President-Elect Barak Obama has been famously channeling Abraham Lincoln as he prepares for his inauguration.

This weekend, he'll take a train, as Lincoln did, from Philadelphia to Washington. Next Tuesday, he'll be sworn in on the same bible that Lincoln used and enjoy a lunch in the Capitol of...

The most remarkable thing about Barack Obama's remarkable campaign was his personal consistency.

In his victory speech last night before 100,000 cheering fans in Chicago's Grant Park, he was the same composed, confident, understated, serious Barack Obama who came out of political nowhere to win the Iowa caucuses. That...

When the great photographer Cornell Capa died at 90 last week, the obituaries said he covered conflicts from Latin America to the Middle East, including the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors.

What the obits didn't describe was the pivotal moment when he decided, during...

Rooney, our elegant, black-and-white Borzoi, or Russian wolfhound, is dead. At age five. From bone cancer. A terrible conclusion, by any description.

Not big news, perhaps, but it is to me. He was the most free-spirited, acrobatic, energetic, sunny, enthusiastic, delightful, downright funny dog . Never met a person or...

When five former secretaries of state -- three from Republican administrations and two from Democratic - -sit down to give foreign policy advice to the next president in the midst of two wars and a heated campaign, sweet reason and unanimity is not guaranteed.

Include polar opposites like Henry Kissinger...

"It is time to get real -- get real about how we actually win this election," Hillary Clinton told an audience in New York this week. "it is time to get real about the challenges facing America."

"Get real," is her new mantra.

The unspoken subtext is "don't...

Eugene Robinson, arguably the best columnist writing in America today, posed a two-part question in his column this morning in The Washington Post:

"Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators... basically in the tank for Barack Obama?"

Gene's answer: no...

So, what do the first caucuses and primaries tell us about the last glass ceiling in American Presidential politics?

Is it race, as some surmise after New Hampshire? Is it gender, as some concluded after Iowa? Is it both?

Or do the results demonstrate that neither is meaningful anymore?

If the past truly is prologue, then you can find a detailed roadmap to a future Hillary Clinton administration, should there be one, in the pages of Sally Bedell Smith's new book, For Love of Politics.

In 450 pages, Smith dissects the unique political and personal partnership of Bill and...

The charming, historic town of Annapolis is quiet again, now that the President, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and the representatives of 40 other nations have had their one-day conference and headed back to Washington. Those of us who live nearby can drive downtown again and sailboats can cruise alongside...

Now that he's got it, the time has come to take Rupert Murdoch at his word.

He has said that he intends to build up The Wall Street Journal, not dumb it down. He has said that he will strengthen the Washington bureau, not reduce it through layoffs and...

The Aspen Institute has just wrapped up its third annual Ideas Festival, which gathers a couple of hundred people in the Colorado Mountains for panel discussions on everything from politics to poetry. On one panel, five journalists were 30 or 40 minutes into a discussion of media credibility or...

Anniversaries have a way of sneaking up on you. Amazingly, it has been 40 years since the outbreak of the Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors on June 5, 1967. It seems like a very long time ago -- another era, really -- and yet the...

In the end, Scooter Libby's conviction took its toll on just about everybody involved.

None of the parties came out looking good.

Certainly not the Bush White House, whose clumsy attempts at manipulating the press and public opinion back-fired. Certainly not Vice President Cheney, who was...

The quiet passing on January 2 of Teddy Kollek, the longtime Mayor of Jerusalem, got me to thinking about the man and his moment in history. The Kollek story got lost amid all the commotion last week surrounding the execution of Saddam Hussein and the funeral for former President...

I don't know about you, but I love this time of the year: Christmas, New Year's, the turkey, the mistletoe, all the traditions that make it special.

Like the Papajohn's.com Bowl.

That holiday football classic pitted South Florida against East Carolina this year, just before Christmas. If you...