Circling the Wagons at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue The recent history of second term U.S. presidents indicates trouble will come at some point.  You just don’t expect it to come three at a time with roots both foreign and domestic.  But for the moment that is where the Obama administration finds itself. All of sudden last […]

Obama’s Leadership Test It was only a few months ago that Barack Obama was inaugurated for a second presidential term with all the pomp and pageantry that official Washington can muster.  There was a time in this country when the early days of a second term were a heady time for a freshly re-elected president. […]

Unity in the Face of Adversity Boston is a tribal town.  I know because I grew up in the area.  Back in the day, it was the Irish who held sway politically, while the descendants of the English, the so called “Boston Brahmins,” controlled business and finance.  My grandmother could recall the days when signs […]

Progress on Guns and Immigration It’s taken a while but spring has finally come to Washington.  The weather is warming, personal moods are improving and thousands of tourists continue to flock to what remains of the world famous cherry blossoms near the Jefferson Memorial. There are signs of a ‘political spring’ as well.  Progress is […]

Republican Youth versus Democratic Experience Okay, I know, it’s way too early to be talking about 2016 presidential contenders but the fact is Washington is a political town and is fueled by political speculation.  And if you’re a Republican, there is no better way to escape the gloom of last year’s presidential election than to […]

Justices Caution Not So Fast It’s not often that a revolution winds up on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, but it seemed to happen this past week.  The nine justices heard two potentially significant cases on same sex marriage and while decorum was maintained inside the chamber, a lot of the action seemed […]

Bracing for a Summer Showdown Members of Congress are away for the next two weeks, but before they left town they approved a law that will keep the federal government funded through the end of September.  Passage of the funding measure avoided a government shutdown and includes the $85 billion worth of across-the-board spending cuts […]

Party May Need Heart Transplant Like all smart political parties, Republicans have been spending some time looking in the mirror after last November’s dispiriting election results.  In a report called the Growth and Opportunity Project, Republican leaders studied what went wrong last year and offer up some general ideas about improving the party’s electoral prospects […]

  Looking for the Next Reagan Thousands of election-weary conservatives gathered at a resort hotel outside Washington this week, trying to figure out what went wrong in last November’s election and how to fix it for the future. The Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, is a kind of melting pot for the conservative […]