So Bill and Hillary did not invite Barack and Michelle to Chelsea's wedding. No surprise there. As the author of a book on Bill Clinton's post presidency that covered Bill's fury as Barack took the nomination from the woman Bill felt was entitled to have it, I strongly suspect that...

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was this week's winner of the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza's "Worst Week in Washington" award. On the one hand, it is richly deserved; on the other, before Monday, when he fired USDA bureaucrat Shirley Sherrod and then had to beg her to return --...

Norah O'Donnell, MSNBC's chief Washington correspondent, was on the panel last Sunday of NBC's Chris Matthews Show. The subject was BP and the $20 billion fund that President Obama had, the panelists (in addition to O'Donnell, Newsweek's Howard Fineman, the Washington Post's David Ignatius, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Cynthia...

My husband and I were walking on a rainy, chilly Friday night from our car to one of the many Italian restaurants on Chicago's Taylor Street. It was after 10 and we got in under the wire as the kitchen was closing. A man in his early 20s who I...

After the Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Mike Sneed reported a cute item last week that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan was at the White House and had taken home to her daughters "two boxes of presidential M&M candy," I wondered if Obama aides Rahm Emanuel and/or David Alexrod...

"The Breck girl" -- that was Rush Limbaugh's nickname for John Edwards when he still had a political future.

Turns out that Rush was wrong. He should have nicknamed Edwards the "HairTec Thick & Strong Shampoo for Fine, Fragile Hair" girl.

Not as snappy,...

In August 2003, I interviewed Rod Blagojevich, then the new Illinois governor, n his Chicago office. He was full of stories--about Elvis and Sylvester Stallone and Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon and himself, of course--and brimming with optimism. Toned, tan, and fit, Blago was more than six years from being...

I called former governor and senator of Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, to ask how he would have voted on health care reform if he were he still in the United States Senate today. "I presume that the answer is I would vote yes," he said, but not with much enthusiasm.

Kerrey...

When I was a child growing up in Chicago, a trip to the pediatrician was made tolerable by a cool machine, called a Fluoroscope, in the doc's examination room that allowed my brothers and me to stand in front of it, fully clothed, and get a look at each others'...

When David Gregory, in the wake of the death of NBC's Tim Russert, took over the helm of Meet the Press, expectations for Gregory were sky high. He was the fearless reporter who had made a name for himself taking on all of "W's" men.

Gregory waltzed into a...

To scrape together the 60 votes he needs for health care reform, the skinny, pale Harry Reid morphed into an unlikely Santa, giving away goodies to such colleagues as Joe Lieberman (okay, so Reid was Hanukkah Harry in Joe's case), Ben Nelson ("full and permanent federal funding for...

Some mornings when the Chicago Sun-Times has a dumb celebrity story on the front page, as if there were no news locally, nationally, or internationally, I wonder why I still pay to have the tabloid delivered to my doorstep.

I got my answer again today when...

I like Chris Matthews; I watch his show most days, and I appreciate his genuine love of politics and politicians. (He likes politicians so much that he wanted to be one; he lost the primary for a House seat in 1974 and flirted with running for the Senate from Pennsylvania...

I've been thinking about political operative Pat Caddell for years, but haven't written about him because I figured that anyone interested enough to care about the subject must know that Pat Caddell is quite conservative--and rarely disagrees with cable pundits such as Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck. I've watched Caddell,...

For a short time last January, it appeared that the Illinois legislature, the state's new governor, Pat Quinn, and the Democrats in the U.S. Senate might actually do the right thing and deny our local laughingstock, Roland Burris, the Senate seat formerly held by President Barack Obama. No such luck....

When I checked my BlackBerry this morning while stumbling to the kitchen to make coffee, I saw the headline "Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize." My first thought was, "This must be a hoax." When I saw the "News Alerts" from the Washington Post and the New York Times I knew...

So much strategizing and lobbying, in the wake of Ted Kennedy's death, to change the law in Massachusetts to make certain the 60th Democratic vote is there for the health care bill.

Why so little attention to West Virginia Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, 91, who is more often than...

In their Sunday editions, the New York Times and other major dailies (my hometown Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, for example) gave Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Shawn Hannity huge hunks of red meat for their Monday shows.

Expect to hear repeatedly about how the New York Times in...

To my eye Oprah was looking good on Tuesday, taping her show's season's opener -- it will be aired on Thursday, Sept. 10 -- on an outdoor stage on Michigan Avenue. Dressed in a stretchy yellow top and stretchy black slacks -- both of which were undoubtedly uber-pricey but...

In February, 2002, my family traveled from Chicago to visit our daughter in London where she was studying abroad for the semester.

We were hurrying to the theater when our son, then 10, was hit by a motorcycle while crossing the street.

...