With or Without Comey, This Presidential Election Was Always Going to Be Close
Clinton was never going to win in a landslide, and GOP voters were bound to come home to Trump.
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Clinton was never going to win in a landslide, and GOP voters were bound to come home to Trump.
The Republicans who are separating themselves from the candidate are far too late.
Caught between a disastrous presidential candidate and a base that loves him.
A question to watch in the upcoming days is whether they impressed a key demographic.
We live in a media culture that covers everything as a potential cataclysm. But fewer and fewer of us are taking the bait.
No follow-ups or fact-checks during Wednesday night’s forum played right into Trump’s strategy just as the polls are tightening.
The more “presidential” candidate never emerged. Why fight it?
The hold on power is a stronger pull than patriotism.
She gave the GOP candidate a real verbal beatdown in her convention address.
"The problem is not that the press is failing to do due diligence; the problem is that many of his [Trump's] adherents are impervious to that diligence."
Hillary Clinton needs to vanquish him. But it's going to be close.
After the Orlando attack, Republican leaders dismissed his proposals. But they're too afraid of him — and the base — to break up completely.
The Democrat locked up the nomination. Now it's time to call on the guy in the White House who defeated her eight years ago.
Why the likely Democratic nominee can't try to remain above the fray anymore.
Get ready for the GOP's self-proclaimed "presumptive nominee" to begin a new phase of anti-Hillary attacks.
He's making Clinton a stronger candidate by staying in the race. She's going to need it against Trump.
Spiraling closer to a contested Republican convention in Cleveland.
Blaming the press for Trump's rise is a fundamental misunderstanding of the political moment.
The only thing we have to fear is that it will work.
Wishful thinking among the Establishment won't change what South Carolina reaffirmed: Those guys aren't going anywhere.
The lovers of the Constitution now want to block any Supreme Court nominee President Obama puts forward.
All of their guys — Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Christie — now seem like nothing more than also-rans.
Maybe, maybe not. But beware the narrative that Rubio is poised to take over the race.
A Sanders-versus-Trump election might not be so unbelievable after all.
The gun-obsessed right tried to blur the truth about the president's emotion and his modest executive action. It didn't work.
When it comes to fearmongering, never bet against the Donald.
His anti-Muslim plan is the latest outrage that only seems to make him stronger.
Candidates are trying to drum up fears over refugees, but it can't hide their utter cluelessness when it comes to how to combat ISIS.
The moderators practically let the candidates rehearse their stump speeches, and it's unlikely anyone will knock Trump or Carson from atop the polls.
With Jeb Bush looking finished at last night's debate and Marco Rubio still not attracting base voters, the possibility remains in play.
Democrats and Republicans alike are recognizing that Hillary Clinton remains the candidate to beat — and it will take more than some emails to bring her down.
The GOP handed her a gift when they slipped up about the Benghazi investigation. She's playing it brilliantly.
Along with Donald Trump and Ben Carson, she's the latest 2016 candidate to ride the wave of dissatisfaction with the GOP Establishment to a higher spot in the polls.
His Late Show has great fundamentals. Now it just needs to loosen up and bring the laughs.
Even after the debate fracas, the oft-predicted implosion in support for Trump has yet to materialize.
Bush was dreadful. Rubio was tedious. Walker was bland. Only Kasich held his own against the GOP's man of the hour.
The candidate's campaign circus keeps gaining steam because of the fault lines within his own party.
Her sit-down with CNN doesn't count.
If the 2016 candidates hedged on the removal of South Carolina's flag, how could any of them be expected to tackle the real problems of racism America faces?
The Bush legacy aside, the GOP's greatest case against Hillary Clinton is that the country doesn't need a repeat. There's only one candidate who can't argue that.
As the investigations widens, the question remains whether anyone in Congress knew what the former Speaker was trying to hide.
The Irish vote recast the country's relationship with the Catholic Church. Will America be able to do the same with the religious right?
2016 hopefuls Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio bungled their stances, a sign the party still isn't ready to confront its decade-long denial on the lead-up to the war.
It means as much for America as it does for her campaign that she muster courage and leadership in the slog to 2016.
“We’ve never seen her get a burrito before.”
There will be consequences far beyond the economic punishment that is already being inflicted on Indiana.
His scandal didn't teach us anything new about D.C. — but that didn't make it (or him) any less entertaining.
Those around her keep saying she won't repeat her 2008 missteps. There's no evidence for that.
It's early yet, but will Hillary Clinton's use of personal email become big enough to derail a presidential run?
He periodically pops his head up from his business empire to spew venom at the president.
The anchor and the network badly flubbed the first attempt at an explanation.
The recent anti-vaccination debate proves it could be a big liability for 2016.
Sure, the film has sparked a furious debate. But no one sees the war like they did in 2004.
The cancellation of The Interview sets a dangerous precedent for both the First Amendment and America's future under cyber warfare.
What does it mean to be a "nation of laws" if those laws are not applied to people in power?
Looking back on a career like few others.
The country wanted to throw the bums in power out, and the bums in power were the Democrats.
The paranoia runs deep on our suburban streets.
Conservatives are stoking Ebola hysteria for pure political gain.
The ISIS campaign is a "dumb war."
They're ready to support Obama on ISIS, but they don't want to go back to war.
The president's deliberateness may be America's best recourse against the chaotic threats from ISIS and Putin.
The U.S. public seems scarcely to have noticed our latest foreign policy emergency.
A familiar bleakness has settled on Washington.
Netanyahu has fumbled the situation and needs the U.S. help to make a deal.
The “religious freedom” argument of those who want to restrict access to contraception is a fig leaf.
Of course he lost! It's not his party anymore.
A freed POW has become a pawn in the fallout over a failed military adventure.
The Republican civil war is over. The tea partiers won.
The exhaustive and ominous new White House report won't break the political gridlock.
Jo Becker's chronicle of the marriage-equality movement overlooks many of its real giants.
Big-time talent still matters, even as the the desk-and-guest show loses its cultural weight.
It's the only issue Republicans have in the midterms.
A swaggering, nationalistic Russia is not the Soviet Union.
It's a matter of voter demographics.
There are some uncomfortable parallels between Sochi 2014 and Berlin 1936.
Yesterday's truce was a temporary victory for what remains of the Republican establishment—and that's about it.
How can we make sense of his legacy and his death?
The great Republican Establishment's hopes are dead on arrival.
Her doomed Senate bid was on the wrong side of history—and the GOP.
How could such an accomplished president screw up so badly?
It's reminiscent of the faux "Hitler diaries."
The New Jersey governor as president? Fuggedaboutit.
Reaganism would make a comeback.
This anti-government insurgency is 200 years old.
The Obamacare fight isn't about reforming health care in the slightest.
Mass shooters are the equivalent of homegrown suicide bombers.
The president couldn't rouse Congress after a massacre in Newtown, so how could he for one abroad?
The Iraq consensus of yore is long gone.
Hard to believe?
It's frightening that the government would charge a leaker with "aiding the enemy."
Talk is cheap.
Iraq.
The chief justice is no match for history.
If Senate Republicans don't kill it, the crazies in the House will.
America yawns while he hides.
The country is not panicked about terrorism, and that gives the president an opportunity.
The GOP finds a new Watergate.
It's Whitewater.
The president could do more despite Congress tying his hands.
Politicizing tragedy before the manhunt was even over.
Even if background checks pass, it will be a small step forward for gun control.
Look who doesn't support traditional marriage.
Cynicism, tax cuts, and economic collapse.
Note to GOP: Bartender photo-ops win elections.
The senator's performance art was admirable.
Look who's getting behind gay marriage and Obamacare.
At least he wasn't the totally ignored Rand Paul.
For most people, Zero Dark Thirty is just a movie.
McCain has some chutzpah to criticize the nominee over Iraq.
The chief justice doesn't want to be on the wrong side of history.
This will take decades.
The standoff is over but the ideological war will get much bloodier.
The struggle to make America safer will take decades. Is Newtown the start?
Who's really hurting workers? The Koch brothers, for starters.
Obama can wait out the GOP.
Treasury is a big concern.
Adultery isn't a crime.
Do you think Christie would've cozied up to Obama if Romney was already winning?
The Beltway morning-after boilerplate on Mitt is wrong.
The president left the Ambien at home and kept going at Romney.
How he can recover and what Romney should do to keep his momentum going.
Maybe old, rich white men won't buy this election after all.
Mitt reveals himself to be a callous man who doesn't know how Americans live.
Mitt gets ahead of the facts to attack Obama.
Remember when she was considered a liability to Barack?
Mitt is a passing fad for the governor.
After a short ceasefire, the Republican war on women starts again.
This guy is no game-changer.
Not paying taxes for ten years isn't quite the same as being a communist.
Even his own party wants to see what Romney made and paid.
The truth about Mitt's wealth is finally trickling out.
Robertscare?
Romney had to bend to conservative donors with a serious crush on Rubio.
Yes, Obama had a rough month, but his team hasn't even begun to attack brittle Romney yet.
A big defeat for organized labor, a symbolic defeat for Democrats, and a victory for vulture capitalism.
Donald Trump isn't a politician: He's a pure self-promotion machine that's sucked up Mitt Romney.
I hope no one is nauseated if I suggest that this was idle self-promotion on Booker’s part.
Mitt is the the Demon Barber of Wall Street.
We have now seen an American president take a historic stand on gay civil rights.
Let’s talk about what is truly despicable here.
Are conservatives rallying around Mitt?
The general election begins with one crazy week.
One-Mississippi, Two-Mississippi ...
How the president can survive—and thrive—if health-care reform goes down.
Will the real Mitt please stand up?
Pollsters keep giving Romney the edge — but voters keep giving Santorum the wins.
Hatred of Obama may be the only thing Republicans can agree on.
What was going on with that Ron Paul–Mitt Romney team-up against Santorum?
Why the races in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota were so devastating for Romney.
The election will be decided in blue-collar swing states after all.
“There was a functioning Washington then; we have a non-functioning Washington now. It's hard to imagine such a ‘supercommittee’ even existing in those days.”
“What we do know is that, for the foreseeable future, class anger is not going away on the left or right.”
“A hundred years from now, is anybody going to be teaching Sarah Palin in high school?”
“A Christie-Cain ticket would be endlessly entertaining and just possibly the biggest boon to pizza since the founding of the republic.”
“Bankers win, America loses. Did I get that right?”
“I have no expectation that anything like this bill will get through this Congress, let alone in a timely fashion.”
“The riots raised questions about everything from immigration, race, and class to the state of the criminal justice system, education, and cultural values. ”
“The Perry-Bachmann battle will be a blast, so let's hope it doesn't end too soon. I really think almost anything can happen in the GOP race and in the election. ”
“Everyone knows that S&P; has gotten everything wrong in the recent past, but the kindling for panic was there, waiting for just the right spark to ignite it.”
“I woke up Saturday morning with two thoughts — that McConnell is now the most important man in Washington, and that the next U.S. president will be someone who was not in Washington while this nightmare unfolded. ”
“Until Washington gets full congressional representation, this unreconstructed plantation-era injustice will blight D.C.'s status as a city, and no White House occupant can dispel it, Obama included.”
“I’d still give the odds to Romney for the nomination (though Perry, too, has great hair), but the fact remains that many Republicans across the party’s ideological spectrum really do not like him and/or trust him (not without reason!)”
“Murdoch has always seemed to me more like a James Bond villain — with their placid exteriors and raging interiors — than any other corporate executive I know. He revels in it.”
“When this administration’s pragmatism risks losing the election anyway, some real course correction would seem essential.”
A civil rights landmark, plus the latest production of 'The Normal Heart' and a tribute to the actress Alice Playten.
The Trump candidacy looks a lot more like Reagan’s than anyone might care to notice.
There was no Establishment after all.
Even today, Todd Haynes’s mesmerizing adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel comes as a shock—mostly for how much lesbian culture remains invisible to America at large.
Far from destroying it, he’s exposing all its phoniness and corruption in ways as serious as he is not. And changing it in the process.
Why do America’s riots so precisely mirror each other, generation after generation after generation?
The Great American News Anchor is no different from the Great and Powerful Oz.
Is also the latest GOP political unicorn. No wonder the party hopes Dr. Ben Carson will stay in the race as long as possible.
What’s killing comedy. What’s saving America.
Just look at the future we imagined in 1964.
What’s worse than being depicted as a bloodthirsty power-monger with a filthy mouth? Depicting yourself so blandly that no one cares.
We are still stuck in 2003, and it isn’t (only) George W. Bush’s fault.
As the late-night comedy landscape reshuffles, are right-wing comics being unfairly ignored? An investigation.
Again? But the harder their enemies hit, the stronger the couple becomes.
Act One is an infectious evocation of a vibrant world written, it turns out, by a chronic depressive who also found the business “pure hell.”.
The conservative news channel’s only real power is in riling up liberals, who by this point should know better.
A lifetime making sense of the extraordinary songwriter—as young fan; critic and “enemy”; and, by now, old friend.
If only 12 Years a Slave (or Roots, or any other wrenching American slave narrative) could move audiences beyond those already eager for a dose of feel-good shame.
The shutdown crisis is nothing we haven’t seen before.A good portion of America has been trying to sabotage the government for almost our entire history.
The junior senator from Kentucky would be an appalling right-wing president, and yet he is a valuable politician: a man of conviction, and a visitation from a post-Obama political future.
Washington may be a dysfunctional place to govern, but it’s working better than ever as a marketplace for cashing in. And that’s thanks, more than anything, to the Democratic Establishment.
Note to Edward Snowden and his worrywarts in the press: Spying is only spying when the subject doesn’t want to be watched.
… is really just yesterday. My surrogate parent Clayton Coots was one of countless closeted men who didn’t live long enough to see this moment.
The party on the brink of destroying the Voting Rights Act reminds us that Republicans were really the great civil-rights leaders all along.
Time is on the block. The New York Times is teetering. It can get an alumnus down, but the last thing the news business needs is a case of nostalgia.
Deep behind a tangle of denial and rebranding initiatives, a GOP resuscitation plan emerges.
Oscars for the Obama age: Me, I'd vote Django.
We should have known all along that David Petraeus was cheesy. And Lance Armstrong mendacious. And Joe Paterno a coward. And yet.
Denial has poisoned the GOP and threatens the rest of the country too.
This is a nation that loathes government and always has. Liberals should not be deluded: The Goldwater revolution will ultimately triumph, regardless of what happens in November.
A week steeped in right-wing media reveals a Republican Party far more despairing than the lamestream knows.
"Everything is copy," Nora Ephron learned from her mother. She kept one thing to herself, though—and left many of us wondering why.
Declinist panic. Hysterical nostalgia. America may not be over, but it is certainly in thrall to the idea.
Why negative advertisements are powerful, essential, and sometimes (see "Daisy") even artistic.
Since America elected its first black president, the conversation on race has turned just as loopy as the hilarious and audacious Clybourne Park.
The old, white, rich men who are buying this election.
The GOP's woman problem is that it has a serious problem with women.
Liberals applaud themselves for championing gay marriage. But there are ghosts at the weddings.
His greatest passion is something he’s determined to keep secret.
For the new GOP, conservative isn’t nearly radical enough.
The hate that ended his presidency is eerily familiar.
And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.
What good did bipartisanship ever do anybody?
The 9/11 decade is now over. The terrorists lost. But who won?
The News Corp. scandal already exposed just how thoroughly the company had corrupted Britain. Now it’s time to look on this side of the pond.
The President's failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.
Frank Rich joined New York magazine in June 2011 as Writer-at-Large, covering politics and culture. He is also a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.
Rich joined the magazine following a distinguished career at the New York Times, where he had been an op-ed columnist since 1994. He was previously the paper’s chief drama critic, from 1980 to 1993. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the Times introduced in the Sunday “Week in Review” section in 2005. From 2003 to 2005, Rich had been the front-page columnist for the Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section as part of that section's redesign and expansion. He also served as senior adviser to the Times’s culture editor on the paper's overall cultural-news report. From 1999 to 2003, he was also senior writer for The New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for the Times.
Rich has written about culture and politics for many national publications. He won the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. His books include Ghost Light: A Memoir and, most recently, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina. Since 2008 Rich has also been a creative consultant to HBO, where he is an executive producer of the Emmy-winning comedy Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and executive produced the Peabody Award-winning documentary Six by Sondheim as well as the forthcoming documentary Becoming Mike Nichols.
A native of Washington, D.C., and graduate of Harvard, he lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Alex Witchel.