NEW YORK—We may never know for certain what Hillary Clinton was thinking when she chose, nearly two weeks ago, to bring up Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our powers of observation are limited to effect, not intent. But the effect of Clinton’s comment, and the verbal skirmishes it unleashed, has been clear: the transformation of Barack Obama from a presidential candidate to a black presidential candidate. And the beneficiary of that transformation seems to be her, and her alone. (more…)

NEW YORK—Kim Campbell, who was momentarily prime minister of Canada in 1993, was once reported to say on the campaign trail that an election is no time to discuss serious issues. That campaign turned out to be her last, but the maxim remains true for some.The latest example was noted by the New York Times’ Michael R. Gordon, who reminded us on the weekend that in the midst of intensely competitive presidential primaries, no candidate from either party has yet to deal honestly with the dilemma of Iraq.Gordon runs through the proposals of the Democratic candidates, whose positions range from pulling out of Iraq immediately (John Edwards: troops out in ten months) to just pretty damn fast (Barack Obama: sixteen months). (more…)

NEW YORK—Iowa is a magical place. On caucus night four years ago, I was in a banquet hall at the edge of Des Moines, setting up filing desks for reporters sent to cover Howard Dean’s victory party. I had been on the campaign for three months, a peon in an enormous operation that had seemed, until just a few days earlier, utterly unstoppable. When the results came in, I wasn’t so much disappointed as confused: we came third? So I couldn’t help feeling a bit of sympathy for Hillary Clinton on Thursday night.

Or at least, for Clinton’s staffers. Campaign workers are the ones who take defeat the hardest — you wouldn’t be able to work the gruelling hours of a presidential campaign if you didn’t believe in your candidate, and nothing hurts like finding out the party feels otherwise. But there’s another reason to feel sorry for Clinton’s campaign workers. Right now, Clinton staffers (and John Edwards’, if he still has any) are the only people in the Democratic universe who aren’t allowed to be excited about Barack Obama.

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TORONTO—The holidays are about tradition, and no tradition is more enduring than the journalistic urge to define, in a phrase, the year that was. Notable this season is Lawrence Martin, who argued in Monday’s Globe that Canadian politics in 2007 was defined by inertia: no big policy initiatives out of Ottawa, no real gains or losses by any party, and nothing but political eye-gouging left to fill the column inches.

Martin’s right, as far as he goes — nobody will remember 2007 for the vigorous pace or sweeping vision of Canada’s then-prime minister. But if Martin is genuinely concerned about the inertia of Canadian politics, he needs to look a little further than Parliament Hill. (more…)

“My biggest mistake in life, by far, was ever agreeing to be introduced to Karlheinz Schreiber in the first place,” Mr. Mulroney said. The former prime minister said his second biggest mistake was accepting cash payments from Mr. Schreiber.
-The Globe and Mail, December 13

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“My biggest mistake in life, by far, was ever agreeing to be introduced to G. Gordon Liddy in the first place,” Mr. Nixon said. The former president added that, on reflection, his second biggest mistake was probably ordering Mr. Liddy to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and plant a wire, and then lying to the country about it for years. (more…)

NEW YORK—Monday’s New York Times reported that Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, will give a speech on Thursday addressing the issue of his religion. Romney is a Mormon, a point long thought to be a theoretical concern for his electability. But as the Times points out, the recent burst in support for fellow Republican presidential candidate (and Baptist minister) Mike Huckabee, driven largely by Christian conservatives, has turned Romney’s religious beliefs into a very real concern for his campaign.

The debate around Romney’s Mormonism raises an interesting, if delicate question: should the religious beliefs of politicians be a legitimate topic for public scrutiny? (more…)

NEW YORK—Ulysses Grant was at one point the greatest American of the 19th century: he defeated the Confederate forces, ending the Civil War and saving the Union. Things were pretty much downhill from there. Grant won the presidency, only to be remembered for scandal: as PBS notes in its round-up of presidential history, “His Treasury secretary collected illegal taxes, his secretary of war took kickbacks for patronage jobs, and his vice president defrauded government contracts through a dummy railroad corporation.”

Well, nobody’s perfect. But it gets worse. (more…)

NEW YORK–To grasp the essential charm and weirdness of American politics, look no further than this: among the current cast of presidential candidates, the most strident critic of the Iraq war is a Republican. Say what you like about Ron Paul — contrarian (he shunned his party to vote against the Patriot Act), libertarian (he wants to abolish the IRS), even crazy (he wants to return to the gold standard). But he is also raising lots and lots of money. (more…)

New York—We’re really in the homestretch now. After three years of campaigning — starting the day John Kerry stood up in Boston’s Faneuil Hall to concede to George Bush — there’s just one more year to go before the 2008 presidential election. To mark the occasion, here are my picks for the issues the candidates aren’t likely to talk about over the next twelve months, at least not in the sort of detail they deserve. And that’s all the more reason to keep bringing them up.

Climate Change. Everybody knows the Democrats are eager to tackle global warming. Or are they? For all the optimistic predictions that a Democratic Congress would push the Bush Administration to act on greenhouse gas emissions, the actual results have been disappointing. It turns out that passing smart laws to fight climate change is actually kind of hard. (more…)

Elliot Spitzer is somewhere on the spectrum between stubborn and crazy. Last month, the governor said he would allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses, to cut down on the number of uninsured drivers on New York streets. He might as well have declared that henceforce, every baby boy in the state will officially be named Nancy.

Spitzer’s sticking to his proposal, and he’s gotten support from some high-profile figures, who point out that the first priority for security officials is to have information on who’s living in the state. But facts only go so far. In this country, it’s hard to find support for any measure perceived as pro-immigrant, whatever the reason behind it.

Earlier this week, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois held a press conference in support of a bill to give legal status to illegal immigrants who graduate high school, then go to college or serve in the United States military for two years. (more…)

Just when it seemed like nothing more of interest could possibly be written about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, New York magazine comes out with a surprisingly engaging look at their respective political activism in law school — Clinton fighting for civil rights in the early ’70s at Yale, Obama caught up in the affirmative action debates of the late ’80s at Harvard. The article is focused on the two candidates’ early lessons in politics, but I read a more pressing question: what happened to student activism? If every generation is defined by the cause it fought for, what’s ours? And if you can’t answer that question right away, what does it tell you?

Last week, the Times’ Thomas Friedman called the current crop of students “Generation Q.” (more…)

New York—Whoever wins tomorrow’s Ontario provincial election, it’s going to be remembered as a test case for the maxim that in politics, big ideas don’t sell. John Tory, as I wrote a few weeks ago, will probably become code for what happens when politicians forget the maxim. From now on, party leaders are going to think even harder before going to the electorate with a sweeping proposal for change.

Tomorrow’s referendum on proportional representation looks likely to reinforce that conclusion. Whatever the wisdom of a mixed-member proportional system, there’s no justification for putting it to a vote when 3 million Ontarians can’t tell you what it means. (more…)