Outside the Beltway

Half a century have passed since a botched burglary changed history.

The longtime Senator and Vice Presidential and Presidential nominee is gone at 98.

The weirdest goddamn story you’re likely to read today.

An interesting but uneven debate.

It’s time to start speculating about a brokered convention again,even though it probably isn’t going to happen.

History shows us that candidates who enter the race for President late rarely do well, and rarely manage to win.

Is the Sanders-Warren position too extreme for the general election?

Former President Jimmy Carter is warning his party against drifting too far left as we head into the midterms and, beyond that, the 2020 campaign cycle.

Democrats have pulled the trigger and essentially eliminated the power of superdelegates except in the unlikely event that a nominating convention goes to a second ballot.

Democrats are on the verge of reducing the power of superdelegates to the point where they will essentially become meaningless in the nomination process.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are objecting to the proposed changes in the role of superdelegates in the party’s nomination process.

It’s been a bad week for Donald Trump, something he can ill-afford with less than 100 days left until Election Day.

Democrats will consider changing superdelegate rules, but not as much as Bernie Sanders would like.

National tragedies, whether man-made or natural disasters, used to bring Americans together. Now they just seem to pull Americans apart.

The Democratic race in Iowa and New Hampshire is tightening, according to new polling, but this still seems to be Clinton’s race.

Another poll shows Bernie Sanders doing will in New Hampshire, but there’s no evidence he’s catching on anywhere else in the country.

A new poll shows Bernie Sanders ahead of Hillary Clinton, but within the margin of error, in New Hampshire. But a deeper examination suggests that Bernie-mentum is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Bernie Sanders is closing in the polls, but it still seems as though it doesn’t mean as much as some political pundits will try to tell you it does.

Jeb Bush told a group of supporters that his brother is his top Middle East policy adviser. This strikes me as being a bad idea.

Bernie Sanders is running for President. He’s not going to win, but he’s not running because he thinks he can win.

Pundits and political scientists agree that, if the 2016 presidential election were today, we’d have a much better idea who would win.

The GOP is dominant in the Southern United States, but it’s unlikely to last as long as Democratic dominance of the region did.

Once something that generally benefited Republicans, social issues are now becoming a wedge issue for Democrats.

Conservatives have their own Kennedy myth to compete with the myth of Camelot.

Michael Kinsley contends “Being against marriage equality doesn’t make you a monster.”

Is someone who’s only be a Senator for just over 100 days a serious contender for the Republican nomination in 2016?

Less than two weeks after he lost the election, the GOP is acting as if Mitt Romney never existed.

My latest for The New Republic, “America’s Scandalous Drone War Goes Unmentioned in the Campaign,” is out.

The Occupy movement began one year ago today. It’s no surprise that it ended up being a failure.

The GOP still hasn’t dealt with the legacy of George W. Bush.

President Obama didn’t blow the doors off the Time Warner Cable Arena last night, but he didn’t need to.

As its convention begins, one has to wonder what has happened to the Republican Party.

The quadrennial political conventions have become, long, boring, tedious, and largely predetermined. It’s time to shake things up by making them a lot shorter.

There’s little evidence that Vice-Presidential picks have as big an impact on elections as pundits seem to think.

The New York Times finds some infighting among old Republican foreign policy hands.

Since the adoption of the current rules for delegate allocations only twice has either party nominated someone who did not win either IA or NH.

Despite the seeming odds against him, the Electoral College map is very favorable for President Obama.

Last night’s GOP debate was a two-man affair.

It never ceases to amaze me how many smart people manage to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that their political philosophy has massive support.

While Sarah Palin continues to tease her supporters about a possible Presidential run, the damage she could do to the GOP becomes even more apparent.

If the Republicans win back Congress in November, it will be largely unearned. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no incentive for change in American politics.