Posts by Bruce J. Schulman

The career of another senator-turned-president offers valuable lessons. Lyndon B. Johnson transformed the ties between the legislative and executive branches. ‘If it’s really going to work,’ LBJ said, ‘the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous.’

In navigating the transition before his Jan. 20 Inauguration Day, President-elect Obama must avoid the pitfalls that have undermined presidents-elect past.

As the economy takes its worst turn since the Great Depression, now is not the time to make specific promises.

In her concession speech Saturday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton appealed for party unity. But did Clinton’s endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama come too late? Has the bruising primary battle so divided the party and so weakened its presumptive nominee that Obama is vulnerable to defeat despite an unpopular war and a troubled economy?
On the [...]

Sen. Barack Obama’s opponents are still working to exploit the flap over his remarks in San Francisco, gleefully labeling him an “elitist.”
“I don’t think it helps to divide our country into one America that is enlightened and one that is not,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) charged. “If you want to be the president of [...]

As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) girds for the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries — races that could mark her last stand in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination — her candidacy represents a surprising turnaround. As an operative in George S. McGovern’s 1972 insurgent campaign, Clinton embodied the reform agenda that McGovern [...]

“I guess this was how the West was won,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (d-N.Y.) told cheering supporters in Las Vegas after the Nevada caucuses last month.
Clinton’s proclamation was premature — she has not yet won the West — but savvy, for the West is likely to determine the victor in this year’s presidential campaign. With [...]

On the heels of a decisive victory in South Carolina, Sen. Barack Obama heads into Super-duper Tuesday as a surprisingly strong challenger to the presumptive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. With much of the party leadership against him, Obama seeks to accomplish what few Democrats have managed in [...]