John McCain is effectively the nominee of the GOP He has more than 700 delegates of the 1 191 needed and his closest rival Mitt Romney dropped out of the race yesterday Mike Huckabee may make a last attempt to rally the conservative base but he faces two problems He only has 195 delegates and mu

The news that Hillary Clinton had loaned her campaign 5 million sent shockwaves through the commentariat It was not good news for her assuredly It shows a lack of enthusiasm for her campaign It shows a lack of good fiscal management that undercuts her claims to super-competence And given th

If you live inside the Beltway and you care about politics late afternoon of every election day you start making calls to find out what the exit polls show The content of these polls shape your last-minute expectations and will constitute much of the coverage and analysis as the night goes on If

In this morning s Washington Post Shailagh Murray ranks Sen Ted Kennedy s endorsement of Obama along with the latter s victories in Iowa and South Carolina as the principle reasons for the wind at Obama s back going in to today s Tsunami Tuesday Last week I argued that endorsements don

I confess I listen to C-Span radio in the car Sometimes this only entails waiting to see how long the host waits until cutting off a caller who is linking undocumented workers to take your pick the assassination of JFK the Nazis or an uncomplicated racism If you ever wonder why the Founders

One of the more interesting findings from the Florida exit polls last week was how poorly John McCain did among those who are frequent church-goers Among those who attend church more than once a week McCain came in third with 24 of the vote behind Mike Huckabee with 40 and Mitt Romney with 26

All eyes were trained on the stage at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles for the first one-on-one debate between Hillary and Barack After the fireworks at the last debate and the hype the Clinton campaign tried to generate after Edwards dropped out the day before This is the one-on-one match-up we

It is hard to know where Mitt Romney looks for a big victory on Tsunami Tuesday In Georgia and Arkansas conservative states with plenty of wealthy country club Republicans Mitt s base if you will Mike Huckabee stands between Romney and victory Georgia s rich load of delegates will be aw

Commentators have focused ad infinitum on the racial composition of the electorate in South Carolina last week But as noted earlier Obama trounced Clinton among church-goers by 58 to 27 3 points better than he did among all voters Certainly there was a degree of overlap between church-goers an

I went to dinner with three friends last night in Bethesda just outside Washington We began talking about the Democratic primaries and about how disgusted we were with the Clintons campaign tactics especially Bill Clinton s dismissive equation of Obama s South Carolina victory with Jesse J