American - Journalist | June 10, 1943 -
If the court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act, is that a 'liberal' result enabling gay couples married in states where gay marriage is legal to enjoy the same economic advantages that federal laws now grant to straight couples? Or is it a 'conservative' ruling, limiting the federal government's ability to override state power?
Jeff Greenfield
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One of the litmus tests for judicial conservatism is the idea of judicial restraint - that courts should give substantial deference to the decisions of the political process. When Congress and the president enact a law, conservatives generally say, judges should avoid 'legislating from the bench.'
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Remember, the first presidential candidate to reject public financing for both the primary and general election was... Barack Obama, in 2008. He did it, in spite of a flat pledge to the contrary, because his campaign saw that it could vastly outspend John McCain.
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If Obama's vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
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As a personal matter, I stopped voting more than a decade ago, on the grounds that it helped me as an analyst not to think about making a choice in the voting booth.
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In every debate, whatever the format, whatever the questions, there is one and only one way to identify the winner: Who commands the room? Who drives the narrative? Who is in charge?
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In another life, before taking the veil of journalistic purity, I practiced the black arts of a political operative, including 'debate prep.'
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One of the enduring myths of campaign analysis is that you can actually count the number of 'undecided' voters by asking voters if they are undecided or not. Sometimes, significant numbers of voters actually change their minds.
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When the blood of thousands of Americans is shed, the impact lingers. For a generation after the Civil War, the Republican injunction to 'vote as you shot' kept the party dominant for decades; from 1868 to 1912, only one Democrat - Grover Cleveland - won the White House.
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George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House.
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There is something discordant about a team of speechwriters and political operatives hammering away to create an image of the 'real, inner' candidate. And, to be blunt, there is no necessary connection between a moving life experience and the skills necessary for leadership.
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I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.
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