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Barack Obama used his victory in South Carolina to change the dialogue with the Clintons in the presidential race. He has taken Hillary’s and Bill’s attempt to use the race issue and replied with a clever move. He has basically called their bluff. And Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama has ratified the Illinois Senator’s strategy and candidacy. So far, to summarize: Move One was when Obama arrived as a new candidate. Move two was Hillary’s comeback that she is more experienced. Move three was when Obama pivoted off her experience message and said he was the voice of change. Move...

From the color of her suit to her latest choice in hairstyle, Hillary Clinton and her appearance is a common topic of conversation, and according to political analysts, the female presidential candidate is scrutinized for her looks more so than her male counterparts. "There's no doubt that [Clinton] is held to a different standard — the evaluation of appearance has always been traditionally different for female candidates," said Sarah Brewer, the associate director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University. "It's really very sexist," Geraldine Ferraro, a former vice presidential candidate, told ABCNEWS.com. "Nobody is going to say...

Today's New York Post Page Six gossip column offers readers the following prima facie risible item: Not So Secret HUMA Abedin, the traveling aide who is rarely out of Hillary Rodham Clinton's sight, has been seen with bachelor Rep. Anthony Weiner on the campaign trail. Shortly before Clinton arrived for a fund-raiser Thursday night at the Hiro club in the Meatpacking District, Abedin was spotted going into the Maritime Hotel around the corner with Weiner. If they were trying to keep their affair a secret, you'd think they'd find someplace where political reporters wouldn't be walking by. "If they were...

Despite Hillary Clinton’s surprising win in the New Hampshire primary, discontent remains the order of the day in “Hillaryland,” according to an article in the liberal New Republic. “For all of Team Hillary’s gifts, it is not known as a happy group,” Michelle Cottle writes in the magazine. “‘I’ve never seen a campaign where everyone feels so bad about themselves,’ says one campaign staffer, echoing others.” That feeling was palpable the morning after Clinton’s defeat in the Iowa caucuses, when a “sad and sorry Team Hillary” gathered for a conference call with the candidate, Cottle relates. After Hillary came on...

Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly lose the South Carolina primary as African-Americans line up to vote for Barack Obama. And that defeat will power her drive to the nomination. The Clintons are encouraging the national media to disregard the whites who vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary and focus on the black turnout, which is expected to be quite large. They have transformed South Carolina into Washington, D.C. — an all-black primary that tells us how the African-American vote is going to go. By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights...

Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain scored hugely significant wins on Saturday in Nevada and South Carolina, wins which might set them on the road to the nomination. Hillary is very likely to lose South Carolina because of the large black vote there. Had she lost Nevada too, she would have been badly handicapped going into Florida and Super Tuesday, having suffered two consecutive defeats. But now that she has won Nevada, she can lose South Carolina and still have momentum. The run-up to South Carolina and the primary itself will feature constant focus on the African-American vote. Analysts and...

As American banks go hat in hand to foreign financial institutions and governments, begging for capital to help them get out of the mess into which their subprime loans have landed them, the question arises as to whether the United States should permit nations like China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) and the banks they control to acquire part ownership of our leading banks. The presidential candidates discussed this issue in their Nevada debate and Hillary was asked about it in an interview with Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business Network yesterday. She replied that she would not...

People in the Las Vegas neighborhood saw all the cameras and trucks and buses and police on the streets Thursday, and they began to trickle out of their houses to find out what was going on. Soon, as a sherbet-orange desert sunset filled the sky, they got their answer, as New York Sen. Hillary Clinton began walking up the street of low-slung houses near Eastern and Washington avenues, accompanied by the area's representative, state Assemblyman Ruben Kihuen. Clinton hugged Kihuen around the shoulders and asked about his family, and then the two began knocking on doors, the same doors Kihuen...

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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