NEW YORK CITY -- Today, Election Day, marks the end of the most expensive, least informative, least inspiring presidential election since TV took over...

Whoever wins in whatever combination -- presidency, Senate, House -- will face a country divided over whether to raise taxes and in what way; over how to distribute and control health care; over how to put together a deal to address long-term debt.

WASHINGTON -- A week ago, The Des Moines Register surprised the political world by endorsing Mitt Romney for president, the first time the storied Iow...

WASHINGTON -- We interrupt this presidential campaign to bring you a disturbing special report from the future. It's called Lower Manhattan. And now ...

WASHINGTON -- It took awhile but it's a relief to finally know what this presidential election is about. It's about making Jeeps in Toledo. It's some...

It's hard to believe that any voter hasn't already decided whom to vote for -- but also that any undecided voter isn't terminally depressed by the TV ads, fact-free spin and invective. Here's an undecided-voters guide to 10 topics that Obama and Romney are arguing about.

The debates over, we're now in the Battle of Verdun phase of the 2012 campaign. It is a bloody war of attrition over tiny pieces of real estate: t...

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. -- If you're an undecided or still "persuadable" female voter in a swing state, last night's debate was all about -- and for -- you. ...

If the president ends up losing the race to Romney, here are some of the reasons Democrats will eventually, but certainly, cite in public.

DANVILLE, Ky. -– Henry Ford once said, “History is bunk.” He could have been talking about this presidential election. Historical number-cru...

Before last Wednesday's debate, one of the grand viziers of number-crunching said that no one who was in Romney's trailing position at that point had ever come back to win the White House. That looks like a laughable statement now. My own view was that it was way too early to count Romney out. I wrote and said that a guy who had made that many mistakes -- who had had so much dumped on his head, and who still remained within hailing distance of the president -- still had a chance. Less than a week later, things seemed to have turned utterly upside-down. The Denver debate has sent Romney rocketing into a lead, and tightened races in key swing states to the point than a Romney Electoral College victory now seems eminently possible -- rather than the ridiculous GOP wishful thinking it looked like only days ago.

After last week's disastrous debate performance, Democrats in and around the president's camp are privately pointing fingers at each other for Obama's failure in Round One in Denver.

Simply put, the Obama-Biden team can't afford another weak, confused and defensive performance against the Republican ticket after the one the president turned in Wednesday in the West.

Something is not quite right with President Barack Obama. That was clear long before his passive, distracted performance here Wednesday night against Mitt Romney. The president needs to get back some form of his old magic if he hopes to secure a victory that, until the Denver debate, seemed all but inevitable, even to many of his foes. The evidence of the president's distance and distaste for the campaign is everywhere. He is invisible around Washington, a place he clearly doesn't like and where he has made few new political friends. He mailed in his acceptance speech in Charlotte, N.C., looking at the end like a man who couldn't wait to get off the stage. He has dutifully hit the campaign trail, but not with the zest or the frenzied response of 2008. And he clearly didn't master his brief for the debate when he went to ground in Las Vegas, though he did take time for a day trip to Hoover Dam. What gives?

If you want hope and change in politics, mayors offer tons of it. The key to success in their jobs, they say, is to avoid -- as indeed they do -- partisan bickering and focus on What Works.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama was full of promise -- 508 of them to be precise. But with just six weeks to go until Election Day 2012, President Obama has made few new promises and is not repeating many of the original ones.

This election is unlike any other in recent memory. Despite a lot of huffing and puffing, it is not about grand ideological conflict in America. It is more prosaic, but in its own way more urgent.

You couldn't make up the impressive biography of Richard Carmona of Tucson, Ariz. Hollywood would never buy it. But Carmona is real -- and one reason why Republicans are losing what once looked like a good shot at retaking the U.S. Senate.

The debate season will be Romney's last chance to overtake Obama in what, so far, has been an uninformative and tactical contest of accusation, innuendo, non-ideas, non-specifics and invisible agendas.

Why is Ohio so pivotal? Perhaps more than any other big state, Ohio sits at the center of the pinwheel of American geography and culture.

If American democracy is to work -- if we are to prevent the blood from clotting in the body politic -- presidential elections must be real contests over real ideas and real records, informed by real facts. This campaign hasn't really been any of those things.

WASHINGTON -- The attack on Mitt Romney was tough, even vicious. As expressed at a now-infamous fundraiser in Florida, the Republican nominee's "id...

Timing is everything in politics, and President Obama is getting just enough verifiable positive economic news just in time to propel him into the lead against Romney on this 47th day before the election.

Romney's video proves to be a corollary to columnist Michael Kinsley's famous dictum that in politics, the biggest scandals arise when people say the most obviously true but usually unspoken things.

WASHINGTON -- Remember when Mitt Romney said that Palestinians don't want peace and aren't as culturally prepared for modernity as Israelis are? If...