Patrick Gaspard, a New York labor operative who was Obama’s campaign political director, will be White House political director, a Democrat confirmed.

Gaspard had held one of the most powerful jobs in New York politics as the top political hand at …

Politico’s editors, reporters and, yup, bloggers are dissecting the election at the University of Southern California today. 

Watch it live!

Ali Abuminah, a Chicago Palestinian-rights activist who has criticized Obama, emails that he’s "amused" by the argument — which I quoted Steve Clemons and Hendrik Hertzberg suggesting yesterday — that Obama is hiring pro-Israel stalwarts because they’ll have the …

The President-elect still hasn’t given any signal that he’ll show up in person for the Georgia run-off, but he did cut an ad for Democrat Jim Martin.

A Democrat close to Hillary says that the reported ambivalence about taking State was real.

She "said ‘no’ then ‘yes,’" I’m told.

My new colleague Carol Lee reports:

Some Verizon Wireless employees accessed billing records from a cell phone President-elect Barack Obama had used, the Obama transition team and Verizon Wireless said Thursday.

Transition spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that Obama no …

I’m on West Coast time and a bit slow, but as you’ve probably read, Mike Allen reported last night that Clinton’s apparently going to State.

McCain likes the Napolitano pick. (And not just because of his re-elect.)

Kamen says Iowa player Jackie Norris will be Michelle’s CoS.

Beaumont too.

Anita Dunn stays out.

Manny Diaz is Mentioned.

Palin sells Alaska.

Ayman Al-Zawahiri, gaffe machine.

…

There’s an emerging consensus that Obama will go for big, liberal projects on domestic policy, while tacking right on foreign policy. The reasons for seeing Obama as a dove were always vague: He’s an internationalist, he’s globally popular, he used …

Way back in May, Avi and I did a story on Jeff Berman, the Obama campaign’s delegate guy and an unsung hero of the primary campaign.

I mentioned in passing that he had worked for the "in-flight telecommunications firm Aircell," …