Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced yesterday that she’s quitting her job with 18 months left to serve.

Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska since 2006, is John McCain’s choice for his vice-presidential running mate. The selection is considered a high-risk, but also high-reward gamble to woo conservatives, as well as female voters who may feel alienated by Barack Obama’s defeat of Hillary Clinton.

For months during the heated contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mark J. Penn was the Hillary Clinton adviser everyone loved to hate.

Frederick M. Baron was there for John Edwards in the past, giving and raising lots of money and doing other favors like letting the Democratic presidential candidate use his private jet.

What’s the value of a celebrity endorsement in a political campaign? In the case of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, about 1 million votes.

JibJab has news: “It’s Time for Some Campaign!” Borrowing the melody and the refrain of the Bob Dylan song, “The Times They are A Changin’,” JibJab has launched its first flash animation video of the non-primary, presidential season.

Patti Solis Doyle today became the first high-profile member of Hillary Clinton’s organization to take an official role in Barack Obama’s campaign.

An ongoing investigation of offshore investments handled by the Swiss bank UBS may have major repercussions in the U.S.

No woman in the Hillary Clinton camp, other than the candidate herself, is tougher than Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

A relatively obscure Chicago charitable fund and a 1960s radical turned college professor have become headaches for Sen. Barack Obama.

Mark J. Penn, one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s key and most controversial advisers, is leaving her campaign.

If Hillary Clinton is a ninth cousin (twice removed) to Angelina Jolie, and Barack Obama is a ninth cousin to Brad Pitt, maybe the race for the Democratic nomination is just an ancient lovers’ quarrel, looping endlessly, one generation to the next.

Samantha Power
Photo credit:
Obama Campaign

Politicians beware. Once you’re on the record, it can be hard to go off the record.

Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Harvard Law graduate, and now former senior foreign policy adviser to Sen. Barack Obama, learned that lesson the hard way this week.

While in London on a book tour she was candid, too candid it would seem, in her assessment of Obama’s opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Faced with questions this past week about his dealings with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, Sen. John McCain had another lobbyist speak in his defense.

“Neither Sen. McCain nor the campaign will dignify false rumors and gossip by responding to them,” Charles R. Black Jr., McCain’s chief political adviser, told The Washington Post Thursday. “John McCain has never done favors for anyone, not lobbyists or any special interest.”

More than one media outlet pointed out the irony of Black’s serving as a point man on the lobbyist issue, as Black himself is a high-powered, well-connected Washington lobbyist.

Get that woman an office. She’s earned it.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Julianna Smoot, finance director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, doesn’t even have an office.

Nonetheless, Smoot has led an effort that has brought in more than $150 million so far, $36 million in January alone, the Times reported.

The Democratic Party will make history this year, nominating either a woman or an African-American for president.

But there’s speculation that the Republicans could make history, as well, not in nominating Sen. John McCain to run for president, but in choosing a vice presidential candidate.

Some conservative commentators, and at least one website, are urging McCain to select former Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts Jr. as his running mate.

Maggie Williams has been part of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political life for years, often behind the scenes.

She moved onto center stage Sunday, becoming Clinton’s campaign manager as the senator from New York seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.

Williams replaces Patti Solis Doyle, who just a month ago seemed to have secured her job by helping Clinton win the New Hampshire primary.

In times of real need, the Bill and Hillary Clintons turn to Harold M. Ickes.

So it’s no surprise that Ickes, the son of Harold L. Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, is leading the effort to sew up Democrat superdelegates for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, in her bid for the Democratic nomination.

Like mother, like daughter.

“Her mother found her voice in New Hampshire, and Chelsea Clinton, has found hers too,” wrote Nikki Schwab of U.S. News & World Report in a story posted Tuesday on the magazine’s website.

The emergence of the 27-year-old daughter of presidential contender Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, and former President Bill Clinton, as a campaign speaker represents a significant shift in the role of the former, and possibly future, first daughter.

Lawrence Haas isn’t the first to suggest that Democrats might blow a sure thing.

Yet Haas, vice president of the U.S.-based Committee on the Present Danger, offers a theory that goes well beyond the Democrats-always-shoot-themselves-in-the-foot school of thought.

He suggests that the party may lose the White House in 2008 because of its stance on national security.