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When her father Bill ran for the presidency in 1992, Chelsea Clinton was a gawky 12-year-old with braces and a mop of crinkly hair, ill at ease in front of the cameras. Some 15 years later, her mother Hillary has assigned her daughter a crucial role in the family's latest White House campaign as the former First Lady hopes to firm up support among women voters with a "mum strategy". Standing together: Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Miss Clinton, 26, who now works for a Wall Street hedge fund, has not appeared alongside her mother since the New York senator launched...

Jerome Corsi, co-author of the 2004 campaign book "Unfit for Command" attacking Sen. John Kerry's war record, joined up Tuesday with the organization intended to similarly undermine Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 campaign. TheVanguard.org is intended to be a right-wing version of the leftist MoveOn.Org. It was founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Gil Amelio, former CEO of Apple and National Semiconductor. Coming on board Feb. 16 as TheVanguard's full-time editorial and creative director will be Richard Poe, who has served as editor-in-chief of FrontPage Magazine. He has been described as the conservative movement's leading expert on MoveOn.Org's...

For a candidate who is portraying herself as the most hawkish of the Democrats — and who, at least to judge by Jeffrey Goldberg's dispatch in the latest New Yorker, is the most hawkish of the Democrats — Senator Clinton's reaction to President Bush's speech on Iraq was quite a disappointment. Mrs. Clinton came out against sending more troops, and her statement began with the words, "based on the president's speech." But based on Mrs. Clinton's statement, it doesn't sound like she even listened to the speech.

<p>WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent much of the last month behind closed doors, putting the final touches on a presidential campaign-in-waiting.</p> <p>Her hectic schedule has been crammed with private lunches and phone conversations with elected officials and political operatives. She has sounded out Democratic Party officials from New York to Des Moines about her chances and hired a cadre of new campaign aides.</p>

THE first vote is still more than a year away, but the campaign to replace President George W Bush in the White House is already throwing up surprises. Unfortunately for Senator Hillary Clinton, long the front-runner in the Democratic drive to retake the presidency, most of them are coming at her expense. A brace of Christmas opinion polls has left Clinton with a political hangover after a year that had appeared to cement her status as the Democrats’ best-organised, best-financed and best-connected contender for her party’s presidential nomination. Despite winning re-election to the US Senate by a handsome margin in...

NEW YORK Just to prepare you for the new year's press frenzy surrounding the still-distant 2008 race for president, here are latest December poll results in key primary states from American Research Group.

    Some Democrats are beginning to doubt Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's electability in 2008 and are saying so publicly for the first time.     The New York liberal, who is far ahead of her rivals for the Democratic nomination in all the polls, is the most polarizing figure in American politics. Half the voters polled say they would support her if, as expected, she becomes a candidate, but the other half says they couldn't vote for her under any circumstances.     Her inability to reach out to more moderate voters worries Democrats who think '08 is their year to win back the White...

Chicago Sun-Times political columnist Robert Novak has some bad news for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: You've lost momentum. According to Novak, a national poll of Democratic voters shows that support for a presidential candidacy for Sen. Barack Obama has surged while Clinton is treading water. Republican pollster John McLaughlin questioned voters on Election Day in both 2004 and 2006 and discovered support for Clinton, D-N.Y., unchanged at 27 percent. Sen. John Kerry, who was second in 2004 at 16 percent, got only 8 percent this year. Meanwhile, Obama attracted 21 percent, up from 2 percent in 2004. In the GOP...