Some candidates need to say provocative things that make noise to break through the media muffle and get themselves noticed.

Let us now praise Barack Obama.

While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied - and to some extent overshadowed - by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future.

The exit polls suggest that after a relatively disappointing first term, Obama managed to reassemble almost all of his 2008 electorate.

America is great not because it's a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.

Newt Gingrich never received more than 100,000 votes in his life. He'll never be president.

This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.