Maybe I’m crazy, but I’d bet on John McCain to win the Republican presidential nomination. And the Democrat with the best chance to beat him is John Edwards.
If there’s any candidate who knows what he or she would be dealing with in attempting to change the American healthcare system, it’s Hillary Clinton. And, according to Boyarsky, charging into that particular political battleground might have made her a stronger contender.
As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know well, this season’s crop of presidential candidates can’t ignore the super-famous, the super-rich, or those fund-raising impresarios known as “bundlers” in their quest for the White House—and that campaign trend isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
If a Democrat wins the next presidential election, she or he will have to tackle battles abroad—and, no less significantly, at home. Boyarsky predicts that, after ending the Iraq war, a Democratic president would “immediately be confronted with domestic issues that have no Democratic consensus, issues in which debate is charged with deep feelings about national, ethnic and racial identity.”
Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. both understood the relationship between war abroad and poverty at home—an insight, says Boyarsky, that the nation sorely needs right now.
The Bush administration’s hit job didn’t work. Despite all the Republican efforts to stop the liberal grass-roots organization ACORN, its workers continue to trudge the streets of urban America, signing up voters in places where the Bush people never venture.
YouTube ushered in a new kind of political debate Monday night with the latest showdown between Democratic presidential hopefuls, and, according to Boyarsky, the new format made for refreshing changes.
Although John McCain has made several serious missteps in his bid for the presidency, and although pundits and politicos alike have all but sounded the death knell for his campaign, McCain may still have the wild-card potential to make a comeback—especially if President Bush gives him even the slightest boost.
As the immigration issue takes the front-and-center position in Congress, opportunities for real reform—as well as legitimization for millions of undocumented workers—are being squandered in each round of deliberation over the pending legislation.
In their mad race for money, the front-running Democratic presidential candidates might be selling themselves to the devil. That is, in words more familiar to political debate, they might be delivering themselves into the hands of rich and powerful opponents of progressive policies.
Truthdig’s seasoned political reporter sizes up the Republican candidates in the 2008 presidential race, noting how their tributes to Ronald Reagan remind him of Walt Disney’s animatronic reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln.
Truthdig is pleased to welcome Bill Boyarsky, one of the top political journalists in America, to the site. Bill will be adding his insights, honed over decades of reporting about presidential elections for the L.A. Times, to our political coverage in upcoming months.
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