We need real campaign finance reform to loosen the grip of special interests on politics.
Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong, and, if necessary, hit back.
Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics - not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but the real thing. The candidate himself is glamorous. Audiences project onto him the personal qualities and political positions they want in a president.
I always start my campaigns early, and I run hard. Maybe it comes from the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco politics, where it's not even a contact sport - it's a blood sport. This is how I am as a candidate. This is how I run campaigns.
Once Canadians no longer believe that there is any good in politics, they no longer feel we can work together to solve the challenges we're facing, and that is my fundamental motivation: how do we work together as a country to solve the big challenges we're facing.
In modern politics, polls often serve as the canary in the mine - an early warning signal of danger or trends. But polls can also be used to wag the dog - diverting attention from something significant.
The undue influence of money on our politics is like a cancer underlying other cancers, the issue underlying all other issues.
To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment - especially those who were filled with great hope a few years ago, when then-Senator Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois.
If you're a white candidate, it is twice as important for you to be talking about racial inequity and not just describing the problem - which is fashionable in politics - but actually talking about what we're going to do about it and describing the outcomes we're trying to solve for.
I didn't come up through the ranks of the conservative movement... I came to these revelations about my own personal politics in a realm in which those books, those ideas, the canon of conservatism, is nonexistent.
There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.
It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.
The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.
There is a disconnect between Arkansas and Washington, D.C. The career politicians in Washington are not listening to people here in Arkansas, and this is the fundamental problem with politics.
No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.
One respect in which I'm very much my father's son is how I feel about Joyce. 'Ulysses' is very much about daily life, when you get into this other guy's life and you learn about the things he cares about, and why he cares about them. And then, very indirectly, very subtly, you learn why politics has impacted his life, too.
Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.
I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund - doing favors for oppressive regimes, and many others, in exchange for cash.
The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.
