Howard Fineman

WASHINGTON -- He barely speaks in his own first general-election ad. On the top floor of his Boston campaign headquarters, the most visible poster is one of his dad's. His party's leaders in Congress, the states and the lobbying world don't bow to him, or mention him much, even as...

CHICAGO -- Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's campaign manager, is a soft-spoken Montanan who loves order, detail and teamwork.

In 2008, when he was number two in the upstart Obama campaign, Messina didn't have the time to assemble the fast-growing enterprise the way he wanted to. "We had to do...

WASHINGTON -- As he tries to become only the second Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to win reelection, Barack Obama is adopting much of the strategic playbook Republicans have developed and used for 40 years.

Of course, on the core substance of policy -- tax rates, regulation and the size...

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney has a lovely corner office at his Boston campaign headquarters.

Two walls of tall windows give him a view of the inner reaches of Boston Harbor, Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown and the "Old Ironsides" battleship. A large desk is positioned so that he can survey...

WASHINGTON -- Dick Lugar was a nice guy who stayed too long. But his crushing loss is also a valid data point in a profound and troubling trend, obvious not only in politics but in every other aspect of American life.

We are losing the mediating middle of everything, and...

I picked the winner of the Derby, "I'll Have Another," but for shamefully accidental reasons. Everybody's having another here, juleps, Buds or whatever. So it seemed appropriate.

A certain welcome giddiness takes over during the Derby race. People sing "My Old Kentucky Home" and cry. People who don't like...

LOUISVILLE -- If you are here on Derby Weekend, it's easy to lapse into thinking that Louisville is the center of the world, or at least America.

It's neither. The crowds here don't "look like America" as our increasingly diverse country is defined. This is a whiter, older, more Anglo...

LOUISVILLE -- Politics has a family flavor in Kentucky, and to a surprising degree, the Obamas are family here in Louisville, even if they are not much liked elsewhere in the commonwealth.

Early in his career, then-Senator Barack Obama caught the eye of a young entrepreneur, Matthew Barzun,...

LOUISVILLE -- Once you come back here, as we did Thursday night, you remember what you used to know when you lived here but forgot: that everybody has to have a theory and a horse.

It doesn't matter if you are a Louisvillian, or a regular visitor, or a first-timer....

LOUISVILLE -- I'm not a horse racing expert by any means. I did spend five years as a reporter here. I did cover four Derby race days at Churchill Downs and four Kentucky Oaks (the filly Derby, run on Friday). I can read The Daily Racing Form. I know a...

WASHINGTON - Where is the "Mission Accomplished" banner?

There was no aircraft carrier in Kabul and President Barack Obama wasn't wearing a jumpsuit when he landed there in secret. But his drop-in on the one year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden was the most dramatically political photo-op...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama won late-night TV style points this week for slow-jamming his way through a campaign update on Jimmy Fallon's show. But he made a less-noticed but perhaps more noteworthy bid for youth support the day before.

Speaking at the University of North Carolina...

WASHINGTON -- The Democratic congressman thought his credentials were in order. He was popular, from a prominent district and the ranking member of a key committee. Most important, he had not endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential race. So through an intermediary, he asked Bill Clinton to headline...

WASHINGTON -- As the air war begins in earnest between the president and Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign in Chicago called itself, in the words of campaign official David Axelrod, "confident, but realistic."

"It is a tough environment," Axelrod told The Huffington Post. "There are events that are beyond our...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is leading in the polls, particularly in swing states. The economy is, in some ways, recovering impressively from the mega-meltdown of 2008-09. The Republican Party is poised to nominate Mitt Romney, a man with no public political skills who wants to install an elevator in...

WASHINGTON –- All of you non-Kentuckians out there have no idea what brand of deep-fried hell is about to break loose in the Bluegrass state this week and in the New Orleans Superdome Saturday.

Why? Because the University of Louisville Cardinals are playing the University of Kentucky Wildcats for the...

WASHINGTON -- Now that Illinois has come and gone, and Mitt Romney has won, the time has come not to bury him but to praise him.

Stripped of sentiment, accepting the pitiless morality of the American win-at-all-costs game, Willard "Mitt" Romney deserves to be acknowledged for what he is:...

News that Mitt Romney wants to vastly expand one of his six homes -- an expensive sea-view spot in La Jolla, Calif. -- reminded Republican veterans of a key but unreported moment in the 2008 presidential campaign, a moment with resonance this year, too.

Four years ago, Romney was on...

WASHINGTON -- Here's what the Mitt Romney campaign has been reduced to as it crawls toward the Republican presidential nomination: bragging about the candidate's sweeping victories this past week in American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands, Guam and Hawaii.

Throw in his earlier triumph in Alaska, and...

NEW YORK -- If the tax cut lobby were a church (and many of its members see it that way), then its pope would be Steve Forbes, the jovial 64-year-old publisher of the magazine-and-web empire that bears his family name.

But in an interview with The Huffington Post, Forbes said...