President Obama  told Jay Leno Wednesday night that Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock's comments about pregnancy and rape  illustrate why men alone should not be making decisions about women's issues.

"Rape is rape. It is a crime," Obama told the "Tonight Show" host in an interview set to air this evening, according to an account from a pool reporter traveling with the president. "These various distinctions about rape don't make too much sense to me."

Mourdock, a tea party Republican who defeated incumbent Sen. Richard G. Lugar in the primary this year, is in a tight race that could help decide control of the Senate.

On Tuesday night, Mourdock said during a debate with his opponent, Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly,  that if a pregnancy results from rape it is "something that God intended to happen." That  set off a new firestorm in a campaign year in which both presidential candidates are courting the women's vote.

Romney has appeared in an ad supporting Mourdock's candidacy....

WASHINGTON – The son of a Virginia congressman resigned from his father’s campaign Wednesday after an undercover video captured him discussing possible voter fraud.

Patrick Moran, whose father is Democratic Rep. James P. Moran, was secretly recorded in a video posted by conservative activist James O’Keefe.

In the video, Moran, who was working as his father’s campaign field director, talks about using utility bills and other documents to evade Virginia’s new voter ID laws. The person who made the recording – saying he was a worried supporter of President Obama – asked for Moran’s advice in casting votes for 100 Virginia residents who weren’t going to the polls.

“He'll need bills,” Moran said, standing outside an Arlington, Va., sandwich shop, referring to the requirement to present identification. “He'll need something with their name and address on it.”

But at another point, Moran suggests that “all the...

On Wednesday, the president began his two-day tour in front of 3,500 supporters in eastern Iowa. He tried to pump up the volume by telling the faithful that they were entering the stretch drive and he needed every vote. “We’re going to pull an all-nighter. No sleep!”

Twenty days out from election day in 2008, Sen. Barack Obama faced quite a different scene. He stood in front of 30,000 people gathered in a park on the Miami waterfront. His mere appearance on stage had the crowd rocking — women waving their arms, men shouting praise and hundreds of cameras flashing.

INTERACTIVE: Battleground states map

Although political reporters are taught not to read too much into...

WASHINGTON -- “I want your endorsement. You’ll feel better when you give it.”

So said President Obama, ending a conversation with the editor and publisher of the Des Moines Register that was intended to be off the record, until the paper went public afterward with a complaint.

The Register is the largest newspaper in a highly competitive swing state. Newspaper endorsements may not sway many votes, but the Obama campaign evidently thought one from the Register could have enough influence over undecided voters to carve out a block of presidential time to speak with them. Mitt Romney had already spoken with the paper’s full editorial board on the record on Oct. 9.

It’s unclear why the Register’s editor and publisher first agreed to an off-the-record conversation, then insisted that the conversation be on the record and started griping publicly when the Obama campaign refused.

INTERACTIVE: Battleground states map

“How could we not? It’s the leader...

WASHINGTON — More pro-Obama television commercials than pro-Romney spots aired in the first three weeks of October, according to a new analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project — a stark reminder that every dollar is not equal in the raging ad war.

GOP White House challenger Mitt Romney and his allies spent an estimated $87 million on ads between Oct. 1 and 21, nearly $10 million more than President Obama and his supporters. But the Obama forces got more for their money, running 112,730 ads compared to 97,407 aired by Team Romney, according to data from the ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG analyzed by the Wesleyan Media Project. The project tracks broadcast television and national cable buys, but not local cable.

“There was a lot of talk that Romney and his allies were hoarding resources for a major ad push in the closing moments of the campaign,” Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, wrote in a report released Wednesday. “This was...

Since Monday, the cartoonish personality had claimed he had news that could change the course of the presidential election between President Obama and Mitt Romney. Instead, it inspired widespread mockery, as Trump merely rehashed tired old insinuations about President Obama’s national origin and college credentials.

The big "reveal" from the sneering New Yorker turned out to be merely this: He would offer to give $5 million to Obama’s favorite charity if the president would release his college applications and records and his “passport information.”

Trump’s gimmickry appeals to the legion of cranks and conspiracy mongers who congregate in particularly fetid corners of the Internet. There, they spin out their...

The poor aren’t often discussed much on the campaign trail; they’re not generally a swing vote or a hot-button issue that motivates voters to get to the polls.

Though ads might mention falling incomes or candidates’ positions on government programs, it is middle-class voters, rather than the poor, who are often the laser focus on the campaign trail and in debates.

But it’s an issue the Mitt Romney campaign thinks is worth mentioning in the final weeks of the presidential race, as Paul Ryan visited Cleveland State University on Wednesday to deliver an address on upward mobility and the economy, telling the audience that “America’s engines of upward mobility aren’t working the way they should.”

Still, Ryan didn’t add much new to the issue in his speech, focusing on getting government out of anti-poverty and education programs and on how Romney would create jobs in the nation, all long bedrock conservative principles.

PHOTOS: Paul Ryan's...

DAVENPORT, Iowa -- To Mitt Romney's apparent surge in polls, the Obama campaign offers this counter-argument: Momentum? What momentum?

Speaking to reporters in Iowa on Wednesday, Obama advisor David Plouffe argued that there's no evidence Romney is picking up steam in the key battleground states necessary to win. He said Romney's recent gains in polling merely show him reclaiming ground lost and approaching his "ceiling."

"Gov. Romney was not going to get 44% or 45% in battleground states," Plouffe said. "He's a major-party nominee in a divided country in a tough economy. He's going to get 47, 48, 49 in a bunch of these states."

All that's happened, he said, is that Romney has "picked up some of what he lost. But we don't consider that momentum."

INTERACTIVE: Battleground states map

At the moment, most polling data show the two candidates close enough that both sides can make plausible arguments for why they will win the most contested states.

As the president kicks off a blitz of...

The quest for insiders with information to peddle grows increasingly intense as an election year moves into its final stretch. News organizations, including this one, compete intensely to find campaign sources willing to talk, and those knowledgeable sources turn to favored reporters to explain why their strategic insights pushed their candidate into the lead. (That’s a one-way street, of course: When the candidate loses, his own failings, rather than the strategists', typically receive the blame).

If insiders can’t be coaxed into talking, reporters will try to draw conclusions from their appearance, writing or talking about how advisors for one side or the other seemed “confident” or “worried.”

In the spirit of a consumer warning, here’s one tip to keep in mind amid the clamor:...

Indiana Senate hopeful Richard Mourdock has offered a partial apology for his remarks Tuesday night that pregnancy from rape is “something that God intended to happen,” after sparking a firestorm akin to Missouri Republican Todd Akin’s earlier this year.

“I don’t think God wants rape. I don’t think he wants that at all because rape is evil,” he said during a news  conference Wednesday.

“So many people mistook, twisted, came to misunderstand the points that I was trying to make,” Mourdock added.

“If in any way people came away with the wrong meaning, I apologize,” he said, but the Republican candidate remained adamant that to stay true to his faith, he cannot completely apologize for the intended significance of his remarks.

The controversy stemmed from Tuesday’s debate against Democratic rival Rep. Joe Donnelly, when Mourdock was asked whether abortion should be allowed after instances of incest and rape.

“I...

DAVENPORT, Iowa – Trying to stoke his campaign for the final stretch to the election, President Obama began a two-day swing Wednesday that will take him through seven battleground states and, his campaign hopes, close enough to the finish line to pull off victory in November. 

The “48-hour, campaign marathon extravaganza,” Obama told the crowd of 3,500 gathered under oak trees on the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds for the first stop on the tour. “We’re going to pull an all-nighter. No sleep!”

Obama’s blitz began with the electoral cram-session in Iowa, the scene of his first primary win in 2008 and 15 presidential visits over the last four years. As in most of the other states on Obama’s packed itinerary, the president appears to have a slim advantage over his GOP rival, Mitt Romney, in Iowa.

But here as well as in the other states on the tour, the former Massachusetts governor has pulled within striking distance.

Obama’s campaign is...