You really are going to have to pay attention in these Republican debates. Zone out, and you might find yourself looking up with a start at a phrase like “… illegals, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers … freeloading off the system now,” and a cheer so lusty Mike Huckabee might just have offered the entire […]

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  Never have so many done so much to reveal so little than in the collected journalism about presidential nomination contests. The personality-driven trivia. The hokey generalizations. The bogs of conventional wisdom. The day-by-day scorekeeping that ends up worse than uninformative; it is anti-informative. (Just ask Presidents George Romney, Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, John Connally, […]

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The “money primary” continues, but it is becoming a “billionaire primary,” in which each candidate must secure the backing of at least one billionaire. The winner of the “billionaire primary” will be the beneficiary of a $900-million Koch brothers coordinated pledge to elect a Republican to the White House in 2016.

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  American politics is not easy for believers. “This is a forum where our candidates can share their faith and testimony and not feel ostracized. Except maybe by the press,” Mary Frances Forrester told me. “Here, we can ask questions and candidates can include their faith when they’re talking about important social issues.” Forrester—a state […]

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  The killing of nine congregants at the Emanuel A.M.E. church in South Carolina was a hate crime committed by a young white man influenced by the Council of Conservative Citizens. The CCC began in Mississippi in the 1950s as the Citizens’ Councils of America. It is “a modern reincarnation of the White Citizens’ Councils, […]

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