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Barack Obama rebounded from a close loss to Hillary Clinton and won the support of the heavily Hispanic union representing Las Vegas casino workers on Wednesday ahead of the next Democratic presidential contest. The Obama endorsement by the Culinary Workers Union, whose 60,000 members service the famed hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas strip and is a major political force in Nevada, was a blow to Clinton, who had campaigned for its backing in the state's January 19 contest. "We had a wonderful dilemma," D. Taylor, the union's secretary treasurer, told a noisy news conference. "It's been a very...

A day after the New Hampshire primary recast the presidential race, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Wednesday that the candidates’ debate on Saturday was a turning point in her surprising victory over Senator Barack Obama, while Mr. Obama sought to remain upbeat and traveled to New York on a fund-raising mission. On the Republican side, Senator John McCain, fresh off his own comeback victory over former Gov. Mitt Romney, jetted off to Michigan, where in next Tuesday’s primary he will attempt to overcome Mr. Romney’s natural advantage in the state of his birth. The results from Tuesday night breathed...

Fleetwood Mac would roll over in their musical graves if they could hear how the Hillary campaign has gotten into a time warp, obsessing with the 90s while a new political generation demands a focus on tomorrow. Going into Iowa, the Hillary campaign was notable for transcending the gender barrier while Obama struggled to overcome the racial divide. But last night, as the Iowa results came in, it was apparent that the real polarity was over generation and age. The Baby Boomers are being challenged to give up power. Voters under 30 backed Obama by 4:1, signaling the emergence of...

Hillary Clinton made one thing very clear at Saturday night’s Democratic debate: Her likability tour is definitely over. Baring her claws at opponents Barack Obama and John Edwards, the real Hillary was finally in evidence. The mask was off and her rage, arrogance, and sense of entitlement were on full display. It was not a pretty picture. From the first moment that she entered the stage, Hillary’s body language shrieked one thing — smoldering, simmering anger. The constant smile and the cackling laugh that have been her campaign trademark were suddenly gone. In their place was a furious, primal glare....

If (although I strongly suspect the right word is "when") Hillary Clinton loses tomorrow's New Hampshire primary, there will be a few proto-obituaries for her campaign and many more stories about how it will be "shaken up" or "relaunched." Scapegoats will be found and exiled: Mark Penn, the pollster and strategist, foremost among them. After all, the candidate can't very well dispense with the überstrategist who also happens to be her husband and who was fully complicit in designing and driving her message. The flaw wasn't just the attempt to go back to the future, to the 1990s, but that...

The scope of Barack Obama's victory in Iowa has shaken the Clinton machine down to its bolts. Donors are panicking. The campaign has been making a round of calls to reassure notoriously fickle "superdelegates" — elected officials and party regulars who are awarded convention spots by virtue of their titles and positions — who might be reconsidering their decisions to back the candidate who formerly looked like a sure winner. And internally, a round of recriminations is being aimed at her chief strategist, Mark Penn, as the representative of everything about her pseudo-incumbent campaign that has been too cautious, too...

THE amazing victories by Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee in Iowa last night are truly historic. They demonstrate the impact and viability of a message of change in both parties. On the Democratic side, Obama - by winning in a totally white state - shows that racism is gone as a factor in American politics. On the Republican side, Huckabee's win shows how a truly compassionate conservative can win by harvesting voters who want the message of concern for the poor and for values to prevail. But what of Hillary Clinton? She's down but not out. In the first really...

Helen Thomas on stage with Hill and Bill in Iowa?

VINTON, Iowa - Ever since Barack Obama suggested Hillary Clinton's eight years as first lady were a glorified tea party a few days back, she's looked for an opening to strike back. On Saturday night in Dubuque she pounced, arguing she risked her life on White House missions in the 1990s, including a hair-raising flight into Bosnia that ended in a "corkscrew" landing and a sprint off the tarmac to dodge snipers. "I don't remember anyone offering me tea," she quipped. The dictum around the Oval Office in the '90s, she added, was: "If a place was too dangerous, too...

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jaw-boned the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Roman Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward. But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a...

The National Archives is withholding from the public about 2,600 pages of records at President Clinton's direction, despite a public assurance by one of his top aides last month that Mr. Clinton "has not blocked the release of a single document." The 2,600 pages, stored at Mr. Clinton's library in Arkansas, were deemed to contain "confidential advice" and, therefore, "closed" under the Presidential Records Act, an Archives spokeswoman, Susan Cooper, told The New York Sun yesterday. An official who oversees the presidential libraries operated by the federal government, Sharon Fawcett, said in a recent interview that the records were withheld...

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It's very easy to fall behind the times.  It is for this reason that you find parents who never seem to really know what the younger generation is involved in, older folks who still act as if a hot dog should be 10 cents, and people who fight yesterday's social battles.  As to the last thing, there are those who ask if a woman can be elected president. The real question is, can a man running against a woman be elected president? With androgyny being the order of the day, it has often been lamented that men no longer know...

At two campaign events in Iowa this year, aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton encouraged audience members to ask her specific questions, a tactic that drew criticism from an opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination and led her yesterday to promise that it would not happen again. Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters in Iowa, said she was unaware that her aides had ever planted questions. “It was news to me,” said Mrs. Clinton, of New York, “and neither I nor my campaign approve of that, and it will certainly not be tolerated.” Staff members have been told to avoid doing...

Bill Clinton was hit with caustic criticism Tuesday from his wife's Democratic rivals, who accused the popular former president of falsely comparing questions about her candor to smears of past campaigns. In a presidential nomination fight growing more intense by the day, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama also criticized the former first lady for having voted in the Senate against incentives for ethanol production and higher fuel efficiency standards. And 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards challenged her to spell out what she would do about Iraq. The week after Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign accused her rivals of "piling on," those...

Summary: At a Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Sen. Hillary Clinton ducked some questions and gave misleading answers to others. She falsely implied that the reason White House documents about her communications with her husband haven't been released is due to bureaucratic delays, and she avoided saying whether she would ask Bill Clinton to clear their release from the National Archives. She avoided a yes-or-no answer to whether she supports giving New York driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and at one point denied saying the idea made sense, when in fact she said less than two weeks earlier that it "makes...

Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) will undergo a presidential campaign rite of passage fraught with both peril and potential positives when he appears this Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Thompson has appeared on Tim Russert’s famed Sunday morning news show nine times, his campaign said, but this will be his first time as a candidate. Karen Hanretty, a spokeswoman for Thompson, said the ex-senator is grateful for the chance to expand on some issues that warrant more time than debate formats allow for. “Fred Thompson is a thoughtful candidate who has said many times that debates and 30-second sound...

Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson suggested on Thursday that Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's lack of clarity in her debate answers raises questions about her ability to handle diplomacy. Addressing a crowd of Republican donors, the former Tennessee senator joined Clinton's Democratic opponents in seizing on her debate answer on whether she supported a plan by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to grant drivers' licenses to illegal immigrations. At first, Clinton appeared to praise the plan. Pressed later in the debate, she seemed to backtrack, saying she didn't say it should be done. Her campaign sought to clarify her comments...

The chairmen of the House and Senate Democratic campaign committees sounded differing notes of optimism on Wednesday, just more than a year away from what they say will be a second straight election on the offensive. Speaking to reporters at a briefing, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) was effusive, saying the 2008 election could be “a seminal election” on par with only a few in the history of the country. The two-cycle chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said the results could “change the tectonic plates of politics.” Schumer said he expects to hold all 12 seats that Senate Democrats...

Republican presidential candidate who led a Senate inquiry into illegal foreign fund raising in the 1996 presidential campaign, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, is warning that the phenomenon may be repeating itself with Senator Clinton's current White House bid. "From what I read in the papers, it looks to me like some of the same familiar refrains are playing when I look at Senator Clinton's situation," Mr. Thompson told reporters yesterday during his first campaign swing through California. "I'm not going to jump to any conclusions or make any accusations until all the facts are in, but when I see people...