Maybe anyone who voluntarily runs the gantlet we call our presidential election process must be mentally imbalanced in some respect, but this year’s crop of Republican candidates has been especially odd. Of the four who remain viable, only Mitt Romney can even pass as normal — and he has that eerie, Stepford-wife quality of being [...]

            By Michael Kinsley -             Feb 16, 2012 During a presidential debate in 1984, Ronald Reagan, who was then 73, famously said of his opponent, Walter Mondale, who was then 56 and trying to make an issue of Reagan’s age: “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The [...]

PITY THE BILLIONAIRE The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right By Thomas Frank 225 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25 Thomas Frank is the thinking person’s Michael Moore. If Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, had Frank’s Ph.D. (in history from the University of Chicago), he might produce books like this one and [...]

By Michael Kinsley – Feb 9, 2012 It’s been going on for too long, right before our eyes. Inevitably, someone was going to blow the whistle, and wouldn’t you know it would be Felix Salmon, the famous financial blogger for Reuters? The name Felix Salmon (for some reason) always makes me think of those plastic [...]

Many years ago, when Senator Ted Kennedy was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination, I quit my job at a national magazine in protest over the owner’s refusal to publish an article I had edited about the senator’s extramarital activities. At that time, there was a general consensus among Washington journalists that one didn’t do that [...]