As the dust settles from the remarkable election of 2008 and the Obama transition is in full tilt, it is worth taking stock of lessons learned so they can inform not only campaigns that follow but the way Democrats and progressives pursue their legislative agendas.

From the standpoint of...

After a sweeping electoral victory, Democrats today have much to rejoice. So do middle class Americans, who made clear with their votes that they could not afford another four years of a government asleep at the wheel that cost them a fifth of the equity in their homes...

With three weeks left to go, the election appears to be a battle of titans: anxiety pitted against anxiety. Anyone who still thinks campaigns are "debates on the issues" (e.g., whether the newly unveiled McCain economic plan is better or worse than the plan released the day before by Obama)--or...

It was Tuesday afternoon last week, and I was heading back from San Diego to the East Coast when I caught a piece of a speech on the economy by Barack Obama. I almost missed my flight because I couldn't walk away from it. My immediate response: This was a...

Democrats around the country have been growing increasingly anxious over the last week, and for good reason. If there was a clear message from Denver, it was reflected in the remarks of virtually every commentator on television after Obama's magnificent speech: "Wow, Obama can throw a punch." He needed to...

The Democratic Convention this year was simply stunning, with multiple-base hits by many of the players and triples or homeruns by all its superstars. It was bookended by two picture-perfect speeches. In the first, Michelle Obama accomplished exactly what she needed to: to make clear that she is a mother,...

In the presidential race of 2004 we had the Two Americas. In this year's race we have the Two Obamas: the one who has drawn repeated comparisons to JFK, RFK, and MLK, and the one who has drawn comparisons to Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. Whether Obama will...

For years Democratic candidates have struggled with how to counter Republican stands that paint the world in black and white, readily summarized in brief, evocative phrases (e.g., "life begins at conception," "tax and spend," "cut and run"). A prime example is abortion, which has left Democrats outside the Northeast and...

My first thought upon hearing Friday's "big news" on all the cable stations -- straight from the pages of the nation's leading investigative newspaper, the National Enquirer -- that John Edwards had been caught with his trousers down, was, "Oh, no, what if this cuts into the story of that...

A New York Times report this week described the frustration and perplexity of the Obama team as to why they are having trouble "getting their message out" in the face of GOP "distractions."

Sound familiar?

The economy is tanking, and McCain's chief economic adviser, Phil Gramm, made one of...

This year should be a perfect storm for a Democratic presidential candidate, particularly one with the rhetorical gifts of Barack Obama. McCain has literally every indicator political scientists enter into their models to predict electoral success or defeat working against him: He has repeatedly allied himself with the most unpopular...

This week McCain and his campaign have complained about "Obama-love," arguing that fawning journalists are mirroring or fostering a fawning electorate. McCain's charge of press bias on Obama's overseas tour is a little hard to swallow on two counts. The first is that no one has enjoyed so little objectivity...

In retrospect, finding flaws with the Clinton campaign seems the natural thing to do. How else could a man who was just a state senator four years ago have defeated one of the most competent, intelligent, well-connected, well-respected members of the Senate? The New York Times ran a series of...

Since the rise of television as a major force in American politics, and particularly since Joe McGinnis's extraordinary behind-the-scenes portrait of how the 1968 Nixon campaign, led by a team of advertising men, manipulated the public image of Richard Nixon in The Selling of the President, many have expressed concerns...

This is an adapted version of Postscript to the Paperback Edition of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, to be released today, May 5, 2008.

It was July, 2006. A few weeks into writing what I thought was going to...

I watched Barack Obama's speech yesterday morning intently. The "pre-game show" of cable commentators predicted a somewhat grim outcome. What could Obama say that could possibly overcome his association with the words of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Would he throw his pastor on the train tracks? And even if he...

In a press conference Thursday, the president labeled MoveOn's recent ad in the New York Times "disgusting" and questioned the patriotism of Democrats who refused to repudiate it. Those were disingenuous words from a president who was either silent or complicit in the whisper campaign against John McCain in the...

If I hadn't known what to expect from the title ("Stop Making Sense"), I could guess from the well crafted first sentence, with all the resonance of the opening lines of a Dickens novel: "Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this...

The polling season has started early. Nearly a year and a half before the general election, we are already in the midst of the horserace. On the right side of the aisle, straw polls just in from Iowa have already shown what anyone who can read the nonverbal writing on...

John McCain's free-fall from high-flying Republican front-runner to the driver of a bus sputtering for cash and careening downward without any brakes is only the dénouement to a story that began in 2000. That's when McCain gave that infamous convention address praising the man who had behaved so unethically toward...