I'll sometimes forget it's my birthday, but my mom has taken to calling me at the exact time of my birth, so that'll usually remind me. It was an important moment for me, obviously, but I guess a more memorable one for her.
Back in August 2002, I was hired as a reporter for a website covering New Jersey politics, then still a pretty novel concept. I was 22 years old, not from the state, and thoroughly inexperienced.
Typically, the view of party leaders is that primaries are best avoided. Better to coalesce around a consensus candidate early, help that candidate amass a mighty bankroll, and focus the attention of volunteers, activists and other stakeholders on the general election.
When the two have crossed paths in public, McCain hasn't even tried to mask his ill will toward Obama.
Governorships and Senate seats are the most common stepping-stone offices for presidential campaigns, and U.S. House seats are the most common stepping-stone positions for statewide campaigns.
I want to thank Chris Hayes and his team for creating a totally original and incredibly smart model for political television.
The Tea Party was really a two-front war - one against Obama, the other against any Republican politician who reeked of insiderdom or insufficient purity.
When it comes to gay marriage, the electorate can be broken into three basic groups: a relatively small core of committed opponents; a relatively small core of committed supporters; and a vast swath of conflicted voters who like to think of themselves as 'tolerant,' but who are instinctively uneasy with sudden, sweeping change.
What I really love is modern political history. I love the research process, whether it's digging through old newspaper stories, artifacts from election campaigns or TV stories and being able to recreate moments in history that - when you look back at them now - you can get to that question of how did we get here.
There's always been deep divisions in this country - we had a civil war - and there've been regional and cultural and demographic. They've always been there.
Walter Mondale was dissuaded from running for the Senate from Minnesota in 1990, in part out of fear that his 49-state loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984 had reduced his standing.
In a gesture to moderate Republicans, Reagan put Bush on his '80 ticket, and Bush recognized that the Reagan crowd was rapidly becoming an overwhelming majority in the party. So he adjusted his views, served Reagan loyally and spent much of his vice presidency using his stature to convince conservative leaders they could trust him.
Boston is both a world-class city, home to some of the best academic and medical institutions on the planet, and a quirkily parochial place, where one of the biggest annual sporting events involves college hockey players competing for a beanpot and where generations of baseball fans actively believed they were victims of a curse.