Patti Solis Doyle, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, is in the fight of her life.

Doyle, whose ties to Clinton go back to 1991, when she was hired as Clinton’s scheduler, has five days to turn the tide. After a solid defeat in Iowa, the New Hampshire primary is a crucial event for a candidate who was once considered a Democratic shoo-in.

This is Doyle’s first national campaign. Although she prefers to stay behind the scenes, she is known as a fiercely competitive person who runs a tight, well-organized operation. She has described herself as “tough as dirt.”

If traffic to a candidate’s web site is any indication of the candidates popularity in the Iowa caucuses, then Barack Obama and Ron Paul will be the winners of their parties caucuses after the votes are tallied this evening.

Web site traffic statistics provided by Alexa show Obama with a clear lead in the Democratic contest over second place finisher Hillary Clinton. John Edwards lands in third place with Joe Biden taking a distant fourth and Christopher Dodd finishing fifth. Bill Richardson’s doesn’t even break the top 100,000 websites, so there is little data on Alexa about their traffic trends.

He claims he IS America in the title of his best-seller, I Am America (And So Can You!). So why is it so surprising that Stephen Colbert has announced he’s running for president?

For starters, Colbert is running only in South Carolina. And he’s a comedian.

As the chairman of Madison Square Garden, the company that owns the hapless New York Knicks, James L. Dolan should have already known a lot about losing.

But Dolan, 51, who is also a blues/rock singer, has learned even more about embarrassing defeats during the last few weeks.

The recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Michael Mukasey to be U.S. attorney general might have passed for a meeting of the Yale Law School alumni association.

Mukasey, class of 1967, was introduced to the committee by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., also Yale Law class of ‘67.

Two seasons have collided - the endless season of the presidential campaign and the shorter season of the baseball playoffs.

This means that presidential candidates have been showing up at the playoffs, most especially Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, who was there front and center to see his beloved New York Yankees exit the playoffs in the first round.

These sporting appearances make sense. The politicos get a little TV airtime away from the coffee shops of New Hampshire and Iowa. And they associate themselves with a game that’s American as apple pie and steroids. (OK. They don’t stress the steroids.)

But there can be risks to rooting for a team, as it inevitably means rooting against another team. Giuliani have picked up some votes in New York, but the inhabitants of Red Sox Nation might not be able to forgive his connection to, in their opinions, an evil empire.

The Clinton campaign took a defensive crouch yesterday after reports that a company headed by one its top advisers had counseled Blackwater CEO Erik Prince.

A subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm headed by Clinton strategist Mark Penn, helped prepare Prince for his congressional testimony Tuesday.

However, Penn told Politico that he was not involved in the account, and said the firm’s work for Blackwater was “a temporary assignment based on a relationship that has concluded.”

The Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign announced yesterday that it would give to charity $23,000 received from Norman Hsu, a major Democratic supporter who has an outstanding arrest warrant for a 1991 fraud charge. Campaign officials pledged to review thousands of dollars in other donations from Hsu.

California authorities said Hsu left the state in 1992 after pleading no contest and agreeing to serve up to three years in prison for defrauding investors. Hsu now lives in New York, where he is in the apparel business. On campaign finance reports, he lists his companies as Next Components, Dilini Management, Cool Planets, NBT and others.

While controversial tech entrepreneur Vinod Gupta
widely cultivates political alliances around the country, he stays
close to home when he picks board members for his Omaha-based company,
infoUSA.

Six of the company’s eight directors, including Gupta, have strong ties to Omaha or Nebraska, a Muckety analysis shows. A seventh is a name partner in a law firm that did more then $1 million in business with infoUSA last year.

Truly independent directors are a key to responsible corporate governance, experts say. If directors are too close to a CEO, they can’t properly oversee his actions.

Gupta’s lavish spending on his political connections, including naming buildings after Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in one of his India projects, have caused a backlash. Some infoUSA shareholders sued Gupta for wasting company money.

Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou are the best of friends.

But, as the New York Times notes today, they’re likely to avoid talking politics.

Winfrey endorsed Obama on “Larry King Live” in May, and is planning a fundraiser for him at her California home. Angelou is featured on Clinton’s web site, backing her candidacy and describing the importance of women running for high office.