Search

ON A RECENT Thursday night in July, Lanny Davis, the lawyer and crisis-management expert, was sitting on a toilet on a southbound Acela train interrogating Michael Cohen, his newest client, [...]

Byline: Ryan Lizza Firing Back How Sally Yates stood up to the President. It is hard to locate when President Trump first declared war on the government establishment, but the [...]

PURPLE 2008 PART 1 BEFORE I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO VOTE, I worked as a volunteer for George McGovern's presidential primary campaign, then voted for him in the November election, [...]

DEMOCRATS HAVE A DREAM. They dream that they will wake up on November 8 and that West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, the 88-year-old antiwar firebrand, will be in charge of [...]

Mark Sanford, a Republican congressman from South Carolina who lost his seat in June after sparring with the president on several issues, has been thinking a lot about Hitler. He [...]

Byline: Ryan Lizza Taming Trump A new campaign manager tries to reform an unreformable candidate. In late September, when Donald Trump spoke in Chester Township, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, he wasn't [...]

Byline: BY RYAN LIZZA FLYING HIGH In a bizarre Presidential race, Gary Johnson might be the x factor. Not long ago, Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's 2016 Presidential candidate, put [...]

Byline: BY RYAN LIZZA OCCUPIED TERRITORY The Republican élite struggles over whether to resist Trump or capitulate. Last month, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, and Paul Ryan, [...]

Byline: BY RYAN LIZZA THE GREAT DIVIDE Clinton, Sanders, and the future of the Democratic Party. On February 8th, the day before the New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton stepped onstage [...]

Byline: BY RYAN LIZZA THE DUEL The Trump and Cruz campaigns embody opposite views of politics and the future of the G.O.P. Donald Trump has a rule at his rallies: [...]

Byline: BY RYAN LIZZA A HOUSE DIVIDED How a radical group of Republicans pushed Congress to the right. On July 28th, Mark Meadows, a Re-publican representative from North Carolina, walked [...]

Byline: BY RYAN LIZZA WHAT WOULD JEB DO? An ex-front-runner looks to his brother's advisers. On Friday, October 2nd, Jeb Bush was onstage at a college auditorium in Greenville, South [...]

Byline: BY RYAN LIZZA THE VIRTUAL CANDIDATE Elizabeth Warren isn't running, but she's Hillary Clinton's biggest Democratic threat. The relationship between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, the Party's most [...]

Bob Shrum was only thirty-two years old when he first caused a stir in a Democratic campaign. The year was 1976, and the young speechwriter, a former collegiate debating champion […]

CROSSING CHRISTIE What the bridge scandal says about the Governor's political style, and his future. On April 1st, Chris Christie, the beleaguered Republican governor of New Jersey, attended a celebrity [...]

STATE OF DECEPTION BY RYAN LIZZA Why won't the President rein in the intelligence community? On March 12, 2013, James R. Clapper appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [...]

On the day of his second Inauguration, in January, Barack Obama delivered an address of unabashed liberal ambition and promise. As recently as early April, before the realities of the […]

Six years ago, when John McCain, the Arizona senator, last worked on an immigration bill, his partner was Ted Kennedy, of Massachusetts. Kennedy, especially in his final decade in the [...]

On July 20, 2012, Governor John Hickenlooper, of Colorado, was attending a friend's seventieth-birthday party in Colorado Springs when he learned about a shooting in a suburb east of Denver. [...]

Every year, Republican members of the House of Representatives retreat from Washington to assess their political fortunes. This year, they gathered in mid-January, at the Kingsmill Resort, in Williamsburg, Virginia. [...]

The article discusses U.S. Senator Barack Obama's early political experiences. In the 1980's Obama served as a community organizer in Chicago, Illinois. Obama's work focused on helping poor African-Americans on Chicago's South Side. Obama is linking his Chicago days to his 2007 presidential campaign. He said the best education he had was learning the science of community organizing in Chicago.

This article highlights the Yearly Kos blogger convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2006. The author portrays the bloggers as a liberal interest group, with its own agendas. Blogger Armando Llorens-Sar is also discussed in light of his identity being revealed as a corporate lawyer who has represented companies such as Wal-Mart.

The article profiles Virginia Senator George Allen, who many believe is the principal conservative alternative to Arizona Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential race. Allen considers his down-home credentials and cowboy-boot charisma as his two main advantages in the race against McCain.

This article reports on Senator Hillary Clinton, her staff and aides, and her political activities and partnerships as she explores the possibility of a run in the presidential election in 2008. The author analyses the structure and staffing of the various offices maintained by the Senator, her fund-raising, and legislative strategies. There is a comparison of the Senator's offices and aides with those of her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

The article offers a humorous guide to the Republican culture and character of the city of Washington, DC. After five years of George W. Bush's presidency and eleven years of Republican rule in Congress, Republicans have altered the city's culture and character. The article discusses the ways in which Republican Tom DeLay linked lobbyists to the Republican Party. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff now faces indictments.

Presents diary reports from the Democratic presidential trail in New Hampshire in the days leading up the primary. Account of a Joe Lieberman rally in Nashua, which attracted a large number of right-leaning independent voters; Account of a John Kerry rally in Hampton, in which appeared to have moved into front-runner mode following his victory in the Iowa caucus; Account of a Dean event at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, where he appeared to be desperate for votes in the wake of his third-place finish in Iowa; Account of a John Edwards rally in Manchester, during which the candidate delivered a carefully scripted stump speech; Details of the Dean campaign's response to their candidate's second-place finish in New Hampshire.

This article offers an eye-witness account and analysis of the 2004 Iowa Presidential Caucus and ends in Manchester, New Hampshire. Maybe I'm just caught up in the dynamics of the pack, but Dean does not look like a man on the eve of a great victory. What's so fascinating about this late Edwards surge is how organic it is. Today, Kerry is leading in all the polls, and the campaign is brimming with confidence. By the time the Dean captain at this caucus figures out that he's supposed to be picking up undecideds and former Gephardt people, the Edwards and Kerry teams have already divvied them up between themselves. Final score: Kerry 53, Edwards 51, Dean 26. It's a result that is repeated, more or less, across the entire state. Why did Dean's Iowa campaign die at the end? Trippi's fear that high turnout would turn the caucuses into a virtual primary also came true. When hordes of kids with dyed hair and multiple piercings descended upon the state to spread Dean's message with Scientology-like evangelism, Kerry began to look real good. But there is a nagging sense on the ground and in the polling data here in New Hampshire that no stump-speech tinkering can overcome the self-inflicted wounds of the Val Air scream.

Reports on last-minute campaigning by Democratic candidates in Iowa in the run-up the caucus, focusing on the campaigns of Iowa frontrunners Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt. Account of a typical day in Dean's campaign headquarters, and the efforts of volunteers to win over voters; Description of activities by Gephardt campaigners, who include around 300 union activists shipped in for the final weeks of the Iowa campaign; Claim that, in Iowa, winning the caucus is a test of organizational prowess; Importance to all the campaigns of a list known as the Iowa Democratic Party's Voter Activation Network; Explanation of how a caucus works, and how its unusual structure has influenced campaigns.

The author reports on the campaigning efforts of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa. Four presidential aspirants--John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, and Howard Dean--are competing to win, place, or show in the state's January 19 Democratic caucuses. Operating on the theory that the only way not to get crushed in New Hampshire on January 27 is not to get crushed in Iowa the week before, Kerry is investing a huge amount of time and money in the state. But there isn't much evidence it's paying off. Watching Kerry, I get the sense that his fall from front-runner to long shot has broken his confidence. Much of Kerry's energy these days is devoted to convincing his audience that voting for Dean--who leads in most recent polls here--would be an historic mistake. Kerry and Dean spend a lot of time hitting red and orange towns, which tend to be larger, more affluent, and more liberal. Gephardt and Edwards, meanwhile, spend more time wooing downscale Democrats at the green and blue end of the scale. More than any of his rivals, Edwards is also trying to define himself as the candidate of optimism. If Kerry is the candidate of traditional liberals and Edwards the candidate of Clinton-style incrementalism, Gephardt--who's currently tied or a close second to Dean in most polls--is the candidate of big, old-fashioned, activist government. All the candidates criticize special interests, and, of course, Gore hit populist notes in 2000, but Dean has begun railing against corporate America in a way no major Democrat has done for decades.

The article offers a look at California gubernatorial candidates in lieu of the possible vote to recall Governor Gray Davis. Arnold Schwarzenegger will eventually hit the campaign trail, but the basic strategy so plainly on display is: avoid the political press, avoid specifics, and coast to election on populist platitudes and high name recognition. Fortunately, there are 134 other candidates on the ballot. As the establishment candidate, Schwarzenegger has far more in common with U.S. President George W. Bush than with Jesse Ventura, to whom he is often compared. But the analogy that Schwarzenegger has glommed onto is that of Hiram Johnson, the California governor who brought direct democracy--the initiative, referendum, and recall--to the state back in 1911. The true originator of the recall was a a more radical thinker named John Randolph Haynes who founded the Direct Legislation League at the turn of the century. If Haynes and Johnson are the grandfathers of the current recall circus in California, the father is Howard Jarvis, the entrepreneurial conservative, who in 1978 changed California politics by almost single-handedly pushing through the famous ballot initiative known as Proposition 13. The measure lowered property taxes to 1975 levels, capped annual increases at two percent, mandated a two-thirds majority vote from the voters to raise taxes locally, and required a two-thirds vote from the legislature to raise taxes at the state level.

This article presents a 2004 presidential campaign diary while describing the activities of democratic candidates in Charleston, South Carolina. The temptation for candidates to reinvent themselves is everywhere here in South Carolina. Liberal Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, for instance, tells an inquiring voter he "would love to" come speak at hyper-conservative Bob Jones University, the anti-Catholic college that until recently banned interracial dating. Antiwar firebrand Howard Dean shows up as the only candidate to speak before a luncheon held by the devoutly centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) on the Saturday of the debate. The idea behind moving the South Carolina primary to February 3, 2004, just a week after the New Hampshire primary, is to force the Democratic candidates to appeal to more moderate constituencies than those traditionally experienced in Iowa and New Hampshire. And the idea behind the nationally televised Democratic debate in Columbia is to make sure that this moderating effect begins sooner rather than later. It seems to be working. Kerry's mangling of a quote from former President Bill Clinton was not exactly a high note for his campaign. Nor was his performance in Saturday's debate, in which he was widely seen as spending too much time sniping back and forth with Dean. But, without a rapt audience to feed off of, Dean has a tendency to come across as, well, mean. The extent to which the Senator John Edwards campaign believes that his likeability, personal charm, and talent for retail politics will carry him to victory can't be overstated. If Edwards is the candidate of Personality, Congressman Richard Gephardt is trying to make himself the candidate of Ideas--and his health care plan is the biggest idea he has to offer.

Presents a presidential campaign 2004 journal from Indianola, Iowa. How Senator John Edwards and Vermont Governor Howard Dean address the issue of a war with Iraq; Possibility that the anti-war views of Congressman Dennis Kucinich may make Dean look more moderate; Anti-war activism in Iowa; Expectation that Senator Joseph Lieberman will note fare well among Iowan voters.

When historians look back on Mitt Romney's bid for the Presidency, one trend will be clear: no Republican candidate ever ran a similar campaign again. For four decades, from Richard [...]

The Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago occupies the sixth floor of 1 Prudential Plaza, an aging forty-one-story tower that, for a brief period in the nineteen-fifties, was Chicago's tallest building. [...]

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have never been close. Some of their advisers concede that the two men don't really like each other. They have openly disagreed on policy issues [...]

One day in March, 2009, two months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space in his [...]

In November, 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reëlected in a landslide victory over Walter Mondale, taking forty-nine states and fifty-nine per cent of the popular vote. The Reagan revolution was [...]