A team of NEWSWEEK reporters reveals the secret battles and private fears behind an epic election.
POLITICS
CAMPAIGN 2008
A journey through a troubled region.
CAMPAIGN 2008
Both political parties are pouring massive resources into the state's high-stakes runoff election for a U.S. Senate seat.
CAMPAIGN 2008
Many of the biggest battles of the 2008 campaign played out on YouTube. A look at how the channel became the most important political venue of the year.
CAMPAIGN 2008
American Muslims overwhelmingly voted Democratic.
THE ROAD TO THE INAUGURATION
The First Lady readies her family for Washington.
BETWEEN THE LINES
HOW HE DID IT 2008
Americans are getting more comfortable with one another
HOW HE DID IT 2008
Obama can create a new governing ideology for the West
HOW HE DID IT 2008
Obama will need the spirits of Kennedy, FDR and Lincoln, and also a patient public.
Campaign 2008
Chicago's Journey: From Washington to Obama.
THE REPUBLICANS
Some advice for the Alaska governor should she seek her party's nomination in four years.
OPINION
John McCain's chaotic operation may well rank among recent history's least successful efforts.
CAMPAIGN 2008
With a smashing victory, Illinois senator leads a Democratic takeover of national politics
CAMPAIGN 2008
Why was crime overlooked in this campaign?
CAMPAIGN 2008
How McCain let Michigan go blue
SOCIETY
Abortion hasn't been a central debate in the 2008 campaign. But that doesn't mean that its opponents feel any less strongly about it.
OPINION
Tuesday's election will be the most technologically advanced in American history. But will it be the most reliable?
OPINION
Forget Claire Huxtable. She could be a real-life role model for black women.
IDENTITY
Obama's win would be the culmination of a process of inclusion that began with Andrew Jackson.
CAMPAIGN 2008
Turkish Americans typically vote Republican. This time, they are divided over which White House candidate should get their ballot.
CAMPAIGN 2008
These days, answering your phone often means listening to a recorded political message. But do robo-calls work?
CAMPAIGN 2008
Stevens's conviction scrambles Alaska's political scene
MCCAIN CAMPAIGN
REFLECTIONS
In an excerpt from his book 'Make It Plain,' a collection of his speeches, Vernon Jordan looks back to explain the here and now. How the men and women obligated to 'disturb the unjust peace' gave us the candidacies of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
Q&A
Robert Gates dueled with the Soviets, but even he's daunted by today's challenges.
BOOK REVIEW
A new look at the brilliant yet flawed McGeorge Bundy illuminates mistakes we're still making today.
THE BIG IDEA
He's endured the unendurable, and survived. Inside the mind and heart of John McCain.
GALLERY
An audio tour of some rare, odd and even vicious mementos from presidential campaigns past
A new ad goes too far when it says Medicare will be "bankrupt" in eight years.
PHOTO GALLERY WITH AUDIO
Tim Gunn fires his style pointers at the 2008 presidential race
May 13, 1846
The United States declares war on Mexico. Although it added a vast amount of territory to the United States (all of California, Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona and a big chunk of Colorado and New Mexico), the Mexican War has only a small place in the nation's historical memory because it took place during the long period between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln that sometimes seems like nothing more than the buildup to the Civil War. And in some ways the Mexican War was a preamble to the much bloodier, more traumatic conflict to come. Slavery was an important issue in the Mexican War; many Southern Democrats were in favor of the war—and many Northern Whigs opposed it—on the grounds that conquered territory would be open for the expansion of slavery. Rep. Lincoln of Illinois denounced the war for that reason, and Henry David Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes to support it. In 1880 the Republican Campaign Textbook was still calling the Mexican War "one of the darkest scenes in our history—a war forced upon our and the Mexican people by the high-handed usurpations of Pres't Polk in pursuit of territorial aggrandizement of the slave oligarchy." Many of the officers on the Mexican battlefields would go on to find glory in the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman—even Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Grant, however, was disillusioned by the conflict: "I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war … as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." He later said that "the Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."
News/Week
- Twenty five years feels right in my bones and right in my spirit. Oprah on ending her showCST
- It’s going to be a holy war Orrin Hatch on debate over the Senate health billNYT
- The nation and the world will see him for the coward he is Holder, on trying KSMAP
- I'm not scared of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will have to say. Holder on terror trialsREUT
- The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist. Sarah Palin on the magazine coverCSM