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May 22, 2012 Max Nutting, a journalist who writes for the MarketWatch website affiliated with The Wall Street Journal looked at the data and found that rhetoric and reality don't quite match up. Nutting found that, contrary to repeated allegations from the president's political foes, including Mitt Romney that Obama has been on a federal spending tear, he actually hasn't.

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May 21, 2012 It's a classic campaign chain of events: a rising star (in this case Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker) seems to cross his party's leader, and then says he was misunderstood. Meanwhile, the opposition uses his words to its advantage.

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May 18, 2012 In a new Mitt Romney ad, his image makers try to level the distance between the Republican and the incumbent president by referring three times to "President Romney."

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May 18, 2012 New French President Francois Hollande said he wants his nation's 3,300 troops home from Afghanistan by year's end. He also said France would support effort in a "different way."

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May 17, 2012 We decided to check in with political types in North Carolina, where the electorate is about 72 percent white and 23 percent black, and where polls show Obama and expected GOP nominee Mitt Romney in a dead heat. We asked how ads featuring the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright would play in their state.

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May 17, 2012 In the first month since he effectively wrapped up the GOP presidential nomination, Romney and his party raised almost as much money as the president and the Democratic Party.

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May 16, 2012 The descriptions of the White House lunch meeting from those on the opposing red and blue teams made it sound like yet another meeting featuring the nation's top policymakers that you could have accurately scripted beforehand.

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May 15, 2012 Whether this video tug of war featuring the hard luck stories of everyday Americans will move enough of the people they're aimed at in one direction or another is impossible to know at this point. The only certain thing is that both campaigns are stockpiling their real-people stories for all the videos to come between now and November.

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May 14, 2012 President Obama was in exceedingly friendly territory Monday at New York's Barnard College. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, wasn't quite Daniel in the lion's den in his Saturday speech at evangelical Liberty University. But some seniors questioned why a Mormon was giving their commencement address.

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May 14, 2012 President Obama's decision to back same-sex marriage was no small feat. But did he do it because Vice President Biden forced his hand? Plus: your favorite "It's All Politics" podcast moments.

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May 11, 2012 President Obama's re-election campaign played right into the hands of its GOP energy critics with a website explaining the administration's energy policy priorities that initially listed every source of energy except coal, which is produced in several battleground states.

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May 10, 2012 Mitt Romney and Speaker John Boehner showed a determination Thursday to keep the election-year debate confined to the topic on which they believe President Obama has the greatest vulnerabilty — the economy.

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May 10, 2012 The response to the president naturally cut across the ideological spectrum. It also ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.

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May 9, 2012 The president and his re-election team are clearly wagering that his support for same-sex marriage will attract more voters than it repels — and allow him to make the choice between himself and Mitt Romney even sharper.

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