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There have been many gangs roaming the 16 perilous blocks between the Capitol and the White House, but only one of them mattered: the Gang of Two. President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner came close to rescuing the nation from a manufactured debt-ceiling crisis last week. But their buddy act fizzled, leading them to deliver starkly different speeches on July 25.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman may be trailing the pack in the Republican presidential primary, but he is a leader in one important regard: Unlike his colleagues, Huntsman has refused to sign any of the special-interest pledges that are increasingly turning political office into an ideological straitjacket.

The story of Stella Liebeck came to stand for all that is moronic about our legal system and culture. Liebeck sued McDonald’s in 1994 after spilling a 49-cent cup of coffee in her lap as she was wheeling away from a drive-thru window in Albuquerque, N.M. She hit the liability jackpot, winning a $2.86 million jury award as compensation for this minor nuisance.

Harry Reid, the Senate’s Democratic leader, and Mitch McConnell, his Republican counterpart, can barely agree that the sun sets in the west. Yet the process for confirming presidential appointees has become so crippling to Republican and Democratic administrations alike that the two partisan warhorses have just led the Senate to adopt bipartisan legislation to ease the trauma.

Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign announcement Tuesday qualified as both impressive stagecraft and political curiosity. Huntsman arrived at Liberty State Park in New Jersey accompanied by the most photogenic political family since the Kennedys. A huge (and seemingly enthusiastic) contingent of reporters was lured to the event in part by a quirky series of Web videos that Huntsman had aired in the days leading up to it. They featured a lone motorcyclist tearing through the rugged mountains of Utah to the accompaniment of winsome country music.

Mitt Romney has had the kind of smooth life that makes people want to trip him as he bounds up stairs two at a time. But he has become a steadying presence in a field of Republican presidential candidates who raise the blood pressure — and not in a good way. At this week’s debate in New Hampshire, Romney was a mighty oak planted at center stage, with little saplings arrayed around him. In every Republican primary poll, Romney holds a sizable lead.

John Edwards committed the perfect crime. He began an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter on the night she waited outside his New York hotel and told him he was “hot” and later produced a child with her. Yet he didn’t suffer for it at the polls. He lost his bid for the White House in 2008 simply because voters, who knew nothing of his dalliance, concluded that he wasn’t presidential timber. Nor was he denied access to his children, as men in his situation so often are. Instead, he won them in an existential custody fight that his wife lost by dying.

Most of us don’t begin the summer by crashing the annual Memorial Day weekend gathering of bikers at Rolling Thunder, a Washington event to honor veterans. But most of us are not Sarah Palin. While Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty are holding traditional coffee klatches in Iowa and New Hampshire, Palin is on the road.

Newt Gingrich is not the only Republican in a difficult spot over House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare-slashing budget. As election results in New York’s 26th Congressional District have confirmed, the whole GOP is.

In one of his last significant acts as California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger backed Proposition 14, an “open primary” initiative that California voters passed last June. California has one of the nation’s most politically polarized state legislatures and congressional delegations. The open primary has the potential to alter that.

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has quit the charade that we can simply cut our way out of the national debt. Having committed the Capitol offense of honesty, Coburn — one of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress — must be punished, of course. And that’s where Grover Norquist comes in.