Political Aides

Sen. Barack Obama strode into a hotel ballroom filled with expectation one recent Tuesday and declared that his quest for the Oval Office, which "began as a whisper in Springfield, has swelled to a chorus of millions calling for change." That's the essence of the Illinois senator's message: Obama equals change; Hillary Rodham Clinton equals status quo. All else cascades from there. In this contest -- where the candidates are but a micron apart on most policy matters -- message is everything.

In big ways and small, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton have spent their millions in campaign funds differently. Clinton pays top dollar to her aides -- giving her communications director twice as much in one month as Obama paid his communications director in a year. In the past year, Obama spent $1.8 million on buttons and other paraphernalia, whereas Clinton paid dearly for the fuel of many campaigns: pizza and doughnuts.

Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey refused Friday to refer the House's contempt citations against two of President Bush's top aides to a federal grand jury. Mukasey said White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet E. Miers had committed no crime. As promised, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she had given the Judiciary Committee authority to file a lawsuit against Bolten and Miers in federal court.

In the second week of July 2007, a pall settled over the half-empty headquarters of John McCain in an Arlington, Va., skyscraper. The campaign was nearly broke. The top two officials had resigned. Two-thirds of the staff had been fired or left, and those who remained worried the campaign might never recover. With headlines predicting the end, a small band of loyalists coalesced around McCain.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has picked an aide to Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez to serve on the city Planning Commission, less than a week after the aide dropped out of a legislative campaign in which he would have been running against the mayor's cousin. Boyle Heights resident Ricardo Lara, who had talked up his bid for the state Assembly only a few weeks ago, decided last week to quit the race to replace Nunez (D-Los Angeles), who will be forced out by term limits at the end of the year.

For the second time in four weeks, a mid-level White House aide has resigned under a cloud, this time for allegedly misusing money provided to a previous employer by the U.S. Agency for International Development. White House Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel said Friday that Felipe Sixto, who began work at the White House in July as associate director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, had resigned March 20.

Harold M. Ickes never forgets a favor, especially if he's the one who did the favor. So the veteran political operative made sure that, when the time was right, he alone would call Garry Shay, former chairman of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. As Ickes saw it, he had helped Shay; now he was looking for Shay to help him. And once Ickes started calling, he didn't stop until Shay said the words Ickes wanted to hear -- that he would support Sen.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton shook up her campaign for the second time in as many months Sunday, demoting her chief strategist and renewing questions about the stability of her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mark Penn, a divisive figure who has worked with Clinton and former President Clinton for more than a decade, is considered one of the architects of her campaign. He has been under increasing scrutiny since Sen.

As John McCain and Barack Obama intensify their battle for the White House, they are competing for the mantle of reform, with each claiming that he has done the most to shield his campaign from the taint of lobbyists. But the strategists behind those efforts are senior aides with a more-than-passing resemblance to -- what else? -- lobbyists. Obama is well ahead of McCain in restricting lobbyist participation in his campaign.

Labor union officials and some liberal activists were seething Tuesday over Barack Obama's choice of centrist economist Jason Furman as the top economic advisor for the campaign. The critics say Furman, who was appointed to the post Monday, has overstated the potential benefits of globalization, Social Security private accounts and the low prices offered by Wal-Mart -- considered a corporate pariah by the labor movement.