It's standard fare for a president to make a bipartisan gesture by including one member of the opposing party in his cabinet - just as it's always the case (lest we forget) that every president-elect vows to change the tone in Washington and reach out magnanimously to his vanquished opponents. But John Podesta, the former Bill Clinton former chief of staff who's spearheading the tra...

All may not be lost for McCain-supporting Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman. It seems President-elect Obama won't be kicking him to the party curb after all. Apparently, supporting the opposition -- campaigning with Republican candidate John McCain, speaking at the Republican National Convention, and criticizing Obama's foreign policy cred -- wasn't enough of an offense against Obama to...

Criticizing John McCain’s response to the brief war between Russia and Georgia last August, I wrote: It is, of course, possible to be appalled at Russia’s aggressive actions in the conflict without turning Georgia and its government into blameless democratic heroes. For suggesting that the government of Mikheil Saakashvili may have been at least partly responsible for

In response to William Kristol's lament that John McCain's advocacy of the surge in Iraq lost him the election while winning the war, Fareed Zakaria writes: Let us imagine that the surge had not worked. Imagine that over the past year and a half, American deaths in Iraq had soared, the gruesome civil war between Shiites and Sunnis had deepened, the flow of refugees out of Iraq had increa...

I don't believe that for one moment. If it were true, then no one at all would have voted for John McCain. In the event, nearly half the electorate did so. And if these things really were decided on YouTube, Facebook or, yes, blogs, then the re-affirmations of traditional marriage in California, Florida and Arizona would have been defeated, as would the repeal in Colorado of legal discrimination a...

Some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Matthew d'Ancona watches two films which deal with recent history. Fraser Nelson suggests that David Cameron shouldn't repeat John McCain's tax error. James Forsyth reports on the latest Tory poll lead, and claims we can have a British Obama. Peter Hoskin marks Remembrance Sunday, and wonders who will win the tax war. And C...

Parties of all colours love to engage in civil war, after an election loss. Sometimes, incipient civil war is why the party lost the election in the first place. Sometimes, the civil war was unavoidable. Here’s Red State’s “Operation Leper Petition” I pledge to publicly expose and actively oppose all of John McCain’s staffers smearing Sarah Palin and

Rod Dreher eavesdrops on a post-election gathering of conservative deep thinkers. Seems the only bright spots, as far as they're concerned, are Palin and Joe the Plumber: Like John McCain of last week, it appears this bunch has got 'em just where they want 'em. Heh. Honestly, this is the brain trust for the future of conservatism? The same folks that have been big players at the top...

One of the stranger things being said about Barack Obama's election victory is that part of the reason for his success was his use of the Internet. Obama, we are told, 'got it'. John McCain did not. The young... Eric Lee

John McCain wanted to be nice; Barack Obama wanted to be president.