The Washington Post | May 13, 2012 President Obama came out in support of gay marriage Wednesday. Yet, only a day earlier, voters in North Carolina had approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage and other domestic partner arrangements — even though a majority told pollsters they favored allowing gay marriage or domestic partnerships. If that seems confusing, it…

The Daily | July 24, 2011  TEN Republicans are in the running for the presidential nomination. It looks like a big, competitive field. But don’t be fooled. More than a century’s worth of history suggests that only three candidates — former governors Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Jon Huntsman — are electable in 2012. Of…

Attacking countries we aren’t at war with is the new normThe Daily | May 23, 2011 IT HAS been a bad few months of a bad few years of a bad few decades for the central principle of international relations. Consider an odd headline about an American attempt to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an al Qaeda propagandist…

The New York Times | November 7, 2010 A GRAND victory for Republicans in the 2010 midterm election? Yes, of course. But also no. In all three of the most recent earthshaking midterm elections — 1994, 2006 and now 2010 — the same candidate won: divided government. That is not a coincidence. In the last two…

National Journal | September 11, 2010 THOUGH headless, the tea party movement is not mindless. Its collective brain meets every Monday night. More than 200 leaders of local tea parties — coordinators, as they usually call themselves — join a conference call every week organized by an umbrella group called the Tea Party Patriots, the…

The Atlantic | April 2010 My father came to live in Washington, D.C., near me, in the spring of 2009. I went with my partner, Michael, to Phoenix, to fetch him and bring him east. He had Parkinson’s disease, or so everyone thought. He was falling regularly, which he insisted was no cause for alarm, because…

National Journal | December 5, 2009 RONALD REAGAN, though dead, has not lost his sense of humor. Told that some conservative Republicans have proposed a “Reagan test” whose effect would be to drum moderates out of the party, the former president chuckled. “You know, I know Ronald Reagan. I am Ronald Reagan. And believe me,…

National Journal | March 14, 2009 Naturally, when a gigantic omnibus appropriations bill came to the Senate floor last week, 98 percent of it got almost no attention. “Member projects — aka earmarks or ‘pork’ — account for less than 2 percent of spending in the $410 billion omnibus bill on the floor of the…

The Advocate | November 16, 2008 Every national campaign has its moments of revelation, straws in the wind of change. For me, one of the most memorable blew past in a snippet of video. It was June. Hillary Clinton was conceding the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. A few minutes into her speech, as she called…

National Journal | September 20, 2008 “WORST. President. Ever.” That succinct judgment, received not long ago via e-mail from a political scientist, sums up a good deal of what conventional wisdom has to say about President Bush. In an unscientific online poll of 109 historians conducted in April and published by the History News Network…