By M.E. SPRENGELMEYER, Scripps Howard News Service

WASHINGTON -- Pick your favorite term for the grumpy-faced man sitting at a desk in the back of a sparsely furnished office suite.

Populist or egotist. Crusader or pariah. Idealist or spoiler. Hero or has-been.

EAST MOLINE, Ill. -- Big news shook this little riverfront city on May 14, 2004.

A fracas in the parking lot outside an area Holiday Inn marred the retirement party for East Moline's longtime police chief. As Quad-City Times columnist Barb Ickes later put it: "the cops called the cops on the cops."

CHICAGO -- It takes the Rev. Jesse Jackson 10 1/2 minutes just to get warmed up.

He enters the studio dressed head-to-toe in black. He has black history on his mind, too.

So when Jackson sits behind a desk and begins an hour-long chat with the Rocky Mountain News, he doesn't wait for the first question before launching into a detailed monologue that can't be interrupted.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- A mercurial figure swoops through the crowded lobby of the Beverly Hilton, tugs this way and that by well-heeled conference-goers who've arrived by chauffeured Bentleys and run-of-the-mill Maseratis.

Twenty years have passed, but Michael Dukakis still kicks himself -- again and again and again.

Seven times in an hour-long chat, he brings up "mistakes" from that 1988 presidential election.

MINNEAPOLIS -- The handwriting was on the wall in 1984.

Correction, Walter Mondale says: "The writing was not on the wall. It was all over the wall and on the floor. No, no, no. It was clear. Anybody who lived around 1984 knew that this was going to be a tough one."

A tough election for a challenger to win, he means. And that, perhaps, is also an understatement.

What is this?

On a steamy spring day, in a cramped office that hot air can't escape, the archetypal child of the '60s does something truly radical.

He wears a necktie.

This is not the hairy, scary leader of the New Left who had Chicago locking up its daughters for the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

HOUSTON --

You can almost hear her famous voice booming off the printed page.

Barbara Jordan still speaks, boldly, forcefully, from a letter buried in a box on a shelf behind two sets of glass doors inside a library on the poor side of town.

The archives at Texas Southern University tell the story.

Add another reluctant supporter to the list backing Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain: Rep. Tom Tancredo.

Some say Denver is risking a barrage of grumpy press reports during the Democratic National Convention if it can't find more hotel rooms for the folks who buy ink by the barrel.