As the presidential race heats up, both parties are looking at so called swing voters, those who have in the past gone from one party to another dependent on the candidates and on the issues.  One of the largest groups is the Catholic vote.  Once solidly Democratic and working class, Catholics have voted Republican in larger numbers from Reagan to Bush II. 

Recently, I walked into a large movie theatre with my wife Barbara to see "Sex and the City," the long, long rendition of themes that animated the television series: single, older women with money and time on their hands living in the greatest city in the world and complaining about life, love, and their uncertain future. As I entered, we came a bit late, and I went across the audience's front and began to climb the stairs. As I made my way across the viewers, a group of women applauded me. They said they were delighted that I would come to this event. Indeed about three of the people out of 200 were men.

One of my favorite segments of the Jay Leno Tonight show is when they stop people in the street and ask them questions on history and historical figures.  Most recently, they asked a young woman who was George Washington?  She thought he was maybe a president, probably number 50.  Jay looked at her and said we have not had that many yet.  She was unembarrassed.  Other people were asked who were Lewis and Clark.  Huh?

As George W. Bush finishes up his second term as president, some historians and political pundits have already presumed history's judgment on that incumbent.  With the publication of Bush's former press secretary, Scott McClennan's memoir those retrospective judgments have already begun. 

Somehow, something unheard of is happening—a novice politician and senator Barack Obama is going to receive the presidential nomination from the oldest political party in the world.  Somehow, in a nation with such a long and brutal history of race relations, a black man or at least a man with a black father is making a very serious bid to govern a historically white nation. 

With her victory by ten points in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton has re emerged as a very viable candidate for the Democratic nomination.  It is obvious that the party is severely split and that both she and Obama are like two punch drunk boxers slugging it out without a knock out coming.  They each have their own base in the Democratic Party, and neither is gaining or losing adherents to the other.  Clinton is strong with the lower class, union based, non college educated wing of the party that is deeply worried about employment and the difficult economy.  They are not much interested i

In their collective wisdom, the American Founding Fathers in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 wrote into our primary document that there would be no religious test for public office.  Later, in the Bill of Rights, they banned any interference between church and state.  They had learned the lessons of Western Europe all too well and sought to avoid that political climate where Catholic and Protestant did battle for centuries over religious preferences, ending up with the doctrine that the people took the faith of their rulers.

In the chaos of Iraq, there are some interesting lessons we might extract from our occupation of post world war II Germany.  The historian David Stafford has carefully shown where the similarities and differences between these cases.  With the collapse of the Wehrmacht in Germany, the Allies began a de Nazi program--dissolve the party, put war criminals behind bars awaiting trial and retribution, and abolish the Prussian state—often seen as the site of much militarism in that nation. <!--break-->

As spring comes, the landscape is still populated by presidential candidates. It appears that the Republican nomination is set, and Senator John McCain has positioned himself as a conservative Republican, even though large segments of fundamentalist Christian groups and the some of the GOP chattering class dislike the mercurial maverick. McCain continues to preach the sterling virtues of staying in Iraq-even if that commitment lasts a century. He has been the prime supporter of the surge in US troop force, which he proudly proclaimed is now working.

 On Easter Sunday, the Christian day for forgiveness and resurrection, the Untied States noted almost in passing the death of the 4,000th service person in the endless war in Iraq.  Of  that number 97% were killed after President George Bush proclaimed on the carrier, “USS Abraham Lincoln” that the mission of those fighting forces was accomplished.  But tragically, for all involved, the post war period wa