Hillary Clinton's Democratic National Convention speech.

Potential Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Masterstroke or mousetrap? Or both?

And for whom?

The political world has been all aflutter for the better part of a...

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's truncated, confused press conference at yesterday's Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami.

Don't look now, but the national Republican Party is on the verge of becoming the California...

Former Navy Secretary-turned-U.S. Senator Jim Webb, the most highly decorated Marine combat officer of the Vietnam War, introducing Barack Obama three weeks ago in Roanoke, Virginia.

It's just a week since the election...

President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech Tuesday night in Chicago.

It was The America That Can Be vs. The America That Has Been. The future won. Yet there is much in the past that is...

Barack Obama's positive closer ad.

The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft...

Barack Obama accepts the Democratic presidential nomination at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado.

The election hasn't happened yet, so it's too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats' new Western strategy....

John McCain's latest attack ad plays the Iran card, saying Barack Obama is "dangerously unprepared to be president."

With seven days until Barack Obama likely makes history as the first African American president of the United States,...

Barack Obama captivated people around the world with this speech in Berlin, in which he identified himself as both a proud American and a "fellow citizen of the world."

Let's start by acknowledging that this election is...

"Americans are catching on" to Barack Obama, says this John McCain attack ad featuring Joe The Plumber.

With two weeks to go, it looks like John McCain is going with Joe the Plumber as the advertising centerpiece...

Will the "Bradley effect" bring down Barack Obama, seen here after his Wednesday night debate win?

Barack Obama has won all three presidential debates over John McCain. He has a solid lead in the polls. What could...

"Raymond, why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?"

"He's ... an Arab." It's perhaps fitting that last week ended that way for John McCain -- face to face, embarrassingly, with an angry supporter...

If only there were a tape of one of the Obamas talking like this. Say, Michelle Obama. Ranting about "whitey."

It's come to this.

I've spent a lot of time talking this week with some top Republican...

The 13-minute Obama campaign video on John McCain and the Keating savings & loan industry fiasco.

It's all negative all the time now in the TV ad wars. For once, Team Obama has stolen a march on...

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin discussing when she would deploy "nucular weaponry," the "be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet," as she put it in last night's vice presidential debate. She...

Paul Newman, seen here in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, passed away last night.

The man whose picture has been in my refrigerator for 25 years has passed away. That would be Paul Newman, who said...

After easily winning its war with Georgia, Russia makes a big move into Latin America and the Caribbean with this tightening alliance with Venezuela.

Let's face it. This has been a disappointing campaign. Two very interesting candidates....

John McCain's statement "suspending" his campaign, in which he proposes to postpone the first presidential debate.

Well, that was, ah, sudden. Yesterday, as I've reported on my New West Notes, John McCain campaign topper Steve...

John McCain's new TV ad, amidst an epic global financial crisis, does not discuss the crisis but posits Barack Obama as product of "the corrupt Chicago political machine."

In the midst of the biggest financial crisis since...

Barack Obama's campaign finally hits John McCain for top economic advisor Phil Gramm, a principal deregulator. But Obama's vagueness thus far on solutions to the financial crisis leaves him vulnerable in our Hobbesian media culture.

It's not...

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in this New West Notes video, during happier days with fellow Republicans at the 2007 California Republican Party convention.

A remarkable political debacle here in California points up the intransigence and hypocrisy not infrequently...