WASHINGTON — If authenticity is your calling card, how do you become authentically inauthentic? Welcome to the New Donald Trump, a marvel of the Twitter-Cable-Facebook Non-Industrial Complex and the age of minuscule attention spans. It took Richard Nixon prodigious feats of hard work between 1962 and 1968 to create the New Nixon who got himself […]

WASHINGTON — It will not be the first time that a Clinton relies on the tough-minded voters of New York to salvage a front-running presidential candidacy. On March 24, 1992, an insurgent candidate named Jerry Brown (yes, California’s current governor) upended Bill Clinton, the Democrats’ nominee-in-waiting, in the Connecticut primary. To re-establish his primacy, Clinton […]

WASHINGTON — Sudden, horrific events in the middle of a presidential campaign provide an X-ray of the instincts and thinking of the candidates. We can see what their priorities are, and pick up clues about their character. The terrorist attacks in Belgium brought out the worst in Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Cruz demonstrated that […]

WASHINGTON — There’s a reason, beyond garden-variety partisanship, that Senate Republicans resist even holding hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Their gambit evades a full and open debate over the conservative judicial agenda, which is to use the high court in an aggressive and political way to reverse decades […]

PHOENIX — In a span of about 12 hours, Americans were given definitive evidence that the Republican Party is now in thrall to its most ideologically and tactically extreme forces while the Democrats still look to the center ground and to compromise. Exhibit A: The results of Tuesday’s primaries. Exhibit B: President Obama’s nomination of […]

WASHINGTON — Obama Derangement Syndrome is striking Republicans once again. To avoid having to answer for the rise of Donald Trump, they want to hold the man in the White House responsible for the emergence of a demagogic showman who has been the loudest voice challenging the legal right of the winner of two elections […]

WASHINGTON — It was William Bennett, education secretary in the Reagan years, who embedded a phrase in the American consciousness when he bemoaned the fact that “our elites presided over an unprecedented coarsening of our culture.” Well, it is Bennett’s party and two of its presidential candidates in particular, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, who […]