With one tweet last Sunday afternoon, President Biden transformed the 2024 race – from a same-old, same-old election to a stark choice between past and future, hate and hope, grievance and progress. Suddenly, only one party is trying to elect an 80-year-old President who mixes up names, mangles his thoughts and looks to be in severe cognitive decline. The election is now a choice between a criminal prosecutor and a convicted criminal. It’s a choice between a champion of women’s reproductive rights and the man who ripped away those rights and sexually assaulted women. Democrats, bitterly divid ..read more

Climbing out on a limb the New York Times led the charge to get Biden out of the race. The day after Biden got out the Times published a chart ranking ten Democrat candidates from the most likely to least likely to beat Trump. At the top of the list was Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro…at the bottom Kamala Harris. Four of the Times top five choices were from swing states: Pennsylvania is the biggest swing state and Shapiro got the top ranking. That looks like the bedrock beneath the Times’ thinking. The ranking’s not scientific. It’s not fact. It’s an opinion. From the Times’ writers. And i ..read more

Joe Biden got out of the race. Kamala Harris got in, a legion of Democrats endorsed her, and she raised $50 million in 24 hours. But Harris faces an enigma. Since 1960 Vice Presidents have run for President seven times. Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore all lost. Nixon lost in 1960 but won eight years later. George H. W. Bush won in 1988. Biden won in 2020. Four of seven times Vice-Presidents ran and lost. Here’s another piece of history: Arguing, a friend told me, “Look, the Lord saved Trump from an assassin’s bullet. He wants Trump back in the White House.” I thought a moment. “Di ..read more

With President Biden’s age off the agenda, maybe now the media will focus on the Republican Party’s agenda for America. Ronald Reagan’s party of limited government, individual freedom, decentralized power and resistance to totalitarian rule in the world is dead, gone and – after last weeks’ Republican National Convention – buried. The new world order in the Trump-MAGA-Project 2025 GOP is powerful centralized government, an imperial presidency, state control of individuals’ lives and cowardly surrender to Vladimir Putin. Trump’s party wants unchecked, unlimited power and control – over the exe ..read more

Did the Good Lord save Trump, touch his soul? Trump says God saved him. And his son says he’s a changed man. So did Trump have a moment in Butler, Pennsylvania like St. Paul on the road to Damascus? For three days in a row Trump sat quietly in the Republican National Convention, smiling – who’d have expected that? The last night of the convention standing on stage Hulk Hogan tore off his shirt to reveal his MAGA tee shirt. Next I listened to the wrestling magnate Trump had picked to introduce him. Then the lights dimmed. Music played. And Trump appeared on the dark stage. I watched, and liste ..read more

Years of political battles taught me this: You ain’t beat ‘til you quit. There’s too much quit in the Democratic Party right now. Yes, President Biden’s poll numbers are perilous, and pressures on him to quit are enormous. Still, I’m not convinced that Vice President Kamala Harris would be a stronger candidate, even if she picked Governor Roy Cooper as her running mate, which would be the right choice. I am convinced that, if she isn’t the nominee, the Democratic Party’s most loyal voters will rebel. Whatever happens, Democrats need to remember there is a clear path to victory: a ruthless, re ..read more

Climbing out on a limb George Clooney told Biden not to run – Trump slammed Clooney as a ‘disloyal, backstabber, third-rate movie actor’ – added, ‘He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are.’ On one side of the table this election we’ve had an old man who, memory slipping at the NATO summit, called Zelensky ‘President Putin’ and who, an hour later, called Kamala Harris ‘Vice-President Trump.’ And on the other side we’ve had Trump hurling insults to get headlines. This week both are saying politics has gotten ‘overheated.’ They want to tone it down. Let’s pray they do ..read more

The first time Ronald Reagan ran for president a lot of Democrats voted for him. Those ‘ticket-splitters’ respected their political party but a candidate’s honesty, character, beliefs mattered more to them than his party. Governor Jim Hunt ran for reelection the same year Reagan won and a lot of those same ticket-splitters voted for Hunt and Reagan. You don’t see that much these days. Party is revered the way idols once were. A lot of Democrats, as we’ve been seeing in the press, have qualms about Joe Biden’s age – but vote for him because he’s a Democrat. Trump makes a lot of Republicans fee ..read more

For years, MAGA Republicans have fetishized AR-15s, the weapon Trump’s assailant used. They wear AR-15 lapel pins and pose brandishing the high-powered assault rifles. Now, in an Olympic-worthy feat of mental gymnastics, Trump’s acolytes claim that the AR-15 attack makes Trump and Project 2025 off-limits to campaign criticism. Get real. After Paul Pelosi was brutally beaten by a hammer-wielding attacker, Trump joked at the California Republican state convention, “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi … how’s her husband doing, anybody know? And she’s against building a wall at our border, even ..read more

A brawl’s going on in Oklahoma. About teaching the Bible in schools. A preacher’s son Ryan Walters grew up in a small town, after college taught at a local high school; whisps of whiskers covering his cheeks, at 39 ran for Oklahoma School Superintendent – won. Sounding like a teacher said schools needed to teach about the Bible. A culture war erupted. He got called ‘a far-right Christian nationalist,’ a domestic terrorist, absolute trash, a bigot and an idiot on Facebook and Twitter. On Chris Cuomo’s show, leaning back, he calmly explained Thomas Jefferson used the words ‘endowed by the Creat ..read more