LEONARD PITTS JR. I was 6 years old when John F. Kennedy was killed. I don’t remember much about that time, but do I recall that people felt as if hope had died. The murdered young president had embodied transformation, the startling power of the new, a sense of promise, optimism, unexplored frontiers. Four decades of revelations about backstage politics, marital infidelities, gangsters and Marilyn Monroe have not stopped people from looking back on that era with longing. To his admirers back then, Kennedy represented a promise that we the people could be better than we were. Much as Barack Obama represents for his admirers now. That realization was crystalized for me by two events of recent days. • The first was public. Shortly after the Illinois senator won South Carolina’s Democratic primary, John F. Kennedy’s daughter Caroline announced her support of him in a New York Times column that compared him to her father. This was followed by an endorsement from her uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. • The second event was personal. A chat with one of my best friends. Michelle, 46, said she intends to volunteer for Obama’s campaign. As far as I know, she’s never volunteered for any candidate, ever. In that, she’s like my brother, also 46, also a first-time volunteer, also working for Obama. Michelle, a registered independent, told me that if Obama is not the Democratic nominee, she will vote Republican, even though none of the GOP candidates excites her. She feels she’d have no choice, because she can’t stand Hillary Clinton. Clinton is a politician, Michelle said. And at this crucial juncture in our history, ”We don’t need another politician. We need a leader.” Which strikes me as the most succinct explanation of Obama’s appeal I’ve ever heard. For months now, we in the punditocracy have struggled to frame the question of What It Means, this Obama phenomenon. We have talked about charisma, but that doesn’t half explain it. Bigger crowds are coming out for him. Republicans are switching parties for him. People who have never volunteered before are volunteering for him. “We don’t need another politician. We need a leader.” I submit that the answer to the question lies there. I submit that maybe a critical mass of us have grown sick of the politics of acrimony, the politics of red versus blue, the politics of addition by division. I submit that there is a yearning to be called into the service of something larger than self or party. It’s not that Obama is a tabula rasa, bereft of political ideology. He has an ideology, and moreover, that ideology is — pardon my language — liberal. Indeed, I interviewed him once and described him as a centrist, whereupon he promptly corrected me. It’s more accurate, he said, to say that he tries “to understand the arguments that are being made on both sides and to see there are ways of finding common ground. But that common ground may not always be in the middle.” Yet if Obama has an ideology, he has managed to avoid being trapped by it or defined by it. He has not sacrificed intellectual honesty for ideological purity. He comes across as a man not so rigidly enslaved by political creed that he cannot be persuaded, a man who is, in a word, reasonable. And reason has become a rarity. Obama appeals to American characteristics that have lately seemed used up, forgotten, discarded. Meaning our capacity for reinvention and the native idealism that powers it. That appeal has been Obama’s most valuable political asset, his Teflon and shield through the rough and tumble of this political season. “We don’t need another politician. We need a leader.”

If I were a politician, I’d be taking notes.

By David S. Broder

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Heading into Tuesday’s unprecedented day of voting in two dozen states, a degree of order is finally emerging in the dramatic races for the presidential nominations of both parties. Public opinion and leadership support are finding their way to the same destinations, pointing to a clear favorite and a single viable alternative in each race. John McCain has the easiest path remaining to the Republican nomination, with Mitt Romney needing some kind of dramatic breakthrough Tuesday to keep his hopes of an upset alive. On the Democratic side, the battle is closer, but the advantage has shifted back to Barack Obama — thanks to a growing but largely unremarked-upon tendency among Democratic leaders to reject Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president. The New York senator could still emerge from the “Tsunami Tuesday” voting with the overall lead in delegates, but she is unlikely to come close to clinching the nomination. And the longer the race goes on, the better the chances Obama will prevail as more Democratic elected officials and candidates come to view him as the better bet to defeat McCain in November. As the race has moved from contests in small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire to the national dimension of Tuesday’s voting, the role of endorsements and leadership testimonials has increased. The candidates simply lack the time and resources to make personal appeals to very many voters. Had McCain not invested such personal time in New Hampshire, holding more than 100 town meetings where he argued for the correctness of his views on the Iraq war, he could not have reversed the summertime disaster that overtook his campaign, when he ran out of money and lost most of his senior staff. But after turning back Romney in New Hampshire, the Arizona senator picked up significant establishment backing in South Carolina and Florida — hard-core Republican states where he had to show his credentials. He campaigned in South Carolina flanked by Sen. Tom Coburn and former representative Jack Kemp, icons of social and fiscal conservatism, and won Florida thanks to last-minute endorsements from Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. Mel Martinez. Now, with the defeated Rudy Giuliani adding his voice to the chorus of McCain endorsements, and with Mike Huckabee remaining in the race to challenge Romney from the religious right, McCain appears poised to lock up the nomination. Unelected conservative ideologues — such as Rush Limbaugh and George F. Will– can mutter in frustration, but Republican politicians recognize what was written here as long ago as last Dec. 2: “If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009 . . . it would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president — and president-in-waiting.” The Democratic race remains harder to handicap, in part because Clinton has already demonstrated her resilience by fighting uphill battles to prevail in New Hampshire and Nevada and because she retains formidable alliances and organizational strengths. But in the past two weeks, there has been a remarkable shift of establishment opinion against her and against the prospect of placing the party’s 2008 chances in the hands of her husband, Bill Clinton. The prominence of his role in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the mean-spiritedness of his attacks on Obama, stunned many Democrats. Clinton’s behavior underlined the warning raised in this column before Iowa, by a prominent veteran of the Clinton administration, that the prospect of two presidents both named Clinton sharing a single White House would be a huge problem for the Democrats in November if Hillary Clinton is the nominee. The Clintons’ negatives have brought much support to Obama, most notably that of Ted Kennedy, the most prestigious figure in the Democratic establishment in Washington. But it is also Obama’s own appeal that is being talked about across the country, from Massachusetts to Arizona, by the younger generation of governors, senators and representatives who share with him an eagerness to “turn the page” on the battles of the past. Obama is not inevitable, but the longer the race continues, the greater that hunger will be. And the growing recognition of McCain’s appeal to independents also works in Obama’s favor.

By Donald C. Orlich Special to The Spokesman-Review

January 31, 2008

On Jan. 21, as our nation observed Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, many statements focused on his famous “I have a dream” speech. Unfortunately, a dream is all that the majority of minority children have in Washington state. Why? Because of the devastation that the Washington Assessment of Student Learning is having on children of color, standards notwithstanding. The WASL is administered in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10. The total direct and indirect costs associated with the WASL are over $1 billion. For that tidy sum, let us review the results for only grade 10, a very critical point in high school where students often decide to stay on or drop out. Data for all 10th-graders – approximately 75,000 – who took the WASL in 2006-07 show the following: The percentages meeting standard — that is, passing an arbitrary score — were 80.8 on reading, 83.9 on writing, 50.4 on math and 36.4 on science. White and Asian students exceeded those performances in all categories. But the percentages for black students were 37 for reading, 39.3 for writing, 14.2 for math and 9.2 for science. Among students with limited English, the percentages passing were 38.3 in reading, 37.7 in writing, 10.7 in math and 2.9 in science. For American Indians, the corresponding figures were 68.4 in reading, 72.4 in writing, 31.3 in math and 19.3 in science. For Hispanic students the percentages were 66.1 in reading, 68.6 in writing, 25.6 in math and 15.5 in science. Low-income 10th-graders receiving free and reduced-price lunches recorded passing percentages of 68.2 in reading, 72.3 in writing, 30.5 in math and 18.7 in science. A detailed analysis for all grades in which the WASL is administered would show a similar (and most depressing) pattern, although there has been some improvement since 2000. The WASL and the costly nonsense of school reform, including the No Child Left Behind Act, flat out discriminate against poor and minority children and carry more than a hint of institutional racism. Yes, there are isolated instances where schools with large populations of minority or poor children have substantially higher passing rates on the WASL. But those schools are anomalies. Those increased scores cost students their chance for a well-rounded education – dropping art, music and vocational education. The percentages of 10th-graders meeting the WASL science standard range from 2.9 to 41.4. Is this an indication of poor science instruction? No. It is a dramatic illustration of a terribly constructed science test. Science is an important subject for our state. Science teachers have been subtly informed to shut up and do the WASL. School board members have been far too silent on the negative impact that the WASL is having on a balanced curriculum. A small number of brave superintendents are now fighting for changes in the graduation requirement, as are the state Parent Teacher Association and the Washington Education Association. Others have protested the adverse effect that the WASL has on all children, regardless of race, color or creed. Spokane and several other school districts face severe budget cuts for instruction and elimination of library services. This is in the face of the governor now wanting to waste more than $38 million on a new form of WASL. Take time to stand up and be angry. Dump the WASL and all its trappings. It is time to end this miscarriage of justice and end the WASL now. Only by eliminating this costly moral and educational blunder will that dream of Martin Luther King Jr. have a chance of becoming a reality. Contact your state senator and representatives to de-link the WASL from high school graduation. Better yet, suggest that the entire WASL reform package be thrown out.

John Edwards announces his withdrawal from the presidential race Wednesday in the Hurricane Katrina-stricken Ninth Ward of New Orleans as his wife, Elizabeth, and son Jack applaud. Associated Press (Associated Press ) Murray backs Clinton Democrat Patty Murray, Washington’s senior senator, on Wednesday endorsed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, citing their long working relationship and what Murray views as a good understanding by Clinton of regional issues, from border and port security to cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Murray, an automatic delegate to the national convention, had been staying away from an endorsement because of her spot in the Senate Democratic leadership.

Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times
January 31, 2008

WASHINGTON – He launched his campaign in the hurricane-ravaged quarters of New Orleans and traveled through Appalachia, talking about poverty and railing against corporate greed and financial disparities. But something strange happened as John Edwards built his campaign for president: He drew votes from an economically diverse bloc of voters, mostly white men, who were just as likely to be rich as they were to be poor.

Now that Edwards’ departure from the campaign has left a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are trying to figure out how to attract those voters. And because his support was hard to characterize – the one thing it was not was disproportionately poor – his political base is the subject of a scramble.

The latest surveys show Edwards supported by as much as 15 percent of the Democratic vote, enough to make the difference Tuesday when voting takes place in more than 20 states as part of a nationwide primary day. But where these voters’ sympathies will lie is a mystery.

The two senators moved quickly Wednesday to attract that base, adopting pieces of Edwards’ populist message.

Clinton, of New York, lauded Edwards for making poverty “a centerpiece of his candidacy” and said the issue should be “on the top of the list of American priorities.” Obama, from Illinois, called Edwards’ return to New Orleans a “gracious way to end” his campaign.

Edwards said Wednesday in New Orleans that he dropped out only after receiving assurances from Clinton and Obama that they would make poverty a central theme of their campaigns and, if elected, their presidency.

But the decision by the former North Carolina senator to leave the race, along with the surprising makeup of his supporters, suggests that the fiery populism he brought to the campaign was a doomed strategy from the beginning.

Poverty and income inequality “may not be the primary thing you want to hang your campaign on,” said Harry Holzer, an economist with Georgetown University and the Urban Institute in Washington. “Especially poverty – since it doesn’t directly affect most voters, you probably don’t want to make that your primary reason for running.”

Edwards made poverty a central, animating mission for his candidacy. He also talked often of the problems of working-class Americans, repeatedly reminding voters that his father had been a mill laborer.

Over time, his campaign took on a more emphatic and even angry tone, as he drew pictures of insurance companies denying health coverage that could save patients’ lives. He promised to kick corporate interests out of the room when negotiating public policy, saying his hardball tactics would work where his opponents’ would fail. “You can’t ‘nice’ these people to death,” he said.

But Edwards’ tone might have run too hot for the taste of some voters, even those feeling anxious about the economy.

Americans are generally reluctant to embrace anti-corporate messages, Holzer said. Similarly, he said, many people are uneasy with attempts to rein in free trade and place new constraints on the rich, as Edwards suggested.

Finance Committee comes up with its own plan

Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post
January 31, 2008

WASHINGTON – With bipartisan support, the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday approved a $157 billion economic stimulus plan that rivals the measure fashioned by President Bush and House leaders, setting up a Senate showdown today that could determine who will receive rebates from the federal government and how quickly the checks will arrive.

The Bush administration and House leaders had hoped the Senate would simply accept the stimulus plan approved by the House on Tuesday, ensuring final passage this week and mailing of the first checks by May. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will try today to block the Senate from adopting the Finance Committee plan and force the passage of the House bill instead.

That effort received a blow Wednesday when Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the influential ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, threw his weight behind the Senate alternative. Finance Committee Republicans Olympia Snowe, of Maine, and Gordon Smith, of Oregon, also backed the bill.

“Concern with timing must be weighed against the question of the quality of the House bill,” he said, singling out that plan’s failure to include as many as 20 million retirees.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., is counting on Democrats to stay unified behind their leadership, and said that if enough Republicans join Grassley, a threatened filibuster by McConnell would be broken and the House and Senate would be forced into negotiations on a final stimulus bill.

But with only three Republicans on the Finance Committee voting for the package, and Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., absent, Baucus’ ability to round up 60 votes to thwart a filibuster {cloture} is far from certain.

Senators added provisions to the Finance Committee bill to make a “no” vote on the Senate version very difficult, offering federal stimulus checks to 20 million low-income seniors and 250,000 disabled veterans who would be ineligible under the compromise worked out by Bush and House leaders. Senators also tightened wording in the House bill to make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to claim a check.

After the Finance Committee vote, AARP launched a lobbying push to win passage of the Senate version. Advocates of the Senate bill said House-Senate talks should take a few days.

By James Carney

In war and in politics, John McCain has endured more than his share of near-death experiences. He’s been shot out of the sky and held captive, hung from ropes by his two broken arms and beaten senseless. This is his second run for President; he lost before, has nearly lost again and has been all but disowned by his party. So on the night of South Carolina’s Republican primary, when the victory he needed to keep his campaign alive seemed as if it might be slipping away once again, McCain stood silent amid the chaos of his crowded hotel suite, his eyes fixed on the television screen. The normally loquacious Senator, who is rarely silent and hates to miss a punch line, was tuning the rest of the room out. Rumors that the primary was about to be called for McCain had fizzled, supplanted by whispers that Mike Huckabee had taken a slim lead in the ballot count. For a moment, it all seemed as though it were going to fall down again.

But the announcement came: “McCain wins South Carolina!” The room erupted in cheers; McCain’s wife Cindy dissolved into tears; and the candidate’s pale, scarred, 71-year-old face spread into a triumphant grin. “Whether it was because of what happened eight years ago in South Carolina or because his campaign was declared dead last July, I don’t know,” says Mark Salter, McCain’s adviser, speechwriter and alter ego. “But he was as happy as I’ve ever seen him.” The old warrior in McCain has learned to savor every battle won because he knows it could be the last.

McCain has traveled a long road to get where he is now, positioned as the ever-so-slight front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Last summer his once formidable campaign all but collapsed in debt and acrimony, with even his closest friends and advisers questioning whether he should bother marching on.

Now having won two important early contests (New Hampshire came first), McCain finds himself burdened with the front-runner label for the second time in a month, the third time in the past year and the fourth time since the 2000 primaries, when he challenged, briefly triumphed over and then was crushed in South Carolina by George W. Bush. Up to this point in McCain’s career as a presidential candidate, becoming the man to beat has meant, inexorably, that he was about to be beaten.

Whether that history repeats itself may depend on Florida, where the G.O.P. primary is a closed affair. That means no independents or crossover Democrats, the voters who secured McCain’s victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina, are permitted to cast ballots. If McCain does manage to win in such a pure party contest, it could be enough to persuade Republicans, desperate for clarity in this wild election cycle, to rally around him. “Florida is turning out to be the decisive state for the Republican Party,” says Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign. “Whoever comes out on top is going to have a tremendous amount of momentum.”

Maybe. But John McCain has been in presidential politics long enough to know that there is always the McCain exception to every rule. After he decisively beat former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in neighboring New Hampshire, McCain’s low-budget campaign expected a windfall of fresh donations to help propel it forward. But the haul was disappointing; donors still weren’t ready to buy in to a candidate they view as too much of a risk. The towering obstacle between McCain and victory is not so much his rivals for the nomination but the suspicion long held by many Republicans, especially rock-ribbed conservatives, that the Senator and former war hero is too much the maverick on issues that matter deeply to them to be trusted to occupy the White House.

G.O.P. Jitters
Conservative fears about McCain are often irrational: through a 25-year career in Congress, first in the House and then in the Senate, McCain has proved himself consistently pro-life on abortion and a hawk on defense, a scourge of wasteful government spending and a generally reliable vote in favor of tax cuts. Yet at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of party power brokers, McCain was booed.

Conservative élites are the ones most likely to break out into hives at the mention of McCain’s name. Former Republican House majority leader Tom DeLay has declared that he would not vote for McCain in the general election, even if Hillary Clinton were the Democratic nominee. Railing against McCain and Huckabee, both of whom he views as anathema to conservatives, talk-radio kingpin Rush Limbaugh recently warned his 13.5 million listeners, “If either of these two guys gets the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party.” A few days later, Limbaugh was so outraged by the possibility that Republicans might support McCain that he bellowed, “If you Republicans don’t mind McCain’s positions, then what is it about Hillary’s positions you dislike? They’re the same!”

The truth is that McCain and Clinton remain far apart on the political spectrum. But it is also true that conservatives have a lengthy bill of complaint against McCain. In the past decade he has joined with Democrats on a series of crusades in Congress — with Russ Feingold on campaign-finance reform and Ted Kennedy on immigration reform — that a majority of Republicans have opposed. He voted against President Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and ‘03, each time citing the need for fiscal restraint. And during his 2000 campaign, he labeled Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance.”

He has seemed to delight in doing battle with members of his own party and creed. “John’s mistake is that he makes it personal,” says a close friend in Washington. “When he’s convinced he’s doing the right thing, he has a hard time staying above the fray.” All the while — and this may be what galls conservatives most — McCain has been hailed by liberals and lionized in the mainstream news media for being a rebel.

This maverick reputation, so prized for its general-election appeal, makes it difficult for McCain to pass the primary threshold. As was the case in 2000, McCain in 2008 has yet to win even a plurality of Republican votes in a presidential primary outside his home state of Arizona and the generally liberal Northeast.

This frustrates McCain, something I saw over dinner with him in Washington in May 2002, when McCain told me he was probably through with running for President. He had tried it two years before and almost pulled off a historic upset against Bush. But, he said, “you can’t bottle lightning.” Twice during dinner, patrons went over to shake McCain’s hand and urge him to run again — against Bush in 2004 — as an independent or Democrat. The Senator was gracious and noncommittal. But after the second time, he gave me an exaggerated roll of his eyes and shook his head. “I’m a Republican, for chrissakes!”

The Right Stuff
But conservative and independent voters have the same question about McCain: What kind of Republican is he? In 2000, when the U.S. was at peace and the economy was luxuriating in the frothy end days of the first Internet boom, McCain’s first campaign was about character and biography much more than issues. McCain was the authentic hero, the fighter pilot who had been shot down over Hanoi and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war. He was the reformer and the straight talker, the rare politician who — perhaps because of his experience as a POW — wasn’t going to compromise his principles or hold his tongue to please his party. He was also, at his core, still the rowdy, runty, red-tempered plebe who finished near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy despite an IQ of 133. McCain became a symbol in 2000 of courage and candor. Few took close looks at his policy positions. It was almost enough to get him the Republican nomination.

This time is different. Character and authenticity still matter, but McCain’s reputation as an expert on defense and foreign affairs carries far greater weight in the post-9/11 world than it did eight years ago. On Iraq, McCain supported the invasion and still does. But he was an early critic of the way the Bush Administration was prosecuting the war and called for a change in strategy that would include a surge in U.S. troops to gain control of Baghdad. At the time, advocating an increase in U.S. troop levels in Iraq rather than a reduction was unpopular even within the G.O.P. But McCain stood by Bush when the policy was implemented.

For all his expertise, McCain tends to prefer blunt declarations about Iraq — “the surge is working.” He says U.S. troops should remain in Iraq for 100 years if necessary. What he doesn’t often discuss are the trade-offs required to sustain an unending commitment to a war that drains more than $9 billion from the U.S. Treasury every month. Instead, he is dismissive of those who doubt that he’s right. “It’s almost a ludicrous argument — ‘How long are we going to stay?’” McCain insisted to me between campaign stops in Florida’s Panhandle. “It’s like asking ‘How long are we going to stay in Japan?’ Well, we’ve been there since World War II.”

The success of the troop surge has given McCain points for prescience and reaffirmed his political courage. Yet there’s a downside too. As violence in Iraq has ebbed, economic anxiety has rocketed to the top of voters’ concerns. This shift exposes one of McCain’s weaknesses. He is a conviction politician, passionate about the issues that animate him, dismissive of and uninterested in those that don’t. Iraq, foreign policy, the military and treatment of veterans — these topics get him excited. In the domestic realm, he’s fire and energy when he rails against pork-barrel spending. But mention other issues — taxes, health care, education policy — and he briefly resorts to talking points before changing the subject. “Obviously, the economy is a very, very vital issue,” he told me. “There’s no doubt about that, O.K.? But the issue that’s going to be with us after the economy recovers is the challenge of radical Islamic extremism, of which Iraq is the central battleground.”

Can’t Help Himself
What’s both refreshing and vaguely masochistic about McCain is that even when he knows it’s in his short-term political interest to dodge a question or adjust his message, he often just won’t — or can’t — do it. If McCain becomes the nominee and wins the White House, he will be 72 when he takes office, the oldest person ever to ascend to the presidency. He has suffered serious skin cancers over the years, not to mention brutal physical torture as a prisoner of war. His age and health, therefore, are of legitimate concern to voters. But McCain doesn’t downplay his liabilities; he highlights them. “I’m older than dirt, with more scars than Frankenstein,” he likes to joke.

McCain has what author and friend Michael Lewis once described as “a love of actual risk” that is “freakish” in a politician. Before the Michigan primary, he told voters in the economically ravaged state that lost auto-industry jobs “aren’t coming back,” a dose of undiluted straight talk that probably cemented his loss there to Romney. And no sooner had he arrived in Florida than he declared himself opposed to a costly national catastrophic-insurance bill that is widely backed by Sunshine State voters and supported by Florida’s popular Republican governor, Charlie Crist, whose endorsement McCain covets.

Still, McCain’s appeal tends to transcend his positions on the issues — when it doesn’t contradict them entirely. He is the candidate most associated with supporting the President’s war in Iraq, yet he is the hands-down choice so far of antiwar and anti-Bush voters in his party’s primaries. He has accrued a far more conservative record in political office than Rudy Giuliani, Romney or, in many cases, Mike Huckabee, but he is, as he was in 2000, the favorite of independents and Democrats who choose to vote in G.O.P. primaries.

That’s the main reason that skeptical Republicans may fall in line behind McCain, even if they don’t fall for him. This is shaping up to be a dismal election year for the G.O.P.; regaining control of the House or Senate is beyond reach, and the incumbent Republican President has approval ratings that top out in the 30s. Home foreclosures are rampant, joblessness is up, and the markets are plunging. The Iraq war, while quieter, remains deeply unpopular. In other words, conditions could scarcely be worse for a Republican trying to win the White House. And yet every poll suggests that McCain — because of his appeal beyond his party — could actually win.

“McCain has his flaws,” says Ken Duberstein, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan, “but everyone is starting to recognize that he’s the most electable Republican out there.” As if to dare Republican pooh-bahs to keep dragging their feet, McCain is holding a top-dollar fund raiser at a Washington steak house favored by lobbyists, on Jan. 28, the day before the Florida primary. The message: Get on board now, before McCain’s nomination is a fait accompli.

If McCain does get the nod of his party, he has promised, he will wage a civil campaign. And he says he’s confident that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will play by the same above-the-belt rules. Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are his colleagues, after all, and McCain has worked with each of them in the Senate. He once even bonded with Clinton over late-night vodka shots in Estonia on a congressional trip. “I am confident we’d have a respectful debate with any of the three,” McCain says. “Why not? I’ve worked with them all. They’re all patriots.”

That’s the kind of talk that strikes terror in the hearts of many Republicans and makes them worry that McCain might lack the fire to attack his Democratic rival or, if he won the White House, might abandon the bedrock values of the G.O.P. in his zeal to make deals with Democrats. If McCain loses Florida, and the nomination, it will be because Republicans can’t overcome their doubts about him — and because McCain isn’t willing to make it easy for them.

By Gregory Rodriguez

I imagine he said it as if he were confessing a deep, dark secret. And, of course (wink, wink), he had no idea his little confession would make the rounds. But when Sergio Bendixen, Hillary Clinton’s pollster and resident Latino expert, told the New Yorker after her win in New Hampshire that “the Hispanic voter–and I want to say this very carefully–has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates,” he started a firestorm of innuendo that has begun to shape how the media are covering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the heavily Hispanic Western states. After the Jan. 19 Nevada caucuses, in which Latino voters supported Senator Clinton by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1, some journalists literally borrowed Bendixen’s analysis word for word before going on to speculate about Barack Obama’s political fortunes in such delegate-rich states as California and Texas. Ignoring the possibility that Nevada’s Latino voters actually preferred Clinton or, at the very least, had fond memories of her husband’s presidency, more than a few pundits jumped on the idea that Latino voters simply didn’t like the fact that her opponent was African American. The only problem with this new conventional wisdom is that it’s wrong. “It’s one of those unqualified stereotypes about Latinos that people embrace even though there’s not a bit of data to support it,” says political scientist Fernando Guerra of Loyola Marymount University, an expert on Latino voting patterns. “Here in Los Angeles, all three black members of Congress represent heavily Latino districts and couldn’t survive without significant Latino support.” Nationwide, no fewer than eight black House members–including New York’s Charles Rangel and Texas’ Al Green–represent districts that are more than 25% Latino and must therefore depend heavily on Latino votes. And there are other examples. University of Washington political scientist Matt Barreto has begun compiling a list of black big-city mayors who have received large-scale Latino support over the past several decades. In 1983, Harold Washington pulled 80% of the Latino vote in Chicago. David Dinkins won 73% in New York City’s mayoral race in 1989. And Denver’s Wellington Webb garnered more than 70% in 1991, as did Ron Kirk in Dallas in 1995 and again in 1997 and ‘99. If he had gone back further, Barreto could have added longtime Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, who won a majority of Latino votes in all four of his re-election campaigns between 1977 and 1989. Are these political scientists arguing that race is irrelevant to Latino voters? Not at all. Hispanics, coming from many countries, are hardly monolithic; but all things being equal, Latino voters would probably prefer to support a Latino candidate over a non-Latino candidate, and a white candidate over a black candidate. That’s largely because they are less familiar with black politicians, as there are fewer big-name black candidates than white ones, and because, stereotypes not withstanding, many Latinos don’t live anywhere near African Americans. California, for example, which has the largest Latino population in the country, is only 6% black. Furthermore, in politics, things are never equal. “It’s all about context,” says Rodolfo de la Garza, a political-science professor at Columbia University. “It always depends on who else is running. Would Latino Democrats vote for a black candidate over a white Republican? Hell, yes. How about over a Latino Republican? I’m very sure they would.” Guerra says name recognition and the role of mediating entities such as unions, political parties and Latino elected officials are also important. For a well-known black politician or incumbent, there is little problem winning Latino voters. But when the candidate is not well-known, it helps to be endorsed by mediating institutions that people trust. Part of Obama’s problem in Nevada was that, apart from the late endorsement by the Culinary Workers’ Union, he didn’t have a lot of that institutional support. And though he has begun to build those relationships in California–including the endorsement of the Latina head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor–he may not have enough time to attain the kind of recognition among Latino voters that Clinton enjoys. But if there’s one thing we’re learning in this historic year, it’s that voters are even less easy to pigeonhole than candidates.

Rodriguez is author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America

By Joe Klein

“I think it is fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time,” Barack Obama recently told a Nevada editorial board. The Senator took some notable, if not quite accurate, grief from Hillary Clinton over that: she said he was expressing support for Republican ideas (clearly, he wasn’t). But what did he actually mean? People—and not just Republicans—have been calling the GOP the party of ideas for nearly 30 years, since Ronald Reagan transformed the mushy, defensive conservatism of his party into a sleek ideological message celebrating individual freedom, military strength and traditional moral values.

It was an easy sell, in part because the political pendulum was swinging rightward from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, but also because the Democrats seemed to have lost confidence in their own ideas. They had lapsed into an intellectually sloppy identity politics, subdividing themselves by race, gender and sexual preference. They fixed on narrow-gauge programs rather than broad themes. All too often they sounded like Ginsu-knife salesmen on late-night cable television: “And if you buy our children’s health-care plan, we’ll throw in—absolutely free!—a $4,000 college-tuition tax credit. Plus, this special onetime offer: universal day care!” To be sure, the Republicans had their own special interests and slovenly hypocrisies—an avalanche of corporate tax breaks that made Swiss cheese out of the federal code—but they could always return to their big, clean public offer: freedom, strength, morality.

There was and is, however, one very big idea lurking at the heart of the Democratic Party, even if its leaders have been loath to unleash it. If Republicans were about individual freedom, Democrats were about national unity. If Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Democrats can say, “Government is the ultimate expression of our public values—including our desire to create a free, fair market system.” For decades since Reagan, it has been easy for feckless demagogues to rail against the nation’s capital as if it were a deadly virus implanted on the Potomac by space invaders or the French. But that ended abruptly on Sept. 11, 2001, when Karen Hughes changed pronouns at a White House press conference: “Your Federal Government continues to function effectively.”

In 2008, a fresh, maybe even exciting federal response to the interlocking national economic, energy and security crises should be front and center of the debate, but none of the Democrats running for President seems to have the courage or sagacity to make the offer. Their timidity was obvious when George W. Bush proposed a larger economic-stimulus package—roughly $145 billion—to meet the looming recession than Clinton, Obama or John Edwards did. Worse, the Democrats seemed willing to play on the Republican side of the field, proposing short-term fixes and tax rebates rather than a more comprehensive, thematic solution to the problem. Think about it: the terrorist threat to national security, the relative decline of the American middle class, the sudden flimsiness of the international economic structure—to say nothing of the potential destruction of the planet—all are influenced by the fact that, as Clinton often says, “we borrow money from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis.” Somewhere in there is a big campaign theme waiting to be born.

The intensity of these problems is so obvious, even the Republicans—especially John McCain, Mike Huckabee and the latest edition of Mitt Romney—are talking about them. But GOP credibility is undercut by its antediluvian Reaganism: its reflexive opposition to any solution—and therefore any sense of nonmilitary national purpose—coming out of Washington.

All the leading Democrats have produced impressive energy-independence plans, with Clinton’s the most sophisticated, but none of them have extrapolated, none of them have made this the central theme of their campaign, the national purpose that provides the spine for their economic and national-security plans. Clinton, to her credit, threw $5 billion for weatherproofing and retrofitting into her stimulus package, but it was an afterthought. “We weren’t being as creative as we might have been,” one of her economic advisers told me.

Creative would have been to announce a Great American Renewal, to announce—for starters—that we’re going to attack the looming recession by unleashing an army of unemployed construction and manufacturing laborers to insulate every public building in America, replace every incandescent lightbulb, rebuild the rail system for high-speed travel and start building solar and wind farms to provide electricity for our military installations and every other federal building. Or whatever. But something big, something that recognizes that the word United, which appears prominently in the name of our country, is probably the biggest Democratic idea of all.

Thomas Sowell
January 30, 2008

Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a “stimulus package” of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy.

That alone should be enough to make us remember that “the devil is always in the details,” because things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan.

A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done.

The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general notion that there are things the government could do to make things better in the economy.

Unfortunately, there is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to do.

Economists can give you all sorts of scenarios in which government intervention could make things better, whether when fighting off a recession, regulating domestic markets or controlling international trade.

Some people even believe that whenever there is “market failure,” the government ought to step in.

Of course markets can fail. Everything human can fail. But if Alex Rodriguez strikes out, do the Yankees take him out of the game and send in a pinch hitter for him?

No one would dream of suggesting such a thing. We are far more rational when discussing sports than when discussing politics.

The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.

There are too many examples of government interventions that made things worse, the Great Depression of the 1930s being the most tragic.

Those on the left love to believe that the stock market crash of 1929 showed the failure of the free market and that the New Deal interventions in the 1930s saved the day.

But the stock market crash of 1987 was just as big and Ronald Reagan resisted loud calls for him to intervene. The result was not another Great Depression but the beginning of a decades-long period of prosperity.

Before Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt came along, there was no expectation that the federal government would intervene when the stock market crashed or when there was a downturn in the economy.

Previous stock market crashes and previous downturns in the economy worked themselves out faster and less painfully than the Great Depression of the 1930s, just as the 1987 crisis did.

The track record of government intervention is far less impressive than its rhetoric.

One of the biggest problems with government intervention in the economy is that politicians usually have neither the knowledge nor the incentives to intervene at the right time.

Bruce Bartlett has pointed out that most government intervention in an economic downturn comes too late. That is, the problem it is trying to solve has already worked itself out and the government intervention can create new problems.

More fundamentally, markets readjust themselves for a reason. That reason is that people pay a price for their misjudgments and mistakes.

Government interventions are usually based on trying to stop them from having to pay that price.

People who went way out on a limb to buy a house that they could not afford are now being pictured as victims of a heartless market or deceptive lenders.

Just a few years ago, people who went out on that limb made money big-time in a skyrocketing housing market. But now that they have been caught in the ups and downs that markets have gone through for centuries, the government is supposed to bail them out.

Solving short-run problems, especially in an election year, often means creating long-run problems. Pumping money into the economy can help many problems. but do not be surprised if it also leads to inflationary pressures and financial repercussions around the world.

Froma Harrop
January 30, 2008

Single women were supposed to be the Democrats’ guest of honor on Election Day. Excuse me, unmarried women. The party has studied unmarried women so much it knows they don’t like to be called single women.

But something wild is happening. Unmarried women are crashing the party early. In Iowa, they were 28 percent of Democratic caucusgoers. In New Hampshire, they were 22 percent of the party’s primary voters, and in South Carolina, 30 percent. Those are big numbers – for them.

“It’s exceptional given past history,” Sarah Johnson of the Democratic-aligned group “Women’s Voices. Women Vote” told me.

That history shows single women voting in dismal numbers. Only 59 percent turned out for the 2004 presidential election, compared with 71 percent of married women. For midterm elections, their participation nearly falls off the map. They normally sleep through the early political contests – the caucuses and primaries. Until now.

Democrats have huge stakes in awakening this demographic. Unmarried women make up nearly a quarter of the electorate – a bigger share than blacks, Latinos and Jews combined. And when they do participate, their vote is overwhelmingly Democratic.

In 2004, single women preferred Democrat John Kerry by 25 percentage points. By contrast, married women gave Republican George W. Bush an 11-point margin. The Democratic Party’s big hope is that an activated single sisterhood will do for them in 2008 what white evangelicals did for Republicans in 2004.

The category, of course, covers a lot of territory. Unmarried women can be impoverished young mothers, hotshot professionals, elderly widows or college students. But these subgroups all go to the polls less often than their married counterparts. Single blacks, three-quarters of black women, come closest to matching their married sisters’ voting records.

Unmarried women certainly haven’t shown unity of preference in the Democratic caucuses and primaries. Young educated whites pushed Barack Obama to victory in Iowa. Older women drove Hillary Clinton’s triumph in New Hampshire, and Hispanics helped her take Nevada. And in South Carolina, black women propelled Obama to his major win.

What accounts for this burst of civic interest? One explanation is that the campaigns are aggressively recruiting single women.

Another says it’s the times. The economic insecurities haunting many struggling Americans are even darker for single women. If wages are flat, theirs are flatter. Unmarried women are more likely to lack health coverage than the population at large. A study by “Women’s Voices. Women Vote” found unmarried women less happy with the country’s direction than any other major voting bloc.

The storyline in South Carolina focused on whether black women would favor a fellow woman, Hillary Clinton, or fellow black, Barack Obama. (Over half of the Democratic primary voters in South Carolina were back.) That these women might have considered factors other than race and gender – health care, for example – got little play.)

Whatever. Obama’s sizable margin of victory wasn’t the most interesting statistic here. It was the turnout numbers. More than 500,000 people had voted, an 80 percent increase from the 2004 Democratic primary.

A Democrat will eventually be anointed, and the angry dust will settle. While single women may now be splitting their affections among the Democratic candidates, they haven’t shown a similar divide between Democrat and Republican.

If the turnout by unmarried women on Nov. 4 follows the trajectory of these early contests, this group may very well elect the next president. Democrats will no doubt target single women in an energetic get-out-the vote campaign, but they may not have to send engraved invitations

Call them single. Call them unmarried. But don’t call them politically disengaged. Not this year.

By Chris Cillizza
washingtonpost.com staff writer

Sen. John McCain won a crucial victory over former governor Mitt Romney today in Florida’s Republican primary, a second straight win that cements the Arizona senator as the front-runner for his party’s nomination.

With 80 percent of the vote on the Republican side counted, McCain led Romney, 36 percent to 31 percent. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had staked his entire campaign on a strong showing in Florida, trailed with 15 percent. Former governor Mike Huckabee (Ark.) ran fourth with 13 percent.

“Our victory might not have reached landslide proportions, but it’s sweet nonetheless,” McCain told supporters in Miami tonight.

The results were a major disappointment for Giuliani, who had said he needed a strong showing in the state to build momentum for the nearly two dozen states set to vote on Feb. 5.

“You don’t always win but you can try to do it right,” Giuliani said in a speech to supporters in Orlando. He gave no indication about his plans, but a senior Giuliani aide said that it’s “very, very likely” the former mayor will drop out of the race tomorrow and endorse McCain.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) won a largely symbolic primary victory.

The Democratic primary in Florida was effectively neutralized by the Democratic National Committee after the state resisted warnings not to move its presidential primary into January. When Florida Democrats did not comply, the national committee pledged not to seat the state’s delegates at the party’s national convention this summer, and none of the candidates actively campaigned there.

Despite the “beauty contest” nature of the race, Clinton made a stop in Florida this evening to thank her supporters. Clinton described her showing as a “resounding victory.”

The stakes were far higher on the Republican side. McCain picked up all 57 Florida delegates to the national convention in this winner-take-all contest. The victory proved that McCain could win a race in which only Republicans were allowed to vote.

In his two previous victories, in New Hampshire and South Carolina, McCain was buoyed by support from independent and Democratic voters. Those showings echoed his performance in the 2000 presidential race and stoked concerns that the base of the party had not yet accepted him.

In an exit poll, six in 10 Republican voters in Florida described themselves as “conservative.” Among those voters, Romney led with 40 percent of the vote to 27 percent for McCain.

The exit polling showed the economy as the breakaway issue, with nearly half of GOP voters calling it the nation’s top concern. In something of a surprise, McCain led among those voters despite Romney’s heavy focus on his experience as a businessman and investor in creating jobs in the private sector.

McCain, a decorated naval veteran and senior senator, beat Romney convincingly among voters who described the war in Iraq as the most pressing issue facing the country. Romney won by double digits among the group that chose illegal immigration as the central issue in the campaign. Romney criticized McCain’s immigration stand as favoring “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

Roughly three in 10 of Republicans who voted today are military veterans, nearly four in 10 are seniors and about two in 10 describe themselves as independents, according to the exit polling. About one in eight is Hispanic; up somewhat from 2000.

McCain’s victory consolidated his front-runner status after wins in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Crucial to McCain’s victory was the last-minute endorsement of Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who stumped with the Arizona senator this morning. Throughout the day, McCain blasted Romney as a flip-flopper on matters of importance to the party base and a liberal masquerading as a conservative.

The two leading Republican candidates bashed one another repeatedly in the days leading up to the Florida vote.

On Monday, Romney hit McCain for allegedly backing liberal policies on energy and immigration policy as well as campaign finance reform. Ideas like that “aren’t conservative, those aren’t Republican, those are not the kind of leadership that we need as we go forward,” Romney said.

McCain, whose personal distaste for Romney is an open secret, was quick to respond. “Mitt Romney’s campaign is based on the wholesale deception of voters,” McCain said, alleging that the only thing on which the Massachusetts governor had been consistent was his inconsistency. During his victory celebration tonight, McCain had kind words for Romney and his other Republican opponents.

As in previous state races, Romney heavily outspent his main rivals on television. The former Massachusetts governor ran 4,475 commercials in Florida, compared to just 470 for McCain, according to figures released by the Nielson Co.

Florida represented a critical test for both men.

For McCain, it was a chance to prove that he can win over rank-and-file Republicans. Unlike New Hampshire and South Carolina, where McCain won primaries this month with heavy backing from independents, only registered Republicans were allowed to vote in Florida’s contest. In claiming victory tonight, McCain happily noted that “As I’ve been repeatedly reminded lately,” this was an all-Republican primary.

For Romney, Florida was an opportunity – lost — to prove that the fight for the Republican nomination is a two-man affair heading into Super Tuesday. To date, Romney has scored wins in two states that were lightly contested –Nevada and Wyoming — and Michigan, where his father served as governor and where he was born.

Many of the campaigns predicted a huge turnout today, and state elections officials said a large number of voters had already cast absentee ballots or early votes.

Some 972,982 early and absentee ballots had been cast by Saturday, according to state officials. Of those, 521,036 were by Republicans and 451,946 were by Democrats.

Although technically there were 210 Democratic delegates up for grabs today, none of those delegates will be awarded to candidates due to sanctions imposed by the Democratic National Committee for the Sunshine State’s decision to move its contest too early in the nominating calendar.

Over the last few days, the campaigns of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) have feuded over the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the Florida vote. Clinton has voiced support for the seating of Florida’s delegates at the party’s national convention in Denver and rolled out endorsements from Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and former U.S. attorney general Janet Reno who ran for the Florida governor’s mansion in 2002.

Obama’s campaign has accused Clinton of seeking to change the rules of the game and insisted that no attention should be paid to the results from Florida tonight.

Washington Post staff writers Juliet Eilperin, Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. and Polling Director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.

By MICHAEL POWELL and MICHAEL COOPER

Perhaps he was living an illusion all along.

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president took impressive wing last year, as the former mayor wove the pain experienced by his city on Sept. 11, 2001, and his leadership that followed into national celebrity. Like a best-selling author, he basked in praise for his narrative and issued ominous and often-repeated warnings about the terror strike next time.

Voters seemed to embrace a man so comfortable wielding power, and his poll numbers edged higher to where he held a broad lead over his opponents last summer. Just three months ago, Anthony V. Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s affable senior policy adviser, surveyed that field and told The New York Observer: “I don’t believe this can be taken from us. Now that I have that locked up, I can go do battle elsewhere.”

In fact, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was about to begin a free-fall so precipitous as to be breathtaking. Mr. Giuliani finished third in the Florida primary on Tuesday night; only a few months earlier, he had talked about the state as his leaping-off point to winning the nomination.

As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign. He allowed a tight coterie of New York aides, none with national political experience, to run much of his campaign.

He accumulated a fat war chest — he had $16.6 million on hand at the end of September, more than Mitt Romney ($9.5 million) or Senator John McCain ($3.2 million) — but spent vast sums on direct mail instead of building strong organizations on the ground in South Carolina and New Hampshire.

Indeed, his fourth-place finish in New Hampshire, a state where he was once considered competitive, provided an early indication of his vulnerability.

And, curiously, this man with the pugnacious past declined to toss more than light punches at his Republican opponents.

Mr. Giuliani spoke on Tuesday of his own strategic mistakes, suggesting that his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries. But this is a rhetorical sleight of hand; he in fact competed hard in New Hampshire, to remarkably poor effect.

Perhaps a simpler dynamic was at work: The more that Republican voters saw of Mr. Giuliani, the less they wanted to vote for him.

He was a temple-throbbing Italian-American New Yorker who ruled a cacophonous city seen as the very definition of liberalism. He was somewhat liberal on social issues — notably immigration and abortion — where Republican candidates are invariably conservative. And he possessed a complicated family life: he has been thrice-married and has two adult children who rarely speak to him. At the beginning of his campaign last spring, he sat for a celebrity photo shoot smooching with his third wife, who snuggled in his lap.

“It bordered on science fiction to think that someone as liberal on as many issues as Rudy Giuliani could become the Republican nominee,” said Nelson Warfield, a Republican consultant who has long studied the former mayor’s career. “Rudy didn’t even care enough about conservatives to lie to us. The problem wasn’t the calendar; it was the candidate.”

Several of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign aides acknowledged as much Tuesday. They say he tried to tack right without ever really convincing voters that he had experienced a change of heart. And an adviser who has known Mr. Giuliani since the early 1990s and spoke on condition of anonymity said the mayor’s early poll numbers struck him as ephemeral.

“His numbers were built on name recognition and celebrity,” this adviser said. “He had so many of his old friends around him, sometimes it was like he was running for president of Staten Island.”

Still, in the beginning, few such cracks were evident in the Giuliani campaign machine.

Mr. Giuliani led the Republican field in polls throughout the summer, as his support peaked in August in New York Times/CBS News polls at 38 percent nationally in a four-way fight with Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and Fred Thompson. That put him 20 points ahead of his next closest competitor, Mr. Thompson, who has since dropped out of the race.

Mr. Giuliani often played to large crowds in New Hampshire and on forays through the Deep South; everyone seemed to love his tough talk on terrorism. When Mr. McCain’s campaign nearly flat-lined last summer, as he ran low on money, Mr. Giuliani seemed poised to take great advantage.

No candidate last summer sent out as many direct-mail appeals in New Hampshire as Mr. Giuliani. Last fall, the campaign also broadcast its first television commercials there, ultimately spending more than $3 million on advertisements, and dispatched Mr. Giuliani there for lots of retail campaigning in a state where voters tend to worry more about taxes and the military than conservative social issues. And the candidate seemed at peace with this choice.

“It is not inconceivable that you could, if you won Florida, turn the whole thing around,” Mr. Giuliani told The Washington Post in late November on a bus trip through New Hampshire. “I’d rather not do it that way. That would create ulcers for my entire staff and for me.”

But Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was stumbling, even if it was not immediately evident. He leaned on friendly executives who would let him speak to employees in company cafeterias. Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain, by contrast, compiled lists of undecided Republican voters and invited them — sometimes weeks in advance — to town-hall-style meetings.

“Rudy Giuliani had a tremendous opportunity in New Hampshire that his campaign never embraced,” said Fergus Cullen, the state Republican chairman. “They vacillated between being half committed and three-quarters committed, and that doesn’t work up here.”

Mr. Giuliani also relied on a New York-style approach to photo-friendly crowds. “Rudy went very heavy on Potemkin Village stops, working what I call ‘hostage audiences,’ “ Mr. Cullen said. “It looked like he was campaigning, but he didn’t know who he was talking to.”

A curious new vulnerability also arose. As mayor, Mr. Giuliani took much joy in crawling through the weeds of policy debate, flashing his issue mastery. But as a presidential candidate, he as often seemed ill at ease.

Mr. Giuliani once embraced gun control, gay rights and abortion rights; he knew that all of these issues would be a tough sell to Republicans. While he never shifted positions as sharply as Mr. Romney — who renounced his former support of abortion and gay rights — he as often occupied a muddled middle ground that pleased no one.

This became most evident in the first Republican debate. Asked about repealing Roe v. Wade, he was equivocal.

“It would be O.K. to repeal,” he said. “Or it would be O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision.”

Later, he said that the decision on abortion should be left to women — but that he would appoint strict constructionist judges of the type who had favored overturning Roe v. Wade.

“Give him credit — he sort of stuck to his positions,” Mr. Warfield said. “It made him a man of principle, but it won’t make him the Republican nominee.”

Storm clouds swept over the Giuliani campaign in October and November. A federal prosecutor indicted his friend and former police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik. And a report indicated that Mr. Giuliani had spent city money to visit his girlfriend, now his wife, in the Hamptons; the police also provided some security for his new love.

Cause and effect is difficult to chart in a presidential campaign. Mr. Giuliani’s poll numbers did not fall off the table. But the news gave newly wary voters another reason to reconsider him.

By late fall, Mr. Giuliani’s poll numbers were fading in New Hampshire, and he trailed Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain. He began a curious two-step, saying he would compete in but probably not win in New Hampshire.

Weeks earlier, he had executed a similar tactical retreat in South Carolina — he and his campaign strategist, Mike DuHaime, said they hoped voters would cast ballots for him, but they did not necessarily expect to win the state.

That was a tough pitch in states where voters much pride themselves on being taken seriously by candidates.

“DuHaime comes out and says it’s all about delegates, rather than winning the state,” Mr. Cullen said. “It was amazing. It was the talk of every Dunkin’ Donuts and rotary club.”

By late December, Mr. Giuliani made a fateful decision. He formally abandoned plans to run hard in and perhaps win New Hampshire or Michigan. Instead, he made sporadic appearances in those states and retreated to Florida, where he would make something of a final stand.

This was a deeply controversial move; no one had won an election by essentially skipping the first four or five caucuses and primaries. With this decision, he consigned himself to the media shadows during weeks of intensive coverage. But Mr. DuHaime, who had run President Bush’s effort in the Northeast in a past election, signed off on it, as did his other top campaign aides.

In the end, Mr. Giuliani and his advisers treated supporters as if they were so many serried lines of troops. If they tell a pollster in November that they are going to vote for you, this indicates they are forever in your camp, their thinking went.

But politics does not march to a military beat; it is a business of shifting loyalties. By Tuesday night, even those voters who rated terrorism as the most important issue were as likely to vote for Mr. Romney or Mr. McCain as for Mr. Giuliani. And those who had voted early for Mr. Giuliani now felt a sense of irrelevance.

“I’ve already voted; I vote for Mr. Giuliani,” David Brown, 70, said in Sun City Center Florida. “I wish I’d voted for Mr. Romney.”

So Mr. Giuliani confronts the hardest of choices, as he finished far behind two other candidates in a state he vowed to win. Some of his former aides, particularly those who hail from his days at City Hall, have urged him to slog on to New York, New Jersey and California on Feb. 5.

But there, too, the ground is shifting. Only weeks ago, Mr. DuHaime spoke in a call about the former mayor’s strong lead in those states. “Some of these leads are momentum-proof at this point,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani now trails or is at best tied in polls in all of those states. And soon after that phone call, reporters received a memorable e-mail rebuttal from Mr. Romney’s spokesman, Kevin Madden.

“Mayor Giuliani’s momentum-proof national polling lead, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all walk into a bar,” it began. “You’re right. None of them exist.”

Dalia Sussman and Russ Buettner contributed reporting.

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, January 29, 2008; 10:19 PM

DAVIE, Fla.

Cheering supporters? Check. Election returns on the projection screen? Check. Andrea Mitchell and Candy Crowley doing stand-ups? Check and check. In fact, the only piece missing from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Florida victory party here Tuesday night was a victory.

Yes, Clinton (N.Y.), as expected, beat Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) by a wide margin in the Democratic primary in Florida. But all the Democratic candidates had agreed months ago to boycott the contest after the Democratic National Committee stripped Florida of its delegates to punish the state for moving up its primary date. The result was a primary without purpose, a show about nothing.

But in a political stunt worthy of the late Evel Knievel, the Clinton campaign decided to put on an ersatz victory party that, it hoped, would erase memories of Obama’s actual victory Saturday night in South Carolina’s Democratic primary. “Thank you, Florida Democrats!” Clinton shouted to the cheering throng. “I am thrilled to have this vote of confidence.”

It was a perfect reproduction of an actual victory speech, delivered at a perfectly ersatz celebration at a perfectly pretend location: a faux Italianate palace with lion sculptures, indoor fountains and a commanding view of Interstate 595. The Signature Grand (”Elegant Weddings and Grand Social Occasions”) was also holding receptions Tuesday night for a pediatric practice and for a group of optometry students, but the Clinton campaign was the biggest draw: It filled the Silver Palm Room, the Golden Palm Room and the Emerald Palm Room.

But even some of the faithful in the hall doubted that the big margin for Clinton, flashed on a projection screen, was an accurate gauge of the race here. “Probably not,” said Eleanor Forte, on the outer rim of the celebration. “If they had campaigned here, it probably would have come out differently.”

That was a nuance the Clinton campaign was hoping to overlook as it sought retroactively to give weight to the Florida primary. “I am a gutter-ball bowler,” Clinton said as she campaigned Sunday night in the state in which she had pledged not to campaign. The remark, overheard by a Miami Herald reporter, was no doubt meant literally; she was standing outside Lucky Strike Lanes in Miami Beach. But in politics, too, Clinton has recently been putting some questionable rotation on the ball.

First came the South Carolina primary, in which she and her husband tried unsuccessfully to morph Barack Obama into Jesse Jackson. Then came word Sunday that she would fly here to celebrate her “victory” in the Florida primary — even though she and the other Democratic candidates long ago declared it null and void. She said she wanted restoration of the stripped delegates from disobedient Florida and Michigan (where Clinton, the only major candidate on the ballot, beat “uncommitted,” 55 percent to 40 percent).

“There are more voters in Florida alone than there are in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina combined,” Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle argued in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. This was the same Solis Doyle who last summer committed Clinton to signing the Florida boycott pledge, saying, “We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process, and we believe the DNC’s rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role.”

Five minutes after Solis Doyle’s call, Obama’s campaign retaliated with its own conference call, featuring Obama backer Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). “It is not a legitimate race, it should not become a spin race, it should not become a fabricated race,” he protested.

Reporters on the Clinton conference call seemed to share that view. “The timing seems a little curious,” said one. “A little desperate?” asked another. “Trying to have it both ways?” inquired a third.

Clinton announced plans for the Florida celebration on Sunday, the same day she held a trio of fundraisers in Florida and accepted the endorsement of the Miami mayor while pressing some flesh for the cameras. On Monday, her campaign claimed the endorsement of Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, while pro-Clinton unions continued sending out mailings in her support.

All of this sounded suspiciously like campaigning. But aides said they were merely trying to protect the people of Florida who, despite the campaign’s “scrupulous” refusal to campaign in the state, showed up to vote for Clinton anyway.

And so, at the Signature Grand here Tuesday night, a few hundred invited supporters, many of them from labor unions, clustered around the ballroom doors waiting for the Secret Service to finish its sweep so they could start the victory party and buy “ultra-premium” liquors for $7. There was a brief delay opening the doors, as organizers let the old folks — a prominent demographic in South Florida — take their seats first. But when the doors finally opened at 7:30, the younger supporters charged in, screaming and staking out positions near the lectern.

Wolf Blitzer was up on the big projection screen. Clinton banners (”Solutions for America”) had all the camera angles covered. The orange stucco palace was filled with official Hillary Clinton posters and stickers, and people in “Team Hillary” T-shirts signed in elected officials and other supporters. Clinton aides worked the rows of reporters and the candidate entered to the strains of “9 to 5″ and roars from the crowd.

“Thank you, thank you for this tremendous victory tonight,” Clinton shouted.

Well, at least a tremendous victory party.

State of the Union Reflects New Focus on Money Matters
By Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 29, 2008; A01

President Bush told the American people last night that his strategy to stabilize Iraq is achieving results “few of us could have imagined just one year ago,” even as he sought to reassure the public that his new stimulus plan will stave off a recession that threatens to hobble the nation’s economy during the final year of his presidency.

Appearing before Congress for his seventh and last State of the Union address, Bush claimed vindication for his controversial decision a year ago to send a “surge” of about 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. “The enemy is still dangerous, and more work remains,” Bush acknowledged, but with a decline in the number of high-profile attacks, sectarian violence and civilian deaths, he said, progress is unmistakable.

“Some may deny the surge is working,” Bush said, “but among the terrorists there is no doubt. Al-Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, and this enemy will be defeated.”

Bush’s address highlighted the shifting priorities of an administration that had planned to focus its final year on the war and other international challenges but has found itself moving quickly in the past month to address the growing crisis in the economy. The past year has brought an increasing tide of bad economic news, culminating in last week’s global stock market panic over a collapsing housing market and other financial woes in the United States.

The president called on Congress to finish work quickly on a $150 billion stimulus package, urging lawmakers not to “load up” the initiative with measures beyond the tax rebates and business incentives he agreed to last week with House leaders. “That would delay it or derail it, and neither option is acceptable,” said Bush, who also repeated his long-ignored call to make permanent his early-term tax cuts.

The president avoided grim economic talk and instead described conditions as mixed. “In the short run, we can all see that growth is slowing,” he said. “America has added jobs for a record 52 straight months, but jobs are now growing at a slower pace. Wages are up, but so are prices for food and gas. Exports are rising, but the housing market has declined.”

Bush appeared in a cheery mood during his valedictory State of the Union. He chuckled at the partisan rites of the annual speech, in which Democrats and Republicans roared at different junctures, interrupting him with applause more than 70 times in the 53-minute address. His remarks, however, came amid a fierce political campaign season in which many voters are looking beyond the Bush presidency to his potential successors.

In a nod to the political realities, the president did not revive the kind of ambitious reforms on Social Security and immigration that animated his past State of the Union addresses. He offered instead a menu of familiar initiatives, mixed in with modest new proposals on education, social services and assistance for military families, that his aides said stand a reasonable chance of congressional passage before the political conventions start in late August.

One new plan would devote $300 million to new grants for low-income children to attend private schools. The president also proposed writing into law rules that require federal agencies to give equal consideration to religious-based groups providing social services to the poor.

Bush, whose administration has come under fire in recent years over the poor treatment of injured soldiers, also unveiled several initiatives aimed at boosting federal assistance to families of veterans and active service members. One proposal would give hiring preferences throughout the federal government to military spouses; another would allow troops and veterans to transfer unused GI education benefits to spouses and children.

Bush’s approach suggested that he remains undaunted by the low approval ratings that have characterized his presidency in recent years. “We have unfinished business before us,” the president said, “and the American people expect us to get it done.”

Democrats chose a centrist red-state governor, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, to respond to Bush’s address. She described the stimulus package as only a “temporary fix” and blasted Bush’s foreign policy for leaving the nation with “fewer allies and more enemies.” But her message also struck a conciliatory tone: “There is a chance, Mr. President, in the next 357 days, to get real results and give the American people renewed optimism that their challenges are the top priority.”

The top two congressional leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) offered faint praise for Bush. “We agree with the President that we must work together to make progress on our most pressing challenges,” they said in a statement. “Yet, tonight, the President offered little more than the status quo. At a time when our economy is on shaky ground and our leadership around the world is eroding, the status quo won’t do.”

Bush made clear to Democrats that he intends to employ fully the powers of the presidency until his final hours in office. He reiterated his demand that they approve new surveillance legislation by Friday, when a temporary wiretapping law is set to expire. He also said he will use his veto pen and administrative powers to try to rein in the proliferation of “earmarks,” the projects inserted by lawmakers into annual spending bills and totaling roughly $17 billion in the last budget.

Bush warned he would veto any spending bill that does not cut in half the number and cost of earmarks from the year before. He also said he will sign an executive order requiring agencies to ignore any earmark not included in the language of legislation. “The people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks,” Bush said.

Bush’s pledge was met with skepticism from many Democrats and even some in the GOP, who noted that the practice increased dramatically while Republicans controlled Congress. “The number of earmarks exploded under Republican leadership in the House, and for six years President Bush did nothing to slow their growth,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).

In keeping with the traditional civility of the occasion, Bush was greeted warmly as he entered the House chamber. Among the lawmakers present were two of his would-be Democratic successors, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

The White House invited a customary mix of prominent and ordinary citizens to sit with first lady Laura Bush as a way of humanizing some of the broader themes of the president’s speech. Last night, the guests included a single mother from Tanzania who benefited from the U.S. global AIDS initiative; the co-chairs of his commission on health care for veterans; and several troops who served with valor in Iraq and elsewhere. Bush did not introduce any of the guests, as he and past presidents have done.

Bush devoted special attention to the two main issues that could shape long-term perspectives on his presidency: the souring economy and the war in Iraq.

On Iraq, Bush made clear he is not ready to accelerate a drawdown of U.S. forces, which are scheduled to return to pre-”surge” levels of 130,000 by mid-summer. He cited a warning from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, that pulling troops out too quickly risks the recovery of al-Qaeda in Iraq and an increase in violence.

“Members of Congress,” he said, “having come so far and achieved so much, we must not allow this to happen.”

Democrats challenged Bush’s upbeat portrait of conditions in Iraq. While even critics concede violence has ebbed because of the troop increase, many military experts are unsure whether this is a temporary phenomenon. And even senior U.S. military commanders are concerned that the military progress has not been matched by steps to forge a more lasting political accord.

Bush renewed his call to strengthen the No Child Left Behind Act, which set up a system of testing and other benchmarks for the nation’s schools, and urged Congress to ratify trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. He also promised that the United States will do “everything we can” to achieve a peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis, which has become a major goal in his final year in office.

Bush also proposed to contribute $2 billion over three years to an international clean-energy fund. He will seek additional funds from countries such as Britain and Japan, and a donors’ committee will dole the money out in the form of grants, loans and loan guarantees. The money would probably go to firms selling such things as energy-efficient coal plants and would help make those less expensive for buyers from developing countries.

Staff writers Paul Kane, Lyndsey Layton and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

Jack Z. Smith
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
January 29, 2008

America’s housing meltdown has spawned an epidemic of home foreclosures and job losses. It has dealt huge hits to the bottom lines of big homebuilders and Wall Street banks. It has sent the stock market into a frightening tailspin. It’s triggering fears of a recession and sending shock waves to financial markets around the world.

In the United States, the victims range from shell-shocked homebuyers unable to keep up ballooning subprime mortgage payments to middle-class investors seeing their 401(k) value plummet.

Most of this pain could have been avoided had it not been for greed, imprudence and sloppiness on the part of everyone from homebuyers to mortgage lenders.

Some damage control is occurring. Mortgage service companies have helped hundreds of thousands of homebuyers with subprime loans by modifying mortgages and setting up repayment plans. Congress is considering sorely needed legislation to help prevent future mortgage abuses, and a general economic stimulus package is planned to juice the economy. The Federal Reserve Board has ratcheted down interest rates, which could encourage refinancing of mortgages and the sale of many homes awaiting a buyer.

A massive government bailout targeted directly at the housing industry and beleaguered homeowners would be inappropriate, however.

Reckless homebuyers, mortgage lenders, real estate speculators and Wall Street investors who took risks and got burned must, as a general rule, suck it up and move on. American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their mistakes, which often resulted from greed, dishonesty, wishful thinking and throwing caution to the wind.

There were the homebuyers, for example, who lied about their income to qualify for loans. Many homebuyers foolishly entered into subprime loans with low “teaser” interest rates that are now resetting at higher levels and raising monthly payments by hundreds of dollars.

Then there were the greedy, sloppy lenders who issued loans they never should have and who in some cases didn’t even bother to document the buyer’s income (the infamous “no-doc” loans).

There were the big Wall Street banks that purchased subprime loans, packaged them into mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investors such as pension and hedge funds. Authorities in New York and Connecticut are investigating whether the banks failed to disclose sufficient information about the risk of loan defaults.

There were the real estate speculators whose capacity for wishful thinking was boundless. They worked on the theory that home prices would keep rising forever, even after home prices in California routinely began topping $400,000.

Some Americans were skeptical long before the housing collapse. They would, for example, hear about a young couple of modest means buying a $200,000 home and wonder how on earth they could afford it. Some people without steady jobs and a respectable credit rating somehow qualified for a mortgage.

In short, lending practices got far too loosey-goosey. The next time there’s a housing boom, such laxity shouldn’t be allowed, lest we want an inevitable housing bust to follow.

A young couple should wait to buy a home if the only choice is to take out an ultra-risky subprime loan. And if you’re a lender, how could you sleep at night knowing that you had made such a potentially problematic loan to someone blinded by the prospect of realizing the American dream?

The negative impact of the housing meltdown probably will total trillions of dollars when you take into account everything from tumbling home values to falling stock prices.

Will we learn from this? How on earth could we not?

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
January 29, 2008

The aptly named Republican “retreat” last weekend at the ritzy Greenbrier resort in West Virginia should have included Democrats because Republicans are behaving just like them.

There was President Bush arguing for his “bipartisan stimulus package” and supporting government handouts with borrowed money. Republicans can always cut a bipartisan deal if they behave like Democrats.

House Minority Leader John Boehner implored his fellow Republicans to “sacrifice” by agreeing to a one-year moratorium on earmarks to “prove” that Republicans are the party that can fix Washington. Someone should have pointed out to Boehner that the word “fix” also is used to describe the neutering that occurs at a veterinarian’s office to keep a pet from reproducing. The Republican Party is engaging in self-mutilation.

President Bush, according to the Wall Street Journal, chose to “use his State of the Union address to lay down his toughest anti-earmarking pledge to date … tell Congress that he will veto any fiscal 2009 spending bill that doesn’t cut earmarks in half from 2008 levels” and issue “a Presidential order informing executive departments that from now on they should refuse to fund earmarks that aren’t explicitly mentioned in statutory language.”

This would have been more credible and more effective had it occurred when Republicans controlled Congress. Too many Republicans continue to embrace the notion that more spending on pork barrel projects will keep them in office. They should have been disabused of that notion when they lost control of Congress in the 2006 election, largely because their collusion with President Bush on spending and expansion of government mimicked the Democrats. The Republican rank and file and Independent voters prefer their liberalism straight up rather than diluted by party leaders.

The best opportunity Republicans had at their retreat to prove they see the light on spending was to name the tireless anti-pork crusader Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, to the powerful Appropriations Committee. This would have been the equivalent of placing a preacher at the entrance to a house of ill repute, or a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union on an alcohol beverage and control board. The analogies are apt because too many politicians are drunk on power and behave like harlots with other people’s money.

Flake, who was passed over for the post, would be the conscience of the committee, which has been devoid of a moral compass no matter which party controls the House. He sends out news releases spotlighting the “Egregious Earmark of the Week.” Last week’s was $1.12 million for potato research, which he characterized as “a waste of money no matter how you spell it.”

In a phone call from the retreat, Flake told me his colleagues rejected an earmark moratorium after hearing pleas from some members that earmarks were the only way they can get re-elected (whatever happened to ideas?). He said Republicans called on Democrats to act first and that by doing so they missed an opportunity to stand on principle and win political points. Flake predicted, “we’ll get there” on earmark restraint, but not until after more Republicans are indicted and “an anti-earmark crusader like John McCain or Mitt Romney is nominated and elected president.”

What Republicans need is a dose of Barack Obama, who recently praised Ronald Reagan to the consternation of leading Democrats. Obama correctly noted that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not.” That’s because Reagan had core principles from which he rarely deviated.

Instead of standing in front of those silly signs they use to promote whatever it is they are talking about, Republicans should use backdrops that promote some of Reagan’s greatest sayings. These include:

“Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States”; “Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets”; “Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them”; “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves”; “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

My personal favorite is: “Man is not free unless government is limited.”

That last one should be tattooed on every Republican member of Congress. Have any of these core principles been proved wrong, outdated or unworkable? Did not these ideas promote economic growth and Republican electoral prosperity?

They did, so why aren’t Republicans advancing them again, instead of retreating and trying to buy votes with “stimulus” packages and pork barrel projects?

Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
January 28, 2008

Barack Obama is not a Muslim.

We know this because he has told us so.

We know it because there is no credible evidence to suggest otherwise.

We know it despite a campaign of lies and whispers from various bloggers, pundits and head cases.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim. But, what if he was?

Same guy, same charisma, same inspirational idealism. But also, a Muslim. Not a crazy Muslim. Not a guy prone to strapping bombs to his chest in hopes of meeting virgins in heaven. A Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-type Muslim. A Dave Chappelle, Ahmad Rashad, Shaquille O’Neal-type Muslim. A guy you like and admire who just happened to be, you know … Muslim.

Would it matter? Should it?

The question bears answering because of the creepy, are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been attitude toward Islam that seems to be seeping into the public dialogue lately. As in that campaign of lies and whispers that keeps showing up in my inbox – claims that Obama won’t salute the flag, took his oath of office on a Quran, belongs to a terror cell and other assorted idiocy.

NBC News anchor Brian Williams has apparently been getting the same e-mails. In moderating a recent Democratic debate, he asked Obama about rumors “that you are trying to hide the fact that you’re a Muslim …”

The senator laughed a heard-that-a-few-times-before laugh. Then he replied that he is a Christian, that he is a victim of Internet rumor and that he trusts the American people to “sort out the lies from the truth.”

What bothered me is that, by its phrasing, Williams’ question presupposed there is something wrong with being a Muslim. And Obama’s answer left the presupposition unaddressed.

What if he was a Muslim? What then?

A 2007 Pew Research Center survey found that 43 percent of us have a favorable opinion of Muslims (make it Muslim-Americans and the number rises to 53 percent). That may sound not so bad, except when you compare it to favorable ratings of other religious groups. Jews, for instance, are at 76 percent. Even evangelical Christians manage 60. And that ranking for Muslims represents a 5 point drop since 2004.

It’s no mystery why the nation’s opinion of Muslims is becoming less favorable. In a word, terrorism. And frankly, Americans are right to fear Muslim fanatics who embrace violence as a means of getting what they want.

But see, the key word there is not Muslim. It’s fanatic. Yet some of us still think Muslim is the brand name for crazy. Me, I think the only difference between religious fanatics here and in the Middle East is that Middle Eastern nations tend to be theocratic (i.e., the word of the holy book has the force of law) and to be intolerant – sometimes, violently so – of dissent. So no one dares tell them no.

But if Pat Robertson, to name an American Christian fanatic not quite at random, had the force of law behind him and the ability to silence those who disagree, don’t you think he would be as scary as the scariest ayatollah in Iran?

I do. That’s why I would never want him to be president. That’s not quite the same as saying I’d never want a Christian to be president. I just prefer my presidents – regardless of their religion – reasonable. And sane. That seems a fair standard.

Yet it’s a standard some of us now discard. The ongoing whisper campaign against Obama, against his very American-ness, is a shameful appeal to ignorance and fear. Against that, I offer a simple statement the world’s most famous and well-loved follower of Islam made just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I am a Muslim,” said Muhammad Ali. “I am an American.”

That says it all. Or at least, it should.

Michael Barone
Creators Syndicate
January 28, 2008

South Carolina: In 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2000, it was the state that, with its early primary, determined the winner of the Republican nomination for president. It gave George H.W. Bush the nomination over Bob Dole, determined that he would not be upset by Pat Buchanan, delivered for Dole over Buchanan and gave George W. Bush a decisive victory over John McCain.

This year, South Carolina was not decisive in the same way. Its Republicans gave John McCain a 33 percent to 30 percent victory over Mike Huckabee Jan. 19, and Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton by a decisive margin on Saturday.

Neither result, at least at this time, seems likely to determine the nomination. Mitt Romney and, depending on his showing in Florida on Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani appear capable of beating McCain. Clinton’s numbers in Florida and the Feb. 5 primary states look much stronger than her numbers in South Carolina. And, just to take no chances, she seems poised to defy the Democratic Party’s ban on campaigning in Florida (because it scheduled its primary earlier than allowed under party rules).

But both South Carolina results seem likely to reshape the two parties’ contests – and perhaps to change the balance of strength between the two parties and reduce what has been a major advantage for the Democrats.

For the Republicans, Huckabee’s defeat in South Carolina seems to remove him as a major contender. He has won many votes from evangelical and born-again Christians, but except in the Iowa caucuses, he has not won big majorities in the group and has won only about 10 percent of the votes of other Republicans.

He doesn’t have the money to run much in the way of ads in Florida. This means we’re unlikely to see a confrontation between Huckabee and one other candidate, between someone closely identified with evangelicals and one who is not. The result: The winner of the primary will not be seen as having disrespected a core constituency of the party.

Democrats face a dissimilar prospect. John Edwards, who won 4 percent of the delegate vote in Nevada, is effectively out of the race, whether he keeps delivering his “two Americas” speech or not. That pits Hillary Clinton against an African-American candidate, and her surrogates – Black Entertainment Television head Bob Johnson, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, former President Bill Clinton – have been delivering harsh attacks on Obama with racially loaded language.

The Nevada caucus, the first contest with large minority participation, revealed sharp differences between groups that Democrats regard as core constituencies. The entrance poll showed Obama carrying black caucus-goers 83 percent to 14 percent, while Clinton carried Latinos 64 percent to 26 percent and Jews 67 percent to 25 percent.

Polls in South Carolina, where blacks will make up about 50 percent of primary voters, have him carrying blacks by wide margins – the reason everyone assumes he will win there. But Florida and several Feb. 5 states have smaller percentages of blacks and larger percentages of Latinos and Jews. The 2004 Democratic primary voters in California, the nation’s largest state, were 8 percent black and 16 percent Hispanic. I haven’t found the Jewish percentage, but it’s probably at least 5 percent.

Nationally, Rasmussen’s post-Nevada daily tracking shows Obama leading among blacks 62 percent to 19 percent and Clinton leading among whites 43 percent to 23 percent. That looks like a sharper racial polarization than we saw before the round of caucuses and primaries began. It raises the possibility that Hillary Clinton may win the Democratic nomination by visibly disrespecting a core constituency of the party. And that could spell trouble, in the form of low black turnout, in the general election.

South Carolina, whose early primary was engineered by the late Lee Atwater, and which gave the Republican nominations to the two Presidents Bush, doesn’t seem likely to determine either party’s nominee this year, but may have done a lot to shape the fall campaign.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

MIAMI — The presidential campaign is entering a new phase as Democratic and Republican candidates move beyond state-by-state competition and into a potentially protracted scramble for delegates Congressional district by Congressional district.

The shifting terrain is influencing the strategies of candidates from both parties — though decidedly more so for Democrats — as they move from early state contests to the coast-to-coast contests on Feb. 5, when 41 percent of Republican delegates and 52 percent of Democratic delegates will be chosen.

It is the first time in over 20 years in which the campaign has turned into a possibly lengthy hunt for delegates, rather than an effort to roll up a string of big-state victories.

This development reflects the competitive races in both parties, with neither a Republican nor a Democrat yet able to claim front-runner status. It has forced the campaigns to master complex delegate-allocation rules as they make a series of critical decisions about how best to allocate campaign resources to produce the greatest return of delegates.

Many of these decisions involve as little as a single delegate.

“We are going to compete in all 22 states; you can’t ignore states,” said David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois. “But you want to get as many delegates as you can. At the end of the day, this is a delegate contest.”

Carl Forti, the political director for Mitt Romney, a Massachusetts Republican, said: “There’s two things going forward at this point. One is momentum; but two, it’s about delegates.”

For Republicans, this means, for example, turning to approximately 10 heavily Democratic Congressional districts in California where there are relatively few registered Republicans, making it easier, and less expensive, to win a district and its three delegates. Both Senator John McCain of Arizona and Mr. Romney are heading there on Wednesday.

For Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Mr. Obama, it means investing resources — mailings, telephone banks and candidate visits — in Congressional districts where there are an odd number of delegates at stake, creating an opportunity to pick up an extra delegate.

Under Democratic rules, two candidates who do well in a Congressional district are likely to end up evenly dividing the delegates; where there is an odd number of delegates, the extra one goes to the candidate who wins more votes.

“It’s all about the delegates!” Mr. Obama said the other day, shouting his words to a crowd of supporters. His itinerary this week includes a visit to California but also to smaller states that his aides said offered opportunities for picking up delegates, whether or not he can win the state itself: Arizona, Kansas, Missouri and New Mexico.

This new dynamic is not only challenging the way the candidates are approaching the contest, but is also throwing into confusion how the results of these contests should be judged, by the campaigns and by the news media that report on them.

Given Democratic rules, it is entirely possible for one candidate to win a majority of Feb. 5 states, and enjoy the election night ratification that comes with a TV network map displaying the geographic sweep of that person’s accomplishment, while his (or her) opponent ends the night with the most delegates.

On the Republican side, it is possible for one of the candidates to win the overall popular vote in California, but end up with fewer delegates than a rival, since most of the delegates are awarded in winner-take-all Congressional district races.

“This race requires everyone to sort of throw away their old assumptions and start thinking anew,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The important thing to measure on Feb. 5 is where we are in terms of delegates. My guess is one of us will be ahead, but not decisively, and one of us will be behind, but not decisively, and this will go on for some time.”

Democrats had a preview of this in the Nevada caucuses when Mrs. Clinton won the actual vote of people who attended the caucuses, but Mr. Obama won 13 delegates to her 12, leaving the two sides squabbling over who had prevailed.

The fight was renewed Sunday when aides to Mrs. Clinton argued that the Florida primary on Tuesday — in which no delegates are at stake, because the state held its primary earlier than allowed by the Democratic National Committee — should nonetheless be viewed as a measure of the strength of the candidates.

Mr. Obama’s advisers ridiculed the argument, given that the primary is purely a beauty contest.

The possibility of a long-term slog is real for Democrats, given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama appear evenly matched in resources and political talent.

It is less certain on the Republican side, pending the outcome of the party’s primary here on Tuesday. Aides to Mr. Romney and to Mr. McCain said they were putting off many crucial decisions, in particular where to go and how to invest resources, based on who wins in Florida.

McCain campaign aides said that if Mr. Romney lost here on Tuesday, it would clear the road for Mr. McCain to win the nomination by traditional rules: sweep enough state contests on Feb. 5 to rally the party around him as the presumptive nominee.

Still, McCain aides said they were making decisions about how to approach Feb. 5 based on what would net them the most delegates, looking first and foremost at a handful of states where the winner gets all the delegates, either statewide or district by district.

“It’s triage,” said Rick Davis, campaign manager for Mr. McCain. “But winner-take-all states have got to be the top priority. The cost per delegate is so much lower.”

For Democrats, 2,025 delegates are needed to win; for Republicans, the number is 1,191.

The sheer number of states in play — indeed, the sheer number of Congressional districts in play — has presented an extraordinary tactical challenge to these candidates at a time when they are running low on resources. It is prohibitively expensive to poll in all these states and districts to determine where to spend money. It is also prohibitive to run voter identification operations or advertise everywhere a candidate might be competitive.

Aides to Mrs. Clinton and to Mr. Obama said they had tried to compensate for that by building models, based on past voting history and even consumer data, to pinpoint Congressional districts where voters would seem particularly open to their candidate.

Beyond that, the delegate rules for Democrats and for Republicans are different and, within each party, often vary from state to state. For example, the Republicans have some states where the statewide winner gets all the delegates, providing an obvious target for a candidate who might seem strong there. Among them are Missouri, New Jersey, New York and Utah.

But there are other states where the delegates are allocated by Congressional district, sometimes winner-take-all, and sometimes proportionally.

By contrast, Democrats eliminated the so-called winner-take-all rules. Instead, delegates are allocated depending on the percentage of vote each candidate gets in a Congressional district, under very expansive rules that, generally speaking, mean the candidates divide the trove evenly assuming they get more than 30 percent of the vote. There are also some delegates allocated statewide, again proportionately.

That rule, aides to both campaigns said, has the effect in a race that seems so closely matched of making it extremely hard for anyone to pull far ahead.

“It’s going to be really hard — I’m not saying it’s impossible — it’s going to be very difficult for someone to pull out way ahead in a delegate count,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic consultant and an expert on his party’s nominating rules. “If you have two candidates who are getting 30 percent of the vote, and that is the scenario that is developing now, they are going to pretty much split the delegates.”

Republican rules reward bonus delegates to states with a Republican voting history. This means that it might make more sense to invest time in Missouri than the more populous larger state of New Jersey; there are more delegates to be won in Missouri because it voted Republican in the 2004 presidential race, and it is a much cheaper place to campaign.

By contrast, someone like Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who has long argued he would win by a slow accumulation of delegates, has banked on winner-take-all rules helping him sweep up large number of delegates in states like New York, New Jersey and Delaware. That said, his viability in those states will to no small extent be determined by how well he does here Tuesday.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Macon, Ga.

By JEFF ZELENY and CARL HULSE

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Senator Edward M. Kennedy, rejecting entreaties from the Clintons and their supporters, is set to endorse Senator Barack Obama’s presidential bid on Monday as part of an effort to lend Kennedy charisma and connections before the 22-state Feb. 5 showdown for the Democratic nomination.

Both the Clintons and their allies had pressed Mr. Kennedy for weeks to remain neutral in the Democratic race, but Mr. Kennedy had become increasingly disenchanted with the tone of the Clinton campaign, aides said. He and former President Bill Clinton had a heated telephone exchange earlier this month over what Mr. Kennedy considered misleading statements by Mr. Clinton about Mr. Obama, as well as his injection of race into the campaign.

Mr. Kennedy called Mr. Clinton Sunday to tell him of his decision.

The endorsement, which followed a public appeal on Mr. Obama’s behalf by Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, was a blow to the Clinton campaign and pits leading members of the nation’s most prominent Democratic families against one another.

Mr. Kennedy, a major figure in party politics for more than 40 years, intends to campaign aggressively for Mr. Obama, beginning with an appearance and rally with him in Washington on Monday. He will be introduced by Ms. Kennedy.

Mr. Kennedy then heads west with Mr. Obama, followed by appearances in the Northeast. Strategists see him bolstering Mr. Obama’s credibility and helping him firm up support from unions and Hispanics, as well as the party base.

The endorsement appears to support assertions that Mr. Clinton’s campaigning on behalf of his wife in South Carolina has in some ways hurt her candidacy.

Campaign officials, without acknowledging any faults on Mr. Clinton’s part, have said they will change tactics and try to shift Mr. Clinton back into the role he played before her loss in the Iowa caucuses, emphasizing her record and experience.

Mr. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, has worked closely with Mrs. Clinton, of New York, on health care and other legislation and has had a friendly relationship with both Clintons, but associates said he was intrigued by Mr. Obama’s seeming ability to inspire political interest in a new generation. For his part, Mr. Obama actively courted Mr. Kennedy for several years, seeking him out for Senate advice and guidance before making the decision to enter the presidential race.

Mr. Kennedy had been seriously considering an endorsement for weeks — a break with his traditional practice of staying clear of primaries.

He remained uncertain of his decision as late as the middle of last week. But, according to allies, when he learned that his niece’s endorsement would appear as an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on Sunday, he decided to bolster that with his own public embrace of the campaign at a joint rally at American University in Washington on Monday, giving Mr. Obama, of Illinois a potentially powerful one-two Kennedy punch.

As Mr. Obama flew here on Sunday, he smiled when asked about his new wave of support from the Kennedy family.

“For somebody who, I think, has been such an important part of our national imagination and who generally shies away from involvement in day-to-day politics to step out like that is something that I’m very grateful for,” Mr. Obama said of Caroline Kennedy’s support. Ms. Kennedy declined requests on Sunday to discuss her endorsement.

Trying to dilute the impact of the twin endorsements by the brother and daughter of the late president, the Clinton campaign on Sunday issued a statement of support from Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former lieutenant governor in Maryland and a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.

“I respect Caroline and Teddy’s decision, but I have made a different choice,” Ms. Townsend said in her statement, adding: “At this moment when so much is at stake at home and overseas, I urge our fellow Americans to support Hillary Clinton. That is why my brother Bobby, my sister Kerry, and I are supporting Hillary Clinton.”

But two years ago, Ms. Townsend’s mother, Ethel Kennedy, referred to Mr. Obama in an interview as “our next president” and likened him to her late husband.

The Kennedy endorsement grants Mr. Obama, who has been framed by the Clintons as being short on experience, the approval of one of the Senate’s senior members.

Before the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Kennedy had planned to stay out of the race, largely because he had so many friends in the contest, chiefly Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut. He also said he was waiting for one of the candidates to spark a movement.

“I want to see who out there is going to be able to inspire not only our party, but others, because I think we’re going to need the inspiration in order to bring a change in American foreign policy and domestic policy,” Mr. Kennedy said last year on ABC News’s “This Week.”

After Mr. Obama won the Iowa caucuses, associates to both men said, Mr. Kennedy concluded that Mr. Obama had transcended racial lines and the historical divisions the Kennedy family had worked to tear down. Mr. Kennedy was also impressed at how Mr. Obama was not defined as a black candidate, but seen as a transformational figure.

It was then, associates said, that Mr. Kennedy began talking with his children, nieces and nephews, including Caroline Kennedy, who had reached her own judgment some time ago independently of her uncle. They then agreed last week to move ahead with their endorsements, coordinating their decision before the Feb. 5 contests.

Mr. Kennedy has a long history of working with the former president and Mrs. Clinton on health, education and other social issues and, according to his associates, has a good relationship with both. While the Clintons were in the White House, the families socialized and sailed off Cape Cod.

Mr. Obama courted Mr. Kennedy as well, using late-night sessions in the Senate to get some tutoring about the intricacies of the institution. Conversations about the White House began more than a year ago, with Mr. Obama paying Mr. Kennedy a visit to seek his thoughts about whether he should run for president. Mr. Kennedy told him that he should because such opportunities rarely come along.

On the night of Mr. Obama’s national political debut at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he was preceded on stage by Mr. Kennedy, a symbolic bookend of the party’s dean and its new generation.

A year later, near the end of Mr. Obama’s first year in the Senate, Ethel Kennedy asked him to speak at a ceremony for her husband’s 80th birthday. At the time, she referred to Mr. Obama as “our next president.”

“I think he feels it. He feels it just like Bobby did,” Mrs. Kennedy said in an interview that day, comparing her late husband’s quest for social justice to Mr. Obama’s. “He has the passion in his heart. He’s not selling you. It’s just him.”

Democratic Race Continues With No Clear Front-Runner
By Dan Balz, Anne E. Kornblut and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 27, 2008; A01

CHARLESTON, S.C., Jan. 26 — Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois won the South Carolina primary in a landslide Saturday, attracting a biracial coalition that gave his candidacy a much-needed boost as the Democratic presidential race moves toward a 22-state showdown on Feb. 5.

Obama trounced Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the first Southern primary of the 2008 campaign, winning 55 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 27 percent. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina was third with 18 percent.

After a bitter and racially charged campaign in which former president Bill Clinton became the center of controversy, Obama won with overwhelming support from African Americans and attracted about a quarter of the white vote, according to exit polling.

“After four great contests, in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans that we’ve seen in a long, long time,” Obama told an enthusiastic crowd of supporters in Columbia who interrupted his victory speech with chants of “Yes, we can!” and “Race doesn’t matter!”

Obama depicted the Democratic race as “the past versus the future.” But he told supporters they are facing a formidable challenge, and then, alluding to controversies that erupted with the Clintons last week, said, “This is our chance to end it once and for all.”

Obama’s big victory margin means the battle for the Democratic nomination will continue without a clear front-runner. Obama and Clinton have now split the first four contests of the campaign, and the candidates face the possibility of a conflict that aides in both campaigns said Saturday could stretch into March or even April.

In a move certain to spark more warfare with the Obama campaign, Clinton set her sights on Tuesday’s beauty-contest primary in Florida as a way to blunt Obama’s South Carolina momentum.

That contest is not sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee, and the candidates earlier agreed not to campaign there. But Clinton, who leads in polls there, signaled Saturday night that she will seek a public relations victory in a state that will turn out more voters than in any contest to date.

Clinton currently leads in a number of the most populous states with contests on Feb. 5, including California and New York, and her campaign has predicted that she will emerge from the competition that day with a lead in convention delegates. Obama hopes to win more states than Clinton on Feb. 5, but he will be equally focused on preventing her from jumping into a big lead in the battle for delegates.

Clinton’s campaign had anticipated a loss in South Carolina and sought throughout the week to play down the significance of the vote here. But Obama’s victory margin was far larger than her advisers or any pre-primary poll had expected, as Obama demonstrated an ability to energize his supporters on a day when turnout appeared likely to break the previous record for a Democratic primary in the state.

Clinton left South Carolina shortly after the polls closed and delivered her concession speech in Nashville. She briefly offered her congratulations to Obama and then plunged into a version of her standard stump speech. “I want to tell you how excited I am that now the eyes of the country turn to Tennessee and the other states that’ll be voting on February 5th and, of course, to the state of Florida that will be voting on Tuesday,” Clinton said.

Her husband was campaigning in Missouri, another Feb. 5 state, and said there that Obama had won “fair and square.” But before leaving South Carolina, he compared Obama’s victory to those of Jesse Jackson in the same state in 1984 and 1988. “Jackson ran a good campaign and Obama ran a good campaign here,” he said.

Edwards, who won South Carolina four years ago, appeared to capitalize on the bickering between Clinton and Obama, winning half of the white voters who made up their minds in the final three days.

Edwards hopes to profit from the Clinton-Obama wrangle. But after three consecutive third-place finishes, he now must decide whether continuing his candidacy will result in him becoming a potential power broker or a spoiler.

Speaking to supporters, Edwards vowed to carry his campaign forward to “give voice to millions of Americans who have absolutely no voice in this democracy.”

Obama’s victory was built on a foundation of support from African Americans. Black voters made up slightly more than half of the Democratic electorate on Saturday, and Obama won about four in five of their votes.

Months earlier, he and Clinton were in a pitched battle for the support of black voters, with Clinton hoping to draw on her and her husband’s deep roots in the African American community. But Obama quickly consolidated their support, and his superior organization provided an extra boost that paid off on voting day.

Clinton made a special effort to attract support from African American women, but they were as strong in their support for Obama as were black men. Obama defeated Clinton among black women 4 to 1.

The South Carolina campaign turned into the nastiest stage of the Democratic battle so far. Clinton and Obama traded insults during a rancorous debate in Myrtle Beach on Monday night, and the two campaigns clashed repeatedly over whether the Clintons — and, in particular, the former president — were deliberately distorting some of Obama’s statements for political advantage.

The attacks raged through much of the week, until Clinton and Obama backed away from the brink on Thursday, but by then the damage was done. The results of the primary were “a sound rejection of the politics of attack and division by the voters of South Carolina,” David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said shortly after the polls closed.

Clinton advisers held firm in their argument that it was the Obama campaign that had sought to undermine the former president, and they predicted that the battle in South Carolina will damage Obama going forward.

By 7:37 p.m., barely half an hour after the polls closed, Clinton was in the air headed toward Nashville, her campaign’s eagerness to leave South Carolina barely disguised. Although her strategists took care not to disparage the voters of South Carolina — as they had caucusgoers after losing Iowa weeks earlier — the private assessment from some supporters was that Obama had won only because of large minority turnout.

Obama’s team quickly rebutted that argument, noting that he had solid support in the white community, as well, and the dispute seemed certain to roil the campaign further.

The real battle will be the nearly two dozen states that vote on Feb. 5. Almost 1,700 delegates are at stake that day — slightly more than half of the pledged delegates to the Denver convention — and the two campaigns will throw enormous resources into the contest.

“Obama’s given himself another chance,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who is unaffiliated. “The question is: How big a bounce does he get out of this? He’s going into Super Tuesday behind in a number of major states. . . . He gives himself a chance to get back in the game in a serious way.”

The racial makeup of most of those states is far different from South Carolina’s, with smaller black populations and larger Latino populations. Clinton carried the Hispanic vote in last Saturday’s Nevada caucuses and hopes to repeat that in states such as California, Arizona and New Mexico.

The exit polls in South Carolina showed Obama winning a majority of both men and women, and winning most categories of voters. But there were clear racial splits, with African Americans solidly behind Obama and white voters divided among the three candidates.

Inside the Obama campaign, a nervous energy built in the final days here. Internally, the numbers continued to look solid, but advisers feared that the arguments with the Clintons would tarnish Obama’s image as he prepared to pivot to Feb. 5. But as Saturday unfolded, concern gave way to elation. At about 4 p.m., Obama emerged from his downtown Columbia hotel wearing sweats and basketball shoes, headed to a local gym to play with a group of Secret Service agents and staffers.

South Carolina political veterans said Obama’s ground organization was one of the best they had seen, consisting of 9,000 volunteers and nearly 150 voting-day staging areas. His operation overlooked no potential source of votes.

Most significantly, Obama virtually swept the African American vote despite rejecting typical tactics deployed in the South; aides said they hadn’t paid “street money” to local leaders and community organizers to get people to the polls. Obama campaign officials had bragged about bucking this long-entrenched system, but they weren’t certain until Saturday whether it would work.

Kornblut reported from Tennessee with the Clinton campaign. Murray reported from South Carolina with the Obama campaign.

David Broder
Washington Post
January 27, 2008

You would never realize how big the stakes are in Tuesday’s winner-take-all Florida Republican primary if you judged only the behavior of the leading presidential candidates these past few days.

Their final pre-primary debate was bland to the point of apathy. Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and even iconoclastic Ron Paul were on their best behavior – as if oblivious to what the 57 delegates available in Florida could mean to anyone who pulls out a plurality victory.

A win could establish either McCain or Romney as the man to beat in the massive round of Feb. 5 primaries. It could launch Giuliani into a late rush for the nomination, wiping out his weak showing in the earlier contests. And an upset by Huckabee would force an upper revision in his prospects, which have been diminished since he surprised the field in Iowa.

But their televised confrontation in Boca Raton on Thursday was haunted by the spirit of the departed Fred Thompson. It was as if the actor and former senator had left a blanket of boredom behind when he exited the race after finishing third behind McCain and Huckabee in South Carolina.

The big Tennessean departed so quickly and quietly it was hard to remember the trumpet fanfares that had greeted his entry into the race as the last of the “major contenders” to announce.

My personal experience with Thompson illuminated one of the real puzzles of the past year. Last summer, as word circulated that he was about to join the campaign, a member of his staff phoned with an invitation to lunch.

I readily accepted because I had not interviewed Thompson since he left the Senate in 2003. We met at a restaurant in McLean, Va., and the candidate arrived by himself, with no press aide in tow.

We visited for two hours and he answered every question, outlining plans for a campaign that would be notable for its boldness. Repeatedly, he emphasized that the only reason he saw to run was to raise issues that the other candidates were too timid to address. Those issues, he said, included the need to expand military manpower and increase the Pentagon budget, while attacking the “unaffordable” entitlement programs that dominate domestic spending.

Thompson was particularly critical of farm subsidies, and when I asked if he were really going to take that message to Iowa, he said, “Yes, but I’d like to keep that off the record until I announce out there.” I agreed to omit that detail from my column, but reported that he was going to enter the race with rhetorical guns blazing.

Then I sat back and waited – and waited. In time, Thompson unveiled a serious proposal to attack the long-term deficits in Social Security – another of the major entitlements. But I never heard the speech on the farm subsidies. When I asked for a follow-up interview with Thompson, his new press secretary found reasons to put me off.

Would a bolder campaign delivered with some of the personal passion I saw in Thompson at that lunch have produced a different result? I don’t know, but given what he said about his own motives, I suspect Thompson would feel better today if he had followed his own instincts instead of becoming a more conventional conservative.

That is a lesson for those remaining in the race. As the competition moves beyond Florida, a state with complex constituencies, to an even more diverse national background stretching from California to Connecticut, there will be a temptation to be all things to all people.

You can expect Paul, as a libertarian, to resist the efforts to blend into the crowd, but the temptation to put on camouflage will certainly be there for the others.

The closer the survivors of this shakedown process come to securing the nomination, the greater the pressure to smooth the edges of their beliefs and personalities.

We are at the point where this GOP campaign will become a real test of character.

By Gloria BorgerPosted January 17, 2008 It’s hard to be a Republican these days. While Democrats are pleased with their crop of presidential candidates and energized by them, you’re unsure and unenthusiastic. You’re not eager to go to the polls and vote because you can’t even decide which box to check. You used to feel inspired and at home with the ideals and ideas offered by your leaders; now you can’t find one fellow who has it all. It’s way past Ronald Reagan in the GOP, and about to be post-George W. Bush. So who’s your daddy?It’s a question Republicans can’t seem to answer. In the early primary and caucus states, GOP voters made only one thing clear: They’re searching. Like the proverbial blind man and the elephant, they find presidential attributes in different places, yet they can’t come upon the whole picture. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s I’m-fighting-for-the-little-guy economic populism and faith-based homilies can be appealing. John McCain’s fierce independence and national security credentials are impressive. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s can-do CEO experience is part of a great résumé. Or maybe Rudy Giuliani is the tough boss America needs.Way back when (last summer), the Republican establishment was looking at TV star and former Sen. Fred Thompson as the guy who might rescue the party from any messiness. Trouble was, while he looked like a president, he campaigned as if he were running for a part-time job. So the establishment went back on the hunt for Mr. October.But there was no natural. If this were the Democratic Party, that would be just fine, because it’s the way things have always worked. But these are Republicans, and they’re not used to such brawling. Sure, it was messy in 1976 when Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully challenged incumbent President Gerald Ford, but that all got resolved nicely when Reagan ran and won four years later. And Republicans started having succession contests rather than long-lasting battles, because they were happy. The GOP establishment cheerfully—if not always successfully—nominated the next guy in line for his turn to become president. Only this year, two things are different: McCain is the only one who has been waiting (since he ran in 2000), and there is no unified GOP establishment to anoint him. And while he has a bunch of key supporters in early states, it probably won’t guarantee him much of anything except some organization, a few nice press conferences, and a bunch of votes. Not victory.Life might be happier for the GOP if the governing were going better. Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006—and now they’re hoping to just hold on to their margins next time around. Most of all, they’ve got a president whose popularity rating sits uncomfortably below 40 percent, running a war that is just as unpopular, with an uncertain economy. “We need a savior right now,” moans one GOP strategist. “But there’s no one who fits the bill. And even if there were, we’d be having a hard time agreeing on who it is.”No unity. Even the tried-and-true Republican issue set is up for grabs. Huckabee wants a national sales tax instead of the income tax, and some Republicans are aghast that one of their own could propose something so regressive. McCain spoke of global warming and fuel efficiency standards for cars in Michigan, of all places, and got whomped for it. Huckabee has even split the evangelical movement along generational lines; after all, Pat Robertson did endorse Giuliani. Mitt Romney seems to be the only candidate truly in tune with every segment of the divided GOP electorate—constantly morphing into whatever is demanded in order to win.Maybe strategy will be everything for a party in search of its new brand. It is, at least, for Giuliani, who hasn’t really competed in the early states. He figures he’ll be the guy on the white horse riding in to rescue the party by winning the Florida primary on January 29. One tiny problem: The voters might figure you don’t deserve a nomination after a drop-by on the process. The Republicans have always been kind of old-fashioned about fighting to win.Of course, no one should dare to predict anything in this campaign. Consider this: Giuliani was first in the national polls in mid-December, and he came in behind Ron Paul in the Michigan primary. All of which says that the party is far from deciding anything. If only they had a daddy to tell them what to do. 

What caused the unraveling of the Republican Party? The president’s former speechwriter explains.

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:57 PM ET Jan 19, 2008

The evening of the 2004 presidential vote had been late and frustrating. The networks, burned by their monumental confusion on election night 2000, had refused to declare a winner in Ohio, even though the result was clear. In the Oval Office the next morning, President Bush sat with Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Dan Bartlett and me, talking distractedly on random topics. Then his assistant Ashley called in, “Senator Kerry on the line.” There was a cordial, five-minute conversation. When the president got off the phone, his eyes filled with tears—tears of relief that another election crisis had been avoided—and he hugged each of us in turn.

The Republican Party, at that moment, was on a roll. Between 2000 and 2004, the president increased his total vote by 23 percent. Republicans in the House held their highest majority since 1946. It was the first time Republicans had controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress in back-to-back elections since the 1920s. One respected conservative commentator said that Republican hegemony in America was “expected to last for years, maybe decades.”

Well, “decades” was a bit optimistic. In early 2008, by nearly every measure, the Republican Party is in trouble. Republicans in the House and Senate have been exiled from leadership and are retiring in large numbers. Fund-raising—the most tangible measure of enthusiasm—is weak. In the first three quarters of 2007, Democratic presidential candidates out-raised their Republican counterparts by $77 million. One adviser to a major Republican campaign recently complained to me that a significant number of wealthy donors on their fund-raising list were giving to … Barack Obama. Voter turnout on the Republican side in the early primaries has been weak compared with Democrats. And the party, well into the primary process, lacks a unifying candidate.

What caused the Republican unraveling? It began with the Bush administration itself. Through the intense experiences of 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republican Party became closely identified with President Bush—and President Bush became closely identified with Iraqi violence and chaos. The slow response to rising sectarian conflict in 2005 and 2006 left an impression of stubbornness in a losing cause. Every element of the Republican coalition the president had offended during his political rise—budget hawks, anti-immigration activists, libertarian critics of compassionate conservatism—felt liberated and emboldened by Bush’s weakness, and reasserted their claim on the party’s future. The president’s embrace of the surge in Iraq has dramatically improved the situation—but the damage was done. The cracks in the Bush coalition began spreading.

Then came the congressional losses of 2006, which were related to a sour public mood on Iraq—but only in part. Republican congressional leaders had assumed the same earmark-seeking and ethical corner-cutting image of their Democratic predecessors. The “bridge to nowhere” became a Republican symbol of waste and hypocrisy. Some conservatives tried to shift the blame to the president’s “reckless spending” for the midterm defeats of 2006—conveniently forgetting that more than 15 Republican members of Congress had been implicated in sexual and financial scandals. Americans generally change control of Congress when the party in power appears corrupt and arrogant—and by that standard it is difficult to argue with the judgment of the American people in 2006.

Now the frustrations of the last two or three years—the resentments of every group that has felt ignored, marginalized, helpless, slighted or unfairly blamed—are being taken out on the Republican presidential candidates. As each one of them steps forward from the crowd, he is greeted by ideological sniping. Mike Huckabee is targeted by free marketers and movement conservatives for his economic “liberalism.” John McCain is attacked for his heresies on immigration and campaign finance reform. Rush Limbaugh argues that the nomination of either candidate would “destroy the Republican Party.” Mitt Romney attempts to avoid this kind of criticism by blending in perfectly with his surroundings—a social conservative in Iowa, an agent of change in New Hampshire, a protector of the auto industry in Michigan—and gets criticized (including by me) for his inconsistencies.

In this cycle, many Republicans seem led to support their candidate by process of elimination—”I guess I could live with X.” At the same time, many Republicans seem led to oppose candidates passionately—”The nomination of X would end Western civilization.” This is a factionalism of Bolshevik fervor, and it is a bad sign. Parties that prefer purity to victory—à la Goldwater and McGovern—usually lose. At this moment, Republicans look like the party that wants to lose the most.

The problems run deeper than the temper of party activists. The Republican coalition of the 1980s was built around a series of issues—reducing high marginal tax rates, reforming welfare, fighting crime. The success of this agenda has made it less compelling. Tax rates have been dramatically reduced, leading to astounding economic growth. Rates of violent and property crime have plummeted in the last decade. Welfare caseloads have fallen by 60 percent. Public policy success always involves a political curse—issues that were once powerful became less urgent and relevant.

The Republican search for new issues to replace the old has been less than successful. For a while, some thought tough restrictions on immigration were the key. But like an unstable compound, this issue has a tendency to explode and burn those who handle it roughly. Especially on the presidential level, there are few winning strategies that involve the alienation of Hispanic voters.

Though all Republicans share a belief in federalism and limited government, a simplistic, exclusive emphasis on those themes serves only to confirm the worst Republican stereotypes. What does it profit Fred Thompson to criticize President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, arguing that we should focus on “problems here”? What is the benefit when candidates turn against the No Child Left Behind Act, which has succeeded in improving minority test scores? Why attack a Medicare prescription drug care plan that has been implemented smoothly and is wildly popular among the elderly? In all these cases, why not defend achievements instead of abandoning compelling issues?

The old priorities of the Republican coalition are being replaced—not yet totally, but swiftly—by new issues such as energy, the environment, health care and the effects of global competition on American workers. Some of the candidates have fragments of a new message—Huckabee’s economic populism, McCain’s support for a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, Romney’s Massachusetts health-care approach. But, for the most part, this is unfamiliar territory for Republicans. National security issues, of course, could return in a moment, with a vengeance. But in the long term, Republicans will need to find compelling conservative and free-market policies that appeal to the concerns of young people, Hispanics and an anxious middle class. This will involve not only reassembling a coalition, but constructing a new one.

It has been a quick, downward path from Kerry’s concession call to the present discontents of the Republican Party. But two caveats need to be kept in mind. First, political recoveries can be as sudden as political declines. And second, there is, perhaps, one large American political figure who could cause depressed, fractious Republicans to bind their wounds, downplay their divisions, renew their purpose, and join hands in blissful unity at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Republican convention.

And that figure is Hillary Clinton.

The president has left his party in a precarious state. But the GOP candidates running in the wake of his wreckage can learn much from his failures.

By Evan Thomas

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 10:42 PM ET Jan 19, 2008

We are all stars in the movies that play in our minds: not true-life stories, exactly, but life as we imagine it could or should be. Little imperfections are conveniently forgotten or smoothed over, messy relationships downplayed or deep-sixed. The future beckons brightly, even if the past was dark or dreary. This need to believe in an idealized self is especially strong in politicians. They must get up every day and sell a vision—fanciful, perhaps, but inspiring: Morning in America, or a Bridge to the 21st Century, a New Frontier or a New Deal. To fulfill these myths, our leaders must be Born in a Log Cabin, or be the Man From Hope, or Speak Softly But Carry a Big Stick. A certain amount of hooey is tolerated, even required. In real life, Teddy Roosevelt didn’t speak softly at all. He more often brayed like a donkey. But he could make people listen out of fear and respect.

The modern Republican Party has indulged in more than a little mythmaking during the past 30 or 40 years. Its greatest hero was a Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan. Morning in America was a brilliant bit of feel-good theatricality. Still, the GOP’s core ideology—lower taxes, stronger defense, conservative social values—was a story that voters could follow. The GOP’s long ascendancy in American politics was based on performance, not just showmanship.

President George W. Bush has squandered that trust. His presidency has been, in essence, faith-based—not just faith in God, but faith in Bush. After 9/11, he asked the nation to invest in his narrative of good versus evil. He seemed to be saying, “I’m taking care of this, you have to trust me.” Critics and naysayers were scorned as ditherers or cowards. Bush wanted to appear resolute, but at times he just seemed bullheaded and oblivious. As Jacob Weisberg shows in the following excerpts from his new book, “The Bush Tragedy,” the president constantly changed his rationale for invading Iraq—indeed his entire foreign policy—as inconvenient facts popped up or the mood moved him. Other crises, like Hurricane Katrina and more recently the sinking economy, seemed to catch him by surprise.

The Democrats have a fundamental advantage in 2008: none of them is George W. Bush. Whether promoting experience or change or populism, none of the Democrats can ever be the heir to the current president’s legacy. For the Republicans, the matter is more complicated. The candidates are generally careful not to publicly disavow the president while scuttling away from his record. Mitt Romney is a case in point. Last Tuesday night, after he won the Michigan primary, Romney fulsomely praised Reagan and George H.W. Bush—but never mentioned the current president. Romney does somewhat limply praise the commander in chief for “keeping us safe for the last six years,” but by making a hero out of Bush’s father, Romney seems to be signaling that the elder Bush was the smart one when he decided not to march on to Baghdad in 1991. Romney does need the Bush family; he depends on former governor Jeb Bush’s political network in Florida, though a Romney spokesman says Jeb himself “doesn’t strategize with us.” Rudy Giuliani’s campaign manager, Michael DuHaime, insists to NEWSWEEK that his boss “refuses to pile on” the president. But one story you don’t hear Giuliani repeat now is how, on 9/11, he grabbed the arm of his then New York City police commissioner, Bernie Kerik, and said, “Thank God George Bush is our president.” As the choice of many evangelical voters, Mike Huckabee has no need to woo Bush’s base, and he goes farthest in dissing the president. In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, he accused Bush of having an “arrogant bunker mentality” on foreign policy, and has said, “I’m not trying to run for a third Bush term.” Though John McCain harshly criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Iraq strategy, he has supported the Bush surge in Iraq. Still, he has never been fond of the president since getting slimed by GOP operatives allegedly linked to the Bush camp in the 2000 South Carolina primary. On the campaign trail last spring, McCain was asked: “Senator, you were defeated by Bush in 2000. With your stance on the surge in Iraq, is it possible that you will be defeated by George Bush again in 2008?” McCain stood silently for a few seconds, almost as if he were trying to keep himself from saying the wrong thing. He looked mad. Finally, he spoke. “I do not allow my views and my concerns about the future of the United States of America to be affected in any way by my personal ambitions,” he said coldly and carefully. (Mark McKinnon, Bush’s media strategist in 2000 and 2004, notes that Bush still has a 70 percent approval rating with Republicans, and argues that Giuliani and McCain have actually benefited by supporting Bush’s immigration and Iraq policies.)

Political eras, in modern times, have not been wiped away in landslides. In 2000, ending eight years of Democratic rule, Bush did not even win the popular vote against Al Gore. In 1960, after eight years of Republican rule, John F. Kennedy eked out a narrow win against Richard M. Nixon, and some historians still suspect the Democrats had to steal votes to do it. This time around, however, the Republicans appear poised on a precipice. Their candidates have raised only about two thirds as much money as the Democrats (about $168 million to about $245 million), and GOP turnout badly lagged the Democrats’ in both Iowa and New Hampshire. There’s no clear front runner: McCain’s victory in South Carolina last Saturday gave him two wins in early nominating contests; Romney’s win on the same day in Nevada gave him three; Huckabee has one. It is possible that one of the GOP candidates will patch together the old coalition and at least make it close in November, and it’s true that the Democrats have shown a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But it is just as likely that the long run of Republican dominance in national politics is coming to an abrupt end.

What can the Republicans do to salvage their party fortunes and show they have learned from Bush’s experience? It is too late to reinvent the party’s core beliefs. But the GOP candidates can embark on a more humble mission: to show, in effect, some humility. By examining Bush’s hubris, his almost willful disregard for annoying counterarguments, the Republican candidates can demonstrate a greater level of critical open-mindedness and self-awareness—they can show that they are not deluded by wishful thinking and Manichaean narratives. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad standard for the candidates of either party. The test of a successful presidency, history shows, is the ability to project visionary self-confidence without, at the same time, brushing aside stubborn truths.

Visitors to the Oval Office have a tendency to become yes men. Bob Strauss, a cagey lobbyist and adviser to presidents, liked to tell a story about visitors intimidated by the power of the Oval Office. Before they went in, Strauss used to say, the president’s men would posture and boast to one another, “I’m gonna tell that dumb s.o.b. a thing or two!” But once they were actually inside, face to face with the Leader of the Free World, all resolve would melt and they would meekly say, “Oh, Mr. President, you’re doing such a fine job.” Curiously, Bush has, from time to time, told that Bob Strauss story, or a variation thereof. And yet, by his snide prep-school teasing and bluff shows of resolve, he probably has done as much to discourage honest dissent among his advisers as any of his predecessors.

In realms of power, yes men (and women) are inevitable. The great presidents actively seek out diverse points of view. George Washington included in his first cabinet a pair of political polar opposites—Alexander Hamilton (who wanted to centralize power) as Treasury secretary and Thomas Jefferson (who wanted to diffuse it) as secretary of State. Lincoln’s cabinet was a “team of rivals,” as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has dubbed it. Franklin D. Roosevelt positively delighted in pitting his subordinates against each other in creative competition. That allowed Roosevelt to be the one in charge, of course, but he was always willing to listen to the bad news. In early 1938, the president’s advisers cringed as they watched a young one-star general, George C. Marshall, telling FDR that his defense strategy was all wrong. They assumed Marshall’s career was finished. Instead, FDR made Marshall his Army chief of staff, and was rewarded when Marshall became the “organizer of victory” in World War II.

The good presidents learn from their mistakes, however painful. John F. Kennedy dismissed the elaborate national-security structure set up by his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, as too stodgy and bureaucratic. Instead, JFK listened to the freebooting swells at the CIA—who promptly led him into the Bay of Pigs. In agony over his humiliation by Fidel Castro’s Cuba, JFK threatened to “splinter” the CIA “into a thousand pieces” and moaned to his putative future GOP rival, Barry Goldwater, “So you want this f–––ing job?” But in October 1962, when crisis loomed again in Cuba—this time more dangerously, with the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles—Kennedy was ready. He convened an executive committee (an “Ex Comm”) of diverse voices. Over the course of 13 days, these present and former high-ranking government officials argued, sometimes bitterly, but were able to avoid Armageddon with a facesaving secret missile trade with Moscow.

No one came to office with a clearer vision about America’s role in the world than Ronald Reagan. He sometimes seemed to believe his own fables, but in his first term, he was clever enough to appoint a tough-minded chief of staff in James A. Baker to serve as a reality check. In Reagan’s second term, Baker left the White House to become Treasury secretary, and Reagan allowed a couple of Marine colonels, Bud McFarlane and Oliver North, to cook up an absurd arms-for-hostages deal with Iran that also illegally funded a secret army, the contras, fighting the communist regime in Nicaragua. His presidency in near ruin from the Iran-contra scandal, Reagan was able to recover by bringing in moderate, experienced advisers and working closely with Congress—in time to continue the essential task of winding down the cold war.

Although he gets almost no credit from the mainstream press, Bush 43 has also learned from experience. During his first six years in office, he allowed his political guru, Karl Rove, to dominate weak policy advisers. (The low point may have come in February 2006, when Bush’s domestic policy adviser, Claude Allen, resigned after being accused of shoplifting from a suburban mall; he later pleaded guilty.) Josh Bolten, who replaced Andy Card as White House chief of staff in April 2006, has quietly prodded a move toward moderation by the Bush administration. Last summer the White House almost pulled off a much-needed, middle-of-the-road attempt at immigration reform. But it was too late: the Bush White House was too weak to force its will on its own party in Congress.

Bush himself appears to be playing a movie in his mind of ultimate redemption. With the surge in Iraq doing more to reduce violence than most alleged experts had predicted, Bush can hope that his resolve will be vindicated and that future historians will regard him as a latter-day Harry Truman. Grover Cleveland, or some other 19th-century mediocrity, is probably more like it. Still, not long ago, Bush was being compared by some pundits to James Buchanan, Lincoln’s pre-Civil War predecessor, generally regarded as low man on the presidential totem pole.

The current crop of presidential contenders may be only marginally more realistic than Bush in their self-assessments. Voters will have to look closely and ask whether the candidate who preens so confidently on the trail will behave with appropriate humility in the Oval Office. It is often hard to tell whether a good candidate will make a good president. But the small self-delusions of their campaign posturings can offer hints about how self-aware they’ll later turn out to be.

Giuliani starred in a movie—a disaster film—we all remember too well. His calm and cool presence on 9/11 should be honored. But under scrutiny from the press, Giuliani’s record has looked shakier. Why had the mayor of New York City located his crisis-command center in the World Trade Center—a well-known target that had been bombed by terrorists in 1993? And why couldn’t the mayor who slashed crime in the city—no easy feat— perform the simple task of making sure the radios worked between the cops and the firefighters? Giuliani’s response to questions about his leadership seems essentially to bluff and deny. He blames technological and bureaucratic obstacles for the problems with the radios. It is not reassuring that in New York City, the mayor’s top aides and advisers were known as “Yes Rudies.”

Mitt Romney is selling himself as Mr. Fix-It. He is the can-do guy from the world of business who will come in and repair the mess inside the Beltway. There is something practical about Romney; he does not seem to be unduly weighed down by ideology. On the other hand, he has been a little too eager to do whatever it takes to get elected. He clumsily flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights, intending first to please the voters of Massachusetts, where he served as governor from 2003 to 2007, then to appease the politically powerful religious right in the presidential campaign. Speaking through gleamingly white teeth, he has also rearranged his personal past, claiming to have seen his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 (the two men were not even in the same city on the date in question). Romney later quibbled about the meaning of the word “saw,” saying he used it in a “figurative sense.”

Mike Huckabee has been in sales all his life, embarking on his career as an evangelical minister as a teenager. He has been an effective reaper of souls for the Lord, in part because he is more folksy and self-deprecating than bombastic. But his show of Christian remorse over a negative ad on the eve of the Iowa caucuses was greeted with hoots of derision. At a press conference, Huckabee played for guffawing reporters the ad he was pulling from the airwaves—thus guaranteeing it would be seen by millions of people on YouTube and the nightly news free of charge, without costing the strapped Huckabee campaign a penny. It is possible that Huckabee had made the classic mistake of falling in with cynical campaign consultants—especially his top adviser, Ed Rollins, a former boxer who delights in smash-mouth political gamesmanship.

John McCain may be showing more integrity than his rivals, which in a typical presidential campaign amounts to stepping over a fairly low bar. After suffering for five and a half years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, beaten and starved and forced into a phony “confession,” McCain gives off the aura of a man who has nothing left to lose. Still, in October, when he entered the race as the front runner looking to shore up the support of the GOP establishment, he almost wrecked his campaign by pandering to the religious right. (McCain claimed, falsely, that the Constitution established the United States as a “Christian nation.”) Since then, he has recovered his honest voice and made a virtue, of a kind, out of his unflinching support for the war in Iraq. In the Senate, colleagues sometimes warily regard McCain as a hothead. An impulsive, impetuous president could be dangerous. A key question is whether McCain calms down and listens after corking off; the anecdotal evidence on that seems to be mixed. He does have the capacity to apologize and forgive, and he has shown an unusual ability to reach across the aisle on controversial issues like fuel-emissions standards and campaign-finance and immigration-reform laws.

It is perhaps too easy to poke through the statements and campaign literature of candidates who are dizzy with exhaustion and caught up in a desperate race. In 2000, Al Gore was unfairly mocked as the man who claimed to have “invented” the Internet and served as the model for the hero of “Love Story.” A recent Vanity Fair article, “Going After Gore,” showed how Bill Clinton’s former vice president became the victim of a jaundiced press corps as well as his own tendency to exaggerate. Still, the candidate who wins the 2008 election will be tempted to become less, not more, honest once he or she reaches the Oval Office. As soon as the pundits and the Washington insiders start baying and growling outside the White House gates (a process that starts on the afternoon of Inauguration Day), all presidents feel a desire to build a moat, if not pour boiling oil into the press room on the lower level of the West Wing.

The trick is to make sure that the next president will hear something beyond his or her own self-justifications and the cloying encouragement of handlers. Former ambassador David Abshire, a longtime Washington centrist and author of a new study of the presidency, “A Call to Greatness,” has proposed the creation of a unity cabinet. Citing presidents like FDR and JFK, who brought in Republicans as advisers and cabinet secretaries, Abshire proposes that the next president name at least two major cabinet members from the opposing party. Such a bold move would send “an immediate signal,” says Abshire, that the new president wants to reduce the angry partisanship that poisons Washington.

Of course, presidents can cut out even the most powerful cabinet officers. Just ask former secretary of State Colin Powell how much face time he had with Bush once it became known that he opposed an invasion of Iraq. Presidents have to be willing to seek out contrary advice, but they don’t have to be showy about it. In fact, modesty works well. When Truman’s advisers recommended that he create a plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, Truman wisely said, “Just don’t put my name on it.” Thus was born the Marshall Plan, named after the sainted General Marshall, who had become secretary of State.

Eisenhower was a master at creating consensus behind the scenes. After he was elected in 1952, he secretly gathered all the best national-security thinkers in the country to help him shape a strategy to deal with the Soviet Union. Three teams were created, each to argue a different point of view. Eisenhower could seem inarticulate, even a little dim, in public. But in the private “Project Solarium” (named after the room where the teams met in the White House residence), the man who was best able to sum up the opposing points of view was … Dwight Eisenhower. The next president of the United States faces challenges just as vexing as Soviet communism. He or she would do well to summon proponents of different strategies—and then truly listen to what they have to say. If George W. Bush had done something similar before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, his would-be successors might not be so standoffish, and the Republican Party might not be in such a precarious state.

By Jonathan Alter

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:43 PM ET Jan 19, 2008

Prominent Democrats are upset with the aggressive role that Bill Clinton is playing in the 2008 campaign, a role they believe is inappropriate for a former president and the titular head of the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, both currently neutral in the Democratic contest, have told their old friend heatedly on the phone that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Sen. Barack Obama, according to two sources familiar with the conversations who asked for anonymity because of their sensitive nature. Clinton, Kennedy and Emanuel all declined to comment.

On balance, aides to both Bill and Hillary still see Bill as a huge net plus in fund-raising, attracting large crowds and providing a megaphone to raise doubts about Obama—even if some of those doubts are distortions. But there’s concern that in hatcheting the Illinois senator and losing his temper with the news media (last week he thrashed a San Francisco TV reporter for asking about a lawsuit filed by Clinton-backing teachers union members to limit the number of Nevada caucuses), Clinton is drawing down his political capital and harming his role as a global statesman. “This is excruciating,” says a member of the Clintons’ circle, who asked for anonymity. “But the stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s worth it to tarnish himself a bit now to win the presidency.”

During a December taping with PBS’s Charlie Rose, a frustrated Clinton called Obama “a roll of the dice,” as aides tried to end the interview. Then, in New Hampshire, he argued angrily that the story of Obama’s principled position on the Iraq War was a “fairy tale,” a charge few reporters bought. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the top-ranking African-American in Congress and officially neutral, found Clinton’s tone insulting and said so publicly.

When the former president called Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat gave Clinton an earful, telling him that he bore some blame for the injection of race into the contest. In any event, both Hillary and Obama made peace on the race issue at the Las Vegas debate. The Clinton camp now fears that Kennedy is leaning toward Obama, according to the Clinton source, though Kennedy’s office says he is making no endorsement “at this time.”

Clinton aides admit the boss sometimes goes off script. Obama officials say this itself should be a campaign issue. Greg Craig, who coordinated Clinton’s impeachment defense in 1998 and is now a senior Obama adviser, argues that “recent events raise the question: if Hillary’s campaign can’t control Bill, whether Hillary’s White House could.”

There is little precedent for a former president’s engaging in intra-party attacks. In 1960, Harry Truman criticized the idea of a Roman Catholic president and tried briefly to stop John F. Kennedy’s nomination. “I urge you to be patient,” he told JFK publicly. But in 2000, former president George Bush declined to attack his son’s GOP primary opponent, John McCain.

Clinton is undeterred by the criticism and will likely keep hammering Obama if he thinks it helps Hillary. “History will judge the impact on the Clinton legacy, not daily or weekly political reporters,” says Matt McKenna, Bill Clinton’s press secretary.

By Michael D. Shear and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 25, 2008; A01

BOCA RATON, Fla., Jan. 24 — In a debate here Thursday, Republican White House hopefuls called on President Bush to embrace deeper tax cuts to stimulate the economy, as each sought to portray himself to Florida voters as the true conservative in a race that will shift to a nationwide test in less than two weeks.

The mostly civil forum came at a critical moment in the muddled GOP competition, and the five remaining candidates appeared eager to avoid some of the sharper differences that have sparked tough exchanges. Instead, they played it safe and were often cordial to one another five days before Florida’s primary election, which could end one or more candidacies.

Tuesday’s vote will be particularly important for former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has staked his fading campaign on a win here. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney are seeking momentum and a springboard into the Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5, when 21 states will hold GOP primaries or caucuses.

But rather than raucous exchanges about immigration or social issues, the three sought to appeal to Florida voters and burnish their credentials on the economy, an issue that has dominated their stump speeches as the stock market tumbled in recent weeks.

“What it does is okay, and I would support it, but it doesn’t go far enough,” Giuliani said of the economic stimulus package that Bush and congressional leaders announced Thursday. “I think, in the face of what’s been going on, which obviously is a matter of serious concern, we should be very aggressive.”

McCain said he was “disappointed” with the stimulus plan because it does not include a proposal to make the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 permanent. Romney said of Bush’s proposal: “There’s a great deal that is effective in his plan. I just wish it went further.”

The debate offered Romney a chance to shine as he received several opportunities to discuss economic issues and his experience in the private sector. McCain performed well but was under pressure to explain how his early opposition to Bush’s tax cuts squares with his support for making them permanent now.

The debate was sponsored by MSNBC and was moderated by NBC anchors Brian Williams and Tim Russert. Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee also participated in the 90-minute exchange at Florida Atlantic University.

Williams and Russert tried unsuccessfully several times to get the candidates to engage one another. Russert observed afterward that it seemed as though the contenders had made a “nonaggression” pact.

Instead, much of the debate was characterized by lighthearted moments, even when the rivals were offered a chance to question one another.

None took the opportunity to focus on an overly controversial issue, preferring instead to lob easy queries that gave the recipient a chance to recite portions of his stump speech.

Romney began the round by asking Giuliani how he would manage the nation’s economic relationship with China to ensure that “we protect American industry and American jobs.” The former mayor responded that the United States needs to focus on how to best take advantage of the opportunity that China’s rapidly growing middle class presents: “They need to buy what we have.”

Several minutes later, Giuliani joked that perhaps Romney’s overture reflected the fact that his GOP rivals no longer consider the former mayor’s candidacy a threat after he finished well behind in the pack in every contest held so far. “When Mitt Romney asked me a question, he asked me a very nice question. I think I lulled him into a false sense of security,” he said. Giuliani, who has staked his struggling candidacy on Florida but is running third in most polls, added later in the debate: “We’re going to come from behind; we’re going to win here in Florida.”

McCain was just as accommodating as he queried Huckabee about his support of replacing the current tax code with a national sales tax. He asked the former governor how he would deflect criticism that a flat-out sales tax would “cause lower-income Americans more of the pain and the burden of paying for our government,” and he took the opportunity to tack on a question about why Huckabee’s proposal had resonated with the public.

“Well, the reason that it’s getting resonance is because people would love to see the IRS abolished,” Huckabee said. “I think most of us realize that there’s got to be a better system. The one we have now is irreparably broken.”

Paul was more assertive, asking whether McCain would retain the president’s working group on financial markets. But that, too, did not lead to a fierce exchange, and neither did Huckabee’s question for Romney about his position on gun rights, to which Romney replied: “I do support the right of individuals to bear arms.”

In one of the debate’s more awkward moments, Romney made an ambiguous comment about Bill Clinton when asked how he would run against the former president and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination.

“I frankly can’t wait, because the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I just can’t imagine. I can’t imagine, the American people can’t imagine, and I,” he said, leading Russert to retort, “What does that mean?”

“I just think that we want to have a president, not a whole — a team of husband and wife thinking that they’re going to run the country,” Romney said.

Later, Russert pressed Romney to disclose how much of his personal fortune he had poured into his campaign so Floridians could factor it into their voting decision. Romney replied that he will release that information on Jan. 31, as required by law, “and not a minute sooner,” because that could give his rivals an advantage.

“I’m not worried about the voters. I’m much more concerned about the other guys on this stage,” he said, adding that he wants to improve the country his children will “inherit.” “I’m in this race because I want to help America.”

Huckabee later quipped that he has a solution: He is willing to become president to ensure that Romney’s sons inherit a better country, and that “your boys will still get your money, too.”

McCain’s 95-year-old mother, Roberta — who has made several controversial statements during her son’s presidential run — became an unexpected topic of the debate.

McCain was asked about comments she made earlier in the day that members of his party would be “holding their nose while backing him.” McCain laughed and said he has a “very, very conservative record.”

With the exception of Paul, who said the Iraq war was “a very bad idea and it wasn’t worth it,” all of the candidates defended the decision to go to war but acknowledged that the conflict has been badly mismanaged.

Huckabee offered a new analogy to explain his belief that weapons of mass destruction may have been in Iraq before the war, saying: “Just because you don’t find every Easter egg doesn’t mean it wasn’t planted.”

Staff writer Perry Bacon Jr. contributed to this report.

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Hoping to give a quick adrenaline shot to the ailing economy, President Bush and House leaders struck a deal on Thursday for a $150 billion fiscal stimulus package, including rebates for most tax filers of up to $600 for individuals, $1,200 for couples and, for families, an additional $300 a child.

The deal capped a series of fast-paced and intense negotiations in which the Bush administration and lawmakers in both parties had to agree to numerous compromises after more than a year of acid relations between Congressional Democrats and the White House.

In praising the deal, Mr. Bush said it had resulted from “the kind of cooperation that some predicted was not possible here in Washington.”

The House is expected to approve the package on Feb. 6, and the leaders in both chambers have set a goal of Feb. 15 to send a measure for the president’s signature, a deadline Senate Democrats said they could meet even though they had reservations about the plan.

Although the two sides made big concessions, the deal came together because each side could walk away claiming victory.

The White House made clear early that it would not insist on permanently extending the president’s tax cuts from 2001 and 2003. Many Democrats had seen such a demand as a potential deal breaker.

And Speaker Nancy Pelosi ultimately bowed to Mr. Bush’s insistence that the package not include extending unemployment benefits or increasing food stamps.

And by the time Ms. Pelosi, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, formally announced the deal at a brief news conference at the Capitol, the two sides were crowing that they had achieved something remarkable, even as some economists questioned whether the package could be adopted and put into effect quickly enough to have a real effect.

Republicans expressed satisfaction that they had forced House Democrats to show fiscal restraint, by agreeing to a plan focused mostly on tax cuts.

“I have always believed that allowing people to keep more of their own money and use it as they see fit is the best way to help our economy grow,” Mr. Bush said. “I’m also pleased that this agreement does not include any tax increases, as well as unnecessary spending projects.”

House Democrats , in turn, said they were pleased that they had persuaded the White House to endorse a package primarily benefiting middle- and working-class Americans by setting income caps on the full rebates at $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for joint filers.

Democrats said that would be the reverse of Mr. Bush’s earlier tax policies, which primarily benefited wealthier filers.

“It’s the mirror opposite,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the Democratic conference chairman. “This is middle class and progressive.”

Senate Democrats, however, immediately criticized the plan, which also provides tax breaks for businesses, and said they were developing their own package that could temporarily extend unemployment benefits and increase food stamps.

Some economists agree with Senate Democrats that increasing the benefits and food stamps would inject money into the economy faster than the rebate checks, which would not be sent until May at the earliest.

House Democrats countered that their package would send more money to low-income workers than an increase in food stamps, and they pointed to a projection that 35 million families would receive one-time payments of $300, even though they did not earn enough money to pay income taxes. Under the deal, tax filers who earned at least $3,000 last year, but paid less than $300 in income tax, would receive the $300.

The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who had said the House should lead in negotiating the package with the White House, was one of several Democrats calling the House plan “a first step,” but saying the Senate expected to shape the final result.

“The secretary of the Treasury has understood, the president has understood, the speaker has understood that when it comes over here, we are going to take another look at it,” Mr. Reid said.

Among the components the Senate might seek to add, he said, was a summer jobs program for young people at a cost of $500 million to $1 billion. Some Democrats said they would push for more public works spending, which is often given low marks as a tool because projects take too long to start.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said road resurfacing in particular could be done fast. “I am absolutely convinced that there are infrastructure projects that can get off the ground weeks and weeks earlier than the rebate checks end up in people’s hands,” Mr. Wyden said.

Mr. Paulson, standing with the president, acknowledged hurdles remained on Capitol Hill. “The work is far from over,” he said.

The plan’s cost will add to a 2008 budget deficit projected at $219 billion. Over 10 years, House officials said, the plan would add $110 billion to the national debt.

If enacted, the rebates and stipends in the House package, totaling $103 billion, are expected to reach 117 million taxpayers. Payments will be processed automatically for all tax filers.

Full rebates of up to $600 or $1,200 would be paid to individuals earning up to $75,000 adjusted gross income or couples filing jointly and earning up to $150,000. Above that, rebates would be reduced by 5 percent for each $1,000 in income. Rebates would be reduced by $50 for each $1,000 in income, meaning a couple with no children earning $174,000 would have no rebate. A single mother of two children earning $50,000 and paying at least $600 in taxes would receive $1,200 —a $600 individual rebate and $300 a child. A married couple with three children earning $100,000 and paying at least $1,200 in taxes would receive $2,100 — a $1,200 rebate and $300 a child.

On the business side, companies would be given a 50 percent bonus deduction on new equipment that would normally be depreciated over many years. The incentive, which would cost $42.3 billion in 2008, is intended to encourage spending. The package would also double the limit on expenses, to $250,000 from $125,000, that small business can write off as a deduction from annual income, with a total cap of $800,000. That is expected to cost $1 billion in 2008.

In a nod to the mortgage market problems, the plan would allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies, to buy loans up to $625,500, from the current $417,000 limit. The Federal Housing Administration would be able to insure home loans of up to $725,000, from the current $362,000 ceiling.

The one-year increases would make it easier to obtain new mortgages or refinance loans in expensive markets.

In a major concession, the White House agreed to increase the conforming loan limits and stopped insisting on wider reform of the mortgage finance companies. Mr. Paulson, at a news conference, acknowledged that he was not happy about that.

“I got run down by a bipartisan steamroller,” he said. “Republicans and Democrats reunited on this.”

The cooperation was accelerated by worsening economic news. Mr. Bush had initially intended to wait until his State of the Union speech on Jan. 28 to decide whether a stimulus was needed, but gloomier economic indicators forced him to speed those plans.

He moved swiftly after returning from the Middle East to speak to Congressional leaders and start negotiations. Finally, the declines in global stock markets on Monday and the emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve on Tuesday pushed the House leaders and the Treasury secretary into high gear.

The House took the lead in part to avoid entangling the stimulus negotiations in presidential politics — two leading Democratic candidates and a leading Republican one are senators — and in part because the Democratic majority is wider and the caucus easier to unify in the House than in the Senate.

The final meeting among Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Paulson and Mr. Boehner was a Wednesday evening session that lasted from just after 7 until about 8:30.

Ms. Pelosi returned to her office where she met late into the night with Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Rangel had lobbied strenuously to include payments for the poorest wage earners, even if they do not have to pay income taxes, and to extend unemployment benefits.

The deal was sealed in phone calls on Thursday morning, less than a week after Mr. Bush had a conference call with Congressional leaders.

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said his panel would mark up its package on Tuesday.

At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified that increases in food stamps and unemployment benefits would have more immediate economic effects than rebates.

“Food stamp and unemployment benefits can affect spending in two months,” Mr. Orszag said. “Rebates would affect spending at the end of 2008.”

Edmund L. Andrews, Carl Hulse, Steven Lee Myers and Robert Pear contributed reporting.

Froma Harrop
The Providence Journal
January 23, 2008

You’ve seen the hound who sits out front and emits a low growl when people walk by. He’s saying, “You can pass, but don’t try any funny stuff.”

The Blue Dog Democrats are making similar noises toward proposals to goose the economy. A coalition of 47 moderate-to-conservative House Democrats, the Blue Dogs abhor budget deficits. They are the chief enforcers of PAYGO, the noble rule revived by the Democratic majority. PAYGO requires that new spending and tax cuts be offset by new revenues.

But recession looms, and ideas to simulate the economy are scampering down the halls of Congress. They include tax rebates, increases in food stamps and other ways to quickly inject cash into the economy. Almost everyone agrees that something’s needed – and a stimulus would not be much of one if it had to be immediately paid for.

What’s a Blue Dog to do? I asked two of the coalition’s leaders – Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas and Florida Rep. Allen Boyd. They say a stimulus package must pass. But they’re on high alert for the funny stuff.

“It should be temporary,” Ross told me in his office, joined by Boyd. “It should be targeted, and it should be paid for over five years.” It should not get “larded up.” And, yes, lobbyists are swarming around what could become a $150 billion bag of money.

“Our role in this,” Boyd added, “no matter how we come on this in terms of substantive policy, is to be the fiscal-responsibility police.”

And so how could this be paid for in later years? Ross says the House Ways and Means Committee has some good ideas left over from the failed effort to offset the one-year patch of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

They include seeming no-brainers, such as closing some loopholes on offshore tax havens and taxing hedge fund managers at the same rates their chauffeurs pay. Since Democrats took Congress, the AMT legislation has been the only fall from PAYGO grace. The Blue Dogs still howl at it.

Ross faults Senate Republicans for their inability to make the AMT fix revenue neutral. “It was all about the tax cuts that would expire in 2010,” he said. “They knew that if they had to pay for this one, they’d have to pay for that one.”

The Blue Dogs irritate some on the left, who complain that they hurt the Democrats’ ability to enact their social priorities. The Dogs do not apologize for their fiscal discipline, seeing the national debt as a drag on all Americans. And they insist that budget watchdogs can also serve the interests of ordinary Americans.

For example, Ross wants the stimulus money directed at lower- and middle-income people, many of whom are struggling. “They’ve got a car that’s broken, they’ve got a washing machine that doesn’t work,” he said. “They get a $300 check in the mail – they’re going to get these things fixed. That’s how you stimulate the economy.”

Boyd blames the Bush administration for turning the American economy into a “pure mess.” The president, he said, “led people to believe that they can have all the spending programs they want and have tax cuts and go to war, and we can borrow the money from China, and everything’s going to be OK.”

Ross happily reports that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on the coalition’s side. Fiscal restraint is good for the country and also for the Democrats. After the 2006 election, the Blue Dog den gained nine new pups. Eight had just taken seats from Republicans.

Given the economic emergency, the Blue Dogs will let the stimulus package pass – but not before they give it a good sniff.

David S. Broder
The Washington Post
January 23, 2008

COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina has become a must-win state for Barack Obama.

Whatever the outcome of Saturday’s Democratic presidential primary here, the Illinois senator has the money and the organization to compete in the nearly two dozen states voting on Feb. 5.

But as his first and only victory in Iowa on Jan. 3 slips further into history, his strategists concede that Obama badly needs to demonstrate broad enough support to slow Hillary Clinton’s progress toward the nomination.

Having trailed her in popular votes in both New Hampshire and Nevada, where he was favored, Obama finds himself more in need of help than he perhaps expected from the voters here.

This state offers him many advantages he will not enjoy automatically when the competition moves to California, New York, New Jersey and other delegate-rich states next month.

The African-American vote is a larger percentage of the Democratic electorate here – perhaps half the total – than in any of those states, and even Clinton supporters credit Obama with having the best field organization on the ground. Clinton has switched her South Carolina leadership several times, while Obama has had steady and impressive local management.

This is also the state where John Edwards won in 2004 – and perhaps the last place where the native son can be expected to siphon off a significant number of white votes this year, simplifying the math for an Obama victory in a state where racial polarization often prevails.

For all these reasons, anything other than an Obama victory on Saturday would represent a significant setback to his long-term prospects, while Clinton has built-in alibis for a possible loss.

The stakes may explain why tensions became so obvious during the Monday night debate in Myrtle Beach, with Clinton and Obama accusing each other of distorting the record and falsifying their own voting histories.

Their exchanges were personal and angry. He referred to her as a corporate lawyer who had served as a director for Wal-Mart, a company with an anti-union reputation. She shot back that he had been a lawyer for a reputed Chicago slumlord. Any thought that these two might someday team up as a Democratic ticket vanished into the night.

Edwards seemed stunned by the ferocity of the other two, but took advantage of the situation by landing some punches of his own on both. He sided with Clinton on health care, but reinforced Obama’s contentions on campaign finance, special interests and Social Security, only to switch and join Clinton in questioning why Obama had voted “present” so often in the Illinois Legislature.

No one came out unscathed, but Edwards probably fared best, raising the possibility that he could split the white vote with Clinton and, ironically, thereby help Obama.

But all that is down the road from South Carolina. For now, Clinton and her husband, the former president, have gotten inside Obama’s head and rattled his composure. Obama seemed unusually defensive in his speech here Sunday evening, launching the final burst of campaigning in the state.

He deviated from his standard “time for a change” and invocation of hope to deliver a point-by-point rebuttal to the arguments that have come from the Clinton campaign since they recognized his threat in Iowa.

He ripped Clinton by name for her hypocrisy in supporting a bankruptcy bill and then saying she hoped it would not become law. That, he said, is the kind of double-talk his critics would like him to learn – but he said he scorns.

He accused her also of distorting his position on Social Security, by describing his support for raising the ceiling on payroll taxes above the current $102,000 a year as “a trillion-dollar tax increase.” He said that it would hit only the top 4 percent of earners.

And he also sought to dispose of complaints from both Clinton and Edwards about his favorable comments to a Nevada newspaper about Ronald Reagan – disclaiming any idea that he embraced Reagan’s economic or social policy and arguing that he wanted only to emulate Reagan’s ability to win support from voters aligned with the other party.

While he was on his defensive spiel, Obama also urged people to ignore “crazy” rumors that he was a Muslim or ever failed to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or take his oath to uphold the Constitution.

Many of those same points came up again in the Monday night debate, where the audience seemed sympathetic to Obama’s answers. He has to hope that he is not misreading the South Carolina electorate, because a rejection here would be bad news indeed for what looms ahead.

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
January 22, 2008

My campaign and election memories go back to 1960, when I was one of the few who backed John Kennedy at an election night party that my parents were throwing. The early broadcasts had him winning big (they extrapolated that his gains in heavily Roman Catholic Connecticut would be matched across the mostly Protestant country), and I was too young to stay up for the dramatic conclusion.

Two years later, as a freshman at Harvard, I went into Boston and saw a fresh-faced Edward Kennedy on the night of his Senate primary victory. In 1965, I ventured to New York to report for the Harvard Crimson on the race for mayor of New York. At John Lindsay’s election night headquarters, I urged the guard to let novelist Norman Mailer into the press and VIP section at the front of the room (maybe not the right judgment).

I have many memories of campaigns, too – of bitterly cold, dark winter mornings as I got into rental cars in Iowa and New Hampshire, and, consulting the maps as I went, drove to the first campaign stops of the day. Of being part of the crowd at the Carpenter Hotel (now an old folks’ home) backing Eugene McCarthy the Saturday night before the 1968 New Hampshire primary. Of tracking Bill Clinton after Gennifer Flowers went public to jam-packed events in New Hampshire where he established himself as “the comeback kid.”

Or of meeting George McGovern’s 22-year-old pollster Pat Caddell in his office in Cambridge, Mass., in 1972, shortly after the publication of my first “Almanac of American Politics.” Working with my boss Peter Hart in the 1974 cycle, when our Democratic clients seemed to be winning everywhere. And sitting down with him the week before the 1980 election and, looking at each race, calculating whether Republicans had a chance to win a majority in the Senate.

They did, we concluded, but they wouldn’t, because they would have to win almost all the close races, and that never happens. But it happened in 1980, and again in 1986, and in 2002 and 2006, as well.

In the 1980s, I remember a young Republican backbencher named Newt Gingrich prophesying that the Republicans would win control of the House and explaining just how. He was right, finally, in 1994, but not before being wrong in several previous election cycles.

Campaigns and elections are mysterious things, predictable in many respects but also full of surprises, and never more so than in this wild and woolly cycle. Character plays an ineluctable role, and we come to know pretty well our candidates’ strengths and weaknesses (which are often the same thing: Bill Clinton’s fluency-slipperiness; George W. Bush’s steadfastness-stubbornness).

Yet it’s hard for citizens of a nation with 303 million people to judge the character of candidates most will never get a chance to talk with. We get buyer’s remorse during campaigns and presidencies. Think of our reactions against Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, both Bushes and, at least as to character if not competence, both Clintons.

The classic accounts of American campaigns are Theodore H. White’s four “Making of the President” books, from 1960 to 1972. White was part of a generation of journalists who got their start in World War II and thought their role was to celebrate our nation and our leaders. He was a fine reporter who did not ignore practical and even tawdry politics, but his tone was uplifting. His winning candidates were fine and noble, his losers decent though limited.

After Watergate, White felt betrayed by Nixon and wrote a mea culpa volume. Political journalism took a turn toward exposure rather than celebration, toward cynicism rather than awe.

But none of the fine campaign books written since has sold in anything like the numbers of White’s volumes. Cynicism prevails but doesn’t sell. Ronald Reagan, who was of Teddy White’s generation, and who voted for 12 winning presidential candidates and only four losers in his active adult life, knew about the tawdry things yet believed there was something noble about our politics. Maybe we should feel that way, too. After all these years, I think I do.

Rancor Between Obama and Clinton Continues in S.C.
By Dan Balz and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 22, 2008; A01

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C., Jan. 21 — The Democratic presidential front-runners clashed angrily in a debate Monday night, with Sen. Barack Obama accusing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband of repeatedly distorting his positions and Clinton asserting that Obama is trying to run away from his record.

Their sharp exchanges in the nationally televised forum underscored the Democrats’ increasingly fierce competition five days before a pivotal primary test in South Carolina.

The debate turned personal almost from the outset, as Obama accused the Clintons of misrepresenting his comments about Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party’s ideas, as well as his record on the Iraq war. “That is simply not true,” he said.

Clinton responded forcefully: “It is very difficult having a straight-up debate with you, because you never take responsibility for any vote, and that has been a pattern.”

With three major contests behind them in the 2008 campaign, there is still no clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination. South Carolina’s primary, where more than half of the electorate is expected to be African American, will be the last big test before they head into Feb. 5, when more than half of the pledged national convention delegates will be chosen in nearly two dozen state contests.

In the debate, Clinton and Obama offered perhaps the most pointed criticisms of one another in the campaign. Obama went after Clinton during a discussion on economic stimulus by recalling his years as a community organizer in Chicago, adding: “While I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.”

And he brought up Bill Clinton’s campaign surrogate role by chiding, “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”

Hillary Clinton, reacting to Obama’s discussion of Republican ideas, struck back by saying: “I’m just reacting to the fact, yes, they did have ideas, and they were bad ideas. . . . Bad for America, and I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor [Tony] Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.”

Obama has been dogged by his connections to Rezko, an indicted businessman; he recently returned $40,000 in campaign contributions linked to Rezko.

Former senator John Edwards (N.C..) pursued Obama over his voting record in the Illinois legislature, seeking to turn the forum into a three-way brawl. But after being repeatedly sidelined by the back-and-forth, Edwards complained: “Are there three people in this debate, not two?”

After the initial tense exchanges Monday night, the three candidates went on to hold an extended discussion about racial inequality and gender on a day that began with all of them paying tribute to the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Obama was questioned about a remark by House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), a Clinton supporter, that “black voters should not do what makes us feel good, but what’s good for our great nation.”

Obama responded: “I think Charlie’s right in principle. Now, obviously, he and I differ in terms of what would be best for the nation.” But later, he added: “I don’t want us to get drawn into this notion that somehow this is going to be a race that splits along racial lines.”

Obama was also asked whether he agreed with a statement by African American author Toni Morrison about Bill Clinton that “this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

Obama paused for several moments, then responded: “Well, I think Bill Clinton did have an enormous affinity with the African American community, and still does. And I think that’s well earned.” He went on to add: “I would have to, you know, investigate more of Bill’s dancing abilities, you know, and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother.”

“Well, I’m sure that can be arranged,” Clinton said, as the crowd laughed.

The Democratic race has been roiled by racial issues over the past two weeks, after statements made by both Clintons and a key surrogate that were interpreted by some black leaders as attempts to unfairly undermine Obama’s candidacy.

A week ago, Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson, a longtime ally of the Clintons, used his introduction of Hillary Clinton at an event in South Carolina to drop a veiled reference to Obama’s previously acknowledged drug use as a young man. Johnson at first denied that was his intent but later apologized to Obama.

Tensions between the Obama and Clinton campaigns have risen sharply in the past few days, with Obama and his advisers outspoken in their criticism of the former president. In an interview Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Obama accused Bill Clinton of distorting some of his recent statements.

The candidate and his advisers are upset with statements that both Clintons made about Obama’s position on the Iraq war, his campaign’s efforts in the Nevada caucus and his remarks about Reagan.

“One of the things that we’re going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he’s making statements that are not factually accurate,” he said on ABC.

When excerpts of the interview leaked out Sunday night, Bill Clinton shot back at a Buffalo event that Obama “said President Reagan was the engine of innovation and did more, had a more lasting impact on America than I did. And then the next day he said, ‘In the ’90s, the good ideas came out from the Republicans,’ ” he continued. “Which it’ll be costly maybe down the road for him because it’s factually not accurate.”

For Obama, the Reagan issue represents a potential sore point in the nomination battle. Praising Reagan — even in an objective historical context — is not a recipe for success with liberal Democrats or African Americans, among whom Reagan was not popular.

The issue of race is also sensitive for Obama. He needs strong black turnout to win South Carolina and create momentum as he heads into the 22-state showdown Feb. 5. But he has sought throughout his campaign not to make his a racially based candidacy.

Monday’s debate was co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and was aired nationally on CNN. Wolf Blitzer served as moderator, with questions from CNN correspondents Joe Johns and Suzanne Malveaux.

Obama badly needs a victory in South Carolina after consecutive losses in New Hampshire and Nevada, and he will devote most of his campaign time this week to barnstorming the state.

Clinton, meanwhile, is scheduled to spend Tuesday and Wednesday campaigning in California, Arizona and New Mexico, all vital states in the Feb. 5 coast-to-coast mega-primary and all with significant Hispanic populations. Aides said Bill Clinton will cover for her in South Carolina on days when she is not in the state. He will spend much of his time wooing African American voters, who appear to be moving in large numbers to Obama.

The three candidates had spent the morning together in Columbia, S.C., attending a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally on the steps of the state Capitol.

The rally drew supporters from all three camps, who cheered and waved placards as their candidates rose to speak. But the undercurrent was Obama’s candidacy, viewed in deeply emotional terms across the South. One by one, local speakers addressed the potential gravity of this Saturday’s primary. Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina NAACP, told the crowd: “You will determine the course of history for generations to come.”

Clinton portrayed all three Democratic candidates — a woman, an African American and a Southerner — as groundbreaking figures. “That we stand here is a measure of Dr. King’s life’s work and his legacy,” she said. Clinton singled out Obama for special praise, calling him “an extraordinary young African American man, with so much to contribute.”

But at a King Day service Monday morning in Atlanta, the Clinton-Obama feud still simmered. At Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King had been co-pastor, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin spoke to a crowd of 2,000 that included Clinton’s husband in a front pew. Franklin, an Obama supporter, said the country is on the “cusp of turning the impossible into reality.”

“Yes, this is reality,” she said, “not fantasy or fairy tales.” Clinton had drawn fire for calling Obama’s claim of consistent opposition to the Iraq war a “fairy tale” on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. According to news reports, when the crowd rose to cheer Franklin, Clinton remained seated, clapping politely.

David S. Broder
Washington Post
January 20, 2008

COLUMBIA, S.C. – There are few if any states as freighted with history for John McCain as South Carolina. It was here in 2000 that the senator from Arizona came, riding his 18-point victory over George W. Bush in New Hampshire. And it was here, in the fortnight of their bitter struggle, that Bush reversed the outcome and put an end to McCain’s hopes of reaching the White House that year.

John Courson, the veteran Republican state senator from Columbia and former member of the Republican National Committee, had a close-up view of that struggle as part of the state political establishment supporting Bush. So it was a significant moment for him, and for McCain, that Courson was the master of ceremonies at the McCain rally in downtown Columbia that closed his 2008 pre-primary campaign.

Courson was only one of a half-dozen conservative legislators who paraded before the microphones here to identify themselves as past Bush campaigners now endorsing McCain. Their comments struck familiar themes: praise for McCain’s endurance as a Vietnam prisoner of war, for his steadfast support of the armed forces, for his insistence on victory in Iraq – and for his conservative social issue positions.

The effect was to dramatize how far McCain had come, in eight years, in co-opting the heart of the Republican establishment, with several of the state’s most popular Republicans – including the senior senator, Lindsey Graham – all vouching for him. Graham had been almost alone in backing McCain in 2000, when the establishment Republicans who looked to former Gov. Carroll Campbell for guidance all lined up behind Bush.

The campaign that unfolded back then was notably ugly, including anonymous slurs on McCain’s behavior in a North Vietnamese prison camp and unfounded rumors that the child his wife had adopted from a Bangladeshi nursery was actually the product of an extramarital relationship between McCain and another woman. Last week, McCain told reporters he attributed his 2000 defeat not to the sneak attacks, but to the depth and breadth of establishment support for Bush.

In this campaign, a multitude of options were available to those who were not ready to sign up with McCain. The evangelical community had former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, or, alternatively, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, both with strong anti-abortion records. Mitt Romney gave South Carolina short shrift, preferring to focus on Michigan and Nevada. And Rudy Giuliani spent his time and money preparing for the Jan. 29 race in Florida. But all of them, plus libertarian Ron Paul, could claim constituencies of some size.

Graham said the real difference this year is that “we’ve had eight years to get to know John” and to reflect, perhaps, on the decision the state made in rejecting him for Bush the last time around.

To encourage that reconsideration, the McCain campaign surrounded the candidate with people who symbolically reinforced the message that McCain is a mainstream, Reagan-era Republican.

He came to Columbia flanked by two icons of the conservative movement: Tom Coburn, the physician-senator from Oklahoma, and Jack Kemp, the former congressman from New York.

Coburn is a hero to two types of Republicans: those for whom abortion is an abomination and those who view wasteful federal spending as almost as serious a moral failing. When he testifies that he regards McCain not just as an ally but as a model, it challenges the notion that McCain is an unreliable maverick.

As for Kemp, no one has a longer history of championing supply-side economics, with its persistent belief that lower tax rates spur economic growth, than the old quarterback and one-time secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

McCain is better known for fighting earmarks and other forms of “nonessential” spending, and famously opposed Bush’s first round of tax cuts because they did not call for similar spending reductions. But Kemp told the voters here that McCain wants an overhaul of the whole tax system, “and I will work with him” – adding to reporters that he also admires the senator’s insistence on a “humane” approach to the issue of immigration.

Basking in their praise, McCain could hardly believe all this was happening to him in South Carolina. Whatever the result, this campaign was very different.

The Top Candidates Finally Go All-Out In a Closed Primary
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 21, 2008; A01

COLUMBIA, S.C., Jan. 20 — Riding the momentum from his weekend victory in South Carolina, John McCain turned his attention Sunday to Florida and the high-stakes primary there that will test whether the Arizona senator can consolidate support among Republican voters and take control of the GOP nomination battle.

The Jan. 29 contest in Florida will be the first Republican primary closed to independent voters, who have provided McCain with his margins of victory in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. A victory, strategists agreed, would stamp McCain as the front-runner in what has been a muddied Republican race and give him a clear advantage heading toward Super Tuesday on Feb. 5.

Leaving South Carolina on Sunday, McCain at first seemed hesitant to adopt the mantle of Republican leader. “I don’t know how to define a front-runner,” he told reporters asking him if he believed he was now the candidate to beat in the GOP race.

Minutes later, he changed his mind. Asked about critical comments from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, McCain shot back with a grin, “When someone hasn’t run a primary, I can understand why they would attack the front-runner.”

Florida has played a pivotal role in the past two general elections and now is poised to help determine who the Republicans will send into the main event this November. The primary looms as a potential showdown in the GOP nomination battle not only because of its size and importance but because it will be the first this year in which all the leading candidates are competing.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has won Nevada’s caucuses and the Michigan primary in the past week, sees Florida as a potential breakthrough for his once-battered candidacy and is pouring more of his personal fortune into the state in an effort to deny McCain a victory.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, after a loss to McCain in South Carolina, looks to Florida as perhaps a last opportunity to show that his Iowa caucus victory at the start of the nominating season was not a fluke. A second consecutive Southern loss would be especially costly for the underfunded Huckabee.

But what makes Florida most different from the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina is the presence of Giuliani as a full-fledged participant. The onetime national front-runner has finished far back in the Republican pack this year — behind Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in Iowa, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina. But Giuliani has been parked in Florida for several weeks and has made the primary the critical test for his candidacy.

Whether former senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee will be competing at all remains a question mark after his third-place finish in South Carolina, the state he was hoping would give him his first breakthrough of the year.

There was considerable speculation that Thompson would quit the race if he did not do well in South Carolina, but aides said Sunday that no decision had been made. “We are in the process of assessing the state of the campaign, but as of this point no decisions or plans have been made one way or the other,” spokesman Todd Harris said.

Florida offers a large and complex battleground for the Republican candidates. A full complement of television ads would run at least $3 million between now and the primary, perhaps more, according to strategists in the state. No candidate, not even the wealthy Romney, will be able to spend so freely.

Romney has ordered up about $1 million in TV commercials, and an adviser said more might be bought depending on the state of the race. McCain’s campaign has promised to counter with a seven-figure buy of its own. The Giuliani team expects to be competitive with McCain on television but not with Romney. Huckabee’s hand-to-mouth campaign will struggle to stay abreast of the others.

Geographically, Florida is a series of mini-nations. Giuliani hopes to capitalize on retirees from the Northeast who now live in South Florida. Huckabee will look to the Panhandle and its Southern complexion for the votes of religious and social conservatives, but McCain sees significant potential support there as well because of the concentration of military veterans.

The main battleground is likely to be the corridor between Tampa-St. Petersburg and Orlando, which all candidates will be plying over the next nine days.

Florida will award 57 delegates on a winner-take-all basis next week, the most of any state to date. The Republican National Committee penalized the state, cutting its delegate slate in half, because officials moved up the date of the primary. But by the time of the national convention this summer, it is possible that all 114 delegates will be awarded to the winner.

Recent polls have shown McCain with a slender lead over Giuliani, followed closely by Romney and Huckabee. But the campaigns expect to reassess the state of play over the next few days as the effects of South Carolina and, to a lesser extent, Nevada are felt in the Sunshine State.

McCain has yet to clearly win the Republican vote in any contest this year. In South Carolina, he and Huckabee evenly divided GOP voters. The senator’s margin came from independents, who represented one-fifth of the vote. The same pattern occurred in New Hampshire, where McCain and Romney evenly split Republicans and McCain won by a big margin among independents. In Michigan, Romney decisively won Republicans on his way to victory there.

“We’ve proven that we can win among Republicans and appeal to conservatives,” Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said. “Given that it is a closed primary, John McCain is not going to be able to find refuge in independent voters as he did in New Hampshire and South Carolina.”

“We certainly did a lot better than Governor Romney did among Republicans in the first contest in the South,” McCain strategist Steve Schmidt responded. “We feel good about how Senator McCain is performing across all bands of the Republican Party.”

McCain advisers see a two-person race against Romney developing in Florida. They believe Giuliani will begin to fade, as he has in other states and nationally. But they know the stronger Giuliani’s support, the more difficult it will be for McCain to win the state because the two candidates draw from similar pools of voters.

Mike DuHaime, Giuliani’s campaign manager, acknowledged the significance of Florida for his candidate. “We’ve made no secret about the importance of this state,” he said. “We’ve always known this would be the most critical stretch.”

But he said he expects the race to remain wide open through Feb. 5, when 21 states hold Republican contests.

DuHaime also tweaked McCain over his dependence on independent voters, saying, “John McCain hasn’t won a primary yet without the help of independent voters, so coming into a closed primary is a complicating factor.”

He said differences between McCain and Giuliani on President Bush’s tax cuts, immigration and campaign finance reform will shape the debate between the two.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Giuliani sounded one of those themes in challenging McCain’s credentials as an economic conservative. “I am the strongest fiscal conservative in the race, and I have a record of supporting tax cuts,” he said. “John voted against the Bush tax cuts, I think on both occasions, and sided with the Democrats.”

McCain responded later that he was supporting Republican tax cuts when the mayor was backing a Democrat for governor of New York — a reference to Giuliani’s endorsement of Mario Cuomo over Republican George Pataki in 1994.

Romney, who plans to focus on economic issues, also took aim at McCain on “Fox News Sunday,” saying his own experience and business background can fix both the ailing economy and a politically paralyzed Washington.

“If people want somebody who has been in Washington all their life and understands Washington’s ways and has been part of the Washington scene for a quarter of a century, then John McCain will be their person,” he said.

McCain, in an interview with CNN, dismissed questions about the breadth and depth of his support. “I got more votes than anybody else, and it says that I got it from across the spectrum from all over the state,” he said.

Staff writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

By David S. Broder
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The New Hampshire verdicts were reinforced Saturday in Nevada and South Carolina, bringing a degree of clarity to both parties’ nomination fights.

Hillary Clinton’s victory in the Nevada caucuses and John McCain’s win in the South Carolina primary were close enough to keep the competition going on both sides. But the winners gained significant advantages for the coming rounds.

Mitt Romney remains a serious challenger for the Republican nomination, with a win in Nevada Saturday on top of earlier victories in Michigan and Wyoming, and second-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Barack Obama, winless since Iowa, nonetheless continued to draw the kind of independent support that could fuel a comeback for him, starting next Saturday in South Carolina.

Mike Huckabee, the upset winner among Iowa Republicans, was damaged by his inability to roll up comparable margins among South Carolina evangelicals.

But he remains a factor in the four-way contest on Jan. 29 in Florida, where McCain will test his momentum against Romney and Rudy Giuliani, who has rested all his hopes on the Sunshine State.

Meantime, Saturday put a severe dent in two other contenders, Democrat John Edwards and Republican Fred Thompson. With third place finishes for the two former senators, their ability to remain viable candidates appeared to be in serious doubt.

For McCain, winning South Carolina reversed the most bitter of defeats in his 2000 challenge to George W. Bush — another year where he won New Hampshire’s independents.

The Arizona senator rallied the kind of establishment support here this time that went to Bush eight years ago and secured a victory that should enable him to raise money for the coming contests against the well-funded Romney.

But McCain still faces a challenge in states, such as Florida and California, where only registered Republicans — and not independents — can vote in the GOP primary.

On the Democratic side, in Nevada, as in New Hampshire, Clinton demonstrated powerful appeal to women voters, who dominated the turnout in both states. And she trounced Obama among Hispanics, despite his endorsement by the Culinary Workers’ Union that represents many of them employed in the casino industry.

In coming, delegate-rich states, such as California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey, those two constituencies could once again be critical. Obama’s appeal to African-Americans and younger voters in both races makes him competitive, but may not be enough to push him past Clinton.

In the next contest, in South Carolina, Clinton also benefits from the weakness being shown by the third Democrat, former senator John Edwards. He has looked more and more beleaguered in each state since he edged Clinton and took second place behind Obama in Iowa.

In 2004, Edwards was able to win his native state of South Carolina, thanks primarily to his support from white voters, and he has spent more days campaigning in the state this cycle than any of his rivals. But now, looking like a loser in the national competition, he may divert fewer white votes from Clinton than the Obama campaign had hoped.

Meantime, the Clinton campaign is planning to have Bill Clinton working black audiences across South Carolina, pitting his historical ties to African-American voters against Obama’s strength.

Some veteran Democrats here see a potential pattern of racial voting that could yield a narrow Clinton victory.

By JEFF ZELENY and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LAS VEGAS — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won the vote in the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday, giving her a second consecutive victory in what is shaping up as a protracted battle with Senator Barack Obama.

Mrs. Clinton scored a clear victory measured in the number of people attending the caucuses on her behalf. But Mr. Obama’s campaign was successful by another measure — in the allocation of delegates to the national nominating convention, a result of a complex formula that gave more weight to votes in some parts of the state.

Another Democratic candidate, John Edwards, placed a distant third in Nevada, a state that he once viewed as crucial to his prospects. Mr. Edwards has a chance to rebound next Saturday in the primary election in South Carolina, where he was born. But the Democratic contest already appears to be turning into a long-term fight for delegates between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama.

The results in Nevada had encouraging signs for Mrs. Clinton. She did well among women and Hispanics, two constituencies she is counting on as the campaign heads toward a coast-to-coast showdown in 22 states on Feb. 5.

The battle was most fiercely fought in Las Vegas, particularly at the casinos that hosted some of the caucuses. This provided an odd tableau for a nominating contest: women in black-sequined cocktail dresses and neatly pressed maid uniforms, and men coming off their shifts in the bar and wearing sunglasses indoors as they voted.

The contest in Nevada drew record turnout among Democratic caucusgoers, a reflection of the intensity of the race. In hundreds of precinct caucuses, including nine casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, about 116,000 voters took part in the first Western contest in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, 10 times the amount in the 2004 caucuses here.With 98 percent of the precincts reporting on Saturday night, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, had 51 percent of the vote and Mr. Obama, of Illinois, had 45 percent. Mr. Edwards, of North Carolina, came in with 4 percent, a surprisingly poor showing given the attention he had devoted to Nevada.

But the delegate count under the intricate rules of the caucuses appeared to favor Mr. Obama because of his support from a wide swath of the state, giving him 13 delegates compared with 12 for Mrs. Clinton.

In a statement, Mr. Obama noted that he had received one more delegate in Nevada than Mrs. Clinton because of a strong performance in precincts outside Las Vegas.

“We came from over 25 points behind to win more national convention delegates than Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Obama said, “because we performed well all across the state, including rural areas where Democrats have traditionally struggled.”

Strategists from both campaigns, as well as the Nevada Democratic Party, were poring over the returns several hours after the caucuses concluded. If the Democratic presidential race becomes a bare-knuckle fight to the nominating convention in August, the extra delegate for Mr. Obama could prove as important to him as the momentum that Mrs. Clinton might receive from winning the most votes in the state.

In a news conference with reporters before flying to a campaign event in Missouri on Saturday evening, Mrs. Clinton brushed aside questions about the delegate count.

“We’re looking really good,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I find it somewhat strange, actually, that there’s such a reaction when this was a very effective campaign to reach as many as people as possible.”

On the Republican side of the presidential race, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts easily won his party’s caucuses in Nevada, with 51 percent of the vote.

The Democratic results give the Clinton campaign a morale boost as it heads into the more challenging terrain of South Carolina, where Mr. Obama is hoping the large black Democratic electorate gives him his first victory since his first-place performance in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3. South Carolina Democrats go to the polls in a primary election next Saturday.

The outcome in Nevada provided a fitting coda to the campaign in the state, which was selected to play an early role in the presidential nominating contest because of its diversity and to signal the importance Western states hold for Democrats. It was the most chaotic of the early-voting states, with no precedent for holding such a contest, allegations of political high jinks and a late lawsuit that challenged holding caucuses in casinos.

“I don’t want to say it’s embarrassing, because I’m here, but I do see why people would think it’s strange that we are voting in a casino,” said Tiffany Romero, 31, a barista who participated at Wynn Las Vegas. “It’s not normal from what our country is doing, but this is Las Vegas.”

Indeed, when the caucuses commenced at noon, it was a curious scene.

Voters not only went to scores of schools and community centers across the state, but they also weaved their way through slot machines and bar stools to participate. Maids and cooks, bellmen and bartenders, nearly all of whom wore their uniforms and matching name tags, were granted a lunch break to attend the caucuses.

At Flamingo Las Vegas, one of the at-large caucus sites, 245 voters inside the Sunset Ballroom registered their attendance before breaking off into a corner to stand for their preferred candidate. As many of the voters ate from a boxed lunch, the caucus rules were translated into Spanish.

In this caucus site, as well as others along the Las Vegas Strip, the clout of Mr. Obama’s endorsement from the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 came into question, with people dividing nearly equally between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. (Associates of the Clinton campaign had sought to block the casino caucuses, but in the end, they turned out to be nearly a wash.)

Mrs. Clinton received half of the women voters, according to a poll of voters entering the caucuses on Saturday conducted by Edison/Mitofsky. She received about half of white voters and almost two-thirds of Hispanic voters. More than three-quarters of black voters supported Mr. Obama.

Mrs. Clinton handily won Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its influential union blocs, by a 10 point margin with 98 percent of the precincts reporting. In the final week of the race, the endorsement from the 60,000-member culinary union injected controversy into the contest, prompting the lawsuit as well as allegations of intimidation.

“They were bullying and threatening us to vote for Obama,” said Steve Gelt, who works in the coffee shop at the Flamingo and has been a member of the union for 12 years. “I like them all; I’m a Democrat. But that’s why I went for Hillary.”

Mr. Gelt said he wished the union would not have weighed in.

The campaign took on an increasingly negative tone, with phone calls identifying Mr. Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” and Spanish language radio ads suggesting that Mrs. Clinton “does not respect our people.”

Several Nevada voters, though, said they were accustomed to such political tactics.

“They think that we’re backcountry and we’re just a bunch of hillbillies or whatever, but I think there are a lot of people here who are well educated and are read-up on the issues,” said Fred Slaughter, 71, who attended his first caucus in Pahrump. “We’re going to be surprising to a lot of people.”

Steve Friess and Patrick Healy contributed reporting from Las Vegas, and Julie Bosman from Atlanta.

By MICHAEL COOPER and MEGAN THEE
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Senator John McCain staved off a spirited challenge by Mike Huckabee to win the South Carolina primary on Saturday, exorcising the ghosts of the attack-filled primary here that derailed his presidential hopes eight years ago.

Mr. McCain’s victory here, on top of his win earlier this month in New Hampshire, capped a remarkable comeback for a campaign that was all but written off six months ago. In an unusually fluid Republican field, his aides said they hoped the victory would give Mr. McCain a head of steam going into the Jan. 29 Florida primary and the nationwide series of nominating contests on Feb. 5.

“It took us a while, but what’s eight years among friends?” Mr. McCain said at a boisterous victory celebration that broke out into shouts of “Mac is back! Mac is back!”

Mr. McCain did best among voters who said experience was the most important quality in a candidate, among those who said the Iraq war and terrorism were their top concerns and among the state’s veterans, who made up a quarter of the vote. He ran about even with Mr. Huckabee, who pressed a populist message here, among the many voters who said their top concern in the election was the economy. He also continued to draw strong support from independents.

Mr. Huckabee’s loss in a Southern state with a strong turnout of religious voters was a setback to his campaign as it heads toward potentially less hospitable states.

Nearly 60 percent of the voters in South Carolina identified themselves in exit polls as evangelical Christians, a group that was heavily courted by Mr. Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher. While Mr. Huckabee captured 4 in 10 of their votes, Mr. McCain also made inroads with the group, capturing more than a quarter of their vote.

The South Carolina primary has accurately predicted the Republican presidential nominee since 1980, and since 1988 it has often played a decisive role. The McCain campaign sought to highlight that history here this week, but he is still left facing a scrambled field of opponents, including Mitt Romney, whose lopsided victory in the lightly contested Nevada caucuses Saturday gave him his second win in a week. He defeated Mr. McCain in the Michigan primary on Tuesday.

In his concession speech, Mr. Huckabee praised Mr. McCain for running “a civil and a good and a decent campaign” and vowed to battle on.

“The reason that I want to encourage you tonight is to remind you that politics — and particularly this year, more than perhaps any other — this is not an event,” he said. “It is a process. And the process is far, far from over.”

With 94 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mr. McCain had 33 percent of the vote, Mr. Huckabee 30 percent, Fred D. Thompson 16 percent, and Mr. Romney 15 percent.

The distant third-place finish was a severe blow to the candidacy of Mr. Thompson, an actor and former Tennessee Senator. He had been counting on a strong showing in a Southern state to revive his fortunes, and gave a rambling speech in which he urged his followers to “stand strong.”

The primary also narrowed the field of Republican candidates, leading Representative Duncan Hunter of California to drop out of the race.

For Mr. McCain, the victory was especially sweet. His presidential hopes were dealt a crippling blow here eight years ago when he lost to George W. Bush after a primary battle that was marked by vicious personal attacks on Mr. McCain and his family. This time his campaign aggressively responded to the few attacks that were leveled at him in fliers and phone calls, both debunking them and using them to gain sympathy for Mr. McCain. The campaign also enjoyed the support of the political establishment in the state.

“You and I are aware that for the last 28 years, the winner of the South Carolina primary has been the nominee of our party for president on the United States,” he said at a victory rally at the Citadel, a military school, where he kissed his mother, Roberta, 95. “We have a ways to go, my friends, and there are some tough contests ahead, starting tomorrow in the state of Florida. But, my friends, we are well on our way tonight.”

The campaign now heads to Florida, where Mr. McCain faces another challenge: Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been advertising heavily and campaigning nearly nonstop there. His campaign hopes a win there will rescue his faltering candidacy.

The South Carolina contest was crucial for Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee, who were trying to build on earlier victories — Mr. McCain in New Hampshire and Mr. Huckabee in Iowa — to establish their dominance in the still-muddled Republican field.

Mr. McCain had predicted that he would win the primary here, and, although many polls were close in the last week, he campaigned as if he were the strong front-runner, pressing his twin issues of military strength and fiscal conservatism. He never disparaged or engaged Mr. Huckabee, even in the face of a spate of phone calls and radio advertisements attacking him by independent groups supporting Mr. Huckabee.

Mr. McCain’s campaign tried to portray him as the one candidate ready to be commander in chief, a message it sought to drive home with a big rally at an aircraft carrier museum here and a visit Saturday morning to a company that makes armored vehicles for the troops. He traveled with current and former senators and prominent state officials.

Mr. Huckabee, meanwhile, tackled South Carolina as if it were his home ground, with a populist patter and a calculated sense of the state’s stress points. He leaned heavily on secular themes in his public appearances — delivering an I-feel-your-pain economic message — but was very much the ordained Baptist minister on the airwaves, embracing the evangelical belt in the Midlands and western hills. The one commercial he ran over the last three days focused on his Christian beliefs.

Mr. Huckabee also emphasized his Southern origins in Greenville and Spartanburg, urging listeners to “support a Southerner who has run a Southern state.”

And he seized on several issues to try to galvanize conservative voters. Although he made a point of being compassionate toward illegal immigrants as the governor of Arkansas, he took a resolutely anti-immigration stance in South Carolina, sending out a mailing on the subject and becoming the first presidential candidate to sign a pledge promising not to give amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Mr. Huckabee also dove into the murky waters of Southern cultural identity politics, raising a dormant issue Thursday when he said that it was not his business whether the state chose to fly the Confederate battle flag over the Capitol. (The state removed the flag in 2000.) That same day an apparently unaffiliated group, Americans for the Preservation of American Culture, began running radio advertisement criticizing Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney on the issue, while praising Mr. Huckabee.

The McCain campaign grew concerned Saturday morning when voting problems were reported in Horry County, which includes Myrtle Beach, where they had expected strong support.

Gary Baum, a spokesman for the South Carolina State Election Commission, said voting machines in 15 or 20 of the county’s 118 precincts were not properly set up for voting, forcing voters to use emergency paper ballots. Mr. Baum said there might have been some precincts that did not have enough paper ballots.

The McCain campaign said it had received reports that some voters were turned away from the polls without voting.

Mr. Baum said that the voting machines worked, but that elections workers had not properly cleared test votes, rendering it impossible to open the machines for actual voting. He said workers were sent to the precincts to fix the machines.

Despite pouring millions of dollars into South Carolina, Mr. Romney struggled in the state. So he abandoned the state to compete in the lightly contested caucus in Nevada.

Mr. Romney’s runaway victory in Nevada was powered to a large degree by Mormons, according to an entrance survey reported by The Associated Press. Mormons made up a quarter of Republican caucus participants, and 95 percent of them voted for Mr. Romney.

Michael Powell contributed reporting from Columbia, S.C. and Michael Luo from Jacksonville, Fla.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Bush called Friday for roughly $145 billion in tax relief for individuals and businesses that he said would “provide a shot in the arm” for the economy, while Congressional Democrats, in a rare show of Washington bipartisanship, pledged to work with him to enact a plan quickly.

Mr. Bush laid out his ideas for an economic rescue package only in broad strokes, saying the plan must be “built on broad-based tax relief” and “big enough to make a difference in an economy as large and dynamic as ours.” He did not use the word recession, but acknowledged that “there is a risk of a downturn.”

His comments, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, reflected a heightened sense of urgency within the administration and on Capitol Hill about the need to stimulate spending in an economy shaken by higher gas prices and instability in the housing and credit markets.

Though the details must still be negotiated, both the White House and Congressional Democrats are leaning heavily toward a combination similar to the one the administration turned to in 2001 as a recession-fighting tool. It would include a one-time tax rebate for individuals and an immediate expansion in the deductions that businesses take for investment in equipment. If Congress acts quickly, checks could be in the hands of American taxpayers as early as spring.

Still, there will be sticking points. In laying the foundation for a plan rooted in tax policy, Mr. Bush held fast to a central theme of his presidency, that cutting taxes, rather than increasing spending, was the route to prosperity. Democrats, by contrast, supported an extension of unemployment benefits, coupled with tax breaks aimed at the middle class. Some reacted warily, even as they praised Mr. Bush.

“We want a balanced package: a tax rebate for the middle class and spending stimulus that jump-starts this economy quickly,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, told reporters.

In declining to offer specifics, Mr. Bush acceded to the wishes of the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who had asked him during a conference call on Thursday not to lay out a formal proposal before Democrats had a chance to coalesce around theirs. Administration officials were assiduous on Friday about refusing to comment on details, including a report that the rebate would be set at $800 for individuals and $1,600 for couples.

“I don’t want to play, ‘Is it bigger than a breadbox?’ ” Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. told reporters, adding that Mr. Bush intentionally did not release details “because we’re looking to be collaborative in working with Congress here.”

In setting his parameters, Mr. Bush said the package should be about 1 percent of the gross domestic product, or roughly $145 billion. He said it must include tax incentives to induce businesses “to make major investments in their enterprises this year,” as well as provide “direct and rapid income tax relief for the American people.”

Mr. Bush said his purpose was “to keep a fundamentally strong economy healthy.”

“In a vibrant economy, markets rise and decline,” he said. “We cannot change that fundamental dynamic. Yet there are also times when swift and temporary actions can help ensure that inevitable market adjustments do not undermine the health of the broader economy. This is such a moment.”

Mr. Bush offered an important olive branch to Democrats. He did not insist that the package be linked to making his tax cuts permanent — an idea that Democrats had warned would face stiff opposition — but instead called on Congress to take up the issue of permanent tax cuts after passage of a rescue package.

As he spoke, the members of his economic team were behind him, among them Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a prominent backer of the tax cuts Mr. Bush got through Congress in 2001 and 2003.

Friday’s announcement set Congress on a timetable much faster than the one Mr. Bush envisioned when, in an interview with reporters for Reuters two weeks ago, he volunteered that he was contemplating a stimulus package to provide a short-term push for the economy.

Mr. Bush pledged to make a decision about whether a package was necessary sometime around his State of the Union address on Jan. 28.

But a combination of economic and political factors conspired to thrust the stimulus package to the top of the Washington agenda. The day after Mr. Bush’s interview with Reuters, the government released a disappointing unemployment report. That, coupled with the slide in the stock market, created a sense that Congress needed to act quickly.

As Democrats began previewing their plans, the question of the stimulus package became a quiet undercurrent of Mr. Bush’s extended trip through the Middle East. As Mr. Paulson reached out to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Mr. Bush was receiving daily updates on economic data and reports being released back home, according to the White House counselor, Ed Gillespie.

The White House staff took part in a conference call on the options being considered by Mr. Paulson on the night Mr. Bush stayed on the farm of the Saudi leader, King Abdullah. The president convened a final staff meeting to talk about the package aboard Air Force One on Wednesday as he flew home from Egypt, and he agreed to talk to House and Senate leaders on Thursday.

One Republican close to the White House said Mr. Bush’s aides concluded that it was important for the president to get out ahead of any Democratic proposals. “The president had to define the policy and political environment and lead the Congressional Republicans,” this Republican said.

Both parties see political opportunity in acting quickly. Mr. Bush’s approval ratings may be low, but the ratings of Congress are even lower, and both sides believe that voters will look favorably on quick bipartisan action.

“There is a growing concern that the economy is deteriorating and Congress and the president must act quickly,” said one senior Democratic aide, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We’re not able to afford that typical drawn-out and political legislative battle where both sides first stake out hard-line positions and come together after months of debate. We need to expedite the process by trying to take the politics out of it, which in turn is good politics.”

Republicans appeared to be lining up behind Mr. Bush’s plan — and, in a rare turn of events, praising Democrats. “We have started this year in a new way,” the House Republican whip, Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, said.

But some economists questioned the wisdom of tax rebates as an effective stimulus tool. Brian M. Riedl, who analyzes the federal budget for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization here, argued that rebates were essentially a redistribution of wealth and did not add anything to the economy, because the government must either levy taxes or borrow money to pay for them.

“Unfortunately, lawmakers are taking the political approach on the stimulus, which is to say they seem to be focusing on what proposals are popular than what will actually help the economy,” Mr. Riedl said.

At least one Republican, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, agreed. “I think it’s fine to send people their tax money back, but I don’t think it does much to generate economic growth,” he said, adding, “This wouldn’t be the first thing on my wish list.”

But Mr. Ryan said he would vote for the plan anyway.

Carl Hulse, Steven Lee Myers and Edmund L. Andrews contributed reporting.

Cal Thomas
January 19, 2008

Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court unilaterally struck down state laws restricting abortion, the cost of that decision continues to increase our moral deficit, which will have far greater (and eternal) consequences than the impact from economic challenges during a possible recession.

Depending on how one counts the number of abortions per year since 1973, more than 50 million people who might have been are not. These were people who, regardless of the circumstances of the women who carried them, had the potential to contribute to the country and to the world. But now they cannot, because they are not. Would we be fighting the battle over immigration had we not rid ourselves of a generation of humans who likely would have done the work for which we are now importing illegal aliens? Actions have consequences.

Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, took the question of endowment of life by “our Creator” and placed it in the hands of individuals. History has shown what happens when humanity seizes such power for itself: political dictatorships, eugenics and scientific experiments unrestrained by any moorings to a moral code. Each becomes her and his own god; each becomes a taker of life, rather than a giver, inverting the creation model into one of destruction and transforming the pregnant woman from life-giver to life-taker.

The social restructuring unleashed by the judicial fiat that was Roe created a cultural fissure that remains today. We moved quickly from acknowledgement of a right to live, to assertions of a right to die. In her essay “The Women of Roe v. Wade,” Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon calls to mind the novelist Walker Percy who prophesied two years before Roe that “Qualitarian Centers” would spring up, “where, as one of Percy’s characters explained, doctors would respect ‘the right of an unwanted child not to have to endure a life of suffering.’ ” State governments, Percy suggested, might eventually recognize a right to die. Arrangements would be made for the sick and elderly to push a button that would transport them to a “happy death” in Michigan, a “joyful exitus” in New York, or a “luanalu-hai” in Hawaii. Percy’s fiction increasingly resembles fact.

Abortion on demand cannot be seen in isolation from social breakdown. In 1973, near the end of the Vietnam War and the approaching resignation of President Nixon two years later, the focus on self, pleasure and convenience by Baby Boomers was at its height. Marriages easily dissolved as “no fault” divorce laws were passed; cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births were on the rise; “unwanted babies” (who were labeled “products of conception” to make it easier to deny the obvious) became an impediment to the pursuit of pleasure and material gain.

Abortion was not a cause, but a reflection of our decadence and deviancy. One does not begin to kill babies until other dominoes have fallen. And once they have fallen, it becomes difficult to set them aright because to do so would require an admission of something so horrible that those responsible for this fetal holocaust would have to acknowledge their sin and repent of it. Such a thing is not a character trait of this most pampered generation.

In recent years there have been signs that things may be – if not turning around – then moderating. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abortion numbers have declined steadily since 1990, from a high of 1.2 million annually to fewer than 900,000. This is due, I believe, to the unrelenting commitment of the pro-life movement through pregnancy help centers, information by Internet, marches and what appears to be a growing pro-life consensus among many women who reject the cavalier attitudes about life displayed by their mothers’ feminist generation.

Hollywood has infused a pro-life subplot into films such as “Juno” and “Knocked Up.” Might the “old-fashioned” become the new fashion?

Politicians and judges could help bury Roe by requiring that pregnant women receive complete information about the nature of the life within them, including being required to view sonograms before electing abortion. This would follow truth-in-labeling and truth-in-lending laws by fully informing and empowering women. Such an approach would satisfy the liberal demand to keep abortion “safe and legal” and the pro-life desire to make them rare.

After 35 years of slaughtering our young, isn’t it time to stop? That child born in 1973 could be a parent now. There are children who could have been born today. Thirty-five years of killing has diminished and corrupted us all. Let’s summon the moral courage to stop it for our sake … and for theirs.

John C. Bersia
January 19, 2008

To confront Iran, two serious approaches compete for attention. The favorite of the Bush administration – the criticize-and-alienate strategy – has demonstrated limited utility. The other – the criticize-and-engage strategy – has yet to be fully tested but offers greater potential for resolving tensions.

Disappointingly, President George W. Bush has wasted no opportunity to lash out at Iran during his swing through the Middle East. This week, in Abu Dhabi, he urged U.S. regional allies to join together against Tehran “before it’s too late.” According to the White House, Iran funds terrorists, disrupts Lebanon, helps arm the Taliban, rhetorically intimidates nearby countries and refuses to come clean on its nuclear ambitions.

I find none of that surprising, but new information has changed the conversation. For example, on the same day as Bush’s speech, word circulated from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Tehran has agreed to resolve outstanding questions about its nuclear research within the coming month.

That would be significant in and of itself. But what makes the announcement even more important is that it follows last December’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which presented a startling conclusion: Iran placed its nuclear-weapons efforts on hold in 2003.

Even the Bush administration should acknowledge that the black-and-white clarity of its position has become obscured in a sea of gray.

Following the useful advice that one ought to hold friends close and adversaries even closer, Washington should try a criticize-and-engage strategy. Frankly, a hint of serious engagement with Iran is something that I had hoped would come out of Bush’s trip rather than the familiar alarmist ranting.

To be clear, none of this means that I trust Iran’s leaders. In fact, I have long hoped that the Iranian people would see through their rulers’ manipulative system, rise up and create a new order. Unfortunately, such change rarely occurs as quickly as one would like.

In the interim, it is worthwhile to see what emerges from Tehran’s understanding with international nuclear regulators. In four weeks’ time, the world will either know much more about Iran’s nuclear secrets or find itself still stuck in the uncomfortable uncertainty of the present. At that point, the community of nations will face a decision.

Next, as hopeful as the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate is, more information is needed. For example, is there anything credible in Iranian opposition claims that Tehran may indeed have stopped its program in 2003 but restarted it at a later date?

Finally, even as it maintains a close watch over Iran’s predisposition to interfere in neighboring countries’ affairs – a habit as old as the country’s revolution – Washington should explore ways to nudge Tehran toward more-acceptable behavior. I firmly believe that at least part of the answer lies with including Iran in a regional peacemaking initiative. That gesture would dovetail nicely with Bush’s ambitious goal of securing an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty before he leaves office.

Which will it be, then? A continuation of a tired approach? Or a new one that takes into consideration changing realities?

Hopefully, Americans will not have to wait for a different administration to see the strategy of criticizing and alienating make way for one that criticizes and engages.

By Dan Balz and Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 18, 2008; A08

COLUMBIA, S.C., Jan. 17 — Time is running out for former senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee to make a statement in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Once billed as the party’s next Ronald Reagan, he is just two days from knowing whether his candidacy has a future.

As the first Southern state prepares to vote, Thompson has conceded that a disappointing finish in Saturday’s GOP primary would probably sink his chances. Other candidates have much to gain or lose here, but none more than the man whose candidacy has been one of the campaign’s biggest puzzles.

Until now, Thompson has been overshadowed by his rivals. He ran third in Iowa, the state that vaulted former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to the race’s front ranks. He got 1 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, where Sen. John McCain of Arizona came back to life. He attracted 4 percent in Michigan on Tuesday, when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney resuscitated his candidacy with a victory.

That is hardly the script written for the television and movie actor months ago as he began a high-profile effort to test enthusiasm for his campaign.

Now he is down to one state where he hopes that his combination of Southern roots and conservative views will lead to the breakthrough that has so far escaped him. He isn’t reluctant to remind audiences here that he’s kin. As he said at a West Columbia restaurant Thursday morning, “It’s good to be back in home territory where they know how to cook green beans — and they’re not crunchy.”

His rivals doubt his chances, but Thompson believes something is happening in the Palmetto State. Asked during a radio interview at the restaurant Thursday whether his efforts here represent a “too little, too late” strategy, he offered an upbeat assessment.

“We’re clearly moving in the right direction,” he said. “We had some ground to make up, but from what I can tell, we’re moving up.”

Noting that Romney’s campaign had spent heavily early, only to effectively concede the state this week, Thompson said, “I think you ought to be asking them the question of too early, too late, or something like that.”

Thompson advisers see the three biggest strands of the Republican coalition — economic, social and national security conservatives — divided among three candidates: Romney, Huckabee and McCain. Thompson, they argue, still has the capacity to unite all three, but only by showing that in South Carolina.

“It’s where we feel we need to break through,” said campaign manager Bill Lacy.

Lacy said the campaign has run a heavy television ad campaign this week, is making thousands of phone calls and has 200 volunteers to get out the vote.

South Carolina is the key to Thompson’s red-state strategy, conceived to take advantage of party rules that award extra delegates to states won by President Bush. A strong showing here, Lacy said, would set up the former senator to consider a major effort in the Jan. 29 Florida primary.

Thompson has been most aggressive here in challenging Huckabee, whose candidacy has drawn heavy support from evangelicals and whose Southern ties complicate Thompson’s chances.

Strategists around Huckabee and Romney see Thompson not so much as a threat to win the nomination but as a candidate who could help McCain by taking votes from their coalitions. Some believe he is a stalking horse for McCain. Thompson is a longtime ally of McCain’s and supported him in 2000.

“Why would he get aggressive all of a sudden here?” asked Ed Rollins, Huckabee’s campaign chairman, noting the series of attacks that Thompson directed at Huckabee in a recent debate. Rollins added: “Thirty-five seconds after he drops out, he endorses McCain. . . . Anything he takes from us I’m concerned about, because it’s a close race.”

Thompson, who touts what he calls a “100 percent pro-life” record on abortion, could peel religious conservatives from Huckabee. Romney aides fear that Thompson could take away anybody-but-McCain mainline conservatives.

At an event in Prosperity on Thursday, a man told Thompson that many people had gotten “push poll” calls from a group backing Huckabee, an allegation echoed by several others. An angry Thompson said he had heard of push polls accusing him of supporting what opponents call “partial birth” abortion.

“They’re taking the most outrageous, easily disproved things that they can come up with. . . . It’s so ham-handed,” Thompson said. “I had a 100 percent pro-life voting record over eight years.”

Asked about the issue during a news conference in Columbia on Thursday night, Huckabee said, “We think push-polling is a terrible way to campaign.”

He said he had called for the organizers to stop. But he noted that campaign finance laws prevent his campaign from talking to the groups using the tactic.

All the major Republican candidates except Rudolph W. Giuliani campaigned in South Carolina today. Romney canceled some appearances because of the weather and flew to Nevada, where he hopes to win Saturday’s GOP caucuses.

Before boarding the plane, Romney held a brief news conference with reporters at a Staples store outside Columbia, where he again accused his rivals of being beholden to Washington lobbyists.

“I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign,” he told reporters.

Romney was challenged on that point by a reporter who noted that Ron Kaufman, a longtime Washington lobbyist, is often by his side. “I said I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign, and he’s not running my campaign,” an irritated Romney said. “He’s an adviser.”

Pressed, Romney said: “Are you listening to what I’m saying? . . . Ron is a wonderful friend and adviser. He is not paid. . . . But I do not have lobbyists running my campaign. Ron Kaufman is not even at the senior strategy meetings of our campaign.”

Aside from Kaufman, lobbyist Vin Weber, a founder of the Washington firm Craig & Winstock, serves as Romney’s policy chairman.

Huckabee on Thursday raised the thorny issue of the Confederate flag, which roiled the 2000 primary. Eight years ago, McCain refused to take a position on whether the flag should be allowed to fly over the State House, saying that was a state issue. After the campaign, he said he regretted that stance and argued that it should come down.

The legislature has since voted to allow the flag to be displayed on the State House grounds, instead of on the capitol dome. Huckabee said the flag is a state issue. McCain said last spring that he believes the issue has been settled.

McCain campaigned in Columbia on Thursday, where he received testimonials from a group of legislators and was introduced by Jack Kemp, one of the GOP’s leading economic conservatives, and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a strong opponent of abortion and of wasteful government spending.

Staff writers Juliet Eilperin with McCain, Michael D. Shear with Romney and Joel Achenbach with Thompson contributed to this report.

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 18, 2008; A01

The question was about a campaign polling memo in 2008, but somehow the answer drifted back to the political wars of 1998. Bill Clinton was holding forth to a group of college students in New Hampshire too young to remember much about the investigations and battles of his presidency. But Clinton remembered.

“Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn’t take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon,” he told the students last week, his eyes narrowing and his finger jabbing the air. At another point, he complained that the investigations during his White House days virtually bankrupted him: “The Republicans were so mean to me when I was president that I was poorer when I left than when I got there.”

Ten years ago Monday, the story of Clinton’s relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky and the perjury investigation that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr had initiated as a result of it broke in the media, and the former president’s anger over that time can still seem close to the surface.

As Clinton travels the country campaigning for his wife with characteristic intensity, he is fighting not only to promote Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy but also to set the record straight on the two terms he spent in the White House. And if some cast the Democratic nomination battle as a test of whether the party wants to turn the page on the Clinton years, then he is determined to win the referendum.

Friends describe a man who has made peace with the past since leaving the Oval Office, but with his wife’s campaign now on the line, Clinton’s frustration seems to be boiling over. He has likened her Democratic rivals to Republican “Swift boat” attackers and castigated Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for making up a “fairy tale” about Obama’s war position. Just this week he berated a television reporter who asked about a dispute over Nevada caucus rules.

“What he perceives is a lack of fairness — equal scrutiny, equal accountability,” said the Rev. Carolyn Staley, a longtime friend from Arkansas. “While their lives have been an open book for all these years they’ve been in public service, other candidates have not been subject to that sort of scrutiny.”

Few know more about the harsh scrutiny of Washington than Bill Clinton. He spent much of his presidency fending off investigations by special prosecutors, congressional committees and news organizations. His marital indiscretions were excavated by tabloids and depositions. And then, on Jan. 21, 1998, came news that Starr was investigating whether he obstructed justice to cover up an affair with Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

The next 13 months were absorbed by the battle to save his presidency as Clinton tried to mislead and maneuver his way out of trouble and House Republicans impeached him on a party-line vote. Clinton won acquittal in the Senate, but a federal judge later found him in contempt of court for not telling the truth under oath. He eventually admitted giving false testimony about his relationship with Lewinsky, surrendered his law license and paid about $1 million in fines and settlement costs.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has managed to avoid much discussion of these episodes over the past year, and her Democratic rivals have brought them up only obliquely, saying, as Obama has, that they do not want to return to the political battles of the 1990s. Advisers to the senator from New York are acutely aware of Monday’s anniversary, coming at the height of the primary season, and hope it will pass with little notice. Some of them cringed last week when her husband recalled the scandal-ridden times at the same event where he made his “fairy tale” comment.

Friends and associates said the former president does not dwell on the old battles. If anything, they said, he has proved to be an unusually forgiving combatant. He has exchanged cordial notes with former congressman James E. Rogan (R-Calif.), one of the House managers who prosecuted his impeachment trial. His wife has teamed up on political initiatives with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), another manager, and former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who helped drive impeachment. Clinton even broke bread with Richard Mellon Scaife, the wealthy conservative who bankrolled many of the anti-Clinton projects in the 1990s.

“He’s not a normal politician who keeps score in his head and remembers everything,” said Joe Lockhart, who served as Clinton White House press secretary and still stays in touch. “There are people who did him wrong a million times that he loves. . . . But there are exceptions. Starr is one.”

Clinton himself said in his New Hampshire appearance that his heart surgery a few years back changed his outlook. “I’m very close now to former president Bush,” he said of the man he defeated in 1992. “I’ve always liked him a lot, and I’ve actually got a good relationship with the current president, because I just made up my mind that after I survived my heart trouble, I was too old to have enemies with anybody.”

Yet the instinct for conciliation seems to struggle at times with a deep sense of grievance. By his own account, he has been stewing over what he sees as unfair media treatment of his wife while Obama has gotten a free ride. “I’ve been blistered by it for months,” he said in New Hampshire. Nor does he hide his low regard for reporters. “I almost always disagree with them,” he told Charlie Rose on PBS.

Collectively, his recent comments echo the feeling of victimization he often expressed when he was president. “I don’t think he spends a lot of time thinking about the Whitewater investigation and the special prosecutor and all that. I don’t think that crosses his mind much at all,” said Staley, who sees Clinton regularly when he visits Little Rock. “But I think he now thinks he understands injustice because he was treated so unfairly. When you’re singled out for persecuting, trumped up — as he would view it and many would agree — and politically motivated set of events, you never forget that.”

Another old Arkansas friend, David Leopoulos, said Clinton is able to put his experiences in perspective. “Yeah, he was hurt,” Leopoulos said. “But you know what? How hurt was he? They impeached him, and his approval rating was 67 percent when he was impeached. The American people aren’t stupid.”

Leopoulos recalled talking with Clinton in the White House solarium two weeks before he left office in January 2001 and asking how he felt. “David, I don’t hate anybody,” he recalled Clinton answering. “I knew it would be tough when I got in. I didn’t know it would be as radical as it’s been, but I knew it would be tough. And I love this place and I wouldn’t do it any differently. I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

For most of the seven years since then, Clinton has avoided the partisan fray, focusing instead on making money, working to fight HIV/AIDS and climate change, and raising funds for victims of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Instead of portraying him as eager to jump back into campaigning, friends and former aides say he is somewhat reluctant to step back from his role as a world statesman. Other than fundraising, he had largely stayed off the campaign trail until late November.

“He is different than I’ve ever seen him,” said Terence R. McAuliffe, one of his best friends and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. “He is totally at peace with himself. He loves doing the Clinton Global Initiative. He is more introspective than I’ve ever seen him. He’s started joking that he now realizes he has more days behind him than ahead of him. He’s in a different place.”

Some Democratic strategists privately have wondered whether Clinton is more drawback than asset for his wife. His early speeches seemed more about touting his own record than hers, and he has gone off message a number of times in recent weeks with his “Swift boat” and “fairy tale” comments and with his assertion that he opposed the Iraq war in 2003, despite past statements.

“He’s not always singing from the same song sheet,” a Clinton campaign adviser acknowledged. “He’s the best political strategist in the world. Sometimes he’s got ideas and he runs with it. Probably half the time he was right and we were wrong.”

Other strategists said the former president was one of the few voices in the Clinton camp urging the candidate to attack Obama many months ago, before he became strong enough to upend her in Iowa — advice that was rejected but looks better in hindsight.

The Hillary Clinton campaign has tried to claim the best parts of his record while keeping its distance from less successful ones. His wife has depicted herself as a virtual partner in creating 22 million jobs and forging peace in Northern Ireland, but she repudiates the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which is unpopular with organized labor.

When a debate moderator pointed out that her position on torture differed somewhat from his, she brushed it off with a couple of quips. “Well, he’s not standing here right now,” she said, then added wryly, “I’ll talk to him later.” A friend said Bill Clinton, watching on television, loved the moment and called out, “Go get ‘em, girl!”

Not everyone has been convinced. In endorsing Obama in Nevada’s caucuses, the Reno Gazette-Journal wrote yesterday that Hillary Clinton “continues to struggle under the cloud of her husband” and that his “baggage” would “follow her into the White House.”

Still, campaign advisers said the former president is a net plus given his vast popularity with Democratic loyalists. “I start laughing every time I hear it — ‘Is it positive or negative?’ ” said former commerce secretary Mickey Kantor, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign chairman and an adviser to Hillary Clinton. “This borders on the ridiculous.”

Yet it is true that some in her circle still privately resent what they learned about 10 years ago and harbor no great loyalty to him. “I wouldn’t be out here for Bill Clinton,” a former White House aide close to Hillary Clinton said on the campaign trail. “I believed in his presidency, but I never really liked him all that much.”

As the former president hopscotches across the country these days, he campaigns with all the indefatigable fervor of his own White House bids. At a school in New Hampshire, he talked for hours, took questions and worked the rope lines until he had exhausted everyone but himself. As the clock passed midnight and he prepared to leave, he ran into the school custodian and lingered for 20 more minutes to talk about energy-efficient light bulbs.

Clinton seems intent on giving his wife the chance he once had — not out of guilt or an attempt to make amends, friends say, but out of genuine conviction that she is the best person for the job. And she is best prepared, he often argues, not in spite of the political wars of the 1990s, but in part because of them.

“She would have the best chance to win because she’s been beat up so,” he said in New Hampshire, sounding as though he might be talking about himself, too. “It’s hard to get blood out of scar tissue.”

Number of terminated pregnancies plummets; more opt for the pill

Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times
January 17, 2008

The most comprehensive study in years of abortion in America underscores a striking change in the landscape, with ever-fewer women choosing abortion and those who do increasingly opting to avoid surgical clinics.

The number of abortions has plunged to 1.2 million a year, down 25 percent since peaking in 1990, according to a report released Thursday – days before the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

In the early 1980s, nearly one in three pregnant women chose abortion. The most recent data show that proportion is closer to one in five.

“That’s a significant drop, and it’s encouraging,” said Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research for the anti-abortion group National Right to Life.

Women looking to end early pregnancies are gravitating to medication abortions, in which they take two pills under a doctor’s supervision to induce miscarriage. This approach lets them avoid surgery – and the protesters who often picket clinics – and expel the embryo in the privacy of their homes. The Food and Drug Administration approved the pills in 2000 for use through the seventh week of pregnancy.

By 2005, the most recent year covered by the report, the pills accounted for 13 percent of all abortions.

The research was conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based nonprofit that focuses on reproductive issues. The institute supports abortion rights and has received funding in the past from Planned Parenthood. Abortion opponents, however, generally view its statistics as reliable.

The Guttmacher report came to no conclusions about why the abortion landscape has changed. But that didn’t stop activists on both sides from speculating — and using the data to press their political agendas.

Abortion-rights advocates suggested women may not be terminating as often because they’re avoiding unwanted pregnancies, thanks in part to emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which is sold without a prescription to women 18 and older.

Led by Planned Parenthood, activists have pledged to spend much of 2008 lobbying for laws to make all forms of birth control cheaper and more widely accessible. They also plan to push states to require sex-education classes that teach contraception.

A political tactics manual recently developed for Planned Parenthood asserts that voters respond well to such issues especially when they’re framed with buzzwords like “prevention,” “protection” and “personal responsibility.”

Keeping the focus on abortion is exactly what opponents want.

They contend that the more women learn about the procedure, the less likely they are to choose it. The falling abortion rate, they say, may be the result of laws mandating counseling before an abortion.

More than 30 states have such laws. Some of the material given to women is false or misleading – for example, warnings that abortion raises the risk of breast cancer or causes post-traumatic stress disorder. Brochures often use photos of fetal development through nine months, though 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester. North Dakota’s packet informs women that the term fetus comes from the Latin for “young one.”

Abortion opponents view such material as a vital tool; they plan to lobby to expand this type of counseling.

Some of the biggest drops in the abortion rate, however, have come in states that do not impose tight restrictions.

Oregon, for instance, was rated this week by Americans United for Life as the nation’s “least pro-life state,” yet its abortion rate dropped 25 percent from 2000 to 2005 – more than any state except Wyoming.

The data suggest that the decline in abortions may be due not to legal restrictions, but to a shift in “socio-cultural mores” – in other words, women’s attitudes, said John Seery, a professor at Pomona College who studies the politics of abortion.

The Guttmacher report offered the first comprehensive census of abortion providers since 2000.

The number of abortion clinics nationwide was down 15 percent, a net loss of four dozen surgical clinics. But other women’s health centers and doctors in private practice filled the gap by offering medical abortions.

That trend may have political implications.

Abortion clinics have been besieged by “an escalation of pickets and protests,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. It’s much harder for protesters to identify a physician in private practice.

“Increasing reliance on nonsurgical abortions is a problem for the anti-abortion movement,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. “There is little popular support for restricting such abortions.”

On the other hand, the trend isn’t a clear victory for abortion-rights advocates. “It’s harder for protesters to target these physicians, but it’s also harder for women to find them,” said Rachel K. Jones, a senior research associate at Guttmacher.

By Dan Balz and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 16, 2008; A01

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 15 — After a week of bitter intraparty disputes over the issue of race, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) extended an olive branch to Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) on Tuesday night and declared that she and the other Democratic presidential candidates are “all family” in a nationally televised debate.

Obama returned the gesture, acknowledging on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday that both Clinton and former senator John Edwards (N.C.) are committed to racial equality. Despite their charitable tone, however, the three top contenders continued to challenge one another over substantive issues, especially energy and the economy, salient issues in Nevada, where caucuses will be held Saturday.

Obama and Clinton, in one of their sharpest distinctions of the night, offered starkly different visions of the presidency. Obama said he believes that the job is about “having a vision for where the country needs to go” rather than ensuring the “paperwork is being shuffled effectively,” while Clinton emphasized the need for understanding how the system works.

“I do think that being president is the chief executive officer. I respect what Barack said about setting the vision, setting the tone, bringing people together,” Clinton said. “But I think you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy.”

After a week of rancor, the civil discourse of the night was notable. Obama went so far as to say he regrets a comment he made in a Jan. 5 debate, when he described Clinton as “likable enough.”

“Well, I absolutely regret it, because that wasn’t how it was intended. I mean, folks were giving Hillary a hard time about likability. And my intention was to say, ‘I think you’re plenty likable,’ ” Obama said, drawing laughter from the audience at the Cashman Center near downtown Las Vegas.

Tuesday’s debate was the first since Clinton scored a stunning victory in New Hampshire a week earlier, defying polls that showed Obama with a clear lead a day before the balloting. Her victory revived a candidacy badly shaken by Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses and set the Democrats on a course that could see their nominating contest carry on well past the avalanche of Super Tuesday contests in three weeks.

Obama said he did not buy in to the theory — advocated by some of his supporters — that he fared worse in New Hampshire than polls predicted because voters had misled pollsters about their racial prejudices.

“I think what happened was that Senator Clinton ran a good campaign up in New Hampshire,” Obama said.

The two-hour debate — moderated by NBC anchor Brian Williams with questions from Tim Russert, the moderator of “Meet the Press,” and Natalie Morales, national correspondent for the “Today” show — drew a late challenge from the campaign of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), who filed suit protesting the decision of the sponsors to exclude him from participating. Late Tuesday, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that MSNBC, which was airing the debate nationally, did not have to include Kucinich.

The flurry of legal maneuvering came as both Clinton and Obama were calling for a cessation to the hostilities that had surrounded their candidacies, amid accusations of attempting to inject race into the Democratic campaign. The conversation had left Edwards largely on the sidelines.

Clinton had come under fire for statements she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had made during the previous week, as well as for a remark Sunday by ally Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, in which he appeared to remind voters about Obama’s admitted use of drugs as a youth. Johnson later said he was talking about Obama’s days as a community organizer. Clinton at first defended Johnson’s remarks Tuesday night but went on to say that he had been out of bounds.

Obama, meanwhile, appeared Tuesday to take responsibility for a memo from his South Carolina press secretary that outlined verbal missteps on race by the Clintons and their allies. His campaign had not previously confirmed ownership. “It is my responsibility to make sure that we’re setting a clear tone in our campaign, and I take that responsibility very seriously,” Obama said.

Both candidates pointed to the role of surrogates in the spat and said they hope to put it behind them.

“We both have exuberance and sometimes uncontrollable supporters,” Clinton said, adding that “neither race nor gender should be part of this campaign.” Obama noted: “As Hillary said, our supporters, our staff get overzealous. They start saying things that I would not say.”

The Democrats are competing vigorously for the 25 delegates at stake in Nevada and for what each hopes will prove to be additional momentum for their campaigns as they look toward South Carolina’s Jan. 26 primary and the 22 contests spread across the country on Feb. 5.

Before Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton had a big lead in polls taken of Democrats in Nevada. But Obama got a major boost late last week with the endorsement of the Culinary Workers Union, considered the most politically powerful labor organization in the state.

One of the sharpest exchanges Tuesday night came over energy policy, nuclear power and the local issue of whether the state’s Yucca Mountain should have a national nuclear waste facility.

All three said they would not allow Yucca to become a nuclear waste site, but Clinton challenged both Obama and Edwards on the topic. She said Obama has received considerable money for his campaign from Exelon Corp., “which has spent millions trying to make Yucca Mountain the waste depository.”

“I think it’s a testimony to my commitment and opposition to Yucca Mountain that, despite the fact that my state has more nuclear power plants than any other state in the country, I’ve never supported Yucca Mountain,” Obama said.

Even sharper differences emerged over the 2005 energy bill and the future of nuclear power. Obama was questioned by Russert on his vote in favor of the bill, asking whether he knew at the time that it would encourage the development of new nuclear power plants.

“I voted for it because it was the single largest investment in clean energy — solar, wind, biodiesel — that we had ever seen,” he said.

Clinton hit Obama for supporting that bill, calling it “the Dick Cheney lobbyist energy bill. . . . It wasn’t just the green light that it gave to more nuclear power. It had enormous giveaways to the oil and gas industries. . . . It was the wrong policy for America.

Edwards then criticized Clinton for taking money from those very interests. “You’ve raised more money from those people than any candidate, Democrat or Republican,” he said. “I think we have to be able to take those people on if we’re going to actually change our policy.”

When the debate turned to the subject of Iraq, Clinton challenged Obama to co-sponsor legislation in the Senate aimed at preventing President Bush from locking in a long-term U.S. commitment in that country.

Obama reacted coolly. “I think we can work on this, Hillary,” he said. He quickly added that he does not think Bush can “tie the hands of the next president,” predicting that voters will make clear their displeasure with the administration’s policies in November.

Just before the debate ended, Clinton returned to what has become an important theme of her candidacy.

She was asked by Williams whether she was engaging in the politics of fear through some of her campaign rhetoric. She said the United States faces a “dangerous adversary” and said, “I feel prepared and ready to take on what is a daunting but necessary responsibility.”

But Obama pushed back, accusing Clinton of using “the fear of terrorism in scoring political points.”

By JOHN M. BRODER

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who ran as a son of Michigan though he left the state nearly 40 years ago, won a commanding victory Tuesday in the Republican primary here with a message aimed at voters deeply anxious about the state’s ailing economy.

Mr. Romney defeated his principal rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, by winning a clear plurality of Republicans and conservatives, who turned out in greater numbers than they had in the 2000 primary, which Mr. McCain won.

“Tonight marks the beginning of a comeback,” Mr. Romney said in declaring victory at a hotel rally in Southfield. “Tonight is a victory of optimism over Washington-style pessimism.”

Mr. Romney needed a victory in Michigan to save his candidacy after finishing second to Mr. McCain in New Hampshire and to Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, in Iowa. Mr. Huckabee finished third in Michigan.

With 97 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mr. Romney had 39 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for Mr. McCain and 16 percent for Mr. Huckabee. Ron Paul, the antiwar congressman from Texas, came in fourth with 6 percent of the vote.

Mr. Romney’s victory here means three different Republican candidates have won each of the first three major contests. The race moves to South Carolina and Nevada this weekend with no clear front-runner and two credible candidates, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee, yet to seriously contest a state.

Katon Dawson, the Republican chairman in South Carolina, declared the race for the party’s nomination wide open.

“Now, it’s our time to hold the nation’s first truly make-or-break contest this primary season,” Mr. Dawson said Tuesday night.

The economy and the troubles of the auto industry dominated the contest here from start to finish, with Mr. Romney seizing on Mr. McCain’s suggestions that the jobs lost “are not coming back.” Mr. Romney also capitalized on his business background and his father’s leadership in the auto industry to persuade voters that he was best equipped to deal with those problems.

In conceding defeat last night, Mr. McCain congratulated Mr. Romney but said he would be direct about the problems facing the economy.

“We did what we always try to do: we went to Michigan and we told people the truth,” Mr. McCain said. “I am as committed now as I have ever been to making sure that no state, whether it’s Michigan or South Carolina or anywhere in this blessed country, is left behind in the global economy.”

He continued: “But that global economy is here to stay and it is, by its nature, constantly changing, as you all know. To compete more successfully in it we must better prepare American workers and students to seize its opportunities. That is how we will build a stronger and more prosperous America.”

Surveys of voters leaving the polls showed that 55 percent cited the economy as their biggest concern, and 42 percent of them cast their ballots for Mr. Romney compared with 29 percent for Mr. McCain. In Iowa, by contrast, only 26 percent of Republican caucusgoers cited the economy as the most important issue, behind immigration. In New Hampshire, the economy was cited as the top concern by 31 percent of Republican primary voters, followed closely by Iraq, at 24 percent and immigration, at 23 percent.

Mr. McCain campaigned heavily in Michigan, and hoped that a victory in the state would cement a front-runner status for him heading into South Carolina.

A senior McCain adviser here said the Michigan result meant that Mr. McCain had to win in South Carolina to assert a dominance of the field. If he does not, this adviser said, it makes it more likely that Republicans will fail to coalesce around a candidate even after 21 states hold their nominating contests on Feb. 5.

The Michigan results showed much of Mr. Romney’s support came from the three-county Detroit metropolitan area, home of many well-off Republicans and where the Romney name is better known. Mr. Romney’s father, George, was governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969, and he repeatedly highlighted his Michigan roots in campaign appearances.

The exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press, also found that Mr. Romney did well among those who decided in the last day or two, validating his strategy of saturating the state over the past five days with advertising and personal appearances.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, the only major Democratic candidate whose name was on the ballot in Michigan, was the winner on the Democratic side. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina withdrew their names at the request of the national Democratic Party, which penalized Michigan with the loss of its convention delegates because the early date of its primary violated party rules.

But state party leaders said they believed the Michigan delegates would be seated.

More than two-thirds of voters in Michigan’s Republican primary described themselves as Republicans, up from 48 percent in the 2000 Republican primary. This gave a clear boost to Mr. Romney, who won Republican votes by double-digit margins.

Mr. McCain countered with stronger support among independents and Democrats, but they accounted for a far smaller share of the electorate than in 2000. This year, 32 percent of voters here described themselves as independents or Democrats, down from 52 percent in 2000 when Mr. McCain defeated George W. Bush.

The exit polls of Michigan voters showed that more than two-thirds rated the national economy negatively (they divided between Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney). And just 16 percent said they felt they were getting ahead financially.

Voters with family incomes of less than $50,000 divided between Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain. Voters earning more tipped to Mr. Romney.

Voters were most likely to say that the quality that mattered most to them in a candidate was one who shared their values, and more of them supported Mr. Romney, followed by Mr. Huckabee.

Mr. Huckabee, speaking in South Carolina as the results trickled in, gave credit to Mr. Romney for his victory but pledged to win the next primary.

“He won a great race,” Mr. Huckabee said of Mr. Romney. “He worked hard. He, of course, has a great base there, but our hats are off to him for his victory there tonight.”

He continued: “So it looks like that I won Iowa, John McCain won New Hampshire, Mitt Romney won Michigan. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to win South Carolina.”

The race in Michigan forced the Republican candidates to focus chiefly on the dismal economy of the state, where thousands of manufacturing jobs have evaporated in the last several years and where the unemployment rate, 7.4 percent, is the highest in the nation.

Forty-two percent of Republican primary voters said Mr. Romney’s ties to Michigan helped sway their votes.

Dalia Sussman contributed reporting.

For the first time since Bill Clinton took the White House, the economy could be the deciding factor.

By Daniel Gross

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:47 PM ET Jan 12, 2008

Clinton makes a gritty, unexpected comeback in New Hampshire. The contentious primaries pivot from a war in Iraq to economics. Business people fret about recession. What is this, 1992?

Not since James Carville helped Bill Clinton take the White House 16 years ago by reminding him “it’s the economy, stupid,” has the nation’s economic state played such a key role in a presidential campaign. CNN’s New Hampshire exit poll found that 97 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans expressed anxiety about the economy. Of course, the economy is in a worse place than it was when Hillary Clinton’s husband was on the campaign trail. Today, the nation is perilously close to sliding into a recession; in ‘92, the economy had already started growing, though a jobless recovery doomed George H.W. Bush’s re-election bid anyway. The lesson? Voters’ perceptions matter more than whether the economy is technically expanding or contracting.

The news since the ball dropped this year in Times Square has been unrelentingly dour. We’ve learned that in December, the unemployment rate shot up from 4.7 percent to 5 percent, and the manufacturing sector unexpectedly shrank. Santa Claus left retailers lumps of coal for Christmas. Macy’s, the 850-store chain that is an excellent proxy for middle-class spending, reported that same-store sales slumped 7.9 percent in December.

Just two years ago, Wall Street economists spoke of a Goldilocks economy, in which everything was just right. These days, it’s the three bears. As of this week, the economists at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are all predicting a recession for 2008. “I think it’s already started,” says David Rosenberg, chief economist at Merrill Lynch. “The real tipping point was the employment report.”

But policymakers aren’t ready to give up on the business cycle. In a recent interview with NEWSWEEK, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs chief executive officer who is the administration’s designated market whisperer, stayed upbeat and on message. “Our economy, like any other, has its ups and downs,” he says. “But you know, I believe our economy is going to continue to grow.” What gives Paulson his optimism? “The president’s pro growth policies, the fact that government revenues are coming in ahead of forecasts and that our deficit is now down to 1.2 percent of GDP.”

There are bright spots, to be sure. Exports rose 13 percent in November from 2006.The farm belt is thriving, thanks to record prices for grains. Regions that produce coal, gas, oil or minerals are riding the global energy boom.

Recessions—defined as a contraction in economic activity—are notoriously hard to predict, especially since they occur so infrequently. Since 1992 the economy has contracted for just eight months, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cambridge, Mass.-based arbiter of business cycles. Recessions usually occur after a the economy hits a huge speed bump. The commercial real-estate/savings-and-loan implosion precipitated the 1990 recession. In 2001 the bursting tech bubble caused a sharp pullback in business investment.

If the economy teeters into recession this year, it will be because the hardy American consumer—who accounts for 70 percent of economic activity—has finally hit the wall. And when consumers stop spending, the companies that cater to them idle and lay off, which, in turn, leads to more reduced spending.

“Consumers were cautious in their spending at Christmas, and they’re going to be cautious going forward,” said Rosalind Wells, chief economist at the National Retail Federation. As a result, retailers are acting swiftly to reduce costs and cut their losses. In recent weeks, Talbots announced it would shutter all its Talbots Mens and Talbots Kids clothing stores.

At the dank CompUSA store on Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan, a lone security guard checks the bags of the handful of shoppers buying memory cards, cell phones and televisions for 15 to 30 percent off at the store’s going-out-of-business sale. “As the days go by it’s slowing down a bit,” says assistant manager Steve Laureano, who plans to go back to school and seek work elsewhere. The outlet is one of 103 that the chain is closing.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the trouble started with housing. Defaults on subprime mortgage led to a credit squeeze. After enjoying several years of growth, home prices fell an unprecedented 6.1 percent in the past year. “There’s never been a time where you had a real-estate deflation as deep and prolonged as this,” says David Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch.

In the most recent recession, 2001, the areas hardest hit were those that had benefited most from the technology boom —San Francisco, Boston and Austin, Texas. Today, former housing hot spots like California are functioning as cement shoes for the national economy. John Harmer, co-owner of Southland Lumber & Supply of Inglewood, Calif., says his business is off 50 percent this year. After being hit by a slowdown in sales to home-remodeling contractors, his 18-employee firm, which also supplies materials to the sets of television shows like “Boston Legal” and “Nip/Tuck,” was nailed by the entertainment writers’ strike. “TV is out completely,” Harmer says. So far, 10,500 Hollywood workers have been laid off since the strike began, says Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.

In California, slowing economic activity is already producing one of the most unwelcome byproducts of an economic slump: declining government receipts. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week called for steep budget cuts to close a gaping $14 billion deficit.

When the economy slows, debt of all kinds begin to go bad. Subprime loans are yesterday’s news. Today’s news? The souring credit of middle-class consumers. Credit-card giant Capital One Financial had to set aside $1.9 billion for bad loans in the fourth quarter, thanks to higher write-offs of auto and credit-card loans.

From Wall Street to California, eyes are turning to Washington for help. Government responses to recessions come in two forms: fiscal policy (stimulus packages) and monetary policy (lowering interest rates). As the primaries roll into economically depressed Michigan, the need for the government to stimulate the economy—through tax breaks or increased spending—has become a hot political issue. On Friday Hillary Clinton unveiled a $70 billion stimulus package, including aid for struggling homeowners and extended unemployment benefits. President George W. Bush, speaking in Chicago before he departed for the Middle East, shifted subtly from his position that the fundamentals are sound. “Recent economic indicators have become increasingly mixed,” he said. Bush’s upcoming State of the Union address will likely include a grab bag of tax proposals intended to jolt the economy back to life.

The Federal Reserve has already taken action by slashing rates three times since September. Chairman Ben Bernanke last Thursday said the central bank is prepared to take more dramatic action (read: more cuts) given that “the baseline outlook for real activity in 2008 has worsened.” But the assumptions that a proactive Federal Reserve can bail out the economy may not pan out this time. Banks recovering from poor lending decisions are less willing to make mortgage loans today, regardless of the Fed’s interest rates.

Another assumption that underlay sunny economic forecasts in the past may be crumbling, as well. Economists argued that as long as the rich are getting richer, and spending—they account for a disproportionate share of consumer purchases, after all—the economy could skate by a recession. But signs are mounting that even the holders of the American Express Gold Card are struggling. American Express last week took a $440 million charge for bad debt, reporting that more of its well-off customers were behind in card payments. Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the white-shoe law firm where associate pay starts at $160,000, just laid off 35 attorneys. And big layoffs are coming at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, two of Wall Street’s biggest—and most generous—employers.

Tiffany, which notched huge sales gains throughout 2007, even as many retailers suffered, on Friday reported that same-store sales during the Christmas season unexpectedly fell 2 percent. The reason: lower sales on products that cost more than $50,000. Even for the rich, breakfast at Tiffany’s these days is limited to the $1.99 special.

Mudslinging. Hit jobs. Dark arts. Whatever you want to call the practice, it’s back for Campaign 2008, and it’s only going to get worse.

By Michael Isikoff, Mark Hosenball and Evan Thomas

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:43 PM ET Jan 12, 2008

Sunday may be a day of rest, but not for the political dirty tricksters. When Mike Huckabee emerged from the Cornerstone Family Church in Des Moines on the Sunday before the Iowa caucuses, he found that someone had papered the cars in the suburban megachurch’s parking lot with fliers asking, MIKE HUCKABEE—A ‘TRUE’ CONSERVATIVE? The leaflet accused the former Arkansas governor of, among other sins, releasing a convicted rapist who raped again (and murdered) and saying nice things about Bill Clinton. “Don’t be fooled by that smooth voice,” warned the flier. Credited to an anonymous group called the Lynchburg Christian Students for the Truth, the circular had been spotted first at Huckabee rallies in South Carolina in the fall. This time the flier listed an e-mail address: TruthonHuck@gmail.com. When NEWSWEEK e-mailed it to find out more information on the group, no one responded.

The flier was a fairly typical—and relatively benign—example of the trash flying around Campaign 2008. Huckabee has not been a particular victim; his foes have been slimed with much worse, sometimes from “independent” groups backing Huckabee. Evangelical Christians, or at least their fringe groups, seem to be especially practiced at anonymous smears (possibly for the same reason that the worst wars are often religious ones: sins are easier to forgive if you know that God is on your side). Dark arts are hardly new to politics, and dirty tricksters have always been inventive. In 1964, operatives working for the re-election of President Lyndon Johnson circulated a coloring book in which children could color pictures of LBJ’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, wearing the robes of the Ku Klux Klan. But 2008 promises to be a banner year for gutter politics. “I think this will be the nastiest campaign we’ve seen in a long time,” says Darrell West, a professor of political science at Brown University.

Technology serves as a force multiplier for crude partisan passion. Like many political junkies, West has been tracking the vicious e-mail traffic already swirling around the Internet, e-mails saying that Sen. Barack Obama is a Muslim who took his oath of office on a Qur’an or insinuating that former governor Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is some kind of Devil worship. “Technology makes dirty tricks much easier,” says West. “You can do it without leaving fingerprints.” The candidates themselves can stay positive while relying on anonymous supporters to do the dirty work, he notes. Most voters see through the smears, but even swaying 5 percent of them can have an impact in a close election. A NEWSWEEK investigation suggests that political hit jobs are already rampant and likely to get worse. Some are done the old-fashioned way—anonymous fliers left on windshields or shoved under doors—and some, increasingly, by hard-to-track e-mails and automated phone calls.

The Bible-belt state of South Carolina, which votes Jan. 19 (Republicans) and Jan. 26 (Democrats), has a sorry record of smears. Cars outside churches on the Sunday before the GOP primary in 2000 were papered with fliers, sourced to an obscure Baptist group in Kentucky, questioning Sen. John McCain’s sexuality and warning that a vote for McCain would be a vote for “McCain’s Fag Army.” The mud deepened: a flier distributed at McCain’s final debate said that he’d fathered a “Negro child” out of wedlock; it used a photo of Bridget McCain, an orphan adopted years earlier by the senator’s wife, Cindy, while she was on a relief mission in Bangladesh.

McCain tries to shrug off his smearing in 2000. He told NEWSWEEK: “It’s behind me, and I don’t think about it. People don’t like sore losers.” But just in case, his campaign has created a “truth squad” in South Carolina to mount a “rapid response” to any underhanded attacks and has manned a 24/7 war room of college students with laptops, on watch for Internet dirt on their candidate. The McCain campaign breathed a slight sigh of relief when Romney pulled his advertising from South Carolina to devote more resources to his effort in Michigan. Romney had hired Warren Tompkins as a South Carolina consultant. Known admiringly in the political trade as “the god of hell,” Tompkins is legendary in the state as a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, an old Bush-family operative and perhaps the most renowned modern practitioner of campaign dark arts. The old Atwater attack machine may have been switched off, or at least turned down. Still, Tompkins, who has always denied authorship of the nastiest attacks on McCain in 2000, tells NEWSWEEK that he doubts the state’s primary will suddenly become a model of civility. Many of South Carolina’s evangelical leaders—who, Tompkins says, “self-generated” most of the 2000 attacks—have lined up with Huckabee and remain implacably opposed to McCain.

A favorite tactic of negative campaigning is the telephone “push poll“—a phone call in which pretend pollsters ask leading, sometimes false, questions to push voters for or against candidates. In the days before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, voters would pick up their ringing phones and hear an automated voice ask them which of several GOP candidates they supported. If, for instance, they answered “Rudy Giuliani,” they’d hear a message reminding them that Giuliani is a supporter of abortion rights. If a voter indicated Mitt Romney, a series of questions would follow, asking if the voter wanted to back a former governor who had flip-flopped on core GOP issues like immigration. If the voter picked McCain, the robo-call machine would point out that McCain had sponsored legislation limiting campaign activities of anti-abortion activists. Sometimes the calls would end with a pitch for Mike Huckabee as the candidate who would cut taxes and close the borders.

NEWSWEEK traced some of the calls to an organization called Common Sense Issues, a tax-exempt group set up by religious conservatives who support Huckabee but insist they have no connection to his campaign. The group’s president, a former Procter & Gamble executive named Harold (Zeke) Swift, says, “Helping a voter see what the issues are is not negative.” Patrick Davis, the executive director of Common Sense and a former senior official of the national Republican Party, tells NEWSWEEK that the robo-calls, which he refers to as “personalized educational artificial intelligence,” are “factual.” Common Sense is making them by the hundreds of thousands before the Michigan primary, Davis has publicly acknowledged. “Other near term primary states are on our radar screen,” he e-mailed NEWSWEEK. (Huckabee has publicly called on Common Sense to stop its efforts on his behalf.)

As long as there is insufficient evidence of collusion between the campaigns and these independent-expenditure groups, such calls are legal under federal election laws. There is, however, considerable overlap between the campaigns and the supposedly independent nonprofits—especially when it comes to financing. Three of Common Sense’s principals—Swift, Davis and another Procter & Gamble executive named Nathan Estruth—cohosted a Cincinnati fund-raiser for Huckabee in November. Last week NEWSWEEK interviewed Arch Bonnema, a financial backer of both Huckabee and Common Sense, as well as various religious causes (he once personally paid for 42,000 tickets to showings of Mel Gibson’s controversial Crucifixion film, “The Passion of the Christ,” in Dallas-area cinemas and helped finance an expedition to find the remains of Noah’s Ark in Iran). Bonnema was aware that Common Sense was financing calls to make voters “aware of issues,” but says he was unaware of any controversy over the practice.

In New Hampshire, under state law, anonymous push polling is illegal before a general election. In November someone launched calls that appeared to spread slurs about Romney’s Mormonism. Though the calls were made before the primary, the New Hampshire A.G.’s office has deemed them to be intended to influence the general election and launched a criminal investigation. James Kennedy, the state’s top election law-enforcement official, says the calls were initially traced to Western WATS, a well-known marketing and political-research firm in Orem, Utah. Western WATS, in turn, said it was commissioned to make the calls by Moore Information, a Republican polling firm based in Portland, Ore. Reached by NEWSWEEK, Bob Moore, a former operative of the national GOP, declined to identify his client but says, “There’s no way it’s a push poll. It’s opinion research.” The calls were intended for “message testing”—not to spread slurs against other candidates.

The Internet has created an almost limitless battlefield for below-the-radar attacks. One new vehicle is the anonymous attack blog, often created by high-powered political consultants to advance the interests of their clients. Not surprisingly, Atwater’s protégé Warren Tompkins has helped pioneer the phenomenon. Last year, just about the time that Tompkins signed on as Romney’s top South Carolina strategist, a new blog of state politics, The Shot, popped up. Much of it was filled with standard political gossip and news, but some readers detected a pattern of barbs aimed at McCain, Fred Thompson and every other GOP candidate—except Romney. The Shot turned out to be the creation of an employee of Tompkins’s consulting firm. The same employee created a “Phony Fred” Web site that ridiculed Thompson as “Playboy Fred” (”Once a Pro-Choice Skirt Chaser, Now Standard-Bearer of the Religious Right?”). Tompkins acknowledged to NEWSWEEK that the employee had created the Fred Thompson site out of the consulting firm’s office, but added: “I didn’t sanction it. As soon as I found out about it, I had it taken down.” Romney’s campaign has denied any role in these smear tactics. The candidate himself has been the target of a nasty trick sent through snail mail: a phony Christmas card, purporting to be from the Romney family, quoting passages from the Book of Mormon that made Romney seem like a white supremacist.

Democrats have their own share of anonymous mudslingers. An e-mail making the rounds claims, falsely, that Obama was enrolled in a radical Wahhabi school when he lived in Indonesia as a boy, and that he not only used the Qur’an when he was sworn in as a public official, but refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches,” sneers the e-mail.

Obama backers have frequently taken to the Web to knock down these falsehoods; all the campaigns maintain some kind of Web surveillance. The Internet is “a self-correcting medium,” says Peter Daou, the Internet director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Still, the campaign has to constantly monitor the Web and maintain a “rapid response” unit that links Web viewers to a site called the Fact Hub to set the record straight. Younger voters get much of their information online, and campaigns are constantly trying to reach those voters through networking tools. Last spring, apparently trying to show their candidate’s hipness, McCain’s staff created a MySpace social-networking page that “borrowed” a sophisticated template designed by Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, a social news site—without giving him credit. Irked, Davidson couldn’t resist pulling “a nice little prank,” he says. He altered the McCain site by writing, “Dear Supporters, Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage … particularly marriage between passionate females.” Davidson insists that McCain’s staff had a good laugh about the whole thing. But he acknowledges, “I think if it happened now, they would be less good-humored about it.” Davidson says the experience reminded him that “technology can hurt you as easily as it can help you.” It’s doubtful that McCain needed any reminding about what a fast-spreading smear can do in a hotly contested presidential race.

By NANCY GIBBS, David Von Drehle

First came the fresh winds across the prairie, Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama rising fast and blowing away row upon row of tidy assumptions and dead certainties. As that front moved east, the weather changed; spring, the season of rebirth, came to New Hampshire. Snowbanks softened, toppling the yard signs; the Ice Queen melted. By nightfall, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, two veterans once left for dead, had sprung back to life.

In a race that turns out to be all about climate change, just about every forecaster was wrong–which in a way was the best part. People made their own weather, refusing to stay inside, ignoring the old rules, the hot air, the floods of cash. Voters in both contests turned out in record numbers to throw off the polling models, and the fact that no one knows what happens now is itself a cause to celebrate. Maybe the other 99% of citizens will get a chance to play their part too in the already merrily historic campaign of 2008. Political professionals, consultants, lobbyists, reporters and pundits leafed madly through the unread pages of this election saga, but the voters took the book away and closed it. No jumping ahead. The story won’t be foretold. It will unfold.

I. The Democrats

On Tuesday night, as the results started tight and stayed that way, Obama ate dinner at his Nashua hotel with his wife Michelle and his Kenyan sister Auma–no kids, no aides. As the night got longer, his would-be victory rally was tomblike. You could hear change drop. Nothing that had happened in the previous 96 hours had prepared either side for what had taken place across New Hampshire since the polls opened at dawn.

Just as the voters of Iowa hadn’t wanted to be told that Clinton was the inevitable nominee, Democrats in New Hampshire weren’t much in the mood to be told that her candidacy was toast, that their votes were futile. In the final hours, the undecideds, who often end up too torn among candidates or too busy to bother voting, made their way to the polls and carried Clinton to victory. Obama got 37%, just as the polls projected. But the mantra of change that had turned seasoned journalists into giddy ballerinas in the days after Iowa did not win over the supporters of recently departed candidates Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, most of whom cast their ballots for Clinton. She got 40% instead of 30%, and Obama’s lead disappeared, her fortunes revived, and both sides now have to plan for a campaign whose only certainty is uncertainty.

People close to Clinton, including one who spent the day in her hotel suite as she and her team worked on her speech, didn’t think she saw it coming. But Clinton says otherwise. She went out early that morning to polling places. “I looked at voters, and they looked at me,” she said. “I shook their hands, and we saw people just randomly. I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and just began to ask people to go out and vote. I began to sense that we were going to do well.” She didn’t say anything when she got back to the hotel; the first exit polls still had her about 9 points down. “I thought, You know, either I have totally lost my touch for figuring out what voters are thinking and doing, or this is going to be a lot better than anybody thinks.”

The projected Obama blowout had the commentariat writing Clinton political obits and big donors so depressed, they were lined up to jump off that bridge to the 21st century. Her events felt flat and forced; the sound system wouldn’t work well; the mike screeched back at her. Clinton’s crowds each day, impressive by normal standards, could not rival Obama’s immense events, so staffers were reduced to moving risers and limiting entry to create the appearance of overflow. Conservative fund raisers, meanwhile, were pondering in e-mails to one another whether to cut Clinton’s name from their direct-mail appeals and paste in Obama’s. A GOP operative, after watching both party debates on Saturday night, declared, “Well, it’s over now. She doesn’t have a chance, and neither do we.”

But that was just one more example of people who knew too much not seeing what was right in front of them: that voters might actually want to have a say in a primary system that has been engineered and re-engineered entirely around the interests of special interests. It was far too early for the whole process to be over, not with so many questions still to answer.

Fight or Unite?

When Obama talks about change, what he doesn’t say is that Democrats have been arguing among themselves for years about how to achieve it in a pitiless political culture–war or diplomacy, fight or unite? When he talks healing, his crowds go wild; when Clinton talks about fighting, hers do. Her advantage is that the party has its own military-industrial complex: the union bosses and activists and local pols who are well practiced at the art of war and have the scars to show for attempts at compromise. In lining up behind Clinton, they were placing their bets on the likeliest winner, the brand name with the long memory, and the candidate most likely to give their conservative foes apoplectic fits.

New Hampshire was especially Clinton country, full of veterans of battles at her side going back to the day 16 years ago when together they helped breathe life into Bill Clinton’s presidential ambitions. All weary and wise, all steeped in the hard work of small steps, they had no time for the airy (they said empty) hope Obama was peddling; it was as if it diminished everything they’d fought for so long, the way he made it sound easy, as though if only we were more polite to one another, all our problems would just sort themselves out.

It’s an awfully handy thing for a candidate running on a promise to change the system to show he could actually do it. That, after all, is what Iowa caucuses are for–little sealed rooms with lots of measuring instruments in them so you can see if your hypotheses hold true. By any standard measure, Clinton’s calculations worked: she built the organization, spent the money, put up huge numbers in Iowa. In any other year, it would have been more than enough to win. And Obama, he was supposed to be all style and no substance, the Howard Dean of 2008, whose base was a bunch of college kids who showed up to his rallies but wouldn’t make it to the perpetually confusing caucuses.

But a funny thing happened on caucus day. Those college and even high school kids showed up at their precincts; there were three times as many young voters at the caucuses as in 2004, and more than half of them caucused for Obama. In a shock to the Clinton campaign, which had counted on turning out high numbers of women voters, Obama captured more female supporters than his rivals. Both Clinton and John Edwards, who edged past her into second place, played the game by its normal rules and played it exceedingly well. But Obama changed the game. Just as he had promised.

On to New Hampshire

So why did a message that worked well in Iowa and looked to resonate in New Hampshire ultimately fall short? In one sense, it didn’t. Obama got his bounce out of Iowa, jumped in the polls and inspired people in the surrounding states to get in their cars and drive for hours to see the candidate whom headline writers started calling the Barack Star. Listening to him speak, a former Clinton supporter had goose bumps, saying “I felt I started seeing something in America I haven’t seen in a long time.”

In fact, Obama’s message was working well enough that Clinton had to react to it. “This has been very much a referendum on her,” said strategist Mark Penn on the press plane east from Iowa. During private sessions that spread through the weekend, the internal Clinton campaign discussion alternated between how to hit Obama and how to help her. “You’re going to see some very sharp media now,” an adviser promised. Aides threw out charges one after another in e-mails and in conference calls with reporters–about Obama’s vote for the Patriot Act, his relationship with lobbyists, his violation of election rules governing robocalls.

Clinton’s strategists realized she was telling voters too much about what she had done for them, while Obama was talking about what he would do for them. Voters don’t like being told, You should support me because you owe me. She began taking more questions, which was a chance to unfurl her plans for everything from student loans to mortgage meltdowns. She even changed the stagecraft. At her concession speech in Iowa, the platform behind Clinton was filled by alumni from the class of ‘92, including her husband and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It had become clear that a Clinton restoration wasn’t selling and she needed a new visual. Behind the scenes as well, the casting changed. Maggie Williams, who had been First Lady Hillary Clinton’s fiercely loyal chief of staff, and Doug Sosnik, who had been a top aide to Bill Clinton, both prepared to return to the fray post-New Hampshire. “Maggie will make her feel more comfortable. Doug will make him feel more comfortable,” said a campaign adviser. “And they’ve both been through this before.”

Clinton’s debate performance on Saturday, which the theater critics panned, actually served her well with voters and raised once more whether Democrats are looking for a fighter or a healer. ABC News brought in market researchers who hooked up voters with electrodes to monitor their brain activity. Her flash of anger when the boys ganged up played well with all of them; so did her humor, when she was asked why people don’t like her: “Well, that hurts my feelings.” But viewers really hated Obama’s graceless barb when he told her, “You’re likable enough.”

Campaign insiders, however, remained pretty sober about her chances. Just about the best they could manage by Monday was to concede that “it is a reasonably long shot, but it is not a fool’s errand” for Clinton to continue her campaign past New Hampshire. In a sign of the passing of remote-controlled, big media campaigns, their best hope lay with a ground operation run by a 34-year-old named Nick Clemons, a veteran of former Governor Jeanne Shaheen’s operation. “The heart of our ground game was face-to-face contact,” he said Wednesday morning, describing a strategy perfected by the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign in 2004. “I know that sounds like old ward-style politics, but it really works.” The day before the election, Clemons had an army of 4,000 volunteers knocking on 105,000 New Hampshire doors. Early on, Clinton’s team had put together a list of 70,000 of her most likely supporters, slicing and dicing the data by every demographic measure of education level, income and gender to figure out who they were looking for. The answer: “It was women … We knew we had to go after those women and make sure they voted,” said Clemons. Those deemed least likely to make it to the polls got three visits over the final weekend.

Team Clinton even had a worst-case scenario in the event that results out of Iowa weren’t all they might hope for. Organizers focused on getting absentee ballots into the hands of seniors, Boston commuters and students on winter break who might not make it to the polls on election day. In the end it was enough to make the difference.

Obama held his own with the labor vote in Iowa; Clinton got it back in New Hampshire, by 10 points. He won among women in Iowa; they swung over to her by a 13-point margin in New Hampshire, along with blue collar workers, a reflection of the fact that voters’ greatest concern in the state was the economy. Round 2 went to Clinton. Now both candidates set their shoulders to head back into the fray. And voters in the other 48 states get ready for their turn.

II. The Republicans

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney’s plans to shortcut the Republican nomination were based on hard cash, not heartstrings. Instead of challenging his party’s old notions, he conformed to them as closely as a loaf of bread conforms to its pan. But he learned in these tumultuous five days that democracy is more than weighing wallets and poll-testing positions, no matter what your consultants might tell you.

Whipped in Iowa by Huckabee–a former Baptist minister with a parson’s demeanor and a cobra’s bite–Romney foundered in New Hampshire on a block of granite named McCain. When the Associated Press called the New Hampshire race shortly after the polls closed, McCain’s volunteers screamed for joy, but the candidate’s mood was more muted. McCain had spent the previous 24 hours superstitiously re-creating the trappings of his smashing New Hampshire win eight years ago–sleeping in the same hotel room, wearing the same emerald green sweater and so on. “I guess more nostalgia, you know,” he reflected later. “We all know that I would never do this again.”

How had the 71-year-old Arizona Senator managed it this time? His story, too, involved catastrophe and reinvention–and voters responding to a personal message from a candidate and a campaign that wouldn’t give in.

He entered the campaign a year ago as the apparent front runner, an awkward role for a free-ranging, fence-jumping, kick-the-corral maverick. McCain never got the hang of it, breaking with his party’s mainstream on tax cuts, immigration, harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects–the list goes on. By July his bank account and his poll numbers were in a race to zero, which turned out to be a blessing.

“The people who mishandled his campaign did him an enormous favor. They blew up a campaign that couldn’t win,” says an unaffiliated Republican strategist. “They destroyed his bases and mangled his supply lines. They left him only the option of falling back on himself and his instincts to fight a guerrilla-style campaign. And that’s the only way he can win.” Troops decimated, supply lines smoldering, McCain returned to the campaigning he knows and loves best. “He put this campaign on his back,” says Mark Salter, McCain’s close aide, co-author and comrade through long hours spent lying in ambush. “He went out there and worked. Obama gets massive rallies, but McCain just wins them one guy at a time.”

Returning to the turf where he scalped George W. Bush in 2000, McCain revved up the Straight Talk Express and rode it to more than 100 town-hall meetings. Romney barely knew what hit him. McCain’s numbers shot up in the last week before the primary. Says Bernie Streeter, a former mayor of Nashua: “Voters realized that the guy they loved eight years ago was back in the horse race.”

“I think principle and persuasion won over money and political messaging,” McCain told TIME after his victory.

GOP Soul-Searching

Romney should have seen both losses coming. No matter how little money or press Huckabee received, he was tailored from the get-go to appeal to Iowa caucuses. They like down-to-earth, Bible-reading, unflashy dark horses: just ask Jimmy Carter. Huckabee’s populism and gift for campaigning made him an irresistible choice for Iowa Republicans, and he brought remarkable numbers of Evangelicals out to vote. And when the crotchety, conservative New Hampshire Union Leader joined the elbow-patch-liberal Concord Monitor in endorsing McCain, Romney was on notice that his mansion on a New Hampshire lakefront wouldn’t be enough to stop the state’s real favorite transplant.

The will to prognosticate is the dark addiction of the pundit class. No matter how wrong they got Iowa and New Hampshire, Republicans were soon buzzing over phone lines and trading e-mails about the road ahead. McCain and Huckabee are chasing Romney into Michigan, hoping to land a knockout punch in the state where Romney’s father was once Governor. Four days past that comes South Carolina, where McCain’s 2000 bid was rudely demolished. But there, as everywhere, the political landscape is changed in unpredictable ways. The state’s solid GOP machine has fragmented into factions only occasionally willing to cooperate. One belongs to Senator Lindsey Graham, a devoted McCain supporter. Another faction, which includes the much feared strategist Warren Tompkins, is in Romney’s camp, while the widow and one son of the late mastermind Carroll Campbell have signed on with Huckabee. As a result, the Palmetto State may not play its customary role: cutting the GOP field down to one with ruthless discipline and efficiency.

“So the race goes on to Florida, and guess who’s sitting there like a bug on a stump? Rudy Giuliani,” said Mit Spears, a Washington Republican in Romney’s camp. Florida’s Jan. 29 primary will test the former New York City mayor’s unconventional strategy of hanging back until the race reaches the megastates, where his celebrity gives him extra leverage.

For now, the momentum has swung to McCain. Campaign insiders found their phones ringing merrily on Wednesday morning as donors hustled to hop on the latest bandwagon. “We’re ready to schedule as many fund raisers in one week as we’ve had in the rest of the year put together,” said Ryan Ballard, a national co-chair of McCain’s money team. “I haven’t had enough time to answer all the calls I’m getting–from Romney people, mostly, but even from Giuliani people looking over their shoulders and hedging their bets.”

What makes Republican politics into three-dimensional chess is that no candidate seems to measure up to the cherished image of a foursquare Reagan Republican. The party is enduring a dark night of the soul, almost entirely self-inflicted. After the excesses of the recent Republican majority in Congress, the party no longer sees a fiscal conservative in the mirror, while the Bush Administration’s chesty foreign policy and churchy personality have driven wedges between conservatives and neoconservatives, between Evangelicals and pragmatists. Trying to find a candidate to rally around is like asking a roomful of picky eaters to agree on a pizza.

What’s more, signs of a passion gap emerged in Iowa, where the Democratic caucuses drew twice as many voters as Republican ones. Campaign events often had a very different feel–Democrats big and brassy and confident; Republican gatherings smaller and more dutiful. It was easy to find voters who said they had decided for Edwards or Obama but had great respect for Clinton and thought she’d make a fine President as well. Many Republican voters talked about a lesser of evils.

But the GOP was practically buoyant compared with the gloom that reigned when Obama roared out of Iowa. Having spent years planning for an epic rematch against the Clintons, their favorite archvillains, Republicans suddenly saw a new and looming foe rumbling the ground as he approached. Obama’s lack of political baggage and abundance of star power made the all-too-human qualities of the Republican field more apparent.

Never have so many Republicans been so pleased by Hillary Clinton’s success. “Sweet baby Jesus, they saved our bacon,” a veteran of the Reagan Administration exulted. “We’re back in the game.” But that relief may well be short-lived. This is going to last for a while, and in 48 states, voters are getting ready to play.

Jonathan Capehart
January 12, 2008

If you thought Sen. Barack Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses was historic and Sen. Hillary Clinton’s outta-nowhere win in the New Hampshire primary extraordinary, then be prepared to gasp once again if New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announces a bid for the White House.

That’s because the Democrat-turned-Republican- turned-independent would announce not only his own candidacy but also that of his running mate. A source close to the impending Bloomberg presidential effort told me last Thursday, “If Mike Bloomberg were to petition to get on the ballot, it would be easier to do so with a vice presidential candidate.”

Let me disclose that I worked on Bloomberg’s first campaign for mayor, in 2001. I mention this because, while the campaign didn’t officially kick off until June of that year, my informal work on it began in mid-February. So I asked the Bloomberg operative if past is prologue: “Is it safe to assume you guys are already interviewing and vetting a No. 2 for Bloomberg?” He said, “That’s a fair assumption on your part.”

A Bloomberg presidential run looked much more doubtful just a few days ago, when everyone, including Clinton herself, thought the charismatic senator from Illinois would run off with the New Hampshire primary. That Obama’s tidal wave out of Iowa smacked up against the stone walls of the Granite State means the billionaire mayor’s White House hunt is back on track. News broke on Thusday that Bloomberg has been quietly compiling months of polling and voter data to assess his presidential chances. And Doug Schoen, a key adviser and strategist from the mayor’s two campaigns, told the Los Angeles Times last weekend, “Bloomberg is going to spend the next two months doing an assessment of his prospects.”

Just whom Team Bloomberg has met with about joining the ticket is not known. But Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., have been mentioned frequently. The vetting is going on because the calendar demands such a bold move.

People around Bloomberg have said that if he were to pull the trigger on an Oval Office run, it would happen sometime around March 5. That’s when the petitioning process to get on the ballot in Texas begins. He would need 74,108 signatures by May 12 for an independent run in that state. According to Richard Winger of Ballot Access News, if Bloomberg instead accepted the nomination of the Reform or Texas Independence parties, which have filed their intention to petition with the Texas secretary of state, he would have an additional week to gather only 43,991 signatures.

For the major parties, under normal circumstances, getting on a state’s ballot can be difficult. For an independent challenger, the obstacles are even greater. Usually, such a candidate is underfunded and out-lawyered. That wouldn’t be a worry for Bloomberg, who could spend $1 billion of his own money on a campaign.

And by having a running mate at the outset, rather than waiting until the late summer when the Democrats and Republicans will nominate their presidential and vice presidential candidates, Bloomberg would be saved the headache of going back to all those states to amend the ballots to include his No. 2.

The independent mayor has used his own jet to go from one high-profile forum to another to cultivate an image of nonpartisan success. The latest example was Monday’s meeting hosted by University of Oklahoma president and former Sen. David Boren, D-Okla., along with Hagel, Nunn and other possible vice presidential choices. All present decried Washington’s partisan gridlock. Bloomberg didn’t say much and didn’t take questions from the media.

I’ll take Bloomberg at his word that he is not running. Those close to him say he truly hasn’t made up his mind. But this flurry of activity around him squares with my knowledge of the mayor as a deliberative chief executive who takes in as much information as possible before making a decision – even as subordinates stir the presidential pot.

By Paul Kane and Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 13, 2008; A01

LAS VEGAS — Next Saturday, gamblers at the Bellagio, the opulent Las Vegas casino immortalized in the George Clooney blockbuster “Ocean’s Eleven,” will be treated to an unusual sight.

Just before noon, the hotel’s dishwashers, cocktail waitresses, porters and bellhops will go on break and gather in a 30,000-square-foot ballroom to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama or maybe John Edwards to be the Democratic nominee for president.

A similar scene will play out in eight other casinos on or near Las Vegas’s Strip as Democrats caucus in Nevada, the next stop in the party’s fiercely competitive presidential race. There will be more than 1,700 caucus precincts across Nevada, but estimates are that the votes cast in the casinos could be more than 10 percent of the statewide total. Many of them will be cast by Latinos, the first time in the 2008 presidential race when that ethnic group will play a significant role.

Democratic officials, working with national party leaders, came up with the idea of caucusing in the casinos for the first time to increase participation in a town that doesn’t know the meaning of a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday workweek.

Under rules set by the Nevada Democratic Party, only casinos that have been organized by the most powerful labor group in Las Vegas, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, were selected as caucus sites.

The unusual venue has set the scene for a different confrontation between Obama and Clinton, the two front-runners, than occurred in Iowa or New Hampshire.

In New Hampshire, Clinton fared best among working-class and middle-class voters, while Obama did better with higher-income voters and in college towns — a demographic that Clinton at one point mocked as people who “don’t need a president.”

But in Las Vegas, Clinton, a senator from New York, is supported by many hotel and casino executives, while Obama has the backing of two key unions — the Nevada chapter of the Service Employees International Union and the culinary workers, which announced its endorsement Wednesday after fierce lobbying from all three Democrats.

“Not only am I among friends, I am also among the best of the labor movement in this country,” Obama, a senator from Illinois, said in a speech Friday night at the union’s hall on the north end of town.

The same day, another union — the Nevada State Education Association — contended that Obama and the culinary workers are altogether too friendly, and asked a federal court to shut down the casino caucus sites because, the association said, they give preferential treatment to culinary union members.

State Democratic officials, who had been expecting the suit, said they had worked with each presidential campaign since last spring to craft the process, including the casino precincts, to drum up the largest turnout possible.

“The time for comment or complaint has passed,” the state party said in a statement after the suit was filed by the teachers’ union and several individuals. The union, which has not endorsed a candidate, has some leaders who individually support Clinton. It is using a law firm with at least one prominent lawyer who backs Clinton. (Another teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed Clinton and is airing radio ads in Nevada on her behalf.)

Culinary union officials dismiss the complaints as sour grapes from Clinton allies. “It’s strange it’s coming after our endorsement,” D. Taylor, the secretary-treasurer, said of the suit.

Minutes from the meeting last March when the state Democratic committee approved the caucus process show that several of the parties to the suit were there and approved of the process.

Clinton raised questions about the caucus process when she campaigned here Thursday. Repeating an argument she made after she lost the Iowa caucuses, she said caucuses provide only a “limited period of time” for participation, as opposed to day-long primaries. “People who work during that [caucus] time, they’re disenfranchised,” she told reporters.

State party officials counter that the sites in the casinos are specifically designed to meet the objections raised by Clinton and to allow more people to participate in the notoriously cumbersome caucus process.

The casino caucuses are open to any shift worker, including cab drivers and employees at nonunion casinos, who is on duty midday Saturday within a 2 1/2 mile radius of the nine sites. They must present identification showing that they work on or near Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip’s official name. However, the logistical reality of Las Vegas — where mega-casinos can be half a mile long and the Strip is clogged with cabs hustling gamblers around town — is that it will be very difficult for workers in nonunion casinos to take the time to walk or drive to the caucus sites.

Culinary officials have been prepping their union’s members on caucus rules — the doors close promptly at noon, and no late attendance, for example — at meetings for months. Although their endorsement of Obama came late, they predict a near-united front for him, adhering to the labor movement’s notion that division weakens a union’s hand, whether in contract bargaining or politics.

“We believe that everyone has the ability to choose on their own, but normally we all try to stick together,” said Jennifer Grote, 44, who works in food service at the Paris hotel-casino and will serve as a caucus captain on Election Day.

“You cannot divide union workers,” added Leain Vashon, a bell captain at the Paris.

Any members who want to oppose their leadership and support another candidate will have to do so in front of their co-workers, wearing their casino-issued work clothes identifying themselves as members of the union.

At the Bellagio, executives estimate that between 4,000 and 5,000 employees will be working at caucus time. While they have been accommodating so far, executives say they cannot possibly let every worker take more than an hour-long break on Martin Luther King Day weekend, which will be extra busy.

“It’s not perfect for us. We’ve got a business to maintain,” said Gordon Absher, spokesman for MGM Mirage, which owns the Bellagio and three other casinos hosting caucuses.

Despite Obama’s organizational advantage, Clinton has hardly given up in Nevada. After touring a Latino neighborhood that is home to many culinary workers Thursday, she returned here yesterday with former housing secretary Henry Cisneros in an effort to peel away Latino votes.

With Obama getting the support of the dishwashers and housekeepers, Clinton has the backing of such political players as former governor Bob Miller, former Las Vegas mayor Jan Jones, and Rory Reid, son of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (who has stayed neutral in the race).

Her campaign convened a conference call with casino executives Friday to attack Obama for his opposition to expanding casino gambling in Illinois while he was in the legislature there. They said it was hypocritical of him to accept the endorsement of the hotel and casino workers while having previously criticized the industry on which their livelihoods depend.

Taylor, the culinary union leader, pointed to Clinton’s prominent backers as evidence that “the entire Democratic power structure” supports her, saying that makes Obama the underdog.

The competitive nature of the fight is exactly what Nevada Democrats hoped for when they used Harry Reid’s clout to give the state an early place in the primary process. The state party bills the contest as “the test in the West” — the first battle in the western half of the nation.

“Nevada is right in the eye of the storm, and it’s wonderful,” Harry Reid said in an interview last week.

By MICHAEL COOPER and MICHAEL LUO

Fred D. Thompson tried to salvage his faltering presidential campaign at a debate Thursday night with a barrage of sharp attacks on the “liberal” policies of Mike Huckabee, the fellow Southerner whom he clearly sees as a rival in the South Carolina primary.

The performance by Mr. Thompson, which including several pointed one-liners, capped a debate that showed the altered terrain of the Republican field as it moved beyond contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Mitt Romney took on Senator John McCain, the victor in New Hampshire, over economic issues in an effort to sway voters in Michigan before its primary on Tuesday. Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Thompson tussled over South Carolina voters. And Rudolph W. Giuliani took a muted swipe at Mr. McCain in an effort to win over security-minded voters before the Jan. 29 Florida primary.

But it was Mr. Thompson’s performance, in which he shook off the laid-back style that has defined his candidacy, that provided some of the liveliest moments of the debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C..

“This is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party and its future,” said Mr. Thompson, who has staked his run on a strong showing in South Carolina. The primary there is Jan. 19.

“On the one hand,” he said, “you have the Reagan revolution, you have the Reagan coalition of limited government and strong national security. And the other hand, you have the direction that Governor Huckabee would take us in. He would be a Christian leader, but he would also bring about liberal economic policies, liberal foreign policies.”

Mr. Thompson then lit into Mr. Huckabee, the former Baptist preacher and Arkansas governor who won the Iowa caucus, for wanting to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, for supporting what he called “taxpayer-funded programs for illegals” and for wanting to sign a law restricting smoking.

“That’s not the model of the Reagan coalition, that’s the model of the Democratic Party,” he said.

Mr. Huckabee, for his part, responded with trademark humor. “The Air Force has a saying that says if you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target.”

The debate, which was sponsored by the South Carolina Republican Party, was actually more of a series of separate minidebates that happened to be held simultaneously and in the same place, reflecting the strategies of each candidate. Mr. Huckabee and Mr. McCain were frequently the target of attacks.

Mr. Giuliani, coming off distant finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, at one point noted that Mr. McCain was not the only candidate who supported the increased troop presence in Iraq.

“I’d also like to say something to my friend John,” Mr. Giuliani said. “John gets great credit for supporting the surge. But, John, there were other people on this stage that also supported the surge. The night of the president’s speech, I was on television. I supported the surge, I’ve supported it throughout.”

Mr. McCain responded that he had criticized the old strategy in Iraq before President Bush adopted the new strategy.

“My point was that I condemned the Rumsfeld strategy and called for the change in strategy,” he said, referring to former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. “That’s the difference.”

Mr. Huckabee, who is looking for a strong showing in Michigan and a win in South Carolina to show that his victory in Iowa was more than a fluke, tried to appeal to voters in both states with a populist message.

“We need to make sure that we communicate that our party is just as interested in helping the people who are single moms, who are working two jobs and still just barely paying the rent as we are the people at the top of the economy,” he said.

Although the debate was held in South Carolina, Mr. Romney — who has pulled his advertising out of the state after a year-long effort to court Republicans there, concentrating instead on Michigan — turned the very first question, about the economy, into an appeal for Michigan votes.

“I know that there are some people who think, as Senator McCain did — he said, you know, some jobs have left Michigan that are never coming back,” he said. “I disagree. I’m going to fight for every single job. Michigan, South Carolina, every state in this country. We’re going to fight for jobs and make sure that our future is bright.”

Mr. McCain tried to give back as good as he got.

“One of the reasons why I won in New Hampshire is because I went there and told them the truth,” he said. “And sometimes you have to tell people things they don’t want to hear along with things that they do want to hear.”

That appeared to be a not-too-veiled swipe at Mr. Romney, who has been dogged during the campaign by accusations that he has changed his positions on issues like abortion rights, which he once supported but now opposes, for political gain.

“Let’s have a little straight talk,” Mr. McCain said. “There are some jobs that aren’t coming back to Michigan. There are some jobs that won’t come back here to South Carolina. But we’re going to take care of them. That’s our goal. That’s our obligation.

“We need to go to the community colleges and design education and training programs so that these workers get a second chance. That’s our obligation as a nation.”

Mr. Thompson leavened his responses with the kind of one-liners that many supporters had hoped he would use sooner.

Asked about the United States response in a confrontation with Iranian speedboats, Mr. Thompson said, “I think one more step and they would have been introduced to those virgins that they’re looking forward to seeing.” At another point, he offered that “you can tell that the news is good coming out of Iraq because you read so little about it in The New York Times.”

He also went after Mr. McCain on immigration.

“I disagree with my friend John McCain on the bill that they proposed last year,” Mr. Thompson said. “I disagree with my friend Governor Huckabee when he supported in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.”

Mr. McCain championed a controversial Senate bill that would have offered a pathway to citizenship to the 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, provided they cleared certain hurdles.

Asked what he would do as president about illegal immigrants in the country, Mr. McCain said he would make sure to secure the border but did not back away from his views. While those who committed crimes would be deported, he said, others would be addressed in “as humane and compassionate a way as possible.”

In response, Mr. Romney put forth a hard-line stance on the issue, arguing that the illegal immigrants in the country should be given some time to arrange their affairs but that all should be required to go home and “get in line with everybody else.”

By LOUIS UCHITELLE and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Presenting a bleak picture of a deteriorating national economy, Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, strongly suggested on Thursday that the Fed would cut interest rates soon, perhaps by a large amount.

“The outlook for real activity in 2008 has worsened,” Mr. Bernanke said after describing all the forces dragging down the economy. “We stand ready to take substantive additional actions as needed to support growth and to provide adequate insurance against downside risks.”

With fears rising that the economy is sliding into recession, Mr. Bernanke’s blunt assessment is expected to encourage politicians to call on Congress to take steps that would stimulate growth beyond what the Fed can achieve through lower interest rates.

Many analysts now expect the Fed’s policy makers to cut half a percentage point off the Fed’s benchmark interest rate, reducing it to 3.75 when they next meet, on Jan. 29 and 30. They expect the Fed to continue cutting, to 3 percent or even lower by summer, to prevent — or at least mitigate — a recession. The goal would be to get people to borrow and spend more.

Consumer spending, however, may already have hit a wall. Shortly before Mr. Bernanke spoke, at a Washington luncheon, the nation’s biggest retailers announced that holiday sales gains were the weakest in the last five years. Only Wal-Mart gained ground, after it slashed prices to draw jittery consumers.

“Bernanke should have made this commitment to cut rates aggressively two or three months ago,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “Will it be enough? It will be close. With aggressive rate cuts, some fiscal stimulus and a bit of luck, maybe we’ll avoid a recession.”

The stock market responded with uncertainty at first to Mr. Bernanke’s remarks, but then chalked up solid gains. The Dow Jones industrial average surged as he spoke, then fell back, then rose again, closing up nearly 1 percent, to 12,853.09.

Encouraged by other developments as well, including reports that the nation’s largest mortgage lender was about to be acquired by Bank of America, traders apparently concluded that the Fed was at last committed to a more vigorous effort to lift the economy, and to reverse the recent slide in stock prices, which often go up in response to rate cuts.

“Maybe the Fed and the market are not quite on the same page yet,” said Richard Berner, co-head of global economics at Morgan Stanley, “but they are getting a lot closer.”

Mr. Bernanke’s gloomy assessment of the economy represented a turning point for the Fed. Until now, most of the Fed’s top policy makers, starting with Mr. Bernanke, had spoken publicly of their “uncertainty” about what lay ahead. They have cut their benchmark interest rate, the federal funds rate, by a full percentage point since mid-September in response to the credit crisis and the housing downturn.

But they accompanied each cut with a statement that stopped well short of declaring that the economy was clearly in trouble.

Evidence of deterioration has accumulated, however, since the policy makers’ last public statement in mid-December. Within the last week, the Labor Department has reported a sharp jump in the unemployment rate; AT&T said that a number of customers were not paying their bills; American Express reported weaker spending by its cardholders; and the nation’s retailers released their disappointing holiday sales figures.

Acknowledging the evidence, President Bush, speaking in Chicago on Monday, said the nation faces “economic challenges” and “we cannot take growth for granted.”

The mounting evidence has suggested to a growing number of economists and politicians that the Fed by itself cannot stem the economic slide and that Congress must help with fiscal policy in the form of a tax rebate for low-income families, extended unemployment insurance or some other subsidy.

Without addressing the growing demands for fiscal stimulus, Mr. Bernanke devoted most of his talk, at a forum sponsored by Women in Housing and Finance and the Exchequer Club, to a review of the economic damage, which he said had increased in recent weeks.

Housing starts and new-home sales are off 50 percent from their peaks, he said. Foreclosures are rising, and so is the number of households behind on their mortgages. In the financial markets, the subprime shock “has contributed to a considerable increase in investor uncertainty,” he reported, adding that the Fed is seeing “considerable evidence that the banks have become more restrictive in their lending to firms and households.”

Offering an explanation for the Fed’s reluctance to act more aggressively sooner, Mr. Bernanke said that economic growth seemed “to have continued at a moderate pace” until recently, when new information increasingly indicated that “the downside risks to growth have become more pronounced.”

The Fed, Mr. Bernanke said, had counted on an expanding job market to “support moderate growth” in consumer spending. But the government reported Friday that hiring had fallen almost to zero in December and the unemployment rate had jumped to 5 percent from 4.7 percent — a rare one-month surge that almost always indicates coming hard times.

“It would be a mistake to read too much into any one report,” Mr. Bernanke said of the jobs report. “However, should the labor market deteriorate, the risks to consumer spending would rise.”

In a 13-page speech, the Fed chairman devoted only one paragraph to the risk of inflation, although some of his colleagues at the central bank have cited inflationary pressures as a reason to go easy on rate cuts. Mr. Bernanke acknowledged these concerns but clearly put them on the back burner.

“Thus far,” he said, “inflation expectations appear to have remained reasonably well anchored, and pressures on resource utilization have diminished.”

Mr. Bernanke said the Fed had successfully pumped money to banks and other lenders damaged in the mortgage crisis. Lending to banks directly from the Fed’s discount window, he said, had not worked as well as auctioning fixed multibillion-dollar sums.

Among other advantages, he explained, the auctions gave the Fed greater control over how much money was entering the financial system and the effect on interest rates. The auctions, he said, “may thus become a useful permanent addition to the Fed’s toolbox.”

In his speech, Mr. Bernanke carefully avoided any discussion of a recession, which would be an extended period of contracting economic activity and falling employment. But some economists argue that such a downturn may be unavoidable — or already have started — despite the Fed’s recent efforts to contain the damage from the housing collapse and credit market turmoil.

“However much the Fed cuts rates between now and the spring,” said Brian Bethune, an economist at Global Insights, “the die is cast for a pretty rough six months and a very high risk of recession.”

Asked about the possibility of a recession, Mr. Bernanke sidestepped the question. As a Princeton University economist before he came to Washington, he said, he had served on a committee charged with setting the official starting and ending dates of each recession.

“You really cannot make a determination,” he said with a sly grin, “until well after the event.”

by kos

Thu Jan 10, 2008 at 01:31:01 PM PST

In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state’s Democrats. In fact, a third of the voters (PDF) in the Democratic primary were Republican crossover votes. In 1988, Republican voters again crossed over, helping Jesse Jackson win the Democratic primary, helping rack up big margins for Jackson in Republican precincts. (Michigan Republicans can clearly be counted on to practice the worst of racial politics.) In 1998, Republicans helped Jack Kevorkian’s lawyer — quack Geoffrey Feiger — win his Democratic primary, thus guaranteeing their hold on the governor’s mansion that year.

With a history of meddling in our primaries, why don’t we try and return the favor. Next Tuesday, January 15th, Michigan will hold its primary. Michigan Democrats should vote for Mitt Romney, because if Mitt wins, Democrats win. How so?

For Michigan Democrats, the Democratic primary is meaningless since the DNC stripped the state of all its delegates (at least temporarily) for violating party rules. Hillary Clinton is alone on the ballot.

But on the GOP side, this primary will be fiercely contested. John McCain is currently enjoying the afterglow of media love since his New Hamsphire victory, while Iowa winner Mike Huckabee is poised to do well in South Carolina.  

Meanwhile, poor Mitt Romney, who’s suffered back-to-back losses in the last week, desperately needs to win Michigan in order to keep his campaign afloat.  Bottom line, if Romney loses Michigan, he’s out. If he wins, he stays in.

And we want Romney in, because the more Republican candidates we have fighting it out, trashing each other with negative ads and spending tons of money, the better it is for us. We want Mitt to stay in the race, and to do that, we need him to win in Michigan.

Two polls the last couple of days show a tight race: Strategic Vision (R) shows Romney within striking distance with 20 percent to McCain’s 29 (Huckabee is third with 18), while Rossman Group shows Huckabee with the lead — 23 percent to Romney’s 22 and McCain’s 18.

Now here’s the thing — without a real Democratic contest on the ballot, and a lack of party registration in Michigan, this is an open primary. Anyone can pick up a Republican ballot. So Michigan Democrats and independents who want to see the Republican battle royale continue should just take a few minutes on Tuesday, January 15th to cast a ballot for Mitt Romney in the Republican primary.

If you know someone in Michigan, send them the email I’ve included below the fold. If you don’t know someone in Michigan, send the email to your liberal friends and see if THEY have friends in Michigan. Get the word out, whether by blog, mailing list, MySpace or Facebook page, or whatever.

If we can help push Mitt over the line, not only do we help keep their field fragmented, but we also pollute Romney’s victory. How “legitimate” will the Mittster’s victory look if liberals provide the margin of victory? Think of the hilarity that will ensue. We’ll simply be adding fuel to their civil war, never a bad thing from our vantage point.

Michigan Democrats helped deliver their state to McCain in 2000 to spite their hated governor, John Engler, who had “guaranteed” his state to Bush. To prevent such future mischief, Michigan Republicans helped push through a unified tax-payer funded primary date to supposedly keep Democrats focused on their own race (prior to this year, party contests were funded by the parties). Let’s make sure their meddling with the Democratic primary and their misuse of taxpayer funds backfires on them.

Michigan is Romney’s last stand.  He has pulled all advertising from other states for a last-ditch effort there. It’s sink or swim time for Romney, and we’re going to throw him a lifesaver.

So why are we doing this? Because we can. Because it’ll be fun. And because we’ve suffered Republican meddling, stealing, and disenfranchisement in our elections for far too long.

So get the word out and get out the vote!.

David S. Broder
The Washington Post
January 10, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. – The lesson of New Hampshire can be summarized in two simple words: Character counts.

John McCain and Hillary Clinton left the Granite State on Wednesday with hard-earned primary victories because they showed its voters more courage in overcoming daunting odds than anyone else in the race.

Where Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama had prevailed in Iowa as candidates of faith and hope, respectively, McCain and Clinton won in New Hampshire by dint of grit, backbone and sheer determination.

McCain came back from a disastrous early summer slump that stripped his campaign treasury bare and caused an exodus of highly paid consultants. He patiently reconstructed the local networks of support that had given him a New Hampshire victory over George Bush in 2000, and he nurtured them in more than 100 town meeting question-and-answer sessions.

Mike Dennehy, a veteran of that 2000 campaign and his local manager, recalled last week that it was not until Thanksgiving time last year that they could sense any significant revival of voter interest in McCain. But the senator never lost faith in his message, Dennehy said, or slackened in his efforts.

By contrast, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, blessed with a personal fortune and a high-powered local organization, kept varying his TV and stump themes, continually searching for the formula that he thought would be persuasive. The net effect was to cost him a substantial degree of his personal reputation for integrity – and that was reflected in the negative press coverage by New Hampshire newspapers. It was not until the last few days that Romney settled on an effective message of being the non-Washington reformer who could bring change to the gridlocked capital.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani wavered in an even more basic way.

When McCain hit the skids last summer, Giuliani launched a TV campaign to challenge Romney here, and followed up with personal appearances. But he backed off as soon as he encountered resistance, hoarding his money for a later stand in Florida.

His fourth-place finish Tuesday, trailing even Huckabee, who had written off New Hampshire until he claimed his Iowa victory, leaves Giuliani a vulnerable challenger as the campaign moves to Michigan and South Carolina.

McCain, for one, believes on the basis of New Hampshire exit polls that he has a stronger claim than Giuliani to the anti-terrorism credential that many Republican voters are seeking in their nominee. Huckabee has the inside track on the religious right, while Romney perhaps has only one more chance to find a niche in the party’s business center when Michigan, his native state, votes Tuesday.

Meantime, while McCain had six months to recover from disaster, Clinton was forced to do it in five days. Her third-place finish in Iowa, well behind Obama and losing narrowly to John Edwards, left her campaign reeling. Her husband’s bitter complaints about the crowding of early events on the calendar, leaving her insufficient time to recover, seemed to presage a meltdown in the normally disciplined Clinton camp.

But at the very point when those around her seemed stressed to the breaking point, the senator herself rallied. She put on one of the best of her many strong debate performances Saturday night and followed up with marathon question-and-answer sessions with voters Sunday and Monday.

The exit polls confirmed that her courage under fire had the effect particularly of rallying support among women. The gender gap that had been notably missing in Iowa reappeared here and fueled her victory.

The Obama-Clinton contest now offers Democrats a battle between two worthy opponents. She has deeper roots among core Democrats, especially women and blue-collar workers, but he has stronger appeal to independents and younger, better-educated people.

Neither is likely to crumble or run short of money until after the big states have voted Feb. 5.

The 2008 election is only days old, and it already has provided more drama and surprises than many campaign years of the past. This one promises to be a classic.

William Mckenzie
Dallas Morning News
January 10, 2008

NORMAN, Okla. – If you were looking for a coming-out party for Michael Bloomberg’s independent presidential bid, the gathering of frustrated moderates Monday at the University of Oklahoma wasn’t it.

But if you’re among the legions of Americans hungering for change this election season, then this was the place for you. What happened here Monday won’t change our politics overnight, but Washington won’t change without meetings like this.

Surprisingly, Bloomberg was a sideshow. He sat at one end of a podium of 14 former members of Congress or governors, with two presidential experts and a diplomat thrown into the mix. He did little talking, except to explain how we have lost our courage and vision and to suggest we should think about results more than parties.

Not bad. But neither were the New Yorker’s remarks a call to the barricades that some thought would happen here.

The most interesting comments came from the other panelists, most of whom have decades of Washington experience. Former Sens. David Boren, Sam Nunn, Jack Danforth and Gary Hart and their peers looked like movie stars about a decade past their primes. But these Republicans and Democrats knew how to govern in their day. And they are fighting back.

“We’ve seen the system work,” fumed former Maine Sen. Bill Cohen, also President Clinton’s secretary of defense. “And it’s not working.”

Beware: Some proposals the moderates made are process-oriented. And process never seems to get voters to jump out of their seats. Yet Washington is all about process, and unless you change the way things work, the city won’t climb out of its dysfunction, which stems from each of the two major parties trying to steal the show from the other.

Boren ticked off several worthwhile changes, such as getting the next president to form a genuinely bipartisan Cabinet and making sure the 44th president meets regularly with congressional leaders. That would take some of the edge off Washington’s mean ways.

You can trace the talk that went on here yesterday, as well as the “change” chatter we’re hearing on the campaign trail, to our founding as a religious colony. Some of us still see ourselves as that city on a hill that John Winthrop envisioned and Ronald Reagan popularized. We don’t want to get sullied by the mischief in which rulers engage.

So, when someone says, “I’m not like that,” we latch onto them. All that lobbying, posturing and vote trading is for the status-quoers, the insiders, the suits.

In my book, that’s the strain in our political culture that Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are tapping. People are searching for a post-politics politics.

Understood. George W. Bush hasn’t been able to unify Washington, as he promised. The place shows no signs of coming off its partisan bender. But if voters really want to see the people we send to Washington get more done, we need more than platitudes. We’re going to need people like the Borens, Nunns, Danforths and Cohens, who know how to make things move through the city.

A friend of mine made a similar point after Iowa, where change was in the water. If you want change, he asked, doesn’t it take people who know how to get things done?

The group that met here at the University of Oklahoma has experience galore. Their challenge is how to move out of this comfortable university setting and take their message to the masses.

When I interviewed him before the event, Boren said it was up to the American people to broaden this effort. True, we citizens need to speak up. But I hope this group takes its message to the campaign trail. Washington needs changing. No doubt about that.

The rest of us could use some advice about how to change it.

Bush says Iran risks ’serious consequences’

President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hold a joint news conference Wednesday at the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Robin Wright
Washington Post
January 10, 2008

WASHINGTON – The United States on Wednesday slapped sanctions on a top Iranian general and three exiled Iraqis based in Iran and Syria for fomenting violence in Iraq, as President Bush lashed out again at Tehran for last weekend’s encounter between U.S. and Iranian naval vessels.

In a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Bush called Iran a “threat to world peace” and warned that it would face “serious consequences” if it tried to attack U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf.

All options remain on the table, Bush said, a statement that some diplomatic and military officials in Washington said inflated the brief incident Sunday between five small Iranian speedboats and three U.S. warships.

Iran countered Wednesday that a four-minute video of the encounter released by the United States on Tuesday was compiled from file pictures and fabricated audio.

The rising tensions led France and Saudi Arabia to call on Washington and Tehran to show caution. “We hope this incident will not be repeated. We face a constant danger of escalation, so self-restraint is necessary for all players in the region,” Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal told a news conference on the eve of Bush’s visit to the kingdom.

He also appeared to rebuff U.S. efforts to raise the stakes over Iran. “We’re a neighbor to Iran in the Gulf, which is a small area, so we’re keen for harmony and peace among countries in the region,” Faisal said. “We have relations with Iran and we talk with them, and if we felt any danger, we have relations that allow us to talk about it.”

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned Iran about taking a dangerous action but cautioned the two nations to show “moderation.”

Shortly after Bush’s comments in Israel on Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced the new economic sanctions on the four individuals and a television station in Syria.

Treasury imposed the new sanctions under Executive Order 13438, which targets insurgents and militia groups. It freezes any assets – such as property or financial holdings – under U.S. jurisdiction or any transactions with U.S. citizens or entities.

The administration named Brig. Gen. Ahmed Foruzandeh, leader of Iran’s Quds Force operations in Iraq, for allegedly directing assassinations of Iraqis and ordering Iranian intelligence to provoke deeper sectarian violence in Iraq by targeting Shiites and Sunnis.

Bush Middle East visit meant to ‘nudge’ peace talks

An Israeli right-wing activist performs with a toy gun as he and others demonstrate against the visit of President Bush after Bush arrived in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Associated Press (Associated Press)

Los Angeles Times
January 10, 2008

JERUSALEM – President Bush said Wednesday he was trying to “nudge” Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate the outlines of an independent Palestinian state, acknowledging that it has taken the pressure of his first presidential visit to Israel just to get them to the starting line.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, outlining the conundrum the effort poses, told Bush it would be “very, very hard to reach any peaceful understanding” until rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip were brought to a halt.

Gaza is in the hands of the militant Hamas organization that the United States and Israel consider a terrorist group.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president whom Bush is to meet with in the West Bank today, has no control over Gaza or Hamas.

Bush, acknowledging the difficulty of a mission he wants to see accomplished before he leaves office, said the United States stood ready to help but would not take a detailed, hands-on role.

“I’m under no illusions,” he said. “It’s going to be hard work. I fully understand that there’s going to be some painful political compromises. … I fully understand that there’s going to be some tough negotiations.

“America cannot dictate the terms of what a state will look like,” he said.

Bush said he had come to push both sides toward that goal, however, saying Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank “ought to go” and that no part of Palestinian lands can be a “safe haven for terrorists.”

Bush noted that his visit had prompted Abbas and Olmert to agree Tuesday, on the eve of his arrival, to end weeks of delay in tackling the major issues of the decades-old conflict.

“Am I nudging them forward? Well, my trip was a pretty significant nudge,” Bush said.

Bush and Olmert spoke at a joint news conference in the chilly courtyard of the prime minister’s residence after meeting for more than two hours.

By Sara Kugler
The Associated Press    Wednesday 09 January 2008

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has quietly been polling and conducting a highly sophisticated voter analysis in all 50 states as he decides whether to launch an independent presidential bid, associates said Wednesday.

The exhaustive data collection started months ago, and when the review begins shortly, it will provide the data-obsessed billionaire businessman with the information he will use to decide whether to make a third-party run for the White House.

The scope of the research, details of which were revealed to The Associated Press, demonstrates how seriously Bloomberg is considering running for president despite his almost-daily denials that he isn’t entering the race. The extensive coast-to-coast research effort shows that Bloomberg is willing to dig deep into his wallet simply to gauge his chances of winning and lining up the proper support network.

 ”They want a hard-headed sense of their chances,” said Doug Schoen, who spearheaded Bloomberg’s voter database efforts, known as microtargeting, for his two mayoral campaigns.

Bloomberg’s spokesman Stu Loeser declined to comment.

Schoen says he is not working for Bloomberg now, but he is part of the mayor’s inner circle and makes a convincing and well-researched case in his new book, “Declaring Independence,” about how a third-party candidate such as Bloomberg could run for president and upset the election this year.

Schoen was widely recognized for his microtargeting work in Bloomberg’s first campaign. It was considered a groundbreaking concept in 2001 to gather and use information on individual voters, rather than voting blocs, to tailor and tweak the campaign message, advertisements and overall theme.

The Bloomberg database being created nationally would also be used in those same ways if he were to run, Schoen said. But for now, it will serve as the basis of gauging potential support for a bid.

Using the microtargeting model, research firms working for Bloomberg are gathering comprehensive information on voters throughout the country, such has who owns a home, has children in college, where they vacation, type of car or computer and past political support. All the puzzle pieces will then be arranged to create a picture of each individual.

Most of the data already exists in commercial databases that the multibillionaire Bloomberg can simply purchase. It will then be analyzed to determine how each voter fits into several categories: “strong supporter,” “persuadable supporter,” or “potential volunteer.”

Bloomberg’s public denials of any interest in running are getting weaker; he typically says only that he is “not a candidate.”

On Monday, he participated in a bipartisan summit in Oklahoma that only fueled speculation about his interest in seeking the presidency.

William Cunningham, who worked on Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns and was communications director during his first term, said it makes sense that Bloomberg – who founded the financial information company, Bloomberg LP – would gather voter information in this way.

“The mayor has both built a business and managed the city by using data and analyzing it, so it would seem to me that any other venture he gets involved in, he’d be analyzing and collecting data,” he said.

For Bloomberg’s campaigns in 2001 and 2005, he spent more than $155 million, and in both cases, poured millions into the development of his voter database.

The work that Schoen did in 2001 came as Republicans were also developing a similar concept, known nationally during the 2004 presidential election as “Voter Vault.”

Now, mictrotargeting has now become a crucial tool for political campaigns.

The obstacles to a third-party victory are enormous, but Schoen argues they are not insurmountable.

Previous independent bids such as those by George Wallace, John Anderson and H. Ross Perot faced problems of money, organization and ballot access that someone like Bloomberg could more easily overcome.

The 65-year-old mayor already has the money – Fortune magazine estimates his worth in the neighborhood of $11.5 billion, and others have speculated it could be double that.

Next comes organization, and Bloomberg operatives believe they could recruit a million volunteers within a month of launching a campaign, aided by information gleaned from the voter database.

A major task for the volunteer force would be doing the ground work to get him on the ballot – a tricky process that differs wildly by state.

The first deadline to get on a state ballot is May 12 in Texas, and petitioners can only begin collecting signatures after the state’s March 4 major party primary.

So far, the surprise outcomes of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary have added urgency and strength to the Bloomberg operation, Schoen said.

“The uncertainty in the nominating process on both sides makes it more likely that Mike Bloomberg will explore a candidacy,” he said.

By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, January 9, 2008; 7:17 PM

MERRIMACK, N.H. (AP) New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson ended his campaign for the presidency Wednesday after twin fourth-place finishes that showed his impressive credentials could not compete with his rivals’ star power.

Richardson planned to announce the decision Thursday, according to two people close to the governor with knowledge of the decision. They spoke on a condition of anonymity in advance of the governor’s announcement.

The Richardson campaign would not comment on the governor’s decision, reached after a meeting with his top advisers Wednesday in New Mexico.

Richardson had one of the most wide-ranging resumes of any candidate ever to run for the presidency, bringing experience from his time in Congress, President Clinton’s Cabinet, in the New Mexico statehouse as well as his unique role as a freelance diplomat. As a Hispanic, he added to the unprecedented diversity in the Democratic field that also included a black and a woman.

But Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama dominated the spotlight in the campaign, and Richardson was never able to become a top-tier contender. He accused his rivals of failing to commit to bring troops home from Iraq soon enough.

He portrayed his campaign as a job application for president, and ran clever ads that showed a bored interviewer unimpressed with his dazzling resume. The commercials helped fuel his move to double-digit support in some early state polls, and advisers argued he was poised to move past former vice presidential nominee John Edwards for the role of third-place challenger.

But he was not able to build the momentum and came in a distant fourth place in Iowa and New Hampshire. Richardson didn’t get quite 5 percent in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday and came in with just 2 percent in the Iowa caucus last week.

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON — There are many ways to lose a Supreme Court case, and by the end of an argument that was before the court on Wednesday, the Democrats who were challenging Indiana’s voter-identification law appeared poised to lose theirs in a potentially sweeping way, with implications for many future election cases.

The justices’ questioning indicated that a majority did not accept the challengers’ basic argument — that voter-impersonation fraud is not a problem, so requiring voters to produce government-issued photo identification at the polls is an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.

The tenor of the argument suggested, however, that rather than simply decide the case in favor of the state, a majority of five justices would go further and rule that the challenge to the statute, the strictest voter-identification law in the country, was improperly brought in the first place. Such a ruling could make it much more difficult to challenge any new state election regulations before they go into effect.

The Indiana Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the 2005 law before it went into effect, seeking a declaration that it was unconstitutional on its face and could not be enforced even against the majority of Indiana voters who could easily produce the required photo ID. Such an approach, known as a “facial challenge,” is the standard way of attacking election regulations like the poll taxes that the Supreme Court struck down in the 1960s and more recent redistricting and ballot-access cases.

But the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has displayed deep skepticism toward such challenges, most notably on the subject of abortion, on the grounds that they require courts to step outside a limited role of resolving concrete disputes brought by parties with actual injuries.

“You seem to accept that a facial challenge is appropriate here,” Justice Antonin Scalia said with evident disapproval to Thomas M. Fisher, the Indiana solicitor general, who was defending a lower court’s judgment that the law was constitutional.

Indiana, in fact, had not objected to the form in which the case was brought. That argument was introduced by the Bush administration, which entered the case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, No. 07-21, after the Supreme Court agreed in September to hear it. In the administration’s brief, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement urged the justices to uphold “principles of judicial restraint” by rejecting the facial challenge.

Joining Mr. Fisher in arguing for the state on Wednesday, Mr. Clement said the court should wait for a case to be brought by someone who was actually barred by the statute from casting a ballot. Such a lawsuit “could focus like a laser beam” on particular problems, Mr. Clement said, adding that if such a case were successful, it would have the virtue of producing a remedy that solved the problem without invalidating the entire law.

Justice David H. Souter countered, “That would be a virtue, but one of the vices would be that it would be after the election, and the entire matter would be academic for another two years.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg raised a similar objection. “The reason they are bringing a facial challenge is because the horse is going to be out of the barn,” she said. “They will have the election, and just what they are afraid of could happen — that the result will be skewed in favor of the opposite party.”

Justice Ginsburg’s subtle but unmistakable allusion was to the partisan context in which voter identification laws, recently adopted by a handful of Republican-dominated states, are being debated. Democrats charge that the true purpose of the laws is to deter participation by some predictably Democratic voters, particularly poor people and members of minority groups who are less likely than others to have driver’s licenses or passports.

The Bush administration has raised the suspicions of Democrats by making what they call “voter fraud” a priority for Justice Department enforcement. No prosecution for impersonating a registered voter, the type of fraud that would be prevented by a photo requirement, has ever been brought, however. “No one has been punished for this kind of fraud in living memory in this country,” Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer arguing for the Democrats, told the justices.

In his opinion last year upholding the Indiana law, Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit agreed with the Democratic plaintiffs that the law would fall more heavily on Democrats than on Republicans. But that did not make the statute unconstitutional, he said.

On Wednesday, discussion of the law’s justification, and of the extent of the burden it placed on voters, was inconclusive. Mr. Fisher, Indiana’s lawyer, said that because photo identification was “necessary to do so many everyday activities,” the number of those affected was “infinitesimal.” Mr. Smith said the number was more likely in the hundreds of thousands.

Under the Indiana law, voters who are turned away for lack of identification may cast provisional ballots, which are counted only if the voter travels to the county clerk’s office within 10 days to show the required identification or sign a sworn statement that he cannot afford to obtain such an identification. The plaintiffs have argued that this extra step and required travel create an unnecessary burden that other states with identification requirements do not impose; those states do not require voters to make a second trip in order to have a provisional counted.

Chief Justice Roberts, who grew up in Indiana, did not seem to find the burden excessive. “County seats aren’t very far for people in Indiana,” he said.

Mr. Smith replied that the county seat in Lake County was a 17-mile bus ride from the county’s urban center of Gary. “If you’re indigent, that’s a significant burden,” he said. The chief justice also seemed unimpressed by the absence of known voter impersonators. “It’s a type of fraud that, because it’s fraud, it’s hard to detect,” he said to Mr. Smith.

Justice Scalia interrupted the debate over the law’s impact in order to frame his argument against facial challenges.

“Why are we arguing about whether there is one-half of one percent of the electorate who may be adversely affected and as to whom it might be unconstitutional?” he asked Mr. Fisher, adding: “This court is sitting back and looking at the ceiling and saying, oh, we can envision not the case before us, but other cases. Maybe it’s one-half of one percent or maybe it’s 45 percent, who knows. But we can imagine cases in which this law could be unconstitutional, and therefore, the whole law is unconstitutional. That’s not ordinarily the way courts behave, is it?”

“I should hope not,” the Indiana solicitor general replied.

By MARC SANTORA and ADAM NAGOURNEY

PONTIAC, Mich. — Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney sped to Michigan on Wednesday and turned their focus to the slowing economy as they headed toward the next showdown in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr. Romney dropped his television advertising in two other important battlegrounds, South Carolina and Florida, to focus his spending on Michigan in hopes of averting another major defeat. Mr. McCain, whose campaign until now has operated by necessity as a wide open but low-cost insurgency, adopted a carefully choreographed series of rallies as it scrambled to gather the money and the organization it needs to take advantage of his victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

On the Democratic side, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign aides gathered to plot how best to take advantage of her victory in New Hampshire as she and Senator Barack Obama prepared for a protracted nationwide battle for the nomination.

After two fourth-place finishes, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is dropping out of the Democratic contest, according to people knowledgeable about his decision. John Edwards remains in the race, but his distant third-place finish in New Hampshire moved the Democrats toward a two-person race between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama.

After appearing on the morning television news programs, Mrs. Clinton stayed off the campaign trail as she and her aides debated how to allocate her time and money through Feb. 5, when 22 states will vote. Mr. Obama made a foray to the New York area, appearing at a rally in New Jersey, which like New York and Connecticut will hold its primary on Feb. 5, before coming to Manhattan for a fund-raiser.

At midnight on Tuesday, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, convened a conference call of senior staff members across the country, refocusing them on the contest ahead in an effort to move beyond the defeat in New Hampshire. “We’re certainly going to throw all of our energy into Nevada, South Carolina and Feb. 5 states,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.

The immediate focus of both the Clinton and Obama campaigns was the Nevada caucuses on Jan. 19, which was shaping up as the head-to-head test of the strength of both these candidates. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton dispatched their field staffs there from Iowa last week, and Mrs. Clinton plans to visit Nevada on Thursday. Mr. Obama on Wednesday won the endorsement of the culinary workers’ union in Nevada, but Democrats there said that Mrs. Clinton had a strong organization and that the contest was extremely close.

In both parties the candidates were recalibrating their strategies after the results in New Hampshire, which revived Mrs. Clinton’s fortunes after her defeat by Mr. Obama in Iowa and gave Mr. McCain his first victory and a chance to deal Mr. Romney a potentially debilitating blow in Michigan. Mr. McCain arrived in Michigan ahead of Mr. Romney, appearing at two rallies before heading to South Carolina in the afternoon in preparation for the debate there on Thursday.

Both candidates emphasized job loss and the broader anxieties that have taken root as the economy has slowed.

“Some of the jobs that have left the state of Michigan are not coming back,” Mr. McCain warned. “They are not, and I am sorry to tell you that. But I believe we can develop a plan to take care of these workers who have lost their jobs.”

Mr. Romney told an audience of more than 200 at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids that Michigan’s economic woes were personal to him and said the state’s prospects were tied up with the nation’s.

He talked at length about his roots in the state, where he was born and reared, drawing applause when he recalled his father, George, who was governor of Michigan. He went on to recall campaigning as a teenager for his father, whose slogan was about getting Michigan “on the move again.”

“We’re going to make sure this state gets on the move again,” Mr. Romney said. “I care about Michigan. For me, it’s personal. It’s personal for me because it’s where I was born and raised.”

Earlier in the day, after hearing from a voter who recalled his father, Mr. Romney choked up momentarily, according to a pool reporter who was present. “He was a great man, and I miss him dearly,” Mr. Romney said.

The results in New Hampshire left Mr. Romney’s campaign in dire straits after losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, despite pouring millions into the contests and blanketing the states with advertisements for months.

Mr. Romney held a national fund-raising call day on Wednesday in Boston, an event his aides said had been planned for some time. His campaign said it raised $1.5 million that it can use during the primaries and an additional $3.5 million it could use if Mr. Romney wins the nomination and runs in the general election.

But the decision to focus its advertisements on Michigan suggested that the Romney campaign is making tough decisions about where to spend its money, despite Mr. Romney’s ability to reach into his own pockets.

“This race is about Michigan right now,” said Kevin Madden, a Romney spokesman.

Adding yet another wrinkle is the potential impact of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, in the race in Michigan, which holds its primary on Tuesday. Emphasizing economic themes, Mr. Huckabee began running an advertisement here on Wednesday obliquely taking on Mr. Romney, saying voters wanted a president who reminds them “of the guy they work with, not the guy that laid them off” and highlighting the nation’s job losses and rising fuel prices.

Mr. Huckabee’s advisers said several factors were working in their favor in Michigan. They said the size of the state put a premium on news media coverage, which Mr. Huckabee has displayed a knack for attracting. There is a substantial evangelical population in western Michigan, giving him an audience for his conservative views on social issues. And his message of economic populism could resonate among blue-collar workers.

Still, Mr. Huckabee is likely to limit the time and money he spends in Michigan because he does not want to detract from South Carolina, where he has been setting up his first real campaign organization and where he is banking on doing well among the state’s many evangelical voters.

Mr. McCain’s strategy in Michigan rests in part on reaching out to centrist Republicans and independents. Because the Democratic candidates are not actively campaigning in Michigan — the party has put sanctions on the state for holding its primary earlier than the party wanted — independent voters could move toward the Republican contest, potentially helping Mr. McCain. He won Michigan in his losing battle against George W. Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000.

Among the Democrats, aides to both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama said Mrs. Clinton’s victory on Tuesday stopped any movement by donors and party leaders to coalesce around a front-runner.

Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, said it had collected $700,000 overnight, in addition to $20 million it already had on hand. Mr. McAuliffe also said he had no doubt that Mrs. Clinton would be able to keep pace with Mr. Obama in the expensive month ahead, a contention that was not disputed by Mr. Obama’s aides.

The result on Tuesday left both sides studying the map ahead. Both campaigns have abandoned their previous assumptions that the nomination would effectively be settled on Feb. 5 — and instead settled in for what could be a long fight until one or the other wins the most delegates.

“For the first time since 1988, this is a delegate race,” said Howard Wolfson, the communications director for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “This is about more than any one state.”

Mr. Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, said: “I don’t think anyone can tell you with any degree of certainty how long this will go. This is going to be a furious battle between two candidates.”

Although the campaigns appear evenly matched in Nevada, the next state where Democrats will compete actively, Mr. Obama appears to have a stronger organization and base of support in South Carolina, which follows.

As of now, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they were looking to California, New Jersey, New York, Arkansas and Georgia as their first targets among the states that come later, but they made clear that their target list could expand. They said Mrs. Clinton would make in effort to win delegates in certain Congressional districts in Mr. Obama’s home state, Illinois, which is how delegates are allocated there. Mr. Obama is making a similar effort in New York.

While Mr. Obama’s strategists said it was too early to pinpoint their top state targets, California, New Jersey, Georgia and Missouri lead the list, suggesting some shared targets with Mrs. Clinton. The mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, announced her endorsement of Mr. Obama on Wednesday and the campaign is wooing Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who aides say expects to announce her support soon.

For his first campaign appearance in the next stage of the race, Mr. Obama chose a rally on Wednesday in New Jersey, one of the places he is eyeing in the trove of nearly two-dozen states holding primaries or caucuses in the next four weeks. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had surrogates stage rallies on her behalf in about a dozen states that vote on Feb. 5.

Even as Mr. Obama spent nearly all of his time in Iowa in the last two months, his campaign was building an operation in states that hold contests on Feb. 5. An aggressive absentee ballot program is under way in California, anchored by the man who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 New Hampshire race. (One-third of Democrats vote absentee.)

Marc Santora reported from Pontiac, and Adam Nagourney from Manchester, N.H., and Boston. David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Washington, Michael Luo from Grand Rapids, Mich., and Jeff Zeleny from Washington.

By Michael Kinsley

There are presidential candidates for virtually every taste, yet citizens find the menu inadequate. They tell pollsters they are discontented with the selection and generally sick of politics and politicians. In part, they are just being polite. The notion that people hate politics and that politicians are all phonies is so ingrained that to tell a pollster that, yeah, politicians are O.K. and the system is not so bad would almost be a violation of democratic etiquette.

Yet voters are also right to feel that something is phony about democratic politics and that it’s getting worse. Even a candidate who agrees with you on all important issues and always has—no dreaded flip-flops—is forced by the conventions of politics to be disingenuous about at least one core issue: why he or she is running.

Ladies and gentlemen, they are running because they are ambitious.

No, really, they are. You probably suspected as much. And yet you would abandon any candidate who dared to admit this, or at least they all believe that you would. We all are told at our high school graduations to be ambitious, then for the rest of our lives it becomes a shameful secret. Ambition can take many forms. Four decades ago, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, created a sensation with a book called Making It that revealed how even intellectuals are ambitious. But the purest form of ambition is political ambition, because it represents a desire to rule over other people.

When you hear the presidential candidates carrying on about democracy and freedom, do you ever wonder what they would be saying if they had been born into societies with different values? What if Mitt Romney had come to adulthood in Nazi Germany? What if Hillary Clinton had gone to Moscow State University and married a promising young apparatchik? What if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, like his father, where even now people are slaughtering one another over a crooked election? Which of them would be the courageous dissidents, risking their lives for the values they talk about freely—in every sense—on the campaign trail? And which would be playing the universal human power game under the local rules, whatever they happened to be?

Without naming names, I believe that most of them would be playing the game. What motivates most politicians, especially those running for President, is closer to your classic will-to-power than to a deep desire to reform the health-care system. Alpha males are alpha males (and alpha females, ditto): it’s true among apes, and it’s true among humans. This doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people. It also doesn’t make democracy a farce; there will always be more than enough alpha types to go around, and our right to choose among them still gives us plenty of leverage about the kind of society we live in. But because ambition can never be naked in a political campaign, it must be clothed in deceit. And that does make a farce of a lot of what goes on in our democracy.

Voters sense correctly that politics is an act. As a political campaign gets more and more professionalized, it becomes more and more of an act. This is one area in which the media and the voters really diverge. Political correspondents respect the professionalism of a well-run campaign and are quickly bored by complaints of artifice. Voters, meanwhile, still take offense and long for sincerity. This explains the cult of Harry Truman, which usually breaks out around October of election years. Among the current candidates, it explains John McCain, whose behavior as a prisoner of war brings him about as close as anyone can be to proving which side he would be on in a different kind of society.

These days, in our therapeutic culture, an ambitious politician can neutralize almost any human weakness or hunger and even turn it into a plus, as part of his or her life story. Sin and redemption have nearly become requirements for presidential candidates. Our current President has practically admitted to having been an alcoholic. It’s not clear how many marriages add up to a serious disqualification, but thanks to Rudy Giuliani, we know that the number is more than three. The one sin for which redemption and forgiveness are not available is ambition. And yet it’s the one sin we know they are all guilty of.

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 9, 2008; A01

MANCHESTER, N.H., Jan. 8 — New Hampshire proved to be the political firewall that the Clinton campaign long had hoped for. Just as New Hampshire voters saved Bill Clinton’s candidacy 16 years ago, they revived Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s faltering presidential campaign Tuesday night.

Clinton’s battle with Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) now moves to Nevada and South Carolina, then to almost two dozen states, including California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, that will hold contests on Feb. 5. Both campaigns are ready, and with two well-liked, well-funded and determined candidates, Democrats face a battle almost unlike any they have seen in a generation.

Tuesday’s outcome defied the final poll results, which had shown Obama heading toward a handsome victory. It provided a huge psychological boost to the Clinton campaign, just as the results Tuesday buoyed Republican John McCain, and instantly deflated the almost giddy sense of anticipation inside Obama’s headquarters.

What arrested Obama’s surge was not clear. Some strategists speculated that it was Clinton’s performance in Saturday’s debate, in which she declared that “words are not actions” and sought to refocus voters’ attention from the soaring rhetoric and energy of Obama’s candidacy and back to the nuts-and-bolts question of what it takes to produce real change — and who is better equipped to do so.

Others suggested that it was her emotional moment at a New Hampshire diner on Monday, when her voice cracked as she talked about what kept her going. That moment, played and replayed on television over the final hours of the campaign, revealed a side of her rarely seen before, a more vulnerable Clinton than the one described by her own campaign as “one tough woman.”

Whatever it was, women flocked to Clinton’s candidacy in a way they had not in Iowa. There Obama captured more of the female vote than Clinton, but in New Hampshire on Tuesday, exit polls by the National Election Pool showed Clinton winning women handily. Obama won the votes of men by about the same margin, but with women making up more than half the electorate here, Clinton’s victory was assured.

Stunned by the loss in Iowa, Clinton was in the midst of shaking up her campaign as New Hampshire voters went to the polls Tuesday. She was recruiting new advisers to join the existing team. Newer, tougher ads are likely. A new assessment of where to fight and where not to fight between now and Feb. 5 was underway.

But the key for Clinton, say veterans of past campaigns and some of her supporters, may still be her ability to articulate a rationale for her candidacy that goes beyond the assertion that her experience makes her far readier to step into the Oval Office than Obama.

“I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice, ” she said in her victory speech, a speech that Clinton advisers saw as the first critical step in redefining her candidacy and her message.

“There has to be a recalibration and a readjustment,” said one Clinton loyalist, who asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly about the challenge ahead.

“Her rationale has been all based upon tactics,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who is not affiliated with any campaign. “Everything has been tactical. It’s, ‘My five-point program is better than your four-point program,’ and, ‘I am ready from Day One.’ That’s just not where the country is at.” Obama, he added, “clearly fits the mood of the year.”

Obama has his own challenges. The first will be to try to rebuild his campaign’s morale, which plummeted Tuesday night with the first reports that Clinton might win. His loss will take some of the luster away from his candidacy, as he attracts more scrutiny from the media and probably comes under the kind of attacks he has not experienced in his political career.

Clinton has enjoyed the edge in endorsements, but since Iowa, Obama had lined up support from leading politicians in some of the Feb. 5 states. “There’s a lot more interest today than a week ago,” an Obama adviser said a few hours before the polls closed here.

Some of those elected officials had been holding back to see how the race developed. Whether they will continue to wait as a result of Tuesday’s close race was not immediately clear.

Obama’s campaign has said for weeks that it has been preparing for a nomination battle stretching at least until Feb. 5. Campaign manager David Plouffe said Tuesday that the campaign already has staff members and organizations in 19 of the 22 states and will soon have staff members in the other three.

“We have the financial and organizational capacity to do that,” he said. “We’re not in a situation where we’re picking and choosing states. We’re ready for all of them. . . . We want as much Obama blue on the map that night as possible.”

Clinton’s goal now is to win a delegate war with Obama. She hopes to combine the delegates earned in the Feb. 5 contests with support from “super delegates” — party officials with automatic votes at this summer’s national convention in Denver — to emerge from those contests with the advantage over Obama.

The next state on the calendar is Nevada, which will hold caucuses on Jan. 19. Obama has anticipated winning the endorsement of the Culinary Workers union, which would mean a big boost in the low-turnout event.

Clinton’s team had long seen Nevada as friendly territory, but after Iowa it was reassessing its prospects there. It was not clear whether the campaign would make an all-out effort there.

Clinton’s advisers were far gloomier about South Carolina, fearing that Obama’s victory in Iowa and the energy surrounding his campaign would consolidate the black vote behind him. In a three-way race that includes former senator John Edwards (N.C.), the Clinton camp concluded that South Carolina might be a lost cause.

But begging off a fight in the first state with a substantial black population might be difficult for Clinton, given the long and close relationship that she and her husband have had with the African American community.

“They will have to take a new and closer look at Nevada and South Carolina,” said Democratic strategist Anita Dunn.

Clinton’s victory provided a real-time reminder that this Democratic race may have more surprises ahead. Weeks or months ago, it was Clinton who had been anointed as the inevitable nominee. Then after Obama’s victory in Iowa five nights ago, he was being fitted for the nomination crown.

But presidential campaigns rarely end this quickly, and it was as if the voters of New Hampshire on Tuesday were divided enough in their choice of candidates to assure that voters elsewhere will have the opportunity to settle the issue.

“I think it’s awfully interesting that they made her the underdog and she came back,” said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. “Obviously, a lot of these voters don’t want to close down the process. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute.’ ”

Long before the polls closed, pollster Hart offered an unexpectedly prophetic word of caution about the unexpected twists that often define presidential politics.

“Everybody keeps thinking we’ve now hit the straightaway,” he said, referring to commentary about the momentum building behind Obama. “What I say is, this is a presidential election with only hairpin turns.”

By PATRICK HEALY and MICHAEL COOPER

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York rode a wave of female support to a surprise victory over Senator Barack Obama in the New Hampshire Democratic primary on Tuesday night. In the Republican primary, Senator John McCain of Arizona revived his presidential bid with a Lazarus-like victory.

The success of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain followed their third- and fourth-place finishes in the Iowa caucuses last week. Mrs. Clinton’s victory came after her advisers had lowered expectations with talk of missteps in strategy and concern about Mr. Obama’s momentum after his first-place finish in Iowa. Her team is now planning to add advisers and undertake a huge fund-raising drive to prepare for a tough and expensive fight with Mr. Obama in the Democratic nominating contests over the next four weeks.

Mr. McCain had pursued a meticulous and dogged turnaround effort: his second bid for the White House was in tatters last summer because of weak fund-raising and a blurred political message, leading him to fire senior advisers and refocus his energy on New Hampshire.

Several New Hampshire women, some of them undecided until Tuesday, said that a galvanizing moment for them had been Mrs. Clinton’s unusual display of emotion on Monday as she described the pressures of the race and her goals for the nation — a moment Mrs. Clinton herself acknowledged as a breakthrough.

“I come tonight with a very, very full heart, and I want especially to thank New Hampshire,” Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking to become the first woman to be elected president, told supporters in Manchester. “Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice.”

“I felt like we all spoke from our hearts, and I am so gratified you responded,” Mrs. Clinton said. Then, echoing her husband’s “Comeback Kid” speech after his surprise second-place finish in the primary here in 1992, she added, “Now together, let’s give America the kind of comeback that New Hampshire has just given me.”

The scene was noticeably different from the one in Iowa when Mrs. Clinton spoke after her loss in the caucuses. Instead of being surrounded by longtime Clinton supporters like former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, she went on stage with teenagers and young adults behind her.

Mr. Obama leaves here with political popularity that is still considerable, after his victory in Iowa and his growing support in the nominating contests ahead. Mrs. Clinton had been struggling to stop Mr. Obama, turning on Tuesday to new advisers to shore up her campaign team, and both of them are strongly positioned heading into the Nevada caucuses on Jan. 19 and the South Carolina primary a week later.

“We know the battle ahead will be long,” Mr. Obama told supporters in Nashua Tuesday night. “But always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.”

With 91 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mrs. Clinton had 39 percent of the vote, Mr. Obama 36 percent, and John Edwards 17 percent. On the Republican side, Mr. McCain had 37 percent, Mr. Romney 32 percent and Mike Huckabee 11 percent.

The New Hampshire results foreshadow a historic free-for-all for both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations in the weeks to come. Mr. McCain’s victory dealt another serious blow to Mitt Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts. Mr. Romney campaigned hard and spent heavily as he sought wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, only to come up short in both states.

Mr. McCain, after watching television reports of his victory in his Nashua hotel room, took congratulatory calls from Mr. Romney and Mr. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won the Republican caucus in Iowa. He then went downstairs to declare victory.

To cheers of “Mac is back,” Mr. McCain told supporters last night: “My friends, you know I’m past the age when I can claim the noun ‘kid,’ no matter what adjective precedes it. But tonight, we sure showed them what a comeback looks like.”

Mr. Obama, like Mrs. Clinton, devoted considerable financial resources to Iowa and New Hampshire, and his advisers said they planned to spend carefully in the coming contests. He has a major fund-raiser scheduled for Wednesday night in Manhattan — Mrs. Clinton’s home turf — and intends to seek donations from online donors and major party figures. He is also seeking endorsements from members of the Senate and labor groups that have thus far been torn between him and Mrs. Clinton.

The voting in New Hampshire did little to clarify the muddied Republican field. The McCain, Romney and Huckabee campaigns are all girding for battle, and some political analysts still see Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee as a wild card in Southern primaries. Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose strategy calls for winning big in later states like Florida and the Feb. 5 primaries in New York, New Jersey and California, finished near the back of the pack here.

Mr. Romney, stoically smiling in remarks to supporters Tuesday night, is now looking ahead to Michigan primary on Jan. 15; he grew up in the state, where his father was a popular governor, and has been advertising on television there since mid-December.

“Another silver,” Mr. Romney, who ran the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, said in his concession speech. He went on to call for sending someone to Washington “who can actually get the job done,” and added, “I don’t think it’s going to get done by Washington insiders.” He vowed to fight on.

Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Thompson are hoping for a huge lift from fellow Southerners in the South Carolina primary on Jan. 19. And Mr. Giuliani, speaking to supporters before flying to Florida, said the toughest fights were still to come. “By the time it’s over with, by Feb. 5, it’s clear that we’re going to be the nominee of the Republican Party,” Mr. Giuliani said. He added that, perhaps, “we’ve lulled our opponents into a false sense of confidence.”

Mrs. Clinton plans to stay off the campaign trail on Wednesday and huddle with her husband and advisers about the way forward. She is planning to add new strategists and advertising advisers to her team, including a longtime aide, Maggie Williams, and advertising adviser, Roy Spence, as she seeks to build on a strategy memorandum written by another ally, James Carville, to show more fight and grit against Mr. Obama in Nevada.

Even before polls had closed Tuesday, advisers to Mrs. Clinton were portraying her performance here as a gratifying revival and surprise, given her loss in Iowa and Mr. Obama’s double-digit lead in some public opinion polls going into Tuesday’s vote. Advisers and female voters pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s emotional moment on Monday as decisive, with advisers promising that voters would see more personal touches in the days to come.

“Women finally saw a woman — perhaps a tough woman, but a woman with a gentle heart,” said Elaine Marquis, a receptionist from Manchester, who had been torn between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton but was leaning her way when she bared her feelings.

Exit polls of voters on Tuesday showed that women, registered Democrats, and older people — especially older women — came out solidly for Mrs. Clinton, while independents, men and younger voters went for Mr. Obama.

It was an especially remarkable night for Mr. McCain, who had to lay off much of his staff after he nearly ran out of money because of his effort to run a national campaign last spring along the lines of President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. All but counted out, Mr. McCain retrenched and focused his limited resources largely on advertising and campaigning in New Hampshire, where he enjoyed a reservoir of support among Republicans and independents from his 2000 run here.

He got back on his emblematic bus, the Straight Talk Express, chatting with the few reporters who continued to cover him and working to persuade the state’s voters one by one in a seemingly incessant stream of town-hall-style meetings.

And while Mr. Romney outspent him on television commercials by two to one — spending $8.7 million to Mr. McCain’s $4.3 million, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising — Mr. McCain closed the gap in the last days of the campaign here, in part because of his tireless campaigning.

Mike Dennehy, who directed the McCain efforts in the state, estimates that Mr. McCain spoke to some 25,000 people directly.

Exit polls suggested that there was a record turnout, with half a million voters — 280,000 Democrats and 230,000 Republicans.

In the Republican primary, Mr. McCain got 38 percent of voters unaffiliated with either party, and the same proportion of registered Republicans, according to exit polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press. Such undeclared voters made up about a third of voters in the Republican primary.

It was different for the Democrats. Undeclared voters make up a larger share of the voters in the Democratic primary — about 40 percent. Mr. Obama got about 4 in 10 undeclared voters and Mrs. Clinton got about a third of their support. Mrs. Clinton got 45 percent of registered Democrats, and Mr. Obama got a third.

Marjorie Connelly and Michael Powell contributed reporting.

By MICHAEL POWELL

MANCHESTER, N.H. — It has the feel and look of a transformative moment, this tidal wave of young voters buoying the disparate campaigns of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.

The shouts and wild applause, and willingness to knock on doors and work on telephone banks late in the evening transformed the Iowa caucuses.

Even those working for politicians unlikely to draw power from this surge say the youth vote could do the same on Tuesday in New Hampshire. At Dartmouth, which is back in session, professors predicted a 60 percent turnout on the campus in Hanover, a percentage that would far exceed previous primaries.

In Iowa, young voters came out in strength, as did their elders. Fifty-seven percent of voters ages 17 to 24 said Mr. Obama was their first choice, compared with 14 percent for John Edwards and 10 percent for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Far fewer young people voted in the Republican caucuses, and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas scored highest, drawing well with evangelical youth.

Mr. McCain’s persona as a war hero who rarely minds his lip scores well on campuses in New Hampshire.

Even those transfixed by this wave caution against proclaiming the primaries as a coming of age for a new generation of young activists and voters.

Political pied pipers often prove ephemeral. Mr. Obama’s support among a focus group at Dartmouth sagged noticeably after students watched him debate more veteran Democrats.

Over the long run, young voters rarely vote in percentages as high as older voters. And many laboring here hail from out of state and cannot vote here.

“The mass mobilization and excitement this year is tremendous,” said Joseph Bafumi, a professor of government at Dartmouth. “It gives a campaign a feeling of vitality and energy. But young people are famously transient and not yet settled.”

Gaby Gottlob, 19, a student at the University of Vermont, said not all students were so engaged.

“I know a lot of people that are like: ‘Oh, the primary? I haven’t registered yet,’” Ms. Gottlob said.

Every candidate turns to the tools of the youth culture, a Facebook, YouTube and blogging whirl. But some go much further. Mr. Obama has spoken on college campuses for months, acquiring a vast database of potential volunteers.

Former President Bill Clinton has done the same as his wife’s surrogate. Mr. McCain rarely has a rally or forum in which he fails to hand a microphone to a young person.

No candidate is more aware of the tonic appeal of the youth vote, and more intent on capturing its power than Mr. Obama is. His campaign has the trappings of a youth crusade, an impression he emphasizes by having aides place young people behind him on stage.

Few candidates of recent vintage approached Mr. Obama’s capture of more than half the youth vote in Iowa. In 2004, Howard Dean summoned “net rooters” and “alt rockers.” But in the end, Senator John Kerry received 37 percent of the 18-to-24 vote to Mr. Dean’s 23 percent, according to a poll by Edison/Mitofsky.

Mr. Obama challenges young people daily, urging them to prove pundits wrong by turning out in vast numbers. Booming applause greets his words.

“It would be such a shame after seeing the great turnout in Iowa if we weren’t working as hard as we could to make sure that story continues, because I think that was the biggest story out of Iowa,” Mr. Obama told an audience on Monday. “That transcends any individual candidate.”

The precise alchemy of this attraction is uncertain, as often is true in politics. It owes perhaps to Mr. Obama’s youthful look and multicultural persona, his soaring words and a message tinged with liberal politics and talk of uniting partisans.

“It’s not something he’s doing.” Professor Bafumi said. “It’s something he’s being.”

James Nance, 19, a student at George Mason, traveled across New Hampshire as a political tourist watching candidates. Only Mr. Obama spoke directly to his concerns.

“Kids are the best at telling who’s a liar, who’s phony,” Mr. Nance said. “He really inspires me to stand up and fight. There’s something different about him, you know.”

Mr. Obama’s rivals have not conceded the youth vote. Chelsea Clinton has accompanied her mother, Mrs. Clinton, everywhere on the campaign trail of late. She worked on telephone banks for 30 minutes on Monday.

The campaign made sure to let cameras follow her as she strolled the streets of Portsmouth, even convincing a wavering young woman at a diner to vote for her mother.

Mrs. Clinton’s rallies attract young people, although in nothing like the numbers and passion for Mr. Obama. She has tried to defuse that strength by hitting at his weakness. Her campaign placed a billboard in Hanover, with one word, “Ready.”

Mr. Edwards draws relatively few young people to his events, notwithstanding his youthful looks and energetic style. His theme of a middle class betrayed by a corporate elite appears not to resonate with younger voters. Tom Murray, 20, a political science major from Long Island, hears in Mr. Edwards’s message a poetic tale. But Mr. Murray sees few young people at rallies.

“It’s mostly older people,” he said. “I’m not sure why.”

In the Republican ranks, Mr. McCain, 71, is a curious bookend to Mr. Obama. He is the oldest candidate in either party besides Ron Paul, another Republican, who is 72. Yet he draws hundreds of young people at some events.

Mr. McCain drew many hundreds when he spoke at Dartmouth, a number exceeded only by the 2,000 students who showed up for Mr. Obama.

“He is seen as Washington but not in it,” said Ronald G. Shaiko, an associate director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth who works with focus groups. “They think he’ll upset the apple cart.”

Mr. McCain admits to admiring Mr. Obama’s appeal as a “wonderful thing” and has taken to borrowing a line or three. He has been channeling Mr. Obama, calling on Americans to “serve a cause greater than their self-interest,” a theme from his campaign in 2000.

At forums, he may hand the microphone to a young man with ONE, a group dedicated to eradicating what it calls “stupid poverty” and disease. The group has more than 17,000 members in New Hampshire.

At Dartmouth, Emily Goodell, 18, sat astride a strange fence, contemplating a vote for Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama.

“It is kind of a strange thing since they have different views on many of the issues,” Ms. Goodell said. “They come across as genuine. I trust them.”

Nearly as striking is the absence of young people on the trail traveled by Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Romney visited Dartmouth, but the earth did not shake.

“He went straight to the medical school,” Professor Shaiko said. “He wanted to talk to adults. He has no presence here.”

Still, the youth vote has an uncertain mojo. For the moment, Mr. Obama is like catnip for many people younger than 30. Less certain is if his “it moment” will be sustained.

The results of the Rockefeller Center focus group before the Democratic debate in September at Dartmouth may be instructive. Mr. Obama’s stock dropped after he stood shoulder to shoulder with more experienced rivals.

“His talking about his work in the state legislature while another candidate is talking about negotiating with the North Koreans was a turnoff,” Professor Shaiko said. “They found him coming up short on experience.”

Reporting was contributed by Julie Bosman, Marjorie Connelly, Michael Cooper, Michael Falcone, Patrick Healy, Michael Luo, Ashley Parker, Yardena Schwartz, Sarah Wheaton and Jeff Zeleny.

Candidates try to set selves apart for N.H. primary

Fred Thompson, left, and Mike Huckabee have their makeup touched up Sunday at the Fox News debate in Manchester. By the numbers Democrats Barack Obama, 41 percent Hillary Rodham Clinton, 28 percent John Edwards, 19 percent Bill Richardson, 6 percent Republicans John McCain, 34 percent Mitt Romney, 30 percent Mike Huckabee, 13 percent Ron Paul, 8 percent Rudy Giuliani, 8 percent USA Today/Gallup New Hampshire poll conducted Friday through Sunday with a margin of error of 4 percentage points

Jim Tankersley and John Mccormick
Chicago Tribune
January 7, 2008

NASHUA, N.H. – Knocked from their perches atop state polls and facing potentially damaging losses in Tuesday’s primary, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney urged New Hampshire crowds on Sunday to vote with their heads, not their hearts.

The senator from New York and the former governor of Massachusetts excoriated their leading rivals and pitched themselves as their parties’ most logical nominees to win the White House in November and overhaul Washington as president.

Those rivals, Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and John McCain, R-Ariz., opened commanding leads in a batch of primary polls released Sunday. They dismissed attacks with heavy doses of “hope” and “straight talk,” respectively.

Clinton amplified claims that her political record uniquely positions her to bring the change Democratic voters appear so eager for. She mocked the change credentials of Obama and former Sen. John Edwards by repeating accusations she leveled in Saturday night’s debate: that they flipped positions or proved ineffective on key issues in the Senate.

“If you give a speech saying you’re going to vote against the Patriot Act, and you don’t, that’s not change,” she said, referring to Obama. “If you say that you’re going to prevent members of Congress from having lunch with lobbyists … but they can still have lunch standing up, that’s not change.”

A moment later, she added: “If you gave a speech, and a very good speech, against the war in Iraq in 2002 and then by 2004 you’re saying you’re not sure how you would have voted, and by 2005, 2006 and 2007, you vote for $300 billion for the war you said you were against, that’s not change.”

An Obama spokesman defended the ethics reform as “expansive” and the renewed Patriot Act as moderately improved. Obama himself fought back by accusing Clinton of lacking faith in American potential, because in Saturday’s debate she warned against raising “false hopes” in the campaign.

“False hopes, what does that mean?” Obama asked a packed gymnasium crowd in Salem. “Is that the message we want to send the American people? To focus on constraints instead of possibilities? Did JFK say, ‘The moon, it looks too far, let’s have a reality check here. We can’t do it’?

“We don’t need leaders who will say what we can’t do,” he continued. “We need leaders who will inspire us and tell us what we can do.”

The Clinton campaign also slammed Edwards as he brought new guests – the family of a young California woman who died after her health insurer denied coverage for a liver transplant – on the first stops of a 36-hour overnight bus tour that will lead him into primary day. “In order to be president, you need to do more than read articles about people who need help and talk about them,” Clinton spokesman Jay Carson said.

Edwards responded by saying the Clinton campaign “doesn’t seem to have a conscience. This is not about them – it’s about families … who desperately need a voice.”

The Democratic dynamic – and Obama’s shadow – spilled onto the Republican side. Romney continued to label McCain a “Washington insider” and to cast himself, based on his record in politics and the private sector, as the stronger opponent against Obama in a general election.

Obama, Romney said, “will stand up and talk about change. He hasn’t ever done it, but he’ll talk about change. And he’ll be able to stand up (against McCain), as he is right now against long-serving U.S. senators who talk about their experience. He just blows them away.”

McCain avoided mentioning Romney before a crowd of 1,000 in Salem. He defended his experience in an evening televised debate from Saint Anselm College, calling himself an “agent of change” in the Senate on issues such as his early support for a shift to the “troop surge” strategy in Iraq.

The debate, aired on Fox News Channel, was more civil and sedate than Saturday night’s debate on ABC. Romney, the target of several attacks Saturday, played aggressor. He pressed his change-agent attacks on McCain and quipped to Mike Huckabee, the gregarious former governor of Arkansas: “Mike, you make up facts faster than you talk, and that’s saying something.” He also pushed Huckabee three times to say whether he raised taxes as governor.

Asked by moderator Chris Wallace about a series of foreign policy gaffes, Huckabee replied that he may have made slips of the tongue but “I don’t have a slip of my judgment, I don’t have a slip of my character, I don’t have a slip of the truth.”

Former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, tossed cold water on the word of the weekend.

Thompson said he would tell America the hard truths about Social Security and energy independence. “We had some folks vote in Iowa, and we all came out talking about change,” he said, adding: “What is more important is leadership.”

Giuliani warned that Democratic candidates would raise taxes and prematurely pull troops from Iraq. “Change is a slogan,” he said, “and the examination of it has to be: Is it change for good or is it change for bad?”

The top Democrats continued to draw huge crowds across the state, ranging from 400 for Edwards in Keane to 2,500 for Clinton in Nashua. Their audiences included several undecided voters who often walked away as vexed as they came in.

Steve Lear spent hours on Saturday and Sunday waiting for and listening to Obama and Clinton in Nashua. After seeing both, Lear, a middle-aged information technology worker for an insurance company, said he is still torn but leaning toward Clinton.

“She’s not as dynamic a speaker, but that experience card is what’s got me stuck right now,” he said. “I’m really plagued by the experience thing. (Obama has) the youth and change vote locked down, but Washington is a tough place.”

By Anne E. Kornblut and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 7, 2008; A01

HAMPTON, N.H., Jan. 6 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, slipping further behind her chief rival in the Democratic primary here, has taken direct control over her strategy and message as she scrambles to block the ascent of Sen. Barack Obama.

With just two days to go until the New Hampshire primary, contenders in both parties blanketed the state with campaign events. On the Republican side, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) continued their war of words, with Romney seeking to remind voters about McCain’s unpopular stand on immigration legislation.

Despite being outwardly optimistic, Romney advisers are well aware that a loss Tuesday after defeat at the hands of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in Iowa on Thursday would unravel their carefully plotted route to the nomination. A new CNN/WMUR poll, released after a heated Saturday night debate in which Romney was peppered with criticism from his rivals, showed McCain maintaining a narrow lead over Romney.

That poll also showed Obama (Ill.) opening up a significant lead in the state, suggesting a major bounce in support following his win in the Iowa caucuses, where Clinton (N.Y.) finished third.

Frustrated by her campaign’s reaction to the defeat, Clinton ordered her advisers Sunday to reorient their message to more aggressively focus on the idea that Obama is all talk and no action.

“This election is about the difference between talk and action, between rhetoric and reality,” Clinton said at a crowded rally near the coast Sunday night in what advisers said was a new approach that she scripted herself. “If we’re going to be talking about change, then let’s talk about change. Let’s talk about who’s produced change, and let’s talk about who’s more likely to bring about change.”

Obama, drawing overflow crowds at every stop, challenged Clinton’s assertion that he is offering “false hope.” Former senator John Edwards (N.C.), who placed second in Iowa but is trailing in New Hampshire, held an emotional event with the family of a young woman who died after she could not afford a liver transplant.

The Clinton campaign on Sunday held two conference calls to knock Obama over his record, advisers said, and attacked his campaign’s use of automated phone calls. Officials sent out an appeal, labeled “urgent,” seeking phone bank volunteers at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters. Former president Bill Clinton also held a full day of campaign events, and advisers said he played a prominent role in crafting his wife’s new approach to the race.

Clinton’s campaign pounced on the fact that one of Obama’s New Hampshire co-chairs, Jim Demers, is a registered state lobbyist, arguing that it calls into question Obama’s pledge to clean up the insider culture in Washington. She also pointed to votes on Iraq war funding, the Patriot Act and energy policy that she said conflicted with her rival’s public positions on those issues, attempting to portray him as another waffling politician.

“It’s a classic response, when a candidate is in trouble, to go harshly negative,” senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said.

In an unscheduled conference call with senior aides on Sunday morning, Clinton took what her advisers described as an unprecedented level of control over the direction of the daily message — issuing orders rather than soliciting advice. According to one participant in the call, Clinton did not explicitly relieve any advisers of responsibilities, but she made it clear that she intends to reorient her campaign toward sharpening her differences with Obama on the trail. Two advisers, separately, used the term “very determined” to describe Clinton’s attitude toward winning Tuesday’s primary — a characterization matched by her pace and aggressiveness on the campaign trail Sunday.

“It is important for you to have the facts, and last night we saw some of what the differences are,” Clinton said during a rally that drew thousands in Nashua, referring to a Democratic debate the night before.

Of Obama, she said, “if you give a speech saying you’re going to vote against the Patriot Act and you don’t — that’s not change. If you say that you’re going to prevent members of Congress from having lunch with lobbyists sitting down, but they still can have lunch standing up, that’s not change.”

She continued to use the “that’s not change” mantra, with an enthusiastic audience eventually joining in the chant. Clinton’s challenges in regaining an advantage in the race with an emboldened Obama go beyond sagging poll numbers, some of her own supporters acknowledge. Campaign officials have sounded the alarm about shortcomings in their organization in South Carolina, the next major contest on the Democratic calendar, causing concern that she will be outmatched in the primary there on Jan. 26.

But her campaign is continuing to hire staffers in key states that will vote in the Feb. 5 primaries, an indication that Clinton is determined to carry the race forward.

Obama drew overflow crowds as he campaigned across the state Sunday, but Clinton’s attacks from the debate the night before lingered, adding an intensity to his typically breezy and uplifting stump speech. “We don’t need leaders telling us what we cannot do. We need a president who can tell us what we can do,” he said to a roaring crowd.

One of the Obama campaign’s most pressing concerns is that an increasingly popular McCain, who leads the GOP field here, will siphon away independent votes, allowing Clinton to win. To add heft to his pitch to independents, Obama will be joined on the campaign trail Monday by former senator Bill Bradley (N.J.), a favorite of moderate and unaffiliated voters and among the vanguard in a wave of establishment endorsements that is expected to break should Obama prevail again.

Edwards, meanwhile, struck an emotional closing note, surrounded by the family of Nataline Sarkisyan, who died last month after her insurance company balked at paying for a liver transplant.

Edwards helped organize a protest that persuaded the insurer to offer, just hours before Sarkisyan’s death, to pay for the procedure, and he has told her story repeatedly over the past 10 days. Her parents and brother contacted the campaign after hearing Edwards cite their experience as an example of what is wrong with the health insurance system. They flew into Manchester to appear with Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, at a jampacked downtown venue.

Edwards also went out of his way to assure New Hampshire voters Sunday that he will not quit the race if he fails to break through here. In 2004, as he did last week, Edwards finished second in the Iowa caucuses, then slipped further in New Hampshire before winning the South Carolina primary. Once again this year, Edwards is operating at a financial disadvantage. Nonetheless, he vowed: “I am in this race for the long haul. I am in it through the convention and into the White House.”

Staff writer David S. Broder contributed to this report from New Hampshire.

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 7, 2008; A01

Exploiting a deep well of voter revulsion over partisan gridlock in Washington, Sen. Barack Obama is promising to do something that has not been done in modern U.S. politics: unite a coalition of Democrats, Republicans and independents behind an agenda of sweeping change.

But in pitching himself as a “post-partisan” politician, Obama (D-Ill.) is only the latest in a string of presidential candidates promising to remake Washington into a city that sings in unison. George W. Bush was to be a uniter, not a divider. Bill Clinton was going to put people first. Even Richard M. Nixon, on the day after the 1968 election, invoked a sign he had seen during the campaign that said, “Bring Us Together,” and said that was the goal of his administration.

Washington, however, has a way of consigning such rhetorical hopes to the partisan waste bin.

“Words are not actions,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday night during a Democratic debate in New Hampshire, as she called for a “reality brake” on her rivals’ rhetoric. “As beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action.”

“He believes he’s a game-changer, but I don’t believe the game has changed,” said Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, dismissing Obama’s transformational pledges as naive. “It’s captivating. It’s intoxicating, but it’s not going to last.”

In Washington, bipartisanship for decades has been synonymous with compromise and incrementalism. When it has worked, both parties have sacrificed some elements of ideology for modest steps forward. The Clinton White House could not win passage of universal health care, so it settled for a federal-state partnership to insure the children of the working poor. The Republican “revolutionaries” of 1994 could not abolish a Cabinet agency, such as the Education Department, so they settled for slowing the growth rate of Medicare and abolishing Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment.

Obama is promising something very different, what skeptics call an oxymoron: sweeping bipartisan change.

“I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes, not incremental changes, not small changes,” Obama said Saturday night. “I think that there are a whole host of Republicans, and certainly independents, who have lost trust in their government, who don’t believe anybody is listening to them, who are staggering under rising costs of health care, college education, don’t believe what politicians say. And we can draw those independents and some Republicans into a working coalition, a working majority for change.”

Republicans in Washington view Obama’s “post-partisan” political appeal with a mixture of skepticism and fear. They are skeptical, they say, because the first-term senator’s thin record has shown virtually no sign of bipartisanship. They are fearful because his appeal just might work.

“It’s clear he is a phenomenon,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a conservative scrapper who revels in Washington’s partisan warfare. “He will use style and grace to achieve liberal goals, which is absolutely politically brilliant but intellectually dishonest.”

“Any new president is going to have a honeymoon period, and with his communication skills and the foundation that he appears to be wanting to lay — ‘Look, I’m above partisanship; I want to be everybody’s president’ — I’m concerned he could push through some policy things that I fundamentally disagree with,” said Rep. Jim McCrery (La.), the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Liberals have their own trepidations about a candidate who exudes an air of compromise, even if he doesn’t necessarily propose it. “I like my Democrats a bit more hard-edged, at least at this moment in time,” read one posting on the liberal Web site DailyKos yesterday. “I never got over the stolen election of 2000 and I don’t think I ever will. I was hoping for someone, as a candidate, who conveyed that they understood why that matters.”

Beyond the partisan polls, Obama’s appeal is clear, said Trent Lott, who retired last month as the Senate’s second-ranking Republican to begin a career as a Washington lobbyist — K Street being a favorite foil of Obama’s when he talks about what’s wrong with Washington.

Americans are tired of the bickering and want progress, Lott said. But he said Republicans are not about to concede to Obama’s vision of progress, a vision they see as classically liberal: federally run health care, government-mandated energy changes and a rapid pullout from Iraq.

“Barack is tapping into a feeling that he has heard out on the trail, and it’s very real,” Lott said. “But if he’s talking about bipartisan, sweeping big government, I don’t think that’s what people are talking about.”

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said bipartisanship tends to produce the worst that Washington has to offer — transactional politics where lawmakers scratch one other’s backs without regard to the bigger picture. Pork-barrel spending goes unchallenged because members of both political parties know that by objecting to one project, they jeopardize their own, Flake said.

“Partisanship is underrated. There is a time and place for it, and more time and place than we realize,” he said.

In Obama’s first years in the Senate, he showed little interest in the middle, where moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats coalesce, often to thwart their leadership.

In 2006, he won a 95 percent rating from Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal rating group, and a 93 percent rating from the AFL-CIO. In 2005, both groups gave him ratings of 100 percent. In contrast, the American Conservative Union ranked him at 8 percent, the same figure awarded to Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), two unapologetic liberals.

Obama’s aides and supporters say voters should look beyond traditional measurements. Campaign spokesman Bill Burton said that Obama assembled a bipartisan coalition in the Illinois Senate to expand health insurance for children and approve more stringent ethics rules, and that he took that approach to Washington to help win passage last year of the most significant ethics and lobbying rule changes since Watergate.

“If he can do that in the state Senate and the United States Senate, just imagine what he could do as president,” Burton said.

The first attempt at ethics reform showed the limits of Obama’s legislative skills. The bill presented on the chamber floor in 2006 was far weaker than the one he had worked on with Feingold and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Those three were among just eight no votes when the bill passed overwhelmingly in March 2006, but died in a House-Senate conference.

Shortly after the 2006 elections, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) pulled Feingold into his office. “Russ, I want you to write the ‘gold standard bill,’ and I want Barack to work with you,” Feingold recalled Reid saying.

Obama and Feingold convened a conference call with newly elected Senate Democrats, several of whom who had campaigned as reformers. They secured support for a stringent bill banning all gifts from lobbyists and prohibiting lawmakers from paying cheap rates to travel on corporate jets (a perk Obama has acknowledged he heartily enjoyed in his first year in the Senate).

The final bill passed with more than 80 votes and was signed into law last August. It had some loopholes, including a “widely attended” event exemption allowing lobbyists to pick up tabs at events so long as they are not sit-down meals.

But Feingold and most reform advocates praise the final package. “When Senator Obama says this is the strongest ethics reform legislation, he’s absolutely right,” he said. “It’s a genuine accomplishment.”

McCrery, the Louisiana Republican, said the next president will confront problems that will beg for bipartisan solutions, such as funding Social Security and Medicare.

“He’s very good. He’s very smooth. He has charisma,” McCrery said of Obama. “If he’s elected and he chooses to use those qualities not only to win elections but to lead, I think he’ll have a great opportunity.”

Staff writer Paul Kane contributed to this report.

David S. Broder
January 6, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. – It may seem paradoxical, but New Hampshire is poised to close down the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and launch a wide-open Republican contest.

The difference is that Barack Obama, the winner of the Iowa Democratic caucuses, can well repeat his victory here over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. But Mike Huckabee faces much steeper odds in duplicating his Iowa win on the Republican side.

While Huckabee shattered Mitt Romney’s strategy by winning Iowa, where Romney had invested massively in advertising and organization, he is likely simply to empower John McCain to repeat his 2000 victory in New Hampshire.

A second Romney loss would effectively end the former Massachusetts governor’s candidacy – a victim of a campaign that lost its credibility along with its ideological definition.

But McCain and Huckabee have yet to build broad constituencies among mainstream Republicans. Huckabee’s following is centered among evangelical Christians, who dominated the low-turnout Iowa caucuses. McCain’s greatest appeal is to Republican-leaning independents who powered his 2000 victory and who remain loyal to him.

McCain has been endorsed by more than two dozen New Hampshire newspaper editorial pages, a major boost to his standing among independent voters.

The uncertainty facing Huckabee and McCain is heightened by their relatively meager campaign treasuries and by the shortage of time for further fundraising before the expensive Feb. 5 primaries in California, New York and other major states.

That opens at least something of an opportunity for Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson to demonstrate their ability in Florida, South Carolina and other states that were part of George W. Bush’s political base. Mainstream Republicans in those states are still looking for a candidate.

That search becomes more urgent as the major party politicians come to understand that Obama could be the most electable candidate the Democrats have fielded in many years.

If that seems a hasty judgment, consider what Obama already has demonstrated. Running in two of the “whitest” states in the country, Obama has shown crossover appeal that defies conventional wisdom about the limits an African-American candidate will face.

It is a pattern of his brief political life. When he ran for the Senate in Illinois in 2004, Obama scored well both in small towns and rural areas far from Chicago, and in the Republican-oriented suburbs.

The Obama campaign exploited that crossover appeal by having him camped in the small towns of Iowa and in suburban Boston areas of southern New Hampshire for weeks on end.

Over the summer months, Obama honed the elements of a stump speech with a polish that enabled him to deliver it without notes a half-dozen times a day – with perfect pitch. Backing his personal appeal with an organizational effort that was underestimated by both the Clinton and Edwards campaigns, which had a year’s head start, Obama showed Democrats a combination of campaigning and organizational skill they had not seen from any candidate in their party since Bill Clinton first ran for president.

If he can demonstrate that combination again Tuesday in New Hampshire, this race would be a lot closer to being finished than anyone might have guessed even a week ago.

Hillary Clinton has one more chance to stop Obama’s momentum here. New Hampshire has been good to the Clintons in the past. They need the state to come to their rescue one more time.

She cannot count on help from anyone else. Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, two veteran senators, have left the race with their personal reputations intact but with little political reward for their efforts.

Bill Richardson is hanging on, but with only a modest hope of securing second place on the ticket.

Edwards claimed a degree of satisfaction by edging Clinton for second place in Iowa. But since his populist appeal failed to win in that state, with its rich tradition of rewarding that kind of campaign, it is hard to imagine him doing better in New Hampshire.

Any way you view it, the race is now Obama’s to lose.

Anywhere from February to May, depending on your state, party

Jim Camden
Staff writer
January 6, 2008

As the national presidential circus shifts this week from the snow-covered plains of Iowa to the snow-covered townships of New Hampshire, voters in the Inland Northwest might be asking “What about us? When will they care about us?”

The short answer is they won’t really care about us until February – if then.

The longer answer is that Washington and Idaho have selected times in the process that are earlier than ever before, but still behind the rush to the front of the line in the 2008 presidential sweepstakes.

Depending on the state and the party an Inland Northwest voter supports, he or she may be caucusing in early February or voting in a primary in mid-February or one in late May. And whenever they caucus or vote, it’s unlikely to generate the kind of attention afforded farmers in Iowa or mill workers in New Hampshire.

Part of the attention lavished on those two states comes from the tradition of being first for its respective process – caucuses in Iowa, presidential primaries in New Hampshire. Those traditions are backed by state laws and party policies that allow Iowa to move its caucuses as early as necessary to ensure they are first, and New Hampshire to shift its primaries to be second only to Iowa.

Although other states exhibit some degree of envy over the attention those two receive every four years, there’s not much the other 48 can do about being first. The scrum this year has been to be early enough to be important, which in 2008 came down to a decision of whether to take part in what is sometimes referred to as Super-duper Tuesday on Feb. 5.

Caucus or vote? Depends
On that day, 22 states, including Idaho, will start some piece of their presidential selection process. But each state is different, and Washington and Idaho are among the most eclectic in the way they pick nominees.

Idaho Democrats will hold county caucuses on the evening of Feb. 5 to start the process of selecting delegates pledged to presidential candidates. Idaho Republicans won’t; they’ll hold a presidential primary on May 27.

Washington’s Democrats and Republicans each will hold precinct caucuses Feb. 9 at 1 p.m., but in different locations and with different rules. Washington also will hold a presidential primary Feb. 19.

Confused? Don’t feel bad. Political experts all over the country are having trouble keeping track of all the changes, and some aspect of the process in Washington or Idaho is routinely listed incorrectly on most schedules of presidential events.

County caucuses
Idaho’s presidential primary is set by law for late May, to coincide with the state primary for other offices. The law allows the state to move it earlier, but despite some discussion over the years, the cost of holding two statewide primary elections – one for the presidential candidates, one for everyone else – has always weighed against that.

But the parties are free to hold caucuses, which are meetings of party members, and that’s a system Idaho Democrats have used for decades. Idaho differs from many caucus states, however, by having a single caucus in most counties, rather than breaking the meetings down into smaller districts like a voting precinct.

Participants at Idaho Democratic caucuses show their support for a presidential candidate during the meeting, and if that candidate has the support of at least 15 percent of those attending the caucus, supporters get a proportional share of delegates to the state convention. Supporters of candidates who don’t make that 15 percent threshold can switch to another candidate and the caucus leaders in each county report the final number of supporters for each presidential candidate to the state headquarters.

Presidential candidates receive a proportional share of Idaho’s 23 delegates based on the final statewide tally, provided they have at least 15 percent of the total.

A mixed bag
Washington, like Idaho, has a presidential primary set by law for May. But for most of its history, the primary has been scheduled earlier – if at all – by secretaries of state hoping to draw more attention to the West or Northwest. This year, a panel headed by Secretary of State Sam Reed scheduled the presidential primary for Feb. 19, or two weeks after Super-duper Tuesday. Their reasoning was that Washington couldn’t compete for candidates’ attention with states like California, New York and New Jersey holding contests Feb. 5. By waiting a few weeks, the field of candidates may be narrowed, but the ones who survive the big vote will be eager to win a contest elsewhere.

Before the primary was scheduled, state Democrats said they would not give up their tradition of picking their presidential delegates through a process that begins with the precinct caucuses. National party rules say people who select delegates must be Democrats, and with a state like Washington that does not have party registration and gives both party’s ballots to each voter, the results of the primary can’t be counted, state Chairman Dwight Pelz said.

Washington Republicans, who have used both primaries and caucuses in recent election cycles to select presidential delegates, offered to use the primary results as the basis for half their presidential delegates if the Democrats would do the same. Democrats said “no dice,” but Republicans stuck with the idea. They’ll award 19 of the 37 delegates up for grabs based on the primary results; the other 18 will come from the caucus process.

Both parties will start their precinct caucuses at 1 p.m. on Feb. 9, a Saturday. Until 2004, both parties held caucuses on a Tuesday evening; but four years ago, Washington Democrats moved theirs to Saturday and saw a huge jump in participation. They decided to try to build on their success, and Republicans followed that schedule this year rather than stick with a Tuesday.

Party variances
The caucus process is a little different for each party.

Democrats sign in and write down the candidate they support, or list themselves as uncommitted, at the start of the meeting. Caucus leaders tally the support for each candidate and announce how many delegates to the county convention each candidate or an uncommitted block would get from that precinct. The number of delegates varies from precinct to precinct.

Supporters of a candidate who doesn’t qualify for any delegates can switch to another candidate, and a final tally is taken. That determines the final division of delegates to the legislative district caucuses and the county convention, which is the next step in the process. Presidential candidates can gain or lose support as the process continues, depending on whether their supporters show up at each succeeding round of meetings.

Republicans don’t sign in for a candidate. Although many participants express their support for individual candidates, there’s no tally and delegates to the county convention can be elected on any combination of candidate support, opinions on key issues or party activity.

“They have to sell themselves,” not necessarily just their candidate, GOP State Chairman Luke Esser said.

County convention delegates elect state convention delegates, who elect national convention delegates. By then, the party’s nominee will likely be decided, and the delegates pledged to him, but they wouldn’t necessarily have started out backing that candidate.

Ten days after the precinct caucuses, Washington state will hold its primary. By then, some candidates on the ballot will have dropped out of the race, but the state will count and report all votes. Although Democrats will ignore the results, Republicans will divide 10 delegates among the winners based on the statewide totals, and one delegate to the overall winner in each of the state’s nine congressional districts.

The rules are complicated, but voters don’t need to know them backwards and forwards to participate. Most presidential campaigns will keep a close eye on the steps after the caucuses as long as their candidate is viable. If the race is close and either state’s delegates are important to clinching a nomination, candidates will pay attention to Washington and Idaho as the process continues.

If not, the campaigns essentially hit the “reset” button after the national convention and pay attention to states where the November election is close. That gives them another chance to care about this part of the country.

Debate comes three days before critical primary

Sen. John McCain, of Arizona, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani talk during a break in the GOP presidential debate Saturday in Manchester, N.H. Associated Press (Associated Press ) Poll shows McCain ahead A CNN-WMUR poll of 313 likely Republican voters taken in New Hampshire on Friday and Saturday showed McCain taking the lead with 33 percent to Romney’s 27 percent, Giuliani with 14 percent and Huckabee 11 percent.

Liz Sidoti
Associated Press
January 6, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney clashed with Mike Huckabee on foreign policy and John McCain on immigration Saturday night in a high-stakes presidential campaign debate three days before the New Hampshire primary.

“It’s not amnesty,” McCain shot back after Romney criticized his plan for overhauling the immigration system. “My friend, you can spend your whole fortune on these attack ads, but it still won’t be true.”

Earlier, Romney criticized Huckabee for having written that the Bush administration was guilty of an “arrogant bunker mentality” on foreign policy.

“Did you read the article before you commented on it,” asked Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor.

“I read the article, the whole article,” said Romney.

Romney’s aggressive demeanor reflected the stakes in the wide-open race for the Republican presidential nomination. Huckabee defeated him in the Iowa caucuses on Thursday with an underfunded campaign. Now Romney faces a strong challenge from a resurgent McCain in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary next Tuesday.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Texas Rep. Ron Paul also shared the stage, but they were largely eclipsed for significant portions of the 90-minute debate as Romney, McCain and Huckabee struggled for advantage.

Both Huckabee and McCain jabbed at Romney for having changed his position on numerous issues such as abortion, gun control and gay rights.

“You are the candidate of change,” McCain said with a laugh.

And Huckabee, admonished not to characterize Romney’s position on the Iraq war, replied, “which one.”

Romney’s aides were at work challenging Huckabee’s truth-telling even when their candidate himself did not.

As the debate unfolded and Huckabee said he had supported President Bush’s decision a year ago to increase troop strength in Iraq, Romney’s campaign quickly e-mailed reporters with a Huckabee quote to a different effect. “Well, I’m not sure that I support the troop surge, if that surge has to come from our Guard and Reserve troops, which have really been overly stretched,” it said he told MSNBC last January.

The event was part of a rare debate doubleheader, Republicans first, Democrats second, in the same hall at Saint Anselm College. Intermission brought White House hopefuls from both parties onto the stage at the same time, an unusual occurrence that left McCain chatting with Democratic New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

McCain, whose candidacy appeared at the point of collapse last summer, sought to stress his national security credentials against major rivals whose political resumes are limited to governorships.

He said he had been the first one in the race to say the president’s initial strategy in the war in Iraq was not working, “And I again say that I’m glad to know that now everybody supported the surge.”

McCain added that “I was criticized by Republicans at that time. And that was a low point, but I stuck to it. I didn’t change. I didn’t say we needed a secret plan for withdrawal.”

Immigration emerged again in the debate as an issue that divided McCain and Romney.

McCain has long backed a path to citizenship for millions of people living in the country illegally provided they meet certain requirements. Romney is running an ad that says McCain “wrote the amnesty bill that America rejected.”

“I’ve never supported amnesty,” McCain said, taking issue with the characterization and describing several steps immigrants must meet.

Romney allowed: “What he describes is technically true, which is his plan does not provide amnesty because he charges people $5,000 to be able to stay.”

Romney wins Wyoming caucuses

Victory helps in race for GOP nomination

Mead Gruver
Associated Press
January 6, 2008

CASPER, Wyo. – Mitt Romney captured his first win of the Republican presidential race on Saturday, prevailing in Wyoming caucuses for a much-needed boost to his candidacy three days before the New Hampshire primary.

“This is just the beginning,” he declared.

The former Massachusetts governor won eight delegates, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson got three and California Rep. Duncan Hunter won one.

The victory was a welcome development for Romney, coming two days after his loss to Mike Huckabee in the Iowa caucuses and three days before the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire. Those two states have attracted most of the political attention.

Wyoming had scheduled its GOP county conventions earlier to attract candidates to the state but had only modest results.

Romney visited Wyoming in August and November and three of his five sons campaigned in the state. One son, Josh Romney, owns a ranch in southwest Wyoming.

“Number one, he campaigned here,” delegate Leigh Vosler, of Cheyenne, said of Romney. “I think that helped while some other candidates ignored us. But also he’s the right person for the job.”

Hunter, Thompson and Ron Paul all stopped by the state – visits they probably wouldn’t have made except for this year’s early conventions – and candidates have sent Wyoming’s GOP voters a flood of campaign mail.

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, did not visit Wyoming and drew little support. Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also did not visit and received little support.

The traditional leadoff nomination contests in Iowa and New Hampshire have dominated the attention of both candidates and the national media in recent months, and no candidates had visited Wyoming in the four weeks leading up to the caucuses. Hunter was the last to visit the state on Dec. 4.

Tom Sansonetti, the county convention organizer, maintained Saturday that moving the state’s caucuses ahead was the right thing to do.

“The ultimate goal is not how many times we appear on Katie Couric,” Sansonetti said. “The ultimate goal was to have attention paid to rank-and-file Republicans by national candidates.”

Wyoming Republicans also paid a price for jumping ahead. The Republican National Committee has slashed half of Wyoming’s 28 national convention delegates. National party leaders similarly penalized Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire and South Carolina for moving up the dates of their nomination contests.

Hillary Clinton looks into the audience as Barack Obama shakes hands after the Democratic presidential debate Saturday in Manchester, N.H. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Anne E. Kornblut and Dan Balz
Washington Post
January 6, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Under mounting pressure to shift the dynamic of the Democratic race, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Sen. Barack Obama of being inconsistent on the issue of health care during a high-stakes debate among the top four contenders here Saturday night.

Obama calmly shot down Clinton’s assertions that he scaled back his ambitions on health insurance in recent years, while former Sen. John Edwards rushed to align himself with Obama, delivering the harshest bromides of the night against Clinton as a symbol of entrenched Washington interests.

“Every time he speaks out for change,” Edwards said of Obama, “every time I fight for change, the forces of status quo are going to attack, every single time.”

As a pair of new polls showed the two front-runners even in New Hampshire, Clinton badly needed to blunt Obama’s momentum after her disappointing third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses two nights earlier. Edwards hoped to propel himself into a one-on-one showdown with Obama after a second-place finish in Iowa, while Obama needed to exude confidence and avoid mistakes. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was simply hoping to gain enough ground to hang on in the race.

Clinton charged Obama with inconsistency on health care and questioned his plan not to mandate that all Americans buy health insurance. Obama responded that there was a philosophical difference, saying he does not believe that a mandate is necessary because it is the cost of insurance that keeps people from buying insurance, not the lack of desire to do so.

But Clinton immediately challenged him by pointing out that his plan includes a mandate that parents buy insurance for their children. “Because they don’t have a choice,” Obama replied.

“Well, they don’t have a choice, and you’re going to make sure that parents get health care for children,” Clinton said. “So, you know, you stopped short of going the distance to make sure that we had a system that could actually deliver health care for everyone.”

When Clinton charged that Obama has not been specific about issues, he sought to turn the tables on her, saying he and Edwards have addressed the financial problems of Social Security by calling for raising the cap on wages covered by the payroll tax to force wealthy Americans to pay more.

“You criticized me for that, which is fine,” he said. “We have a disagreement on that, but that’s hardly because I wasn’t specific on it. I was very specific on it.”

Before the debate, Clinton rolled out a new campaign approach, dramatically shortening her stump speech and taking dozens of questions from voters in an effort to appear more at ease. Her campaign officials said the emphasis on questions and answers was designed to draw a contrast with Obama. They hoped that the more Clinton showed her command of the issues, the more it would force voters to question whether Obama has the same mastery of the issues.

Some call for more attacks on Obama

Anne E. Kornblut and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post
January 5, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. – After an unexpectedly thorough defeat in Iowa, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton faced a barrage of second-guessing Friday from supporters worried that her campaign strategy could cost her the Democratic nomination.

In a flurry of conference calls throughout the day, described by several participants, anxious Clinton advisers agreed to stick to her original message – that only the former first lady has the experience to bring about change. And while they decided to increase the pressure on Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., here, campaign officials were debating how hard to hit him on his experience level in the few short days until the New Hampshire primary.

So far, no senior Clinton advisers have been ousted for failing to produce a victory in Iowa, despite their spending many months and millions of dollars there only to see the candidate’s status as the Democratic front-runner vanish. But supporters outside the campaign were quick to question Mark Penn, the chief strategist, whose polling data suggested she could win in Iowa; Patti Solis Doyle, the campaign manager, who moved to Iowa to try to eke out a win; and an inner circle of operatives whose “inevitability” strategy failed to blunt the message of “change” that swept Obama into first place Thursday night.

As Clinton flew from Iowa to New Hampshire, her supporters were divided over how she should handle the early defeat. Paul Begala, a campaign strategist for her husband and a Hillary Clinton supporter, said she could take one of two approaches: explain away Iowa by dismissing it as unfamiliar territory, diminishing its odd caucus system and portraying it as Obama’s neighboring state; or accept responsibility for the loss, saying, ” ‘I’ve been knocked on my rear end. It’s not fun, but the view from the canvas can be instructional.’ ”

“America loves an underdog,” Begala said. “Candidates can show their character in defeat.”

But the Clinton campaign did not appear poised to take the advice. The senator from New York and the former president started the day taking jabs at Iowa, justifying Clinton’s third-place finish. And for those who counseled that she could not campaign both as an agent of change and the most experienced candidate in the race, Clinton had a clear answer: Her two-sided message would not be altered much.

Tad Devine, the chief political strategist for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, said Clinton is facing the same dilemma that vice presidents such as Gore and George H.W. Bush faced as they sought to emerge from the shadow of a president while benefiting from a record of incumbency. If she wants to seize the mantle of change from Obama, she will have to quickly establish herself as a candidate apart from her husband’s administration. The image Thursday night of Clinton surrounded by her husband’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and her husband’s favorite general, Wesley Clark, was all wrong, Devine said.

“Being the change candidate in a change election is the most formidable position to be in,” Devine said. “They’re trying to find a way to maneuver into that position, but sometimes positioning just isn’t available.”

Clinton’s advisers, echoing her stepped-up edge on the campaign trail, said they intend to turn new attention to Obama’s record, questioning whether he really has achieved change. One Clinton adviser described it as a “Where’s the beef?” strategy similar to the one that Walter Mondale, borrowing from a Wendy’s ad, deployed against Gary Hart in their 1984 Democratic nomination fight.

Outsiders continued to question whether Clinton should have run on a message of inevitability, and some said they had privately urged the campaign to take a more humble approach. “It’s the inevitability thing that’s hurt her so much. There’s an arrogance that comes from the message that ‘I’m inevitable,’ ” said a Clinton supporter and White House veteran, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Just as the Clinton team sought to reassure staff members Thursday night, top campaign advisers – including former President Bill Clinton – convened a conference call Friday morning to soothe members of Congress who have endorsed her campaign.

The message to the lawmakers was that the campaign will tweak the message to focus on equal parts experience and how to effect change.

But, according to two people who listened to the former president and the aides, the Clinton team is also trying to dramatically play down the importance of the caucuses’ result, contending it was a home-turf win for Obama because he hails from a neighboring state.

The mood among the lawmakers was fairly calm, even upbeat, according to participants. One lawmaker, Rep. Diane Watson of Los Angeles, said her constituents paid little to attention to Iowa. “All anybody out here is talking about is Britney Spears,” Watson said, according to a participant.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

DES MOINES — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a first-term Democratic senator trying to become the nation’s first African-American president, rolled to victory in the Iowa caucuses on Thursday night, lifted by a record turnout of voters who embraced his promise of change.

The victory by Mr. Obama, 46, amounted to a startling setback for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 60, of New York, who just months ago presented herself as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. The result left uncertain the prospects for John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, who had staked his second bid for the White House on winning Iowa.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards, who edged her out for second place by less than a percentage point, both vowed to stay in the race.

“They said this day would never come,” Mr. Obama said as he claimed his victory at a packed rally in downtown Des Moines.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who was barely a blip on the national scene just two months ago, defeated Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, delivering a serious setback to Mr. Romney’s high-spending campaign and putting pressure on Mr. Romney to win in New Hampshire next Tuesday.

Mr. Huckabee, a Baptist minister, was carried in large part by evangelical voters, who helped him withstand extensive spending by Mr. Romney on television advertising and a get-out-the-vote effort.

“Tonight we proved that American politics is still in the hands of ordinary folks like you,” said Mr. Huckabee, who ran on a platform that combined economic populism with an appeal to social conservatives.

Mr. Huckabee won with 34.4 percent of the delegate support, after 86 percent of precincts had reported. Mr. Romney had 25.4 percent, former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee had 13.4 percent and Senator John McCain of Arizona had 13.2 percent.

On the Democratic side, with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Obama had 37.6 percent of the delegate support, Mr. Edwards 29.8 percent and Mrs. Clinton had 29.5 percent. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico was fourth, at 2.11 percent.

Two Democrats, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, dropped out of the race after winning only tiny percentages of the vote.

A record number of Democrats turned out to caucus — more than 239,000, compared with fewer than 125,000 in 2004 — producing scenes of overcrowded firehouses and schools and long lines of people waiting to register their preferences.

The images stood as evidence of the success of Mr. Obama’s effort to reach out to thousands of first-time caucusgoers, including many independent voters and younger voters. The huge turn-out — by contrast, 108,000 Republicans caucused on Thursday — demonstrated the extent to which opposition to President Bush has energized Democrats, and served as another warning to Republicans about the problems they face this November in swing states like this.

Mr. Obama’s victory in this overwhelmingly white state was a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president. What was remarkable was the extent to which race was not a factor in this contest. Surveys of voters entering the caucuses also indicated that he had won the support of many independents, a development that his aides used to rebut suggestions from rivals that he could not win a general election. In addition, voters clearly rejected the argument that Mr. Obama does not have sufficient experience to take over the White House, a central point pressed by Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Obama took the stage, smiling broadly and clapping his hands in response to the roar of cheers that greeted him.

“They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,” Mr. Obama said. “But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.”

The result sent tremors of apprehension through Mrs. Clinton’s camp, and she promptly turned her attention to New Hampshire, flying there on a plane that left at midnight. Aides said that former President Bill Clinton would go there immediately and spend the next five days campaigning in a state where he has always been strong. Mrs. Clinton, in her concession speech, sought again to embrace the mantle of change that has served Mr. Obama so well, even as she was flanked on the stage by Mr. Clinton, his face frozen in a smile, and Madeleine K. Albright, who was Mr. Clinton’s secretary of state.

“What is most important now is that, as we go on with this contest, that we keep focused on the two big issues, that we answer correctly the questions that each of us has posed,” Mrs. Clinton said. “How will we win in November 2008 by nominating a candidate who will be able to go the distance and who will be the best president on Day One.”

Mr. Edwards in his speech suggested that he had benefited from the same electoral forces that lifted Mr. Obama to victory. “Continue on,” Mr. Edwards shouted at supporters from the stage, his voice sounding hoarse. “Thank you for second place.”

In fact, he drew 29.8 percent of the delegates awarded, to Mrs. Clinton’s 29.4 percent.

Mr. Huckabee declared victory at a boisterous rally in which he rejoiced in his ability to overcome his better-financed opponent, who had spent much of the past year building up for a victory and had hammered Mr. Huckabee with negative advertisements over the past month here.

“We’ve learned that people really are more important then the purse,” he said.

Mr. Romney will now make a stand in New Hampshire, where he has also invested heavily.

“Congratulations on the first round to Mike,” Mr. Romney said on Fox News.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, had campaigned intermittently here over the past month, at one point hoping to take advantage of the unsettled field here to come in third. Instead, he came in sixth place, garnering just 3 percent.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee face very different circumstances heading into New Hampshire and the states beyond. Polling suggested that a once overwhelming lead enjoyed by Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire was vanishing even before the results of Thursday’s vote. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have long worried that a loss here would weaken her even more going into New Hampshire, stripping her both of claims to inevitability and to electability.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama — as well as Mr. Edwards — face a rigorous and expensive run of nearly 25 contests between now and Feb. 5. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton appear far better-positioned, in terms of organization and money, to compete through that period, than Mr. Edwards. Though Mr. Edwards presented second place as a victory, he fell far short of winning — as he had once sought to do — and might find it difficult now to raise more money or find new supporters.

Compared to Mr. Obama Mr. Huckabee’s situation is much more tenuous, and his victory on Thursday did little to clarify the state of the Republican field. In New Hampshire, polls have shown Mr. McCain on the rise and little support for Mr. Huckabee. Mr. Giuliani has invested much of his time and money in Florida. And, as Mr. Romney’s advisers noted tonight, he has more a foundation of money and support in many of the coming states.

Iowa seemed particularly fertile ground for Mr. Huckabee. Polls of Republicans entering the caucus sites found that 60 percent described themselves as evangelical, and by overwhelming numbers they said they intended to vote for Mr. Huckabee.

The polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and The Associated Press, also left little doubt about the reasons for Mr. Obama’s convincing victory here. He did much better among young voters.

Voters here were far more interested in a candidate promising change — as Mr. Obama was — than one citing experience, the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s appeal. Half of Democrats said their top factor in choosing a candidate was someone who could bring about change. Just 20 percent said the right experience, Mrs. Clinton’s key argument, was the main factor.

For all the talk about electability, barely one in 10 respondents said it was the main factor in their decision.

There was a sharp generational break in support of the two candidates. Mr. Obama was backed by 60 percent of voters under 25 while Mrs. Clinton was supported by about 45 percent of voters over 65.

The survey of Democrats entering the caucus sites found that more than half said they were attending their first caucus — and they divided with about 40 percent for Mr. Obama and about 30 percent for Mrs. Clinton.

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 3, 2008; A10

1) Will Either Race End in Iowa?

The only race that could is in the Democratic Party and only if Hillary Clinton wins a big victory. Iowa has proved resistant to the Clinton brand, and she has struggled there throughout the year. But her final days of campaigning have been solid, and a victory, no matter how narrow, would be a big boost for her.

Barack Obama has plenty of money to keep going, whatever the outcome. If he wins or there is any kind of a muddled finish on the Democratic side, the battle goes to New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. An Edwards victory here guarantees the race continues; he has been trailing in New Hampshire and lags both Clinton and Obama in money.

There is no way the Republican race ends in Iowa. If Mitt Romney comes back to win, he will get more credit than he might have before Mike Huckabee’s dramatic surge into the pre-caucus poll lead. But Romney has now got a fight on his hands in New Hampshire against John McCain, and the GOP race is too fluid.

Huckabee has an even more difficult path, even if he wins here, because he has been lagging in New Hampshire. “If Huckabee wins, the results will confuse the Republican nomination, rather than clarify it,” said GOP strategist Terry Nelson.

Both the Democratic and Republican races could go to Feb. 5, when nearly two dozen states will hold contests. Some strategists believe the races could go beyond that, particularly the Republican campaign.

The campaign, however, will end for some after Iowa. Lower-tier candidates may try to hang on through New Hampshire, but single-digit finishes in Iowa will spell the end for a number of candidates. And as a Republican strategist observed, “Iowa will mark the beginning of the end for other major contenders in the field, but we just aren’t smart enough to figure out which ones.”

2) How Big Will the Iowa Bounce Be?
The big difference this year is the shortened time between Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primaries. Normally eight days, it will be just five this time, thanks to the decision by New Hampshire Secretary of State William M. Gardner to schedule New Hampshire so soon after Iowa.

The bounce, say experts, usually shows up a couple of days after Iowa and then begins to dissipate. A clean Obama victory over Clinton and Edwards would become a very big story and would dominate the news into the weekend debates. A Romney win could arrest McCain’s growing strength in New Hampshire. But the altered calendar throws a monkey wrench into the predictions of the experts, who are in considerable disagreement on this question.

3) Is This Process Defensible?
Some political strategists found this question too hot to handle, not wanting to offend Iowans but not enamored of a process in which fewer than 200,000 Democrats and fewer than 100,000 Republicans will participate. Add to that the fact that the state is largely white and rural — and the absence of one-person, one-vote rules on the Democratic side — and the caucuses attract even more critics.

Some Democrats also believe the caucus electorate is too left-leaning for the party’s good. As one strategist put it, “The only time Democrats have nominated a candidate who won the White House since 1976 was the year everyone skipped Iowa.” That was in 1992, when all other candidates deferred to home-state Sen. Tom Harkin’s presidential bid. Harkin won Iowa handily, and Clinton went on to become the party’s nominee and president.

But Iowa voters have earned the respect of the candidates and their staffs, even those who feel the caucus process itself is flawed. Iowa’s process forces candidates to look voters in the eye and answer their questions. The long exposure voters have to the candidates — and in this election, it has been longer and more intense than ever — gives them a unique opportunity to weigh strengths and weaknesses. “Somebody needs to do that and Iowans have been trained to do it,” one Democrat wrote.

There is widespread agreement that what has happened this year requires major surgery for 2012. The compressed calendar and the early start to voting have left almost everyone involved in this campaign frustrated.

“The caucus process itself is defensible,” said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. “The calendar is not defensible.”

4) Which Candidate Will Turn Out the Most First-Time Caucus Participants?
Lots of candidates for this award, but the consensus among strategists in Iowa and elsewhere is that Obama will draw the most newcomers. “He has lit a fire among many younger voters and those on the fringes of political activism that is unprecedented in recent years,” one GOP strategist said.

Certainly the Des Moines Register’s final poll suggested that was the case. More than 70 percent of Obama’s supporters in the Register poll said they had not gone to a caucus in the past — well above the percentages for Clinton and Edwards.

On the Republican side, there seems little doubt that Huckabee will find more support among newcomers to the caucuses. Ron Paul could attract newcomers, but the view of one strategist is that Paul’s followers are more likely to show up for a primary — which is why he could surprise people in New Hampshire — but are less comfortable with party-establishment events such as the caucuses.

5) Who Was the Most Effective Celebrity Surrogate?
Oprah Winfrey’s appearances for Obama drew nearly 30,000 people to Obama’s events, giving his campaign, if not actual supporters, the information on another bloc of voters for their caucus-day database.

Bill Clinton is probably the most popular Democrat in Iowa, and his appearances have been welcomed by Hillary Clinton’s team of Iowa strategists. And Chuck Norris was featured in Huckabee’s first ad and appeared with him in Iowa.

One Democrat rated said Bill Clinton a more valuable surrogate than Oprah Winfrey because he’s out every day on the campaign trail, but here’s another thought, offered up by Democratic strategist Dan Gerstein:

“My sleeper surrogates of this race are Hillary’s mother and daughter,” he wrote in an e-mail. “My bet is they are helping to humanize her in Iowa, and could well do the same in NH [New Hampshire] and SC [South Carolina]. Whether it’s enough to have a tangible effect on a sizeable portion of skeptical voters remains to be seen.”

6) If Edwards or Huckabee Win, What Is Their Second Act?
“They don’t have one,” one Democratic strategist said. That’s an extreme view and one not shared by many others, but it goes to the heart of the challenge both Edwards and Huckabee will face even if they win Iowa.

Big money often dominates campaigns and will become more important as the campaign moves past both Iowa and New Hampshire and toward Feb. 5. Neither Huckabee nor Edwards can claim to be the big-money candidate. Huckabee raised little until he began to move, and Edwards has put limits on himself by accepting federal matching funds.

The next state on the calendar does not look hospitable to either candidate. Edwards finished second in Iowa in 2004 but was weak in New Hampshire, and it cost him. This time, mindful of that history, he has invested much more time in the state, attempting to build a better foundation so that an Iowa victory doesn’t get squandered.

Huckabee’s religious conservatism will find far fewer receptive Republicans in socially moderate New Hampshire, and he will be battling not only Romney but also a resurgent McCain — and a struggling Giuliani and an unpredictable Ron Paul — there on Tuesday.

The consensus of strategists is that both should look to South Carolina (Jan. 19 for the Republicans and Jan. 26 for the Democrats) to strike again. “In fact, if Edwards wins Iowa, South Carolina looms very large as the next super showdown between the three,” said Democratic strategist Anita Dunn.

Huckabee might be able to rebound from a weak New Hampshire finish with a strong showing in Michigan on Jan. 15. Edwards has looked to Nevada on Jan. 19 as a possible lifeline.

7) Will Women Prove to Be Hillary Clinton’s Secret Weapon?
“Women who committed to Clinton will be dependable and loyal,” one Democratic strategist predicted. Another said women would be a more potent force for Clinton in a general election, if she wins the Democratic nomination.

The Clinton campaign sees women over 45, many of whom have never attended a caucus before, as the key to success. But several strategists argued that women will prove to be a disappointment for Clinton, that older women in particular have had trouble warming up to her. That, however, is a minority view.

Can Evangelical Christians Carry the Day in Iowa?
Pat Robertson built an army among evangelical Christians in 1988 and finished second with 25 percent of the vote in Iowa. One GOP strategist said he believes that could represent something of a ceiling and that Huckabee will struggle to do better than that.

There are signs of real energy in the conservative Christian community over his candidacy, but he is dependent on a largely untested grass-roots network to turn out potential supporters.

Several GOP strategists believe that religious conservatives can make the difference for a candidate, but only in a crowded field. The better candidates such as McCain and Giuliani do in Iowa, the more potent it would make the power of religious conservatives backing Huckabee. “America remains strongly a nation of faith, and GOP primary voters/caucus attendees strongly reflect that underlying belief,” one strategist said.

David S. Broder
The Washington Post
January 3, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. – One final reminder: When you’re reading the returns from the Iowa caucuses, remember you are viewing them through a double distortion mirror.

The outcome of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation voting is skewed by two big factors. The turnout is ridiculously small, barely 20 percent of the eligible voters. And those who choose to caucus are hardly representative of the population as a whole.

This is not said in disparagement of Iowans, whose overall civic spirit and political acumen are as outstanding as any voters I know. But their traditional way of expressing their early choice for president and the disproportionate influence it exerts in winnowing the field leave a lot to be desired.

The maddening thing about the caucus system, for candidates and outside observers as well, is that large and enthusiastic rally crowds tell you almost nothing about the dynamic of the decision-making. I have been dazzled this year, not only by the thousands who filled arenas in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids to see Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama but by the turnouts of hundreds in high school gyms on freezing Friday nights in small towns like Oelwein.

Yet getting crowds to a rally or a town meeting is child’s play compared with getting them to caucus. In 2004, 1,506,908 people voted in Iowa in the general election for president. Turnout at the Democratic caucuses that year was estimated at 122,000. The biggest number ever for Republicans was 115,000 in 1980.

That system empowers the activists and those with built-in organizational ties who can mobilize people to leave their homes for a couple of hours on a weeknight and motivate them to declare a public – not private – preference for a candidate.

On the Republican side, those networks belong principally to conservative Christian groups, anti-abortion organizations, home-school advocates and some economic interests.

On the Democratic side, organized labor and the teachers boast the best existing networks, but the main impulse is a broader populist tradition that tugs the Democratic Party of Iowa to the left. That tradition may go back to the days of Henry Wallace, the Iowa-born vice president under FDR. But it has been embodied in recent decades in Tom Harkin, the longtime Democratic senator who ran for president himself in 1992 and quickly fell behind the more moderate Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas.

Harkin has accustomed Iowa Democrats to a red-meat diet of anti-corporate rhetoric, a tradition he shared with the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. That theme was echoed this year and in 2004 by John Edwards, and it was imitated – with varying degrees of conviction – by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the closing stages of the Iowa race.

It has been an Iowa pattern to tilt the Democratic race leftward and the Republican race to the right. And often it has been New Hampshire, where the primary turnout approximates the pattern of the overall electorate, that restores the balance and corrects for the distorting effects of the Iowa dynamic.

The key to New Hampshire is usually found among the independent voters, who can go into either party primary, depending on the choice each individual makes on primary day.

That fact by itself pulls the candidates away from the ideological edges and back to the center, and it is abetted by two other forces.

Organized labor is a much weaker political element inside the New Hampshire Democratic Party than it is in Iowa. And among Republicans, the state is much more secular than Iowa, with a significantly smaller percentage of people who describe themselves as “born-again Christians.”

The Democratic Party of New Hampshire is a balanced blend of college-trained high-tech people and educators, with a leavening of retirees and a significant ethnic, urban contingent in Manchester and Nashua as well. The Republican Party here is a small-business and professional class, with some blue-collar elements and a spillover of former Massachusetts residents living along the southern border.

In New Hampshire, nearly half as many people voted in the 2004 primary as in the November general election – a far better cross-section of the state. What was even more remarkable was that the number of votes cast in the Democratic presidential primary – 221,309 – was two-thirds of the votes John Kerry received when he carried the state in November.

New Hampshire is a more reliable, less distorted lens though which to view the presidential landscape than Iowa.