IT’S NOT JUST THAT THE mayor is black; it’s that her civil-rights credentials are so in order. Sharon Sayles Belton grew up in an integrated Minneapolis neighborhood. BILL CLINTON AND BOB Dole were ...

Newsweek's Howard Fineman has no illusions about Republican Ron Paul's political clout. The Texas Congressman, he says, is obscure, radical and, at 74, too old to lead the GOP. Fineman calls his ideas ...

Everybody wants to get to Bill Clinton. For Whoopi Goldberg, it’s no problem. Hers was the third call he took on election night–after George Bush’s and Dan Quayle’s. In 1972, Charlie Black was hungry, ...

Steve Forbes is like the moon. He’s not a star. He doesn’t emit a lot of heat. But he does affect the tides. For a man with little chance of becoming president, Forbes has had a disproportionate ...

As a college student in 1968, Bill Clinton would recite solemnly, to close friends, inspirational passages he had memorized from the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. No matter how ...

George Walker Bush can’t sit still. Hosting a lunch at the Texas governor’s mansion in Austin, he taps his foot under the table like a schoolboy waiting for recess. Bill Clinton was ready to lock and ...

The political conventions have turned into trade shows, so think of the Democratic Convention in the Staples Center here as the Comdex of Politics: a hive of marketers hawking wares primarily to each ...

Presidents always want Colin Powell at their side. There is flesh evidence in “My American Journey,” the autobiography Powell unveils next week. When George Bush won in 1988, Powell discloses, the new ...

REPORTERS KNOW THAT ED ROLLINS IS a treasure: an eager-to-please political operative who would rather dish than spin. Even so, no one was expecting him to make news when he showed up last week at a ...

From the start, he displayed a calming sense of involvement in the agony of Los Angeles. He visited the bedsides of hospitalized riot victims. In interviews, he preached compassion-and respect for law ...

Newt Gingrich, an army brat, sees politics as a matter of life or death, good or evil. A look into the life and mind of the speaker of the House, and at the revolution he is about to launch in ...

ELIZABETH DOLE WAS WORRIED for her husband. Not about his energy, which was remarkable, or his will to win, which was equally so. She was anxious, she told a close friend late last week, about ...