Marc Cooper

It was once said of George W. Bush that watching him get through a debate is like watching a wobbly waiter weave among tables while desperately trying to balance a heavy serving platter above his head. You think he’s going to crash at any moment, but somehow he always makes......

THE IMAGES I HAVE in my head are not pretty. Bill Clinton, prone in a backless hospital gown, his eyes fixed on the muted TV above his head, a CNN graphic showing Kerry down in every poll this week. Clinton’s left hand lazily plays with and curls his tummy hair,......

Photo by Ted Soqui As I sat in the Madison Square Garden bleachers and watched John McCain’s opening-night speech to the RNC, I kept longing for Poppy Bush and his great 1992 Houston convention. Twelve years ago the president sat in his special convention box with Pat Robertson, a firm......

George W. Bush’s tepid protestations this week against “that ad, every other ad,” those political attack ads run by supposedly independent committees, have all the authenticity of Brer Rabbit’s anguished supplications of “Please, whatever you do, don’t fling me into the briar patch.” Dubya’s presidency was as much as birthed......

TUCSON, ARIZONA — One moment the desert sun hangs suspended as an oppressive, solitary orange sphere against a china-blue sky. Seemingly just a moment later, tar-black clouds cloak the landscape like a woolly blanket, sharply raising the humidity. Lightning bursts in the foothills, and the wind smells electric as a......

PHOENIX — Here in the triple-digit dog days when at times you can literally fry an egg on the asphalt, a couple of dozen fearless volunteers are going door to door in the southern, Latino quadrant of this desert metropolis, methodically registering new voters. The young canvassers — backed by......

Photo by Joeff Davis BOSTON — With the speakers required to submit their podium copy in advance to party managers eager to homogenize the nationally televised message, who can be surprised that avuncular Jimmy Carter, railing against the “super-rich,” came off — by midweek — as perhaps the most radical......

Photo courtesy of Kerry forPresident/Sharon Farmer Writing in The Wall Street Journal recently, Publishers Weekly news editor Steven Zeitchik neatly coined the term “flockumentary” to describe such films as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed. These are movies, he said, that people attend en masse, “to nestle together......

I’m embarrassed that I’m getting to this three weeks late. But that’s also part of the story. Writing about Francisco Ortiz Franco could not be postponed any longer after I passed through Tijuana this weekend and saw on the newsstands that Zeta — the crusading weekly magazine Ortiz co-founded —......

Illustration by Winston Smith In the darkest days of the Cold War, UC Berkeley professor and sometimes consultant to the CIA Chalmers Johnson heartily denounced anti–Vietnam War protesters as misguided. Nowadays, Johnson is a hero to a new generation of peace protesters. One of the most outspoken critics of the......