Presidential Candidate

Mitt Romney's powerful performance at the first presidential debate gave the Republican presidential candidate a considerable boost in the polls. Never mind that the chronic flip-flopper changed his previous talking points, moving more to the center while throwing President Obama off his game. The result was an Obama who lived up to Clint Eastwood's impression of him .  “Once the two candidates met on an equal footing in Denver, many voters were amazed to meet a Romney who seemed like an earnest businessman looking for ways to fix the economy -- a Romney who insisted that, contrary to his previously stated positions, he didn't want to cut taxes for the wealthy, abandon healthcare reform or reduce education spending (issues that polls find especially important to female voters)

With the U.S. economy struggling to gain steam and tensions flaring in the Middle East, discussion of science policy has taken a back seat in the presidential campaign. But a group of voters concerned about the state of American science has solicited the opinions of both candidates on a variety of issues related to research, technology, energy and the environment. ScienceDebate.org - an effort supported by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies and the Council on Competitiveness, among others - compiled a list of 14 questions and posed them to President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

In my column Wednesday morning, I offered a sneak preview of tonight's debate between President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Want more? I'll be discussing the debate, and the polls that show Romney narrowing the gap with Obama, with Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, in a Google+ hangout at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) today. On Tuesday, Kohut published a poll finding that 83% of voters say they are likely to watch the debate -- and a razor-thin majority of 51% expect Obama to come out on top. Are high expectations for the incumbent good news for the challenger?

I don't know why anyone would want to call the presidential race over. We haven't even had a single debate. The fun is just starting. But in the last week we've had a few commentators and politicos say they already know the outcome. None of them stepped out of their predictable ideological silos, so the early prognostications didn't make much news. But here they are: -- Cenk Uygur, host of Current TV's “The Young Turks,” said this week that “barring a major miracle, I'm calling the election right now. It's already over.” The liberal  outlet, founded by Al Gore, has supported President Obama all along.

WASHINGTON - Mitt Romney has privately told donors that if elected president he will not work for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the official policy of the last three U.S. presidents, and one that Romney has publicly endorsed - because the Palestinians don't want peace, according to a leaked video. The secretly recorded video, which was posted online Tuesday by the liberal Mother Jones magazine, showed the Republican presidential nominee telling several dozen supporters at a May 17 fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla., that a Romney administration would attempt to "sort of live with" the conflict.

WEST CHESTER, Pa. - Little-known presidential candidate Gary Johnson gave an answer that would create a media firestorm if delivered by Barack Obama or Mitt Romney: the United States should get out of the Middle East. Johnson, a Libertarian who is on 47 state ballots and fighting petition challenges in the other three, including Pennsylvania, suggested that the U.S. presence in the Middle East is abetting unrest in the region. "Get out of these embassies, just plain get out," Johnson said in an interview Monday with the Allentown (Pa.)

If you weren't already hopelessly cynical about American politics, here's the perfect chance for you to wake up, slowpoke. The presidential campaign is running full bore, meaning there is virtually no chance of hearing constructive conversations about policies that will affect our lives for years to come. 'Tis the season of partisan exaggeration and simplification, multimillion-dollar super PAC distortions, and bold, inspired lack of specificity, particularly when it comes to jobs and the economy, a centerpiece of this election.

MEXICO CITY — Under a banner declaring "ours is a question of dignity," defeated presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced Sunday in this city's massive Zocalo main square that he was withdrawing from the leftist parties he has long dominated while also launching a campaign of peaceful resistance to the newly elected government. Lopez Obrador, who came in second in the July presidential vote, said during a rally that he would not recognize the official results that named Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, as the winner.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party's Enrique Pena Nieto has twice been declared the winner of Mexico's presidential election, yet the runner-up, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, refuses to recognize the results. Instead, the leftist candidate is preparing to hold a demonstration Sunday and threatening to establish a kind of shadow presidency, just as he did in 2006, when he narrowly lost that vote. That's unfortunate. Mexico can't afford the kind of long and divisive battle that Lopez Obrador is threatening to wage.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Mitt Romney must be wondering what he has to do to win the love of conservative stalwart William Kristol. The Republican presidential candidate might have thought he would earn some degree of insulation from Kristol's ideological and tactical arrows when he picked Kristol-favorite Paul Ryan as his vice presidential candidate. No such luck. Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and onetime chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, fired off a couple more salvos in what has been a long-running barrage against Romney; the most recent shots coming after what was supposed to be the Republican's Unity Conclave (read: Convention)