [...]

One of the great things about the Blogosphere is that I run into answers to things that have puzzled me for a long time – often for the better part of my life. In a post about Joe Lieberman’s reactions to the non binding resolutions on the Iraq War in the US Congress, Wretchard of [...]

While Jeff Jarvis has been attending Davos and noticing that while the big shots have got it that the Internet can empower individuals they haven’t understood that the Internet’s real power is that it empowers groups. I discussed that in my last post, and like suddenly similar model cars that seem everywhere after you buy [...]