ArcaMax

Ignore, if you can, the insult marathon that passes for a national election while we turn to America's real October drama: the final chapters of our baseball season. Why? Because we Americans, especially those in my adopted hometown of Washington, urgently need, in this unhappy year of 2016, to appreciate anew the values of our national ...Read more

The presidential debates, especially this year's first scheduled one -- at New York's Hofstra University on the night of Sept. 26 -- are really a national job interview. We the people will have a chance to make our own judgments on the character, intelligence, personality and humanness of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

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What comes to mind when you listen to the two last names of a presidential ticket spoken as one word? For example, I always thought the winning 1980/'84 combination of Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Bush, or "Reagan-Bush," sounded like an Oktoberfest event in Wisconsin. "We had a great time at this year's Reagan-Bush."

Did not the ...Read more

You're a white male blue-collar voter, and you think about how your nation's political and financial establishment has treated you and yours over the past 25 years. All "the best people" -- presidents and prize-winning professors and respected editorial writers -- told you that American trade deals with Mexico and China would be good for ...Read more

During my more than a half-century of living and working in Washington, D.C., in my semi-humble opinion, Gerald Ford was the most emotionally secure president I have observed. To support that position, allow me to tell you about President Ford's 1976 campaign against his Democratic challenger, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter.

Ford, who had ...Read more

As regular readers may remember, I have long insisted that Jan. 1 -- smack in the middle of winter and completely overshadowed by Christmas, just a week earlier -- makes no sense as to when to begin the year. Labor Day -- the first Monday in September, when days grow shorter and weather cooler, when vacations end and schools reopen and summer ...Read more

Mark Shields is off. The following is a column by Jamie Stiehm.

From on high they have spoken to us, we the people.

The neocon foreign policy elite vigorously embraced and enforced President George W. Bush starting three wars going into the 21st century: Afghanistan, Iraq and the global "war on terror." Detainees, drones and now ISIS in...Read more

Air Force Col. Bud Day, having already fought in World War II and the Korean War, was flying his 65th mission over Vietnam, when his plane was shot down and he, after bailing out, suffered a broken arm and injuries to his back and eye. Captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, he was beaten up before becoming that conflict's only U.S. prisoner of...Read more

In 1945, Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, the first Jewish chaplain in the history of the United States Marine Corps, was asked by his senior Protestant colleague to deliver the sermon at a single, interdenominational service dedicated to the fallen after the historically bloody Battle of Iwo Jima -- which cost the lives of nearly 7,000 Marines, ...Read more

In 1984, Hal Riney, a San Francisco advertising man, wrote and narrated "Morning in America," which became the signature television commercial of Republican Ronald Reagan's winning re-election campaign. In Riney's calm and reassuring voice, the script began: "It's morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever ...Read more

The first very first "presidential" test in public for every nominee for the White House is the selection of a vice presidential running mate. Right after the 1968 Miami Beach convention where he had won the Republican nomination, Richard M. Nixon explained why he chose his running mate: "There is a mysticism about men. There is a quiet ...Read more

Even though Democrat Hillary Clinton continues to lead Republican Donald Trump in nearly all major public polls, the answer to one question in the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll had to trigger panic attacks throughout the entire Clinton campaign. Respondents were asked whether Trump or Clinton "would be better" on "being honest ...Read more

In 1986, some 34 years after he had first been elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, the hero of the conservative movement that made possible the eventual election of Ronald Reagan, retired. As Sen. Goldwater cleaned out his Capitol Hill office, I was privileged to listen as he reminisced about the 1964 presidential contest ...Read more