Even if you come in dead last in every poll, a run for the presidency might be a career booster. Then again, anyone remember the Carol Moseley Braun campaign of 2004?
Jimmy Carter was a long shot who won the White House.
United States Air Force, ID DF-SC-83-0126
The obscure candidates jumping into the Republican race for president will likely only see the inside of the White House on a tour. Yet long-shot candidates persist. Why?
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
What is up with Bernie Sanders? No chance that he would win the primary, much less the presidency. But there is a long history of outsider candidates who have impacted American politics.
Is that a womanly or a manly finger wag?
Rick Wilking/Reuters
Women have made remarkable strides in politics but a Hillary Clinton White House would still have to contend with continuing sexism against women in public life.
A still shot from DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
The Hollywood Reporter
Last month President Obama welcomed the film Selma into the White House – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House…
As much as we like to think that we vote on substance – not style – studies have shown that physical appearance matters to voters.
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
While much of the 2014 midterm election analysis centered on the Republican takeover of the Senate, the pundits may have overlooked an important development: the end of a time when politicians looked a…
Is the Obama presidency over? This has been the burning question on the lips of many Washington DC pundits and beltway insiders in the wake of devastating Democratic midterm election losses. According…
What are the similarities between 28 and 44?
Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Smithsonian Institution
The National Security Agency’s eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone calls. The United States Postal Service’s computers recording names and addresses on selected mail. The Obama Administration…
Barack Obama’s speech to announce a strategy to destroy Islamic State had a familiar ring to it because it followed the script of the past half-century.
EPA/Saul Loeb/pool
A few years back, an honours student in linguistics at Macquarie University did a small study of American presidential oratory. The student chose four speeches, in which four different American presidents…
“Ask what you can do for your country”: John F. Kennedy in 1963.
PA
Even though the assassination of John F Kennedy was the US’s fourth such loss, contemporaries talked of the end of national innocence. Looking back, 50 years on, perhaps what was so shocking was the killing…
While Obama may have given little up-front attention to climate change, he’s assembled a top-notch team behind the scenes.
EPA/Mark Wilson
President Obama’s inauguration speech this week presented a source of real hope for all those concerned about global climate change. With eight sentences, he devoted more of his address to this “wicked…