JOHN PODHORETZ

She needs to seem tough, and whatever Hillary's weaknesses, tough is a pretty good word to describe her.

One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.

Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we're desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.

Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He's pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the proposition that this too will be the American century.

Some candidates need to say provocative things that make noise to break through the media muffle and get themselves noticed.

The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.

Whether my columns are worth reading isn't for me to say.

Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

You want a political culture that works to create conditions under which an economy can thrive? Since signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Israel has spent two decades working to unshackle its economy from its socialist roots, with remarkable results.

Newt Gingrich is a very intelligent man, if he says so himself.

When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight - though whether the insight was conscious or not I don't know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.

This has always been the way of presidential politics. The president rises above the fray while his surrogates go on the attack. They throw the spears and fling the mud; he sits upon the throne.

By keeping most tax rates at present levels, Obama and the Democrats will claim that they have championed tax cuts for the middle class.

Conservatives must avoid the siren song of schism, or all is lost.

Nixon was an awful president in many ways, including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America's leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.

America is great not because it's a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.

Comedians and impressionists used to be two different showbiz animals entirely, but now there's no such thing as a comedian who doesn't do impressions.

Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn't care. This is war - not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that's a victory he savors and desires - unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.

You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power.

The Middle East Media Research Institute has spent decades detailing the diseased messages emanating from Palestinian TV and textbooks, instructing children in the glories of suicide terrorism against innocent Israelis.

While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied - and to some extent overshadowed - by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future.

Why, listening to Obama talk about his economic triumphs over the last three years might make you want to move to the country he was describing. Too bad that country exists primarily in his own head.

Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills - the pension bills they cannot afford - come due. They'll have to go after existing contracts with current workers.

Christopher Nolan's astounding third Batman feature, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' represents the true maturation of the superhero movie - and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre.

As a member of the Mormon church, Romney is instructed to tithe 10 percent of his income. That's in keeping with most charitable giving: Religious institutions get about one-third of all contributions, according to 'The American' magazine.