Barack Obama, the prevailing wisdom goes, covered all bases in picking Joe Biden as his running mate. The Delaware senator is a well-liked and widely admired legislator. His background as the "scrappy kid from Scranton, Pa." is supposed to appeal to working-class voters. Most important, his foreign policy expertise is meant to lend reassuring judgment on international matters to the inexperienced Obama. So it is curious that on the most important foreign policy issue, Iraq, Biden has been wrong by some measure at virtually every turn.
On the eve of the Democratic convention, consider a contrarian idea: How Barack Obama is like President Bush.
You can sense a change in Republican spirits. It's certainly not confidence, but something more than hope is welling up in Republican hearts. A quickening GOP pulse signals Republicans believe John McCain at last has a fighting chance of winning the presidency in the fall.
The war on free speech by Islamic fanatics has claimed another victim. This time they did it without killing anyone, staging a riot or even issuing a threat. Fear alone turned out to be enough for Random House to drop plans to publish a novel about a wife of the prophet Muhammad.
Mention Georgia a few days ago, and most of us would have thought of the state evoked so sweetly in "Georgia on My Mind," the classic tune sung by Ray Charles. Very few of us had heard of the South Ossetia province of Georgia, the nation with the misfortune to have Russia as its neighbor, until war broke out last week.
It's hard to escape the conclusion the world is sleepwalking toward a dangerous crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions. No great leap of imagination is needed to envision waking up one morning to headlines reporting that Iran tested a nuclear weapon or Israel bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. Only a determined, united international front can prevent such calamities, but where is the evidence of that kind of commitment?
Flip-flopping has a bad reputation in politics. But when it comes to the issue of gas prices this election year, it might turn out that the candidate who flip-flopped first gains an advantage by being more in tune with American voters.
The silliest -- and ultimately self-defeating -- argument offered by Democrats and environmentalists against offshore oil drilling is that it won't immediately lower gas prices or produce new supplies of fuel. That same objection applies to alternative strategies such as solar and wind or any additional source of energy.
Like most homeowners, you scrimped and saved for a down payment, got a mortgage you could afford and made the monthly home payment a top priority. Because of all that, the housing crisis and the bailout passed by Congress this weekend constitute the political issue you should be angry about -- even more so than gas prices.