We skipped last week’s column because, frankly, there weren’t eight major developments in the presidential race, but this week is another story. It was packed with news on all sides. Here’s what you need to know:

1) Many involved in the 2008 race spent a day wondering whether John Edwards’s “announcement” yesterday would be the end of his presidential race. It wasn’t, and it’s certainly too soon to tell what affect the recurrence of Elizabeth Edwards’s cancer will have on the race. Some observers wonder whether Edwards will be forced to withdraw down the road but just couldn’t face doing that immediately this week. As much as the attention may gain him some sympathy, it will also make potential staff and donors a little more wary about getting on board with a candidate in a highly competitive race who has a major question mark hanging over him.

2) Before the Edwards announcement, another major story this week was the pro-Barack Obama anti-Hillary Clinton parody of the ‘1984’ Apple ad. Originally pegged as a “grassroots-generated” ad, word broke Wednesday that it was actually a staffer at Barack Obama’s internet consulting firm—hardly the impartial outsider that the story had seemed to imply. Also on the YouTube front, Mitt Romney faced yet another week of embarrassing clips of his former positions. He’s having a tough time breaking out of the meme that his current positions are merely politically expedient for the GOP race.

3) The close of the critical first fundraising quarter is next week, and there was a sign this week that John McCain may not be as formidable as everyone expected. A Monday fundraiser in Philadelphia that was supposed to bring in $500,000 was scaled back by 60 percent to a $200,000 event—not a good sign for a campaign that’s hoping to distance itself from the rest of the field with a strong fundraising figure. It’s widely believed that McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani are the only candidates currently in the race who can raise the money to be competitive in the cycle. Romney’s fundraising is going gangbusters, and if he matches or beats McCain’s number, it would be an expectations upset.

4) As the primary calendar continues to shift, Rudy Giuliani’s chances start to look a whole lot better. While voters in rural states might not be won over by his liberal policy positions and general “New Yorkness,” the larger states moving up their primaries to early February and maybe even January could mute the impact of rural states dramatically. If so, Rudy, who is making some strong strides in donor circles, may just break out without ever having to trudge through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Politico's website trumpeted its scoop, which turned out to be false.

Live by the Internet; die by the Internet.

That could be The Politico's lesson of the day. The two-month-old political news venture—which has pegged its success on lightning fast, behind-the-scenes, reportage—published a major blooper this morning.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards put out word yesterday that he would make an important announcement this morning. It would concern his wife, Elizabeth, who had been battling breast cancer.

At 11:06 this morning Politico reporter and blogger Ben Smith posted this item:

"John Edwards is suspending his campaign for President, and may drop out completely, because his wife has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that sickened her in 2004, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, an Edwards friend told The Politico."

Cable news channels went with the scoop, trusting The Politico's reporting and trumpeted it in the minutes leading up to the noon news conference. But something was wrong: Edwards aides hit back, saying the story was wrong. Finally shortly after noon the truth came out: At a press conference with his wife in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Edwards said his wife's cancer had recurred and added: "The campaign goes on. The campaign goes on strongly.

At 12:34, Smith blogged the obvious:

"My source, and I, were wrong," he wrote.

He continued: "The source, whose anonymity I agreed to respect, spoke of the kind of grim prognosis Elizabeth Edwards herself just described hearing before a second round of tests came back. I trusted the source, somebody I've known for several years, and who has always been reliable. And with less than an hour before Edwards was to announce, I unwisely wrote the item without getting a second source."

Smith concluded: "My apologies to our readers for passing on bad information."

There's nothing like winning a quiz game when you lose a vote on the Iraq war. Although New York Senator Charles Schumer and 47 other senators failed to garner the majority for a resolution to revise United States policy on Iraq, Schumer nailed nine out of ten trivia questions during the fortieth reunion of his high school "It's Academic" quiz team.

Schumer, who skipped eighth grade, captained his high school team at the slender age of sixteen. He lead James Madison High School (also the alma mater of Republican Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman) to the televised “It’s Academic” semi-finals in New York, where they dispatched Flushing High School only to suffer defeat at the hands of the well-organized Plainview-Old Bethpage High School squad.

All three teams assembled for a fortieth reunion on the Hill in the office of the one person nobody in the room described as a huge nerd.

Senator Schumer calls his mom.

"He always had a good sense of humor, and he tried to cultivate a non-nerd persona," said Janet Schwartz, who attended junior high, high school, and college with the man she still calls, "Chuck." Schumer also played on his high school basketball team, perhaps because he was, as Schwartz described, "tall for our ethnic group."

Loyalty to this "King of the Nerds" filled the air like the warm aroma of freshly baked New York bagels. "Go Chuck!" said Schwartz as she noted that Schumer was running considerably late and was probably taking care legislative affairs.

"I would never hesitate to vote for Chuck," said Mark Cannon, a Manhattan psychiatrist who lost to Schumer’s team in the semi's. "I'm proud we had this association with him," Cannon said.

In fact, Cannon's pride jump-started the reunion. Months ago, Cannon e-mailed It's Academic's headquarters noting that their fortieth anniversary was coming up and that he had video clip of Schumer in the competition, thanks to an illicit videotape made by Cannon's parents. The clip was later played on Meet the Press and can be found here.

When the Senator finally arrived, he greeted those assembled—many of whom had not seen each other for decades—like old friends. He dialed his mother to confirm details of the competition, only to be chided for not reading the New York Times editorial she had sent him. "I'll read it, Mom," he assured. Schumer also received a slap on the wrist for breaking with “It’s Academic” in the middle of a busy legislative schedule. "I'm horsing around with 'It's Academic' while the world is burning," he said while on the phone.

A few pictures later and Schumer was called away to talk with the president of George Washington University. Apparently the world can wait for a few trivia questions, but it cannot wait for long.

More photos from the event are below.

In his 1999 memoir of the Clinton White House, All Too Human, George Stephanopoulos wrote at length about his former boss’s blemishes—his indecision, his emotional rampages, his questionable personal life. For all of President Bill Clinton’s political charm and idealistic ambition, his former right-hand man spelled out in the clearest of terms one of the frustrating realities of politics and every other human enterprise: They’re undertaken by flawed people.

In contemporary times, media access and technological advances have made this especially evident. Every slip of the foot or tongue is caught on tape and played out for weeks on TV, radio, and the Internet.

Former Senator George Allen’s ill-fated racial slur last fall—echoed in sound bites for weeks afterward—played a big part in his defeat by Jim Webb last November. Footage of Senator Joe Biden’s embarrassing comments to reporters about Indian-Americans and Dunkin’ Donuts was posted on YouTube days before he announced his presidential bid. And many wonder if a politician as prone to inappropriateness as Senator John McCain—he once joked at a Republican fundraiser that Janet Reno was Chelsea Clinton’s father—can make it to November without a major faux pas.

Technology has captured the humanness of public figures while raising our expectations of politicians to a super-human level. What if we’d had the same technology, access to information, and sensibilities during Andrew Jackson’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency? Imagine the banter in the backrooms of the Hermitage or the jokes cracked on TR’s famed hikes through Rock Creek Park.

The fact is that our most lauded presidents were great to the extent that they triumphed despite ignoble tendencies and personality flaws.

In last year’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Conrad Black exposed FDR’s opportunism and implacability, even as he placed him right below, if not in the same league as, Abraham Lincoln as our greatest president.

Lincoln’s emotional struggles, as documented in Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness do little to undermine his achievement. Rather, they make Lincoln’s achievements more astounding.

History’s hands hold in their grasp no perfect men. We’ve never elected one and never will, but if we could, what would the perfect president look and act like?

That’s the question taken up in Stephanopoulos’s The Perfect President, to be published by Hyperion next spring. Todd Brewster, who cowrote In Search of America and The Century with Peter Jennings, will lend a hand.

Stephanopoulos—now broadcast royalty as host of ABC’s Sunday show This Week—will cull through the presidents, “examining the often surprising characteristics that have contributed to presidential greatness.”

What would your perfect president be like? Mine would command respect like George Washington. He—or she—would employ the thoughtfulness of the first John Adams, have Thomas Jefferson’s ingenuity, and be as stubborn as Andrew Jackson when stubbornness is required. At other times, he’d be as humble as Gerald Ford.

My president would have a story like Lincoln’s and, like Lincoln, would use the podium to pack a precise and eloquent punch. He’d have the vigor of the first Roosevelt and the same fearlessness in the face of domestic and international disaster as the second.

He’d have a nickname as catchy as Ike, hair like John F. Kennedy’s, a laugh like Ronald Reagan’s. And he’d be as likable as Clinton.

It’s a given that such a candidate won’t be on the ballot in 2008. But maybe we’ll find one or two with a few of our greatest presidents’ hallmarks. This person won’t be perfect, but imperfection has never been the ultimate bar to greatness.

Other recent Washington-related book deals:

The big news on February 28 was the suicide bombing at an air base in Afghanistan where Vice President Dick Cheney had been waiting to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But buried below that story in the headlines on my RSS feed was one from the BBC that also got my attention: “Picasso Paintings Stolen in Paris.”

It turned out that robbers had waltzed into the home of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughter while she and her mother were sleeping and lifted “Maya With Doll,” a portrait of Picasso’s daughter, and “Portrait of Jacqueline,” a painting of the Spanish artist’s second wife. The two oil works are estimated to be worth a combined $66 million. In the three weeks since the theft, Paris police haven’t made any arrests.

Art theft is a burgeoning industry. Much was made in 2004 of the theft of two Edvard Munch paintings—“The Scream” and “Madonna,” with a combined insured value of $121 million—from the Munch Museum in Oslo. They were recovered later that year, but the case remains unsolved.

Without further ado, here are the top eight developments you need to know about what's happening on both sides of the presidential campaign:

1) As rumors continue to percolate that former senator and actor Fred Thompson might enter the race, Monday may see the presidential race change in a relatively major way: Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel is preparing to announce his political future. He might step down from the Senate, announce he’s running for reelection, or throw his hat into the presidential ring, as has been rumored for months. Hagel, who hasn’t taken any visible steps towards assembling an organization or raising money, would upend the race if he could begin to do both. Hagel’s been a vocal critic of the Iraq war and the Bush administration and could continue to make life very difficult for supposed front-runner John McCain, who has failed thus far to generate the enthusiasm many expected he would. McCain, meanwhile, is stepping up his campaign with the announcement that Tom Loeffler, a well-connected former congressman, will become the campaign’s consigliere. Mario Puzo fans will remember the role of a consigliere as the chief enforcer, tasked with making sure that the support of supporters remains strong. As in many establishment GOP campaigns before McCain’s, Loeffler’s role is to make anyone who might cross McCain—and, say, support Chuck Hagel—think twice.

2) With the first fundraising quarter closing at the end of the month, all the campaigns are busy gaming the press—underplaying their own fundraising efforts while overplaying the likely success of others’. Money is, in the early stages, all about expectations. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is publicly talking about a target of $15 million for the first quarter, but one rival camp told the Post’s Chris Cillizza this week to expect her to raise $40 million to $50 million. To put that number in perspective, it is roughly the entire 2003 haul for Howard Dean’s then-record-breaking campaign and exceeds what any Democratic presidential campaign had ever spent on a race prior to 2004. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is trying a novel fundraising approach: raising people, not dollars. His latest effort counts the number of people who contribute, not the number of dollars raised (although you can bet someone at headquarters is monitoring that number closely).

3) This week saw the opposition research files on Barack Obama begin to spread, including a front-page article in the New York Times on some questionable (money-losing) investments Obama made and some unpaid Cambridge parking tickets from his days at Harvard Law School. The leaks thus far have no fingerprints on them from other campaigns, but it’s just the beginning of what’s sure to be a year of dribs and drabs of stuff to muddy the image of Obama. The question is, what can we read into these leaks? Is this the best stuff out there on Obama, or is someone trying to build a pattern of thoughtless actions?

4) Also this week, some serious interest-group outreach begins: Mitt Romney launched his first Spanish-language radio ads in Florida, and both he and Hillary Clinton launched groups to recruit the support of women. Romney’s “Women’s Leadership Team” in South Carolina and Clinton’s “Women for Hillary” effort hope to capture big chunks the expected 54 percent of voters in 2008 who will be female. EMILY’s List, the pro-women political PAC, made clear its support early: It endorsed Hillary within hours of her announcement. As Hillary’s campaign trumpeted this week, “Women are the ‘X factor’ in this upcoming election.”

What: Champions for Change, the International Center for Research on Women’s Awards Gala

Where: Union Station

When: March 7, 2007 from 6:30-10:30 pm

Who: A laundry list of ambassadors, activists, and businesspeople, and, of course, the ever-theatrical Meryl Streep.

Ticket Price: Individual tickets started at $250

Food: While the food was certainly no year-end youth soccer banquet fare—the finger food and three-course dinner, including the medjool dates and goat cheese, the exotic pairing from the air and sea (a duet of chicken and red snapper) and the melty-in-the-middle chocolate soufflé with toasted coconut ice cream, were delicious all around—the kitchen seemed less prepared than one could have hoped. Our table never got the promised “five-grain bread,” and one of the guests never got her vegetarian option.  

Drink: Red and white wine.

Scene: The marble-columned arch-ceilinged East Hall of Union Station was bathed in red for the occasion, and the tables featured elaborate floral centerpieces of pink and orange (some of which later sold at auction for more than $500). The wall behind the podium was draped in a pattern of Indian cloth, befitting the recipients of the first award, ICICI bank, India's "fastest growing bank."  The event’s train station setting made for a few interesting moments, as speeding trains below shook the tables and even caused Streep to exclaim that “the earth moved!” from her remarks.

Auction: In probably the most exciting portion of the night, Human Genome Project Director Eric Lander traded his microscope for a microphone to serve as auctioneer, and an amusing one at that. Among the items on the block were a week in a Tuscan villa ("Who doesn't want to go to Tuscany? If so, you should have yourself examined."), a week in a private beach club in Baja California for $900 a night (“On a snowy day in Washington, what would be better?”), a tour of his own laboratory for $5,000, and, the big ticket item, unlisted on the program, a lunch with Meryl Streep, who mouthed "I want you" into the cameras and piped up "It's my own homemade egg salads!" to drive the price up to a cool $20,000.

Most Moving Moment: Despite the laughs, it was hard to forget that the event was for a serious cause. The stories relayed by ICRW president Geeta Rao Gupta were both heartbreaking and uplifting, but, for my part, most sobering—despite the freely-poured wine—were the remarks of Reverend Johannes Heath of Anerela +, a group of African religious leaders who are living with or are personally affected by HIV/AIDS. His most poignant statement, I thought, was his denial of the idea that HIV is just another chronic illness: "People don't get stoned to death for having high blood pressure," he said.

Ratings:  

Bold Face Names: 3 (out of 5)
Food/Drink: 4 (out of 5)
Swankiness: 4 (out of 5)
Exclusivity: 3 (out of 5)

Total Score: 14 (out of 20)

More photos below.