Philip Roth

SOMETIMES, LATE AT NIGHT, when Bob Dole was plunging off podiums, labor was blacklisting Republican candidates, and his onetime loyal allies were talking about impaling him, Haley Barbour reached into the bottom of his office closet and pulled out a bottle of Maker's Mark whiskey. There, surrounded…

In the fall of 1995, when Democrats were running ads hammering Ohio Republican congressman Bob Ney for cutting Medicare, Ney cornered Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour and asked why the GOP hadn't countered with a blitzkrieg of its own. "Where are the RNC ads?" Ney asked.

DESPITE WHAT ENID WALDHOLTZ MAY THINK, life is not the Jenny Jones program. Her five-hour, teary-eyed press conference last month deserves an Emmy for stamina and strength, but in presenting herself as her husband's unwitting victim she failed the most important test of a politician: personal…

THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY in Los Angeles over-shadowed its political equivfilent in Washington: the forced resignation of Sen. Bob Packwood. The Oregonian lothario exited Congress quietly on October 1. There were no crowds or cameras, no white vans, but there was a deliciods double irony at work.…

THE DEMOCRATS' LAST HOPE may be a middle-aged mother from the Rust Belt. She is Debbie Stabenow, a 45-year-old career state legislator who traveled last week from her Michigan home to the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to consider a run for Congress. "I've never been afraid…