Does Donald Trump's big win in the Nevada caucuses mean he's the inevitable Republican nominee? He has made himself the favorite and could sew up the nomination with the first winner-take-all primaries March 15. But it's not inevitable that he will become the nominee. The question is how others can prevent it.
The race for president is accelerating in high gear, or, rather, the races for president -- in the Republican and Democratic parties, in the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary and primaries and caucuses to come. How's it going? Let's look at these separate races.
Rough and tumble. Hammer and tongs. In the race for this year's Republican nomination, Donald Trump has not hesitated to attack and ridicule many of his opponents, and some of them have teed up attacks on him, only to hold back when they seemed to help rather than hurt him.
Some observations on the 2016 presidential race as we head into the dark period, i.e., the two weeks of Christmas and New Year's holidays in which no one has ever dared, at least in the past, to conduct any polls. Those of us who pick over poll results will have to fly blind until the week starting Jan. 4.
On Sept. 14, 2012, three days after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi, Libya, Hillary Clinton appeared at Andrews air force base, where she spoke with family members of those slain.
As the week began, I planned to write this column about some implications of Barack Obama's Sunday night Oval Office address. I noted that he devoted about one-fifth of this 13-minute speech to pleas that Americans not discriminate against Muslims.
There are just eight-and-a-half weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, with two of those weeks devoted to holidays during which polling is ordinarily not conducted, and the race for the Republican presidential nomination seems to be taking perceptible shape. And it continues to defy conventional wisdom.
Each of our two political parties, ancient by world standards, seems to be facing a gathering storm.
Tuesday night's Fox Business/Wall Street Journal debate in Milwaukee provided clues as to why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have been climbing, not by wide margins but perceptibly, into the top-polling positions of the candidates behind the two poll leaders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
"'Shut up,' he explained." That's a sentence from Ring Lardner's short story "The Young Immigrunts." It's an exasperated father's response from the driver's seat to his child's question, "Are you lost, Daddy?"
