Political Platforms

Politicians of both parties trooped into Boston's historic Faneuil Hall as a fife and drum corps played. Business titans stood alongside labor and religious leaders. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney even welcomed the man who had once been his bitter foe in a U.S. Senate contest -- Democratic lion Edward M. Kennedy.

When Rudolph W. Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring of 2000, one thing he did not have to worry about was a lack of medical insurance. Today, the former New York mayor joins two other cancer survivors in seeking the Republican presidential nomination: Arizona Sen. John McCain has been treated for melanoma, the most serious type of skin malignancy, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson had lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.

Finally, nearly five years into the Iraq war, John McCain sees vindication at hand. More than any other candidate for president, McCain has tied his fortunes to support for sending more U.S. troops into the unpopular war. Now that violence in Iraq has waned after a troop buildup, McCain wants some credit.

It would seem an ideal time for Kansas politicians opposed to abortion to push that agenda, hard. The state's two biggest clinics are under criminal indictment, and two grand juries will soon convene to consider additional charges. But as the political season revs up, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party has issued a stern warning to his fellow conservatives: Abortion is not a winning issue.

As governor of Arkansas five years ago, Mike Huckabee joined a bipartisan chorus of politicians who concluded that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was bad for businesses. Now that he's a top-tier candidate for president, Huckabee has decided he favors the embargo -- so much so that he vowed Monday to outdo even President Bush in strangling the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro and punishing those who do business there.

Centrist Democrats, led by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, unveiled a policy manifesto Monday aimed at winning Congress and the White House and distancing the party from its clamorous left wing. The prescription, directed at middle-class voters and focused on economic issues, capped a three-day meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, another installment in the party's search for itself.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's agreements this week on a minimum-wage hike and prescription drug discounts solidifies an election-year transformation that robs his Democratic opponent, Phil Angelides, of coveted middle-class issues. Since voters rejected his largely conservative special election platform last November, Schwarzenegger has methodically shed all links to his calamitous second year in office.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger must be misinformed about his reelection opponent's tax proposals. Because if he weren't, he'd be flat-out fibbing. That's the gentle way of putting it. The misinformation, it's logical to assume, is being fed to the governor by his campaign attack dogs, the biggest ones trained in the political kennels of President Bush.

Since U.S. forces attacked in 2003, Rep. Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican from Connecticut's liberal 4th District, has been a stalwart defender of the Iraq war. "I've been carrying the bucket when it comes to the war," Shays said in September. But facing an antiwar Democratic opponent in a tough midterm election race, Shays is starting to express reservations. In a telephone interview Friday after he returned from his 14th trip to Iraq, Shays said that he believed the U.S.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein delivered a lengthy, impassioned speech Wednesday about the need for this country, other nations and every individual to step up the fight against global warming. Then she drove off in a gas-guzzling Lincoln Town Car.