Conservatives may worship Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' but for Obama, the helping hand comes in large measure from the public, not the private sector. To call this 'socialism' is to do violence to the word and to the concept. To call it 'un-American' is a smear.

Victory has 1,000 fathers; defeat has 1,000 kibitzers.

In another life, before taking the veil of journalistic purity, I practiced the black arts of a political operative, including 'debate prep.

As a personal matter, I stopped voting more than a decade ago, on the grounds that it helped me as an analyst not to think about making a choice in the voting booth.

Well, politics is war, and in war, truth is the first casualty.

When an office-holder facing a multi-count indictment says that he has decided to spend more time with his family, the proper response is a horse-laugh. When an accused politician explains that a charge of corruption is 'really' an attack on his or her race, religion, ethnic background or gender, the odds that something felonious happened jumps.

There is no such thing as political science, but there are tenancies so strong that they might as well be called laws of nature.