The Daily Beast

This campaign, like every campaign, pundits offered historical analogies. 2012 was 2004 or 1992 or 1948. But, in the end, it wasn’t any of those. It was 1936.

Whether Mitt Romney wins or loses tonight (or tomorrow, or next week), the most interesting story of the campaign, to my mind, is his turn to the center starting in the first debate. It’s interesting first of all because it happened so late. After the primaries, most pundits expected Romney to Etch-a-Sketch his way to the center. Instead, he chose Paul Ryan and temporarily turned the race into a referendum on entitlement cuts. Conservatives loved it, until Romney began falling behind in the polls, at which point they began slamming to the press.

There are many reasons I hope Barack Obama wins on Tuesday. But here’s a less obvious one: the recriminations will be more interesting.

Prominent Republicans seem genuinely surprised that Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama, again. So baffled was Romney adviser John Sununu that he chalked Powell’s decision up to racial solidarity. But that’s silly. African-Americans motivated by racial solidarity don’t spend their careers serving Republican presidents. Powell’s real tribal motivation, I suspect, is more interesting, and more significant. He’s backing Obama because he thinks Obama’s better for the U.S. military.

Barack Obama didn’t win tonight’s foreign policy debate. Neither did Mitt Romney. George W. Bush did.

Bush won it because the framework for understanding the world that he put in place after Sept. 11 still holds, even though it wildly distorts the world that the next president will actually face.

Robert Wright argues that racism isn't natural--at least, not the way we think it is. We are almost certainly hard coded to be xenophobic, which is why hunter gatherers often have such extraordinary homicide rates. But we are not hard-coded to attach ...

The big question about the second debate of the presidential campaign—and perhaps the entire presidential campaign itself—is this: is this now a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney or Mitt Romney and himself?

If it’s the former, Obama won tonight. Like Joe Biden before him, he spent more time on the offensive. He not only came out of the Libya discussion, potentially his most perilous, unscathed, but he flat-out won that portion of the night. He repeatedly and lucidly unloaded all the anti-Romney material that he didn’t mention in the first debate.

Good for Martha Raddatz. In last Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, she served up the first serious, widely watched discussion of the foreign-policy differences between this year’s Democratic and Republican tickets. And in so doing, she revealed what foreign-policy wonks already know. There aren’t as many differences as the two sides would have you believe.

Bowden readily compliments the scholarship and reportorial scope of Peter Bergen's Manhunt, which, like The Finish, takes a global, strategic view of the mission. This point of view sets these two books apart from No Easy Day and Seal Target Geronimo, ...

For a year, Mitt Romney has been trying to pretend he’s Ronald Reagan. Wednesday night he did something much smarter: He acted like George W. Bush.