The case against Joe Biden as a vice-presidential prospect is easy to make.

He comes from Delaware, a blue state worth only three electoral votes, and he’s been in the Senate for nearly four decades—not exactly the kind of executive resume to add balance to a ticket led by Barack Obama, a career legislator.

Plus, there’s his knack for talking his way into a mess, whether by lifting words from Neil Kinnock and puffing up his own academic credentials 20 years ago or by awkwardly stumbling into racial politics more recently.  read more »

In her embrace of a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax – an idea that virtually every credible economist agrees is a gimmick – Hillary Clinton is making the same bet that delivered her husband to the Democratic nomination 16 years ago: that voters prefer promises of free candy to the truth.

In 1992, with the country mired in an economic slump, Bill Clinton made a middle-class tax cut the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.  read more »

Sort of like the idle Colin Powell rumors that swirled before the 1996 and 2000 Republican conventions, we’ve been forced this campaign cycle to endure months of sporadic chatter about Condoleezza Rice’s supposed candidacy for the number two spot on the G.O.P. ticket.

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.  read more »

It can often to seem to rank-and-file Democrats as if the Republicans are still in charge of Congress: Nearly a year after their party picked up 31 House and six Senate seats, the war in Iraq still rages, with tens of thousands of more troops deployed now than then. This failure to force even a beginning to the end of the war accounts for the painfully poor poll standing of the Democratic-led Congress, with the party faithful even more restless and frustrated than independent voters.  read more »