Jonathan Alter

During the 1928 presidential campaign, nutty right-wing Protestants claimed that Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party, was planning to extend New York’s Holland Tunnel all the way to the Vatican.

The 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case is fast becoming as explosive as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) or Roe v. Wade (1973). It took nearly 60 years before the Supreme Court reversed the Plessy endorsement of “separate but equal” treatment of the races in Brown v. Board of Education, and opponents of abortion are still waiting (probably in vain) for Roe to go.

Newt Gingrich was so bitter after his Florida loss that he neither called Mitt Romney to concede nor congratulated him in his primary-night speech. Now he’s hell- bent on chasing Romney around the U.S. for the next seven months making his life miserable. Who does this help? I say Romney.

If 2011 was defined by a debate over the national debt, 2012 looks to be focused more on fairness, which is just the way President Barack Obama wants it. The trick for him -- the balance he was trying to strike in his State of the Union Address -- is to come across as a pro-business populist.

The news media won’t learn what’s in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address until a few hours before he delivers it Tuesday night. But we know one thing: If the president doesn’t give us specific ideas of what he wants to do in a second term, he’ll have a harder time winning one.

The resignation of William M. Daley as President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff brings to mind the words of David Wilhelm when he left his post as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1994: “I’m going back to Chicago where they stab you in the front.”

Even after a surging Rick Santorum had tied Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses, Intrade, the predictions market for politics, put Santorum’s chances for the Republican presidential nomination at less than 5 percent. Traders apparently think Romney will win because he has the funding and organization.

“Have It Your Way,” the Burger King slogan goes. And most politicians do, twisting words to fit their interests. But sometimes they go beyond french-frying facts to serving whoppers.

All U.S. ground troops will be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, and soon this sorry conflict will fade quietly into the past, the second-dumbest war in American history. Yet the Iraq War has been missing in action during the Republican presidential campaign.

Newt Gingrich is back in contention for the Republican presidential nomination partly because he understands the power of words, the pervasiveness of amnesia, and the dark art of making them work together.