Who's Who.

• Author: THREADGILL, SUSAN
• Position: Politicians - Brief Article

There's a new consulting firm in town and you might say that its two partners seem an unlikely pair: Henry Kissinger, who became famous as Richard Nixon's national security advisor, and Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty, who served as Bill Clinton's chief of staff. This isn't as odd as it appears. It's actually quite customary for a Washington firm to have Republican and Democratic partners so that the firm can flourish regardless of who is in power. Is it possible that lucrative fees could temper ideological differences? We're only asking.

If you watched the first Gore-Bradley debate in New Hampshire, you may be interested to learn that the man who asked Al Gore the question about politicians' behavior and then told reporters he wasn't satisfied with the answer was not exactly a disinterested citizen, reveals Paul Bedard of U.S. News and World Report. In fact, he was a Bradley campaign worker named James Sheridan. On the other hand, when Al Gore cited an Emory University study to support his claim that Bradley's health care plan would cost too much, he didn't mention that the health care scholar who crunched the Emory numbers was Kenneth Thorpe, who just happens to be a former Clinton administration official, according to The Wall Street Journal's Bob Davis and John Harwood.

It turns out there was a Red Bone in George W. Bush's past. Red, you will recall, was the wizard who turned Hillary Clinton's $1,000 into $100,000. Now it seems that Richard Rainwater, a wealthy Texan, turned a $385 investment by W. into $45,512, a feat that in percentage terms is even a bit more impressive than Bone's. But Rainwater's kindness to W. didn't stop there. A long story in the October 30 edition of The New York Times details a list of transactions by which Rainwater helped Bush's wealth to grow, the best known being Bush's investment in the Texas Rangers, which grew in value from $600,000--the stake that was given him by Rainwater and other investors--to almost $15 million in just nine years.

Speaking of Bradley and Gore, Democratic wise man Bob Strauss recently told The Hill: "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Gore wins Iowa and his opponent wins New Hampshire. And if Gore wins California and his opponent wins New York, we've got a campaign that could go all the way to the convention." Old-timers tell us that the last close race at a Democratic convention was in 1956 when the vice-presidential balloting seesawed back and forth between John Kennedy and Estes Kefauver...