Jonathan Darman

Candidates for the November elections usually campaign flat-out in the week after Labor Day. Jim Webb, Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Virginia, took off to hang out with a bunch of 20-year-olds on a Marine base in North Carolina, to drink beer, make small talk and wait.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, had been avoiding a group of particularly determined--and strident--community activists who were after him to do more to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward, a working-class, predominantly black area that was wiped out by Hurricane Katrina.

Joe Lieberman awoke last Wednesday with few prospects and no party. He'd lost the Democratic primary for his own Senate seat to challenger Ned Lamont and the army of "Netroots" Internet activists who'd hammered Lieberman's stubborn defense of the Iraq war.

After a bitter primary, Tennessee Republicans chose former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker as their U.S. Senate candidate. But on the eve of the decisive day, it was the virtually unopposed Democrat who couldn't sleep. "I was up all night," says Harold Ford Jr., the young congressman campaigning to be the South's first black senator since Reconstruction. "Elections are like Christmas morning for me."This summertime Christmas brought Ford an unwelcome gift: a strong foe with crossover appeal and a...

The Senate takes up a proposal to expand stem-cell research this week; it's a hot issue for the Christian right, so conservative opponents will be jockeying for attention.

It's friday night in iowa and an old politician is trying some new tricks. John Edwards is back--back, with the familiar deep drawl, dark tan and honeyed hair.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is sitting on his back porch in Berkeley, Calif., listening to the hummingbirds and explaining his plans to seize control of the Democratic Party.

She witnessed the resurrection, then vanished, leaving popes and painters and now 'The Da Vinci Code' to tell her story. In search of the real Mary Magdalene.

The TV news business can be hard on women past a certain age. Just ask Jane Pauley. She put in 13 years on the "Today" show, only to be squeezed out at 39 for Deborah Norville, eight years her junior.

Immigration is a signature topic for CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. Night after night, he takes to the airwaves and preaches against the Bush administration, taking sharp issue with its border-security policy and its guest-worker plan for illegal aliens.

Harold Ford Jr.'s bid for a Senate seat from Tennessee sounds like a long shot. First there's the party issue: The Democratic congressman is running in a state that George W.

Cpl. Jacob Knospler, his jaw mostly blown away by a grenade, did not wake up for a month. His first clear memory is of President George W. Bush standing over his bed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. "How the hell you doin'?" asked the president.

Oprah Winfrey was in no mood for applause. As she walked onto the Chicago set of her talk show last Thursday, she was greeted with a thunderous, almost giddy ovation. "OK, everybody sit down," she said curtly and went quickly to her work.

Stepping down from the podium at Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings yesterday, Christie Todd Whitman slipped quietly into the second row. Her work for the day was done: She'd introduced Alito, her fellow New Jerseyan, to the Senate Judiciary Committee and urged the committee to vote for his confirmation to the Supreme Court.

With no government salary or special stationery, former vice presidential candidates have only each other. As co-chairs of a Council on Foreign Relations task force on Russia, Jack Kemp, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1996, and John Edwards, the Democratic candidate in 2004, have forged a friendship in the past six months--traveling halfway around the world, coauthoring an op-ed and appearing in public forums together. "It's probably raised some eyebrows among his friends and...

Italy, late May 1944. The allied army advanced on Rome and suffered a brutal counterattack. Hunkered down near the beaches of Anzio, a 23-year-old Army private from Oak Ridge, Tenn., sent a despondent letter home. "Take a combination of fear, anger, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, loneliness, homesickness," Paul Curtis wrote to a younger brother who wanted to know about war, "and you might approach the feelings a fellow has." Nothing can ease his depression, not even the prospect that the war might...

Judith Miller wanted a restful weekend. Days after her newspaper published a blistering account of her role in the Valerie Plame leak case, The New York Times reporter went home to tony Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Harriet Miers is George W. Bush's kind of woman. She works ceaselessly, around the clock if necessary. She is a tomb of discretion. And she never, ever, says anything that might in the slightest way be construed as critical of George W.

Haley Barbour doesn't like to talk about Louisiana. As governor of Mississippi (the state, he's quick to note, that received Hurricane Katrina's most "grievous blow"), he has enough to worry about at home.

And yet for all of its predictable pandering, Current TV did manage to deliver a major surprise when it debuted this summer: Gore's network was actually, well, kind of good.

Art Teele sounded different to Jim DeFede--and not in a good way. A columnist for The Miami Herald, DeFede had talked to Teele, a former Miami commissioner, countless times in the past 14 years.

When writing about their own bosses, career-minded media reporters tend to skip the backbiting details and let their competitors get the scoop. Yet last week, when Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll announced he would step down and be replaced by his deputy, Dean Baquet, the paper with the juiciest details was none other than the L.A.

Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the 1970s, Patrick Fitzgerald was so determined to attend the prestigious Regis High School that even a rejection letter couldn't keep him away.

Not just any viewer. "Open Exchange" broadcasts on Plum TV, the cable network that caters to the privileged folk of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; the Hamptons in New York and Vail, Colo.

Senators usually distinguish themselves with their mouths, not their ears. In a chamber where everybody gets their say (and takes their time to say it) the ability to listen sometimes gets short shrift.

You know that a group is powerful when it's willing to take on Paris Hilton. This week, cable news channels flooded their airwaves with clips of a commercial for the Carl's Jr.

It's traditional for out-of-work politicos to head to Harvard's Institute of Politics for genial wonk talk. It's also traditional for failed veep candidates to put major distance between themselves and their old campaign.

Publishing high-end society mags like Hamptons Magazine and Los Angeles Confidential, Jason Binn routinely hobnobs with Hollywood celebs and Wall Street kings.

Rao's, the legendary east Harlem Italian eatery, is more than a hundred blocks above Wall Street. But with a clientele that includes some of corporate America's leading lights, big business is never far away.

Ed Schultz comes from Bush country and looks like it. At 6 feet 2 and 250 pounds, his idea of the good life is eating wings, fishing for walleye and watching football on TV.