"The president shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate."

WASHINGTON -- The spectacles we persist in dignifying as presidential "debates" -- two-minute regurgitations of rehearsed responses -- often subtract from the nation's understanding.

SALT LAKE CITY -- A specter is haunting the Congressional Black Caucus, the specter of integration.

WASHINGTON -- With two extravagant entertainments under way, it is instructive to note the connection between the presidential election and the college football season: Barack Obama represents progressivism, a doctrine whose many blemishes on American life include universities as football factories, which progressivism helped to create.

WASHINGTON -- Now begins the final phase of this cognitive dissonance campaign. America's 57th presidential election is the first devoted to calling the nation's bluff.

WASHINGTON -- Conventions are the seventh-inning stretches of presidential politics, a pause to consider the interminable prelude and the coming climax.

WASHINGTON -- Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy.

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama claims only that his legislative and foreign policy achievements in his first two years matched those of "any president -- with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln" in "modern history." Some Obama enthusiasts are less restrained.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The huge humpback whale whose friendliness precipitated a surreal seven-year -- so far -- federal hunt for criminality surely did not feel put upon.

The men are so near to each other in all their convictions and theories of life that nothing is left to them but personal competition for the doing of the thing that is to be done.