If you watched the annual Al E. Smith Foundation dinner in New York last evening you saw both Barack Obama and John McCain at their very best. This is the event at which the presidential candidates speak just a few weeks before the election every four years. Both men are expected to speak humorously for fifteen minutes. They were both brilliant and charming. McCain has an amazing sense of humor and showed incredible deference in congratulating Obama on accomplishing a number of historic firsts in his campaign. McCain said, at the end, "I can not wish you luck Senator Obama, but I can wish you well." What a great line.

And Obama was in the most humorous form I have ever seen in him. It prompted me to see a side of him that I do not think we have seen as a nation. (McCain has been around a long time and many of us have seen his incredible sense of humor on other occasions. We also know he used this to his advantage in prison for five and […]

The last of the three presidential debates ended last evening, as most everyone knows by now. I suppose the way you felt about the whole evening depended on who you are inclined to support. Most observers felt McCain did the best he has done but almost all agree that the difference was so slight that it matters very little to the outcome. I agree with this assessment. I believe debates generally do not swing elections unless one candidate really messes something up badly. One remembers Al Gore's sights and groans with George Bush and how much that turned people off. (Plus, Bush was expected to be a total dud against Gore and the low expectations helped him, so it seems.) Or we remember the last Reagan debate with Jimmy Carter and how he convinced millions that he was capable to lead us.
The most noted of all was the physical […]

On the issue of who they would appoint to the Supreme Court John McCain and Barack Obama could not have more radically different views about what a justice should do on the highest court. We can thank Rick Warren for helping to make their differences starkly clear when he asked both men which current justices they would not have chosen if they had been the president. (If you think about this, the question is brilliant, as were many that Warren asked in that Saddleback Forum.)

Obama said that he would not have appointed Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Samuel Alito (he voted against the last two in the Senate). McCain said that he would not have appointed John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer (he voted for Roberts and Alito in the Senate).

Besides the usual debates about Roe vs. Wade (abortion), there is much more involved in these answers than many people realize. McCain […]

David Freddoso, a political reporter for the National Review Online, has written what seems to me to be the best book against the election of Barack Obama. The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate came out in July and became an immediate best-seller. I have mentioned several times before that I have followed Obama's political rise in Illinois for some years. But even I didn't know a number of the things that Freddoso includes in this well-written critique. What separates Freddoso's book from other similarly critical works about Senator Obama is that he does not use the silly charges that have been thrown against Obama by far right critics. Freddoso dismisses, for example, the idea that Obama is really a Muslim, that he was sworn into office on the Koran, that he hates the American flag and the national anthem. He avoids character assassination and thereby sticks to the central claim of the Obama campaign: Barack Obama is […]

I think Thomas Sowell said it but there is, in this present political campaign, "a willingness to suspend belief." I sure agree with him. Both candidates, and the people in general, are seemingly willing to suspend belief and go with their emotions and feelings. In this scenario Obama wins the election easily. McCain has actually made the case for himself much worse since the Wall Street meltdown. I could not have imagined this a few weeks ago. I am not sure anyone could. But McCain's response is so bad that it is almost beyond belief. Obama's response is more measured at the end of the day.

First, McCain has launched an unfocused attack on greed and corruption. Well, yes, there is greed and corruption all around, but McCain offers no real solutions. Neither does Obama for that matter. But then I have come to believe the winner of this election may be the biggest loser […]