Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

These days, to hear Republicans tell it, the conservative movement’s intellectual and strategic thunderbolts seem to be emanating, instead, from an undistinguished box of a building on K Street, amid the city’s famed corridor of lobbyists. In unmarked office suites scattered across separate floors, some 35 employees divide their duties among a consulting group, two insurgent policy centers, a documentary-film production company and a public-relations firm with only one client. That client would be the man who sits atop this emerging center of opposition, the once-defeated revolutionary who, like Che or Tito, is best known by a single name: Newt.

In many parts of the USA far from the White House, people were happy — and looking forward to Obama's promise of change: in public housing projects, the auto towns of the Midwest, the Katrina-ravaged neighborhoods of the Gulf Coast and in schools, where for a day students watched history instead of reading about it.

Straus, flanked by both Democratic and Republican state representatives, announced a list of 94 names supporting his bid to become the next Speaker of the Texas House. The list includes all five El Paso House delegation.

Although Hillary Clinton’s candidacy insures that her husband’s eight years as President will be central to the 2008 campaign, he also hovered over the two previous primary seasons, in each of which the field narrowed to a Clinton candidate and an anti-Clinton candidate.

Senator Shapleigh's notes and observations will keep you updated on what is happening behind the scenes in Austin and El Paso.