On Sunday night, as Hurricane Gustav bore down on New Orleans and Republican Party elders scrambled to muffle all sounds of revelry from the Twin Cities, Sammy Hagar, the former Van Halen frontman, stood before a microphone at the legendary Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue. He was wearing plaid board shorts, sunglasses, and a logo T-shirt Read More
DENVER—Michael Nutter, the young, brainy, African-American mayor of Philadelphia, took a chance during the Democratic primary season. He vocally supported Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama, the candidate with whom he shares many qualities—and the overwhelming preference, as it turned out, of his constituents. He explained his decision by citing the Clintons’ track record of delivering Read More
DENVER–“America has come very far,” Charity Ngilu said.
Sitting in a Denver cafe, sipping a cup of English tea, Ngilu—Kenya’s minister for water and irrigation, and the highest-ranking member of a small delegation of leaders from her nation who are attending the Democratic convention—was reflecting on the unlikely rise of Barack Obama. Four years ago, Read More
DENVER–Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, is a man of large and unfettered appetites, and to see him tear into a small, crustless reuben sandwich, corned beef flying, is a little like watching a lion take after a plump, wounded antelope. His first order of business completed, Rendell gallumphed up the microphone at the Pinnacle Read More
DENVER—Art is to presidential politics what food rations are to war—a necessary component of the enterprise, but nothing one would choose to consume under normal circumstances. In this, as in so many ways, Barack Obama’s campaign is different.
Early on, Mr. Obama captured the fancy of the bicoastal artistic community, and he’s gone Read More
DENVER—This Democratic convention, with its change-agent star, is supposed to be all about the future. But for one evening, in one small corner of Denver, the talk was still all about the past—four years past, to be exact.
At a private reception on Monday, Senator John Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Read More
This guy is canvassing outside the Colorado Convention Center for some kind of Halloween-related voter turnout drive called trick or vote. Kind of an unfortunate choice of costume though, all things considered.
DENVER — Howard Dean came up from behind and clapped Walter Mondale on the shoulder. “Joe Biden,” he said. “Great choice. Great choice.”
It was two glasses into cocktail hour on Sunday evening at the International Leaders Forum, a quadrennial powwow of foreign dignitaries hosted by the National Democratic Institute, an organization that promotes good Read More
Hillary Clinton got a temporary boost out of Pennsylvania last night, and today, her surrogates are likely to be arguing to superdelegates that her comfortable victory in a swing state is yet more proof that she is the superior general election candidate. But the risk of sounding like one of those baseball nerds who try Read More
[This article originally appeared in the 8/2/2004 edition of The New York Observer.]
Uhuru Kenyatta and Barack Obama have a lot in common. They both have Kenyan fathers. They are a year apart in age. (Mr. Kenyatta is 43, Mr. Obama, 42.) They are both in politics.
In his dazzling keynote speech to the Democratic Read More
