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George W. Bush leaves office with a job-approval rating that once soared to historic highs, then fell slowly but steadily for five years before settling, in the last couple of years, into lows that no president has ever experienced for so long. The president’s final Gallup approval rating of 2008 is 28 percent; a number like that means some core Republicans don’t approve of Bush’s performance, and even among the many in the GOP who still approve, there are a number who are ready to see the president go. Bush knows that. The White House staff knows it. But the...

Sahuarita, Arizona — “I will end misguided defense policies,” Barack Obama said last February. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems. . . . I will not develop new nuclear weapons.” Obama’s words — delivered during the primary season to an organization that seeks to cut Pentagon spending in favor of increases for education and healthcare — come to mind easily here, at the Titan Missile Museum, in the Arizona desert about 20 miles south of Tucson. I’ve come to Arizona on a family...

Will the Blagojevich scandal damage the incoming Obama administration? Given Rod Blagojevich’s profane railings against Barack Obama, revealed on federal wiretaps, few observers believe — although none know for sure — that the Obama camp engaged in any pay-for-play dealings with the governor, and therefore few see any legal problems for Team Obama resulting from the criminal investigation. But that’s not the only way the incoming administration might be caught up in the Blagojevich affair. The probe is being conducted, after all, by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the man who prosecuted one of the most intensely investigated and politically-charged perjury-and-false-statements...

The Blago Scandal: What’s the Rush? Are Obama allies stoking a crisis to push an embarrassing scandal offstage? By Byron York How serious is the political crisis in Illinois? Each day brings new word that the emergency is intensifying; the latest came Friday, when Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan asked the state supreme court to declare Gov. Rod Blagojevich incapable of governing, arguing that the scandal surrounding Blagojevich amounts to a disability that prevents him from serving as governor. At a news conference in Chicago, Madigan also suggested that Blagojevich’s legal troubles are plunging the state into financial crisis, making...

I spent several years of the Clinton administration writing about one scandal or controversy after another. There was, of course, the Whitewater affair and the fight over the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. There was the Lewinsky matter. Travelgate. The bitter controversy over Elian Gonzalez. The furor over Bill Clinton's last-minute pardons. And more. It seems like so long ago. So why am I suddenly hitting the search feature on my laptop ten times a day, looking for old articles? Why am I looking for names like Eric Holder, Gregory Craig, Rahm Emanuel, and John Podesta? Because change has come to...

- - Republican governors meeting in Miami say their party has to shift its emphasis from ideology to voters' everyday issues. The Republican Party, still grappling with last week's election results, should position itself as a pragmatic problem-solver for working people, GOP governors meeting in Miami said Wednesday. Without unequivocally stating that the party should move to the ideological center to appeal to moderate voters, leaders at the two-day Republican Governors Association meeting urged their colleagues to tackle education, energy and the environment to broaden the party's base. Largely absent from their discussions at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Miami:...

Byron York, Jen Rubin, and Michelle Malkin all have smart takes on the McCain aides' smearing of Sarah Palin. The Anchorage Daily News has a couple videos of Sarah Palin talking to the press after arriving back in Alaska, and it looks like she's more than capable of defending herself, if she thought it was worth her time. Regarding the leaks against her, Palin said: “If they’re an unnamed source, then that says it all. I won’t comment on anybody’s gossip, or allegations that are based on anonymous sources. That’s kind of a small, evidently bitter type of person who...

Shippensburg, Pennsylvania — If John McCain wins Pennsylvania on Tuesday — a question that’s shaping up as perhaps the most critical of the campaign — it will be because of places like this. Situated on the border between Cumberland and Franklin counties, Shippensburg is in the south-central part of the state. Like other towns in the area, it’s between 90 and 95 percent white; about 15 to 20 percent of people over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher; and the median household income is about $45,000. Voters in the Democratic primary in this area chose Hillary...

Palin and CNN [Byron York] A bit more on CNN's "quote" from National Review in its story on Sarah Palin. In the CNN interview with Palin, aired today, reporter Drew Griffin said to Palin: GRIFFIN: Governor, you've been mocked in the press, the press has been pretty hard on you, the Democrats have been pretty hard on you, but also some conservatives have been pretty hard on you as well. The National Review had a story saying that, you know, I can't tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt or all of the above. PALIN: Who wrote that...

At John McCain’s rallies these days, the talk is of taxes and Joe the Plumber and the financial crisis and mortgage relief and an end to wasteful federal spending. Those are all perfectly fine things for a campaign to emphasize; polls show voters of all stripes are overwhelmingly concerned about the economy. But at McCain’s events, you’ll also find people who’ve come for another reason, one that is slipping in the polls of voters’ concerns but is deeply personal to them: the war in Iraq. “I just gave John McCain my Purple Heart,” Marine Sgt. Jack Eubanks told me a...

At John McCain’s rallies these days, the talk is of taxes and Joe the Plumber and the financial crisis and mortgage relief and an end to wasteful federal spending. Those are all perfectly fine things for a campaign to emphasize; polls show voters of all stripes are overwhelmingly concerned about the economy. But at McCain’s events, you’ll also find people who’ve come for another reason, one that is slipping in the polls of voters’ concerns but is deeply personal to them: the war in Iraq. “I just gave John McCain my Purple Heart,” Marine Sgt. Jack Eubanks told me a...

Watching press coverage of the Republican candidate for vice president, it's sometimes hard to decide whether Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, backward or - well, all of the above. In fact, Palin may even have it worse than Quayle, since she's taking flak not only from Democrats and the press but from some conservative opinion leaders as well. Reporters raced to Alaska to look into her family life, including her teenage daughter's pregnancy; into her per diem expense requests; into her controversial firing of the state's public safety commissioner; into her husband's role as informal adviser; into the...

- - A boring debate ends in a lot of bad feelings. This was the worst-moderated debate in the history of presidential debates,” one McCain campaign insider told me just moments after John McCain and Barack Obama left the stage at Belmont University in Nashville. “The audience and the American people should feel robbed — that the one opportunity they had to ask questions of the presidential candidates was taken from them by Tom Brokaw.” Before the debate, there had been lots of talk about how the town-hall format would favor McCain, who has done hundreds of town halls in...

Just talked to a member of Team McCain preparing for tomorrow night’s debate in Nashville. There’s been a lot of talk about “taking the gloves off” and coming out swinging at the debate, but I didn’t get a sense of that from this conversation. “I think the point of the town hall debate is to connect with the American people,” the McCain person said. “Our first goal is to show that John McCain gets it.” When I asked what “it” was, the source said, “That he understands the concerns of the American people better than Barack Obama does.” The source...

In the hours before Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden took the stage here at Washington University, Barack Obama’s top advisers went out of their way to talk up Palin’s debating skills. “I expect that Gov. Palin is going to be very effective tonight,” chief strategist David Axelrod told reporters. “She’s been working hard at this.” David Plouffe, the campaign manager, upped the ante when he called Palin “one of the best debaters in American politics.” Maybe they were just trying to raise expectations, set about a millimeter off the ground after Palin’s interview with CBS’s Katie Couric. Maybe they really...

“If your neighbor’s house is burning, you’re not going to spend a whole lot of time saying, ‘Well, that guy was always irresponsible, he always left the stove on, he always was smoking in bed’ … There will be time to punish those who set this fire, but now is the moment for us to come together and put the fire out.” So says Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) about the Great Financial Crisis. And he’s right. But once the fire is out, I want to learn a lot more about what happened at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We know...

In the 1996 campaign, a Republican businessman named Raymond J. Clatworthy challenged Joseph Biden's run for a fifth term as senator from Delaware. By many accounts, Clatworthy ran a hapless, hopeless race. He tried to portray Biden as a soft-on-crime liberal. It didn't work. He tried to portray Biden as a big-government tax-and-spend liberal. That didn't work, either. He even brought in Hollywood GOP icon Charlton Heston to campaign for him in all three of Delaware's counties. Still no luck; the popular Biden maintained a strong lead in the polls going into election day. Despite his frustration, Clatworthy stuck to...

Oxford, Mississippi — A few minutes after the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama ended here on the campus of the University of Mississippi, I asked close McCain adviser Charlie Black whether Obama had performed as McCain’s debate team had anticipated. “No, no,” Black said emphatically. “I never expected Sen. Obama to spend the entire debate on the defensive, and he did. He did.” Maybe there was a tad of exaggeration in Black’s verdict, but there was some truth in it, too. Obama was smooth, unflappable, and just a little off balance for much of the evening. Worse for...

I wrote a story for National Review this week in which I looked into the claims — heard virtually everywhere in the press — that John McCain’s “sex education” ad is a bald-faced lie. I don’t have room to go into the details here, but I read the Illinois state legislation involved, looked at the arguments in its favor at the time of its introduction and talked to one of its sponsors (four other sponsors successfully resisted or ignored my appeals for comment). I came away with the conclusion that the widely derided McCain ad was, in fact, accurate. Barack...

If ever there was a need for an investigation or a special prosecutor, Fannie Gate fits the bill. Politics, Democratic corruption, and a laundry list of Clinton pals have cause Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go belly up. How come no one wants to get to the bottom of this. Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Charles Rangel are up to their ears in potential criminal activity. Where are the calls for an Enron-type investigation?

In recent days, a consensus has developed among the Obama campaign and commentators in the press that John McCain has decided to lie his way to the White House. Exhibit A in this new consensus is McCain’s ad, released last week, claiming that Barack Obama’s “one accomplishment” in the field of education was “legislation to teach ‘comprehensive sex education’ to kindergartners.” Within moments of the ad’s appearance, the Obama campaign called it “shameful and downright perverse.” The legislation in question, a bill in the Illinois State Senate that was supported but not sponsored by Obama, was, according to Obama campaign...

If you’ve been to Barack Obama’s big public rallies, you know it’s not unusual to see lines of people stretched for block after block after block — seemingly mile after mile after mile — waiting to get in. That hasn’t usually been the case with John McCain’s rallies. Until now. When McCain and running mate Sarah Palin appeared this morning at Van Dyck Park, in the city of Fairfax, Virginia, the people spilled out of the natural amphitheater, over the sides, out the back, and nearly all the way to the Old Lee Highway. The rally had originally been scheduled...

...Alaska does not have a death penalty — I did not know that — and Palin was asked for her opinion. Her answer was that if the state legislature decided to pass a narrowly focused death penalty, she would support it. If our lawmakers were to consider such a thing, I think that support should be given for heinous crimes. A murder of a child? I say, my goodness, hang 'em up. Yeah. A murder of a child, anything to such a degree, I don't think that there can be anything worse. And if lawmakers were to consider it, that...

Even Obama didn't know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly," Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass...

Last January, on the night of John McCain’s back-from-the-dead victory in the New Hampshire primary, I asked a longtime adviser how McCain had survived the collapse of his campaign a few months earlier. “You know, in the darkest days, I think there were a lot of us who just respected him so much we just wanted to band together to make sure to restore his dignity,” the adviser told me. “But the chance of this actually happening was pretty remote.” And yet it did happen. After McCain won New Hampshire, he kept on winning until there he was, onstage last...

The story, my campaign source told me, is “materially false.” Gov. Palin, the strategist said, was subjected to a “complete vet.” “That included her filling out a 70-question questionnaire that was highly intrusive and personal. She was then interviewed for more than three hours by A.B. Culvahouse. There were multiple follow-up interviews.” (I asked precisely how many follow-ups there were, but my source stuck with “multiple.”) “There was a thorough interview process,” the strategist continued. “There was a public records search and political vet. There was a private life and financial vet. Everything that has come out was known by...

Had a long talk this morning with a senior strategist in the McCain campaign. I think it’s fair to say Team McCain is seriously unhappy with a New York Times story, “Palin Disclosures Raise Questions On Vetting,” which came out this morning and is driving much of the coverage of the issue. The story begins: A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket. On Monday morning, Ms. Palin and her husband, Todd,...

Denver — On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, in a downtown high-rise conference room lined with two-way mirrors, 21 undecided Colorado voters sit trying to decide whether they have more doubts and reservations about Barack Obama or John McCain. It’s not easy. The group has been convened by the pollster Frank Luntz, who usually does this sort of thing on live television but has instead organized the session at the behest of the American Association of Retired Persons and the related activist group Divided We Fail. As the voters answer Luntz’s rapid-fire questions, a small group of reporters...

But a dark horse lurks. I’ve been talking to more people about the veep thing, and the picture I get is this: McCain is sitting in front of a console with a switch with two positions: GAMBLE and PLAY IT SAFE. If he moves the switch to GAMBLE, he picks Lieberman… Still, Romney is an unquantifiable here. I mentioned yesterday that if McCain were to pick Ridge, “it will be because he likes him personally and believes Ridge can win Pennsylvania.” Now, it’s not clear to me that McCain will make the choice based on whether a veep could carry...

Things Are Getting Rough Out There From McCain spokesman Brian Rogers, in response to the Obama campaign's new offensive on John McCain's houses: Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people “cling” to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who’s...

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Lake Forest, Calif.— It’s fair to say that in the hours before John McCain appeared with Barack Obama at the “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency,” here at Pastor Rick Warren’s famed southern California mega-church, there were at least a few McCain insiders who were a bit nervous about their candidate’s prospects. Obama can be remarkably polished in this sort of situation. Unlike other Democrats, he’s not afraid to hang out with evangelicals. McCain, on the other hand, can at times be cranky and take pleasure in irritating his base. Could he come out ahead in this one? Team McCain...

‘We’re working off our timetable, not yours,” says David Perel, editor of The National Enquirer. “I’m not letting other media drive the story for us.” Perel is talking about the issue of whether the Enquirer should have published, by now, photos of a July 22 confrontation in a Los Angeles hotel between its reporters and former Sen. John Edwards. Edwards had, the Enquirer reported, come to the Beverly Hilton to see a woman named Rielle Hunter, with whom he has had an affair and a baby. In an almost surreal scene described on the Enquirer’s website, Edwards was said to...

It takes some big numbers to measure Rush Limbaugh’s success — 20 million listeners, a $400 million contract. But the best index of Limbaugh’s effectiveness can be found in a much smaller figure, somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred, which is the number of Democratic-party officials and liberal advocates who want to use the law to shut him up. Limbaugh, now celebrating his 20th year as a national radio host, is single-handedly responsible for a movement on the part of some Democrats to revive the “Fairness Doctrine.” With origins in the earliest laws regulating radio, the Doctrine...

There’s been a lot of talk lately that former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) will have some sort of role in the Obama administration, if there is one. A few months ago, Edwards, the Democratic Party’s 2004 vice presidential candidate, seemed to pull himself out of the VP race. But then, a couple of weeks ago, Edwards quietly put himself back in, telling National Public Radio, “I’m prepared to seriously consider anything, anything [Obama] asks me to do for our country.” “Anything” could, of course, mean running for vice president. But Edwards has done that before, and he didn’t exactly put...

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has sent a letter to the New York Times, protesting the paper's naming of a former CIA anti-terrorism interrogator. The CIA had objected to revealing of the man's name, but the Times decided to go ahead anyway. There was a case a while back in which many on the left became very upset about the revelation of a CIA employee's name. So far, that does not seem to be happening in this case. In any event, this is the letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the Times:...

What’s up with Barack Obama’s fundraising? We’re more than halfway through July, and Obama has not yet released information on how much he raised in June. John McCain made public his figure — $22 million — quite a while ago. But no word from Obama. It would seem that the last thing Obama has to worry about is money. But his fundraising has, in fact, been on a downward trend since the early primaries. February, when Obama took in $55 million, was his biggest month ever. In March, he raised $40 million. In April, he raised $31 million. In May,...

ON May 23, as a jury in Houston deliberated the case against top Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, a little-known regulatory agency in Washington, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), released a study with the dryly bureaucratic title "Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae." The document received far less attention than the news from Enron, but its conclusions were stunning. In meticulous detail, it outlined a culture of corruption at the Federal National Mortgage Association--better known as Fannie Mae--that rivals the most serious corporate scandals in recent years. In this case, however, the main...

The magazine says the cover art, featuring Barack Obama and his AK-47-toting wife in terrorist garb in the Oval Office, with a portrait of Osama bin Laden above the mantel and an American flag burning in the fireplace, "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Barack Obama's campaign." But the Obama campaign is denouncing the cover, saying The New Yorker's editors might believe the picture is "a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create," but it is fact "tasteless and offensive."

Last October, when John McCain’s presidential campaign was nearly dead, I went to Iowa to follow him around for a few days. The story felt like a eulogy. Few observers believed McCain could come back from the twin disasters of his campaign nearly running out of money and his disastrous stand on comprehensive immigration reform. Riding in a van from Sioux City to Sheldon, I asked McCain what had gone wrong. “The biggest detriment to our campaign so far — by far — was the immigration issue, because it’s an emotional issue with our Republican base,” he told me. “I...

The Washington Post published a June 28th piece geared to protect Barack Obama from the nagging rumors that he is a secret Muslim, rumors that have been circulating since 2004. The Post's Matthew Mosk penned an attack on Free Republic, based on an Obama flak who claims she has somehow discovered that Freepers are to blame, if not initially responsible, for floating the Barack-is-a-Muslim chain email that so many millions of Americans have found in their email boxes over the last four years. But, the Washington Post's article is so filled with assumptions and a singular desire not to...

Do you know what a community organizer does? And if so, do you know what it is about being a community organizer that might qualify one to be president of the United States? My guess is most people don’t know, and they’re not sure what Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) means when he frequently cites his time as an organizer in Chicago as one of his qualifications for the White House.I didn’t know either, which is why I went to Chicago recently to learn about Obama’s organizing years, from 1985 to 1988. And after looking at Obama’s experience there, and talking...

It's common to see mentions in the press these days about some "swiftboating" of Barack Obama that is allegedly in the works, or might someday allegedly be in the works, or might someday be thought to be allegedly in the works. While I'm sure there will be some hit jobs on Obama — this is a presidential campaign, after all — this talk seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding, perhaps willful in some cases, of the swiftboat episode in the 2004 campaign. The swiftboat veterans in that year were the officers who served alongside John Kerry in Vietnam....

How can you tell when someone really, really wants to be vice president? He becomes very outgoing, and very sensitive, at the same time. That’s what has happened with Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) lately. I have not, in the past, been on the senator’s press mailing list. Nothing unusual there; I don’t cover him and don’t usually write about him. But lately, his press office has wanted to make sure I know everything he’s doing. Which TV shows will he visit? Which hearings will he attend? I’m getting frequent updates. There are also signs Webb is paying a lot of...

“Tomorrow, we shall achieve the victory, that the kingdom of God may come on earth as it is in heaven, and all those who love the Lord and will vote for Obama, say Amen.” “AAAMMMMEEENNN!”

But Mrs. Obama, the star attraction, is taking no chances. Walking onstage to chants of “Yes, we can!” and “Fired up — ready to go!” she quickly gets to the heart of her message: There are forces out there who are trying to take away everything Barack has worked for. They — she doesn’t mention anyone in particular but does refer to one “brand name politician” — are trying to win this election for themselves and thereby deny Obama the opportunity to move America to the mountaintop of hope. And they must be stopped. “We’ve learned that we’re still living...

That, not Wright’s wide-ranging social theories, is what forced Obama to denounce Wright at a hastily arranged news conference Tuesday. By questioning Obama’s honesty, Wright was striking at the heart of the Obama campaign. The most damaging thing Wright could ever say is that he knows, based on his long personal relationship with Obama, that Obama agrees with him but can’t say so publicly for political reasons. Put another way, if voters believe that Obama fundamentally rejects Wright’s views, they might question Obama’s judgment in remaining close to Wright for 20 years. But if voters believe that Obama secretly agrees...

This is Clinton country. A new poll from Suffolk University, out today, shows Clinton leading Barack Obama statewide, 52 percent to 42 percent. But in the southwestern part of the state, here in the Mon Valley, Clinton has a huge lead, 74 percent to 17 percent. And people here aren’t just for Clinton. They’re against Obama. At this Hillary rally, no one expresses any outright hostility to Obama, but they tell me over and over again that they just don’t like him, that they don’t care for him, that they don’t trust him. They view him as inexperienced and not...

If we’re judged by those with whom we associate, here’s a question: Would you rather be associated with a ’60s radical who plotted to bomb the Pentagon and to this day believes, as he said a few years ago, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough,” or would you rather be associated with — slight pause, please — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)? That was the rather bizarre scenario raised by Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) at Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, the unrepentant former...

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) got glowing reviews when he addressed the issue of race last month in Philadelphia. But there are aspects of the race issue in this campaign that still make people nervous. Recently I called a number of political strategists of both parties, as well as unaffiliated experts, to ask whether Democrats have been voting along racial lines in this year's primary season. After all, 92 percent of black Democrats in Mississippi voted for Obama, while 91 percent of black Democrats in Wisconsin did the same. And 70 percent of white Democrats in Mississippi voted for Sen. Hillary...