(The Root) — When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last week, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen. As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the “14 words” motto of white supremacists was running…

(The Root) — President Barack Obama walked a narrow line in his speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans Wednesday night, attempting to fire up his most enthusiastic base while giving his most rabid enemies as little ammo as possible to fire back at him. It was no easy task. There has…

(The Root) — If you’re a strong believer in maintaining the status quo, the outbreak of voter-identification laws across the nation just might make sense. If you’re a student of American politics and history, on the other hand, you see it slightly differently. In that case, what you see is what we’ve got: voter suppression.…

(The Root) — The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished…

Getting the nod as the black consensus candidate for next month’s Chicago mayoral election worked like a charm for Carol Moseley Braun — the third time around. The first time the coalition of the Windy City’s self-appointed black power elites met to bless one of the half dozen or so African Americans vying to replace…