Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said Thursday that he can pull conservative voters to his side for the general election because he offers clear policy differences with Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

McCain, speaking at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, said he wants to make income tax cuts permanent and has a different view than the Democrats on health care reforms and use of the American military.

For instance, he remarked, "we are succeeding in Iraq, something that Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton won't acknowledge."

As the Arizona senator acknowledged, he is still working on winning his party's nomination and the...

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Likely Republican presidential nominee John McCain tried Wednesday to sidestep the touchy issue of the border fence, saying he hopes that federal officials and Texas landowners can agree on where to put it.

Speaking at a town hall meeting with employees at a financial services company that caters to military personnel and retirees, McCain was asked how he would balance the need for border security with individual property rights. Along the Texas border, landowners fear their riverfront land will be divided or taken from them.

McCain's first responded by joking, "This meeting is adjourned."

The Arizona senator then...

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John McCain faces a dilemma on immigration as he works to persuade conservatives he's tough enough on the issue without erasing his historic appeal to Hispanic voters.

Once a crusader for offering the nation's roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants a way to get legal status, McCain now says his first priority is fortifying U.S. borders.

The metamorphosis reflects McCain's intensifying effort to consolidate his support among conservatives, who deride the Arizona senator's past proposals on immigration as offering amnesty to lawbreakers, and bitterly resent his work with...

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The results from Nevada offer a grim warning to Barack Obama. And Hillary Clinton shouldn't be celebrating either.

Ms. Clinton won the state caucuses Saturday, but she won it the wrong way. The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is fissuring along racial lines, which in America is the most dangerous divide.

For the supporters of whoever ultimately loses the nomination, the wounds will be that much deeper. For whoever wins, the task of reuniting the Democratic Party will be that much more difficult.

And when South Carolina holds its Democratic primary on Saturday, the racial schism within the party may become even more glaring.

Ms. Clinton has always appealed to working-class voters and older women, while Mr. Obama's coalition is...

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Ron Paul, the ten-term Republican congressman from Texas finished second in the Nevada Caucus for the GOP nominations which was said to be a key state for both the GOP and the Democratic Party candidates bid for the Oval Office. He finished ahead of John McCain, Fred Thompson and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani by gathering 6,084 votes or roughly 14% of the turnout for the Republican Primary. Mitt Romney won with 22,644 votes.

Ron Paul started the campaign in a relatively low key fashion and struggled early in the Iowa and the New Hampshire Primary where he was relatively inactive and finished fourth in both states. His efforts though have slowly picked up steam as more supporters surfaced to give Paul a political boost. Ron Paul leads all candidates in Internet Searches on internet web sites like Yahoo, Google and Youtube. He also has recorded the largest single day fundraiser in U.S. political history last December when he raised over $6 million in 24 hours through his campaign web site. His Nevada result will certainly serve notice to the rest of the Republican nominees as a threat in their Party’s Presidential nomination. He is primarily viewed by many as a conservative, Constitutionalist, and libertarian. He advocates a non-interventionist foreign policy, having voted against actions such as the Iraq War Resolution, but in favor of force against terrorists in Afghanistan.

Overall, he has taken a more active role in his campaign and the results have been positive. In a gathering of supporters, he spoke about Martin Luther King’s legacy “To me, the timing is more than a coincidence. The American people, regardless of color or creed, have the opportunity to choose a candidate who...

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After he won the New Hampshire primary last week, John McCain had a seemingly clear road to the nomination as the new Republican frontrunner. However, as we noted at the time, McCain's victory was in many ways a soft win in a state tailor-made for him, and exit polls revealed a lot of hidden vulnerabilities that could pose serious problems for him in the days ahead.

The exit polls from yesterday's GOP contest in Michigan paint an even more dire picture for McCain's chances.

First off, McCain's 2000 primary victory in Michigan was heavily dependent on the support of independents and Democrats, who made up an astounding 52% of the GOP primary electorate in 2000, according to CNN's exit polls. This time, though, core Republicans made up a much higher 68%, and McCain's performance didn't significantly change with them — he may have even declined, from 29% in the 2000 exit poll to 27% this time. Simply put, McCain's base in the 2000 victory no longer existed for him.

This tells us that in...

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Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called Tuesday for suspending immigration from countries that sponsor or harbor terrorists.

Hitting the campaign trail in South Carolina's Jan. 19 primary, Huckabee sharpened his rhetoric on immigration and embraced a tougher measure than any of his rivals have so far.

"There's a couple of things we're going to do differently," Huckabee told about 300 supporters in Rock Hill, shortly after arriving in the state from Michigan. "I say we ought to put a hiatus on people who come in here ... if they come from countries that sponsor and harbor terrorists."

"Let's say, until you get your act in order, and we get our act in order, we're not going to just let you keep...

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Sen. John McCain of Arizona, winner of last Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, drew cheers and jeers from an audience of over 500 conservative activists in Michigan over the weekend.

Just days ahead of the Michigan primary, McCain was one of three Republican presidential hopefuls, including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, to visit the Americans for Prosperity Summit held Saturday in the Detroit suburb of Livonia.

McCain was alternately cheered and jeered by the vocal, pro-growth, "limit-the-government" activist crowd. He was cheered for his military service and for his pledges to maintain a strong defense, to cut taxes and to veto earmarks, but he was booed for his stances on immigration and the environment.

McCain's signature lines such as, "We need to send Washington a message: 'No earmarks -- not 10,000, not one. Zero!" drew...

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John Kerry went to John Edwards' home state the other day to endorse someone else in the Democratic presidential race: Barack Obama.

A major-league diss? Yes. A surprise? Hardly.

Our colleague James Rainey recently spent time with Kerry to produce a rich piece updating the activities -- and aspirations -- of the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. And following Kerry's implicit rejection of Edwards, he offered these thoughts:

Kerry's relationship with Edwards has been strained since early in the last presidential race, when the younger and more naturally gifted pol threatened, first, to overtake Kerry during the primaries and, then, to overshadow him in the general election.

Edwards never embraced the traditional role of the VP candidate as attack dog on the opposite ticket, Kerry's team believed. They also felt Edwards never deferred to the top of the ticket. "I had to...

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Dave Weigel, the associate editor of Reason Magazine, warned back in May of 2007 that if Ron Paul started to generate any kind of a buzz in the Republican presidential primaries, someone would bring up the newsletters.

In the 80s and 90s, Paul was involved with newsletters (Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report) that regularly made racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks. They were first reported by the Houston Chronicle in 1996, and have been circulating around the Internet ever since.

Recently New Republic reporter James Kirchick wrote about the newsletters, and talked about them...

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