Sen. Tammy Duckworth, like the man she might serve as vice president, prizes loyalty in her ranks and occasional mischief in her workplace.So when a top communications aide prepared to defect last year to the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, Duckworth recognized an opportunity. She recorded a faux media interview trashing Buttigieg for hiring her staff away. The file was sent to the departing aide, Sean Savett, who called the Buttigieg team in a panic.Soon, Savett was summoned to the Illinois senator’s office, where she fumed theatrically, stalling as other staff members filed in...…Sen. Tammy Duckworth, like the man she might serve as vice president, prizes loyalty in her ranks and occasional mischief in her workplace.So when a top communications aide prepared to defect last year to the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, Duckworth recognized an opportunity. She recorded a faux media interview trashing Buttigieg for hiring her staff away. The file was sent to the departing aide, Sean Savett, who called the Buttigieg team in a panic.Soon, Savett was summoned to the Illinois senator’s office, where she fumed theatrically, stalling as other staff members filed in...WW…

Supported byThe other comics called him “Little Ball of Anger” — semi-affectionately, never to his face — a man flammable by bearing and branding, it seemed, with his taekwondo muscles and a scorching conviction that the Bible had some holes.“Noah was 600 years old and a drunk!” told his Los Angeles crowds some two decades back, in one favored bit about the implausibility of the scriptural ark. Then he’d spar afterward with a waitress who was raised Catholic — and mindful of divine wrath.“Stand back,” Eleanor Kerrigan, the Comedy Store waitress who became a comedian herself, would say to...…Supported byThe other comics called him “Little Ball of Anger” — semi-affectionately, never to his face — a man flammable by bearing and branding, it seemed, with his taekwondo muscles and a scorching conviction that the Bible had some holes.“Noah was 600 years old and a drunk!” told his Los Angeles crowds some two decades back, in one favored bit about the implausibility of the scriptural ark. Then he’d spar afterward with a waitress who was raised Catholic — and mindful of divine wrath.“Stand back,” Eleanor Kerrigan, the Comedy Store waitress who became a comedian herself, would say to...WW…

AdvertisementIt was a concession speech, of a kind: Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Senator bowed not to , who in a second consecutive week of primary elections, but to the reality of his political predicament. Stripped of his briefly held status as the Democratic front-runner, Mr. Sanders acknowledged that he was “” to Mr. Biden but stopped short of accepting defeat.That careful distinction — between accepting Mr. Biden’s dominance in the race, and yielding to him altogether — now defines Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, and perhaps the Democratic presidential race as a whole.For in Burlington,...…AdvertisementIt was a concession speech, of a kind: Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Senator bowed not to , who in a second consecutive week of primary elections, but to the reality of his political predicament. Stripped of his briefly held status as the Democratic front-runner, Mr. Sanders acknowledged that he was “” to Mr. Biden but stopped short of accepting defeat.That careful distinction — between accepting Mr. Biden’s dominance in the race, and yielding to him altogether — now defines Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, and perhaps the Democratic presidential race as a whole.For in Burlington,...WW…