DES MOINES, Iowa -- The final Iowa results aren't in but we already know one big winner: President Barack Obama.

The dismal, nasty campaign here was not good for the Republican Party or the country. There was precious little debate on anything other than who literally was Holier than...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- The 2012 campaign officially begins on Tuesday with voting in the Iowa caucuses. But here in the Iowa Republican campaign, the most influential political figure of the last decade -- the one whose policies everyone should be talking about -- is invisible.

To Democrats, George W....

DES MOINES, Iowa -- A top Romney adviser, speaking on a not-for-attribution basis, said Friday that the former governor's percentage of the vote in the Iowa caucuses will be "held down to some degree by the Mormon factor. It's just a fact of life that we know we have to...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- The caucuses are Tuesday, but the first day of political reckoning in the 2012 campaign comes this Sunday.

It is a judgment day of sorts for Rick Santorum.

In theory, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has the money and Southern accent to at least make a...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- "I can't do modern politics," Newt Gingrich told a Rotary Club breakfast early Friday morning here at a country club near downtown. An hour later, in a supermarket parking lot in the burgeoning new suburbs, Mitt Romney gave a demonstration of what constitutes "modern politics" in...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Newt Gingrich is fading faster than a winter sunset in a plowed-down cornfield. So why did a pro-Mitt Romney super PAC just go up with a vicious new attack ad against him here? Isn't that overkill?

The answer is simple enough: The race here is no...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- This time, Wade Duncan is going hardcore, which says everything you need to know about the Iowa Republican caucuses. This is a race defined by the search for the Hardcore Candidate -- which, ironically, may lead to a victory by the least hardcore candidate of all,...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Some 20 protesters interrupted the start of a Ron Paul event at the Iowa State Fairgrounds just as the GOP candidate and Texas Representative began to speak, at about 7:30 p.m. local time.

"Ron Paul, why do you hate gays," Heaven Ryan, 16, shouted. "Why do...

NEW YORK CITY -- With his neatly barbered white beard and his calm, careful demeanor, 68-year-old Judge Jed S. Rakoff seems too mild-mannered to be the fierce foe of corporate greed that his admirers see.

And yet it is a measure of how timid our politics have become that this...

WASHINGTON -- Faced with (still) intransigent Republicans, the White House on Thursday floated an idea: that Congress extend the payroll tax cuts and long-term unemployment insurance "for a short period of time." Until today, the Obama administration had been arguing for a full-year extension of both.

The compromise idea, floated...

WASHINGTON -- Having surged to the lead in the polls and declared himself the Republican nominee a month in advance of the first vote, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich left the campaign trail last night to take part in a quintessential ritual for well-off and well-connected capital insiders: He attended...

WASHINGTON -- In his early days in the nation's capital, before he toppled the 40-year Democratic hegemony in the House and became speaker, Newt Gingrich would rise at dawn, put on combat boots and take brisk, military-style walks along the Mall.

Whether he did this because he actually liked to...

WASHINGTON -- Joe McQuaid, president and publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader -- the dominant newspaper in a crucial early primary state -- likes Newt Gingrich's idea of firing unionized school custodians and replacing them with working students.

The idea pushes several of McQuaid's conservative buttons: unions, school administrators...

NEW YORK -- On Thanksgiving Weekend, there is no group of Americans more deserving of thanks than the country's youngest war veterans.

One of their leaders -- and an expert on the leadership gifts of his own generation -- is 36-year-old Paul Rieckhoff.

With his bald pate, piercing gaze, firm...

WASHINGTON -- Six months ago, Rick Tyler quit Newt Gingrich cold turkey. He left the former speaker's entourage after 12 years of serving as his spokesman -- part of a mass exodus of campaign aides who had decided that Gingrich was not only unmanageable but unelectable. Now he and Gingrich...

WASHINGTON -- If you know me you know that I love The Tune Inn, a taxidermy-filled, three-generation-in-one-family hole-in-the-wall bar and grill on Pennsylvania Avenue three blocks from the Capitol.

The reason why is simple enough. The Tune Inn is like the favorite neighborhood you knew back home, wherever...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Kentucky is a red state with two Republican senators, a Republican state Senate, and a recent history of voting for GOP presidential candidates by landslide margins.

And yet the Democratic statewide ticket here is expected to sweep to victory on Election Day next Tuesday, led by incumbent...

WASHINGTON -- A presidential call to service that inspired generations of Main Street Americans originated, ironically, in the privileged world of a New England prep school.

"Ask not what your country can do for you," President John F. Kennedy famously declared in his inaugural address of 1961. "Ask what you...

WASHINGTON -- The winners of Tuesday night's GOP debate: Herman Cain and President Obama.

With the devastating accuracy of a CIA drone, the Republican candidates zeroed in on their own party's chances with exchanges that played right into Democrats' hands on a series of issues, from immigration to taxes.

And...

CONCORD, N.H. -- For a self-described amateur, Herman Cain is awfully adept at telling a roomful of professional pols exactly what they want to hear.

He did it Wednesday from the speaker's rostrum of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, a raucous and generally conservative body of 400 souls...