When people learn that for nearly 40 years — including more than 17 spent disagreeing, often heatedly, with him on CNN’s weekly “Capital Gang” — that columnist Robert Novak has been my good friend, they often shake their heads in disbelief.

Let me express my appreciation to the late and legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, who occasionally wrote a column filled with witty one-liners and random insights, which he called “Nobody Asked Me, But ...”

Barack Obama made history this week. He announced he will become the first major-party presidential nominee since Richard M. Nixon in 1972 to fund his general election campaign solely by private contributions.

It was the biggest night of the young presidential candidate’s campaign. In the South Dakota primary, he had trounced that state’s native son, the sitting vice president, while in California he had just defeated the Minnesota senator who, one week earlier in Oregon, had inflicted his first-ever election defeat.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — As his delegate lead over New York Sen. Hillary Clinton expands with every news cycle, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama remains the overwhelming favorite to win the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. But Obama and his legions of zealous supporters would be well-advised to keep the champagne on ice and uncorked.

In a burst of clear thinking, the national Democratic Party in 2007 permitted just four states — New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — to hold their presidential nominating contests before Feb. 5, 2008.

What sauce do you eat with crow? That’s the question asked by yours truly and an unhealthy majority of my fellow travelers on the press bus who could not resist speculating the fallout from Hillary Clinton’s losing the Texas or Ohio primary.

Most people who run for president, by definition, lose. And most of those unsuccessful candidates depart the presidential contest with their reputations and their influence diminished.

Manchester, N.H. — Les Biffle remains the most legendary American “pollster” whose name nobody knows. During the 1948 presidential campaign — when literally all the Wise Men of the press corps (there were among the press no acknowledged Wise Women in 1948) had, long before a single vote was cast, named Republican Thomas E. Dewey the winner over Democratic President Harry Truman — Democratic operative Biffle, disguising himself as a butter and egg salesman, traveled throughout the Midwest. Listening only to ordinary voters, he turned out to be the only semi-public figure to correctly predict the historic Truman upset victory.

Philadelphia — The last six weeks have not been Hillary Clinton’s best. Ever since her first bad debate performance of 2007 in this city in late October, she has spent most of the time on the defensive — forced to answer questions about her own positions, her husband’s statements and her campaign’s tactics. She has seen her lead in national polls shrink and in some Iowa surveys disappear completely.

Richmond, Va. — Here in the onetime capital city of the Confederacy, a city I once flippantly referred to as “a hotbed of social rest,” a dozen solidly Republican voters spent more than two hours on a recent Thursday night pessimistically assessing their party and their children’s future in a session moderated by pollster Peter Hart for the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?” asked humorist Bob Orben.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Every presidential nominee in choosing his (or her) vice presidential running mate follows either micro-politics or macro-politics.

As Professor Robert Schmuhl reminds us, since 1952, seven of the 14 presidential elections have been won by sitting presidents or by the incumbent vice president (George H.W. Bush), and in the other seven, the winners included: a former general (Dwight Eisenhower), a former vice president (Richard Nixon), two former governors (Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan), two sitting governors (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) and only one sitting senator (John F. Kennedy).

As a general rule, candidate endorsements in political campaigns are both over-reported and overrated.

Think about it: When was the last time you, or anybody either of us knows, said, “I fully intended to vote for John Kerry for president until my lieutenant governor endorsed George W. Bush and made me change my mind.”

With the continuing stampede by the states of Michigan, South Carolina, Florida and whatever jurisdiction is next to fast-forward its own presidential primary dates to early January 2008, the nation risks losing a lot more than the reflective judgment of the voters in the traditional first-in-the-nation states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

University of Kansas professor and respected scholar on the subject Diana Carlin said it best about presidential debates: They are the “only time you have the (presidential) nominees in the same place, the only time you can really get to compare them. ... I equate it to a job interview that gives voters the chance to really assess who would be the best president.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became only the second Republican president after the Civil War to win and to serve two full White House terms, liked to quote approvingly the first Republican president and the American martyr to that war, Abraham Lincoln: “The role of government is to do for people what they cannot do at all for themselves or so well do in their individual capacities.”

That New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has maintained, even in some cases widened, her lead for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination in national polls is a tribute to her own polished performance, especially in the candidate debates, and to the professional campaign organization she has assembled.

The Gridiron Club, an invitation-only organization of fewer than 70 Washington reporters and columnists founded in 1885, exists almost solely to host an annual white-tie dinner attended by Supreme Court justices, Cabinet secretaries, congressional leaders and assorted celebrities.

Extended stretches of my youth and early middle age were spent joyfully, if not triumphantly, working in political campaigns in some 38 states and Venezuela. My duties included fund-raising, an experience that left an “anti-Calvinist,” convinced that the Creator bestowed large amounts of money on the least appealing and interesting of His creatures.

Politicians — especially when they choose to duck a race for that next high office they have lusted after for years because they don’t believe they can win it — regularly tell us that they “want to spend more time with (their) family.” 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware is one politician who means it.