The posture of Rudy’s inner circle (made up of the Yes-Rudys) is ‘to hell with the critics! He’s our guy!’

By Jonathan Alter

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:49 PM ET Nov 17, 2007

It was the mid-1990s, and I was trying to interview Judith Regan on the telephone about a media-industry story. We’d never met, but within a few minutes the publishing dominatrix was telling me graphic details about her sex life with her ex-husband. I’ve heard variations on the same theme from several friends: with Judith, it’s always Too Much Information, abusive and profane, pouring out of her mouth in a confusing eruption of fib and fact.

The same applies to the sensational $100 million lawsuit Regan filed last week against her former employer, HarperCollins, and its parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Regan alleges that she was “smeared” as an anti-Semite by her bosses and fired on a “pretext” after being urged by a News Corp. senior executive to lie to federal investigators about her past affair with Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief and nominee to be Homeland Security secretary who was indicted earlier this month. The point, Regan claims, was to protect Rudy Giuliani from embarrassment.

But even as News Corp. called the suit “preposterous” and Giuliani dismissed it on the campaign trail as a “gossip item,” you could see a little fear in Hizzoner’s eyes. Turncoats are dangerous, and Regan is a skillful and brazen enough media manipulator to keep this story humming for months.

The lawsuit feels thin. While it’s true that no one in News Corp. management deemed Regan anti-Semitic until it was convenient for their efforts to scapegoat her, she offers little evidence for her allegations, and is unlikely to win without smoking-gun tapes, which have yet to materialize.

But Regan, whose career blew up last year amid the fiasco of News Corp.’s seeking to profit from O. J. Simpson’s “confessions,” is not your basic disgruntled employee. She generated hundreds of millions of dollars in News Corp. revenues (with best sellers from the likes of Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore and porn star Jenna Jameson). She had her own TV show, courtesy of Murdoch and Fox News Channel founder Roger Ailes. And long before trysting with Kerik in an apartment near Ground Zero that by some accounts was supposed to be reserved for exhausted recovery workers, she was an important player in the FoxRudy power axis, now aiming for the presidency.

Before Giuliani gets there, Americans might want to learn more about the New York demimonde he runs with. In recent years, New York’s hothouse of sex and power has sometimes felt like a nuthouse, with the inmates in charge. It’s astonishing how often you hear traumatized former staffers or bemused acquaintances of Rudy and Roger and Bernie and Judith use exactly the same words to describe them: he (or she) is crazy, as if the political, media, law-enforcement and publishing worlds were run by the denizens of the “Star Wars” bar.

Beyond Giuliani’s temperamental fitness, there’s the question of whether this craziness has a way of trickling down. Giuliani’s subordinates (known as the Yes-Rudys) outdo each other in proving their fanatical loyalty. The whole culture of the inner circle is thus infected: To hell with the critics! He’s our guy!

The Kerik-Giuliani relationship was described by Kerik himself in his memoirs (edited by Regan) as something out of “The Godfather.” After each of Giuliani’s cronies kissed him one by one in a darkened room, he realized: “I was being made. I was now part of the Giuliani family, getting the endorsement of the other family members, the other capos.”

How else to explain how Kerik, who was known by Giuliani to have shady connections (he was briefed), was made police commissioner and then pushed forward in 2004 by Giuliani to handle what the candidate calls the president’s most critical function—homeland security? When his nomination was withdrawn, the explanation was a “nanny problem.” In fact, Kerik was embroiled in several scandals, at least a few of which had to be known by his fellow capos. Even now, Rudy praises him. Loyalists are loyal to the idea of loyalty. Be sure of this: President Giuliani would bring more of the same.

The founding bond for this family goes back to the 1980s. Roger ran Rudy’s first (unsuccessful) campaign for mayor in 1989; then, after winning, Rudy used his power as mayor to pressure Time Warner Cable to put the fledgling Fox News Channel on the air in 1996. No Rudy, no Fox. Ailes even asked Giuliani to officiate at his wedding.

Murdoch himself is not a big part of the family. People close to Murdoch, requesting anonymity, claim he’s never been particularly friendly with Giuliani and so far has specifically declined efforts to get behind his campaign. (He apparently prefers Michael Bloomberg.) But Ailes now has enough autonomy to boost Giuliani on Fox News, to the point where conservative supporters of rival candidates are blogging that—stop the presses!—the network is no longer “fair and balanced.”

With any luck, more episodes of this soap opera are forthcoming. It beats driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. For now, Judith Regan, media moll, is out of the family, vowing vengeance. As the Corleone family said on the eve of a mob war, “Let’s go to the mattresses!”

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/70998

Absent amnesia—which only happens on soaps—Democrats will be fine.

By Markos Moulitsas

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:10 PM ET Nov 17, 2007

Times are tough for the Republican Party and its candidates. Earlier this month, according to Gallup, more people strongly disapproved of George W. Bush than any previous president since the advent of polling—and, really, how could things be any different? Bush can boast of an unwinnable quagmire in Iraq, a decimated housing market, economic instability and a collapsing dollar, a dysfunctional health-care system, a still-devastated Gulf Coast, a wealth gap of a scope unseen since the Great Depression and a pervasive and disturbing image of America as a hapless, blundering giant, rather than a beacon of freedom and morality in the world.

Yet despite this dismal rap sheet, Republicans refuse to distance themselves too far from Bush and his record lest they take a hit from the fringe voters who still support his presidency. That is, after all, the Republican Party base, and no presidential or congressional candidate can get far without its help. It’s why Republicans refuse to break from the president on Iraq, despite the lack of political progress in Baghdad. It’s why Republicans voted to support Bush’s veto of the wildly popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program, denying health care to millions of needy kids. Time and again, GOP leaders have forgone sensible and popular policies in favor of catering to a shrinking and increasingly isolated base.

Consequently, to stand any chance of winning next year, Republicans must pray for a national amnesia to erase the previous eight years from the minds of voters. But amnesia only happens in soap operas—and that’s why Democrats will win in 2008. As long as Democratic candidates remind voters that the Republican platform and Bush’s record are one and the same, victory will be assured.

In his first Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan remarked that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” While the quip has provided Republicans with a cheap slogan for two decades, the philosophy behind it is beginning to box them in. If they govern effectively, they invalidate their own antigovernment ideology. And when you elect people who believe that government won’t work, you shouldn’t be surprised when government stops working.

Bush, who in his failed congressional run in 1978 campaigned against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, gutted the effectiveness of the Mine Safety and Health Administration as president. When sharp decreases in inspections and fines led, not unexpectedly, to a rash of deaths in underground mines from the Appalachians to Utah, the administration might have thought to reverse its leniency. Even mining companies braced for a new round of regulations. Instead, the only major move from the Bush administration has been to relax regulations, in effect rewarding mining companies for having contributed to the deaths of their employees.

When Bush chose a head for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, did he select a competent administrator experienced in disaster management? No, he appointed Mike Brown, an attorney previously fired as the “judges and stewards commissioner” of the International Arabian Horse Association for gross mismanagement. He was an incompetent horse lawyer, yet Bush deemed him capable of running the nation’s top disaster relief agency. Reagan, who once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’,” might have approved the choice, but the abandoned residents of the Gulf Coast would undoubtedly beg to differ.

Neither was the Bush administration shy about exporting its government-busting ideology to Iraq, staffing the Iraqi reconstruction effort not with experts, but with twentysomething ideologues. A 24-year-old with no finance experience was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative—with no background in accounting—was put in charge of Iraq’s $13 billion budget. If the goal was to convince people that government doesn’t work, the Bush administration succeeded spectacularly—at home and abroad.

Democrats, on the other hand, believe government can be a resource for promoting the common good and thus are invested from the beginning in governing competently, efficiently and fairly. Their ideology demands it. And what better way for Democratic candidates to illustrate this contrast than by running against the Republican trifecta—the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court—that governed throughout most of Bush’s eight years in office?

Democrats should and will use Bush and his destructive policies on the campaign trail as the primary example of what happens when people who hate government are elected to run it. The message will be that Bush isn’t a historical anomaly: he’s the embodiment of modern conservatism.

If Americans want willfully ineffective government, they’ll have a Republican Party desperate for their votes. But with 70 percent of the American people thinking the nation is on the wrong track, it’s clear they expect the opposite. As long as Democrats make that contrast clear—and Bush’s record will be integral to that argument—they should be headed for victory in 2008.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/70978

Republicans who think she’ll be easy to defeat are wrong. What they should do.

By Karl Rove

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:56 PM ET Nov 17, 2007

I’ve seen up close the two Clintons America knows. He’s a big smile, hand locked on your arm and lots of charms. “Hey, come down and speak at my library. I’d like to talk some politics with you.”

And her? She tends to be, well, hard and brittle. I inherited her West Wing office. Shortly after the 2001 Inauguration, I made a little talk saying I appreciated having the office because it had the only full-length vanity mirror in the West Wing, which gave me a chance to improve my rumpled appearance. The senator from New York confronted me shortly after and pointedly said she hadn’t put the mirror there. I hadn’t said she did, just that the mirror was there. So a few weeks later, in another talk, I repeated the story about the mirror. And shortly thereafter, the junior senator saw me and, again, without a hint of humor or light in her voice, icily said she’d heard I’d repeated the story of the mirror and she … did … not … put … that mirror in the office.

It is a small but telling story: she is tough, persistent and forgets nothing. Those are some of the reasons she is so formidable as a contender, and why Republicans who think she would be easy to beat are wrong. The Republican presidential nomination is the most fluid and unpredictable contest in decades, but the Democratic nominee is likely to be Hillary. Not without a fight, not without losing early contests (probably Iowa, for starters) and not without bruises and bumps.

And so the question to John McCain from a woman at a town hall in South Carolina last Monday was tasteless, but key: “How do we beat the [rhymes with witch]?” Right now, Republicans are focusing much of their fire on Senator Clinton. Criticizing her unites the party, stirs up the unsettled feelings many swing voters have toward her and allows each candidate to say why he is best able to beat her. For now, that’s enough. But when a GOP nominee emerges, he needs to remember no Republican is as well known as Hillary. The Republican has room to grow in the polls as voters get a better sense of who he is and what animates him. Here’s what he needs to do.

Plan now to introduce yourself again right after winning the nomination. Don’t assume everyone knows you. Many will still not know what you’ve done in real life. Create a narrative that explains your life and commitments. Every presidential election is about change and the future, not the past. So show them who you are in a way that gives the American people hope, optimism and insight. That’s the best antidote to the low approval rates of the Republican president. Those numbers will not help the GOP candidate, just as the even lower approval ratings of the Congress will not help the Democratic standard-bearer.

Say in authentic terms what you believe. The GOP nominee must highlight his core convictions to help people understand who he is and to set up a natural contrast with Clinton, both on style and substance. Don’t be afraid to say something controversial. The American people want their president to be authentic. And against a Democrat who calculates almost everything, including her accent and laugh, being seen as someone who says what he believes in a direct way will help.

Tackle issues families care about and Republicans too often shy away from. Jobs, the economy, taxes and spending will be big issues this campaign, but some issues that used to be “go to” ones for Republicans, like crime and welfare, don’t have as much salience. Concerns like health care, the cost of college and social mobility will be more important. The Republican nominee needs to be confident in talking about these concerns and credible in laying out how he will address them. Be bold in approach and presentation.

Go after people who aren’t traditional Republicans. Aggressively campaign for the votes of America’s minorities. Go to their communities, listen and learn, demonstrate your engagement and emphasize how your message can provide hope and access to the American Dream for all. The GOP candidate must ask for the vote in every part of the electorate. He needs to do better among minorities, and be seen as trying.

Be strong on Iraq. Democrats have bet on failure. That’s looking to be an increasingly bad wager, given the remarkable progress seen recently in Iraq. If the question is who will get out quicker, the answer is Hillary. The Republican candidate wants to recast the question to: who will lead America to victory in a vital battleground in the War on Terror? There will be contentious fights over funding the troops and over intelligence-gathering right after the parties settle on their candidates. Both battles will help the Republican candidate demonstrate who will be stronger in winning the new struggle of the 21st century.

The conventional wisdom now is that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. In reality, she’s eminently beatable. Her contentious history evokes unpleasant memories. She lacks her husband’s political gifts and rejects much of the centrism he championed. The health-care fiasco showed her style and ideology. All of which helps explain why, for a front runner in an open race for the presidency, she has the highest negatives in history.

While the prospective Republican nominee is talking about her now, the time will come soon when he must spend more time telling his story. By explaining to voters why he deserves to be our next president, he will also make clear why that job should not go to another person named Clinton.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/71000

Trailing his rivals, Edwards has injected urgency into his bid.

By Holly Bailey

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:47 PM ET Nov 17, 2007

There are some things about John Edwards that haven’t changed in the four years since he last ran for president. The man who was once featured in People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue still has that glossy, immaculate head of hair. His Tom Cruise megasmile is still disarming. And if the reaction from a crowd packed into a town hall in Iowa last week is any indication, Edwards’s silky Southern drawl can still find its target. “Oh,” one elderly woman whispered after the former senator shook her hand. “He is a handsome boy.”

Edwards is even sounding the same “two Americas” theme he did last time around—that the rich get richer while the poor and middle class get the shaft. But heading into the primaries—and trailing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in national polls and the money chase—there is an edge, and urgency, to Edwards that wasn’t there in 2004. The man who once fashioned himself as a sunny populist who refused to disparage fellow Democrats—if it’s attack politics you’re looking for, he said in 2004, “I’m not your guy”—now excoriates Clinton at every opportunity.

In Dubuque last week, Edwards stood before a United Auto Workers convention and trashed Clinton as an insider beholden to big-dollar contributors. “The person who has raised the most money from Washington lobbyists,” he said, “is not a Republican. It’s a Democrat. The person who has raised the most money from the drug industry, from the health-insurance industry … the defense industry … is Senator Clinton.” His voice rising, he said it is a “lie” that any Democrat will be a better leader than any Republican. “It does not work to replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats!” At the Las Vegas debate last Thursday, Edwards went after Clinton the moment he got the mike. “I am surprised at just how angry John has become,” Sen. Chris Dodd said in a statement last week. “This is not the same John Edwards I once knew.”

It isn’t difficult to see why Edwards might choose to ditch light for heat. At the start of the campaign, he was leading in all-important Iowa, where he took a surprise second place in 2004. But over the summer, Clinton and Obama caught up and most polls now have the three essentially tied, with Edwards in close second or third place. To stand out, he is returning to the skills that made him rich and celebrated. Edwards made a fortune wooing juries with emotional courtroom performances that depicted his clients as victims of money-grubbing corporations. He’s now doing the same thing in the campaign, turning the country into a courtroom and putting the front runners on trial. “Ironically, the guy we are seeing today is probably the real John Edwards, because you’re not sweet and nice and positive when you’re one of the most successful trial lawyers in the country,” says Steffen Schmidt, a Des Moines radio host and political scientist at Iowa State University.

But asking if Edwards is, in fact, newly angry turns out to be the quickest way to make his staff angry. “This is who he has always been,” says deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince. “He’s always been fighting against special interests and standing up for the little guy.” At the same time, Prince says the tone of this campaign is different, something he attributes to the candidate’s experiences running in 2004 and to his wife Elizabeth’s battle with cancer. “He’s more passionate, more intense,” he says, “but he’s not different.”

Even so, Edwards is mindful of a backlash against his attacks. NEWSWEEK has learned that his campaign quietly conducted internal polls to see how his new tone is playing. (Aides say their numbers show it hasn’t hurt him.) Bob Shrum, who managed the John Kerry–Edwards campaign in 2004, says Edwards’s efforts could backfire. Right now, Obama and Edwards are splitting the anti-Clinton vote. But, Shrum says, if Edwards “goes heavily on the attack he may end up hurting Hillary, hurting himself and helping Obama.”

If there’s one person who knows the perils of running too hot, it’s Joe Trippi. Four years ago, he managed Howard Dean’s angry-outsider campaign, which came to a screeching stop in Iowa. This time, it’s Edwards playing the anti-establishment Dean role—and one of his top advisers is Trippi, who is once again urging his candidate not to hold back. “After all he’s been through,” Trippi says, “he understands it’s not worth selling your soul to win an election.” Trippi’s experience with Dean also should have taught him that there is a line a candidate has to be careful not to cross. On the campaign trail, no one wants to hear you scream.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/70997

Barbara Shelly
November 27, 2007

The highs and lows of the political season remind me of a riddle a friend posed a long time ago.

“What four words are sure to make a sad person happy and a happy person sad?” he asked.

I didn’t have a clue, but the answer made perfect sense:

This too shall pass.

It certainly shall. Especially in these United States, where the single unifying trait of citizens may be our capacity to be contrary.

This speaks well of us, actually. We are not a people to be pushed around or herded. Let a particular person, party or movement get too comfortable in the catbird seat, and watch the backlash begin.

Karl Rove should have known better than to go on with his silly talk of a “permanent Republican majority.” This is the nation that rejected monarchy from the outset; we are not about to let any leader or political party get too high and mighty for very long.

The signs of contrariness are all around us. Only 26 percent of Americans surveyed in a recent Gallup Poll said they were satisfied with the direction in which the country was headed. More people currently prefer the Democratic Party than the GOP.

The notion of shrinking government is out of steam; more than half the people recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center think government should help the needy.

Atheists and other nonbelievers are on the rise, partly in protest of having religious doctrine forced into political debate and public policy. Of course, what was the basis of the evangelical clout displayed this decade if not a revolt against the perceived dominance of secularism in the 1990s?

David Aikman, an author and journalist, took on the subject of atheism in a recent column in the magazine Christianity Today.

“Why a surge by atheists right now?” he asks. “One explanation could be ‘faith fatigue’ among skeptics and the hard-core Left, who ordinarily make up 15 percent of the American people. … After six years of a famously evangelical White House, the secularists have recovered from their repudiation at the polls and have come out swinging.”

I would argue that “faith fatigue” has spread far beyond the liberal intelligentsia. Not everybody is renouncing the deity, but plenty of folks in the middle are alarmed at attempts to downgrade evolution in science curriculums and restrict medical research on religious grounds.

“Another explanation is subtler,” Aikman continues in his column. “American evangelicals, we must admit, have not been immune to triumphal attitudes, arrogance, foolish public statements, and, sometimes, downright hypocrisy in personal behavior.”

Bingo.

Not to pick on evangelicals; what Aikman wrote holds true, sooner or later, for every group that drinks the intoxicating brew of power.

Coaches and sportswriters will tell you a team is at its sharpest and most cohesive when it’s working its way to the upper rung. Once there, the group loses focus. Bickering sets in. Players do arrogant and stupid things. The same can be said of presidents and their staffs, majorities in Congress, and special interests and their lobbyists.

Americans don’t suffer fools gladly; it’s another of our admirable traits. We’re adept at recognizing the point at which the lean and hungry champions of reform become the flabby defenders of an unworkable order.

A few years ago, a popular theory held that Americans had retreated into red and blue camps based on social and lifestyle issues.

That theory was wrong. Gun-packing Republicans and granola-munching Democrats are perfectly capable of forming alliances centered on mutual disgust with failed policies, corruption scandals and unnecessary wars.

Contrary we stand. Right now, in presidential politics, that’s good for the Democratic Party. But lest anyone grow giddy over the prospects, remember the lesson of the riddle:

This too shall pass.

Thomas Sowell
November 27, 2007

People who are in the top 1 percent in income receive far more than 1 percent of the attention in the media. Even aside from miscellaneous celebrity bimbos, the top 1 percent attract all sorts of hand-wringing and finger-pointing.

A recent column by Anna Quindlen in Newsweek (or is that Newsweak?) laments that “the share of the nation’s income going to the top 1 percent is at its highest level since 1928.”

Who are those top 1 percent? For those who would like to join them, the question is: How can you do that?

The second question is easy to answer. Virtually anyone who owns a home in San Francisco, no matter how modest that person’s income may be, can join the top 1 percent instantly just by selling their house.

But that’s only good for one year, you may say. What if they don’t have another house to sell next year?

Well, they won’t be in the top 1 percent again next year, will they? But that’s not unusual.

Americans in the top 1 percent, like Americans in most income brackets, are not there permanently, despite being talked about and written about as if they are an enduring “class” – especially by those who have overdosed on the magic formula of “race, class and gender,” which has replaced thought in many intellectual circles.

At the highest income levels, people are especially likely to be transient at that level. Recent data from the Internal Revenue Service show that more than half the people who were in the top 1 percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005.

Among the top one-hundredth of 1 percent, three-quarters of them were no longer there at the end of the decade.

These are not permanent classes but mostly people at current income levels reached by spikes in income that don’t last.

These income spikes can occur for all sorts of reasons. In addition to selling homes in inflated housing markets such as San Francisco, people can get sudden increases in income from inheritances, or from a gamble that pays off, whether in the stock market, the real estate market or Las Vegas.

Some people’s income in a particular year may be several times what it has ever been before or will ever be again.

Among corporate CEOs, those who cash in stock options they have accumulated over the years get a big spike in income the year that they cash them in. This lets critics quote inflated incomes of the top-paid CEOs for that year. Some of these incomes are almost as large as those of entertainers – who are never accused of “greed,” by the way.

Just as there may be spikes in income in a given year, so there are troughs in income, which can be just as misleading in the hands of those who are ready to grab a statistic and run with it.

Many people who are genuinely affluent, or even rich, can have business losses or an off year in their profession, so that their income in a given year may be very low, or even negative, without their being poor in any meaningful sense.

This may help explain such things as hundreds of thousands of people with incomes below $20,000 a year living in homes that cost $300,000 and up. Many low-income people also have swimming pools or other luxuries that they could not afford if their incomes were permanently at their current level.

There is no reason for people to give up such luxuries because of a bad year, when they have been making a lot more money in previous years and can expect to be making a lot more in future years.

Most Americans in the top fifth, the bottom fifth or any of the fifths in between do not stay there for a whole decade, much less for life. And most certainly do not remain permanently in the top 1 percent or the top one-hundredth of 1 percent.

Most income statistics do not follow given individuals from year to year, the way Internal Revenue statistics do. But those other statistics can create the misleading illusion that they do by comparing income brackets from year to year, even though people are moving in and out of those brackets all the time.

That especially includes the top 1 percent, who have become the focus of so much angst and so much rhetoric.

By Amy Sullivan

The new message driving Barack Obama’s resurgent campaign these days is “electability plus.” He debuted the new appeal at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner earlier this month, calling for a “party that doesn’t just focus on how to win but why we should.” Obama referred to what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now” and argued that the U.S. faces too many challenges at home and abroad for Democrats to be satisfied with merely taking the White House away from Republicans.

Electability plus means not just getting elected but getting elected for the right reasons. It is a rebuttal of the argument that Hillary Clinton should win the Democratic nomination simply because of her perceived advantage against G.O.P. rivals. And it provides a rationale for why Obama is running now, why he didn’t wait four or eight years to launch a presidential campaign.

It’s significant then that Obama’s message seems to be catching on among the notoriously pragmatic Iowans. By 55% to 33%, Iowans — who will take part in a Jan. 3 caucus that will be the first test for Democratic presidential candidates — said they favored “new direction and new ideas” over “strength and experience,” a new Washington Post/ABC poll found. In July the ratio was 49% to 39%. After trailing Clinton in the state most of the year, Obama now leads by 4 points, and he has eliminated her advantage among women voters and older voters. He is also dead even with her when voters are asked whom they trust more to handle the economy, Social Security and the war in Iraq.

To run on electability plus, of course, you first have to pass the electability threshold. There, too, Obama has fresh data on his side. His aides tout the fact that their candidate boasts higher favorability ratings among independents and Republicans than either of his main rivals. (A recent Pew survey found that 21% of Republican respondents would like to see Obama as the Democratic nominee.) And the Post poll suggests that Obama could benefit from last-minute shifts in support: 34% of Iowa voters said he was their second choice, compared with only 15% for Clinton. Under the arcane rules of Iowa caucuses, that means Obama is more likely to pick up voters who can switch their support if their candidate falls short of the required 15% bar for votes.

Winning in Iowa, however, still comes down to the fine art of connecting with individual voters. And on that front, the state isn’t always a good match for Obama’s strengths. The graveyards of political campaigns are littered with candidates who excel at forging connections with individual voters but who can’t give a big speech to save their lives. Obama may be that rare politician with the opposite problem. Before a crowd of 4,000, he can be magnetic and compelling. But before a crowd of several hundred, he can sometimes fall flat.

On a Sunday evening a week after delivering the best speech of his campaign before thousands of roaring supporters at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, the Illinois Senator is easily distracted, interrupting himself to get a bottle of water for a man with a cough. A few minutes later, he stops in the middle of a riff to pick up an earring dropped by a woman in the front row. And Obama’s energy level fluctuates. “He hits the wall in late afternoon before really firing back up,” explains Iowa press secretary Tommy Vietor, making a sine curve with his hand. For long stretches, audience members are sitting back with arms crossed, waiting to be impressed. When he finishes, the crowd stands, yet there are few cheers.

But then a 64-year-old woman named Jane Svoboda stands up to challenge him. She wants to know why Obama doesn’t talk more about terrorism — “the people who keep attacking us,” as she puts it — and illegal immigrants. Obama discusses the need to regain global respect for the U.S. and argues that President George W. Bush erred by focusing on Iraq instead of Afghanistan. Svoboda interrupts to disagree, and that gets Obama going. “Iraq did not launch 9/11,” he says, growing more and more animated. “That is part of the misinformation that has been coming out of this Administration.”

The two get into a back-and-forth, which finally wakes up the crowd. By the time Obama moves on to immigration (”These are people who are trying to make a living. I understand they broke the law. But let me tell you something: if the minimum wage in Canada was $100 an hour …”), he is, to steal a phrase, fired up. And the crowd, which cheers so loudly that he doesn’t need to finish the sentence, is won over. The passionate response has answered their electability questions. As for the plus? On her way out of the event, even Svoboda offers a positive verdict: “He did a good job.”

By JOE KLEIN

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

Senator Christopher Dodd had a nice moment in the Democrats’ Las Vegas presidential debate. Wolf Blitzer had crashed through Bill Richardson’s blowsy, high-minded disquisition on the need to observe human rights in Pakistan, with the question, “What you’re saying, Governor, is that human rights, at times, are more important than American national security?” Richardson seemed to gulp: Was I saying that? What do I do now? Uh, can’t pull a Hillary. And so, very deer in headlights, he said, “Yes.” This gave Blitzer license to ask each candidate the same question. Barack Obama wandered around in it. “The concepts are not contradictory … they are complementary.” True — but foolishly fuzzy. It was Dodd’s turn next, and he said without hesitation, “Obviously, national security, keeping the country safe.” He was quickly seconded by Clinton: “I agree with that completely.”

But the damage had been done. The next day, I suffered through Rush Limbaugh lambasting the dopey Dems, who actually — can you believe this, friends? — put the rights of terrorists above the nation’s security! That was ridiculous. All Richardson and Obama were saying was that support for human rights was an essential component of U.S. foreign policy. They are joined in this belief by George W. Bush, whose naive support for democracy in countries that aren’t ready for it has destabilized the Middle East. Sadly, that sort of complicating detail isn’t very useful in presidential campaigns. If Richardson or, more likely, Obama wins the nomination, the Republicans will have a ready-made “Human Rights for Terrorists” spot.

Dodd and Clinton were right on the merits and astute on the politics. If the Democrats want to win in 2008, they can’t be mealymouthed on issues of national security. That doesn’t mean they need to be witlessly hawkish. It doesn’t mean they have to join the neoconservative frenzy for war with Iran. It means they have to make the arguments against folly with clarity, toughness and a heavy dose of Realpolitik. It means they will have to convince the public that they will be more effective and realistic overseas than the Republicans have been. No more “Freedom Agendas.” No more quagmires. A renewed emphasis on cleaning out al-Qaeda, even if it means special operations against the terrorist camps in Pakistan (as Obama has suggested). It also means that in each and every debate, the Dems should acknowledge the progress being made in Iraq and ask the question, So why can’t we start bringing home the troops now?

That sort of clarity has been rare in the presidential campaign and almost totally nonexistent among the Democrats in Congress, who are being foolishly partisan on two key issues: continued funding for the war in Iraq and updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Iraq-funding issue is particularly difficult. Senator Carl Levin’s proposal for a gradual troop withdrawal, starting now, is the right policy. Various Bush Administration officials — though none in the White House — have told me that a troop withdrawal is the best leverage we have for shoving the Iraqis into a national-reconciliation deal. But Levin made troop withdrawal a condition for continued funding of the war, which is a kamikaze mission. The bill couldn’t muster the votes necessary to overcome a filibuster, much less the inevitable Bush veto. Indeed, with Iraq calmer for the moment, Democrats probably have fewer votes for ending the war than they did last spring. And their continued indulgence in these futile, symbolic gestures conveys a sense of weakness and incompetence. Whatever political value these votes once had — getting Republicans on the record in favor of continuing the war — has long since dissipated and may actually work against the Democrats if the progress in Iraq continues.

The Democratic strategy on the FISA legislation in the House is equally foolish. There is broad, bipartisan agreement on how to legalize the surveillance of phone calls and emails of foreign intelligence targets. The basic principle is this: if a suspicious pattern of calls from a terrorist suspect to a U.S. citizen is found, a FISA court warrant is necessary to monitor those communications. But to safeguard against civil-liberty abuses, all records of clearly nontargeted Americans who receive emails or phone calls from foreign suspects would be, in effect, erased. Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — House Republicans believe would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. (Democrats dispute this interpretation.) In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.

As Dodd said, when the President takes the oath of office, he (or she) promises two things: to protect the Constitution and to protect the nation against enemies, foreign and domestic. If the Democrats can’t find the proper balance between those two, they simply will not win the presidency.

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

By KAREN TUMULTY

Social Security has always been an issue that united the Democrats like no other. But suddenly, the most successful and popular government program in history is a subject of fractious debate in their party’s presidential primary. Barack Obama suggests that Hillary Clinton is refusing to engage in “a real, honest conversation” about the challenges that lie ahead for the program. And Clinton is accusing Obama of buying into “Republican scare tactics.”

At issue: Obama’s proposal to increase the taxes that wealthier Americans pay into the system. Currently, workers are taxed on only the first $97,500 of what they earn, a limit that will rise to $102,000 next year. Getting rid of the income cap, he says, would be enough to “virtually eliminate” the funding shortfall and guarantee the solvency of the system without cutting benefits. John Edwards would also increase the taxes but only on income over $200,000. And Clinton–well, she refuses to be pinned down on what, if anything, she would do with Social Security. Instead, she says she would put her emphasis on balancing the budget and appoint a bipartisan commission to figure out what to do with Social Security.

Turning it over to a commission is the kind of duck-and-cover drill that politicians have usually been able to get away with on Social Security. But Obama and Edwards aren’t going along this time. “We’re not really picking a fight about Social Security,” says Obama strategist David Axelrod. “We’re picking a fight about candor. [Obama] has been forthright about this, and Senator Clinton hasn’t.”

In Social Security, Obama believes he has found the perfect issue to demonstrate the transcendent brand of politics he offers. “We will not be able to solve this problem and protect Social Security for good until we stop treating it like a political wedge issue and instead unite Republicans and Democrats behind a sensible solution,” Obama wrote in an Op-Ed column in Iowa’s Quad-City Times.

But critics, including liberals who have allied with Obama on other issues, say any solvency crisis could be decades away. They accuse Obama of buying into the dire scenarios with which the Bush Administration tried–unsuccessfully–to partially privatize the system. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to write that Obama had been “played for a fool.” Adds a Clinton strategist: “This whole conversation is bewildering. Every Democrat in America has spent the past several years arguing that Social Security is not in a crisis.”

All of this is going to be watched closely, especially in Iowa. Proportionally, the state has one of the nation’s oldest populations. In 2004, 64% of those who attended Iowa’s Democratic caucuses were over the age of 50. While much has been said and written about Obama’s appeal to younger voters, he is also gearing his campaign toward the senior set, even proposing to eliminate income taxes for older Americans making less than $50,000 a year.

As a campaign issue, Social Security has a treacherous history. The last time it figured in any substantial way in a Democratic presidential primary was back in 1992. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton seized on a single passage in Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas’ campaign literature in which Tsongas floated the idea of holding down cost-of-living adjustments for entitlement programs. Bill Clinton declared that the idea proved Tsongas was an enemy of Social Security. He hammered that misleading charge in a barrage of negative ads and clinched the Democratic nomination. Candor in politics can carry a big price.