WASHINGTON, D.C. — Agents for Sen. Hillary Clinton, trying desperately to keep alive her presidential campaign, are privately telling Democrats that she is so "tight" with a dollar that she would not continue her contest against Sen. Barack Obama if she did not have a chance to win. That was a reference to Clinton pulling $11 millio...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Close-in supporters of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign are convinced he never will offer the vice presidential nomination to Sen. Hillary Clinton for one overriding reason: Michelle Obama. The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been snip...

Are we having fun yet? The run-ups to the voting in Indiana and North Carolina kept Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama working on their performance art (and who knew that Ron Paul was still in the Republican race, but he won 7 percent of the vote in Indiana). Hillary joked slyly with George Stephanopoulos that Rush Limbaugh once had a crush on her. A...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Federal Reserve's unprecedented bailout of Bear Stearns was crafted not at the White House or Treasury, but in secret by a New York central banker whose name is unknown to Washington power brokers and was a Clinton administration presidential appointee. "It's a new day," commented an investor and longtime Fed ...

JOHN MCCAIN-SAM BROWNBACK: A darling of the Religious Right, the Republican senator from Kansas bowed out before the presidential race got interesting. He has since endorsed McCain and defended him against other Double Rs as being authentic. With Brownback, author of "From Power to Purpose: A Remarkable Journey of Faith and Compassion," M...

A significant slice of Hillary Clinton's supporters — that is, moderate Democrats — might prefer McCain over Obama, or so I speculated a few weeks back. It was a hunch based on conversations and some suggestive but hardly definitive poll numbers. Critics of this view waved numbers showing more support for Obama than for Clinton among in...

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" today, consumer activist Ralph Nader told host Tim Russert that he has officially decided to wreck the 2008 presidential election. Mr. Nader had been huddling with prominent crackpots over the weekend to determine whether he had enough support among his natural constituency of self-absorbed whack jobs t...

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...

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)...