2012 Presidential Election | featured news

The last campaign got the glory. This one is the grind. For all the many ways that President Barack Obama's bid for a second term is different from his first, the one that stands out now is the feel at the finish. The crowds are behind him, but this is not the 2008 "Fired Up, Ready To Go!"

...Romney was greeted Tuesday by protesters dressed up like Big Bird, Elmo and other Sesame Street characters, The Des Moines Register reports. The Elmo protester shouted, "Trickle down economics does not tickle me." And the gang, identified by the newspaper as supporters of the liberal Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, sang a ditty about the economy and Wall Street to the tune of the Sesame Street theme song. It began: "Stormy days ... taking our jobs away."

President Barack Obama deployed Big Bird in a new campaign ad Tuesday mocking Mitt Romney's vow to end federal funding for public broadcasting. Romney's campaign dismissed it as an example of Obama being small-minded while the foundation behind Big Bird's program, "Sesame Street," asked that the ad be taken down.

What the Republican nominee’s campaign billed as a major foreign policy address didn’t have much new in it and left some analysts unimpressed. The speech, they said, was much like Romney’s previous swings at laying out a foreign policy -- couched in broad ideology and big ambitions and lacking the specifics for how he’d bring any of them about.

After showing President Barack Obama with an 8-point lead in September, the Pew Research Center now finds a deadlocked presidential race among registered voters — and a 4-point Romney lead among those most likely to vote...

NBC, usually protective about the process of putting together Saturday Night Live, allowed access to the show’s writers, stars and rehearsals this week as they prepared their debate sketch.

On Monday morning the Gallup organization reported that on three days of calling after the debate, their daily tracking survey finds Romney and Obama tied with 47 percent of the vote each among registered voters nationwide. Gallup showed Obama leading Romney by 5 percentage points (50 percent to 45 percent) in interviews conducted in the three days prior to the debate.

The address mostly repackaged things Romney has said before, sometimes with greater precision. The Republican, who has stumbled in past efforts to articulate his foreign policy, offered few specific ways he would change the Obama administration’s current approach. Although he made broad critiques of Obama’s “passivity,” Romney did not call for any new armed intervention in any Mideast conflict.

President Obama is poised to make a bit of history when he visits this Tehachapi Mountain hamlet Monday to dedicate the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument, the nation's first such site to honor a contemporary Mexican American.

Judges suspend new state laws requiring voter ID for the Nov. 6 election but leave the door open for them in the future. Earlier this year, voting rights advocates foresaw a cloud over this year's election because new voting laws in Republican-led states tightened the rules for casting ballots and reduced the time for early voting.