WASHINGTON - By endorsing Deb Fischer – the surprise winner of Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary – Sarah Palin let a competent candidate slip through her normal screening process. Fischer is no Sharron Angle or Christine O’Donnell – tea party favorites in 2010 who seemed to view accomplishment and deliberation as pernicious establishment vices. Fischer is a tough, effective, respected state legislator – and, in the few polls available so far, is leading her Democratic opponent, Bob Kerrey.

WASHINGTON - In a blowout presidential election, a few large issues dominate. In a tight election, a range of smaller concerns – important to strategic constituencies in battleground states – can end up being crucial.

WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney did not rise on the power of his rhetoric. At the Detroit Economic Club in February, his speech was swallowed by its stadium venue, overshadowed by a gaffe (his wife’s “couple of Cadillacs”) and weighed down by leaden language. Early in the primaries, Romney’s attempts to wax poetic on the virtues of America – often by quoting patriotic hymns – were waxen.

WASHINGTON – Principled or calculating or a bit of both, President Barack Obama’s choice on gay marriage is a bet on the political future – a wager on the views and values of the millennial generation making its long march through American institutions.

WASHINGTON – “We’re not going back. ... We’re going forward,” said President Obama during his formal campaign kickoff in Ohio. This rallying cry was pedestrian, and appropriately so. Obama is no longer a leader on horseback. His campaign – on the evidence of its first day – will be a long, unimaginative, partisan march to the sea.

WASHINGTON – Scrolling through the headlines in The Long War Journal – a website dedicated to terrorism-related news – is an education in the global drone war. Mohammed Saeed al-Umda, one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, confirmed killed by a drone strike in Yemen. German jihadist Samir H killed in South Waziristan. Egyptian militant Abu Musab al-Masri killed in the Shabwa province of Yemen. The list goes on.

WASHINGTON – In a recent column (TNT, 4-29), I described two forms of conservatism that coalesced in opposition to President Barack Obama’s polarizing expansion in the size and role of government.

WASHINGTON – The last few years have been the most decisive and divisive ideological period since the early 1980s, perhaps since the late 1960s. Barack Obama has pursued Keynesian economics on a breathtaking scale, racking up three deficits in excess of a trillion dollars and presiding over a national credit downgrade.

WASHINGTON – Charles W. Colson – who spent seven months in prison for Watergate-era offenses and became one of the most influential social reformers of the 20th century – was the most thoroughly converted person I’ve ever known.

WASHINGTON – I’ve now been on a diet for 17 weeks, though it feels like it began early in the Carter administration. It was my Washington Post colleague E.J. Dionne who provided the inspiration and the method. When I asked the secret of his weight loss, he told me: “Two things: Cutting carbohydrates and a bout of the stomach flu.” I took the low-carb route.

WASHINGTON – Mitt’s Romney’s electoral trouble with women – more precisely with college-educated women – is real enough. Recent polling has Romney trailing President Barack Obama by 18 points among this group in Ohio, with similar gaps in other battleground states.

MONGU, Zambia – In a global anti-malaria movement I saw begin in Oval Office meetings and international summits, Mongu is at the end of a very long road. Located in western Zambia, about 75 miles from the Angolan border, the town is not close to anywhere. The rivers of the region are more like swamps filling a flood plain, their courses hidden by tall grasses – from the air, wide, serpentine bands of lime green. If rivers are like arteries, these are clogged.

WASHINGTON – Recent endorsements by Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan have solidified Mitt Romney’s status as the presumptive Republican nominee. They have also systemically highlighted Romney’s limits as a candidate.

WASHINGTON – Religion in the 2012 presidential election is the topic that will launch a thousand Ph.D. theses. The pre-Vatican II Catholic candidate, Rick Santorum, has risen largely on the support of evangelicals, who, before Vatican II, often regarded the pope as the Antichrist.

WASHINGTON – From media reports, it is now clear that America’s hold on Afghanistan is unraveling and our military faces defeat. The recent rampage of an American soldier was the last straw for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the people of his country and war-weary American citizens. The Obama administration has begun searching for the exits, no matter the consequences.