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Walter ShapiroRoll Call |
The unmourned death of O.J. Simpson last week provided a timely reminder that a criminal trial can galvanize a nation. The political question hovering...
Impeachment was once considered the most serious and solemn constitutional obligation of Congress. Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy, in his Pulitzer-Prize...
Forty years ago, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a hawkish former Democrat who was Ronald Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, electrified the 1984 Republican convention by...
There are many compelling reasons to recoil at Chinese ownership of TikTok, starting with the quashing of political freedom in once freewheeling Hong...
Slowly, but inexorably, Israel is losing the leaders of the Democratic Party over its brutal war in Gaza. Kamala Harris , getting ahead of her boss...
If someone had told Katie Britt on election night 2022 that she would someday by portrayed by megastar Scarlett Johansson, the newly elected Alabama...
White House leaks in advance of the State of the Union Address have telegraphed Joe Biden’s intention to stress how age and experience have made him...
On the cusp of the third State of the Union address of his presidency, Joe Biden is confronting subterranean approval ratings, two wars (Gaza and...
Finally, Democrats have a presidential contender who can appeal to the most disaffected voters in the party’s sprawling and sometimes unwieldy...
This is shaping up as a presidential election designed to Donald Rumsfeld’s specifications. At a 2002 press conference during the run-up to the...
During a televised hearing 70 years ago that brought down demagogic Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, patrician Boston lawyer Joseph Welch...
Waging a race against Donald Trump that even Don Quixote might consider not worth the gamble, Nikki Haley gives the impression that, at long last, she...
The line is widely, but incorrectly, attributed to Winston Churchill. In truth, it is probably a modification of a remark made by 20th century Israeli...
From his earliest days in politics, more than a half-century ago, Joe Biden has understood the potency of the age issue. When the 29-year-old Biden...
The Senate immigration bill, finally released just in time to roil Congress on Sunday night, offers more political angles than a high-school...
When he wasn’t having temper tantrums in a Manhattan courtroom, Donald Trump — the one-man wrecking ball destroying political norms — turned his...
Nikki Haley will always have Dixville Notch whose six midnight votes in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary she carried unanimously. The former South...
The cheering is still echoing in my ears and bits of brightly colored confetti are stubbornly clinging to my head. Not since the raucous celebration...
Campaign reporters have been breathlessly chronicling the 2024 Republican primaries since Donald Trump prematurely launched his third presidential bid...
Sixty years ago, fashionable liberal opinion was in despair over congressional dysfunction. In 1963, eminent political scientist and Democratic...
Picture a happy Democrat. C’mon. Concentrate. You can do it. Maybe you can recall the momentary joy on the Saturday after the 2020 election...
The 60-second TV spot begins with a series of brief shots: a lobster boat setting out just after dawn, a man exiting a taxi at a crowded downtown...
Charles Peters, the founding editor of Washington Monthly and one of the most important people in my life, died on Thanksgiving at the age of 96....
No other event on the political calendar boasts the storied history of the New Hampshire primary: antiwar crusader Eugene McCarthy stunning Lyndon...
Panicked Democrats, vibrating with anxiety over the polls, continue to nurture an unlikely fantasy: Joe Biden looks at his family across the...
In the late 1960s, another turbulent era in American history, jazz singer Peggy Lee had a hit with her dancing-on-the-brink rendition of “Is That...
As Joe Biden grapples with an unforgiving world, an indifferent electorate, and panicking polls, it is comically predictable that right-wing...
Mike Johnson last week, in one of his first substantive moves as House speaker, paired $14.3 billion in aid to Israel with what would have been a...
After 16 days of bitter wrangling during the steamy summer of 1924, the exhausted Democrats — deeply divided over Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan...
Nearly a century ago, the rope-twirling humorist Will Rogers cracked, “I am not a member of an organized political party — I am a Democrat.”...
The Republican Party could have stepped away from the abyss in 2024. But three months before the Iowa caucuses, it is looking like GOP voters have...
A year from now lawn signs will be vying for attention with Halloween skeletons and pumpkins. Political analysts will be again grappling with the...
Not since the heyday of Athens nearly 2,500 years ago has there been such a stirring triumph of democratic self-government. Over the weekend, the...
It is a come-on long beloved by carnival barkers, casino billboards, and lottery ads: “You can’t win if you don’t play.” But this obvious...
The raging—and entirely hypothetical—debate over whether Joe Biden should seek a second term has been framed by right-wing claims of a doddering,...
This is the month when House Republicans decide whether they want to march off a cliff with bands playing and flags flying. By any rational...
“They’re just running for vice president.” That may be the most common putdown of the White House dreamers who are languishing in the...
Imagine: Without warning and with barely enough time for makeup, you are thrust onstage to have your say on a cable television pundit panel about the...
It is a scene that is probably as old as the world’s first restaurant in China more than 900 years ago. Diners, frustrated by dirty plates or...