Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., is back. By winning the Democratic primaries in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island this week, Clinton has ensured the Democratic presidential nomination will be decided at the Democratic National Convention. She has also demonstrated that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is far from unbeatable. Most of all, Clinton's comeback show...

Within the next two weeks, the number of American troops killed in Iraq is likely to reach 4,000, assuming that the average number of fatal casualties per day remains steady. It is an arbitrary number, given meaning by the fact that the nation may briefly take notice, but a day will come in this presidential campaign when Sen. John McCain must expl...

Did you catch the great showdown this past week? No, not Super Tuesday but the late-night television comedian battle over who discovered and "made" GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. While Republicans and Democrats were slugging it out at the polls, three kingpins of comedy were in chortle combat for the right to be called the crea...

There are elements in the Republican Party who are trying to turn the GOP into the victim party. No matter how much they've won, they want to see themselves as losers. An e-mail I received from a reader summed up the resentment that has been bubbling up all over the GOP. She had liked Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter as GOP hopefuls and didn't know ...

I posted a squib on the National Review website about a robo call I received from John McCain (Virginia's primary is Tuesday). The call stressed that he would, if elected, be a down-the-line limited government conservative who would never raise taxes, would defend life, would enforce immigration laws and would win the war on terror. The candidate i...

Assuming John McCain gets the GOP nomination, it will show how whimsical history can be. It would be the first time in living memory that a Republican presidential nomination went to a candidate who was not merely opposed by a majority of the party but was actively despised by about half its rank-and-file voters across the country — and by ma...

A number of political conservatives have been beating up on John McCain as insufficiently conservative. It's fathomable, but just barely so. We catch a few fellow Republican senators and some conservative activists saying things like, "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine" (Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi) ...

Just shy of a month ago, after the first votes were cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, it seemed that the Republican Party faced a fluid and fractious nomination contest, while the Democrats faced a clear-cut choice between two not particularly adversarial candidates. What a difference a few weeks can make. Now it appears that John McCain is on an uno...

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Everyone knows that. This campaign makes for strange bed-hopping. (How post-modern.) Hillary haters find themselves cheering Sen. Ted Kennedy to rally Democrats behind Barack Obama. Some voters are seduced by Sen. Obama's inspiring rhetoric, but many others merely see him as a way to get the Clinton soap opera off...