Here are your eight highlights from the 2008 presidential campaign trail for this week:

1) Mitt Romney, in an incredible act of staging, raised some $6.5 million in cash and pledges Monday with a giant call-a-thon in Boston. The figure sent shockwaves through many campaign observers, and appears to have even surprised Romney's low-balling staff. To get a sense of just how much the stakes have been raised since the 2004 campaign, remember that John Edwards in the first quarter of 2003 created a major stir by raising some $7.4 million in three months, and he was the only candidate in 2003 to raise more than $4 million in a single month (March). Now most serious candidates are talking about raising more than $100 million in 2007 alone.

2) Romney also began to feel the heat of a presidential front-runner: Senator Sam Brownback tried to undercut Romney's big news by announcing a series of endorsements from social conservatives in Romney's home base of Massachusetts. Plus video from Romney's 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy during that year's senate race surfaced that showed Romney more moderate than he professes to be now. Romney's campaign hit right back, posting on YouTube a video of Romney calling in to a conservative talk show to defend himself just hours after the old video surfaced. Lesson: The news cycle is getting ever shorter.

3) Senators Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, both long-shot candidates, announced this week that they'd be entering the Democratic race—Biden on Meet the Press and Dodd on Imus. Neither announcement was a surprise, both candidacies have long been anticipated and, in the same breath, dismissed, but both Biden and Dodd appear to have lined up some heavy-hitting staff: Party veteran Luis Navarro will head Biden's effort, and Dodd has Jim Jordan, who served as Kerry's campaign manager.

4) Speaking of John Kerry, he's continuing to assemble staff—adding former Daily News reporter and DC mayoral spokesperson Vince Morris and former Gephardt advisor Erik Smith—for a campaign even though his party is still recovering from the debacle of his 2004 campaign. A new memoir this month by former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe adds more fuel to the fire that Kerry's campaign was mismanaged, poorly executed, and a mess from the start. In a book where McAuliffe loves nearly everyone he mentions, it's certainly notable how much he blasts the Kerry campaign.

Even with the November 2008 presidential election some 22 months away and with the first primaries and caucuses a year away, most of the top candidates are up and running—churning out press releases, hiring scores of staff, opening state operations, and holding event after event on the campaign trail.  

All of the activity and speculation is generating reams of political coverage from the mainstream media, bloggers, cable news talk shows, and now, new for 2008, YouTube videos. Even the people whose job it is to follow the political landscape have a hard time keeping up. Famously in Timothy Crouse's book on the 1968 campaign, "The Boys on the Bus," the correspondents would rush to Walter Mears of the Associated Press and ask what the big story was—how the AP covered a story was how everyone would cover the story. "Walter, Walter, what's my lead?" they'd shout on the campaign press bus. Now each day there are dozens of story lines to follow, blogs to surf, magazines and newspapers to read, and dozens of hours of cable news babble. It's too much to process.

Recognizing that the story of the campaign—and its eventual outcome—is critical to many Washingtonians, we're going to try to boil each week's developments down for you in a Friday column. We're going to call it "8 on ’08"—the top eight things you need to know about the presidential campaign this week.

Memorize this column each Friday and you'll be able to hold your own with any full-time political operative at a cocktail party over the weekend.

You never can tell what the Washington Post will bring—in addition to the news.

Monday it was a little bag of oatmeal in the newspaper’s plastic delivery sleeve. Today it was Patrick Dempsey leaning on his wife’s pregnant belly on the cover of Life, a photo-driven weekly supplement that will arrive with the paper every Thursday.

Tomorrow it could be Jon Stewart on washingtonpost.com.

Sources who are part of the talks report that the Post’s Web site is talking with Comedy Central about joining forces with The Daily Show to cover the 2008 presidential campaign. These sources say that washingtonpost.com CEO & publisher Caroline Little and editor Jim Brady have been part of the conversations in New York.

No one could be reached to confirm the talks.

The prospect of mixing Jon Stewart’s brand of irreverence with Dan Balz’s serious analysis could draw more readers to washingtonpost.com.

Stewart and his zany crew covered the last presidential campaign with a mocking tone that delighted the coveted 25- to 34-year-old demographic. Their DVD—The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Indecision 2004—was a big seller. Many viewers thought that Stewart and crew at the conventions were much more entertaining than the talking heads on the evening news—or on cable.

Making a deal with Comedy Central would bring the Washington Post Company together with Viacom, which owns the cable network. At the upper echelons, the Post already is in league with Microsoft, with Melinda Gates on its board of trustees. A deal with Comedy Central would link the Post to Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom. The Post also collaborates with MSNBC and the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday's service for President Gerald Ford at the National Cathedral was filled with pomp and circumstance, from the President's Own—the Marine Corps band—to memorials from Tom Brokaw, Henry Kissinger and President Bush.