Joe Biden has made it official: He is not running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. It's the latest development in a presidential campaign cycle that has not been going according to script.
You may not have noticed, but Lincoln Chafee, the erstwhile Republican U.S. senator and Independent-turned-Democratic governor, had one penetrating comment at the Democrats' debate Tuesday night. "But let me just say this about income inequality," he said toward the end. "We've had a lot of talk over the last few minutes, hours or tens of minutes, but no one is saying how we're going to fix it."
Going into the Democrats' first presidential debate Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton seems to have banked on one thing: that far fewer Americans would be watching than watched the Republican debates in August and September.
Important parts of our two great political parties seem bent on demonstrating that their parties are incapable of governing coherently.
You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left.
Not all important public policy reforms come from Washington. Really lasting reforms can percolate from the bottom up, brewed by citizens with a grievance pushing state and local governments to act.
In November 1964 a crowd of 5,000 attended the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, then the longest suspension bridge in the world. Presiding were New York Mayor Robert Wagner, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and transportation and parks czar Robert Moses. Also in the crowd was a teenager named Donald Trump.
Scott Walker's abrupt withdrawal from the Republican presidential race Monday afternoon shows how different, in ways noticed and unnoticed, this campaign cycle is from those of recent years.
As the 2016 presidential selection process proceeds, there is increasing evidence that the political patterns we have grown used to, that we have come to consider permanent, might be suddenly changing.
Human beings are hard-wired to protect young children. That's the easiest explanation of the rush of Europeans -- especially, but not only, elites -- to welcome huge numbers of refugees after publication of the picture of a dead three-year-old boy on a Turkish beach.
In this presidential cycle, voters in both parties, to the surprise of the punditocracy, are rejecting experienced political leaders. They're willfully suspending disbelief in challengers who would have been considered laughable in earlier years.
Some time in the early evening of Wednesday, London time, Queen Elizabeth II broke a record: she became the longest-serving monarch in British history, beating her great-great-grandmother Victoria's reign of 63 years and 216 days. She is also, at 89, by a solid stretch the longest-lived British monarch.
I've seen this movie before. And for the last 25 years, I thought I'd never have to watch it again. But now it's playing, not in theaters, but all over mainstream media, with something like rave reviews from the president and his administration.
Aside from the court-ordered dribbling out of Hillary Clinton's classified-material-filled emails, the big presidential campaign news of the summer has been the boom for Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. Trump has risen from 3 percent in the polls (when he announced on June 16) to where he now stands at 26 percent -- 14 percent ahead of any other candidate.
In my last column, I looked at the possibility of two impossible things -- impossible things in the sense used by Alice and the Red Queen -- happening in the already turbulent 2016 presidential cycle. Here I'll look at another: the possibility that the partisan division lines that have endured with little change for two decades might suddenly shift and change.
One can't believe impossible things, Alice objected.
Reporters and voters have so far gotten few glimpses of Hillary Clinton speaking candidly. One of the few examples available is in the videotape and transcript of her meeting with Black Lives Matter protesters in New Hampshire last week.
Donald Trump's six-page platform on immigration may not be, as Ann Coulter wrote, "the greatest political document since the Magna Carta." But given the issue's role in elevating the candidate to leading Republican polls, it merits serious attention.
In 1935 George Dangerfield published "The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914," a vivid account of how Britain's center-left Liberal Party, dominant for a century, collapsed amid conflicts it could not resolve.
August is traditionally a vacation month, and East Coast elites, following European tradition, are thick on the ground in the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard (the Obamas' choice) and Nantucket.
