The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.

The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.

I think if you'd had television cameras at Gettysburg, this would be two nations today. People would not have put up with that carnage if they saw it up close. We'd have elected McClellan in 1864.

Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee - an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic 'fights' against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes