Chancellor Forever was created in coordination with the Deutsches Institut für Public Affairs.

WHAT'S NEW IN POLITICS

"HRC Colombia ties don't stop with Penn" - Politico.com

Mark Penn isn’t the only Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter on the wrong side of the Colombia trade agreement.

The Democratic-leaning advocacy firm the Glover Park Group, former home to Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson, signed a $40,000 per month contract with the government of Colombia in April of 2007 to promote the very agreement that Clinton now rails against on the presidential campaign trail.

That means Glover Park Group was arguing the same position as Penn's firm. The contentious Clinton strategist and Burson-Marsteller chief executive lost his campaign job over the weekend after The Wall Street Journal revealed that he’d met with Colombian officials to plot strategy on the pact.

Several other Glover Park employees have deep connections with the Clintons, including founding partner Joe Lockhart, who served as the White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, and Joel Johnson, who was a senior communications adviser in the Clinton White House.

"Clinton battles the facts" - Politico.com

In the waning days of the Democratic presidential nominating contest, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) finds herself battling two opponents: Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), and her own words.

Did Chelsea Clinton go to a private school in Washington because it was best for her education, as the White House said at the time, or because “the press would never leave her alone,” as Clinton said in a debate last year?

The new answer is more accurate, her campaign says.

Why did she perpetuate the family tale that she had been named for the mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, only to correct the record in 2006, on the eve of her presidential campaign?

Her mother had told her the story and the senator only learned the truth when she was older, her campaign says.

And why are there at least two instances of her vividly telling a story that happened to someone else, as if it happened to her? In one case, she apparently was conflating stories, her campaign says. The other was the simple product of a mother’s worry, according to her campaign.

The increasing scrutiny of Clinton’s statements in recent days has revived an old weakness – voter doubts about her trustworthiness – that until now has played little part in the campaign.

"Anti-McCain groups lag in fundraising" - Politico.com

Democratic talk of an early, hard-hitting campaign to "define" and tar Arizona Sen. John McCain appears to have fizzled for lack of money, leading to a quiet round of finger-pointing among Democratic operatives and donors as McCain assembles a campaign and a public image relatively unmolested.

Despite the millions of dollars pooling around Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, anti-McCain funds have fallen far short of the hopes set in November, when a key organizer, Tom Matzzie, reportedly told The Washington Post that the "Fund for America" would raise more than $100 million to support the activities of a range of allied groups.

The Democratic National Committee, too, is organizing an anti-McCain campaign, but a spokeswoman, Karen Finney, said fundraising to support that effort has met "mixed" results.

So while news releases and Internet ads have been launched, the largest-bore weapon in contemporary politics — a sustained television campaign — hasn't. That's because, people involved say, the soft-money groups don't have the soft money.