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In September 1998, Greg Craig, a lion of the Washington legal community, left a top job at the State Department to go to the White House to help Bill Clinton fight impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. One of his first stops was to an old Democratic friend, Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, who warned him what he was stepping into: “You’re about three days away from a delegation of senior Democrats coming up there to ask the president to resign.” That anecdote, recounted in Peter Baker’s history of the impeachment saga, came echoing back to mind in recent...

The state of their union? Icy. Rival Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama came within a foot of one another just before President Bush's State of the Union speech Monday night and managed not to acknowledge each other. It was quite a feat, given the packed House floor, the customary bear-hugging and jostling among other members. Then a doorkeeper sat the rivals in the same row, only an aisle and four senators between them. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was not caught in the middle. The Democrat from the iconic political family had taken sides earlier in the day when...

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...

Cannot be posted due to copyright issues: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071123/OPINION/71122014/1049

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...

During Hillary Clinton's marathon of television performances Sunday, she was asked yet again about the MoveOn.org newspaper ad that questioned Gen. David Petraeus' truthfulness. Clinton had already been asked about the ad four times previously, but this time she had a new answer: She denounced it. "I don't condone anything like that, and I have voted against those who would impugn the patriotism and the service of the people who wear the uniform of our country," she told Tim Russert. "I don't believe that that should be said about General Petraeus, and I condemn that."

Norman Hsu, the Democratic fund-raiser with a habit of fleeing the law, confessed to F.B.I. agents last week that he had swindled investors in what the government describes as a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, and acknowledged pressuring at least some of them to contribute to political campaigns, prosecutors said in a criminal complaint unsealed yesterday. The complaint, filed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, charges Mr. Hsu with bilking hundreds of investors around the country out of at least $60 million over the last four years. It says he used some of that money to reimburse, in violation of election...

It is an honor and privilege to live in the United States, the greatest country in the world. Yet for all its blessings, American society is beset by serious problems, including jihadists seeking weapons of destruction who want to create a world caliphate; a violent, sexually loaded popular culture that targets our children; unelected judges who ignore the Constitution and abuse their powers; and a disrespect for human life that has resulted in tens of millions of abortions. It is possible to become demoralized and conclude that everything is hopeless, and that we should withdraw from the political and cultural...

I have been touting Fred Thompson since January 2007, and it has been several months since I have written an article about him. Among other things, I have noted that Thompson antagonizes no one and would unite the Republican Party – no one really had anything bad to say about him in the New Hampshire debates, and the closest anyone came was John McCain, a close friend of Thompson. I have noted that Fred got the gay marriage issue precisely right – a constitutional amendment which does not require states to give full faith and credit to gay marriages is...

To raise $850,000 for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign in just eight months, Norman Hsu tapped an eclectic group of donors that included wealthy investors in his apparel ventures, hotel shopkeepers, a 96-year-old in a Florida retirement home and an auto-body worker who mistakenly thought he would get a tax break for his political generosity. The Clinton campaign has not yet released any information about the 260 donors whose contributions it is now refunding because they were credited to the prodigious fundraising of the former fugitive, but a detailed analysis of donors Hsu brought to Clinton shows that he...

Norman Hsu was politician's dream who became a nightmare. He knew people, hosted fundraisers, solicited donations. And he was an unabashed fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now in disgrace, his role as one of Clinton's top money bundlers will dog him and her presidential campaign while law enforcement authorities investigate his business and political dealings. Eager to sever her links to Hsu, the Clinton campaign this week returned $850,000 in contributions linked to his fundraising activities. But Hsu's troubles aren't over and the spotlight on his political connections won't recede easily. Hsu is the latest poster boy for rogue fundraising,...

Very seldom will I venture a prediction on a major race like president, especially over a year out and with each party having 10 candidates openly vying for their nomination. In addition, it is the most open presidential race in my lifetime. It has been 80 years since a president was not seeking reelection and a sitting vice-president was not seeking to move up. The race is truly wide open. I am going out on a limb and predicting that Fred Thompson will be chosen as the republican nominee for president at their convention this time next year and that...

Of all the possible vulnerabilities facing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton has long believed that the one of the biggest was money, friends and advisers say. Some sort of fund-raising scandal that would echo the Clinton-era controversies of the 1990s and make her appear greedy or ethically challenged. As a result, Mrs. Clinton told aides this year to vet major donors carefully and help her avoid situations in which she might appear to be trading access for big money, advisers said. Also to be avoided, the senator said, were fund-raising tactics that might conjure up the Clinton...

Hillary Clinton has been in politics long enough to know the value of the word "change." In 1992, her husband's political guru, James Carville, hung a white sign in the Clinton campaign war room that read CHANGE VS. MORE OF THE SAME. Bill Clinton won the presidency that year with 370 electoral votes. Over the course of the summer, she watched her rivals for the Democratic nomination try again and again to define themselves as change and Clinton as the status quo. ("We're more interested in looking forward, not backward," Barack Obama told reporters. "And the American people feel the...

Former vice president Al Gore's pronouncement that he is likely to endorse one of the Democratic candidates for president before the primary season is over has set off a slew of speculation about who his choice might be. Truth is, the courting of the "Goreacle" began many months ago. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Gore huddled in Nashville in December, and Gore has also met with former senator John Edwards (N.C.). Gore and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) conferred as recently as last week. Not surprisingly, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has not met with Gore. Neither has Sen. Joseph...

...RUSH: She was shocked and surprised her own brother was selling pardons... ...RUSH: Yeah, it was a big surprise to find out that Norman Hsu was this bad guy!...When her brothers were involved in the Marc Rich pardons, she was stunned at that...

If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, the former valuing peace and the latter reveling in war, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lot more like Mars than Venus. She loves war.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign said yesterday that it would give to charity $23,000 it had received from a prominent Democratic donor, and review thousands of dollars more that he had raised, after learning that the authorities in California had a warrant for his arrest stemming from a 1991 fraud case. The donor, Norman Hsu, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democratic candidates since 2003, and was slated to be co-host next month for a Clinton gala featuring the entertainer Quincy Jones. The event would not have been unusual for Mr. Hsu, a businessman from Hong Kong who...

A first-tier presidential candidate was the keynote speaker at a recent trade association convention held just outside Washington. The candidate began the evening by telling the crowd: "His eye is on the sparrow, we know that. . . . And we are here tonight to give praise and thanks to He who made it possible for us to be with each other this evening." The candidate spent a lot of time talking about the importance of hard work and personal responsibility, quoting another thinker's motto: "If I've accomplished anything in life, it is because I've been willing to work hard."...

May 28, 2007 issue - It wasn't supposed to be like this. When we were parsing the possibility, dreaming the dream, cruising past President Barbie in her jaunty tricolor accent scarf in the aisles of Evolved Toys, we imagined the endgame: a woman at the podium and the distaff side of the aisle going nuts, seeing decades of slow, steady progress embodied in a single individual. Good morning, Ms. President. The moment has arrived when a woman could well be the Democratic nominee: Hillary Rodham Clinton, smart, experienced, sure-handed. "Help make history!" her Web site says. So how come the...

Her critics can finally pin her down. Hillary haters have something beside their votes to express displeasure with the New York senator and presidential wannabe - the Hillary Clinton voodoo doll, complete with a book of hexes, pins and a battle cry to "stick it to her, before she sticks it to you!" The voodoo doll spell book advises using black magic to inspire "Hillary's chubby hubby to take some embarrassing missteps" by shacking up with a woman who'll "go public when the dirty deed is done." You can also form her platform by having her promise "gay divorce" and...

WASHINGTON, May 3 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed Thursday that Congress repeal the authority it gave President Bush in 2002 to invade Iraq, injecting presidential politics into the Congressional debate over financing the war. Mrs. Clinton’s proposal brings her full circle on Iraq — she supported the war measure five years ago — and it sharpens her own political positioning at a time when Democrats are vying to confront the White House. “It is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible,” Mrs. Clinton said as she joined Senator...

The three top Democratic presidential candidates -- Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards -- have declined to participate in an autumn presidential debate for the frailest of reasons: because one co-sponsor is TV's conservative-leaning Fox News. (The other sponsor is the Congressional Black Caucus Institute.) It's true that politicians and journalists often don't get along. Heck, we've had some famous pols snub Tribune editorial board meetings because they didn't like something we wrote. Fine, it's a free country. But let's be clear here. Clinton, Obama and Edwards weren't going to be debating Fox News...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 — Choices, choices. The Four Seasons in Georgetown or the Four Seasons in Midtown? A town full of political leaks or a town full of mysterious odors? Easy access to hundreds of gabby Democratic strategists or easy access to the one gabby Democrat who matters most (one’s husband, perhaps)? Among the signs that the Clinton presidential kabuki is ending — that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will, in fact, announce her campaign for the White House soon — is a decision, Democrats close to her say, that she plans to base her campaign headquarters in or around Washington...

Hillary Rodham Clinton re-elected at a post of senator WASHINGTON - the ex-First American injury Hillary Clinton was re-elected democratic sénatrice of the State of New York. It thus confirms its base in the American political life which could carry out it to a candidature for presidential of 2008, according to media's. The woman of Bill Clinton had spent nearly 30 million dollars for her re-election campaign to the American Senate, much more than any other candidate with the various polls concerned Tuesday, and this, in spite of an adversary well little threatening for it. This last, the republican...