The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Obama: ‘I’ve Got a Plan!’

Yesterday, I woke up and turned the TV to MSNBC (which I watch so you don’t have to), and they showed almost the entirety of a speech Obama gave at Davenport, Iowa. Perhaps you can watch it without succumbing to the urge to throw your computer across the room: It’s particularly painful for me to […]

Crazy Uncle Joe Biden Campaigns in Ohio, Apparently Thinks He’s in Iowa

All these darned Midwestern states look alike! During a campaign stop in Ohio on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden forgot where he was. Again. “I mean literally,” Biden said (probably meaning “figuratively”), “ladies and gentlemen, this is a guy [Mitt Romney] who’s running all the ads here in Iowa saying that he’s going to get […]

Iowa Flashback: August 2011

Intersection in a cornfield near Roland, Iowa Paul Ryan is campaigning — and getting heckled — today in Iowa and I don’t know how many readers realize that today is the one-year anniversary of the Iowa GOP Straw Poll at Ames, which I covered under the headline, “Fear and Loathing at the Hilton Coliseum.” In case you’ve […]

Nate Silver, the Experts and … Me

From Matt Welch’s article about dinosaur media: In 2008, a 30-year-old baseball stat nerd looked at the reams of public research product churned out by the nation’s 1,500-plus daily newspapers, and concluded that, though “there is nearly as much data as there is for first basemen,” the “understanding has lagged behind.” So Nate Silver launched […]

Ain’t I Done Told Ya So?

Perhaps you remember this Sept. 23 headline: Does Pain Explain Perry’s Poor Debate Performances? Once more, I give credit to Brian Ledbetter of Snapped Shots for the e-mail tip alerting me that Rick Perry had undergone back surgery in July, thus permitting me to become the first national journalist to suggest that there might be […]

Iowa Republican Party Finally Admits That Rick Santorum Won Jan. 3 Caucuses

CHARLESTON, S.C. Few things in this long and frequently shabby campaign season have been more shabby than the Iowa GOP’s mishandling of the results of their first-in-the-nation caucuses. The state party mistakenly named Mitt Romney the winner on Jan. 3 and, when the final certified tally this week showed that Rick Santorum actually won, Iowa […]

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Seventeen Days on the Campaign Trail

P.J. O’Rourke encounters Andrew Breitbart at the Manchester, N.H., Radisson Bar, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012 PHILADELPHIA “Wheels up” from Boston’s Logan Airport was at 1:09 p.m., and as Flight 1727 ascended from the runway, I noticed the houses that dotted the little spits of land jutting out into the bay. There were docks and piers […]

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Eight Days in a Mustang Later …

“What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.” — Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 9, 2011 “Stacy’s not smooth […]

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