Per Ed Henry at CNN, the McCain campaign has quietly asked the Vice President — compared to whom President Bush is wildly popular — not to attend the Republican convention in St. Paul next month. Shocking, I know. To the dismay of some on the campaign, they couldn’t disinvite the President, too. Instead, Bush will [...]

More than 40 days and nights have passed since a credible polling outfit released a survey showing John McCain with even the smallest of leads in a national horserace poll. Now USA Today has a poll with Gallup that puts the Republican up by four points over Obama among likely voters. “Say again?” you ask. [...]

As I read, and then watched, Barack Obama’s powerful and well-turned speech in Berlin, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Senator and/or his speechwriter were consciously invoking John Lennon with the line (and title) “A World That Stands As One”. My guess is not. But this verse from Imagine was the first thing that [...]

Washington Bureau intern Will Schultz filed this quick report from the Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning with House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO): – Energy, energy, energy. It looks like Republicans are going to be all about it this year. Blunt said opinion on drilling “has completely flipped,” and that the GOP has got [...]

Dee Dee Myers, Bill Clinton’s first White House press secretary, sorts through the evidence of press bias in favor of Barack Obama in this fair-minded Vanity Fair blog post. Her verdict is that Obama has been getting both more, and more positive, attention from the press — for a variety of reasons, including ones that [...]

I have a story in the new print edition of Time on the rich history of John McCain’s relationship with George W. Bush.

Whatever was or was not discussed within the McCain campaign, or just between McCain and Mike Murphy, about the possibility of bringing Murphy on board, one thing strikes me as crystal clear: that possibility died the moment Bill Kristol filed his column for yesterday’s New York Times. The column, entiled “So Where’s Murphy?”, was so [...]

Is Charlie Crist on John McCain’s VP short list? In the past few weeks, the popular Florida governor has announced his change of heart on offshore oil drilling, thereby providing McCain cover in the Sunshine State to do the same; cut a deal widely hailed by environmentalists to buy up land from Big Sugar to [...]

Marc Thiessen was a long-time aide to Jesse Helms on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is now chief White House speech writer. On this morning’s Washington Post Op-Ed page, he comes to the defense of his former boss, who passed away over the holiday weekend. Thiessen complains that in reporting on Helms’ death, “the [...]