All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Christina Ruffini is a CBS News broadcast associate based in Washington.

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I am still completely strung out on Campaign '08. I'm not delusional. I know it's over. But two years and $5.3 billion later, I can’t be expected to just quit cold turkey. The election is still coursing through my veins. I need a dose of rhetoric, a snippet of sound bite, a quantum of controversy … anything to fill the giant void now left in my life.

Find me a sanitarium, a hospital, a quiet, secure place where I can hunker down and suffer through the next three years without a fix. The campaigns should be forced to pay for some sort of bi-partisan rehab to dry out all the rabid election junkies they created. Republicans and Democrats alike could be seen as bad back alley drug dealers: They got us hopped up on their product, and then inexplicably skipped town.

I am trying my best to get clean, but the withdrawal process is brutal. I am constantly alienating friends because I insist on calling them by their first name and occupation: Gene the government contractor, Dana the dental hygienist, Mike the middle-manager or Steve the unemployed-freeloader-living-off-of-his-wife's-palimony-payments.

I keep egging on the people ...

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After what seems like decades of campaigning, Election Day is right around the corner – only two weeks from today.

It's usually at this point that commentators lament all the negative attacks, and practically beg the candidates to go positive. But political scientists have found that ads bashing the other guy are often more fair – and more accurate – than ads praising a politician. Done right, they can play an important role informing voters about key differences on the issues.

So the standard shouldn't be whether a candidate attacks his opponent, but whether those attacks are accurate and substantive.

What does that mean for this campaign? Well, when Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann says that Barack Obama "may have anti-American views," and wouldn't say whether Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi are "anti-American or pro-American" That crosses that line. Attack their policies, not their patriotism.

With less than a month left, this presidential campaign has taken a decidedly ugly turn.

At Republican rallies, some over heated supporters have started to yell things like "terrorist" and "treason" when Barack Obama's name is mentioned. This is depressing and unacceptable.

Freedom of speech is one of our most cherished rights, but words that incite violence should be seriously condemned by all the candidates.

It's no surprise that "civil discourse" is such an oxymoron these days. When I sometimes peruse comments on the Internet, they are loaded with vitriol and profanity. I'm embarrassed for the authors of those comments, and for the readers who stumble upon them.

Words are like weapons – they can damage who we are. This is an important time to remind ourselves that even when passions are high, we can agree to disagree. And we can do so with reason – and respect.

Jeff Greenfield is senior political correspondent for CBS News.

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No, CBS News is not re-making a famous spaghetti western. Instead, we’re launching a weekly look at the most effective, most depressing and most what-planet-are-we-on events of the political week. The judgments are non-ideological – effective and depressing and weird events happen across the political spectrum – and we don’t have a standard Olympic-style point-scoring standard for this feature.

For openers, we’ve chosen an obvious starting point: Sen. John McCain’s selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. We’ve seen selections in the past change a campaign for the worse ...

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At some level, winning on Election Day is nothing more than a numbers game. And much of that game comes down to districts, votes, the electoral college and battleground states.

Think you know which way some of those states will swing? Our politics team has created a nifty new map that not only lets you play with the formula to see the different "ways to win," but also is chocked full of information on the battleground states.

To try it yourself, just click here - or check out the simplified version of the map in the widget below. And don't forget to let us know what you think.

This post was written by CBS News producer Jen Yuille. Jen put together Katie's piece earlier this week that took a behind-the-scenes look at the John McCain campaign. You can check it out here – or watch the video below.

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Unfortunately, we can’t include everything in our behind the scenes pieces but there are still interesting elements that we want to share with our audience. Here’s a little more of what McCain campaign senior adviser Steve Schmidt had to say about joining the campaign after vowing to never return presidential campaign politics and the characterization of him in Newsweek in an article that came out after the 2004 election.

Katie Couric: During the 2004 campaign, Newsweek described you this way: "Schmidt liked to refer to himself as Patton. His staff called him the general or the colonel. He was known to stock through the hall of the headquarters, declaring kill kill kill. It was not clear how much he was kidding." Yikes.

Steve Schmidt: Totally untrue. I read it. I talked to the Newsweek reporter who wrote it at the time and I said to him, "it's absolutely fiction. It never happened." They said, but you make a great character. I said, "but the book is supposed to be non-fiction." And he said, but you're a great character in the book. I said, "I don't like that character. That's not me." And I think if you talked to the people around here, that's not how you operate in a campaign and it's certainly not how you lead a lot of young people in a campaign. And I would also say this, as someone who has had family members serve in Iraq, that a lot of people make martial comparisons to campaigns and it's a totally inappropriate comparison. Politics is a competitive enterprise. It's much more akin to a football game than to war ...

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We in the media get the same criticism every four years that the campaign coverage concentrates too much on polls and process -- and not enough on policies and programs.

Later this year, we're going to take an in-depth look where Senators McCain and Obama stand on the issues. But we're also focusing on campaign management -- and just as we gave you a behind the scenes look at Obama's organization in April, tonight we're doing the same for the McCain team. You can see it on the CBS Evening News at 6:30 p.m. EDT.

For now, it's the subject of my Notebook, which you can watch now, with just a click.

Tonight, Barack Obama will probably announce he's collected enough delegates to become the Democratic nominee.

At that point, the epic campaign he fought against Hillary Clinton will come to an end. Clinton will soon face harsh criticism about the race she ran. But let's give the senator her due.

For the rest of my Notebook, simply click on the monitor.

Jill Jackson is a Capitol Hill field producer for CBS News.

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Sen. Barack Obama stepped into a swarm of superdelegates this morning when he visited the House of Representatives in the middle of a vote. Obama stayed on the floor for almost half an hour visiting with both Democrats and Republicans who looked completely star struck.

Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi left her weekly press briefing and made a beeline for the House floor to say hello. And the Capitol Hill press corps surrounded the House Chamber to catch him on his way out and fire questions about such an unusual move for a presidential candidate, even if he is a senator.

"I wasn't campaigning, I was just saying hello to everybody," Obama said.

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Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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That's me talking to the first lady on a military cargo plane on our trip to war-torn Bosnia in 1996.

Back in 1996 I was assigned to travel with the First Lady on her trip to Bosnia, Greece, Turkey and Italy.

Bosnia was the first stop. We spent nine hours there, arriving on a military cargo plane and moving around within the country on giant Chinook helicopters.

Sen. Hillary Clinton gave an account of our arrival in Bosnia during a speech last Monday at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., saying she remembers "landing under sniper fire" and that conditions on the ground were too dangerous for a planned arrival ceremony.

"There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport," Clinton said. "But instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

Watch Clinton's remarks

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