What do you get a President-elect for the holidays who will soon have the weight of the world on his shoulders? Advice books, energy food, sports gear? It's a predicament.

After January 20, Barack Obama will be in official gift land. He will have to declare almost all...

On election night, when the TV returns made clear that Barack Obama had been elected the 44th President, a great shout of joy erupted from the hundreds of Occidental students gathered in the union. Faculty living near campus said they could hear the roar from the crowd, ecstatic that...

The 2008 campaign is heading to a decisive conclusion. Barack Obama is sailing towards a triumphant finish on the winds of economic distress and financial crisis. Obama has demonstrated a steely coolness under fire, while John McCain has turned into a caricature of himself as an old man, out...

I watched the first presidential debate last week with friends in Sydney where I was on a State Department speaking tour to explain US politics to Australian audiences. One of my co-viewers was Don Russell, a former Aussie Ambassador to the US and chief political advisor to the former...

The guns of August are heard again.

The unexpected, sudden and brutal incursion by Russian troops into the small, former Soviet Republic of Georgia, has provided hawkish voices in both the US and Russia with an opportunity to talk tough. Republican nominee John McCain has had...

In the dog days of summer, I and my dogs take comfort in the wisdom of Yogi Berra. As that great Yankee catcher and philosopher said, "It's deja vu all over again." That's just how I feel seeing the photos and reading the reports of Barack Obama's economic gathering this...

While Senator Obama is on foreign tour this week, it is a good time to consider what factors will be decisive in the fall Presidential race.
The election will not be won on foreign policy -- but it could be lost on it. That's why Senator Obama...

Nothing could be more accurate today than the political chant from Chicago in 1968: "The Whole World is Watching." The level of interest in the upcoming U.S. presidential contest is incredibly high, greater than at any time in post-Cold War history. This is due to the rapid decline of America's...

This year's competitive race for the Democratic nomination for president has sparked renewed interest in politics and public policy on American campuses.

Occidental -- the liberal arts college where I teach and where Barack Obama studied his first two years -- is no exception. Oxy students have turned out for...

In the aftermath of the now famous "bitter" remarks by Presidential candidate Barack Obama, an observer of the Democratic primary season might have hoped for a renewed interest in proposals for making the US economy work better and fairer for working class and middle income Americans. Unfortunately, media interest...

Presidential campaigns are not well-suited for rational or sophisticated discussion of economics -- and this year's race is not any different.

Already we have seen candidates blaming trade with Mexico or exports from China for the nation's economic woes, and for the decline of the middle class. In the Ohio...

My friend Bruce Stokes, national economic correspondent for the National Journal, and co-author of America Against The World with pollster Andrew Kohut, has written an interesting and informative column in Thursday's Congress Daily titled, "The Myth of Bipartisanship." Stokes' analysis of data on the growing divide between Republicans and Democrats...

On the February 3 edition of Fox News Sunday, panelist and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol said the only people supporting Senator Hillary Clinton "are the Democratic establishment and white women." Kristol asserted that "it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that's led it...

On election night in New Hampshire, loud cheers of "Change, Change, Change," greeted Senator Obama as he addressed his supporters. A sea of signs emblazoned with the word "Change" faced the cameras. At Governor Romney's event, he similarly talked about amorphous Change.

It is election time and Americans...

Is Senator Hillary Clinton ready to serve as president? And, if elected would she be an agent of change or a protector of the status quo?

I have known Hillary Clinton since she first met my friend Bill Clinton at Yale Law School and he fell head over heels...