What's The Real Racial Divide?

When old-time Democrats in Washington reminisce about the days of brokered conventions — floor fights and frantic early-morning calls, deals cut under the haze of cigar smoke — they talk about them the way a paleontologist might describe the hurtling stride of a velociraptor: an awesome spectacle, to be sure, but not one you would really want to see up close. Last week, Democrats woke up to find that the unthinkable may be upon them.

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Back-Room Choices

This Tuesday was designed to be the day when it all gets decided for Democrats and Republicans, the moment when more than 20 states weigh in at once on the chaotic presidential campaigns. In the Democratic field, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are each hoping to pile up a decisive number of delegates and end in one night what has been a protracted and increasingly unkind competition. If the Democratic voters defy the designs of the party, though, and neither candidate can achieve a clear verdict, the battle will then enter a rare and little-understood phase: the scramble for superdelegates.

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South Poll

The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has thus far been marked by a heightened sense of history and optimism — the former because its two leading candidates are pushing up against societal barriers that were once thought unmovable; the latter because Democrats feel as assured of recapturing the presidency as they have at any time since the post-Watergate election of 1976. Now it’s reality-check time.

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The Clinton Referendum

Winter’s first storm punished the White Mountains of New Hampshire on the Friday before Thanksgiving, rendering the terrain all but impassable. And yet in Gorham, a small town 50 miles from the Canadian border, hundreds of people shuddered patiently in the snow, in a line that snaked halfway around Gorham Middle-High School, while Secret Service dogs sniffed the gymnasium for bombs. “I’ve got a lot of people freezing out here,” a campaign aide barked into a phone, as if this might make the agents go any faster.

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The Web Users' Campaign

Before they chartered planes and opened teeming offices in Des Moines or Manchester, even before they announced their lofty ambitions to the world, the current field of presidential candidates set about absorbing the lessons of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. Dean lost, of course, and in a fairly ignominious way, but his campaign was the first to harness the fund-raising and organizing power of the Internet, and both parties’ 2008 hopefuls had visions of replicating his model — minus the meltdown.

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See How They Ran

I remember exactly where I was sitting when I started reading ''What It Takes,'' Richard Ben Cramer's 1,000-page, tiny-print history of the 1988 presidential campaign. It's not a hard thing to remember, because I couldn't sit anywhere else: I had mangled my knee in a touch football game, and all I could do was sit on the couch with my leg strapped into a motion machine.

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Home-Office Politics

Like other businesses, politics these days is conducted less in person than on speaker phone and laptops. Campaign consultants, policy analysts, fund-raisers and bloggers do most of their work in the comfort of their own homes, or in their cars, or maybe at Starbucks. Political professionals have as a result become part of a much larger American movement. In his new book, “Microtrends,” the Democratic pollster Mark Penn notes that 4.2 million Americans now work exclusively from home (a nearly 100 percent increase from 1990), while some 20 million do it part time.

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Democrats, Look West

As pundits have already noted more times than John Edwards has uttered the words "two Americas," Democrats may well make history this presidential season by nominating, for the first time, either a woman or an African American. What the party will not do next year, however, for the 39th straight time since the massive territory of California won its statehood in 1850, is to select a nominee who hails from the West Coast.

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Profiting from the Pummeling

WHEN MoveOn.org attacked Gen. David H. Petraeus, resorting to the schoolyard tactic of rhyming his name with something mean, leading Republicans must have felt like a band of desert-wanderers who had just stumbled onto an Olympic-size swimming pool. One by one, top Republicans lashed out at the now infamous advertisement, shifting the attention away from General Petraeus’s depressing testimony and branding the administration’s opponents as a bunch of radical, pierced-nose pacifist thugs.

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The Crusader

There are at least half a dozen reasons that a lot of political prognosticators, including many inside his own party, will tell you that Rudolph Giuliani will never be the Republican nominee for president, no matter what the polls say. They are, in no particular order:

1. As New York’s mayor, he was pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-gay rights.

2. He has demonstrated an odd propensity over the years for publicly dressing up in women’s clothing, proof of which is now readily available online, including a disturbing clip of Donald Trump nuzzling the mayor’s bosom.

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