Published: Feb. 28, 2008 at 5:06 PM

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (UPI) — The birthplace of U.S. presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., brings up an age-old question about what constitutes a “natural-born citizen.”

McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. If he wins the general election, he would be the first person to take the presidential oath with an official birthplace beyond the 50 states, The New York Times reported Thursday.

“There are powerful arguments that Sen. McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” said Sarah Duggin, a Catholic University law professor.

When “natural-born citizen” was penned in 1787, little direction was offered about whether a candidate had to be born on American soil. In McCain’s case, he was born on a U.S. military installation where his parents were stationed at the time.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and an ally of McCain, said it would be inconceivable that a son of a military member born on a military post could not run for president.

“He was posted there on orders from the United States government,” Graham said. “If that becomes a problem, we need to tell every military family that your kid can’t be president if they take an overseas assignment.”

© 2008 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be reproduced, redistributed, or manipulated in any form.

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The Times

February 29, 2008

Sadly the presidential contest between Obama and McCain is being ridiculously caricatured

Gerard Baker

Bill and Hillary Clinton are miffed that the American media have fallen in a collective swoon for the phenomenon that is Barack Obama. You can’t blame them.

The tone and even the content of so much of the verbiage that pours from television and newspapers on the subject of the man seems to channel Rodgers and Hart, via Ella Fitzgerald:

I’m wild again, beguiled again,

A simpering, whimpering child again

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered…am I.

In fairness, though, the beguiling of the American liberal mind by this first-term senator from Illinois looks like sober contemplation compared with the ecstasy he has induced in the synapses of the rest of the world.

The Germans call him, without irony, the Black JFK. The BBC evidently thinks he’s the best thing to come out of America since, well, in their rather limited worldview, since Jimmy Carter. If you listen carefully you can hear grown men wandering the corridors of London, Brussels and Berlin, crooning as they ponder an exciting new future:

I’ll sing to him, each spring to him,

And worship the trousers that cling to him

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered …am I.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that all this excitement is going to be repaid in the devalued currency of disappointment. Mr Obama’s ego is certainly writing cheques his body can’t cash. There’s an expectation that a President Obama will change everything in America’s relations with the world. But my guess is that, for all his campaign rhetoric and for all his genuine intent, the facts on the ground won’t change much.

He will be able to do little or nothing new about Iraq. And in return for all those nice commitments he is going to make about multilateralism, global warming and international law, he will, if anything, step up America’s demand for hard European action in the fight against terrorism – especially boots on the ground in Afghanistan – something Europeans are not going to want any part of. If he is half-serious about some of the things he has said on trade, he is going to pit the US against the rest of the world in ways that might make diplomats yearn for the tranquil days of George Bush.

And yet there’s no doubt he has a view of the world that is closer to European attitudes than anything we have seen in the past seven years and it is this that keeps Obamania in full swing. The effect is heightened, of course, by the identity of the Republican nominee.

The same morally simple narrative that hails Mr Obama as Luke Skywalker, bursting out of America’s Death Star, is beginning to portray John McCain as a kind of Darth Vader. Mr McCain is already, in the media’s account, the grumpy old white man who emerged from a field of grumpy old white Republicans.

He was once regarded, even by opponents, as a man of exceptional character, a war hero with a heartbreaking story of courage, who came to Washington to reform government. But that version is steadily being replaced by a new one. This is McCain the Hypocrite. Last week’s shockingly uncorroborated and salacious hit job on him by The New York Times was a case in point. Here he was, we were told, the man railing at the special interests in Washington by day and getting into bed with them by night.

The rest of the world can fill in the blanks of the rest of this morality tale – rich, white corporate warmonger versus fresh new, African-American embodiment of hope and change.

If it’s a caricature that takes hold, it will be a great shame and a great disservice to American politics. Mr McCain has at least as large a claim to be welcomed by America’s critics as does Mr Obama.

He is deemed a foreign policy hawk. It is true that he has insisted that the war in Iraq be fought to a successful conclusion. But it’s not even clear he would have taken the US to war in the first place. If he had, you can be sure he would not have done so in such a disgracefully ill-prepared way as Mr Bush did.

For those around the world who worry about these things, Mr McCain is very Euro-friendly on a number of important issues. He is deadly serious about climate change, favouring an aggressive cap and trading system. He is sharply critical of US detainee policies and wants to close Guantanamo Bay. When he opposes torture by the US, he does so from a position of authority, having for five years been on the sharp end of torture techniques in a Vietnamese hellhole. Mr McCain has a long and almost unique track record of taking on powerful corporate interests in Washington.

What marks him out from Mr Obama is not his age or his race or his party, but that he has achieved so much of what Mr Obama merely promises to do – tackle the role of money in politics, work across the political lines and promote an image of the US in the world that is in keeping with the finest traditions of American democracy

The problem is that there’s a danger that the presidential contest between Mr Obama and Mr McCain will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist.

Instead of being the welcome break with America’s recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, that that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi.

Exxon asks justices to overturn, reduce $2.5 billion damages

Plaintiff attorney Jeffrey L. Fisher speaks with the media after addressing the Supreme Court in the Exxon Valdez case. Associated Press (Associated Press )

David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times
February 28, 2008

WASHINGTON – Nearly 19 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill fouled Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Supreme Court debated Wednesday whether the world’s largest oil company must pay a record $2.5 billion in punitive damages.

The eight justices who heard the case appeared closely split, although several said they were looking for a way to reduce the size of the award. Justice Samuel Alito sat out the case because he is an Exxon stockholder. His stock holdings could prove costly to the company, since a tie vote would have the effect of affirming the $2.5 billion verdict.

No one disputed that the oil spill was an extraordinary disaster. The company’s lawyer began by describing it as “one of the worst environmental tragedies in U.S. maritime history.”

And no one disputed that Exxon was responsible for paying for the cleanup and for the losses suffered by fishermen, cannery workers and other Alaska residents. Exxon paid $900 million in cleanup costs, and a jury ordered it to pay $287 million to 32,000 Alaskans, many of whom lost their livelihoods when the fishing industry was destroyed.

At issue Wednesday was whether extra damages were needed to punish Exxon for corporate recklessness.

In 1994, a jury in Alaska imposed $5 billion in punitive damages, money that would go to the plaintiffs. Years of appeals followed, and the verdict was cut to $2.5 billion.

During this same stretch, the Supreme Court has been putting limits on punitive damages, believing the amount should be tied to the actual harm.

The case heard Wednesday is unusual because it apparently was the first before the Supreme Court involving punitive damages for an accident on the high seas.

Maritime law has shielded ship owners from being punished for damage caused by their vessels. This made sense during the era of sailing ships, said Justice David Souter. “In those days, when a ship put to sea, the ship was sort of a floating world by itself,” he said. It was gone and out of its owner’s control until months, or perhaps years, later when it returned to port.

Representing Exxon, Washington lawyer Walter Dellinger cited this principle of maritime law and urged the court to throw out the entire punitive verdict. He cited the case of the Amiable Nancy in 1818 as having a historic precedent shielding ship owners.

But his argument quickly ran aground. “It’s rather, I think, an exaggeration to call it a long line of settled decisions in maritime law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.

As a fallback, Dellinger argued that the $2.5 billion verdict was too high. He cited several federal laws that, for example, fine those who pollute the environment. Typically, these legal fines may total millions of dollars but not billions, he said.

He also urged the justices to keep in mind that it was an accident. “This was not an intentional act. It was not malicious. The company did not make one dollar of profit,” he said.

But Stanford law professor Jeffrey L. Fisher, representing the workers, said Exxon deserved to be punished for “putting a drunken master in charge of a supertanker.”

He said the jury heard testimony that Exxon officials knew Capt. Joseph Hazelwood was an alcoholic, and they had 33 reports that he had gone back to drinking. “Up and down the corporation, for three years, upper management was receiving reports that this man was drinking aboard the vessel,” Fisher said.

On March 24, 1989, Hazelwood had been drinking and left the bridge of the supertanker. The third mate left in charge failed to turn the giant ship in time, and it hit Bligh Reef. About 11 million gallons of crude oil were spilled.

Fisher said the captain was an agent of Exxon’s management. “It is perfectly appropriate to expose the corporation to punitive damages based on the reckless acts of such an individual,” he said.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia questioned why a corporation should be punished if one of its officials violates its corporate policy. Exxon had a firm policy against drinking.

Three other justices – Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen G. Breyer and Souter – said they saw a need to reduce the punitive damages.

“This is a very dramatic accident … but there are accidents every day,” Breyer said. He questioned whether “negligence or recklessness is now going to be not only imputed to the corporation but subject (to) punitives. … It will be a new world for the shipping industry.”

Economist’s calculation subject of congressional hearing today

Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy
February 28, 2008

WASHINGTON – When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing and rebuilding the nation would cost less than $2 billion.

Coming up on the five-year anniversary of the invasion, a new estimate from a Nobel laureate puts the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at more than $3 trillion.

That estimate from Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also serves as the title of his new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” which hits store shelves Friday.

The book, co-authored with Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, builds on previous research published in January 2006. The two argued then and now that the cost to America of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is wildly underestimated.

When other factors are added – such as interest on debt, future borrowing for war expenses, continued military presence in Iraq and lifetime health care and counseling for veterans – they think that the wars’ costs range from $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

“I think we really have learned that the long-term costs of taking care of the wounded and injured in this war and the long-term costs of rebuilding the military to its previous strength is going to far eclipse the cost of waging this war,” Bilmes said in an interview.

The book and its estimates are the subject of a hearing today by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The White House doesn’t care for the estimates by Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank who’s now a professor at Columbia University.

“People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, conceding that the costs of the war on terrorism are high while questioning the premise of Stiglitz’s research.

“It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?”

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine Corp colonel and Vietnam War veteran, welcomed the effort by Stiglitz and Bilmes to quantify the ways in which the wars will cost taxpayers.

“It’s astounding that here we are about to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and this administration still refuses to acknowledge the long-term costs of the war in Iraq,” he said.

By any estimate, the Bush administration’s predictions in March 2003 of a self-financing war have proved wildly inaccurate. Stiglitz cites operational spending to date of $646 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, working off estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, presumes that spending on these wars over the next decade probably will amount to another $913 billion.

Pentagon officials had no immediate comment on Stiglitz’s book or his estimates.

Stiglitz and Bilmes first estimated war costs of $1 trillion in January 2006. Their research proved controversial and sparked debate about the costs of replacing equipment used by the armed forces and National Guard units. In the new book, they offer a figure of $404 billion for replacing equipment, planes and tanks and bringing military hardware back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an interview, Stiglitz said that too much of the public debate had been over the wars’ operational costs while the real budget strains would show up only years from now.

“The peak expenditures are way out,” he said, noting that the peak expenditures for World War II vets came in 1993.

The pair estimated that future medical, disability and Social Security costs for veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan range from a best-case $422 billion to what they call a more probable long-term expense of $717 billion.

It’s why the two call in the book for creating a Veterans Benefits Trust Fund to set aside money in a “lock box” to pay for future health-care needs of Iraq and Afghanistan vets. Although veterans’ health care amounts to a future promise, they said, it isn’t an entitlement and instead is funded through discretionary spending. In the future, funding for vets will compete with other government programs.

“We should not have an unfunded entitlement program like this,” Stiglitz said. “This is more like deferred compensation. … We require corporations to put money away but we don’t require the government to put money away, and we should be doing that … so when the focus turns away to some other problem, veterans aren’t given the shaft.”

February 28, 2008

By Steve Chapman

Democrats often pillory Republicans for their economic errors. From the 1930s on, they reminded Americans of Herbert Hoover’s Great Depression. In 1960, they blamed Dwight Eisenhower for slow growth. In the 1980s, they decried the “trickle-down” policies of Ronald Reagan. And today, they excoriate the damage caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement passed under … Bill Clinton.

Even Hillary Clinton treats the accord with a warmth she normally reserves for Kenneth Starr. She never misses a chance to denounce what she calls “the shortcomings of NAFTA,” or to insist she was always against it. But she has to deal with Barack Obama, who often gives the impression that his opponent’s name is Hillary Nafta Clinton.

So Tuesday’s debate in Cleveland devoted a lot of time to the question: Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of NAFTA? Both candidates denied any complicity, past or present, and both vowed to scrap the treaty if the Mexican government doesn’t agree to changes.

Obama makes a special theme of blaming this and other trade agreements for setting off a race to the bottom that destroys American jobs. “In Youngstown, Ohio,” he said in a Texas debate, “I’ve talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of bad trade deals like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China.” Why NAFTA would induce a company to move production to China is a puzzle, but you get the idea.

His campaign claims a million jobs have vanished because of the deal. That sounds devastating, but over the last 14 years, the American economy has added a net total of 25 million jobs — some of them, incidentally, attributable to expanded trade with Mexico. When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent. Today it’s 4.9 percent.

But maybe all the jobs we lost were good ones and all the new ones are minimum-wage positions sweeping out abandoned factories? Actually, no. According to data compiled by Harvard economist Robert Z. Lawrence, the average blue-collar worker’s wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation, have risen by 11 percent under NAFTA. Instead of driving pay scales down, it appears to have pulled them up.

Manufacturing employment has declined, but not because we’re producing less: Manufacturing output has not only expanded, but has expanded far faster than it did in the decade before NAFTA. The problem is that as productivity rises, we can make more stuff with fewer people. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s essentially the definition of economic progress.

We’re not the only country facing that phenomenon. China makes everything these days, right? But between 1995 and 2002, it lost 15 million manufacturing jobs.

Even if the candidates don’t want to acknowledge the gains of the last 14 years, it’s hard to see how they can blame NAFTA for economic troubles in Ohio or elsewhere. The whole idea was to eliminate import duties in both the United States and Mexico (as well as Canada). What everyone forgets is that we got the best of that bargain, since our tariffs were very low to begin with.

“Mexico had very good access to the U.S. market” already, says Charlene Barshefsky, who was U.S. Trade Representative in the Clinton administration. “What NAFTA did was level the playing field.”

Critics complain that while exports to Mexico have risen, imports from Mexico have risen even faster. But that’s not because we embraced free trade. It’s because our economy has been more robust than theirs. Prosperous consumers buy more goods, from both home and abroad, than struggling consumers. Absent NAFTA, the trade imbalance with Mexico would not be smaller. It would be bigger.

None of this is a revelation to economists. The candidates’ broadsides require them to ignore not just a wealth of evidence but the overwhelming consensus of experts. Gary Clyde Hufbauer, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, estimates that 90 percent of the people in his profession regard the accord as a good thing.

Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University trade economist, supports Obama and thinks his positions on trade are generally better than Clinton’s. “But on NAFTA,” Bhagwati told me, “he is dead wrong.”

Clinton is also in error, but on the question of which candidate has more consistently and vehemently denounced the accord, Obama has opened up a clear lead. Now there’s a race to the bottom.

schapman@tribune.com

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

John McCain Wants Conservatives by His Side. Fine, They Say, Just Move This Way.
By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 28, 2008; C01

Chris Pohl came to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington to peddle hats.

As political gimmicks go, his was rather ingenious: a Russian ushanka, complete with fake-fur ear flaps, stamped with the red Communist hammer and sickle and adorned with interchangeable name tags — Hillary ‘08 or Obama ‘08. Twenty-five bucks.

In the hallways, he handed out red business cards that listed his name only as “Karl” (as in Marx) and set up a booth at which bottles of red-colored lemonade (”Leninade”) were dispensed next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton herself. Pohl was far down the road of cleverness and — he hoped — economic salvation. “I’m a subprime casualty,” said Pohl, who lost his job at a mortgage company in November. “So now I’m selling hats.”

“Karl” was certainly in the right place to unveil his ushanka: CPAC is the preeminent yearly gathering of conservative activists. Here, they embraced the message of his hats, that electing either Clinton or Barack Obama president would be like installing Vladimir Lenin in the White House. High-fives and chuckles everywhere.

But it occurred to Pohl, in this uneasy way, that the hat was really a general-election prop, and conservatives are not yet ready to start the general election. Their own party’s presumptive nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, is not their kind. Many don’t like him, don’t trust him, hate that he is so cozy with the media, and worry that, once elected, he’ll huddle and compromise with Democrats and give away their store. Too much Straight Talk and not enough street fighter.

“That’s why my hat’s a little ahead of its time,” Pohl lamented.

In the nearly three weeks since McCain himself was both booed and cheered at CPAC, his surrogates and operatives have been making calls and strategic visits, trying to quell the unhappy roar within the GOP’s base. But nothing has worked. In a strange, dumb-luck kind of way, the McCain campaign thought it had gotten a break no one would ever wish for: a New York Times story that raised the possibility of an affair between the senator and an attractive lobbyist drew an immediate backlash from conservatives, who rallied to McCain’s side. But that temporary defense was little more than a respite for the most ardent ideological warriors.

“This assumption that people who defended him are now on board is naive,” said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, a CPAC co-sponsor. “I think he’s got a ways to go. If he really wants an enthusiastic base in the fall, he is going to have to do more than sit there and hope that it comes to him.”

Keene was one of those on the receiving end of a McCain adviser’s recent phone call. The pitch, as Keene described it: Republican loyalty demands that all wings of the party come together in the interest of retaining the White House. Unconvincing, Keene said.

“Part of the problem he has on the right is directly traceable to the attitudes he has expressed over the years toward conservatives, which has led to a queasy feeling on their part,” Keene continued. “I have seen no real evidence of an attempt to find out what the real differences are and try to bridge the gap. I think they have some appreciation of the problem, but I don’t know if they have a commitment to do anything about it.”

McCain strategist Charlie Black pointed to recent national polls that show his candidate, on average, getting 85 percent of the Republican vote against either prospective Democratic nominee. “We don’t have a huge problem at the voter level,” noted Black. “It only matters what happens in November, and McCain is popular with Republican rank-and-file voters.”

As conservatives see it, here’s the problem right now: In 24 primaries and caucuses, McCain never once carried voters who identified themselves as “very conservative,” according to exit polls. And in a majority of the Republican nominating contests, those voters represented a third or more of the total voter turnout. Similarly, the exit polls show, McCain fared poorly with Republican voters who said the most important quality in a candidate is someone who “shares my values.”

Tony Blankley, who was press secretary to former House speaker Newt Gingrich, wrote pointedly in the conservative publication Human Events: “It would be the first time in living memory that a Republican presidential nomination went to a candidate who was not merely opposed by a majority of the party but was actively despised by about half its rank-and-file voters across the country — and by many, if not most, of its congressional officeholders.”

The case against McCain has a number of specific counts, as his critics see it, notably his compromise in the Senate on immigration, his vote against the Bush tax cuts, his co-sponsorship of campaign finance reform, his position on global warming and his involvement in the bipartisan “Gang of 14″ effort to break the procedural logjam on judicial nominees.

“John McCain gives the impression that he needs the conservatives to come to him,” said Bay Buchanan, a conservative activist. “Basically, we’ve been abused for a dozen years here, and he gives us this fatherly kindness and expects us to get in line. He has to give us a reason to vote for him because his record is not enough for us.”

Abused for a dozen years? This sense of beleaguerment — if not entitlement — is a familiar conservative posture. This is the wing that believes it built the modern Republican Party, that licked the stamps for the direct-mail operations and fueled the growth of talk radio. This is the wing that hands out the fliers outside churches and provides much of the passion and energy needed to combat opponents in national elections. This is the wing that likes its candidates to bow down and pledge fealty.

As some strategists see it, the question is not whether McCain will ultimately get the support of conservatives over, say, Barack Obama. It is whether he will win their hearts so that they will battle for him.

“It is so important in the presidential campaigns of our time, which are so close,” said conservative GOP consultant Greg Mueller. “You want the entire apparatus involved. I have never heard of an independent activist, have you? I have heard of a conservative activist. We need them, because we need to get the vote out. That’s Politics 101.”

Politics 102 is this: Conservatives seem most at home — and at their best — when they are complaining about something. They love to put on the underdog’s collar even when they are in power.

“Conservatives are always disputing something or other,” observed Lee Edwards, a Heritage Foundation historian who has written widely about the conservative movement. “They are just a naturally disputatious lot.”

This goes back, Edwards notes, to the beginning of the conservative movement, which was shaped by the 1953 publication of Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” and the founding of the magazine National Review. In the early days, the ideological debate within the GOP was often between traditional conservatives and libertarians. “This is a little bit like the Hatfields and the McCoys,” said Edwards.

During the 1952 presidential campaign, displeased conservatives wanted to take a walk because their favorite candidate, Robert Taft, had been defeated by Dwight Eisenhower in a bitter nominating fight. Taft met with Ike, extracted a few concessions and helped to fend off a potential intraparty disaster that threatened Eisenhower’s election.

Edwards maintains that conservatives often threaten, but often come around. In 1976, he said, conservatives preferred Ronald Reagan but ended up getting behind Gerald Ford, who ended up losing to Jimmy Carter. In 1988, they were lukewarm about George H.W. Bush, but the prospect of a Michael Dukakis presidency was even more revolting. In 2000, George W. Bush was hardly seen as a perfect movement conservative, but the idea of continuing the Clinton presidency with his vice president, Al Gore, couldn’t be stomached. Conservatives have not always been happy with the Bush presidency, but they Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004 even as they pushed Bush to do more for them.

Edwards puts it this way: “Do you want an 82 percent conservative in McCain? Or do you want a 100 percent liberal in Obama?”

The alternative narrative is this: Conservatives stayed home in 1992, upset at Bush the elder for breaking his no-new-taxes pledge. Conservatives didn’t rally behind Bob Dole in 1996, and look what happened to him. Some conservatives believe you have to die first before resurrection.

Saul Anuzis, the Michigan Republican Party chairman, doesn’t believe in self-inflicted pain. “In the end, for conservatives, this is going to be a very simple choice. I think you will see a coalescence of the party behind McCain.”

The McCain campaign hired the conservative consulting firm Shirley &amp; Bannister to help. Craig Shirley, who is working on his second Reagan campaign biography and has strong ties to Reaganites, said his firm has been trying to open doors and close ranks. “At the end of the day, we’re all going to be on the same team,” Shirley said.

There has been considerable tension between the McCain camp and prominent talk-radio hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. And McCain may not have helped himself any in that world by quickly distancing himself from fiery conservative radio personality Bill Cunningham, who was the warm-up act at a McCain rally on Tuesday in Cincinnati. Cunningham’s mocking of Obama drew a public rebuke of Cunningham and an apology from McCain. To which Cunningham fired back: He was now through with McCain, and would vote for Hillary Clinton.

“How does he repudiate me without knowing what he’s repudiating?” Cunningham said later on his talk show.

McCain strategist Black acknowledged that there are still some problems with conservative talk-radio hosts and certain conservative leaders, but he noted that more and more are joining the McCain team each week. He specifically singled out former Cabinet secretary Jack Kemp, businessman (and onetime presidential candidate) Steve Forbes and former solicitor general Ted Olson.

“It’s not unanimous yet, but we’re working on it,” said Black, who said private meetings with key figures are ongoing.

Forbes, who initially backed Rudolph Giuliani for president, had been skeptical of McCain, in part because of the senator’s vote against the 2003 tax cuts. But after Giuliani dropped out, he began watching McCain more closely in debates and consulted with his economic advisers. “I feel comfortable now,” Forbes said.

McCain has been reaching out to fiscal conservatives, Forbes said, by explaining that he understands that tax cuts can be an effective engine for the economy if done properly. His opposition in 2003, McCain has explained, was because Republicans had failed to restrain spending. In addition, Forbes noted McCain’s crusade against pork-barrel spending and his proposals to get rid of the alternative minimum tax and to provide more incentives for business research and development.

“Economic conservatives are starting to warm up to him,” Forbes asserted.

Those who are optimistic that McCain will ultimately pull the lion’s share of conservatives his way often cite his comments about appointing judges in the mold of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

They key, though, almost every conservative says — “the home run,” as David Keene put it — is McCain’s vice presidential choice. The nominee must be an unapologetic conservative, in the eyes of true believers.

“I think his veep candidate should be, has to be and probably will be either Jim DeMint [the South Carolina senator] or Mark Sanford [the South Carolina governor], and Mark’s my guy,” said conservative Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state.

Whoever it is, the sooner the better for Chris “Karl” Pohl, so he can get his hat business cranked up. “The ladies love them. They’re sexy.”

A Soviet history buff who lives in Southern California, Pohl is not so much upset with McCain as he is unmotivated by him. Like other conservatives, he’s waiting to see something, hear something that gets him fired up.

“That’s up to John McCain, I think, to convince us we won’t have any more betrayals.”

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta also contributed to this report.

February 27, 2008

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.

Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. “He might have been working on a column,” Mr. Buckley said.

Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, “National Review.”

He also found time to write at least 55 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and to edit five more. His political novel “The Rake” was published last August, and a book looking back at the National Review’s history in November; a personal memoir of Barry Goldwater is due to be publication in April, and Mr. Buckley was working on a similar book about Ronald Reagan for release in the fall.

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-sized books.

Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.

To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, termed him “the scourge of liberalism.”

In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his biweekly edition — “without the wrapper.”

“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.

“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”

The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.

“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in the National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”

Mr. Buckley weaved the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism from libertarian writers like Max Eastman, free market economists like Milton Friedman, traditionalist scholars like Russell Kirk and anti-Communist writers like Whittaker Chambers. But the persuasiveness of his argument hinged not on these perhaps arcane sources, but on his own tightly argued case for a conservatism based on the national interest and a higher morality.

His most receptive audience became young conservatives first energized by Barry Goldwater’s emergence at the Republican convention in 1960 as the right-wing alternative to Nixon. Some met in Sept., 1960, at Mr. Buckley’s Connecticut estate to form Young Americans for Freedom. Their numbers — and influence — grew.

Nicholas Lemann observed in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the Reagan administration “the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists and policy intellectuals that it takes to run a government” were “deeply influenced by Buckley’s example.” He suggested that neither moderate Washington insiders nor “Ed Meese-style provincial conservatives” could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other reforms.

Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, “Some of these people had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a role model.”

Mr. Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers fascinated by political themes, names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others, he attracted controversy like a magnet. Even conservatives — from members of the John Birch Society to disciples of conservative author Ayn Rand to George Wallace to moderate Republicans — frequently pounced on him.

Many of varied political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form — from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 to startling opinions like favoring the decriminalization of marijuana. He was often described as liberals’ favorite conservative, particularly after suavely hosting an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” on public television in 1982.

Norman Mailer may indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a “second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row,” but he could not help admiring his stage presence.

“No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear,” Mr. Mailer said in an interview with Harpers in 1967.

Mr. Buckley’s vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words) became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators called him “pleonastic” (use of more words than necessary).

And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David Remnick, writing in The Washington Post, said, “He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”

William Francis Buckley Jr., was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley Jr. (John B. Judis relates in his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint Of the Conservative,” that he was christened with the middle name Francis instead of Frank, according to his sister, Patricia, because there was no saint named Frank. Later, in “Who’s Who” entries and elsewhere, he used Frank.)

The elder Mr. Buckley made a fortune in the oil fields of Mexico, and educated his children with personal tutors at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Conn. They also attended exclusive Roman Catholic schools in England and France.

Young William absorbed his family’s conservatism along with its deep Catholicism. At 6, he wrote the King of England demanding he repay his country’s war debt. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York state line from Sharon.

In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates’ papers for them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the grammar.

He did not neglect politics, showing up uninvited to a faculty meeting to complain about a teacher abridging his right to free speech and ardently opposing United States’ involvement in World War II. His father wrote him to suggest he “learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views.”

He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with his mannerisms.

“I think the army experience did something to Bill,” his sister, Patricia, told Mr. Judis. “He got to understand people more.”

Mr. Buckley then entered Yale where he studied political science, economics and history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman of the Yale Daily News, and joined Skull and Bones, the most prestigious secret society.

As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale’s Alumni Day celebration, but was replaced after the university’s administration objected to his strong attacks on the university. He responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to national attention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery, $10,000 to advertise it.

Published in 1951, “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’” charged the powers at Yale with having an atheistic and collectivist bent and called for the firing of faculty members who advocated values not in accord with those that the institution should be upholding — which was to say, his own.

Among the avalanche of negative reviews, the one in Atlantic by McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate, was conspicuous. He found the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.”

But Peter Viereck, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review viewed the book as “a necessary counterbalance.”

After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his case officer was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to win celebrity for his part in the Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went to work for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned after spotting anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.

Over the next few years, Mr. Buckley worked as a freelance writer and lecturer, and wrote a second book with L. Brent Bozell, his brother-in-law. Published in 1954, “McCarthy and His Enemies” was a sturdy defense of the senator from Wisconsin who was then in the throes of his campaign against communists, liberals and the Democratic Party.

In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as voice for “the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order” with a $100,000 gift from his father. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”

It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying blacks should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not be allowed to vote.

Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans, starting with Eisenhower’s campaign for re-election in 1956. National Review’s tepid endorsement: “We prefer Ike.”

Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 at the time of Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, and leveled off to around 100,000 in 1980. It is now 155,000. The magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers’ donations.

Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Robert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the career of several younger writers, including Garry Wills, Joan Didion and John Leonard, who would shake off the conservative attachment and go their leftward ways.

National Review also helped define the conservative movement by isolating cranks from Mr. Buckley’s chosen mainstream.

“Bill was responsible or rejecting the John Birch Society and the other kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism,” Hugh Kenner, a biographer of Ezra Pound and a frequent contributor to National Review told The Washington Post. “Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”

Mr. Buckley’s personal visibility was magnified by his “Firing Line” program which ran from 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and then on the Public Broadcasting Service, it became the longest running show hosted by a single host — beating out Johnny Carson by three years. He led the conservative team in 1,504 debates on topics like “Resolved: The women’s movement has been disastrous.”

There were exchanges on foreign policy with the likes of Norman Thomas; feminism with Germaine Greer and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few viewers thought Mr. Buckley’s toothy grin before he scored a point resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.

To New York City politician Mark Green, he purred, “You’ve been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet.”

But Harold Macmillan, former prime minister of Britain, flummoxed the master. “Isn’t this show over yet?” he asked.

At age 50, Mr. Buckley added two pursuits to his repertoire — he took up the harpsichord and became novelist. Some 10 of the novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and bedded the Queen of England in the first book.

Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis Presley as a significant character, another starring Fidel Castro, a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism, and journals that more than succeeded dramatizing a life of taste and wealth — his own. For example, in “Cruising Speed: A Documentary,” published in 1971, he discussed the kind of meals he liked to eat.

“Rawle could give us anything, beginning with lobster Newburgh and ending with Baked Alaska,” he wrote. “We settle on a fish chowder, of which he is surely the supreme practitioner, and cheese and bacon sandwiches, grilled, with a most prickly Riesling picked up at St. Barts for peanuts,” he wrote.

Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.

For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.”

Unlike his brother James who served as a United States senator from New York, Mr. Buckley generally avoided official government posts. He did serve from 1969 to 1972 as a presidential appointee to the National Advisory Commission on Information, and as a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations in 1973.

The merits of the argument aside, Mr. Buckley irrevocably proved that his brand of candor did not lend itself to public life when an Op-Ed article he wrote for The New York Times offered a partial cure for the AIDS epidemic: “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals,” he wrote.

In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr. Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord publicly.

But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one on the “bewitching power” of “The Sopranos” television series. He commanded wide attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.

On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, who had carved out a formidable reputation as a socialite and philanthropist but considered her role as a homemaker, mother and wife most important, died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other “Ducky.”

He is survived by his son, Christopher, of Washington, D.C.; his sisters Priscilla L. Buckley, of Sharon, Conn., Patricia Buckley Bozell, of Washington, D.C., and Carol Buckley, of Columbia, S.C.; his brothers James L., of Sharon, and F. Reid, of Camden, S.C., a granddaughter and a grandson

In the end it was Mr. Buckley’s graceful, often self-deprecating wit that endeared him to others. In his spy novel “Who’s on First,” he described the possible impact of his National Review through his character Boris Bolgin.

“ ‘Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?’ asks Boris Bolgin, the chief of KGB counter intelligence for Western Europe, ‘it is edited by this young bourgeois fanatic.’ ”

An earlier version of this article included an outdated reference to books Mr. Buckley published in 2007 and to the total number of books he wrote.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Clinton and Obama Clash Over Tactics In Ohio Showdown
By Dan Balz, Anne E. Kornblut and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 27, 2008; A01

CLEVELAND, Feb. 26 — In their final debate before critical primaries in Ohio and Texas, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton clashed sharply on familiar ground, arguing Tuesday night over who has the better health-care plan, who has been right about Iraq and who would move most aggressively to rethink trade policy as president.

In contrast to their debate five days ago in Texas, Clinton and Obama butted heads from the opening moments, starting with a clash over whether the senator from Illinois had mischaracterized her plan for universal health care in his campaign mailings, and continuing throughout the 90-minute session.

“We should have a good debate that uses accurate information, not false, misleading and discredited information, especially on something as important as whether or not we will achieve quality, affordable health care for everyone,” said Clinton (N.Y.).

Obama pushed back with equal aggressiveness. “Senator Clinton has, in her campaign at least, has constantly sent out negative attacks on us, e-mail, robo-calls [prerecorded telephone messages], fliers, television ads, radio calls, and we haven’t whined about it, because I understand that’s the nature of this campaign,” he said.

The tone of the debate was generally civil but rarely relaxed. Throughout, there was no mistaking the stakes involved for the candidates, especially Clinton, who has lost every contest since the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses of Feb. 5. Polls show Clinton and Obama in a very competitive race in Texas, while Clinton holds a narrow lead in Ohio. Obama has closed the gap with Clinton in both states.

Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, has said that she must win both Ohio and Texas in order to keep her campaign going, and throughout the debate Clinton pressed her rival and displayed the greater sense of urgency about getting her points across. Unless she wins both states by wide margins, Obama will still hold a lead in pledged delegates to the national convention.

The debate — the 20th involving the Democratic presidential candidates in the past 10 months — did little to change the overall shape of the race, which may play to Obama’s advantage but will also make the final six days of campaign crucial to both candidates. Earlier in the day, Obama picked up the endorsement of Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who dropped out of the race for the nomination in January.

Clinton’s frustration with her political situation flashed through early on, when she noted that she seemed to always get the first questions in these debates and made a reference to a “Saturday Night Live” skit aired last weekend that mocked reporters for fawning over Obama. “Maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs a pillow,” she said.

Obama did not respond to that swipe, but he missed few other opportunities to parry Clinton’s charges. Toward the end of the debate he used humor to counter Clinton, who had interjected herself into a question about whether Obama had been strong enough in stating his objections to Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam.

Asked to respond to an endorsement of his candidacy by Farrakhan, Obama described the Chicago figure’s anti-Semitic comments as “reprehensible.” Adding that “I obviously cannot censor him,” Obama said he had not sought the support and would do nothing to make use of it.

“I have been very clear in my denunciation” of Farrakhan’s past anti-Semitic remarks, Obama said.

Clinton jumped in to note that, in her 2000 Senate campaign, she had gone to greater lengths to distance herself from people who had made anti-Semitic remarks. “There’s a difference between denouncing and rejecting,” Clinton said, implying that Obama had not gone far enough. “I just think we’ve got to be even stronger.”

Obama laughed. “I don’t see a difference between denouncing and rejecting,” he said, adding that he would both reject and denounce Farrakhan if it would satisfy Clinton, a remark that drew laughter and applause.

The debate was held on the campus of Cleveland State University. NBC anchor Brian Williams served as moderator, and Tim Russert, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” joined in the questioning. The debate was aired on NBC affiliates across Ohio and nationally on MSNBC.

Obama drew one of his sharpest contrasts yet with Clinton on the subject of the Iraq war. The candidates have both said they would seek to end the U.S. combat role, but at the outset of the conflict they stood on opposite sides, with Clinton voting to authorize the war in 2002 and Obama speaking against it as an Illinois state legislator.

Clinton characterized Obama’s initial opposition as a rhetorical stance, made safely from the sidelines. “He didn’t have responsibility. He didn’t have to vote,” Clinton said. Since Obama joined the Senate in January 2005, she noted, their voting records on Iraq have been essentially identical. “When it wasn’t just a speech, but it was actually action, where is the difference?” Clinton said.

Obama responded: “My objections to the war in Iraq were not simply a speech. I was in the midst of a U.S. Senate campaign. It was a high-stakes campaign. I was one of the most vocal opponents of the war, and I was very specific as to why.”

He continued: “The fact was, this was a big strategic blunder. It was not a matter of ‘Well, here is the initial decision, but since then we’ve voted the same way.’ Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out. The question is: Who’s making the decision initially to drive the bus into the ditch?”

“And the fact is that Senator Clinton often says that she is ready on Day One, but, in fact, she was ready to give in to George Bush on Day One on this critical issue — in fact, she facilitated and enabled this individual to make a decision that has been strategically damaging to the United States of America.”

Clinton used the opening moments of the debate to delve into the details of her health-care proposal, repeating her assertion that Obama’s plan would leave 15 million people without coverage.

Obama did not shy away from pushing back against Clinton — saying that she had been misrepresenting his health-care plan throughout the race in mailings and ads that he said were “simply not accurate.” Obama said that he and Clinton both shared the goal of achieving universal health coverage, an assertion that Clinton disagreed with.

The two also had a spirited discussion about trade, a huge issue here in this working-class industrial state. Both said they would threaten to opt out of the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico and Canada agreed to renegotiate its terms.

NAFTA was a landmark pact signed by Clinton’s husband, and Obama has criticized Clinton for having spoken in support of it before her presidential campaign. He also has attacked her in a campaign flier that Clinton has strongly protested as unfair.

Obama continued to duck a question on whether he would commit to using public funds if he wins the Democratic nomination, despite pledging to do so earlier in the campaign. Obama said he is not yet the nominee and would, if chosen, “sit down with John McCain and make sure we have a system that is fair for both sides.” But he did not describe what that system would entail.

Clinton, on a question of financing, defended her decision not to release her joint tax returns, though she said she would consider doing so. Russert asked how the public could know who is bankrolling her campaign if she does not open up her private finances yet continues to loan her campaign millions of dollars.

“The American people who support me are bankrolling my campaign, that’s obvious,” Clinton said. Asked whether she would release her returns by next Tuesday, she demurred. “Well, I can’t get it together by then,” Clinton said.

She also said she would seek to make public records from her time as first lady that have not yet been released, describing the release of White House records as a “cumbersome process.”

Russert asked the two Democrats if they had any moments in their public lives that they wish they could undo. “Obviously, I’ve said many times that although my vote on the 2002 authorization on Iraq was a sincere vote, I would not have voted that way again. I would certainly as president never have taken us to war in Iraq and I regret deeply that President Bush waged a preemptive war,” Clinton said.

Asked explicitly whether she wished she could take that vote back, Clinton — who has steadfastly refused to apologize for voting for the war — said yes. “Absolutely, I’ve said that many times,” Clinton said.

Obama said he wished he had spoken out to stop the resolution on Terri Schiavo, allowing Congress to intervene in the case of a Florida woman in a vegetative state, when he first arrived in the Senate.

February 26, 2008

By ROBIN TONER and DALIA SUSSMAN

WASHINGTON — In the past two months, Senator Barack Obama has built a commanding coalition among Democratic voters, with especially strong support among men, and is now viewed by most Democrats as the candidate best able to beat Senator John McCain in the general election, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

After 40 Democratic primaries and caucuses, capped by a winning streak in 11 contests over the last two weeks, Mr. Obama has made substantial gains across most major demographic groups in the Democratic Party, including men and women, liberals and moderates, higher and lower income voters, and those with and without college degrees.

But there are signs of vulnerability for Mr. Obama, of Illinois, in this national poll: While he has a strong edge among Democratic voters on his ability to unite and inspire the country, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is still viewed by more Democrats as prepared for the job of president. And while he has made progress among women, he still faces a striking gender gap: Mr. Obama is backed by two-thirds of the Democratic men and 45 percent of the women, who are equally divided in their support between the two candidates. White women remain a Clinton stronghold.

When all voters are asked to look ahead to the general election, Mr. McCain is more likely to be seen as prepared for the presidency, able to handle an international crisis and equipped to serve as commander in chief than either of the Democratic candidates.

Even so, the poll provides a snapshot of Mr. Obama’s strength after this first, frenzied round of primaries and caucuses, which knocked seven of the nine Democratic candidates out of the race. For the first time in a Times/CBS poll, he moved ahead of Mrs. Clinton nationally, with 54 percent of Democratic primary voters saying they wanted to see him nominated, while 38 percent preferred Mrs. Clinton. A USA Today/Gallup Poll released Monday showed a similar result, 51 percent for Mr. Obama to 39 percent for Mrs. Clinton.

These national polls are not predictive of the Democratic candidates’ standings in individual states, notably Ohio and Texas, which hold the next primaries, on March 4. Most recent polls there show a neck-and-neck race in Texas and Mrs. Clinton with a lead in Ohio; her campaign advisers say that if she prevails next Tuesday the race will begin anew.

Mark Penn, the chief strategist for the Clinton campaign, said the polls “reflect momentum from Senator Obama’s recent wins,” and “will snap back if we are successful in Ohio and Texas.” He added that other national polls showed a far closer race. Bill Burton, spokesman for the Obama campaign, said, “As we’ve made our case for change across the country, people have responded.”

The Times/CBS poll shows that Mr. Obama’s coalition — originally derided by critics as confined to upper-income reformers, young people and blacks — has broadened significantly. In December, for example, he had the support of 26 percent of the male Democratic primary voters; in the latest poll, that had climbed to 67 percent.

“He’s from Illinois, and I’m from Illinois, and he reminds me of Abraham Lincoln,” said Dylan Jones, 53, a laborer from Oxford, N.C., who was interviewed in a follow-up to the poll. “I can see him out there splitting rails. I don’t have anything against Hillary Clinton, so I guess it’s because he’s new blood.”

Similarly, Mr. Obama’s support among those with household incomes under $50,000 rose to 48 percent from 35 percent since December. His support among moderates rose to 59 percent from 28 percent. In contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s strength among Democratic men dropped to 28 percent from 42 percent in December; her support among voters in households making under $50,000 held stable.

Even among women, Mr. Obama made strides. He had the support of 19 percent of white women in December and 40 percent in the most recent poll. White women, however, remain Mrs. Clinton’s most loyal base of support — 51 percent backed the senator from New York, statistically unchanged from the 48 percent who backed her in December.

“I like them both,” said Ann Powers, 64, a coordinator for special education programs in Fort Dodge, Iowa. “I just think he is too inexperienced and she’s dealt with more in the last 20 years.” The national telephone poll of 1,115 registered voters was conducted Feb. 20-24. It included 427 Democratic primary voters and 327 Republican primary voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all voters, plus or minus five percentage points for Democratic voters and plus or minus five percentage points for Republican voters.

The poll showed Republicans settling in with their likely nominee. Eight in 10 said they would be satisfied if Mr. McCain won their party’s nomination, although just 3 in 10 said they would be very satisfied. Nearly 9 in 10 said he was prepared for the presidency, and more than 8 in 10 said they had confidence in his ability to deal with an international crisis, while a remarkable 96 percent said he would likely make an effective commander in chief.

But misgivings remain among those who describe themselves as conservative Republicans, with a majority saying his positions on the issues are not conservative enough.

On the Democratic side, primary voters indicated they saw few substantive differences between their candidates on issues like the war in Iraq and health care. Most have confidence in both candidates to handle the economy, the war in Iraq and an international crisis. And large numbers think it is likely that either candidate would make an effective commander in chief.

Mr. Obama’s advantages are more apparent on other measures. Nearly 6 in 10 said he had the best chance of beating Mr. McCain, double the numbers that believed Mrs. Clinton was more electable. He is also viewed by more Democratic voters as someone who can bring about “real change” and is willing to compromise with Republicans “the right amount” to get things done.

Democratic voters are also more likely to say Mr. Obama cares a lot about them, inspires them and can unite the country. Sixty-three percent of Democratic voters said he cared a lot about them, while fewer than half thought Mrs. Clinton did. Nearly seven in 10 said he inspired them about the future of the country; 54 percent said Mrs. Clinton did. Three-quarters said he would be able to unite the country as president; 53 percent said Mrs. Clinton would.

Mrs. Clinton also has her strengths: Her supporters are, in general, more committed; nearly 8 in 10 of Mrs. Clinton’s backers said they strongly favored her, while 6 in 10 of Mr. Obama’s supporters strongly favored him. Only 18 percent of her supporters backed her with reservations; about a third of Mr. Obama’s supporters said they had reservations about their candidate.

Democratic women are also more likely to say that the news media have been harder on Mrs. Clinton than on other candidates: 56 percent felt that way, compared with 39 percent of Democratic men. Both men and women were more likely to think the news media has been harder on Mrs. Clinton than on Mr. Obama.

Not surprisingly, Democratic primary voters had an opinion on the appropriate role of the 795 superdelegates who could determine the party’s nominee. More than half said that these party leaders should vote for the candidate who received the most votes in the primaries and caucuses.

Marjorie Connelly, Megan Thee and Marina Stefan contributed reporting.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Kempthorne seeks compatibility with state laws

Richard Simon and Judy Pasternak
Los Angeles Times
February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON – In a victory for gun rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on loaded firearms in national parks.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into line with state laws concerning guns in parks and public lands. His announcement came in a letter to 51 senators who have written to him about the issue. A near majority of the Senate, including Democrats and Republicans from Western states, has backed a drive to repeal the ban, which has been in place in some parks for 100 years.

The proposed rule change might let visitors carry loaded weapons into national parks in states with few gun restrictions, such as Montana.

Gun rights advocates, notably the National Rifle Association, have said the ban infringes on their Second Amendment right to bear arms and their ability to defend themselves from predators, human and animal.

“If you’re hiking in the backcountry and there is a problem with a criminal or an aggressive animal, there’s no 911 box where you can call police and have a 60-second response time,” said Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association. “Here in Montana, we are very used to being able to provide for our own personal protection.”

Kempthorne’s decision to review the ban was hailed by the NRA. “This is an important step in the right direction,” said the organization’s chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox.

On the other hand, the National Parks Conservation Association called Kempthorne’s action “alarming.” Tom Kiernan, the group’s president, said a loosening of the ban would be “a blow to the national parks and the 300 million visitors who enjoy them every year.”

His view is echoed by gun-control advocates and some rangers who say permitting firearms would be dangerous for visitors and wildlife and alter the national park experience.

“Parks have long been sanctuaries for both animals and people,” said Butch Farabee, a former acting superintendent at Montana’s Glacier National Park who is retired. “There need to be places in this country where people can feel secure without guns and know that the guy in the campground across the way does not have one.”

The federal government would not cede authority over firearms in national parks to the states, said Interior Department spokesman Chris Paolino, but would like to reflect the policies of host states. In drafting proposed new rules, Paolino said, the department also would take into consideration the ban on firearms in federal buildings.

“It’s important to note this is the beginning of the process,” Paolino added.

Weapons originally were prohibited in national parks to prevent “opportunistic poaching” of wildlife, said Frank Buono, a former assistant superintendent of California’s Joshua Tree National Park.

A 1908 Yellowstone National Park regulation, for example, required that visitors “having firearms, traps, nets, seines or explosives” surrender them at the entrance unless they received written permission from the park superintendent.

A similar policy was in effect at most parks for decades. Then the Reagan administration in 1983 required that visitors unload and store their firearms before entering most national parks.

Supporters of the repeal effort note that state gun laws currently apply to federal land managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and they see no reason why that should not be the case in national parks and wildlife refuges.

So far, half the Senate seems to agree. Nine Democrats and 41 Republicans have signed letters to Kempthorne calling on him to lift the gun ban. “We do not believe that allowing law-abiding citizens to transport and carry firearms – rather than forcing them to disassemble or store them in their trunks – will increase the chances that they will be tempted to violate prohibitions on discharge,” one group of senators wrote.

Advocates believe it is, foremost, an issue of ending an unconstitutional infringement on their right to bear arms. But they also contend that park visitors are “increasingly vulnerable” to crime.

“While park rangers now use bullet-proof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in states where conceal-and-carry law exists are denied the opportunity for self-defense,” Coburn said in “talking points” distributed by his office.

The National Park Service says there were 116,588 reported offenses in national parks in 2006, the most recent year data are available, including 11 killings, 35 rapes or attempted rapes, 61 robberies, 16 kidnappings and 261 aggravated assaults.

Supporters also believe that gun owners should be able to protect themselves against dangerous animals, dismissing arguments that firearms would ruin the park experience.

Officials at Glacier – which recorded 10 deaths from grizzly bear attacks between 1967 and 1998 – said the last attack was in 2005, when a bear mauled two hikers. One of the victims, Johan Otter, of Escondido, Calif., said the idea that a gun could have stopped the 400-pound bear that charged him is naive. “We only had, like, half a second between seeing the bear and the impact,” Otter said.

Organizations that represent current and retired park workers oppose a repeal, saying it not only would endanger visitors, rangers and wildlife but would change the character of the parks.

Bill Wade, executive council chairman of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, said, “How many of you would want to go out there if you knew that people were running up and down the Appalachian Trail with guns?”

Candidates’ spending proposals aren’t matched by funding sources

Kevin G. Hall and Margaret Talev
McClatchy
February 24, 2008

HOUSTON – Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama champion fiscal responsibility on the campaign trail, but both Democratic presidential hopefuls are promising massive new spending without providing details on how they’d pay for it.

The nation already will face unprecedented fiscal challenges as the baby-boom generation – about 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 – reaches retirement age and begins straining the federal budget as never before.

The federal budget deficit is projected to exceed $400 billion next year. Deficits are paid for by borrowing. The gross federal debt, the sum of what our government owes, is in the neighborhood of $9 trillion.

That means there’s less room to borrow to deal with the growing budget pressure as boomers retire.

By 2017, Social Security is expected to begin paying more out in benefits to retirees than it collects from workers. And the number of Medicare recipients will grow from 44 million last year to 58 million over the next decade.

Increased spending on health and welfare programs for the boomers will start to crowd out other federal spending. That’s why the two Democrats’ mounting campaign promises raise concern among budget experts, who aren’t hearing much about where the money would come from.

Clinton has proposed new spending in excess of $200 billion, much of it annual. Obama has surpassed her, promising annual spending of at least $210 billion.

Both have offered expensive plans to get to universal health-care coverage, either through incentives or by government mandate. They’ve proposed spending big money to help avert housing foreclosures nationwide and to help refinance mortgages for borrowers in trouble.

Both are counting on savings from reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq and rolling back some of President Bush’s tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire after 2010, to pay for their new programs. Both expect that expanded use of electronic health records and other advances in medical information technology will defray some of the cost of moving to a universal health-care system.

Neither, however, has proposed a fix for the biggest near-term strain on the federal budget, the alternative minimum tax, or explained how they propose to balance the cost of their campaign promises with the looming expense of the aging baby boomers.

During a speech Tuesday night in Houston, Obama rattled off a list of promises: lower insurance premiums for all families, subsidized premiums for those who can’t afford them, tax cuts for Americans who earn less than $75,000, no income tax for retirees who earn less than $50,000, inflation-linked increases in the minimum wage, a $4,000 tuition credit for every college student and unspecified investment in early childhood education, roads, buildings and hospitals.

To pay for it, he cited without specifics higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, billions of dollars from “polluters” to pay for alternative energy and ending the Iraq war, which is costing an estimated $9 billion a month.

“We can invest that money in rebuilding roads and bridges and hospitals right here in Houston – building schools, laying broadband lines, putting people back to work, employing young men and women in our inner cities, in our rural communities,” he said to cheers.

That $9 billion in war spending, however, is largely borrowed money, much of it from China and Japan. If Obama intends to redirect war spending to domestic needs, it still would be deficit spending.

“That’s sort of a problem: switching priorities rather than fixing the budget problem,” said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog organization. “I couldn’t help but think, ‘Where is he going to get the money to pay for these things?’ ”

And the U.S. military can’t just pack up, turn off the lights and head home. There’ll be a troop presence in Iraq for some years, and the nation will be paying to replace worn equipment and heal the bodies and minds of returning service members for years.

“It is getting a little bit discouraging that promises that are on the wrong side of the ledger … are starting to add up. It gets more and more difficult to see how any of the candidates can meet the full portfolio of promises” they’ve made, said Maya Macguineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group that advocates balanced budgets.

The most obvious problem, which Clinton and Obama have acknowledged – but which neither has addressed – is the unpopular alternative minimum tax.

The AMT wasn’t indexed to inflation decades ago, when it was targeted at income levels then considered wealthy, so it now threatens to ensnare millions of American families with annual incomes of $75,000 to $200,000.

Abolishing it could cost the Treasury as much as $2 trillion over the next 10 years, just when the government will need more money to pay for programs for boomers. Expanding the AMT, however, could allow it to hit as many as 52 million taxpayers by 2018.

Neither choice is attractive, and because the tax still affects a limited number of Americans, the candidates can duck the issue.

“If you were to repeal the AMT, it would just add to the deficit. It is a serious problem, and none of the candidates is talking about it very seriously,” said Len Burman, the director of the Tax Policy Center, a policy-research group run jointly by the centrist Urban Institute and the center-left Brookings Institution.

New York senator says opponent sent false mailings

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., campaigns Saturday in Huber Heights, Ohio. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Perry Bacon Jr. and Alec Macgillis
Washington Post
February 24, 2008

HUBER HEIGHTS, Ohio – In perhaps her sharpest attack of the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused her Democratic rival Saturday of “using tactics that are right out of Karl Rove’s playbook,” declaring at one point, “Shame on you, Barack Obama.”

Clinton’s comments represented a marked shift from just two days ago, when she and Obama engaged in a generally good-natured debate in Austin, Texas. The Illinois senator responded by noting “the sudden change in tone” and questioning Clinton’s timing, ahead of Sunday newspaper deadlines and with another debate three days away.

“It makes me think there’s something tactical about her getting so exercised this morning,” he said in Columbus, Ohio.

Clinton took strong exception to Obama mailings that criticized her views on health care and trade. Both mailings have been sent before by the Obama campaign, and her aides had expressed frustration about them, but the senator from New York had not previously addressed them in such a pointed way.

“I have to express my deep disappointment that he is continuing to send false and discredited mailings,” Clinton said, holding the fliers in her hand. “He says one thing in his speeches, and then he turns around and does this. It is not the new politics the speeches are about. It is not hopeful. It is destructive.”

She added, “Enough with the speeches and the big rallies and then using tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook. This is wrong, and every Democrat should be outraged. … Shame on you, Barack Obama.”

One mailing says that Clinton’s health care plan would force people to purchase insurance, even if they could not afford it. The other quotes a Newsday article that says Clinton regarded the North American Free Trade Agreement as a “boon” to the economy. The Long Island newspaper has acknowledged that was the word it chose to describe her view of the controversial agreement.

Obama defended the accuracy of the mailings, though he granted that it is “fair” to question that Clinton used the word “boon.” He said the mailing was produced before Newsday clarified that Clinton herself had not used the word.

But he added that the overall thrust of the publication stands.

“Senator Clinton, as part of the Clinton administration, supported NAFTA. In her book, she called it one of the administration’s successes,” he said. “We’re pointing that out in a state that’s been devastated by trade and is deeply concerned about the position of the candidates on trade.”

It is indisputable, Obama added, that Clinton’s plan would require people to buy health insurance even if they did not think they could afford it. She may not want the plan described that way, he said, just as he does not like her characterizing his plan, which does not include a mandate, as leaving out 15 million people.

“We have been subject to constant attack from the Clinton campaign except when we were down 20 points. They need to take a look at what they’ve been doing,” Obama said.

Clinton and Obama have agreed to a debate Tuesday in Cleveland, and Clinton hinted that she will use the opportunity to press her point.

“Meet me in Ohio, and let’s have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign,” she said.

It is estimated that Clinton’s health care plan would cover more people than Obama’s in part because it would require people to purchase insurance, although it stipulates that Americans would have to pay only a certain percentage of their income for health care costs. If government subsidies are large enough, Clinton’s plan is not likely to force people to pay excessive amounts for health care, although it is difficult to define what is “affordable.”

Clinton has sought to distance herself from NAFTA throughout the campaign. In Cincinnati, she said that George H.W. Bush’s administration, not Bill Clinton’s, had “negotiated” the agreement. But her husband was an enthusiastic backer of NAFTA in the 1990s, helping get it passed despite opposition from some Democrats in Congress. Obama’s campaign on Saturday put out a long list of statements from the 1990s in which Hillary Clinton expressed enthusiasm about NAFTA.

Obama has won 11 straight contests in the Democratic campaign, heading into March 4 primaries in four states, including Ohio and Texas.

Tugboats pull the crippled tanker Exxon Valdez toward Naked Island in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on April 5, 1989. Associated Press (File Associated Press )

Robert Barnes
Washington Post
February 24, 2008

WASHINGTON – When a federal jury in Alaska in 1994 ordered Exxon to pay $5 billion to thousands of people who had their lives disrupted by the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill, an appeal of the nation’s largest punitive damages award was inevitable.

But few could have predicted the incredible round of legal ping-pong that only this month lands at the Supreme Court.

In the time span of the battle – 14 years after the verdict, nearly two decades since the spill itself – claimants’ lawyers say there is a new statistic to add to the grim legacy of the disaster in Prince William Sound: Nearly 20 percent of the 33,000 fishermen, Native Alaskans, cannery workers and others who triumphed in court that day are dead.

“That’s the most upsetting thing, that more than 6,000 people have passed and this still isn’t finished,” said Mike Webber, a Native Alaskan artistic carver and former fisherman in the Prince William Sound community of Cordova. “Our sound is not healthy, and neither are the people. Everything is still on the surface, just as it was.”

“The bottom line,” said Tim Joyce, the mayor of Cordova, where half the town’s 2,400 full-time residents are parties to the suit, “is that there is still oil on the beaches. And this lawsuit still isn’t finished.”

The high court is scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday on whether punishment is excessive or even permitted under maritime law. The case, Exxon Shipping v. Baker, may turn, in the eyes of the justices, on a nearly 200-year-old precedent set when privateer ships sailed the oceans, or on the more recent provisions of the Clean Water Act.

An epic event
In Alaska, the lawsuit is seen as a test of justice and corporate responsibility, and its resolution is seen as critical to healing the scars left by an epic event that defines the state’s modern history, Republican Gov. Sarah Palin said in an interview.

“Every Alaskan life was affected by this,” said Palin, elected in 2006. “When I got in here, that was one of the first orders of business: to find out how in the world can this administration speak on behalf of all Alaskans who have been so adversely affected by this spill.”

Exxon officials contend that such sentiments ignore the facts of the case and note that the company already has spent more than $3.4 billion in compensation for losses, cleanup and fines.

“This case is about whether further punishment is warranted,” Exxon spokesman Tony Cudmore said. “We’ve spent $3.5 billion, which is a significant sum of money we think is adequate to deter anyone” from future wrongdoing.

But that figure no longer impresses Palin and others. When the jury awarded $5 billion in 1994, that represented a year of Exxon profits. An appeals court subsequently reduced the damages to $2.5 billion – “about three weeks of Exxon’s current net profits,” the plaintiffs told the Supreme Court in their brief.

“I’m a capitalist, I’m a conservative Republican, I am pro-development and pro-industry,” said Palin, who is herself a former commercial fisherman once party to the suit. “But consider what Exxon has made in terms of profits in all these years. The American judicial system came down with this judgment, and they’ve appealed and they’ve appealed and they’ve appealed.”

The award has been reviewed three times by a district judge and twice by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, with more than four years elapsing between one appeal and a decision.

“It’s a scandal how long it’s gone on,” said David Lebedoff, a Minneapolis lawyer and author who wrote a book about the five-month trial that led to the punitive damages award. He blames the 9th Circuit for not moving faster. “It’s absolutely inexcusable.”

PR, legal tactics
The passage of time is a worry for claimants, and they have responded with public relations and legal tactics unusual for Supreme Court cases. A newly created Web site details the continuing environmental damage to Prince William Sound and a commercial fishing industry that has not fully recovered.

News conferences and a vigil are planned before the arguments. The “ridicule pole” Webber carved from yellow cedar, depicting an Exxon executive with oil flowing from his mouth, is crated and on its way to Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford law professor who will argue the case for plaintiffs, has sent the court a DVD containing photos and footage taken at the time of the spill, video of Exxon executives acknowledging fault and an audiotape of the distress call made by what plaintiffs claim to be a clearly drunk Capt. Joseph Hazelwood reporting that the Exxon Valdez had hit Bligh Reef.

Fisher said it is important to remind the justices of the events of 19 years ago, and that the jury was punishing Exxon for “socially outrageous behavior.”

“One of the dangers for us is that outrage dissipates over time, and it is hard to get back to the place where the country was at that time,” he said.

Justices have extended the allotted time for oral arguments, and the briefs filed on both sides indicate that the events of the grounding might yet be explored again.

‘Relapsed alcoholic’
Some things are not in dispute. The Exxon Valdez left port late on the evening of March 23, 1989, loaded with 53 million gallons of crude oil. It strayed out of the shipping lane to avoid ice. Hazelwood instructed the third mate on when to make the turn back into the lane, and then left the bridge of the ship, a violation of regulations. Just after midnight, the crewman ran the nearly 1,000-foot tanker aground on the reef, and 11 million gallons of oil oozed into Prince William Sound.

The oil eventually spread more than 600 miles, an area plaintiffs contend would stretch from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape Lookout, N.C.

They also charge that Hazelwood, an alcoholic, was drunk. They argue that he consumed at least five double-vodkas in waterfront bars before boarding the ship. They say Exxon knew that Hazelwood, once treated for his disease, had resumed drinking.

Courts have agreed. “Spilling the oil was an accident, but putting a relapsed alcoholic in charge of a supertanker was not,” the appeals court ruled in upholding the punitive damages.

Exxon’s lawyer in the case, Walter Dellinger, told the court in his brief that it is “hotly disputed” whether Hazelwood was drunk at the time of the accident, and points out that Hazelwood was acquitted by a state court jury of operating a vessel under the influence.

Whatever misdeeds were committed by Hazelwood, Dellinger argues, they were not the misdeeds of Exxon. “Imposing vicarious punitive liability on a ship owner, without requiring the jury to find that the ship owner directed, countenanced or participated in the conduct, was in conflict with almost 200 years of unbroken maritime law,” the brief argues.

The reference is to the court’s 1818 decision in “The Amiable Nancy,” in which it held a ship’s owner could not be held responsible for the plundering of its crew when it was miles out at sea.

Exxon also argues that the punishment for discharges of oil and other hazardous substances is governed by the Clean Water Act, and it does not provide for private punitive damages. Alternately, the company says punitive damages should not be allowed because of what Exxon already has paid, or they should at least be reduced.

Not surprisingly, the claimants reject all of those arguments. Exxon itself stipulated that Hazelwood was a “managerial agent” of the company, they argue, and that the jury found that both Hazelwood and the company had acted recklessly. They contend that the Clean Water Act claim is baseless, and that the award is justified.

Final judgment
Justice Samuel Alito Jr. owns Exxon stock and has recused himself from the case. That leaves eight justices to hear it, and an even split would mean that the award stands.

Around Prince William Sound, residents wait for a final judgment on the $2.5 billion award, which plaintiff lawyers say now stands at about $4.8 billion because of the interest earned while the suit proceeds.

“It’s painful for people to talk about this,” said Jennifer Gibbons, executive director of the environmental group Prince William Soundkeeper, “but they want closure.”

February 23, 2008

By Michael Barone
It’s starting to feel like the general election. Rising to claim victory in the Wisconsin Republican primary before the networks could declare Barack Obama the winner on the Democratic side, John McCain started right in on his general election opponent.

He promised to “make sure Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to false promises and failed policies of a tired philosophy that trusts in government more than the people.”

Scorch. Some 40 minutes later, Hillary Clinton got up before the cameras and set out her platform as if she were the winner, ignoring Obama as she had on primary night the week before. Having not been extended this courtesy, Obama did not extend her the courtesy of waiting for her to finish before he began his victory speech.

The networks quickly switched for Clinton to Obama, who went on for 45 minutes, cutting and pasting platform planks into the unspecific ode to hope that has enchanted so many voters.

That camera switch may turn out to be the beginning of the end of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She’s still hoping for victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4, but Obama’s margin in Wisconsin makes that seem less likely, and in any case, she will still be behind in delegates. She could win the nomination only with the votes of super-delegates or by counting the results in Florida and Michigan, where the national party commanded candidates not to compete.

Either move will strike many Obama enthusiasts — and others — as profoundly unfair. The way Clinton has run her campaign — like the way she ran health care reform in 1993-94 — undercuts her claim to be ready for the presidency from day one. In both cases, she had no fallback strategy, no Plan B, in case her best-case scenario failed to come to pass. She started campaigning in Wisconsin only last Saturday and had to cancel her events because of a snowstorm. Didn’t anyone check weather.com?

If you look at the numbers, if the general election were held today, Barack Obama would beat John McCain by a solid margin. (McCain would beat Clinton — another reason the super-delegates are unlikely to foist her on the party.) But the performances of the candidates on primary night — and the performances of their wives on Monday and Tuesday — suggests that may not always be the case.

Obama’s cut-and-paste job does respond to the complaint that he is without substance. But it’s hard to mix poetry and prose and come up with an appealing product. Particularly when, as columnist Robert Samuelson points out, there’s not much that’s interesting about the substance.

Then there are the wives. In Milwaukee on Monday, Michelle Obama, who has spoken frequently in the campaign, said: “Hope is making a comeback, and let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change.”

For the first time in her life? Coming from the realm in which Michelle Obama has lived her adult life — Princeton, Harvard Law, a top law firm, a $342,000-a year job doing community relations for the University of Chicago hospital system — this may not sound out of the ordinary. As Samuel Huntington has pointed out, people in this stratum tend to have transnational attitudes — all nations are morally equal, except maybe for ours, which is worse.

This is not, to say the least, the view of most Americans, including very many who regularly vote Democratic. And it undercuts Barack Obama’s most appealing rhetoric, which emphasizes what Americans have in common.

Cindy McCain, who ordinarily doesn’t speak in public, picked up on this immediately. On Tuesday, she made a point of saying, several times, that she has always been proud of America. On election night, John McCain said he was “proud, proud of the privilege” of being an American.

I remember the electric feeling in the hall, at the first Republican National Convention I attended, in 1984, when Lee Greenwood belted out his country hit, “I’m proud to be an American.” I don’t believe that I’ve heard it at any Democratic National Convention, and I’m pretty sure that some nontrivial number of the delegates would find it off-putting, even obnoxious.

Barack Obama has explained that his wife was just saying that she was proud for the first time of her country’s politics. But that’s not what she said, and said with considerable emphasis. Tuesday night seemed to be the beginning of the general election campaign. But what was said on Monday may prove to be just as important.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Will discuss possible White House run Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press

The Associated Press

updated 9:26 a.m. PT, Fri., Feb. 22, 2008

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WASHINGTON – Ralph Nader could be poised for another third party presidential campaign.

The consumer advocate will appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Nader launched his 2004 presidential run on the show.

A spokesman for Nader did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Kevin Zeese, who was Nader’s spokesman during the 2004 presidential race, but is no longer working for him, said Friday that Nader has been actively talking to “lots of people on all sorts of levels” about the possibility of making another run.

Zeese said he could only guess what Nader might do, but added: “Obviously, I don’t think (”Meet the Press” host) Tim Russert would have him on for no reason.”

Last month, Nader began an exploratory presidential campaign and launched a Web site that promises to fight “corporate greed, corporate power, corporate control.”

Nader’s appearance on “Meet the Press” was announced Friday in an e-mail message from Nader’s exploratory campaign. The message from “The Nader Team” urges supporters to tell friends and family to watch the show and requests online contributions.

“As you know, we’ve been exploring the possibilities in recent weeks,” the message says.

Nader is still loathed by many Democrats who call him a spoiler and claim his candidacy in 2000 cost Democrats the election by siphoning votes away from Al Gore in a razor-thin contest in Florida.

Nader has vociferously disputed the spoiler claim, saying only Democrats are to blame for losing the race to George W. Bush.

Though he won 2.7 percent of the national vote as the Green Party candidate in 2000, Nader won just 0.3 percent as an independent in 2004, when he appeared on the ballot in only 34 states.

Nader was forced to fight dozens of court battles over ballot access in 2004, as Democrats pressed legal challenges over whether he gained enough legitimate signatures to get his name on the ballot.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Kathleen Parker
Orlando Sentinel
February 23, 2008

Much has been made of the religious tenor of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Reports of women weeping and swooning – even of an audience applauding when The One cleared his proboscis (blew his nose for you mortals) – have become frequent events in the heavenly realm of Obi-Wan Obama.

His rhetoric, meanwhile, drips with hints of resurrection, redemption and second comings. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.

Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus. Well, you don’t see any men fainting in Obi’s presence.

Barack Obama has many appealing qualities, not least his own reluctance to be swaddled in purple. Nothing quite says, “I’m only human” like whipping out a hankie and blowing one’s nose in front of 17,000 admirers. The audience’s applause was reportedly awkward, as if the crowd was both approving of anything their savior did, but a little disappointed at this rather ungodly behavior.

So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

If anthropologists made predictions the way meteorologists do, they might have anticipated Obama’s astronomical rise to supernova status in 2008 of the Common Era. Consider the cultural coordinates, and Obama’s intersection with history becomes almost inevitable.

To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society in which fathers (both the holy and the secular) have been increasingly marginalized from the lives of a generation of young Americans.

All of these trends have been gaining momentum the past few decades. Social critic Christopher Lasch named the culture of narcissism a generation ago and cited addiction to celebrity as one of the disease’s symptoms – all tied to the decline of the family.

That culture has merely become more exaggerated as spiritual alienation and fatherlessness have collided with technology (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) that enables the self-absorption of the narcissistic personality.

Grown-ups may have a variety of reasons for supporting Obama, but the youth who pack convention halls and stadiums as if for a rock concert constitute a tipping point of another order.

One of Obama’s TV ads, set to rock ‘n’ roll, has a Woodstock feel to it. Text alternating with crowd scenes reads: “We Can Change The World” and “We Can Save The Planet.”

Those are some kind of campaign promises. The kind no mortal could possibly keep, but never mind. Obi-Wan Obama is about hope – and hope, he’ll tell you, knows no limits.

It is thus no surprise that the young are enamored of Obama. He’s a rock star. A telegenic, ultra-bright redeemer fluent in the planetary language of a cosmic generation. The force is with him.

But underpinning that popularity is something that transcends mere policy or politics: a spiritual hunger. Humans seem to have a yearning for the transcendent – hence thousands of years of religion – but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.

Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals. And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.

Here’s how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling: “When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa …”

This New Age glossolalia may be more sonorous than the guttural emanations from the revival tent, but the emotion is the same. It’s all religion by any other name.

Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

Paxson says senator met with him before sending FCC letters

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., talks with reporters in flight from Indianapolis to Washington on Friday. Associated Press (Associated Press )

James V. Grimaldi and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post
February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON – Broadcaster Lowell “Bud” Paxson on Friday contradicted statements from Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign that the senator did not meet with Paxson or his lobbyist before sending two controversial letters to the Federal Communications Commission on Paxson’s behalf.

Paxson said he talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before the Arizona Republican wrote the letters in 1999 to the FCC urging a rapid decision on Paxson’s quest to acquire a Pittsburgh television station.

Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, likely attended the meeting in McCain’s office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. “Was Vicki there? Probably,” Paxson said in an interview Friday. “The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings.”

The recollection of the now-retired Paxson conflicted with the account provided by the McCain campaign about the two letters at the center of a controversy over the senator’s ties to Iseman, a partner at the lobbying firm of Alcalde & Fay.

The McCain campaign said Thursday that the senator had not met with Paxson or Iseman on the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding,” the campaign said in a statement.

But Paxson said Friday, “I remember going there to meet with him.” He recalled that he told McCain: “You’re head of the Commerce Committee. The FCC is not doing its job. I would love for you to write a letter.”

McCain attorney Robert Bennett played down the contradiction between the campaign’s written answer and Paxson’s recollection.

“We understood that he (McCain) did not speak directly with him (Paxson). Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?” Bennett said. “McCain has never denied that Paxson asked for assistance from his office. It doesn’t seem relevant whether the request got to him through Paxson or the staff. His letters to the FCC concerning the matter urged the commission to make up its mind. He did not ask the FCC to approve or deny the application. It’s not that big a deal.”

The Paxson deal, coming as McCain made his first run for the presidency, has posed a persistent problem for the senator. The deal raised embarrassing questions about his dealings with lobbyists at a time when he had assumed the role of an ethics champion and opponent of the influence of lobbyists.

The two letters he wrote to the FCC in 1999 while he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee produced a rash of criticism and a written rebuke from the then-FCC chairman, who called McCain’s intervention “highly unusual.” McCain had repeatedly used Paxson’s corporate jet for his campaign and accepted campaign contributions from the broadcaster and his law firm.

McCain himself in a deposition in 2002 acknowledged talking to Paxson about the Pittsburgh sale. Asked what Paxson said in the conversation, McCain said that Paxson “had applied to purchase this station and that he wanted to purchase it. And that there had been a numerous-year delay with the FCC reaching a decision. And he wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business.”

The deposition was taken in litigation over the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law filed by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. The contradiction in the deposition was first reported by Newsweek on Friday afternoon.

“I said I would be glad to write a letter asking them to act,” McCain testified, recounting the conversation with Paxson. “But I cannot write a letter asking them to approve or deny, because then that would be an interference in their activities.”

Iseman’s connections to McCain have come into question this week after a longtime associate of McCain’s said that he had asked Iseman to distance herself from McCain and his 2000 presidential campaign to protect McCain’s reputation for independence from special interests.

McCain acknowledged during a news conference on Thursday that Iseman was a friend, but he denied doing anything improper for her or her telecommunications clients.

Paxson defended Iseman as a complete professional and said she was at her best when she worked on the Pittsburgh deal. He said they turned to McCain often when they ran into interference at the FCC, but Paxson added that McCain did not always agree with him. In three other major issues, Paxson said, McCain took the opposing viewpoint.

Paxson had used Alcalde & Fay as his lobbying firm in the 1980s when he founded and ran the Home Shopping Network, an enterprise that he later sold. In the mid-1990s, when he launched a plan to create a new national network, he stayed with Alcalde & Fay.

In the early 1990s, when Iseman joined the firm, she became Paxson Communications’ chief lobbyist, Paxson said. Paxson, now known as ION Media Networks, has paid Alcalde & Fay more than $1 million since 1998.

Paxson saw no particular significance in the meeting with McCain before his penning the FCC letters. “Vicki Iseman, probably between myself and (Paxson Communications President) Dean Goodman at that time, took us in to see a thousand senators and congressmen,” Paxson said. “She was our lobbyist. She was there and helped.”

Stephen Ohlemacher
Associated Press
February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Democratic superdelegates are starting to follow the voters — straight to Barack Obama.

In just the past two weeks, more than two dozen of them have climbed aboard his presidential campaign, according to a survey by The Associated Press. At the same time, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s are beginning to jump ship, abandoning her for Obama or deciding they now are undecided.

The result: He’s narrowing her once-commanding lead among these “superdelegates,” the Democratic office holders and party officials who automatically attend the national convention and can vote for whomever they choose.

As Obama has reeled off 11 straight primary victories, some of the superdelegates are having second — or third — thoughts about their public commitments.

Take John Perez, a Californian who first endorsed John Edwards and then backed Clinton. Now, he says, he is undecided.

“Given where the race is at right now, I think it’s very important for us to play a role around bringing the party together around the candidate that people have chosen, as opposed to advocating for our own choice,” he said in an interview.

Clinton still leads among superdelegates — 241 to 181, according to the AP survey. But her total is down two in the past two weeks, while Obama’s is up 25. Since the primaries started, at least three Clinton superdelegates have switched to Obama, including Rep. David Scott, of Georgia, who changed his endorsement after Obama won 80 percent of the primary vote in Scott’s district. At least two other Clinton backers have switched to undecided.

None of Obama’s have publicly strayed, according to the AP tally.

There are nearly 800 Democratic superdelegates, making them an important force in a nomination race this close. Both campaigns are furiously lobbying them.

“Holy buckets!” exclaimed Audra Ostergard, of Nebraska. “Michelle Obama and I are playing phone tag.”

Billi Gosh, a Vermont superdelegate who backs Clinton, got a phone call from the candidate herself this week.

“As superdelegates, we have the opportunity to change our mind, so she’s just connecting with me,” Gosh said. “I couldn’t believe she was able to fit in calls like that to her incredibly busy schedule.”

In Utah, two Clinton superdelegates said they continue to support the New York senator — for now.

“We’ll see what happens,” said Karen Hale. Likewise, fellow superdelegate Helen Langan said, “We’ll see.”

Other supporters are more steadfast.

“She’s still in the race, isn’t she? So I’m still supporting her,” said Belinda Biafore, a superdelegate from West Virginia.

Obama has piled up the most victories in primaries and caucuses, giving him the overall lead in delegates, 1,362 to 1,266.5. Clinton’s half delegate came from the global primary sponsored by the Democrats Abroad.

It will take 2,025 delegates to secure the nomination at this summer’s national convention in Denver. If Clinton and Obama continue to split delegates in elections, neither will reach the mark without support from the superdelegates.

That has the campaigns fighting over the proper role for superdelegates, who can support any candidate they want. Obama argues it would be unfair for them to go against the outcome of the primaries and caucuses.

“I think it is important, given how hard Senator Clinton and I have been working, that these primaries and caucuses count for something,” Obama said during Thursday night’s debate in Austin, Texas.

Clinton argues that superdelegates should exercise independent judgment.

“These are the rules that are followed, and you know, I think that it will sort itself out,” she said during the debate. “We will have a nominee, and we will have a unified Democratic Party, and we will go on to victory in November.”

Behind the scenes, things can get sticky.

David Cicilline, the mayor of Providence, R.I., indicated this week that his support for Clinton might be wavering after — he contended — members of her campaign urged him to cave to the demands of a local firefighters union ahead of her weekend appearance there. The firefighters, in a long-running contract dispute with Cicilline, have said they would disrupt any Clinton event the mayor attends. A Clinton spokeswoman said the campaign would never interfere in the mayor’s city decisions.

Obama has been helped by recent endorsements from several labor unions, including the Teamsters on Wednesday.

“He’s our guy,” said Sonny Nardi, an Ohio superdelegate and the president of Teamsters Local 416 in Cleveland.

The Democratic Party has named about 720 of its 795 superdelegates. The remainder will be chosen at state party conventions in the spring. AP reporters have interviewed 95 percent of the named delegates, with the most recent round of interviews taking place this week.

The superdelegates make up about a fifth of the overall delegates. As Democratic senators, both Clinton and Obama are superdelegates.

So is Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, which is one reason his phone rings often.

He is a black mayor, and Obama has been winning about 90 percent of black votes. His state has a March 4 primary with 141 delegates at stake. The Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, is stumping hard for Clinton — and perhaps a spot on the national ticket.

A phone call from former President Clinton interrupted Mallory’s dinner on a recent Saturday.

“I continue to get calls from mayors, congresspeople, governors, urging me one way or another,” said Mallory, who is still mulling his decision. “The celebrities will be next. I guess Oprah will call me.”

‘Supers’ owe party a conscientious vote

John Farmer
Newark Star-Ledger
February 23, 2008

If the media (hateful word) are to be believed, the Democratic Party’s 796 superdelegates are tied up in knots over whom to support for the presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, the front-runner, or Sen. Hillary Clinton, the fast-fading former front-runner.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Being named a superdelegate was deemed an honor; it got you to the Democratic convention without the indignity of having to risk repudiation by pledging in advance to a candidate who might get shellacked.

It was freebie – a plum piece of party patronage.

Everyone wanted to be a superdelegate in years past. But those seats are reserved for the elected elite (governors, senators, representatives, mayors et al.) and party bigwigs (national and state chairmen and chairwomen). This year, however, some “supers” may feel a bit like Abraham Lincoln’s description of the fellow who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he’d just as soon have walked,” said Honest Abe.

This year this safest, most sought-after of political plums comes with some risk: the real possibility that the “supers” will be forced at the national convention in August to decide who’s to be the nominee – Obama or Clinton.

Whom to anger and alienate, in other words: women, the Emily’s List and Code Pink crowd and the Clinton government in exile by backing Obama, or African-Americans, the thousands of new party shock troops on the college campuses and liberal reformers in general by opting for Clinton?

It could be a critical consideration in how some “supers” vote because many will have to face the voters themselves in their states or congressional districts this fall.

Now about those “supers” and how they came about. The whole notion of superdelegates – with power to override the decision of millions of Democratic votes cast in state primaries and caucuses – seems out of step with a party so politically correct that it insists convention seats be divided close to equally between men and women. The idea of superdelegates seems, well, undemocratic.

And it is, actually. But the “supers” came into being to remedy what party elders perceived as democracy run amok in the nominating process, particularly at the 1972 convention. That year, liberals, in an orgy of excess, expelled the party’s strongest local leader, Mayor Richard J. Daily of Chicago; radically rewrote the party platform; and carried the convention into the wee hours of the morning, losing a national television audience in the process and crippling their already weak nominee, George McGovern.

The nominating process, the party’s Washington-based establishment decided, needed adult supervision – namely a contingent of sage elders with the power to undo any damage a runaway convention like the 1972 gathering might do.

It’s not the first time party elders have taken things into their own hands to save a Democratic convention from its own bad judgment. In 1952, Sen. Estes Kefauver dominated the Democratic primaries, defeating even President Harry Truman. He was the people’s choice. But rather than let the prize go to the erratic Kefauver, a coalition of Democratic big-city bosses used their muscle to give the nomination to Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson {AKA – “I Love The Gov”}.

Stevenson lost. No Democrat had a chance that year. But Stevenson vindicated the bosses by mounting one of the most eloquent and farsighted campaigns ever run, as evident in collections of his speeches that year.

The superdelegates will face a much tougher choice this year if it all comes down to their decision. Obama and Clinton are credible candidates, unlike Kefauver. But the decision will be difficult because of the choice posed by Clinton and Obama – between race and gender and even generations and between one candidate offering a proven past and another offering an uncharted and different future.

What will guide the “supers” in any such decision? In the best of all worlds, they will heed the wisdom of Edmund Burke, the most eloquent Irish voice ever raised in the British Parliament in explaining to his Bristol district why he’d voted in the nation’s interest and not in theirs or even his own. What any elected representative owes his constituents, Burke said, is “his unbiased opinion, his enlightened conscience (and) these he ought not to sacrifice to you.”

What are the odds the “supers” will follow the Burkean model? Not good, is my guess. More likely they’ll do the smart, expedient thing and vote the way the folks back home voted. Why take a risk?

It’s like the wise guys say: The race isn’t always to the swift or the struggle to the strong. But that’s sure the way to bet it.

Turks launch offensive into Iraq

Thousands of troops take on Kurdish rebels

Army tanks move along a road near the Iraqi border in southeastern Turkey on Friday. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Selcan Hacaoglu and Christopher Torchia
Associated Press
February 23, 2008

CIZRE, Turkey – Supported by air power, Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq on Friday in their first major ground incursion against Kurdish rebel bases in nearly a decade. But Turkey sought to avoid confrontation with U.S.-backed Iraq, saying the guerrillas were its only target.

The offensive, which started late Thursday after aircraft and artillery blasted suspected rebel targets, marked a dramatic escalation in Turkey’s fight with the PKK rebel group even though Turkish officials described the operation as limited.

A military officer of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq said on condition of anonymity that several hundred Turkish soldiers had crossed the border. The coalition has satellites as well as drones and other surveillance aircraft at its disposal.

Sky-Turk television said about 2,000 Turkish soldiers were in Iraq, operating against rebel camps about two miles in from the border. NTV television said a total of 10,000 soldiers were inside Iraq in an operation that had extended six miles past the frontier. The activity was reportedly occurring about 60 miles east of Cizre, a major town near the border with Iraq.

It was not possible to independently confirm the size or scope of the attack on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is considered a terrorist group by the United States and European Union. CNN-Turk television, citing Turkish security officials, said the operation could last two weeks.

Late in the day, the Turkish military said five of its soldiers and 24 rebels had died in a clash inside Iraq and estimated at least 20 more rebels were killed by artillery and helicopter gunships. It said sporadic fighting was continuing.

Earlier, PKK spokesman Ahmad Danas said two Turkish soldiers were killed and eight wounded in clashes along the 240-mile border, but said nothing about rebel casualties. There was no way to confirm either report independently.

The advance was the first confirmed Turkish military ground operation in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Turkey’s army is believed to have carried out unacknowledged “hot pursuits” in recent years, with small groups of troops staying in Iraq for as little as a few hours or a day.

The PKK militants are fighting for autonomy in predominantly Kurdish southeastern Turkey and have carried out attacks on Turkish targets from bases in the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The conflict started in 1984 and has claimed as many as 40,000 lives.

Turkey’s government has complained that Iraqi and U.S. authorities weren’t doing enough to stop guerrilla operations. The Turkish air force has been staging air raids on PKK forces in the north since December with the help of intelligence provided by the U.S., a NATO ally.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he called his Iraqi counterpart, Nouri al-Maliki, on Thursday night to give him advance warning of the operation. Erdogan said he later briefed President Bush in a telephone call.

Confirming the advance notice, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the Bush administration was urging Turkey to show restraint.

Froma Harrop
The Providence Journal
February 22, 2008

“NAFTA bad” has become Democratic shorthand to explain the misery spreading through America’s industrial heartland.

Barack Obama threw this punch at Hillary Clinton: “She says, well, speeches don’t put food on the table. Well, you know what? NAFTA didn’t put food on the table in Youngstown, either.” He was trying to tie her to Bill Clinton’s role in pushing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has called NAFTA “a mistake” and demanded a “time out” on new trade agreements.

May I suggest a “time out” on bashing free trade with our Canadian and Mexican neighbors? Life would be awfully easy if NAFTA were the problem. All you’d have to do is pull out.

The evidence points to NAFTA being mostly good for the countries involved. And if American factory workers want to see where their jobs have gone, they’d do better to look east than south. Labor may be cheaper in Mexico, but it’s cheaper still in Asia. Chinese workers make about a quarter of what their Mexican counterparts earn.

In 2007, the U.S. trade deficit with China hit $256 billion. The deficit with Mexico, despite reaching an all-time high of $74 billion, was less than a third as big, and a lot of it was from buying Mexican oil. The U.S. trade deficit with Canada, which also has a lot of oil, was not far behind at $64 billion.

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, Mexico lost much of any advantage that NAFTA gave it. Hundreds of Mexican factories have since closed and also moved to China.

But somehow the populist anger against trade tends to get trained on Latin America. We saw all the outrage heaped on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, in 2005. The combined economies of those five poor countries, plus the Dominican Republic, roughly equaled that of New Haven, Conn.

More recently, the free-trade agreement with Peru has been denounced as “a NAFTA-style trade deal.” Peru’s gross domestic economy is the size of Utah’s. Clinton and Obama, despite their campaign rhetoric, voted for the accord and were right to do so.

NAFTA knockers who fear sounding anti-Mexican often argue that free trade has been bad for Mexico, as well. They offer vivid examples, such as the peasant farmers protesting the end of tariffs on U.S. corn. Corn production is easily mechanized and relies on abundant water. That gives U.S. farmers a competitive advantage.

But NAFTA has opened the enormous U.S. market to Mexican avocado growers – who now call their fruit “green gold.” For avocados and other produce that requires picking by hand and therefore much farm labor, Mexicans have an advantage. In fact, Mexican farm exports to the United States and Canada have tripled since 1994.

Mexico’s gross domestic product has doubled in the last 10 years, poverty is down, and the march to social liberalization continues. Mexico is no longer a very poor country – it just seems so next to us.

Revisiting NAFTA won’t fix what hurts the Ohio River Valley. A better approach would be universal health coverage that protects laid-off workers from total economic meltdown. A more vigorous program for job retraining would also help. And yes, Democrats are right to denounce tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

The sight of closed American factories – those broken windows and weed-covered parking lots – sickens the soul. The inescapable reality, though, is that the jobs that were going were going, if not to the Caribbean and Latin America, then to Asia. Wouldn’t it be in America’s interests to help our neighbors get the work?

Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
February 22, 2008

The resignation of Fidel Castro is more promising for the burnishing of his legacy than the mostly septuagenarian Cuban hard-liners in Miami and their fawning allies in the Bush administration would like to believe. After all, Mao Zedong is still honored in communist China, the fastest growing capitalist power in the world, and former KGB agent Vladimir Putin is, at least for now, a very popular elected Russian leader.

Those hoping for a “freedom flotilla” of Cuban exiles returning to remake Havana in the image of 1959, threatening the very future of Las Vegas with legalized prostitution as well as gambling, are likely to be disappointed. Odds are that Castro’s successors, beginning with his rhetoric-weary brother, are likely to finally get serious, after decades of fitful starts and reversals, about ending the grip of a moribund statist economy.

Reform leading significantly down the path of the Chinese model, or more appropriately Venezuela, which has thrown a lifeline to the ailing Cuban economy, is more likely than sudden upheaval.

But those changes will come too late to justify the suffering of the Cuban people for half a century at the hands of a revolutionary, as arrogant as he is idealistic, who witnessed his vision founder on the rocks of an incredibly cynical U.S. policy. Prime responsibility for that suffering does go to the Colossus of the North, which in the pursuit of economic exploitation and Cold War paranoia, consistently preferred Latin American dictatorships to serious experiments in popular rule and strangled the Cuban economy with an embargo in place for the almost five decades since Castro dared move against the U.S. corporations that claimed to own much of the island.

If Castro had attempted to listen to the better angels of his fervid imagination and pursued the path of democratic socialism rather than communist dictatorship, his effort most likely would have been subverted by the CIA, as was the case throughout the world – but it was an effort worth making.

That was the promise of Castro’s famous 1953 speech, as he defended himself following the attack on the Moncada Barracks. It was offered as a jailed young revolutionary dreaming of genuine populist power, and even he must have doubts as to whether, as he predicted back then, “history will absolve me” for the price paid in individual freedom for the revolution’s survival in power.

Not that the United States was likely to easily accommodate any populist challenge, as has been shown by the hysterical reaction to Venezuela’s finally sharing some of the oil loot with the poor. The failure of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution to provide a democratic socialist alternative was sealed by the decision of John F. Kennedy, that inexplicable hero of American liberalism, to invade an island that posed no threat to the United States. The United States had backed the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and the Kennedy administration even enlisted Mafia thugs, who had the run of Havana under Batista, in a failed attempt to assassinate Castro.

Only months into his presidency, Kennedy ramped up the Cold War that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower had done his best to tamp down by committing the United States to military confrontation on opposite ends of the world.

In a subversion of Eisenhower’s decision not to send U.S. troops to Vietnam, Kennedy lied to the American public as to the purpose of his decision to send “flood control” advisers to Saigon as well as the U.S. complicity in the death of Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. puppet once proclaimed the George Washington of Vietnam and then summarily murdered in a hit job overseen by Kennedy’s CIA operatives. And just as Eisenhower had resisted calls to overthrow Castro in reprisal for his nationalizing American-owned power grids, nickel mines and sugar plantations in Cuba, Kennedy, in the first months of his administration, authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Yes, the dumbest moves of the Cold War were authorized by a lionized Democratic president and accelerated by his successor, another grand Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Both, as proven by the record of memoirs, academic research and, in Johnson’s case, White House tapes, were motivated by a fear of appearing weaker on national security than their Republican rivals. It provides a cautionary tale in considering the current presidential sweepstakes.

How easy it is to claim to champion universal human rights when you exempt your own country from judgment. When did the United States ever care about human rights in Cuba, or anywhere in Latin America before Castro, if it conflicted with the rape of the region’s resources? And what a mockery we have made of the cause of democratic rule when our president, twice elected by the people, has created one of the world’s most fearsome symbols of torture on the U.S. “liberated” territory of Guantanamo, Cuba.

In Ohio, Clinton Has Small Edge

By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 22, 2008; A07

AUSTIN, Feb. 21 — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, facing a pair of big Democratic primary tests on March 4 that could determine the fate of her presidential candidacy, is deadlocked with Sen. Barack Obama here in Texas and holds a slender lead over him in Ohio, according to two new Washington Post-ABC News polls.

The closeness of the races in Texas and Ohio underscores the challenges facing Clinton over the next 12 days of campaigning as she seeks to end Obama’s double-digit winning streak in their battle for the Democratic nomination. Those victories have given Obama a lead in delegates to the national convention and have put Clinton’s candidacy at risk unless she can rack up a string of big victories of her own.

In Ohio, Clinton leads Obama in the new poll by 50 percent to 43 percent, a significant but tenuous advantage given the shifts that have taken place in advance of previous primaries as candidates intensified their campaigns. In Texas, the race is about even, with Clinton at 48 percent and Obama at 47 percent.

In recent contests in Virginia and Wisconsin, Obama cut into Clinton’s coalition, a potentially significant change in the Democratic race. At this point in Ohio and Texas, Clinton is doing better than she did in those states among her more reliable voters, but she has yet to make deep inroads into Obama’s core supporters.

The Post-ABC News polls show Clinton with solid support from white women, seniors, voters with less education and those with lower incomes in both Ohio and Texas. She holds a big lead among Hispanics in Texas. Obama has large advantages among independents, African Americans and better-educated voters in both states.

Clinton advisers have expressed optimism about her prospects in the two contests, but the new polls suggest that the momentum Obama achieved in his string of victories has turned both into true battlegrounds. Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, said this week that she must win Texas and Ohio to keep her candidacy viable.

In Ohio, the economy and health care are roughly tied for the top spot on voters’ agendas, while in Texas health care is the clear No. 1 concern, followed by the economy and Iraq. In Ohio, the war in Iraq also comes in third place, but far below the other two; just 9 percent of voters there called it their most important voting issue.

Obama and Clinton supporters in both states are highly enthusiastic about the candidates, and more than seven in 10 said they definitely will stick with the candidate they have embraced. But that leaves a sizable number of likely voters in both states either undecided or open to changing their minds between now and primary day.

The Democratic electorates in the two states hold both candidates in high regard, with more than seven in 10 saying they would be satisfied with Obama or Clinton as their party’s nominee in November. More than six in 10 said they believe either candidate could defeat Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in the general election, although when they were asked who has the better chance, Obama came out ahead by 11 percentage points in both Ohio and Texas.

Democratic voters in both states are split evenly on the attributes they are looking for in a nominee — strength and experience, which have been Clinton’s calling card, or fresh ideas and a new direction, which embody Obama’s message. Almost eight in 10 Democratic voters favoring strength and experience in a candidate back Clinton, and roughly the same proportion of those seeking change opt for Obama.

Most in both states view Clinton as the stronger leader, but majorities in Ohio and Texas said Obama has the experience to serve effectively as president. About four in 10 said Obama does not have the necessary resume.

Obama holds only narrow edges in both states on the question of who “would do the most to bring needed change to Washington,” and about seven in 10 said Clinton would do enough to set a new course.

The two candidates run about evenly as the one more in touch with “people like you.”

On the issues, Clinton has big head-to-head leads on handling the economy and health care, while the two are more closely matched on dealing with the war in Iraq and immigration.

Obama campaign officials have argued that victories in Texas and Ohio alone would not be enough to put Clinton on a path to the nomination. Given Obama’s lead among pledged delegates, now in the neighborhood of 150, Clinton would need big wins to make real gains in the delegate count, because of Democratic Party rules that award delegates proportionally on the basis of the popular vote.

The Texas system in particular, which includes both a primary and caucuses on the same day, may benefit Obama, who has excelled in previous caucuses. Given the closeness of the race, that system will make it all the more difficult for Clinton to come out of the state with a big gain in the overall delegate battle.

But Clinton campaign officials counter that victories for her in Ohio and Texas would seed doubts about Obama because he would by then have lost the vast majority of the most populous states that have voted. The Clinton camp hopes such doubts would prompt the superdelegates — members of Congress, governors and party officials who have automatic voting rights at the convention and who may hold the balance of power in the nominating battle — to rethink the race.

The demographic contours of the two upcoming contests provide insights into what each candidate needs to do over the next two weeks to win.

Clinton holds sizable leads in Ohio and Texas among white women — 17 percentage points in Texas and a whopping 35 points in Ohio. She is doing well among white men in Ohio as well, leading Obama by 12 percentage points in that group. In Texas, Obama leads among white men by 10 points. If Obama were to stay stuck at 40 percent among white men in Ohio, it would be one of his worst showings among those voters since Super Tuesday.

Seniors break for Clinton by wide margins in both states; Obama’s only win so far among older voters was in Virginia, according to network exit polls.

Obama has overwhelming leads, roughly 4 to 1, among black voters in both states. But Clinton has solid support in the Hispanic community in Texas, leading Obama by about 20 percentage points among a group of voters who proved crucial in her victories in California and other Super Tuesday states.

Clinton is seeking to hold two other core groups in her once-strong coalition — less-educated, lower-income white voters and self-identified Democrats. By focusing on the economy, particularly in Ohio, she hopes to prevent the kind of shift to Obama seen in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

The Post-ABC News polls show her with wide leads among white voters with annual family incomes under $50,000 in both states, and with a 16-point advantage among those from union households in Ohio. She leads Obama by 11 points among white voters in Texas who do not have a college degree and by 38 points among those voters in Ohio. Obama will need to cut into that margin in Ohio if he hopes to overtake Clinton there.

Independents lifted Obama to many of his early victories, but he has also carried the support of mainline Democrats since Super Tuesday. These new polls, however, show Clinton leading Obama by double-digit margins among Democrats. Both Ohio and Texas hold open primaries, in which any registered voter may cast a ballot.

The polls were conducted by telephone Feb. 16 to 20, among random samples of 611 Ohio adults and 603 Texas adults likely to participate in the Democratic primaries in those states. Sampling-error margins are plus or minus four percentage points for the full samples; error margins are larger for subgroups.

Cohen reported from Washington. Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta in Washington contributed to this report.

Gabriel Sherman,  The New Republic  Published: Thursday, February 21st
Last night, around dinnertime, The New York Times posted on its website a 3,000-word investigation detailing Senator John McCain’s connections to a telecommunications lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. The controversial piece, written by Washington bureau reporters Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn Thompson, Stephen Labaton, and David Kirkpatrick, and published in this morning’s paper, explores the possibility that the Republican presidential candidate may have had an affair with the 40-year-old blond-haired lobbyist for the telecommunications industry while he chaired the Senate Commerce Committee in the late-1990s.Beyond its revelations, however, what’s most remarkable about the article is that it appeared in the paper at all: The new information it reveals focuses on the private matters of the candidate, and relies entirely on the anecdotal evidence of McCain’s former staffers to justify the piece–both personal and anecdotal elements unusual in the Gray Lady. The story is filled with awkward journalistic moves–the piece contains a collection of decade-old stories about McCain and Iseman appearing at functions together and concerns voiced by McCain’s aides that the Senator shouldn’t be seen in public with Iseman–and departs from the Times’ usual authoritative voice. At one point, the piece suggestively states: “In 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, ‘Why is she always around?’” In the absence of concrete, printable proof that McCain and Iseman were an item, the piece delicately steps around purported romance and instead reports on the debate within the McCain campaign about the alleged affair.What happened? The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn’t. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.
The McCain investigation began in November, after Rutenberg, who covers the political media and advertising beat, got a tip. Within a few days, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet assigned Thompson and Labaton to join the project and, later, conservative beat reporter David Kirkpatrick to chip in as well. Labaton brought his expertise with regulatory issues to the team, and Thompson had done investigative work: At The Washington Post in the 1990s she had edited Michael Isikoff’s reporting on the Paula Jones scandal, and in 2003 she broke the story that Strom Thurmond had secretly fathered a child with his family’s black maid. Having four reporters thrown on the story showed just what a potential blockbuster the paper believed it might have.From the outset, the Times reporters encountered stiff resistance from the McCain camp. After working on the story for several weeks, Thompson learned that McCain had personally retained Bill Clinton’s former attorney Bob Bennett to defend himself against the Times’ questioning. At the same time, two McCain campaign advisers, Mark Salter and Charlie Black, vigorously pressed the Times reporters to drop the matter. And in early December, McCain himself called Keller to deny the allegations on the record.In early December, according to sources with knowledge of the events, Thompson requested a meeting with Bennett to arrange access to the senator and to discuss why the Republican presidential candidate had sought out a criminal lawyer in the first place. Bennett agreed to meet, and on the afternoon of December 18, Labaton, Rutenberg, and Thompson arrived at his Washington office. During a one-hour meeting, according to sources, Bennett admonished the Times reporters to be fair to McCain, especially in light of the whisper campaign that had sundered his 2000 presidential bid in South Carolina. He told them that he would field any questions they had, and promised to provide answers to their queries. Of the reporters in the room, Bennett knew Labaton the best. In the 1990s, Labaton had covered the Whitewater investigation, and Bennett viewed him as a straight-shooting, accurate reporter who could be reasoned with. Rutenberg he knew less well, and Bennett was miffed that Rutenberg had been calling all over Washington asking probing questions about McCain and his dealings with Iseman. The rumors were bound to get out.Two days after that meeting, on December 20, news of the Times‘ unpublished investigation burst into public view when Matt Drudge posted an anonymously sourced item on the Drudge Report. “MEDIA FIREWORKS: MCCAIN PLEADS WITH NY TIMES TO SPIKE STORY,” the headline proclaimed; the story hinted around the core of the allegations and focused on Keller’s decision to hold the piece. “Rutenberg had hoped to break the story before the Christmas holiday,” the item said, quoting unnamed sources, “but editor Keller expressed serious reservations about journalism ethics and issuing a damaging story so close to an election.”Immediately, the media pounced on the budding scandal. “If John McCain has hired Bob Bennett as his lawyer,” one commentator said on Fox News, “that’s a big–you don’t hire Bob Bennett to knock down a press story. You hire Bob Bennett because you have serious legal issues somehow.” On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan speculated that the Times newsroom was the source of the leak. “They’ve been rebuffed and rebuffed on this story, and they say we’ve had it, and they go around then and Drudge pops it just like he popped the Monica Lewinsky story first.”Initially, the McCain campaign refused to acknowledge the Drudge post. But by the afternoon of December 20, McCain denied the allegations at a press conference in Detroit, and his campaign released a statement deriding the Drudge item as “gutter politics.”Rumors of the unpublished Times piece swirled through the Romney campaign, then still locked in a tight dogfight for the Republican nomination. After the Drudge item flashed, Romney’s traveling press secretary Eric Fehrnstrom went to the back of the campaign plane to ask New York Times reporter Michael Luo, who was covering Romney, if he had heard when the piece was running.Inside the Times newsroom, the Drudge item sent the McCain piece into hiding, making it both tightly guarded and “a topic of conversation,” as one staffer put it. “The fact that it ended up on Drudge pushed it into secrecy,” added another staffer. “The paper gets constipated on these things,” a veteran former Times staffer said, describing the editors’ deliberations over whether to run the piece.In late December, according to Times sources, Keller told the reporters and the story’s editor, Rebecca Corbett, that he was holding the piece in part because they could not secure documentary proof of the alleged affair beyond anecdotal evidence. Keller felt that given the on-the-record-denials by McCain and Iseman, the reporters needed more than the circumstantial evidence they had assembled to prove the case. The reporters felt they had the goods.The Drudge item didn’t derail the investigation, however. By late December, the reporters had submitted several pages of written questions to Bennett for comment, and completed a draft of the piece before the New Year. But to their growing frustration, Keller ordered rounds of changes and additional reporting. According to Times sources, Baquet remained an advocate for his reporters and pushed the piece to be published, but sources say Keller wanted a more nuanced story looking less at personal matters and more at questions of Iseman’s lobbying and McCain’s legislative record. (The Washington-New York divide is an eternal rift at the Paper of Record: Baquet had successfully brought stability and investigative acumen to the Washington bureau; with the McCain piece, he was being sucked into his first major struggle with New York.)In mid-January, Keller told the reporters to significantly recast the piece after several drafts had circulated among editors in Washington and New York. After three different versions, the piece ended up not as a stand-alone investigation but as an entry in the paper’s “The Long Run” series looking at presidential candidates’ career histories.It was at about that time, amidst flurries of rumors swirling about the looming Times investigation, that the Times’ McCain beat reporter, Marc Santora, abruptly left the campaign trail after covering the senator for four and a half months, frustrated by the McCain rumors. A rising star at the paper, Santora had been working grueling hours, joining the 2008 election coverage straight from a reporting assignment in Baghdad. As the campaign headed to South Carolina, the site of McCain’s defeat in 2000, Santora emailed the Times‘ deputy Washington editor, Richard Stevenson, to vent about how the rumors were dogging him on the campaign trail, and left the McCain beat on January 10. “The last thing I wanted was to be a pawn in this thing,” Santora told me. “I was exhausted, there were a lot of rumors flying around. I thought the best thing for me to do was take a break.”Santora wasn’t the last casualty of the process. Two weeks ago, in early February, Marilyn Thompson, one of the four reporters working on the McCain investigation quit the Times. Thompson had been a staffer at The Washington Post for 14 years, until 2004. She had spent just six months at the Times and recorded only four bylines before accepting an offer to return to her former employer as an editor overseeing the Post’s accountability coverage of money and politics. According to sources, Thompson became increasingly dispirited with the delays, and worked around the clock through the Christmas vacation on the piece, only to see the investigation sputter. Declining to comment on the investigation itself, Thompson told me her decision to return to the Post “was an opportunity to go back to the place that has been a home to me.” (Thompson celebrated her byline during her last week at the Times. Her final day at the paper is tomorrow.)
Some observers say that the piece, published today, was not ready to roll. On Wednesday evening, much of the cable news commentary focused on the Times’ heavy use of innuendo and circumstantial evidence. This morning, Time magazine managing editor Rick Stengel told MSNBC that he wouldn’t have published such a piece. Since the story broke, the McCain campaign has been doing its best to pin the story on the Times and make the media angle the focus.Indeed, when TNR started reporting on the whereabouts of the story on February 4th, all parties seemed intent on denying its viability. “There’s absolutely no story there. And it’d be a mistake for you to write about a non-story that didn’t run,” McCain adviser Charlie Black told me last week. “Drudge shouldn’t have put that up. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker told me last week the campaign had no further comment beyond the December 20 statement assailing the allegations. According to McCain advisers, the Times reporters hadn’t contacted the campaign about the investigation for several weeks before the piece ran, and only a few reporters from competing news organizations have put in calls on the matter. Two members of the McCain team had contacted TNR’s editor to pressure him not to investigate the story.Of course, each of these sources had reason to keep the story from breaking. But what actually pushed it into publication? The reporters working on the investigation declined to comment. In an email to me on February 19, Keller wrote: “This sounds like a pointless exercise to me–speculating about reporting that may or may not result in an article. But if that’s what Special Correspondents of The New Republic do, speculate away. When we have something to say, we’ll say it in the paper.”Late in the day on February 19, Baquet sent a final draft of the Times piece to Keller and Times managing editor Jill Abramson in New York. After a series of discussions, the three editors decided to publish the investigation. “We published the story when it was ready which is what we always do,” Baquet told TNR this morning. He added: “Nothing forced our hand. Nothing pushed us to move faster other than our own natural desire that we wanted to get a story in the paper that met all of our standards.”When the Times did finally publish the long-gestating investigation last night, the McCain camp immediately tried to train the glare back on the Gray Lady. In fact, McCain advisers stated that TNR’s inquiries pressured the Times to publish its story before it was ready so this magazine wouldn’t scoop the Times’ piece. “They did this because The New Republic was going to run a story that looked back at the infighting there, the Judy Miller-type power struggles — they decided that they would rather smear McCain than suffer a story that made The New York Times newsroom look bad,” Salter told reporters last night in Toledo, Ohio.This morning, after the piece ran, and as TNR’s article was about to be posted, Keller finally responded to repeated requests for interviews. In an e-mail, he defended the substance, and the timing, of the story. “Our policy is, we publish stories when they are ready. ‘Ready’ means the facts have been nailed down to our satisfaction, the subjects have all been given a full and fair chance to respond, and the reporting has been written up with all the proper context and caveats.” Important as the story may indeed turn out to be, it may have provided the Times’ critics with a few caveats too many.
Gabriel Sherman is a Special Correspondent to The New Republic. 

February 21, 2008

Political Memo

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON — When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton meets Senator Barack Obama at a one-on-one debate in Austin on Thursday night, one of her final opportunities to change the course of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, she will again face the challenge that has repeatedly stymied her: how to discredit her popular opponent without hurting herself.

Even now, after a string of defeats, her advisers are divided over how to proceed as they head toward what could be her last stands, in Ohio and Texas on March 4.

Some — led by Mark Penn, her chief strategist — have been pushing Mrs. Clinton to draw sharper and deeper contrasts with Mr. Obama, arguing that she has no other option, campaign officials said.

Others, particularly Mandy Grunwald, her media adviser, have pushed for a less aggressive approach, arguing that attacks would not help Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in an environment in which she is increasingly appearing to struggle, aides said.

This latest division within the campaign reflects intense frustration among Mrs. Clinton’s advisers as they look for ways to turn around their campaign against Mr. Obama, an opponent whose appeal and skills as a candidate caught them by surprise. So far, her own positive message has been outshone by his, and every line of attack on him has fallen short, fizzled or backfired.

In a speech in New York on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton said, in sometimes stark language, that Mr. Obama did not have the credentials to lead the world during a dangerous time. Yet rather than taking the scorched-earth approach that had been urged by some of her associates, much of what she said echoed the criticisms she has aimed at him throughout the campaign.

Her television advertising, a key barometer for testing the tenor of a campaign, includes no overt attacks on Mr. Obama at the moment, though aides said they were still debating whether to raise the volume.

Some of the attacks that her campaign has used — including criticizing Mr. Obama for lifting language from the speech of a friend, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts — do not appear to be the kind of things upon which big elections turn.

And Mr. Penn, asked about the extent to which the campaign might move to draw tough contrasts in the weeks ahead, responded with an e-mail message that suggested Mrs. Clinton did not intend to roll out any new lines of attack now.

“It is really up to the press to dig deeper and vet him now,” he wrote. “That’s not our job.”

Mrs. Clinton woke up Wednesday to the realization that she had lost nearly every advantage she once could claim over Mr. Obama: money, momentum, a lead in national polls and an edge in delegates. Polls suggest that Democrats now view Mr. Obama as more electable than Mrs. Clinton. After her ninth and 10th defeats in a row on Tuesday in Wisconsin and Hawaii, Mrs. Clinton is running out of time.

Her advisers said they still see a road to victory, but acknowledged that it was narrowing. Her goal now, they said, is to do well enough in the remaining states, particularly Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, to close Mr. Obama’s lead among elected delegates as the contest moves beyond the primaries and caucuses and into the hands of elected officials and party leaders who serve as so-called superdelegates.

She is pressing challenges to Mr. Obama’s qualifications as a candidate and as a president, and to a certain extent playing for time, hoping that some unexpected event will alter the dynamics of the race in her favor.

There are no large differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama on big issues, leaving her struggling to try to gain ground by such means as criticizing him for not agreeing to enough debates. And Mr. Obama himself has been a tricky target for the Clinton campaign; Mrs. Clinton’s associates said that with him seeking to become the first African-American president, race has loomed over their prolonged and sometimes tortured debates about how to discredit him.

The deployment of Bill Clinton to raise questions about Mr. Obama’s qualifications opened Mrs. Clinton to attacks of running a racially tinged campaign. That was particularly unwelcome considering the extent to which this campaign had looked to Mr. Clinton to keep Mrs. Clinton competitive among African-American voters.

Lines that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers thought would be effective after testing them with focus groups, like reminding voters that just a few years ago Mr. Obama was a mere Illinois state senator, fell flat. The argument that Mrs. Clinton would bring far more experience to the White House, a selling point her aides once thought would decide this campaign, has taken her only so far.

Other attacks drew ridicule, like when the Clinton campaign tried to build a case that Mr. Obama was being disingenuous about his ambition, presenting evidence that he had dreamed of becoming president when he was in kindergarten.

If it is any consolation to Mrs. Clinton, the Republican National Committee and Senator John McCain of Arizona, his party’s likely nominee, are trying much the same lines of attack as the ones she has used. The committee issued a series of talking points to party leaders, first reported on the political Web site Politico.com, that contended Mr. Obama’s “greatest weakness is inexperience. He is not ready to be commander in chief. He is not ready to be president.”

Republican Party officials and aides to Mr. McCain cautioned it would be a mistake to assume that what did not work for Mrs. Clinton would not work for Mr. McCain either. Mr. McCain is a different messenger — a war hero whose foreign policy credentials are well-established — and the audience for him is a general electorate, which could be quite different than the Democratic primary voters who are now the audience for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama.

“I think it’s the difference between their party and our party,” said Robert M. Duncan, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. “They have a more liberal constituency. And the country is center-right.”

“It comes down to the issues,” Mr. Duncan said. “I honestly believe this: I can’t remember a better contrast for us between our candidate and the Democratic candidates during my lifetime.”

Patrick Healy contributed reporting.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Before 2000 Campaign, Advisers Tried to Bar Her
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Michael D Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 21, 2008; A01

Aides to Sen. John McCain confronted a telecommunications lobbyist in late 1999 and asked her to distance herself from the senator during the presidential campaign he was about to launch, according to one of McCain’s longest-serving political strategists.

John Weaver, who served as McCain’s closest confidant until leaving his current campaign last year, said he met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe in Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain. Association with a lobbyist would undermine his image as an opponent of special interests, aides had concluded.

Members of the senator’s small circle of advisers also confronted McCain directly, according to sources, warning him that his continued relationship with a lobbyist who had business before the powerful Commerce Committee he chaired threatened to derail his presidential ambitions.

The New York Times published a lengthy article on its Web site last night detailing McCain’s ties to Iseman. “It’s a shame that the New York Times has chosen to smear John McCain like this,” said Charles R. Black Jr., a top adviser to McCain’s current presidential campaign and the head of a Washington lobbying firm called BKSH & Associates. “Neither Senator McCain nor the campaign will dignify false rumors and gossip by responding to them. John McCain has never done favors for anyone, not lobbyists or any special interest. That’s a clear 24-year record.”

The McCain campaign put out a statement last night decrying “gutter politics” and saying the story — which had been reported on the Drudge Report Web site in December — was a “a hit and run smear campaign.”

Iseman, 40, who joined the Arlington-based firm of Alcalde & Fay as a secretary and rose to partner within a few years, often touted her access to the chairman of the Senate commerce committee as she worked on behalf of clients such as Cablevision, EchoStar and Tribune Broadcasting, according to several other lobbyists who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

McCain, after his unsuccessful 2000 campaign, has emerged as the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. His reputation as a crusader for Washington reform — forged during almost 30 years in the Senate — is based largely on his stinging critiques of the role played by lobbyists. He routinely decries earmarks, or pet projects, inserted into legislation. He has claimed repeatedly that he has “never, ever done a favor for any lobbyist or special interest group.” It was this reputation that McCain’s closest aides sought to protect.

“We were running a campaign about reforming Washington, and her showing up at events and saying she had close ties to McCain was harmful,” said one aide.

The aide said the message to Iseman that day at Union Station in 1999 was clear: “She should get lost.” The aide said Iseman stood up and left angrily.

Iseman could not be reached at her home or office last night. But Iseman told the Times via e-mail that “I never discussed with him alleged things I had ‘told people,’ that had made their way ‘back to’ him.” The Times reported that she said she never received special treatment from McCain or his office.

Three telecom lobbyists and a former McCain aide, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Iseman spoke up regularly at meetings of telecom lobbyists in Washington, extolling her connections to McCain and his office. She would regularly volunteer at those meetings to be the point person for the telecom industry in dealing with McCain’s office.

Concern about Iseman’s presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain.

Iseman’s bio on her lobbying firm’s Web site notes, “She has extensive experience in telecommunications, representing corporations before the House and Senate Commerce Committees.”

Her partners at Alcalde & Fay include L.A. “Skip” Bafalis, a former five-term Republican congressman from Florida, and Michael A. Brown, the son of former commerce secretary Ronald H. Brown and a former Democratic candidate for mayor of the District.

Its client list is heavy with municipalities and local government entities, which suggests that its major emphasis is on the controversial business of winning narrowly targeted, or “earmarked,” appropriations.

In the years that McCain chaired the commerce committee, Iseman lobbied for Lowell W. “Bud” Paxson, the head of what used to be Paxson Communications, now Ion Media Networks, and was involved in a successful lobbying campaign to persuade McCain and other members of Congress to send letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Paxson.

In late 1999, McCain wrote two letters to the FCC urging a vote on the sale to Paxson of a Pittsburgh television station. The sale had been highly contentious in Pittsburgh and involved a multipronged lobbying effort among the parties to the deal.

At the time he sent the first letter, McCain had flown on Paxson’s corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and had received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm. The second letter came on Dec. 10, a day after the company’s jet ferried him to a Florida fundraiser that was held aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach.

McCain has argued that the letters merely urged a decision and did not call for action on Paxson’s behalf. But when the letters became public, William E. Kennard, chairman of the FCC at the time, denounced them as “highly unusual” coming from McCain, whose committee chairmanship gave him oversight of the agency.

McCain’s campaign denied that Iseman or anyone else from her firm or from Paxson “discussed with Senator McCain” the FCC’s consideration of the station deal. “Neither Ms. Iseman, nor any representative of Paxson and Alcalde and Fay, personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding,” the campaign said.

Iseman and her firm, which includes high-profile Republicans and Democrats, have also represented a number of other companies that have had issues before McCain and the Commerce Committee, including Univision, the Spanish-language television network. Iseman clients have given nearly $85,000 to McCain campaigns since 2000, according to records at the Federal Election Commission.

Staff writer James V. Grimaldi and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

February 21, 2008

By JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEPHEN LABATON

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.

But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.

Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)

Mr. McCain helped found a nonprofit group to promote his personal battle for tighter campaign finance rules. But he later resigned as its chairman after news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his Senate office.

“He is essentially an honorable person,” said William P. Cheshire, a friend of Mr. McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended him during the Keating Five scandal. “But he can be imprudent.”

Mr. Cheshire added, “That imprudence or recklessness may be part of why he was not more astute about the risks he was running with this shady operator,” Charles Keating, whose ties to Mr. McCain and four other lawmakers tainted them in the savings and loan debacle.

During his current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain has played down his attacks on the corrupting power of money in politics, aware that the stricter regulations he championed are unpopular in his party. When the Senate overhauled lobbying and ethics rules last year, Mr. McCain was not among the leaders in the debate.

With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding voters again of his record of reform. His campaign has already begun comparing his credentials with those of Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own pitch to voters.

“I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor can be bought,” Mr. McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For.” “From my earliest youth, I would have considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable. Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life.”

A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to cleanse Washington as well. The episode taught him that “questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics,” he wrote, “and because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption.”

A Formative Scandal

Mr. McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for a Congressional district where he could run.

Mr. Keating, a Phoenix banker and real estate developer, became an early sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring, Mr. McCain recalled in his memoir. “People like that appeal to me,” he continued. “I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of public responsibility are much more admirable qualities.”

During Mr. McCain’s four years in the House, Mr. Keating, his family and his business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The banker gave Mr. McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of Congressional ethics rules (he eventually paid for the trips). They vacationed together in the Bahamas. And in 1986, the year Mr. McCain was elected to the Senate, his wife joined Mr. Keating in investing in an Arizona shopping mall.

Mr. Keating had taken over a California thrift institution, the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, and used its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other investments. He pressed Mr. McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back federal banking regulators. For years, Mr. McCain complied. At Mr. Keating’s request, he wrote several letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board.

By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr. McCain agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” Mr. McCain later lamented in his memoir.

When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 — one of the biggest collapses of the savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion — the Keating Five became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr. McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the others, was reprimanded for “poor judgment” but was re-elected the next year.

Some people involved think Mr. McCain got off too lightly. William Black, one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs. McCain’s investment with Mr. Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her husband. (Mr. McCain had said a prenuptial agreement divided the couple’s assets.) He should not be able to “put this behind him,” Mr. Black said. “It sullied his integrity.”

Mr. McCain has since described the episode as a unique humiliation. “If I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important,” he wrote in his memoir. “I still wince thinking about it.”

A New Chosen Cause

After the Republican takeover of the Senate in 1994, Mr. McCain decided to try to put some of the lessons he had learned into law. He started by attacking earmarks, the pet projects that individual lawmakers could insert anonymously into the fine print of giant spending bills, a recipe for corruption. But he quickly moved on to other targets, most notably political fund-raising.

Mr. McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he was preaching to them so soon after his own repentance. In debates, his party’s leaders challenged him to name a single senator he considered corrupt (he refused).

“We used to joke that each of us was the only one eating alone in our caucus,” said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who became Mr. McCain’s partner on campaign finance efforts.

Mr. McCain appeared motivated less by the usual ideas about good governance than by a more visceral disapproval of the gifts, meals and money that influence seekers shower on lawmakers, Mr. Feingold said. “It had to do with his sense of honor,” he said. “He saw this stuff as cheating.”

Mr. McCain made loosening the grip of special interests the central cause of his 2000 presidential campaign, inviting scrutiny of his own ethics. His Republican rival, George W. Bush, accused him of “double talk” for soliciting campaign contributions from companies with interests that came before the powerful Senate commerce committee, of which Mr. McCain was chairman. Mr. Bush’s allies called Mr. McCain “sanctimonious.”

At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the lobbyists buttons reading “ McCain voted against my bill.” Mr. McCain himself skipped the event, an act he later called “cowardly.”

By 2002, he had succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which transformed American politics by banning “soft money,” the unlimited donations from corporations, unions and the rich that were funneled through the two political parties to get around previous laws.

One of his efforts, though, seemed self-contradictory. In 2001, he helped found the nonprofit Reform Institute to promote his cause and, in the process, his career. It collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlimited donations from companies that lobbied the Senate commerce committee. Mr. McCain initially said he saw no problems with the financing, but he severed his ties to the institute in 2005, complaining of “bad publicity” after news reports of the arrangement.

Like other presidential candidates, he has relied on lobbyists to run his campaigns. Since a cash crunch last summer, several of them — including his campaign manager, Rick Davis, who represented companies before Mr. McCain’s Senate panel — have been working without pay, a gift that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain’s committee staff for seven years before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.

Mr. McCain’s friends dismiss questions about his ties to lobbyists, arguing that he has too much integrity to let such personal connections influence him.

“Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against his own views, I don’t think his personal and social relationships matter,” said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.

Concerns in a Campaign

Mr. McCain’s confidence in his ability to distinguish personal friendships from compromising connections was at the center of questions advisers raised about Ms. Iseman.

The lobbyist, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay, represented telecommunications companies for whom Mr. McCain’s commerce committee was pivotal. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.

Mr. Black said Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman were friends and nothing more. But in 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, “Why is she always around?”

That February, Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene.

A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman’s access to his offices.

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about her.

“Our political messaging during that time period centered around taking on the special interests and placing the nation’s interests before either personal or special interest,” Mr. Weaver continued. “Ms. Iseman’s involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that effort.”

Mr. Weaver added that the brief conversation was only about “her conduct and what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us.” He declined to elaborate.

It is not clear what effect the warnings had; the associates said their concerns receded in the heat of the campaign.

Ms. Iseman acknowledged meeting with Mr. Weaver, but disputed his account.

“I never discussed with him alleged things I had ‘told people,’ that had made their way ‘back to’ him,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said she never received special treatment from Mr. McCain or his office.

Mr. McCain said that the relationship was not romantic and that he never showed favoritism to Ms. Iseman or her clients. “I have never betrayed the public trust by doing anything like that,” he said. He made the statements in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to complain about the paper’s inquiries.

The senator declined repeated interview requests, beginning in December. He also would not comment about the assertions that he had been confronted about Ms. Iseman, Mr. Black said Wednesday.

Mr. Davis and Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s top strategists in both of his presidential campaigns, disputed accounts from the former associates and aides and said they did not discuss Ms. Iseman with the senator or colleagues.

“I never had any good reason to think that the relationship was anything other than professional, a friendly professional relationship,” Mr. Salter said in an interview.

He and Mr. Davis also said Mr. McCain had frequently denied requests from Ms. Iseman and the companies she represented. In 2006, Mr. McCain sought to break up cable subscription packages, which some of her clients opposed. And his proposals for satellite distribution of local television programs fell short of her clients’ hopes.

The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients only when their positions hewed to his principles

A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman’s clients. He introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms. Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.

In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain’s staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain’s staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.

Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising questions about intervening for a patron.

Mr. McCain’s aides released all of his letters to the F.C.C. to dispel accusations of favoritism, and aides said the campaign had properly accounted for four trips on the Paxson plane. But the campaign did not report the flight with Ms. Iseman. Mr. McCain’s advisers say he was not required to disclose the flight, but ethics lawyers dispute that.

Recalling the Paxson episode in his memoir, Mr. McCain said he was merely trying to push along a slow-moving bureaucracy, but added that he was not surprised by the criticism given his history.

“Any hint that I might have acted to reward a supporter,” he wrote, “would be taken as an egregious act of hypocrisy.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

By Glenn Kessler and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 20, 2008; A06

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 19 — A triumphant Sen. John McCain claimed the Republican presidential nomination as his own Tuesday night after easily winning the Wisconsin primary, for the first time acknowledging his success at besting a crowded, fractured field of GOP hopefuls.

McCain slogged through 18 inches of snow in 3-degree Wisconsin weather in the morning. But as the votes were being counted, the senator from Arizona was already celebrating in Ohio his victory over former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Ohio will join Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island in holding primaries in two weeks.

“With confidence and humility . . . I will be our party’s nominee for president of the United States,” McCain declared to his supporters, promising to “wage a campaign with determination, passion and the right ideas for strengthening our country.”

He immediately turned his fire on Democrats, and particularly Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), dismissing what he said was an “eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to the false promises and failed policies of a tired philosophy that trusts in government more than people.”

McCain’s win signaled a coalescing of a Republican electorate that has struggled for a year to find a candidate it likes. He posted one of his best showings among GOP voters, beating Huckabee by 22 points. McCain won among women, men, independents, those who are college-educated and those who are not, according to early exit polls.

Conservative voters split about evenly, a stark improvement for McCain, who has struggled to counter Huckabee’s appeal among evangelicals and other GOP base voters. Huckabee still appeared to be winning among those who said they are “very conservative,” but seven in 10 of those voters said they will be satisfied if McCain is the nominee.

Huckabee also continued to lead McCain among voters who said they want someone who shares their values. But McCain easily topped Huckabee among those who chose the economy, the war in Iraq or terrorism as the most critical issues facing the country.

Before Tuesday’s voting, McCain had 908 delegates to the party’s national convention, and Huckabee had 245. A total of 1,191 is needed to clinch the nomination. There were 40 delegates at stake in Wisconsin and 16 in a second round of primary voting in the state of Washington, which held GOP caucuses on Feb. 9. Results in Washington were unavailable.

Huckabee urged Wisconsin voters to give conservatives a voice by helping him defeat McCain. “If you’re going to vote for me, I don’t care if it snows another three feet — please go vote,” he told supporters.

Meanwhile, Huckabee’s campaign manager was gleefully proclaiming the possibility that the former governor could force an all-out fight at the Republican National Convention this summer. “It’d be great fun,” Ed Rollins said on CNN.

Rollins said in an interview that Huckabee is staying in the race out of an obligation to voters and because he believes in following the rules that have been laid out.

The veteran campaign strategist compared Huckabee’s long-shot bid to Ronald Reagan’s attempts to defeat incumbent Gerald R. Ford in 1976. Reagan lost that effort, but it paved the way for his conservative revolution four years later.

“We’re in this game for the long term,” said Rollins, who was director of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign.

McCain will spend much of the next three days in Ohio, though he will also attend fundraising events in Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. Speaking to reporters after he flew to Ohio’s capital Tuesday afternoon, McCain acknowledged that he still needs to energize a Republican electorate that in recent years has been dismayed by GOP missteps.

“Our base was dispirited by the spending and corruption,” McCain said.

He also sought to explain what has become one of the Democrats’ favorite attack lines — his statement that U.S. troops might need to stay in Iraq for 100 years. He said that he was referring to what he called “an American presence” after Iraqis take over military responsibilities, much like the presence of U.S. troops in Germany and Japan more than 60 years after World War II.

McCain made the same point when, during a January event in New Hampshire, he said that having U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years “would be fine with me.”

Shear reported from Washington.

February 20, 2008

By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The winners of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections said Tuesday that they would take a new approach to fighting Islamic militants by pursuing more dialogue than military confrontation, and that they would undo the crackdown on the media and restore independence to the judiciary.

With nearly complete returns from Monday’s vote giving it the most seats, the party of the assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, led by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, made clear that a new political order prevailed in Pakistan.

Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, said the new Parliament would reverse many of the unpopular policies that fueled the strong protest vote against President Pervez Musharraf and his party.

Bush administration officials said the United States would still like to see Pakistan’s opposition leaders find a way to work with Mr. Musharraf, a staunch ally for more than six years, but conceded that the notion appeared increasingly unlikely.

Though Mr. Zardari said he wanted a government of national consensus, he ruled out working with anyone from the previous government under Mr. Musharraf.

Instead he said he was talking to the leader of the other main opposition party, Nawaz Sharif, whose party finished second, about forming a coalition.

Although the resounding victory of the two parties was broadly welcomed in Pakistan, there were immediate memories of the failings of civilian governments here in the 1990s. American officials were particularly skeptical of Mr. Zardari, who has faced corruption charges in Pakistan and abroad and has come to his current position of leadership only through his wife’s death.

Mr. Sharif was twice prime minister in the 1990s and faced numerous corruption charges himself after being ousted by Mr. Musharraf in a coup.

Mr. Sharif quickly announced several conditions for joining a coalition. They included the impeachment of Mr. Musharraf and the restoration of the chief justice and other Supreme Court judges suspended by the president in November.

Mr. Zardari was less categorical, not calling for Mr. Musharraf’s impeachment, for instance. The struggle to end military rule and bring a return to democracy is a long, uphill battle, he said.

“We might have to take soft, small steps,” he said at a news briefing at his home in the capital after a meeting of 50 senior members of the party.

Still, the first order of business will be to undo restrictions on the media and restore the independence of the judiciary, he said.

But Mr. Zardari did not specifically call for the reinstatement of the chief justice and his colleagues; there are corruption charges still pending against him.

Though he has little experience in such matters, Mr. Zardari criticized the antiterrorism policies of Mr. Musharraf, saying that he had played a double game that had led to an increase in militancy. “We feel they in the government are running with the hare and hunting with the hounds,” he said.

The two opposition parties share similar views of how to tackle the terrorism problem. The new approach is more likely to be responsive to the consensus of the Pakistani public than was Mr. Musharraf’s and is more likely to shun a heavy hand by the military and rely on dialogue with the militants.

Mr. Zardari said his party would seek talks with the militants in the tribal areas along the Afghan border, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have carved out a stronghold, as well as with the nationalist militants who have battled the Pakistani Army in Baluchistan Province.

Many in Pakistan, including several parties that boycotted the elections, have been strongly opposed to Mr. Musharraf’s use of the army to battle tribesmen in the name of the campaign against terrorism, which is seen as an American agenda.

“We will have a dialogue with those who are up in the mountains and those who are not in Parliament,” Mr. Zardari said. “We want to take all those along who are against Pakistan and working against Pakistan.”

Some analysts saw opportunities for the United States if a new civilian government could persuade Pakistanis to get behind the fight against the militants. But past attempts to deal with the militants have left them stronger, and any policy too accommodating is likely to raise concern in Washington.

A former chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, said the election of a new government should help the United States if it was looking to work with moderate forces.

“It’s an opportunity to rejuvenate this whole relationship,” General Karamat said. “What we are seeing through these elections is moderate and liberal forces, which is absolutely great.”

Other analysts agreed. The emergence of a moderate Parliament should be good news for the United States, said Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani military analyst based in Washington.

“If Parliament will now have a stronger hand than before in national decision-making, then the United States should be pleased, since it will not have to beg and cajole Pakistan to act in its own interests against the terrorists,” Mr. Nawaz said.

But the results left the Bush administration, which has leaned heavily on Mr. Musharraf, scrambling to find new partners in the campaign against Islamic militants in the region. The election of a hostile Parliament is expected to further marginalize the president, or even push him out, in a country where power traditionally lies with elected prime ministers or the military chiefs who have overthrown them.

Mr. Musharraf was re-elected to another five-year term by national and provincial assemblies in October, but the constitutionality of his standing for office was vigorously contested. The new Parliament could revive that challenge and even impeach him.

Election returns, which were nearly complete, showed the Pakistan Peoples Party led by Mr. Zardari earning 87 of the 268 contested seats in the National Assembly, while Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, got 66 seats.

The former governing party that had supported Mr. Musharraf, what is known as the Q faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, won only 38 seats. It was a crashing fall for the party. At least 10 of its ministers and senior leaders lost seats.

The remaining seats were divided among seven smaller parties and factions and 27 independent candidates. Ten seats remain uncounted, according to the Election Commission.

Mr. Zardari hailed the results as proof of the national appeal of his Pakistan Peoples Party. It won seats in all four provincial assemblies and is in a position to participate in governments in three of them. “We believe that no other party has the leadership and the ability to get Pakistan out of this difficulty,” he said.

Mr. Musharraf told visiting United States senators that he had accepted the election results and the defeat of his party, and would work with any coalition government that was formed.

But Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif have reasons to bear grudges. Mr. Zardari, who returned from exile only after Ms. Bhutto’s death, spent eight years in prison on murder and corruption charges under the government of Mr. Sharif. Mr. Musharraf was army chief at the time.

Mr. Sharif was thrown out of the government in 1999 by Mr. Musharraf, who mounted a coup and arrested and then exiled him. Many Pakistanis agree that the governments of Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif did not distinguish themselves. Both were ridden with corruption.

Neither Mr. Zardari nor Mr. Sharif ran for parliamentary seats themselves and so cannot immediately serve as prime minister. Mr. Zardari is expected to run for a seat to qualify, though, and Mr. Sharif could do the same.

For now, the deputy leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, is one candidate for prime minister. The choice would clearly depend on the coalition forged, however.

Mr. Zardari faces rumblings and distrust in his party, and it was not clear how well the negotiations between him and Mr. Sharif would proceed. The talks, which are expected to begin soon, are likely to be protracted.

Mr. Zardari discussed Pakistan’s options with the militants in an interview last week. He said the campaign against terrorism needed to be redefined in Pakistan. He said it needed to be better explained to the people so they understood it was not America’s war they were fighting, but a threat to their own nation.

Mr. Zardari said that Mr. Musharraf had lost popular support for the campaign and that the morale of the army had plummeted, asserting that only a popularly elected government with the backing of Parliament could reverse that.

He added that a counterinsurgency should be waged by the police in the tribal areas, and that Pakistan had to train and equip its police forces to curb much of the lawlessness. The army is a blunt instrument and should be used selectively so that militants are awed by its power, he said.

Jane Perlez reported from Lahore, Pakistan, and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

February 20, 2008

By PATRICK HEALY and JEFF ZELENY

Senator Barack Obama decisively beat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucuses on Tuesday night, accelerating his momentum ahead of crucial primaries in Ohio and Texas and cutting into Mrs. Clinton’s support among women and union members.

With the two rivals now battling state by state over margins of victory and allotment of delegates, surveys of voters leaving the Wisconsin polls showed Mr. Obama, of Illinois, making new inroads with those two groups as well as middle-age voters and continuing to win support from white men and younger voters — a performance that yielded grim tidings for Mrs. Clinton, of New York.

On the Republican side, Senator John McCain of Arizona won a commanding victory over Mike Huckabee in the Wisconsin contest and led by a wide margin in Washington State. All but assured of his party’s nomination, Mr. McCain immediately went after Mr. Obama during a rally in Ohio, deriding “eloquent but empty” calls for change.

For Mr. Obama, Hawaii was his 10th consecutive victory, a streak in which he has not only run up big margins in many states but also pulled votes from once-stalwart supporters of Mrs. Clinton, like low- and middle-income people and women.

Mrs. Clinton wasted no time in signaling that she would now take a tougher line against Mr. Obama — a recognition, her advisers said, that she must act to alter the course of the campaign and define Mr. Obama on her terms.

In a speech in Ohio shortly after the polls closed in Wisconsin, she alluded to what her campaign considers Mr. Obama’s lack of experience, and his support for a health insurance plan that would not initially seek to cover all Americans.

“This is the choice we face: One of us is ready to be commander in chief in a dangerous world,” Mrs. Clinton said in the remarks, which she also planned to expand upon in a speech in New York City on Wednesday. “One of us has faced serious Republican opposition in the past — and one of us is ready to do it again.” Mrs. Clinton did not mention the Wisconsin results; she did, however, call Mr. Obama to congratulate him on the victory.

As Mrs. Clinton was speaking, Mr. Obama appeared on stage at a rally in Texas, effectively cutting her off as cable television networks dropped her in midsentence, a telling sign of the showmanship power of a front-runner.

“Houston, I think we achieved liftoff here,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of 20,000 people in that city as he hailed the voters of Wisconsin. “The change we seek is still months and miles away, and we need the good people of Texas to help us get there.”

With 90 percent of the electoral precincts in Wisconsin reporting, Mr. Obama had 58 percent of the vote to Mrs. Clinton’s 41 percent. On the Republican side, Mr. McCain had 55 percent to Mr. Huckabee’s 37 percent. And early returns in Washington State showed him with 48 percent of the vote to Mr. Huckabee’s 21 percent. In Hawaii, Mr. Obama had 75 percent of the vote, with 71 of precincts reporting, while Mrs. Clinton had 24 percent.

In Wisconsin, the survey of voters leaving the polls found that Democrats believed Mr. Obama would be more likely than Mrs. Clinton, by 63 percent to 37 percent, to defeat the Republican nominee in the fall.

Her latest losses narrowed even further Mrs. Clinton’s options and leaves her little, if any, room for error. Her road to victory is now a cliff walk.

By the calculation of her own aides, she now almost certainly will need to win the next two big contests, Texas and Ohio on March 4, as well as Pennsylvania on April 22 in order to maintain a viable claim to the nomination and stop so-called superdelegates from breaking for Mr. Obama. But there has been evidence this month that Mr. Obama is building momentum with each victory, and recent polls have suggested that Mrs. Clinton’s once-large lead in Ohio and Texas is shrinking.

What is more, it may not be enough at this point for Mrs. Clinton to simply win Ohio and Texas. She needs delegates to catch up with Mr. Obama; under the rules by which the Democratic Party allocates delegates, she will need to win double-digit victories to pick up enough delegates to close the gap.

Finally, Mrs. Clinton continues to struggle to find a way to try to raise questions about Mr. Obama and stop what has been a rush of voters to his side. Her Tuesday night speech about Mr. Obama’s experience level was one of her toughest yet; still, she has been making similar arguments for months now, and they have not caught fire thus far.

With his Wisconsin victory, Mr. Obama moved into a lead over Mrs. Clinton in delegates; going into the vote, he had 1,078 delegates to Mrs. Clinton’s 1,081, according to a count by The New York Times. Wisconsin had 74 pledged delegates in play, while Hawaii had 20 pledged delegates.

Although Wisconsin borders Mr. Obama’s home state, Illinois, the primary presented a challenge because of the large share of blue-collar workers, a group that he has struggled to win over. Yet the results represented a turnaround for Mr. Obama: About one-third of voters in the Democratic primary came from union households, and they split their votes evenly between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, according to a statewide exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool.

By contrast, in the Feb. 5 primaries in New Jersey and California, two states Mrs. Clinton won, the percentage of Democratic voters from union households was also about one-third of those surveyed by Edison/Mitofsky, but they supported Mrs. Clinton more strongly than in Wisconsin.

About 6 in 10 white men voted for Mr. Obama, while white women split evenly between him and Mrs. Clinton, the polls showed. Mrs. Clinton turned in another strong performance with voters over the age of 60, meanwhile.

In forging ahead, Clinton advisers say she is determined to win strongly among women and union members in Ohio and Texas, and cited a number of factors that they were counting on: Mrs. Clinton’s performance in televised debates in each state this month, including one in Texas on Thursday; her increasingly populist message at campaign rallies; attacks by her and her advisers on Mr. Obama’s authenticity; and her continuing portrayal of him as inexperienced.

On the Republican side, Mr. McCain declared victory in Wisconsin shortly after the polls closed and continued rolling past his last major challenger, Mr. Huckabee, toward the goal of winning the 1,191 delegates needed to seal the party’s nomination.

But surveys of voters gave evidence of misgivings about his candidacy: more than 4 in 10 voters said Mr. McCain was not conservative enough; conservative voters split their votes evenly between the two men. And Mr. Huckabee won a majority of the vote of the one-third of evangelical voters who participated in the Republican primary.

Addressing a packed ballroom in Columbus, Ohio, Mr. McCain said to cheers that he would urge the nation not to be “deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history” and warned against risking “the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate.” He did not even allude to Mrs. Clinton.

Both Democrats have been increasingly sounding populist notes recently to reflect the economic concerns of voters. In her remarks in Youngstown on Tuesday night, Mrs. Clinton allied herself with Americans working on the “night shift” — a phrase that is also the title of a new advertisement that began running in Ohio on Tuesday night. The ad ends with an image of Mrs. Clinton doing paperwork, illuminated by a lamp, as a narrator says, “She’s worked the night shift, too.”

While Mrs. Clinton drew some of her largest crowds to date in Texas, her decision to spend time away from Wisconsin troubled some of her supporters, who believed she had erred in not campaigning enough in states she lost recently, like Maine.

Mr. Obama’s audiences, meanwhile, were filled with a tapestry of supporters — young and old, black and white — many of whom said they had been following the presidential race as it unfolded in neighboring states like Iowa.

Mary Liedtke, a defense lawyer in Eau Claire, Wis., said she had been a supporter of Mrs. Clinton. But in the final weeks of the Iowa caucus campaign, she said she had become inspired by Mr. Obama’s supporters.

“Some elderly women I’ve heard say, ‘I want to see a woman president before I die,’ and I know that’s why some of them are supporting Hillary,” Ms. Liedtke said in an interview after seeing Mr. Obama last weekend in her town.

“But you know what? That’s a selfish reason to vote for a president just because you want to see a woman before you die,” she added. “What about the kids coming up? I feel we should vote for the young people.”

John M. Broder contributed reporting from Ohio, and Megan Thee from New York.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

February 19, 2008

By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States.

Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, the former speaker of Parliament and six ministers.

Official results are expected Tuesday, but early returns indicated that the vote would usher in a prime minister from one of the opposition parties, and opened the prospect of a Parliament that would move to undo many of Mr. Musharraf’s policies and that may even try to remove him.

Early results showed equal gains for the Pakistan Peoples Party, whose leader, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated on Dec. 27, and the Pakistan Muslim League-N, the faction led by Nawaz Sharif, like Ms. Bhutto a former prime minister. Each party may be in a position to form the next government.

The results were interpreted here as a repudiation of Mr. Musharraf as well as the Bush administration, which has staunchly backed him for more than six years as its best bet in the campaign against the Islamic militants in Pakistan. American officials will have little choice now but to seek alternative allies from among the new political forces emerging from the vote.

Politicians and party workers from Mr. Musharraf’s party said the vote was a protest against government policies and the rise in terrorism here, in particular against Mr. Musharraf’s heavy-handed way of dealing with militancy and his use of the army against tribesmen in the border areas, and against militants in a siege at the Red Mosque here in the capital last summer that left more than 100 people dead.

Others said Mr. Musharraf’s dismissal last year of the Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who remains under house arrest, was deeply unpopular with the voters.

Mr. Musharraf, who stepped down as army chief last November after being re-elected to another five-year term as president, has seen his standing plummet as the country has faced a determined insurgency by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and a deteriorating economy.

By association, his party suffered badly. The two main opposition parties — the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-N — surged into the gap.

By early Monday night, crowds of Sharif supporters had already begun celebrating as they paraded through the streets of Rawalpindi, the garrison town just outside the capital, Islamabad. Riding on motorbikes and clinging to the backs of minivans, they played music and waved the green flags of Mr. Sharif’s party decorated with the party symbol, a tiger.

From unofficial results the private news channel, Aaj Television, forecast that the Pakistan Peoples Party would win 110 seats in the 272-seat National Assembly, with Mr. Sharif’s party taking 100 seats.

Mr. Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, was crushed, holding on to just 20 to 30 seats. Early results released by the state news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan, also showed the Pakistan Peoples Party to be leading in the number of seats won.

The Election Commission of Pakistan declared the elections free and fair and said the polling passed relatively peacefully, despite some irregularities and scattered violence. Ten people were killed and 70 injured around the country, including one candidate who was shot in Lahore on the night before the vote, Pakistani news channels reported.

Fearful of violence and deterred by confusion at polling stations, voters did not turn out in large numbers. Yet fears from opposition parties that the government would try to rig the elections did not materialize, as the early losses showed.

Official results were not expected until Tuesday morning, but all the parties were already coming to terms with the anti-Musharraf trend in the voting.

At the headquarters of Sheik Rashid Ahmed, the minister of railways and a close friend of the president, his supporters sat gloomily in chairs under an awning, listening to the cheers of their opponents. “Q is finished,” said Tahir Khan, 21, one of the party workers, referring to the pro-Musharraf party.

The party workers said Mr. Ahmed, who was among the ministers who lost their seats, was popular but had suffered from the overwhelming protest vote against Mr. Musharraf and his governing faction.

The results opened a host of new challenges for the Bush administration, which has been criticized in Congress and by Pakistan analysts for relying too heavily on Mr. Musharraf. Even as Mr. Musharraf’s standing plummeted and the insurgency gained strength, senior Bush administration officials praised Mr. Musharraf as a valued partner in the effort against terrorism.

With Mr. Musharraf as both president and head of the Pakistani military — a post he relinquished last November — the administration poured about $1 billion a year in military assistance into Pakistan after 9/11.

After Mr. Musharraf stepped down from the army, the Bush administration still gave him unequivocal support. Last month, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, Richard A. Boucher, told Congress he considered the Pakistani leader indispensable to American interests.

Such fidelity to Mr. Musharraf often raised the hackles of Pakistanis, and the newspapers here were filled with editorials that expressed despair about Washington’s close relationship with the unpopular leader.

Many educated Pakistanis said they were irritated that the Bush administration chose to ignore Mr. Musharraf’s dismissal in November of the Supreme Court chief justice.

The big swing against the Pakistan Muslim League-Q party that supported Mr. Musharraf appeared to bear out the position of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, who has been a critic of the administration’s Pakistan policy.

On his arrival on Sunday to observe the elections, Mr. Biden said: “I don’t buy into the argument that Musharraf is the only one. We have to have more than just a Musharraf policy.”

As a starting point for a new policy, Mr. Biden said the United States needed to show Pakistanis that Washington was interested in more than the campaign against terrorism. He suggested that economic development aid be tripled to $1.5 billion annually.

But Washington could take some comfort in the losses of the Islamic religious parties in the North-West Frontier Province that abut the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have carved out bases.

The greatest blow for Mr. Musharraf came in the strong wave of support in Punjab Province, the country’s most populous, for Mr. Sharif, who has been a bitter rival since his government was overthrown by Mr. Musharraf in a military coup in 1999 and he was arrested and sent into exile.

He returned last November, and although banned from running for Parliament himself, he has campaigned for his party on an openly anti-Musharraf agenda, calling for the president’s resignation and for the reinstatement of Mr. Chaudhry and other Supreme Court judges.

Underscoring the reversal for Mr. Musharraf was the downfall of the powerful Chaudhry family of Punjab Province, who had underwritten his political career by creating the Pakistan Muslim League-Q party for him.

“The myth is broken; it was a huge wave against Musharraf,” said Athar Minallah, a lawyer involved in the anti-Musharraf lawyers’ movement. “Right across the board his party was defeated, in the urban and rural areas. The margins are so big they couldn’t have rigged it even if they tried.”

A few hours after the size of the defeat became clear, the government eased up on the restrictions against Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement that has opposed the president. Mr. Ahsan, who has been under house arrest since last November, when Mr. Musharraf imposed emergency rule for six weeks, found the phones in his house were suddenly reconnected.

“Musharraf should be preparing a C-130 for Turkey,” Mr. Ahsan said, referring to Mr. Musharraf’s statements that he might retire to Turkey, where he spent part of his childhood.

Two politicians close to Mr. Musharraf have said in the past week that the president was well aware of the drift in the country against him and they suggested that he would not remain in office if the new government was in direct opposition to him. “He does not have the fire in the belly for another fight,” said one member of his party. He added that Mr. Musharraf was building a house for himself in Islamabad and would be ready soon to move.

Jane Perlez reported from Lahore, Pakistan, and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad. David Rohde contributed reporting from Peshawar, and Salman Masood from Rawalpindi.

Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Jane Perlez from Lahore. David Rohde contributed reporting from Peshawar, and Salman Masood from Rawalpindi.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

He thinks he could have won in 1972 with a running mate called ‘the most trusted man in America’—Walter Cronkite.

By George F. Will

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:01 PM ET Feb 16, 2008

The former bomber pilot’s spry walk belies his 85 years, he dresses like a boulevardier—gray slacks, blue blazer, shirt with bright-red stripes and white collar—and tucks into a robust breakfast. Long ago, he began shaping the Democrats’ presidential nomination process into the one that has his party’s two contenders locked in a long march to Pennsylvania’s April primary. He has seen important aspects of American politics move in his direction in the 36 years since he lost 49 states to Richard Nixon.

The belittling of George McGovern, especially by Democrats, only waned as memory of him faded after he lost his bid for a fourth Senate term in the 1980 Reagan landslide. But his story is fascinating, and pertinent to current events.

This minister’s son was raised on South Dakota’s parched prairies during the Depression. He remembers hiking home to the town of Mitchell by following the railroad tracks in a blinding dust storm. He was only the second major-party nominee with a Ph.D. (Woodrow Wilson was the first), which he earned at Northwestern University under Arthur Link, Wilson’s foremost biographer.

Like Wilson, a minister’s son, McGovern was a political moralist. He also was a tenacious politician, who, inspired by the untenacious Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign the year before, went to work for the South Dakota Democratic Party in 1953, when it held only two of 110 seats in the state legislature. Just four years later McGovern was in Congress, where his first roll-call vote was in opposition to granting President Eisenhower broad authority for military intervention in the Middle East.

In tumultuous 1968, with the Tet Offensive and two assassinations (of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy) in five months, two insurgent candidates, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, sought the Democratic nomination. It was won by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who competed in no primaries. More than one third of the delegates to the riotous convention in Chicago had been selected in 1967, months before President Lyndon Johnson decided to retire.

McGovern was named chairman of a commission to reform the nomination process, which put the party on a path to the proliferation of caucuses and primaries allocating delegates proportionally rather than winner-take-all—the long, winding path Obama and Clinton are on. In 1972, McGovern became the first winner under the democratized process. Then he was buried by the demos, Nixon vs. McGovern.

Nixon was, McGovern notes, running nationally for the fifth time (only FDR had done that) and was at his pre-Watergate apogee, fresh from the opening to China and a strategic-arms agreement with Moscow. McGovern was bitterly opposed all the way to the Miami convention by the Democratic constituencies he was displacing. He says Barry Goldwater had warned him, “Don’t get fatigued,” but he reached Miami exhausted, lost control of the convention (he delivered his acceptance speech at 2:30 a.m.) and disastrously selected a running mate, Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton, who did not disclose previous psychiatric problems and was forced off the ticket.

Still, McGovern thinks he could have won with a running mate then called “the most trusted man in America”—Walter Cronkite. Before choosing Eagleton, McGovern considered asking Cronkite, who recently indicated he would have accepted.

Bruce Miroff, a political scientist and admirer of McGovern, argues in his new book, “The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party,” that although McGovern’s domestic proposals featured redistributions of wealth, this was Ivy League, not prairie, populism. Branded the candidate of “acid, amnesty and abortion” (the Democrats’ platform, adopted six months before the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade legislated a liberal abortion policy, did not mention abortion), McGovern became the first candidate since the New Deal to lose the Catholic and labor union vote. So 1972, more than 1968, was the hinge of the party’s history. In 1972, Miroff writes, “college-educated issue activists” supplanted the “labor/urban machine coalition.”

George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, had dropped out of high school at age 14. Speaking about McGovern’s 1972 convention, where 39 percent of the delegates had advanced degrees, he said: “We heard from people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odor of Johns about them.” The Reagan Democrats of 1980 were incubated eight years earlier.

McGovern won only 14 percent of Southern white Protestants. This, Miroff notes, made Democrats susceptible four years later to the appeal of a pious Southerner. Thus did a disaster compound itself.

In September 1963, McGovern became the only senator who opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration. He came by his horror of war honorably in 35 B-24 missions over Germany, where half the B-24 crews did not survive—they suffered a higher rate of fatalities than did Marines storming Pacific islands. McGovern was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak-leaf clusters. In his 70s he lost a 45-year-old daughter to alcoholism. Losing a presidential election, he says softly, “was not the saddest thing in my life.” Time confers a comforting perspective, giving consolations to old age, which needs them.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112767

Agency spent millions setting up agents with non-official cover

Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times
February 17, 2008

WASHINGTON – The CIA set up a network of front companies in Europe and elsewhere after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as part of a constellation of “black stations” for a new generation of spies, according to current and former agency officials.

But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA’s principal targets: terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks.

The closures were a blow to two of the CIA’s most pressing priorities after Sept. 11 – expanding its overseas presence and changing the way it deploys spies.

The companies were the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to increase the number of case officers sent overseas under what is known as “non-official cover,” meaning they would pose as employees of investment banks, consulting firms or other fictitious enterprises with no apparent ties to the U.S. government.

But the plan became the source of significant dispute within the agency and was plagued with problems, officials said. The bogus companies were located far from Muslim enclaves in Europe and other targets. Their size raised concern that one mistake would blow the cover of many agents. And because business travelers don’t ordinarily come into contact with al-Qaida or other high-priority adversaries, officials said, the cover did not work.

Summing up what many considered the fatal flaw of the program, one former high-ranking CIA official said, “They were built on the theory of the ‘Field of Dreams’: Build them, and the targets will come.”

Officials said the experience reflects an ongoing struggle at the CIA to adapt to a new environment in espionage. The agency has sought to regroup by designing covers that would provide pretexts for spies to get close to radical Muslim groups, nuclear equipment manufacturers and other high-priority targets.

But current and former officials said progress has been painfully slow, and that the agency’s efforts to alter its use of personal and corporate disguises have yet to produce a significant penetration of a terrorist or weapons proliferation network.

“I don’t believe the intelligence community has made the fundamental shift in how it operates to adapt to the different targets that are out there,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. The cover arrangements most commonly employed by the CIA “don’t get you near radical Islam,” Hoekstra said, adding that six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, “We don’t have nearly the kind of penetrations I would have expected against hard targets.”

Whatever their cover, the CIA’s spies are unlikely to single-handedly penetrate terrorist or proliferation groups, officials said. Instead, the agency stalks informants around the edges of such quarry – moderate Muslims troubled by the radical message at their mosques, mercenary shipping companies that might accept illicit nuclear components as cargo; chemists whose colleagues have suspicious contacts with extremist groups.

Agency officials declined to respond to questions about the front companies. “Cover is designed to protect the officers and operations that protect America,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. “The CIA does not, for that very compelling reason, publicly discuss cover in detail.”

But senior CIA officials publicly have acknowledged that the agency has devoted considerable energy to creating new ways for its case officers – the CIA’s term for its overseas spies – to operate under false identities.

The vast majority of the CIA’s spies traditionally have operated under what is known as official cover, meaning they pose as U.S. diplomats or employees of another government agency.

The approach has advantages, including diplomatic immunity, which means that an operative under official cover might be kicked out of a country if he is caught spying, but won’t be imprisoned or executed.

Official cover is also cheaper and easier. Front companies can take a year or more to set up. They require renting office space, having staff to answer phones and paying for cars and other props. They also involve creating fictitious client lists and resumes that can withstand sustained scrutiny.

One of the CIA’s commercial cover platforms was exposed in 2003 when undercover officer Valerie Plame was outed in a newspaper column. Public records quickly led to the unraveling of the company that served as her cover during overseas trips, a fictitious CIA firm called Brewster Jennings & Associates.

Official cover worked well for the duration of the Cold War, when holding a job at a U.S. Embassy enabled American spies to make contact with Soviet officials and other communist targets.

But many intelligence officials are convinced that embassy posts are not useful against a new breed of adversaries. “Terrorists and weapons proliferators aren’t going to be on the diplomatic cocktail circuit,” said one government official familiar with the CIA’s cover operations.

After the terrorist strikes, the Bush administration ordered the agency to expand its overseas operation by 50 percent. The agency came under pressure from Congress to alter its approach and got a major boost in funding to expand the non-official cover program.

February 16, 2008

By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and JO BECKER

Former Vice President Al Gore and a number of other senior Democrats plan to remain neutral for now in the presidential race in part to keep open the option to broker a peaceful resolution to what they fear could be a bitterly divided convention, party officials and aides said Friday.

Democratic Party officials said that in the past week Mr. Gore and other leading Democrats had held private talks as worry mounted that the close race between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton could be decided by a group of 795 party insiders known as superdelegates.

The signs that party elders are weighing whether and how to intervene reflects the extraordinary nature of the contest now and the concern among some Democrats that they not risk an internal battle that could harm the party in the general election.

But they also provided an early glimpse at the complex set of tradeoffs facing party leaders, from their desire to make their own influence felt to their worries about offending the candidates and particular constituencies — not to mention the long, sometimes troubled relationship between Mr. Gore and the Clintons.

The issues party leaders are grappling with, they said, include how to avoid the perception of a back-room deal that thwarts the will of millions of voters who have cast ballots in primaries and caucuses. That perception could cripple the eventual Democratic nominee’s chances of winning the presidency in November, they said.

A number of senior Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and three candidates who have dropped out of the 2008 race, former Senator John Edwards and Senators Christopher J. Dodd and Joseph R. Biden Jr., have spoken with Mr. Gore in recent days. None have endorsed a candidate, although Ms. Pelosi made comments on Friday that were widely seen as supportive of Mr. Obama when it came to the process the party should use to make its choice of candidate.

“It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided,” Ms. Pelosi said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Ms. Pelosi said she intended to remain neutral, though some of her closest friends and allies in the House are publicly supporting Mr. Obama.

She said the nomination should not be decided by delegates from Florida and Michigan allocated on the basis of voting in primaries there last month, as the Clinton campaign has proposed. Mrs. Clinton got more votes in both places, although neither candidate actively campaigned there and Mr. Obama was not even on the ballot in Michigan. The party had penalized those states for holding their primaries earlier than the party wanted by stripping them of their delegates to the convention.

“We can’t ignore the rules which everyone else played by,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Few figures are being more closely watched by Democratic insiders than Mr. Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who associates say has been lobbied hard for an endorsement by allies of Mrs. Clinton and of Mr. Obama.

Although it is not clear what role their past may play in his decision, Mr. Gore and the Clintons have a complicated, sometimes intense history, and Mr. Obama’s strength in the presidential race could make it even more complicated.

Some of Mr. Gore’s allies have complained bitterly that Mr. Clinton concentrated more on Mrs. Clinton’s Senate run in 2000 than on getting Mr. Gore elected president. For his part, Mr. Clinton was surprised and hurt that Mr. Gore did not enlist him on the campaign trail in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

Although Mr. Gore has expressed concerns to some associates about the damage a brokered convention could cause, several associates said he was hopeful that one candidate would soon break through, sparing the party such an outcome. He told a close friend recently that his decision not to endorse “feels like the right thing” and that he remained optimistic the race “is going to tip at some point,” the friend said.

Another close ally of Mr. Gore’s, however, said: “He recognizes the need for a few party elders to stay on the sidelines to ensure, if needed, that the process is fair and honest. It could very likely take a group of senior party people, including Gore, to settle this, but the only way they can settle it is if they stay on the sidelines now.”

Kalee Kreider, communications director for Mr. Gore, said that he “has no present plans to endorse a candidate,” though she added, “He has not ruled out that possibility prior to the convention.” Ms. Kreider declined to discuss Mr. Gore’s private conversations with party leaders.

But four close associates of Mr. Gore’s said senior party officials had actively consulted him for his advice about what the superdelegates should do if neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton amassed the 2,025 delegates necessary to win the nomination after the final Democratic caucus in Puerto Rico on June 7.

Party leaders described Mr. Gore as a potentially crucial mediator because the putative head of the party — and the man who chose him as his vice president — Bill Clinton, is hardly a neutral observer when it comes to his wife’s candidacy.

“Because President Clinton is very involved on one side, there is an opening for him to be a more neutral force and an honest broker,” said a close associate of Mr. Gore’s, who like most of the associates spoke only on the condition of anonymity. “He’s probably the only unaligned person with the kind of stature to step in to that role and have a real impact on this.”

Several allies said that because of Mr. Gore’s bruising defeat in 2000 presidential voting in Florida, he would have the credibility with Democrats to carry the message that the will of the people should be respected.

Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns are aggressively lobbying the superdelegates, a battle that received new attention after Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had endorsed Mrs. Clinton, said late Thursday that he would cast his superdelegate ballot for Mr. Obama if the battle for the nomination went to the convention.

The Clinton camp has Mr. Clinton making frequent calls, and Mr. Obama’s surrogates are pushing for superdelegates from states where he won primaries or caucuses to pledge their support to him.

But there was no sign of any wholesale shift in support toward Mr. Obama on Friday. Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip and highest-ranking African-American in Congress, said he intended to remain neutral and let the primaries play out even though Mr. Obama won overwhelmingly in his district and state.

“If I were to only reflect my state, then that may not be good enough for a national candidate,” Mr. Clyburn said. “So I think we ought to use our collective judgment to do what is in the best interests of our party.”

But the role that the superdelegates should play between now and the convention is at the heart of a raging debate. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, which is trailing in the delegate count, has taken the position that superdelegates should be free to choose the best-qualified candidate. Mr. Obama’s campaign has said that the superdelegates should be bound by the voters’ will.

Several senior officials cautioned that the party elders had not yet determined whether superdelegates should be urged to cast their votes for the candidate who has the most delegates, or the one who won their state or Congressional district, or the winner of the popular vote. Because Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton might lead in different categories, the question is a vital one.

At a private dinner that Mr. Edwards, a former senator, held at his home last Saturday for a dozen close friends, he said he had spoken recently with Mr. Gore about the benefits of neutrality, someone who was at the dinner said. Although a number of his supporters had been urging him to endorse Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton has actively sought his backing, Mr. Edwards said he intended to remain on the fence for the time being, the person said.

A senior associate of Mr. Gore’s said that surrogates for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama had tried to lock up the former vice president’s endorsement. But he has steadfastly refused to even hint at which candidate he might favor.

Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

The New York Times

Kevin O’Brien

February 15, 2008

More than six years after Americans watched Muslim terrorists destroy the World Trade Center, damage the Pentagon and kill more than 3,000 innocents, the Bush administration is about to attempt justice for some of the high-ranking alleged perpetrators.

Six al-Qaida members, a cast headlined by Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are headed for trial by a U.S. military tribunal.

The questions before the court will involve 169 charges, including conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, and terrorism.

The question before the nation is broader: Are we more interested in defending ourselves from terrorists or defending terrorists against intrusions upon their “rights”?

For the last five or six years, the defendants have lived at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The key word in that sentence isn’t “defendants,” “detention” or “Guantanamo.” The key word is “lived.” That’s the thing they got to do that their victims didn’t.

I can’t help but feel a little apprehension about seeing them go before a court – even a military court. We haven’t done very well at justice in this war.

In fact, lawyers have provided some of the finest aid and comfort to the enemy that money can buy. In doing so, they’ve worked hard to sow confusion in Westerners’ minds about what constitutes justice.

War isn’t a courtroom drama. The calculations of the people who must save their own lives by pulling a trigger shouldn’t have to include, “What would a lawyer say about this?” Yet those calculations are made every day. But only by our side.

We ought to be ashamed that our own good men have been wounded and killed because hesitation is built into their rules of engagement.

We ought to be ashamed that American lives have been sacrificed to fears that some terrorist might file a lawsuit against his interrogators.

What we don’t need to be ashamed about – not for one second – is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got water up his nose before he cracked. By the standards of his own organization, which has a penchant for cutting off the heads of its captives and gleefully packing the videotapes off to Al-Jazeera – Mohammed says he himself wielded the knife that killed journalist Daniel Pearl – he’s gotten off pretty light, so far.

The people we’re fighting have never shown the slightest inclination toward playing by the rules of the Geneva Convention, or anything else that might pass for “civilized” warfare.

They do not wear uniforms, nor do they act under the auspices of any nation or government. They target civilians. They don’t mistakenly commit the occasional atrocity in the heat of battle. Rather, they strive for atrocities, planning them carefully for maximum loss of life and shock value.

Their most effective weapons are terror, stealth, propaganda and our own civilized sensibilities, which they understand perfectly, sneer at, and use against us at every opportunity.

And some of their most effective propagandists, unwitting and otherwise, are people who demand that Americans focus on the legal niceties of this war and the legal rights of enemies who find our laws quaint, silly and useful.

So, although there were worse ideas than leaving Mohammed and his boys to rot in the warm Cuban breeze, the complaints of the I-dotters and T-crossers have won them a day in court. It isn’t the court they would have preferred – a civilian trial court where the whole legal circus could have come to town. But with the military promising all kinds of openness and transparency, the defendants and their advocates probably will have ample opportunity to spew their venom and insult our intelligence.

With the legal strategizing and handicapping already well under way, the Telegraph of London offered this bit of odd phrasing: “Legal experts said the willingness of Mohammed, known as ‘KSM’ in intelligence circles, to take credit for terrorism could complicate the tribunal process.”

Complicate? Killers who brag about their murderous exploits usually simplify the process.

Then again, maybe those legal experts are hoping for an acquittal.

Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
February 14, 2008

You have no right to read this.

The First Amendment gives me the right to write it, but doesn’t necessarily give you the right to read it. Or so I was once told by an attorney. While the right to free speech certainly implies a corresponding right to hear what is being spoken, he said, the First Amendment doesn’t explicitly grant such a right. So theoretically, it could be argued that no such right exists.

The key word being “theoretically.” As a practical matter, the freedom to read whatever we choose is such an intrinsic part of our national character as to make legal theory superfluous. People would rise in outrage if government ever attempted to dictate what they read. Theory and reality are often two different things.

I bring up the First Amendment in order to discuss the Second. The Supreme Court is pondering what is expected to be a landmark ruling on that amendment which, for the record, reads as follows: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

At issue is whether a District of Columbia law banning handgun ownership is constitutional. The key question is this: Does the Second Amendment confer an individual right to gun ownership, or does it refer only to the right of a state to raise a militia? I’ve always thought the latter, a view buttressed by many legal rulings, including the Supreme Court’s, when it last weighed in on the subject, nearly 70 years ago.

But in a very real sense, and for reasons similar to those just mentioned, I also think that’s beside the point. Regardless of whether a right to individual gun ownership can be found in the Second Amendment, the perception of that right is so deeply ingrained that legal theory is – here’s that word again – superfluous. Do you really think, regardless of what the court rules, it would be possible to ban firearms on a national scale? I think any attempt to do so would lead to uprisings we can scarcely imagine.

What we have here, then, is another case of theory versus reality. It’s a confrontation that did not have to happen.

The problem with this debate is that it has always been defined by its most extreme voices, its most uncompromising, ideologically pure voices.

But what if gun control advocates got over the idea that getting the right ruling from the right court would magically make guns disappear? And what if gun advocates got over the notion that every attempt at firearms regulation is a step toward totalitarianism? Where might this debate go then?

What if supporters of gun control could concede that hunting is, for some, an honored tradition? That some people feel it necessary to have a weapon in the home for protection? That some entirely rational folks simply like guns?

Could gun rights people then concede that you don’t need an assault weapon to go deer hunting? And that manufacturers who flood poor, violence-prone neighborhoods with cheap handguns ought to be held accountable? And that guys who sell guns from the trunks of their cars are nobody’s friend? And that background checks and gun safety classes for new gun owners make us all safer? And that gun registration isn’t totalitarianism any more than a driver’s license is? And, most of all, that all of us are tired of seeing children shoot children with guns they never should have had access to?

It’s called compromise and no, it would hardly mollify ideological purists. It would not make guns disappear, nor acknowledge an individual right to bazooka ownership. What it would do, though, is recognize that ideological purity has its limits. That’s a good thing to remember.

When theory confronts reality, put your money on reality every time.

by Chris Jordan

Fri Feb 15, 2008 at 02:02:07 PM PST

Hillary Clinton’s last stand is on March 4th.  If she doesn’t take Texas and Ohio by large margins, there will be pressure on her to step aside and get behind Barack Obama as the party’s nominee.  It is definitely too early to call this primary, but we need to be thinking ahead.  If Obama does win, how does he match up against McCain?  What are his strengths and weaknesses?  What does he need in a running mate?

I’ve been a strong supporter of General Wes Clark for years now and I was sorely disappointed when he decided not to run.  I think, after watching him for so long, that he may be exactly what Barack Obama needs to win this thing.  Allow me to explain.  Here are several critical reasons why Wes Clark would make a great VP pick…

Military Credibility

Barack Obama has zero military experience.  John McCain was tortured in the jungles of Vietnam.  Although Obama has been right on the war, John McCain’s war experience gives him a lot of commander in chief credibility.  Obama has repeatedly said in interviews that he probably needs someone on the ticket who can bring some military experience to the table because it is something he admittedly lacks.  People don’t need to just trust that a president has good judgment, they need to feel like he/she can handle the military and deal with the threats we face.  Wesley Clark was in the military for 34 years.  He was shot four times while leading American troops through the jungles of Vietnam.  He was a four star general and the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.  He ran the Kosovo operation successfully without losing a single soldier.  Wes Clark is the epitome of military and leadership experience.  His presence on the ticket would inject a serious dose of military credibility and his presence in the White House would be reassuring.

Southern Appeal

If Obama is the nominee in 2008, it seems like we may finally have a chance to eat into the base of Republican “red” states.  He can win Midwest and Rocky Mountain swing states, and with the right running mate, Southern states as well.  Arkansas may be up for grabs, Virginia, and Missouri also seem to be within reach.  With Virginia trending blue, many feel that Jim Webb may be a good fit on the ticket with Obama.  Webb, however, only has a 46% approval rating and a 44% disapproval rating in the latest Survey USA poll.  John Edwards is also a southerner, but he brings no military experience and brought no Southern victories to John Kerry in 2004.  Wes Clark lived most of his life in Arkansas and launched his 2004 campaign from Little Rock.  He won the Oklahoma primary in 2004 and has a lot of qualities that appeal to Southerners – a twang, a fierce patriotism, a strong family, and a long record of military service.  His presence on the ticket not only boosts the national security credentials, but gives Obama a chance to eat into McCain’s Southern military voters.  Wes Clark is essentially the Anti-McCain in the South.  He gives white southerners a reason to consider Barack Obama when they may have otherwise automatically have gone to McCain.

Clinton-ite Appeal

It’s no secret that Wesley Clark has been a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton in this race.  He has campaigned for her everywhere from Nevada to New Hampshire, and it’s exactly for these reasons that he is such a great fit for Obama.  He could very well win this nomination with barely over 50% of the delegates.  The party has been divided and the race has at times gotten heated (remember the WalMart/Rezko debate smackdown?).  In order for us to win this election and win it big, we are going to need a Democratic party that is completely UNITED and FIRED UP.  We need Hillary Clinton supporters to drop their resentment for Obama (which does exist in many circles) and join in the fight with all they’ve got.  If Barack Obama picks a strong supporter of Hillary as his running mate, he is essentially extending an olive branch to Hillary Clinton supporters.  An Obama/Clark ticket will probably help many Clinton-ites overcome their doubts about Obama’s experience because they trust Clark’s.  This would be a strong gesture for Democratic Party unity.

So there you go.  He gives the ticket military cred.  He appeals to John McCain’s southern base.  He gains the trust of Hillary supporters.  

Wes Clark would make one hell of a VP.

James Klurfeld

February 15, 2008Watch out, Barack Obama. You’ve hit the magic tipping point. After winning the Virginia, Maryland and District of Columbia primaries, you are now the front-runner. It doesn’t mean that the nomination is yours, not by a long shot in this kind of competitive race. But you’ve got more delegates than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Don’t get me wrong. Obama has my attention. He might actually have momentum – whatever that is and if it even exists. But it’s been only six weeks since the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. So far, I like what I see. But I’m still not sure what I’m getting. Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.

February 15, 2008 02:23 PM ET | Michael Barone |

 There has been some scoffing at Clinton pollster Mark Penn’s memo issued yesterday arguing that Hillary Clinton can still win more delegates than Barack Obama. The memo contains a certain amount of campaign boilerplate:Hillary is the only candidate who can deliver the economic change voters want—the only candidate with a real plan and a record of fighting for health care, housing, job creation and protecting Social Security.But, hey, he’s paid (and very well) to say things like this. And there’s independent polling data that seem to support his argument.Start with Pennsylvania, which votes April 22. Quinnipiac today released a poll showing Clinton leading Obama there 52 to 36 percent. Whites back Clinton 58 to 31; blacks back Obama 71 to 10. Since Pennsylvania’s population is only 10 percent black, that accounts for Clinton’s big lead.Then look at Ohio, which votes March 4. Here Quinnipiac shows Clinton ahead 55 to 34 percent. Whites back Clinton 64 to 28; blacks back Obama 64 to 17. Ohio’s population is 11 percent black. Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown (whom veterans of the campaign trail will remember as a first-rate reporter) explains why Clinton seems to be doing so well in Ohio (and, by implication, demographically similar Pennsylvania) after losing eight straight contests:Ohio is as good a demographic fit for Sen. Clinton as she will find. It is blue-collar America, with a smaller percentage of both Democrats with college educations and African-Americans than in many other states where Sen. Obama has carried the day. If Clinton can’t win the primary there, it is very difficult to see how she stops Obama.Quinnipiac’s result is similar to two other recent Ohio polls. Rasmussen has Clinton ahead 51 to 37 percent; SurveyUSA has her ahead 56 to 39 percent. The only Ohio poll taken in January, by the Columbus Dispatch, showed Clinton ahead of Obama 42 to 19 percent. Obama has apparently made gains since then. But so has Clinton.In the other big state that votes March 4, Texas, it seems that there has been no public poll since last April(!). Texas’s population is 12 percent black and 32 percent Hispanic, so we can expect the Democratic primary electorate there to be about 20 percent black and perhaps 15 to 20 percent Hispanic.One primary Penn did not stress in his memo was Wisconsin. The Clinton campaign line has been that the post-Super Tuesday February contests are all dismal ground for their candidates. But the Wisconsin polling data tell a different story. Scott Rasmussen shows Obama leading Clinton by only 47 to 43 percent. This is similar to Strategic Vision’s Wisconsin survey, which shows Obama ahead 45 to 41 percent. Wisconsin’s population is 6 percent black and 3 percent Hispanic.How can Clinton be doing so much better here than she did in Maryland and Virginia? One reason is that there are smaller percentages of black voters in these states. Another, probably more important, reason is that the white Democratic primary voters are different. In Maryland and Virginia, they tended to be quite upscale and on the young side, especially in the big suburban counties outside Washington, D.C. In Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, they’re much more downscale. At a time when Clinton and Obama are essentially tied in national polls, it stands to reason that if Obama is ahead in states like Maryland and Virginia, Clinton will be ahead in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.Texas is another, interesting story. Texas doesn’t have party registration, and, historically, huge numbers of white voters participated in the state’s Democratic presidential primary—1.3 million in 1980, 1.8 million in 1988, 1.5 million in 1992. That number plunged downward to 786,000 in 2000 and 839,000 in 2004, even though the state’s population grew from 14 million in 1980 to 22 million in 2004. The obvious conclusion: An awful lot of white Texans began voting in the Republican primary again. This year’s Texas Democratic primary could turn out to be largely a battle of minorities, with blacks voting heavily for Obama and Latinos, as in most other states so far, heavily for Clinton. In this battle Obama will undoubtedly have an organizational advantage, both because his campaign— unlike hers— has done organizational work in the post-Super Tuesday states and because of the strength of pre-existing black turnout organizations. As for white Democratic primary voters, upscale Texans still tend to be heavily Republican, though a little less so than 15 or 20 years ago—very much contrary to the pattern in Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Md. White downscale voters in southern states have generally gone for Clinton, but not by overwhelming margins. Of the four states we’ve looked at here, Texas appears the most problematic for Clinton, though she’s on far stronger ground there than in the already concluded post-Super Tuesday contests. 

Mitt Romne applauds as Sen. John McCain reaches out to shake hands during a news conferenceThursday in Boston.Associated Press (Associated Press )

Perry Bacon Jr. and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post
February 15, 2008

BOSTON – Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on Thursday made a Valentine’s Day endorsement of Sen. John McCain, ending a bitter, yearlong rivalry and releasing almost enough delegates to guarantee McCain the Republican nomination.

Romney urged the 280 delegates who had pledged to support him to back McCain, calling him a “true American hero” and saying the party needs to unify behind him.

“Even when the contest was close and our disagreements were debated, the caliber of the man was apparent,” Romney said at a press conference at his campaign headquarters here. “Right now the Democrats are fighting; let us come together and make progress while they are fighting.”

That the two politicians eventually came together was not entirely surprising, as Romney is already looking to lay the groundwork for a future presidential run and embracing the party’s 2008 nominee could help that effort. McCain made a similar move in 2000, when he endorsed President Bush after a divisive primary fight. For McCain, the endorsement could help mend fences with conservatives in his own party, many of whom had rallied to Romney and view the senator warily.

But Romney’s effusive praise for McCain was nonetheless jarring in light of his repeated criticisms, some as recently as two weeks ago, when both were in the final days of heated competitions for Florida and nearly two dozen Super Tuesday states.

The pair had clashed for more than a year as Romney spent millions from his personal fortune on television ads, many of which portrayed McCain negatively. The waning days of the campaign were especially nasty, with Romney accusing McCain of being dishonest and McCain attacking Romney as an inveterate flip-flopper.

Romney called McCain “wrong and … dishonest” and demanded he apologize for saying the former governor wanted to withdraw troops from Iraq. He called McCain “virtually indistinguishable” from Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and mocked McCain for being bereft of knowledge about the economy.

On Thursday, though, he focused on McCain’s national security credentials, calling him “a man capable of leading our country in its toughest hour.”

McCain said Romney ran “a hard, intensive, fine, honorable campaign” that eventually helped the senator “become a better candidate … I respect him enormously.”

Both favor middle class, condemn corporate tax breaks

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton passes out chocolates to the press corps aboard her plane Thursday. Associated Press (Associated Press ) Black leaders rethink support » WASHINGTON – In a fresh sign of trouble for Hillary Rodham Clinton, one of the former first lady’s congressional black supporters intends to vote for Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, and a second, more prominent lawmaker is openly discussing a possible switch. » Rep. David Scott, of Georgia, announced on Thursday he is backing Obama. » “You’ve got to represent the wishes of your constituency,” Scott said Wednesday. “My proper position would be to vote the wishes of my constituents.” The third-term lawmaker represents a district that gave more than 80 percent of its vote to Obama in the Feb. 5 Georgia primary. » Rep. John Lewis, whose Atlanta-area district voted 3-to-1 for Obama, said he is not ready to abandon his backing for the former first lady. But several associates said the nationally known civil rights figure has become increasingly torn about his early endorsement of Clinton. Associated Press

Jonathan Weisman and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post
February 15, 2008

WARREN, Ohio – Hillary Rodham Clinton slammed Barack Obama during an appearance at a General Motors plant here on Thursday for what she charged was a lack of a record of achievement on the economy.

But as both Democratic presidential candidates announced comprehensive economic plans this week, they advocated similar visions on what has become the single biggest issue for voters in the 2008 campaign.

Clinton and Obama both promise to make the tax code more middle-income friendly and protect consumers from threats real and imagined – from predatory credit card companies to rapacious college lenders. Both condemn corporate tax breaks they say send jobs overseas. Both pledge to protect homeowners and say they would repeal President Bush’s upper-income tax cuts while extending those targeting the middle class. Both pledged to rein in credit card companies that arbitrarily raise interest rates, sending families into a downward spiral of rising debt.

“I’ve been looking for ways to differentiate these two, and it hasn’t been easy,” said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. This week’s economic speeches do not “make it a whole lot easier,” he added.

Despite their similarities, Clinton, anxious to generate positive news about her campaign, went on the offensive during her tour of an automotive plant. She sharpened her line of attack against Obama and what she argues is his lack of substance.

“Over the years you’ve heard plenty of promises from plenty of people in plenty of speeches,” Clinton told a group of factory workers. “Speeches don’t put food on the table. Speeches don’t fill up your tank. Speeches don’t fill your prescriptions.”

Clinton continued: “That’s the difference between me and my Democratic opponent. My opponent makes speeches. I offer solutions.”

But even with the economy teetering on the edge of recession and both Democrats eager to win in union-heavy Ohio – not to mention, they both hope, the endorsement of former Sen. John Edwards in the days ahead – neither Clinton nor, a day earlier, Obama swerved into an overt populist appeal. Where John Kerry castigated “Benedict Arnold CEOs” four years ago, Clinton and Obama seem to be channeling the Bill Clinton of 1992.

“I won’t stand here and tell you that we can – or should – stop free trade. We can’t stop every job from going overseas,” Obama told GM workers on Wednesday, just hours after the company offered thousands of buyouts. “But I also won’t stand here and accept an America where we do nothing to help American workers who have lost jobs and opportunities because of these trade agreements.”

For Clinton, the new emphasis on the economy allowed her Thursday to push policies that aligned with the core of her message: that she would help ordinary voters.

Clinton’s proposals are tailor-made for an industrial heartland hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs and crippled by mortgage defaults and rising debt. She would rescue the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a federal-local partnership program for small manufacturers perpetually targeted for elimination by President Bush, and impose an immediate cap on credit card interest rates and stop credit card companies from raising interest rates without warning or applying new, higher rates to old transactions.

And she would establish a new Financial Product Safety Commission – similar to the Consumer Product Safety Commission – empowered to crack down on abusive lending practices in the credit card, auto loan and mortgage market.

To lower college tuition costs, she vowed to crack down on student lenders that shower college financial aid officers with gifts, stock options and trips in exchange for steering students to captive lending markets.

Many of those plans mirror Obama promises. To pay for some of them, both candidates pledged to eliminate tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas.

Shashank Bengali
McClatchy
February 15, 2008

NYAGASAMBU, Rwanda – In much of the world, President Bush’s foreign policy will be remembered for the Iraq war. But in these emerald hills in central Africa, his legacy looks brighter.

As bright, in fact, as the face of 19-year-old Jeanne Aribatuka, who was diagnosed with HIV while she was pregnant with her only child. She started taking antiretroviral drugs nine months ago and has gained 7 pounds. Her almond eyes dance when she says it.

Nearly 50,000 Rwandan HIV patients now receive the lifesaving drugs – up from 800 four years ago – thanks largely to a $15 billion global anti-AIDS plan that Bush launched in 2003. It’s one of his most widely praised foreign-policy initiatives and, along with a major anti-malaria plan, forms the centerpiece of a dramatic increase in U.S. aid to Africa during his presidency.

Bush begins a six-day, five-nation tour of Africa this week hoping to showcase progress on AIDS and malaria and his commitment to economic development on the world’s poorest continent. He’s also expected to make the case that Congress should double the funding for his AIDS initiative, due to expire this year, to $30 billion over the next five years.

“Africa in the 21st century is a continent of potential,” Bush said Thursday. “It’s a place where democracy is advancing, where economies are growing and leaders are meeting challenges with purpose and determination.”

But even if he’s able to escape issues such as Iraq and a jittery U.S. economy, Bush’s mission comes amid growing violence in Sudan’s Darfur region, an Islamist-led insurgency in Somalia, and post-election unrest in Kenya, a key U.S. ally.

Critics say that the tour is intended to gloss over those and other trouble spots. Bush and first lady Laura Bush will visit Benin, Ghana and Tanzania – three of Africa’s most stable countries – as well as Liberia and Rwanda, which have emerged from civil wars.

“This trip is designed to show the compassionate side of America,” said Gayle Smith, an Africa expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

Africa is one place where Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge of “compassionate conservatism” appears to have been fulfilled, due in no small measure to the evangelical community’s interest in the continent.

When Bush took office in 2001, U.S. humanitarian and development aid to Africa totaled $1.4 billion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By 2006, that figure had quadrupled to $5.6 billion.

While America’s standing in much of the world has diminished because of the Iraq war and other Bush administration policies, a report last July by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that “the U.S. image is much stronger in Africa than in other regions of the world.”

“Bush did more than anybody else for Africa,” said Blaise Karibushi, a Rwandan doctor who has run AIDS programs for several years. “He has had problems (elsewhere), but for us he did a lot.”

Perhaps no Bush initiative is as broadly popular as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, launched in 2003. In 15 of the countries worst hit by AIDS – 12 of them in Africa – the program has helped put 1.4 million people on antiretroviral drugs by funneling money to international aid agencies, which develop programs at the local level.

In Rwanda, health officials say the impact has been remarkable.

The tiny country, still living quietly with the memory of the 1994 genocide, is among the poorest places in the world, ranked 158th out of 177 countries in the United Nations index of development. Just 438 hospitals and basic clinics serve a population of more than 8 million, crammed into a country smaller than Massachusetts.

Thanks to some $300 million in U.S. funding and tens of millions more from other international donors – chiefly the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – two-thirds of Rwandans who need antiretroviral drugs are now getting them free, government officials said.

Bolten, Miers refused to cooperate in probe

Bolten

Paul Kane
Washington Post
February 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – The House on Thursday escalated a constitutional showdown with President Bush, approving the first ever contempt of Congress citations against West Wing aides and reigniting last year’s battle over the scope of executive privilege.

On a 223-32 vote, the House approved contempt citations against White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers for their refusal to cooperate with an investigation into the mass firings of U.S. attorneys and allegations that administration officials sought to politicize the Justice Department.

The vote came after a morning of tense partisan bickering over parliamentary rules. The conflict was capped later in the day when most House Republicans walked off the floor and refused to cast a final vote. They accused Democrats of forcing a partisan vote on the contempt citations instead of approving a surveillance law supported by Bush.

Democrats said they were left with no choice but to engage in a legal showdown with Bush because he has refused for nearly a year to allow any current or former West Wing staff member to testify in the inquiry. Citing executive privilege, the president has offered their testimony only if it is taken without transcripts and not under oath.

“This is beyond arrogance. This is hubris taken to the ultimate degree,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in the closing moments of the debate.

The administration immediately condemned the House action, noting that no White House official has ever been cited for contempt.

The contempt resolution against Bolten cites his refusal to turn over subpoenaed documents and e-mails sought by the House Judiciary Committee in its now year-long investigation into the dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Miers was cited for refusing to testify after she was subpoenaed to appear before the panel last summer.

The furor over the fired prosecutors began last January when congressional Democrats learned that seven U.S. attorneys were fired on the same day, Dec. 7, 2006. Most senior staff of the department resigned as the congressional investigations unfolded; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is the subject of an internal investigation into whether he tampered with a likely witness.

Democrats said their votes were efforts to compel more information from a White House that has blocked their efforts to conclude the investigation.

By law, the contempt citations go to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeffrey Taylor, but the White House and Justice Department have said that no executive branch employee will face a grand jury inquiry.

House Democrats already were looking ahead. They included a second provision in the resolution Thursday that would allow the House general counsel to file a civil lawsuit to compel Bolten and Miers’ testimony.

Officials say disabled craft full of toxic fuel

Peter Spiegel and Ben Dubose
Los Angeles Times
February 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration has decided to try to shoot down a failing 5,000-pound spy satellite, fearing its rocket fuel could turn into a deadly toxic gas if the spacecraft crashed in a populated area, officials said Thursday.

The unusual operation, to be carried out in the next several days, would be the first U.S. attempt to shoot down a satellite since Cold War-era military tests ended in the 1980s.

Pentagon officials plan to use the same ships and missiles that are part of the Navy’s nascent missile-defense system. Ships in the North Pacific plan to fire a tactical missile at the satellite when it reaches a low orbit of about 130 nautical miles over their general location.

Some experts theorized that the administration was influenced by concern that classified components on the intelligence satellite could fall into hostile hands. Denying that, Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said any sensitive instruments would burn on re-entry.

“Once you go through the atmosphere and the heating and the burning, that would not be an issue in this case,” Cartwright said at a news conference. “It would not justify using a missile to take it and break it up further.”

However, the government has never resorted to shooting down a disabled spacecraft or satellite, despite dozens of crashes and re-entries. Administration officials said this time is different because the satellite failed shortly after its launch in December 2006, leaving almost all of its 1,000 pounds of hydrazine rocket fuel frozen in the uncontrollable spacecraft.

Cartwright compared it to a bus, with only half of the craft likely to burn on re-entry. That means the fuel tank could survive if it is not destroyed by the missile strike. Normally, aging satellites – their onboard fuel mostly consumed – are steered into the ocean at the end of their life. But with the spy satellite’s power and communications inoperable, it is tumbling, unguided, to Earth.

Officials compared the effects of hydrazine fuel to chlorine or ammonia.

“It affects your tissues and your lungs – it has the burning sensation,” Cartwright said. “If you stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it, it could in fact be deadly.”

Experts on military satellites agreed that the dispersal of hydrazine could pose a serious health hazard, although even Cartwright said it probably would be spread over a space the size of only two football fields.

John F. Pike, a military analyst who specializes in space-based weapons and intelligence systems, said that under normal circumstances, dying satellites are guided into the Pacific Ocean, primarily so that foreign rivals do not get their hands on sensitive components.

“I’m not arguing that hydrazine isn’t a problem,” Pike said. “But they’re so concerned in normal circumstances about things falling into the wrong hands that I’m not sure I believe them.”

However, administration officials insisted public safety was the reason President Bush approved the plan to shoot down the satellite.

“This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings,” said James F. Jeffrey, assistant to Bush and deputy national security adviser, appearing with Cartwright.

The satellite was operated by the National Reconnaissance Office, the intelligence agency responsible for the nation’s spy satellites. Officials would not comment on the satellite’s mission or its cost and could not estimate the cost of shooting it down.

U.S. officials harshly criticized China after learning last year that its military shot down an aging weather satellite. That incident recharged an international debate over space weapons and prompted a Pentagon review of the safety of U.S. orbiters.

Drawing a contrast with the more secretive Chinese operation, U.S. officials dispatched diplomats from around the world to explain their decision.

The officials also said the Chinese destroyed their satellite at a higher orbit than plans for hitting the U.S. spy satellite. China’s shoot-down left debris orbiting the Earth, while Pentagon plans call for hitting the spycraft just as it enters the atmosphere, so debris would re-enter and burn.

The Pentagon would not say which ship would be assigned the task. One Aegis cruiser, the Lake Erie, has conducted more extensive testing than other ships of the Standard Missile 3 – a defensive rocket that will be used to shoot down the satellite. The Lake Erie is stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The Pentagon will wait to take the shot until the shuttle Atlantis, currently docked at the International Space Station, returns to Earth, scheduled for Monday.

The Navy ships will be modified so the missiles can be used to shoot down the satellite, but Cartwright said those changes will consist of minor software modifications, meaning the shoot-down will be similar to missile-defense tests regularly performed in the Pacific.

“What we’re trying to do is match up that period in which the satellite looks most like a reentering missile,” Cartwright said.

Several Aegis-equipped cruisers and destroyers were deployed to the waters off the coast of North Korea in July 2006 when Pyongyang tested several medium- and long-range missiles, including the Taepo-Dong II, suspected to be capable of reaching U.S. bases in the Pacific.

None of the ships fired on the missiles, however, instead using radars to track and monitor the test.

The satellite shoot-down will give the Navy its first real-life, uncontrolled test of the Aegis-based system.

McCain Abstained

By Paul Kane Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure more than $340 million worth of home-state projects in last year’s spending bills, placing her among the top 10 Senate recipients of what are commonly known as earmarks, according to a new study by a nonpartisan budget watchdog group. Working with her New York colleagues in nearly every case, Clinton supported almost four times as much spending on earmarked projects as her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), whose $91 million total placed him in the bottom quarter of senators who seek earmarks, the study showed. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the likely GOP presidential nominee, was one of five senators to reject earmarks entirely, part of his long-standing view that such measures prompt needless spending. As a campaign issue, earmarks highlight significant differences in the spending philosophies of the top three candidates. Clinton has repeatedly supported earmarks as a way to bring home money for projects, while Obama adheres to a policy of using them only to support public entities. McCain is using his blanket opposition to earmarked spending as a regular line of attack against Clinton, even running an Internet ad mocking her $1 million request for a museum devoted to the Woodstock music festival. Obama has been criticized for using a 2006 earmark to secure money for the University of Chicago hospital where his wife worked until last year. The new report, by Taxpayers for Common Sense, is the first to show all the earmarks each lawmaker added to spending bills for an entire fiscal year. It notes the explosive growth of the practice, which amounted to more than $18 billion in fiscal 2008. Stung by criticism of earmarks, President Bush and an increasing number of lawmakers have started to campaign against their use. In his State of the Union address last month, Bush vowed to veto any spending bills for 2009 that do not cut back on earmarks, and 22 House members have sworn off seeking them. While most are Republicans, Democratic Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), a key committee chairman and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), joined yesterday. “Congressional spending through earmarks is out of control,” he said Lawmakers previously were allowed to include multimillion-dollar items in spending bills without publicly identifying themselves as sponsors. House and Senate Democrats passed measures last year that require open sponsorship of earmarks. Though they still make up a tiny fraction of the federal budget, earmarks remain a multibillion-dollar business on Capitol Hill. Congress added 12,881 earmarks, worth $18.3 billion, to spending bills that Bush signed into law, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. That is a 23 percent drop from the record level of earmarked money for fiscal 2005. Democrats used their new majority to secure 57 percent of total earmarked money in fiscal 2008. Members of both parties even supported a $4.5 billion pot of earmarks. “An increasing number of individual members recognize that a moratorium is needed until significant reforms are made to the earmark process,” Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a longtime earmark opponent, said yesterday. The new report showed that Clinton co-sponsored a $1.6 million earmark to fund technology development by a defense contractor and steered $3 million to the Rochester Institute of Technology for a fuel-cell-technology program. Another $1.6 million earmark she supported went to Weidlinger Associates, a New York engineering consulting firm working on shock testing for naval vessels. Obama, meanwhile, helped steer $3.4 million to the Rock Island Arsenal for a military fire and police building, and was the sole sponsor of a measure seeking $750,000 for an education initiative at Benedictine University in Illinois. McCain, who has helped lead efforts to strip some earmarks from Senate bills, has not focused on the money headed to his home state. Other Arizona lawmakers secured more than $214 million in pet projects in fiscal 2008 spending bills. The candidates “do illustrate the broad spectrum of attitudes toward earmarks in Congress,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. Clinton stands behind her earmarked projects as a sign of her work for constituents. “Senator Clinton is very proud to have helped New York-based projects that train nurses, improve our hospitals, help those suffering from 9/11-related health ailments, bolster our national and homeland security, and provide our brave men and women in uniform with the resources they need to achieve their mission, while keeping them safe,” said Philippe Reines, Clinton’s spokesman. Clinton’s $342 million total consists almost entirely of projects she supported with other New York lawmakers. On her own, she secured one $98,000 earmark. Her total is unusually large for someone who does not serve on the Senate Appropriations Committee, where earmarks are doled out, usually on a members-first basis. Of the 10 largest recipients, Clinton is the only senator not on the committee, the report found. Obama’s criticism of Washington’s insider culture is a linchpin of his campaign; he supports earmarks only for public entities such as schools and hospitals. He secured $3.3 million in earmarks through his own sponsorship, and collected $88 million in concert with other Illinois lawmakers. Since last year, he has publicly released the letters he submits to the Appropriations Committee seeking support for the spending items, but has not released those submitted to the committee in 2005 and 2006. On the campaign trail, Obama has specifically mentioned his ability to work across the aisle “on opening up and creating more transparency in government,” so that all government spending is “posted on a searchable database.” Bill Burton, his campaign spokesman, said Obama’s level of disclosure exceeds Clinton’s. “We began running for president in 2007 and, unlike our opponent, we thought it was appropriate to release our earmarks,” he said. McCain has used his opposition to earmarks to rally conservatives reluctant to support his presidential campaign, regularly criticizing Clinton for such spending. He attacked her Woodstock museum request, saying at an October GOP debate that he was “tied up” and unable to attend the 1969 music festival — a sly reference to his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. “That kind of thing is going to stop when I’m president of the United States of America,” McCain said earlier this month of Clinton’s earmarks. Her item was rejected in a Senate vote last fall, among the few earmarks that were turned down in a House or Senate vote. Staff writer Matthew Mosk contributed to this report.

February 14, 2008

By Allisa Rubin 

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s parliamentary leaders on Wednesday pushed through three far-reaching measures that had been delayed for weeks by bitter political maneuvering that became so acrimonious that some lawmakers threatened to try to dissolve the legislative body.

More than any previous legislation, the new initiatives have the potential to spur reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites and set the country on the road to a more representative government, starting with new provincial elections.

The voting itself was a significant step forward for the Parliament, where even basic quorums have been rare. In a classic legislative compromise, the three measures, each of which was a burning issue for at least one faction, were packaged together for a single vote to encourage agreement across sectarian lines.

“Today we have a wedding party for the Iraqi Parliament,” said Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker, who is a Sunni. “We have proved that Iraqis are one bloc and Parliament is able to find solutions that represent all Iraqis.”

But the parliamentary success was clouded because many of the most contentious details were simply postponed, raising the possibility that the accord could again break into rancorous factional disputes in future debates on the same issues.

The three measures are the 2008 budget; a law outlining the scope of provincial powers, a crucial aspect of Iraq’s self-definition as a federal state; and an amnesty that would apply to thousands of the detainees held in Iraqi jails.

An amnesty law was one of the so-called benchmark measures that the Bush administration had built the 2007 troop increase around, hoping to create better security to allow such legislative breakthroughs.

The vast majority of the 26,000 prisoners being held in Iraqi jails are Sunni Arabs, some of whom have been held without charges for months.

That made the law a driving issue for Sunni lawmakers and the Sunni co-vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi.

The budget measure was closely guarded by the Kurds, who wanted to maintain the Kurdistan regional government’s current allocation of 17 percent of the country’s revenues after subtracting the costs of ministries that serve the entire country, like Foreign Affairs and Defense. That is a larger portion than most lawmakers felt was fair, and the point will be renegotiated next year, when the whole battle could well be re-enacted.

Similarly, the provincial powers law, which includes a provision requiring that provincial elections be held by Oct. 1, will be difficult to carry out unless Parliament approves a new election law and fills a number of vacant election commission seats at the provincial level. Those details have been contentious in the past.

But on the abstract level, a law to increase provincial powers has been supported by members from all three major factions, Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, all of whom have fought for less central governmental authority, albeit in different ways.

The three measures were put to a vote as a single package and passed Wednesday afternoon. There were 206 legislators of the 275-member body at the session, according to Parliament’s press office.

Each article of each measure was voted on individually, with some lawmakers walking out when items they had opposed came up. But almost everyone returned in time for the final package vote.

The jubilation at the conclusion of the session and the atmosphere of amity contrasted sharply with the stinging accusations and walkouts that have characterized many of the negotiations in recent weeks.

Khalid al-Attiya, the deputy speaker and an independent Shiite, beamed as he told reporters right after the vote that the laws had passed “unanimously.”

“It is a big achievement,” he said, and promised that approval of the budget and spending associated with it would translate into as many as 700,000 new jobs for Iraqis.

Parliament members estimated that the overall budget for the fiscal year would reach 60 trillion Iraqi dinars, roughly $50 billion, of which more than two-thirds would go toward salaries and labor expenses.

Even factions that did not agree with some of the measures said they did not want to vote against the package as a whole.

“The Iraqiya list did not want to create a political crisis in a time when the country has suffered a lot, “ said Aliya Nesayef, a member of the Iraqiya Party, which agreed with the amnesty law but was uncomfortable with some provisions of the budget and the provincial powers law.

The decision to vote on the three measures together broke the logjam that had held up the legislation for months, despite pressure from the Bush administration and some senior Iraqi officials. Every group was able to boast that it had won, to some degree. After the legislation is approved by the Presidency Council, in this case a pro forma step since all of the political blocs agreed to their passage, it will be published. The particulars of the laws remained unclear in part because many changes were made in the last frantic days.

The most serious controversy on Wednesday was over the inclusion of a date for holding provincial elections, which President Bush has pushed for in the short term. Such elections would mean that two political parties, one Shiite and one Sunni, would stand to lose control of one or more provincial councils, so those groups have tried to defer the vote. But the majority of Parliament supported setting a date, and Mr. Mashhadani, the speaker, forced the inclusion of a deadline, Oct. 1, at the last minute.

The top American officials in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus, issued a statement after the passage, congratulating Parliament and describing the provincial powers law, in particular, as a “landmark law” in which “Iraqi legislators have reached an historic compromise.”

But they sought to cover themselves in the event that poison pills were buried in the details of the legislation. That was the case in January, with the passage of a law that was promoted as a way to bring more Sunni Arabs into government jobs but that later appeared to have provisions that would actually force out at least as many as it brought in.

“There is also still more to learn about how this legislation will be implemented,” said the statement on Wednesday by Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus.

One example is growing concern over the commission that has been set up to organize provincial elections. There are allegations that the political parties have divided up the seats on the commission by party, but that not all parties ended up with a place at the table, raising questions about whether a vote will be viewed as fair or will merely deepen divisions.

And, still left out of the political bargain are the newly formed Awakening Councils, which are predominantly Sunni and in many cases represent powerful tribes. They have taken the lead in fighting extremist Sunni groups, and now their leaders are clamoring for a place at the table. They are outraged that the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is Sunni but has limited grass-roots support, dominates the provincial council in Anbar Province.

“In Anbar Province we want the provincial council disbanded and another one formed, we want elections to be held in March or April and we want the Iraqi Islamic Party to leave the province in 30 days,” said Sheik Ali Hatem, one of the leaders of the Anbar Awakening, who survived a suicide bomb attack this week.

On the amnesty law, much will hinge on the formation of a “competent committee” which will be charged with reviewing cases that had languished without review or charges. But detainees accused of any one of a long list of crimes would be excluded from the amnesty.

How the committee chooses to interpret the word “accused” — whether in the formal sense of charges being filed or the informal sense of people suspected of connection to such crimes — could alter considerably how many people remain in jail. Human rights experts said that at least on its face, the law appeared to have been written to free a large number of people.

Several legislators emphasized after the voting on Wednesday that achieving true sectarian reconciliation was far more complex than simply passing a law.

“Reconciliation will hang on more than a law, it needs political will,” said Mithal al-Alusi, a Sunni legislator. “I believe there is no political will to achieve reconciliation. The law of amnesty is good, but not enough.”

Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama emerged from Tuesday’s primaries leading Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by more than 100 delegates, a small but significant advantage that Democrats said would be difficult for Mrs. Clinton to make up in the remaining contests in the presidential nomination battle.

Neither candidate is expected to win the 2,025 pledged delegates needed to claim the nomination by the time the voting ends in June. But Mr. Obama’s campaign began making a case in earnest on Wednesday that if he maintained his edge in delegates won in primaries and caucuses, he would have the strongest claim to the backing of the 796 elected Democrats and party leaders known as superdelegates who are free to vote as they choose and who now stand to determine the outcome.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said she could still pull out a victory with victories in the biggest primaries still to come, including Ohio and Texas next month. But Mr. Obama’s clear lead in delegates allocated by the votes in nominating contests is one of a number of challenges facing her after a string of defeats in which Mr. Obama not only ran up big popular vote margins but also made inroads among the types of voters she had most been counting on, including women and lower-income people.

Should the cracks in her support among those groups show up in Ohio and Texas as well, it could undermine her hopes that those states will halt Mr. Obama’s momentum and allow her to claim dominance in many of the biggest primary battlegrounds.

With every delegate precious, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers also made it clear that they were prepared to take a number of potentially incendiary steps to build up Mrs. Clinton’s count. Top among these, her aides said, is pressing for Democrats to seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, who held their primaries in January in defiance of Democratic Party rules.

Mrs. Clinton won more votes than Mr. Obama in both states, though both candidates technically abided by pledges not to campaign actively there.

Mr. Obama’s aides reiterated their opposition to allowing Mrs. Clinton to claim a proportional share of the delegates from the voting in those states. The prospect of a fight over seating the Florida and Michigan delegations has already exposed deep divisions within the party.

Julian Bond, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called for the delegates to be seated, saying failure to do so would amount to disenfranchising minority voters in those states. But on Wednesday, such a move was denounced by the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York, who said many people in those states did not go the polls because they assumed their votes would not count.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers acknowledged that it would be difficult for her to catch up in the race for pledged delegates even if she succeeded in winning Ohio and Texas in three weeks and Pennsylvania in April. They said the Democratic Party’s rules, which award delegates relatively evenly among the candidates based on the proportion of the vote they receive, would require her to win by huge margins in those states to match Mr. Obama in delegates won through voting.

The delegate math set up a new front in the battle for the party’s presidential nomination, one based on competing views of how the party leaders and elected officials whose vote will determine the outcome should make their decisions.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said the delegates should make their decision based on who they thought would be the stronger candidate and president. Mr. Obama argues that they should follow the will of the Democratic Party as expressed in the primary and caucuses — meaning the candidate with the most delegates from the voting.

Mr. Obama’s aides said they hoped to end the voting season with a delegate lead of more than 100, which they would seek to portray as a decisive affirmation by Democratic primary voters of Mr. Obama’s candidacy. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they were looking to bring the margin down significantly below 100 in hope of arguing that the result was too close for delegates to consider in deciding how to vote.

Much for Mrs. Clinton depends on shoring up her support in the portions of the electorate — including women, low- and middle-income voters and Hispanics — that have provided her with victories in key states.

“Hillary does better with blue-collar voters, working-class voters, union members,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who has not endorsed anyone in the race. “Barack does better among African-Americans and younger voters and upper-income voters. If that holds, Ohio tilts toward Hillary.”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign showed signs of being buffeted by conflicting forces as it sought to grapple with a dwindling number of options. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, after some discussion about whether to focus exclusively on Ohio and Texas for the next three weeks, finally decided to send her for three days this week to Wisconsin, which votes next Tuesday.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said that they did not think she could win there but that they had concluded at this point they could not afford to leave any delegates on the table or allow Mr. Obama to run up another big margin of victory in the popular vote.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said they would also argue to superdelegates that they should give less deference to a lead from Mr. Obama because much of that had been built up in states where there were caucuses, which tend to attract far fewer voters than primaries, where Mrs. Clinton has tended to do better than she has done in caucuses.

“I think for superdelegates, the quality of where the win comes from should matter in terms of making a judgment about who might be the best general election candidate,” said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s senior campaign adviser.

The final Democratic primary contests are in early June; Montana and South Dakota vote June 3, and Puerto Rico four days later. It would then be almost three months until the Democratic convention, a period in which, if enough superdelegates have not expressed a firm preference to decide the outcome, the party could face a period of intense horse trading or worse.

Meanwhile, the likely Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, would have a long period to rally his fractious party to his side and hone his attacks on the Democrats.

A delegate count by The New York Times, including projections from caucuses where delegates have not yet been chosen, showed Mr. Obama with a 113-delegate lead over Mrs. Clinton: 1,095 to 982.

Delegate counts by other news organizations and by the campaigns showed somewhat different results, reflecting the difficulty of trying to make exact delegate counts at this point in the process. The figures do not include superdelegates.

Mr. Obama’s campaign said that he had a lead of 1,139 to 1,003; by the count of the Clinton campaign organization, Mr. Obama was doing even better: 1,141 to 1,004 for Mrs. Clinton.

There are 1,082 delegates left to be selected.

By any measure, Mr. Obama is in a much stronger position on Wednesday than he was just a few days ago and in a significantly stronger position than Mrs. Clinton thought he would be at this point. That is because Mr. Obama not only won a series of states, but also won them by large margins — over 20 percentage points — so that he began picking up extra delegates and opening a lead on Mrs. Clinton.

And that is the problem for Mrs. Clinton going forward. If these were winner-take-all states, Mrs. Clinton could pick up 389 delegates in Texas and Ohio on March 4. Now she would have to beat Mr. Obama by more than 20 percentage points in order to pick up a majority of delegates in both states.

“We don’t think our lead will drop below 100 delegates,” David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, said in an interview. “The math is the math.”

Mr. Plouffe said by his count, Mr. Obama had won 14 states by a margin of over 20 percentage points or more; Mrs. Clinton has won two states by that margin.

Mr. Penn said the Clinton campaign believed that it could mitigate the losses she suffered by winning in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. In addition to whatever demographic advantage she might have in Ohio, Mrs. Clinton enjoys the support of the governor, Ted Strickland.

“They are working very hard on her behalf,” said Chris Redfern, the party chairman, who is neutral in the race. “It’s not one of those ‘we show up the last week and do a press conference’ things.”

In Texas, Mr. Penn said Mrs. Clinton would be helped by the Latino vote — which he said could ultimately be as much as 40 percent of the electorate.

But Mrs. Clinton faces another problem there in the form of that state’s unusual delegation allocation rules. Delegates are allocated to state senatorial districts based on Democratic voter turn-out in the last election. Bruce Buchanan, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that in the last election, turnout was low in predominantly Hispanic districts and unusually high in urban African-American districts.

That means more delegates will be available in districts that, based on the results so far, could be expected to go heavily for Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton, Dr. Buchanan said, “has got her work cut out for her.”

Jim Camden
Staff writer
February 13, 2008

Most of Washington state’s 17 superdelegates to the Democratic convention have yet to announce who they will back for president, but the ones who have are an almost opposite image of last Saturday’s caucus results.

Caucus participants supported Barack Obama by about 2-to-1 over Hillary Clinton. But five of the state’s superdelegates are supporting Clinton while just three are supporting Obama.

On Tuesday, some superdelegates tried to calm fears that they would sway a close vote and override the grassroots choice of those who participated in local caucuses. That scenario could occur if neither Obama nor Clinton captures a majority of regular delegates by the time the states finish with their primaries or caucuses in June.

“I would ask everyone to calm down a little bit,” said U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, a superdelegate backing Obama. He’s urging the state’s undecided, or at least unannounced, superdelegates to hold off for a few months on stating their support.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a superdelegate supporting Clinton, announced her endorsement before the caucuses “because I felt voters deserved to know where I stand.” But she believes the voters will select enough delegates through primaries and caucuses to give one candidate or the other the majority before the national convention starts in August.

A spokeswoman said Murray was urging everyone to let the process run its course. When asked how she would vote if neither Clinton nor Obama had enough delegate votes to secure the nomination, spokeswoman Alex Glass added: “We’re not going to get into hypotheticals.”

At issue is the question of the Democratic Party’s use of key members – some elected officials and some party leaders – to cast their ballot for a nominee along with delegates selected through the primary or caucus process. Regular delegates are bound to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged on the first ballot at the national convention. Superdelegates are allowed to choose which candidate to support, and can switch their support at any time.

That system, which the Democratic Party has used in various forms since the 1970s, rankles some Obama supporters who contend the superdelegates should reflect the caucus or primary results. In an interview with Politico.com, an online political news site, Obama said Monday he thought it would be a problem if either he or Clinton won a majority of the delegates, and “that was somehow overturned by party insiders.”

The issue may be less of a concern in Idaho, where Obama won an overwhelming victory in that state’s county caucuses, and three of the four known superdelegates have endorsed him. State Chairman R. Keith Roark is uncommitted and a fifth superdelegate will be chosen by delegates to the state convention.

Idaho Party Vice Chairwoman Jeanne Buell of Worley said she feels she has an obligation to represent voters in Idaho in general, and in Kootenai County in particular, where about 79 percent of the caucus participants supported Obama. She also promised to endorse the first Democratic candidate who would come to Idaho and campaign, and that was Obama, she said.

Even if Clinton had won the caucuses, she’d back Obama because “I made that commitment.”

In Washington, Clinton has the support of most superdelegates who have announced who they back, even though Obama was the clear favorite among caucus participants.

Smith notes, however, that the majority of Washington’s superdelegates are uncommitted, so the final tally could wind up close to the caucus results.

It would look bad for the superdelegates to decide the election by voting in a far different ratio than the public, Smith said. But he doubts that would happen.

“I think it would interfere with the ability of our candidate to win in November,” he said. “These are not stupid people and they want to get a Democrat elected.”

Several of Washington’s superdelegates said they are going to wait for the primaries and caucuses to play out before deciding who to support. Although he’s a superdelegate, U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen said he’s no fan of the system; he isn’t even planning on going to the national convention in Denver unless the votes of the superdelegates are needed to select the nominee.

He said he doesn’t know yet who he’ll support, and is waiting to see the results of all of the caucuses and primaries – including Washington’s Feb. 19 primary, which has no effect on selecting regular delegates.

“We do need to let the grass roots decide, but we need to let them go through the process,” Larsen said.

Washington superdelegates

Endorsing Sen. Hillary Clinton

Sen. Patty Murray

Sen. Maria Cantwell

Rep. Norm Dicks

Rep. Jay Inslee

King County Executive Ron Simms

Endorsing Barack Obama

Gov. Chris Gregoire

Rep. Adam Smith

National Committeewoman Pat Notter

Uncommitted

Former House Speaker Tom Foley *

Rep. Brian Baird

Rep. Rick Larsen

Rep. Jim McDermott

State Chairman Dwight Pelz

State Vice Chairwoman Eileen Macoll

National Committeeman David MacDonald

National Committeeman Ed Cote

National Committeewoman Sharon Mast

Idaho’s superdelegates

Endorsing Obama

State Chairwoman Jeanne Buell

National Committeeman Grant Burgoyne

National Committeewoman Gail Bray

Uncommitted

State Chairman R. Keith Roark

Superdelegate to be chosen at the state convention

* Some lists have Foley, who served as ambassador to Japan during the Clinton Administration, as a Clinton superdelegate, but he hasn’t made a public endorsement.

February 13, 2008

By JOHN M. BRODER and DALIA SUSSMAN

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama rolled to victory by large margins in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, extending his winning streak over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to eight Democratic nominating contests.

The outcome provided him his first chance to assert that the Democratic race, which had seemed to be heading into a protracted standoff, is beginning to break in his direction. And it left Mrs. Clinton facing weeks in which she has few opportunities for the kind of victory that would alter the race in her favor after a string of defeats notable not just for their number but also their magnitude.

In Tuesday’s contests, Mr. Obama showed impressive strength among not only the groups that have backed him in earlier contests — blacks, younger voters, the affluent and self-described independents — but also among older voters, women and lower-income people, the core of Mrs. Clinton’s support up to now, according to exit polls. Mr. Obama also won majorities of white men and Hispanic voters in Virginia, though not in Maryland.

With almost all precincts reporting, Mr. Obama won 75 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia and 64 percent in Virginia. He had 60 percent of the vote in Maryland with results from 67 percent of the precincts.

On the Republican side, Senator John McCain won in Virginia over Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, virtually eliminating any threat that Mr. Huckabee might have posed to Mr. McCain’s status as his party’s all but certain nominee.

Mr. Huckabee got a boost from conservative and evangelical Christian voters in the state, but not enough to overcome support among moderates and nonevangelical Christians for Mr. McCain, who won 50 percent of the vote. Mr. McCain also prevailed in the District of Columbia, with 68 percent of the vote, and in Maryland, where he had 55 percent of the vote with 67 percent of the precincts reporting.

He said of Mr. Huckabee, “He certainly keeps things interesting — maybe a little too interesting at times tonight, I must confess.”

Mr. McCain turned his attention to attacks on his Democratic opponents, saying they “promise a new approach to governing but offer only the policies of a political orthodoxy that insists the solution to government’s failures is to simply make it bigger.”

In all, 168 pledged delegates were at stake for the Democrats and 116 for the Republicans. The Democrats will divide delegates proportionally to the candidates’ vote statewide and at the Congressional level while the Republican races are winner-take-all.

Mr. Obama’s victories gave him a lead over Mrs. Clinton among pledged delegates, according to preliminary counts by the Obama campaign and some news organizations. Obama aides calculate that he also leads in delegate counts that include so-called superdelegates, the party officers and elected officials who control 20 percent of the total delegates to the Democratic convention.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has suffered in recent weeks from overspending and internal upheaval, including the demotion of the campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, late last week and the resignation Tuesday of the deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry.

Mr. Obama, looking ahead to the next contest, was in Madison, Wis., when the results came in. In remarks to a boisterous rally, he did not mention Mrs. Clinton by name. But over loud applause he declared: “We also know that at this moment the cynics can no longer say our hope is false. We have now won east and west, north and south, and across the heartland of this country we love.”

Mrs. Clinton essentially conceded the three contests Tuesday morning by leaving Washington to campaign in Texas. She scheduled four days of appearances in Wisconsin, which holds its primary next Tuesday, but where Mr. Obama already has a significant ground operation and is spending heavily on advertising. Hawaii, where Mr. Obama largely grew up, also holds its nominating caucuses next Tuesday. But the Clinton campaign’s major efforts will be in Texas and Ohio, which vote on March 4. Rhode Island and Vermont also hold primaries that day.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers say she will focus on winning over voters in Ohio and Texas to halt Mr. Obama’s growing momentum and to try to stay close in the count of pledged delegates. The Clinton campaign hopes that Ohio, with large numbers of lower-income and older voters, and Texas, with a large Latino electorate, will serve as a seawall against the Obama surge. The Clinton campaign is also looking to Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22, to provide another big-state victory and to stay competitive in the delegate chase.

“We are going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks bringing our message about what we need in America, the kind of president we need on Day One to be commander in chief and turn the economy around,” Mrs. Clinton said at a rally in El Paso on Tuesday night, making no reference to her losses back East. “I’m tested. I’m ready. Let’s make it happen.”

But in the meantime, Mr. Obama will have a chance to begin convincing his party that his series of convincing wins in the last week represents a turning point in the campaign and that now is the time for Democrats to begin rallying around him as the strongest candidate to take back the White House.

Turnout was brisk in all three jurisdictions, with long lines at polling stations but few serious problems reported. Bill O’Field, spokesman for the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics said that turnout had surpassed previous primaries, with some precincts ran out of paper ballots, but that voting was never halted because the stations had electronic voting machines as well.

In Maryland, polls stayed open an extra 90 minutes, until 9:30 p.m., because of bad road conditions caused by sleet and freezing rain.

Three in 10 voters in Tuesday’s Republican primary in Virginia described themselves as very conservative, and two-thirds of them supported Mr. Huckabee. And 6 in 10 evangelical Christians, who accounted for nearly half of Republican voters here, backed Mr. Huckabee.

Mr. McCain, for his part, had an edge among voters who said they were “somewhat” conservative, as well as broad support among moderates and non-evangelical Christians.

But the exit poll further underscored some of Mr. McCain’s potential vulnerabilities among conservatives going forward. Half of all Republican voters in Virginia said his positions on the issues were not conservative enough. And while 7 in 10 conservative voters said they would be satisfied if Mr. McCain wins the nomination, fewer than 4 in 10 of them would be “very” satisfied.

Mr. Obama’s strength in Virginia and Maryland crossed a range of demographic groups, according to exit polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool. He received support from voters across all income and education levels, as well as across political ideologies, from those who described themselves as liberal, moderate and conservative Democrats. And independents, who were allowed to vote in Virginia’s Democratic primary and accounted for 2 in 10 voters there, supported Mr. Obama two to one over Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton received the support of a majority of white women voting in Virginia and Maryland, but Mr. Obama countered with overwhelming support among black voters, men and women alike. Among white men, Mr. Obama won a majority in Virginia and ran close to Mrs. Clinton in Maryland.

More than 6 in 10 men in both states supported Mr. Obama, as did a majority of women, big changes from numbers in earlier primaries.

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from Arlington, Va.; Patrick Healy from El Paso; and Jeff Zeleny from Madison, Wis.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Number to reach 438 million by 2050, study says

N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post
February 12, 2008

The number of Hispanics in the United States will triple by 2050 and represent nearly 30 percent of the population if trends continue, according to a report released Monday.

The study by the nonpartisan, Washington-based Pew Research Center also found that nearly one in five Americans will be foreign-born in 2050, compared with about one in eight today. Asian-Americans, representing 5 percent of the population today, are expected to boost their share to 9 percent.

Blacks are projected to maintain their current 13 percent share. Non-Hispanic whites will still be the nation’s largest group, but they will drop from 67 percent of U.S. residents to 47 percent.

Overall, the U.S. population will increase by 47 percent from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million by 2050, with newly arriving immigrants accounting for 47 percent of the rise, and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren 35 percent.

The report offers a picture of the possible long-term effects of the immigration surge that began after 1965, when Congress ended a quota system that had nearly eliminated immigration from non-European countries since the 1920s.

Because of a declining birthrate among U.S.-born women, immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren already account for most of the population increase over the last several decades. The study projects that by 2025, the foreign-born share of the population will surpass the peak recorded during the wave of immigration between 1860 and 1920, when foreign-born residents represented as much as 15 percent of the U.S. population.

But the study’s authors said immigration will do little to offset the more than doubling of the nation’s elderly population as baby boomers age. By 2050, people older than 65 will make up 19 percent of the population, compared with 12 percent in 2005, while the share of working-age people will shrink from 63 percent to 58 percent.

Today, there are about 59 children or elderly people per 100 working-age adults. By 2050, that figure will increase to 72 dependents per 100 working-age adults.

Those who oppose allowing immigration to continue at its current pace interpreted the findings as vindication.

“These numbers underline the fact that immigration is not a solution to the aging of the population,” said Mark Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors further limits on immigration.

The study’s authors noted that even if their projections are accurate, the implications may be different by 2050: Given the high rate of intermarriage between Latinos and members of other ethnic groups, many descendants of today’s Latinos may not even identify as such.

Waterboarding, tribunals test prosecution

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, is seen shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan. The Pentagon plans to seek the death penalty for Mohammed and five other detainees at Guantanamo Bay in connection with the 2001 attacks. Associated Press (FILE Associated Press) The suspects •Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. •Mohammed al-Qahtani, who the military said could have been the 20th hijacker had he not been turned down for a visa. •Ramzi Binalshibh, considered a top al-Qaida detainee in Guantanamo. The military called Binalshibh a main intermediary between the hijackers and bin Laden. He also was named Mohammed’s main assistant for “Planes Operations.” •Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. •Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who helped move money among the hijackers. •Waleed bin Attash, who’s charged with training some of the hijackers. For example, the military alleges that he prepared reports for al-Qaida on how to get knives onto flights. McClatchy Related stories 9-11

Aamer Madhani and James Oliphant
Chicago Tribune
February 12, 2008

WASHINGTON – The plan announced by the Pentagon Monday to seek the death penalty against six suspects accused of planning and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks could be complicated by the recent acknowledgment that one of the accused was the subject of waterboarding, as well as the legal and international communities’ antipathy toward the Bush administration’s military tribunals.

The charges filed against the six, including alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, outline a litany of war crimes and include conspiracy, murder, attacking civilians, terrorism and supporting terrorism. All six suspects are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the military plans to try the six together.

Monday’s announcement takes the Pentagon, and the country, into largely uncharted legal territory. The procedures of the military commissions have been repeatedly challenged in court, with some success, and legal precedents that have been developed by courts over decades or longer hold less sway than in the civilian criminal justice system.

But the administration argues that ordinary courts are not equipped to handle the sensitive national security considerations involved in trying top terrorists.

“These charges allege a long-term, highly sophisticated, organized plan by al-Qaida to attack the United States of America,” Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to the tribunal system, told a Pentagon news conference Monday.

Besides Mohammed, the other men facing charges for the Sept. 11 plot are Walid Muhammad bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Mohammed al-Qahtani. Mohammed, bin Attash, Binalshibh, and Ali are also charged with “hijacking or hazarding a vessel” in connection with the four commercial airplanes that were crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.

As the commissions’ procedures dictate, Judge Susan Crawford, the convening authority over the military tribunals, still needs to certify the charges against all six of the suspects as capital offenses to make them eligible for the death penalty if convicted.

Since its opening, the Guantanamo prison has been criticized by human rights activists and some foreign leaders as a secretive facility operating outside U.S. law. The military commissions have also been criticized by many in the legal community, and federal courts have repeatedly questioned the Bush administration’s overall system for handling enemy combatants in the war on terror.

In 2006, the Supreme Court decision struck down the first version of the military tribunal, or commission, system as unconstitutional. Since then, only four defendants had been formally charged by the military commission.

Despite the notoriety of the new defendants, nothing is likely to come easily – or quickly. Hartmann said it could be months before the defendants even make an appearance before a commission, the first step toward an ultimate trial.

The prospect of capital punishment is likely to throw the already muddy process into further uncertainty, since courts demand a higher degree of due process when the death penalty is involved. And lawyers for each of the detainees will undoubtedly file motions to sever their clients’ case from the other five.

Another potential wrinkle: The Supreme Court is considering a case that concerns whether detainees have the right to challenge their detention in federal court outside the commission process. If it sides with the detainees, that litigation would proceed on a wholly separate, and elongated, track.

Kevin Lanigan, the director for the Human Rights First law and security program, said the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other suspects was long overdue, but the allegations of torture will complicate a military system that has been problematic from the start.

“The administration still refuses to acknowledge its two greatest self-imposed obstacles to achieving justice for the families and victims of 9-11: the absence of a credible and truly independent system for trying these defendants, and problems caused by the use of official cruelty in interrogating them,” Lanigan said.

Last week, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the attacks, was one of three terror suspects in CIA custody who had been subjected to the interrogation technique known as waterboarding.

Waterboarding makes a prisoner believe he is in imminent danger of drowning. The suspect is tied to a board and water is poured through a cloth that covers his face. The practice is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual, and most of the international community considers the technique torture.

In addition, al-Qahtani, who Pentagon officials say was supposed to have been the 20th hijacker, has alleged he was tortured and last fall recanted a confession he said he made after he was abused by interrogators.

Jim Cohen, a professor at Fordham Law School who represents two Guantanamo Bay detainees who are not among the six charged Monday, said the government’s case “smells of utter and complete unreliability.”

“What is the basis for the charges?” Cohen said “The meaty basis of this case is the statements made by KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) and others. And (most of) those statements, if not all of them, were made under harsh interrogations.”

When asked if Hayden’s admission could complicate the case, Hartmann said it would be up to the military judge to determine what evidence can be admitted.

Along with the interrogations, a recurring problem facing defense attorneys who have tried to defend detainees before commission has been access to other detainees as witnesses and to classified material. The Pentagon has continually objected to such access because of concerns over national security. Those will also be issues confronting Judge Crawford.

But Hartmann said the six accused men would be given the same rights as U.S. troops tried under a military justice system.

The suspects, for example, will be allowed to call witnesses and will be appointed military attorneys as well as have the right to hire civilian attorneys. They will also be allowed to review any evidence presented against them, Hartmann said. If convicted, appeals can ultimately go to the Supreme Court.

While the trial will not be televised, journalists will be allowed to attend, and arrangements will be made to allow the family of the Sept. 11 victims to view recordings of the proceedings in private, Hartmann said.

“There will be no secret trials,” Hartmann said.

David S. Broder
The Washington Post
February 10, 2008

When this remarkable political year began, many Democrats were expecting a smooth passage to a historic nomination and a relatively easy presidential victory. That is hardly the case today.

Sen. Hillary Clinton was clearly the established favorite among a large field of challengers, blessed with far more financial and organizational resources than anyone else and the best brand name in Democratic politics.

She was the center of attention, not only for the Democrats but for the Republican candidates as well – the person they expected to face in the general election. As Republican aspirants were struggling to escape the downdraft of the self-immolation that had overtaken President Bush and the GOP Congress, with no assurance that anyone in the group could reassemble the scattered pieces of the Reagan legacy, all of them were focused on Clinton as the final barrier to keeping the White House.

Because the odds seemed so favorable for a Democratic victory in November, eight or nine candidates – with varying degrees of plausibility – decided it was worth the gamble to try to wrest the nomination from Clinton. The conventional wisdom at the start was that someone would emerge to challenge her after the first round of primaries and that she would probably defeat that unnamed opponent.

To everyone’s surprise, the least credentialed of her opponents, young Sen. Barack Obama, turned out to have the personal and political skills that rocketed him past all the others. He beat the field in Iowa, stumbled briefly in New Hampshire and Nevada, recovered in South Carolina and emerged from Super Tuesday almost even with Clinton in delegates and ahead in the race for campaign dollars.

As the next phase of state-by-state contests begins, no one can claim the favorite’s role in a Democratic contest that could go all the way to the national convention.

Meantime, on the Republican side, John McCain has resurrected his candidacy with a series of primary victories from New Hampshire through California, amassing enough delegates that his nomination is assured.

With Mitt Romney’s withdrawal, and only Mike Huckabee, a friendly sparring partner, and the eccentric Ron Paul still running, Republicans can begin to focus on November. Their challenge is still difficult. The war in Iraq remains a heavy burden, its costs outweighing its dividends. The economy has turned down. And public weariness with the White House fuels a desire for change.

Nonetheless, McCain now has the luxury of time in which to mend his differences with some of his fellow conservatives and to pursue the independents whose support would make him a formidable contender.

Where Clinton was the measuring stick for all others in both parties during the past year, McCain now becomes the standard of comparison. As the Democratic race continues, the key question becomes, “Who matches up best against John McCain?”

That will increasingly be a factor for Democratic voters, who find themselves being fragmented on gender, racial and generational lines even in the absence of any serious policy or philosophical differences between the candidates.

And it will be even more central to the deliberations of the almost 800 “superdelegates” – elected and party officials who may represent the balance of power at the convention.

Both Clinton and Obama are now framing their campaigns as a riposte to John McCain. Clinton argues that, given McCain’s authority as a warrior and as a defense expert, her experience and toughness are essential for the Democrats to have a chance.

Obama counters with the claim that it is only by providing the sharpest of contrasts – a generational gap linked to a flat-out denial of the strategic centrality of Iraq – that the Democrats can confront McCain and hope to win.

As I have previously noted, Clinton and McCain come close to matching each other when voters are asked to compare their experience and their ability to bring needed change. But McCain has a huge lead on Obama when voters judge experience, and Obama has a large advantage when it comes to promoting change.

The Democratic contest is more than a battle of personalities. It represents two sharply contrasting strategies for victory in November. The choice is one Democrats never expected to face.

796 insiders could override ordinary voters

Peter Wallsten and James Rainey
Los Angeles Times
February 10, 2008

WASHINGTON – In a year that has seen Democratic voters flock to the polls but produce two evenly matched candidates, some party leaders are becoming alarmed that the process for deciding an eventual winner is in disarray, and that the decision may come down not to ordinary voters but to the group of 796 insiders known as “super delegates.”

Contributing to the tension is a continuing battle over the roles of Florida and Michigan, which were stripped of their participation in the party’s national nominating convention due to a fight with the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, over the primary election calendar.

Now, with the prospect that neither Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Barack Obama will win a clear majority in the delegate count, a discussion is re-emerging over whether voters in those states should return to the polls and help pick the nominee, voting this time in an election formally sanctioned by the party.

“We’re headed for a train wreck if we don’t get this resolved,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., referring both to the role of super delegates and to the DNC’s decision to penalize his state. “It is a flawed system that has to be changed.”

Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s 2000 campaign and is herself a super delegate, threatened to quit her leadership post in the party if the nomination were to be decided by insiders rather than the broader group of Democratic voters who have turned out in huge numbers. Brazile, while pleased that the competitive race has invigorated the party, said Friday she was “deeply worried about our ability to ensure that this is a very smooth process.”

The anxiety has risen in the wake of Tuesday’s coast-to-coast primaries and caucuses, which left Obama and Clinton nearly even in the delegate count – leaving strategists in both campaigns to conclude that neither was likely to win the needed 2,025 delegates even after primary and caucus voting ends this summer.

Republicans, meanwhile, have all but crowned a nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Now some Democrats are fretting that the GOP can prepare for the general election while Clinton and Obama wage a bitter and personal war for delegates that would end in a swirl of controversy.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean sought last week to calm those fears, predicting that the party would likely know its nominee by the spring – even if it requires some sort of deal between Clinton and Obama.

“The idea that we can afford to have a big fight at the convention and then win the race (in November), I think, is not a good scenario,” he said Tuesday. “I think we will have a nominee sometime in the middle of March or April. But if we don’t, then we’re going to have to get the candidates together and make some kind of an arrangement. Because I don’t think we can afford to have a brokered convention.”

Florida and Michigan together account for more than 350 delegates. But at the moment the DNC is refusing to seat the delegations because both states held primary elections earlier than the official party calendar allowed.

With the delegate race so close, the dispute over Florida and Michigan has emerged as a point of contention between Clinton and Obama. Clinton, who won the votes in both states, is demanding that the delegates be counted. Obama disagrees, noting that his name did not appear on the Michigan ballot nor did he officially campaign in Florida.

Florida officials said they were especially loath to put aside the Jan. 29 primary results, given that more than 1.7 million Democrats turned out that day and that Clinton and Obama appeared on the ballot.

“You can’t undo an election with a caucus where you would be switching 1.7 million private ballots with maybe as many as 50,000 attending a caucus,” said Nelson, who has endorsed Clinton. “That just is not going to work, especially in a state that is so sensitive about having the right to vote and having it count as intended.”

Another senior Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, issued a similar statement Friday, noting that 600,000 Democrats voted in that state’s primary and that it “would not be practical or fair to throw out the results of that election.”

Adding to the friction is the role that super delegates are entitled to play at the party’s national convention in Denver, set for August.

Both campaigns are now focusing intensely on those 796 insiders – members of Congress, governors, state party chairs and DNC members from each state – who could play kingmaker at a competitive convention. Those super delegates are free to vote for a candidate of their choice, regardless of the outcome of nomination contests in their states.

The super-delegate process appears to benefit Clinton, with her family’s long-standing political connections. She leads among declared super delegates, about 270-170 – a lead that includes the vote of her own husband, former President Clinton, who gets a vote as a “distinguished party leader.”

The tradition of super delegates was adopted in the 1980s as party leaders and elected officials looked for ways to maintain their influence over a national convention. DNC officials on Friday defended the practice, arguing that many of the super delegates are grass-roots activists.

But the closely fought contest between Clinton and Obama is making some super delegates uneasy. Some do not relish the idea of deciding the nominee, even after millions of Americans have already voted.

Questions from Kautzman: What do you think the Democratic Party should do to resolve these two issues? What do you think it will do? What will be the result?

Anyone want to post their thoughts on the whole caucus experience?

Illinois senator sweeps Democratic contests; Huckabee wins in Kansas

The Associated Press

Sat., Feb. 9, 2008

WASHINGTON – Sen. Barack Obama swept the Louisiana primary and caucuses in Nebraska and Washington state Saturday, boosting his slim delegate lead over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in their historic race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Illinois senator also won caucuses in the Virgin Islands, completing his best night of the campaign.

“Today, voters from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast to the heart of America stood up to say ‘yes we can’” Obama told a cheering audience of Democrats at a party dinner in Richmond, Va.

He jabbed simultaneously at Clinton and Arizona Sen. John McCain, saying the election was a choice between debating the Republican nominee-in-waiting “about who has the most experience in Washington, or debating him about who’s most likely to change Washington. Because that’s a debate we can win.”

Clinton preceded Obama to the podium. She did not refer to the night’s voting, instead turning against McCain. “We have tried it President Bush’s way,” she said, “and now the Republicans have chosen more of the same.”

She left quickly after her speech, departing before Obama’s arrival. But his supporters made their presence known, sending up chants of “Obama” from the audience as she made her way offstage.

Obama’s winning margins ranged from substantial to crushing.

He won roughly two-thirds of the vote in Washington state and Nebraska, and almost 90 percent in the Virgin Islands.

With returns counted from nearly two-thirds of the Louisiana precincts, he was gaining 53 percent of the vote, to 39 percent for the former first lady. As in his earlier Southern triumphs in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, Obama, a black man, rode a wave of African-American support to victory in Louisiana.

In all, the Democrats scrapped for 161 delegates in the night’s contests. In initial allocations, Obama had won 31, Clinton nine.

Before Saturday, in overall totals in the NBC News count, Obama had 861 delegates to 855 for Clinton. A total of 2,025 is required to win the nomination at the national convention in Denver.

The Democratic race moved into a new, post-Super Tuesday phase as McCain flunked his first ballot test since becoming the Republican nominee-in-waiting. He lost Kansas caucuses to Mike Huckabee, gaining less than 24 percent of the vote.

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, got nearly 60 percent of the vote a few hours after telling conservatives in Washington, “I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them.” He won all 36 delegates at stake.

Also ahead in Washington, Lousiana
Huckabee also edged ahead of McCain in the caucus in Washington. The two were running neck and neck in Louisiana’s primary.

For all his brave talk, Huckabee was hopelessly behind in the delegate race. McCain had 719, compared with 234 for Huckabee and 14 for Texas Rep. Ron Paul. It takes 1,191 to win the nomination at the national convention.

The Democrats’ race was as close as the Republicans’ was not, a contest between Obama, hoping to become the first black president, and Clinton, campaigning to become the first female commander in chief.

The two rivals contest primaries on Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, all states where Obama and his campaign are hopeful of winning.

Preliminary results of a survey of voters leaving their polling places in Louisiana showed that nearly half of those casting ballots were black. As a group, African-Americans have overwhelmingly favored Obama in earlier primaries, helping him to wins in several Southern states.

Obama was gaining about 80 percent of the black votes statewide, while Clinton was winning 70 percent support among whites, the exit poll showed.

One in seven Democratic voters and about one in 10 Republicans said Hurricane Katrina had caused their families severe hardship from which they have not recovered. There was another indication of the impact the storm had on the state. Early results suggested that northern Louisiana accounted for a larger share of the electorate than in the past, presumably the result of the decline in population in the hurricane-battered New Orleans area.

McCain cleared his path to the party nomination earlier in the week with a string of Super Tuesday victories that drove former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney from the race. He spent the rest of the week trying to reassure skeptical conservatives, at the same time party leaders quickly closed ranks behind him.

His Kansas defeat aside, McCain also suffered a symbolic defeat when Romney edged him out in a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting across town from the White House.

New phase of Democratic race
The day’s contests opened a new phase in the Democratic race between Clinton and Obama.

The Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses in 22 states, which once looked likely to effectively settle the race, instead produced a near-equal delegate split.

That left Obama and Clinton facing the likelihood of a grind-it-out competition lasting into spring — if not to the summer convention itself.

With the night’s events, 29 of the 50 states have selected delegates.

Two more — Michigan and Florida — held renegade primaries and the Democratic National Committee has vowed not to seat any delegates chosen at either of them.

Maine, with 24 delegates, holds caucuses on Sunday. Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia and voting by Americans overseas are next, on Tuesday, with 175 combined.

Then follows a brief intermission, followed by a string of election nights, some crowded, some not.

The date of March 4 looms large, 370 delegates in primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Mississippi is alone in holding a primary one week later, with a relatively small 33 delegates at stake.

Puerto Rico anchors the Democratic calendar, with 55 delegates chosen in caucuses on June 7.

If Super Tuesday failed to settle the campaign, it produced a remarkable surge in fundraising.

$7 million more raised in two days
Obama’s aides announced he had raised more than $7 million on line in the two days that followed.

Clinton disclosed she had loaned her campaign $5 million late last month in an attempt to counter her rival’s Super Tuesday television advertising. She raised more than $6 million in the two days after the busiest night in primary history.

The television ad wars continued unabated.

Obama has been airing commercials for more than a week in television markets serving every state that has a contest though Feb 19.

Clinton began airing ads midweek in Washington state, Maine and Nebraska, and added Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia on Friday.

The exit poll was conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for The Associated Press and the television networks.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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• Story Highlights
• Polls suggest Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain would be tied
• Sen. Barack Obama would have a clear lead over McCain, polls suggest
• Men would be more likely to vote for Obama than Clinton in a general election

From Bill Schneider
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Sen. John McCain became the likely Republican nominee after Mitt Romney decided to suspend his campaign Thursday. Now, the Democrats are debating who would do better against the Arizona Republican.

Two polls this month have asked registered voters nationwide how they would vote if the choice were between McCain and Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton.

A CNN poll, conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation February 1-3, shows Clinton three points ahead of McCain, 50 percent to 47 percent. That’s within the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points, meaning that the race is statistically tied..

A Time magazine poll, conducted February 1-4, also shows a dead heat between Clinton and McCain. Each was backed by 46 percent of those polled.

Sen. Barack Obama believes he can do better, arguing “I’ve got appeal that goes beyond our party.”

In the CNN poll, Obama leads McCain by 8 points, 52 percent to 44 percent. That’s outside the margin of error, meaning that Obama has the lead.

And in the Time poll, Obama leads McCain by 7 points, 48 percent to 41 percent — a lead also outside of the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points.

In both polls, Obama looks stronger than Clinton. Why?

Obama’s explanation: “I think there is no doubt that she has higher negatives than any of the remaining Democratic candidates. That’s just a fact, and there are some who will not vote for her.”

That was three weeks ago. Now, only two Democratic candidates remain.

Clinton does have higher negatives than Obama — and McCain. Forty-four percent of the public say they don’t like Clinton, compared with 36 percent who don’t like McCain and 31 percent who don’t like Obama, according to the CNN poll conducted February 1-3.

Why does Obama do better against McCain than Clinton? Obama does do a little better than Clinton with independents and Republicans.

But the big difference is men: Men give McCain an 18-point lead over Clinton, 57 percent to 39 percent, according to the CNN poll. The margin of error for that question was plus or minus 5 percentage points.

But if McCain and Obama went head to head, McCain’s lead among men shrinks to three, 49 percent to 46 percent — statistically a tie.

Women, on the other hand, vote for either Clinton or Obama by similar margins.

Some Democrats may be worried about how Obama will fare with white voters. Whites give McCain a 15-point lead over Clinton, (56 percent for McCain, 41 percent for Clinton).

But Obama actually fares better than Clinton with white voters. McCain still leads, but by a smaller margin, (52 to 43 percent).

Obama argues that he can reach across party lines. And he does do a little better than Clinton with Independents and Republicans, at least in these polls.

But the big difference is that Clinton doesn’t draw very well with men. Obama does.

All AboutJohn McCain • Hillary Clinton • Barack Obama

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Military prosecutors are in the final phases of preparing the first sweeping case against suspected conspirators in the plot that led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and drew the United States into war, people who have been briefed on the case said.

The charges, to be filed in the military commission system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would involve as many as six detainees held at the detention camp, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former senior aide to Osama bin Laden, who has said he was the principal planner of the plot.

The case could begin to fulfill a longtime goal of the Bush administration: establishing culpability for the terrorist attacks of 2001. It could also help the administration make its case that some detainees at Guantánamo, where 275 men remain, would pose a threat if they are not held at Guantánamo or elsewhere. Officials have long said that a half-dozen men held at Guantánamo played essential roles in the plot directed by Mr. Mohammed, from would-be hijackers to financiers.

But the case would also bring new scrutiny to the military commission system, which has a troubled history and has been criticized as a system designed to win convictions but that does not provide the legal protections of American civilian courts.

War-crimes charges against the men would almost certainly place the prosecutors in a battle over the treatment of inmates because at least two detainees tied to the 2001 terror attacks were subject to aggressive interrogation techniques that critics say amounted to torture.

One official who has been briefed on the case said the military prosecutors were considering seeking the death penalty for Mr. Mohammed, although no final decision appears to have been made. The official added that the military prosecutors had decided to focus on the Sept. 11 attacks in part as an effort to try to establish credibility for the military commission system before a new administration takes the White House next January.

“The thinking was 9/11 is the heart and soul of the whole thing. The thinking was: go for that,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case. Even if the charges are released soon, it would be many months before a trial could be held, lawyers said.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to comment specifically. But he added that the government was preparing a case against “individuals who have been involved in some of the most grievous acts of violence and terror against the United States and our allies.”

“The prosecution team is close to moving forward on referring charges on a number of individuals,” Mr. Whitman said.

Ever since President Bush announced in 2006 that he had transferred 14 “high value” detainees to Guantánamo from a secret C.I.A. detention program, it has been expected that the Pentagon would eventually lodge charges involving several of the numerous terror plots to which officials say several of those men were tied.

Officials have said detainees now held at Guantánamo are responsible for attacks that killed thousands of people, including the United States Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000, and the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002.

But it has always been clear that a case involving the Sept. 11 plot would be the centerpiece of the military commissions system and its most stringent test. After the Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration’s first system for military commission trials in 2006, Congress enacted a new law.

Among other things, the Military Commissions Act provides that detainees charged with war crimes are entitled to military lawyers to defend them, a presumption of innocence and a right of appeal. But detainees’ lawyers and other critics have said that many flaws remain, including the fact that the system is under Pentagon control and even the judges are military officers.

Told of the possible charges, Carie Lemack, whose mother was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, said such a trial would be a grueling process for the families. But, Ms. Lemack said, “It is important that justice be brought to those who killed my mother and nearly 3,000 others.”

It was not clear Friday whether final decisions had been made about precise charges and which detainees are to be included.

But it is known that the prosecutors have considered charges of murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism because of the Sept. 11 deaths. It is also known that a joint team of military and Department of Justice lawyers working on the case have considered charging six of the best-known Guantánamo detainees.

Lawyers have said that two of those are men whose treatment in American hands would inevitably be a focus of defense lawyers in their cases.

One of them, Mr. Mohammed, known as KSM, was subject to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding while in secret C.I.A. custody, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed this week.

The American-educated Mr. Mohammed was described by the Sept. 11 commission as the “self-cast star, the superterrorist,” with plans for destruction on a vast scale. At a Pentagon hearing last year, he claimed responsibility for more than 30 terrorist attacks and plots.

He was explicit about his role in the 2001 attacks. “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said.

The other detainee whose treatment could become a focus of any trial is Mohammed al-Qahtani, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2002. Pentagon officials have said he may have been the so-called “20th hijacker.” A month before the attacks, he flew from Dubai to Orlando, Fla., but was denied entry into the United States by an immigration official.

Pentagon investigators concluded in 2005 that he had been subject to abusive treatment at Guantánamo, including sleep deprivation, being forced to wear a bra and being led around on a leash.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, one of Mr. al-Qahtani’s lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said she had no information about whether he would be charged. “But if he is,” Ms. Gutierrez said, “I can assure you that his well-documented torture and the controversy over secret trials will be the focus.”

Zacarias Moussaoui, who at one point was identified by prosecutors as a potential “20th hijacker” pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2005, and is serving a life term. He is the only person who has been tried in a United States court for involvement in the Sept. 11 plot.

Defense lawyers are also expected to use any commission cases to challenge the prosecutors over the C.I.A.’s destruction of tapes of interrogations of two detainees, which has been acknowledged by the agency.

Among the other four potential defendants are Guantánamo detainees who intelligence officials have said played critical support roles for the hijackers.

Officials say Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who had been a roommate of the lead hijacker Mohamed Atta in Hamburg, Germany, was the main intermediary between the hijackers and Al Qaeda leaders in the months before Sept. 11.

The Pentagon has described another detainee, Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, as “a key lieutenant for KSM during the operation on 11 September” who wired $114,500 to the hijackers.

Mr. al-Baluchi’s assistant was Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, according to various accounts. The September 11 commission said that Mr. al-Hawsawi had been assigned by Mr. Mohammed to help coordinate hijackers’ travel and was so centrally involved that he was their contact for unused money to be returned in the days before the attacks.

Finally, the detainee known as Khallad, who is missing part of his right leg as a result of what officials say is a long jihadist history, is believed to have had long ties to Mr. bin Laden. Officials have said Khallad helped select and train some of the hijackers and was originally slated to have been one of them himself.

David S. Broder
The Washington Post
February 7, 2008

The continuing drama of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination should not diminish what John McCain has accomplished on the Republican side of this campaign.

The senator from Arizona still has to finish off the challenges from Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, but after Tuesday’s victories in such key states as California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Missouri, and a commanding lead in delegates, the question is when, not if, he will secure the nomination.

Were it not for the suspense in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the saga of McCain’s eight-month struggle from the brink of political bankruptcy last summer to his current supremacy would be the most riveting narrative of the year.

What is more, he has emerged – despite all the negatives of the George Bush legacy – as a serious possibility to win the presidency in November.

On Super Tuesday, I placed calls to a number of knowledgeable Republicans, Democrats and neutral observers to check their appraisals of McCain as a general-election candidate. I found him consolidating support within his own party and being treated with great respect by Democrats.

Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, who sees her home-state senator at close range, said, “He is not to be underestimated.” An Obama supporter, Napolitano said McCain is “a gifted campaigner with a great life story. When everything seemed to go wrong for him last year, I told people, ‘Never write John McCain off.’ ”

Former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, neutral since John Edwards withdrew from the race, told me he thought McCain would be “very tough” competition. Don Fowler, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and a Clinton supporter, who saw McCain campaign successfully in his state of South Carolina, said, “He is the best possible candidate for the Republicans by any measure I can see.”

There were some dissents. Gail Kaufman, a savvy California Democrat, said that McCain’s policy positions, including his anti-abortion stance, would cripple him in that state.

But I was struck by the warming tone toward McCain from conservative Republicans I reached in Wisconsin, Ohio and Louisiana, despite the barrage of criticism from Rush Limbaugh and Co.

And Newt Gingrich told me, “We disagree on some issues, but I’d rather fight him in the White House than either of those Democrats. He has come back because of one thing: his courage. As a populist, I love it.”

That message is underlined by the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. It showed McCain in a statistical tie with either Democrat, leading Clinton by 49 percent to 46 percent and trailing Obama by a similar margin.

In either scenario, women break for the Democratic candidate. McCain leads Clinton by 13 points among men, but only runs even with Obama. Party lines are sharp, and the battle for independents would be close. Currently, independents give McCain a 12-point lead over Clinton but favor Obama by 6 points over the Republican.

A fascinating dynamic appears when voters are asked to judge the candidates’ strength and experience versus their new ideas and potential for bringing change. McCain and Clinton match closely in both dimensions, while McCain leads Obama by 20 points on strength and experience, but Obama has a 31-point edge on representing a new direction.

Clearly, McCain’s age will be more of an issue in the general election than in the primaries. And so will his steadfast position on Iraq, symbolized by his support of the troop surge and his declaration that U.S. troops might have to remain there for 100 years. In the Post poll, McCain is competitive with Clinton and Obama on both the economy and health care, though trailing slightly, but he loses badly among voters for whom the war in Iraq is the top issue. Tim Hibbits, an independent pollster in Oregon, said, “People admire McCain’s principled stand against cutting and running, but it doesn’t answer the question why the hell we are there.”

Still, McCain is the only candidate in either party with a favorable personal rating by Republicans, Democrats, independents and evangelical voters. He will be formidable.

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain all but captured the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday after Mitt Romney withdrew from the race, saying the war in Iraq and the terrorist threat made it imperative that the party unite.

In a dramatic announcement before a convention of stunned and largely unhappy conservatives, Mr. Romney said that he wanted to fight on but that taking his campaign all the way to the Republican convention in September would delay a national campaign against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton or Senator Barack Obama, the two remaining Democratic contenders. Mr. Romney described both as weak on national security.

“They would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequences of that would be devastating,” Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, told a crowd that broke into chants of “Mitt, Mitt, Mitt.”

Staying in the race, he said, “would make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win.”

Mr. Romney, who spent tens of millions of dollars of his fortune on the race, added, “Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding the surrender to terror.”

Mr. McCain stepped forward two hours later before the same gathering to try to make peace with a group deeply skeptical of him, if not outright hostile. In a moment that will long be remembered by Republicans, he was greeted with jeers as well as cheers.

Mr. Romney did not explicitly endorse Mr. McCain in his address to the annual convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference, but for the first time in a campaign remarkable for its animosity between the two men, signaled a degree of support for him, saying he agreed with Mr. McCain on the war and on fighting terrorism.

“Now, I disagree with Senator McCain on a number of issues as you know,” Mr. Romney said, as the crowd booed at the mention of the name. “But I agree with him on doing whatever it takes to be successful in Iraq.”

When Mr. McCain took the stage, he reached out to conservatives in conciliatory remarks.

“Many of you have disagreed strongly with some positions I have taken in recent years,” Mr. McCain told the group in an enormous, overflowing hotel ballroom, where people were held back from entering by security guards who said the raucous crowd exceeded fire code violations. “I understand that. I might not agree with it, but I respect it for the principled position it is.”

Nonetheless, Mr. McCain said, “it is my sincere hope that even if you believe I have occasionally erred in my reasoning as a fellow conservative, you will still allow that I have, in many ways important to all of us, maintained the record of a conservative.”

President Bush is to speak to the group on Friday and will indirectly vouch for his old rival for the 2000 Republican nomination, according to a text of his remarks released by the White House. “Soon we will have a nominee who will carry the conservative banner into this election and beyond,” Mr. Bush is to say.

The mixed reception for Mr. McCain reflected the divisions within the party as it tries to chart a post-Bush ideological and political course in the face of a fired-up Democratic Party.

Although Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Representative Ron Paul of Texas remain in the Republican race, Thursday’s events had the effect of placing Mr. McCain in an almost unassailable position, while Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton face the prospects of a long fight between themselves for their party’s nomination.

Mr. McCain’s speech to the convention was one he had hoped to deliver Tuesday night, after voting in more than 20 primaries and caucuses across the country gave him a commanding lead.

On Thursday, with Mr. Romney out, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, faced the task of generating enthusiasm for his candidacy among conservatives while at the same time beginning to reach out to independents and moderate voters who could tilt the balance in the general election.

Many at the gathering responded to Mr. McCain’s speech with a mixture of resistance and resignation, indicating the magnitude of the challenge he will face if he hopes to match the palpable energy of the Democrats. As soon as Mr. Romney announced that he was ending his campaign, a few activists appeared in the hotel lobby with handmade cardboard signs saying, “Republicans Against McCain.”

Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation and a founder of the conservative movement who had endorsed Mr. Romney, said he had watched Mr. McCain’s speech on television and doubted that he had convinced many on the right.

“It didn’t go far enough,” Mr. Weyrich said. “I am going to write in somebody.”

Others said they would vote for Mr. McCain with distaste. “I will hold my nose and pull the lever,” said Tom Lewis, a small-business owner from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who was attending the conference.

Conservatives fault Mr. McCain for what they consider a long list of transgressions: voting against a big tax cut and a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, championing campaign finance laws that put advertising restrictions on independent organizations, pushing an immigration overhaul that many conservatives call amnesty for illegal immigrants, and once calling certain evangelical leaders “agents of intolerance.”

Mr. McCain’s plea for support reflected the Conservative Political Action Committee’s growing centrality to the Republican Party. It was founded decades ago by a small band of Barry Goldwater supporters who railed from the outside against the Republican Party of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

But since the election of Ronald Reagan, the group has become an increasingly central focal point for party activists, a symbol of how much the lines have blurred between the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Mr. McCain was the only Republican primary contender to skip last year’s conference. His absence earned him barbs throughout the conservative media, and his advisers have since said his decision was a mistake.

In his noticeably conciliatory remarks, Mr. McCain cataloged his record, which he said included support for tax cuts, a near quarter-century opposition to abortion rights and enthusiasm for judges who “take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people’s elected representatives.” He reminded the group that he had defended Mr. Bush’s troop escalation in Iraq and vowed, if he became president, never to sign a bill that contains earmarks, the pet spending projects that lawmakers pursue in Congress.

He did not mention his bill to overhaul the nation’s campaign finance system, which conservatives regard as an assault on free speech, but he did address his efforts last year to pass legislation that would have loosened immigration laws. Mr. McCain has since said he would secure the nation’s borders before putting some illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, but he has not changed his basic position.

“I stood my ground, aware that my position would imperil my campaign,” Mr. McCain said.

He added: “While I and other Republican supporters of the bill were genuine in our intention to restore control of our borders, we failed, for various and understandable reasons, to convince Americans that we were. I accept that.”

After Mr. McCain’s speech, Tom DeLay, the former Republican majority leader, said in an interview on “Hardball” on MSNBC, said he was not sure he would vote for him in the general election.

“If he continues down to be the same old John McCain that used to have disdain for the conservatives, then I’m not sure who’s the most dangerous to be in the White House,” Mr. DeLay said.

Mr. McCain learned from news media reports on Thursday morning that Mr. Romney was planning to drop out of the race, forcing Mr. McCain’s speechwriter, Mark Salter, to hastily rewrite the remarks he had planned for the conservative gathering.

In between Mr. Romney’s 12:30 p.m. speech and Mr. McCain’s 3 p.m. remarks, Mr. McCain telephoned Mr. Romney, a McCain adviser said, to express respect and talk about the need to unite the party.

Mr. McCain’s advisers are hoping for Mr. Romney’s endorsement in the coming days, as well as those from other party conservatives.

Delegate Race With Obama Is Nearly Even

By Shailagh Murray and Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 7, 2008; A01

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced yesterday that she had lent her campaign $5 million, a remarkable twist for a candidate who raised more than $100 million last year that came as she and Sen. Barack Obama continued to spar over which of them was the Democratic winner in coast-to-coast Super Tuesday balloting.

Clinton aides pointed to her victories in big states such as California and New Jersey as signs that she had carried the day, while Obama’s camp highlighted his wins in 13 of the 22 states that voted.

The results left Clinton (N.Y.) and Obama (Ill.) roughly even in the number of pledged delegates accumulated during the first month of the Democratic presidential primary and caucus season. Through the first four party-sanctioned contests before Super Tuesday, Obama had won 63 delegates to Clinton’s 48.

A total of 1,681 delegates were at stake Tuesday, and the Associated Press reported yesterday that Clinton won 737, compared with 699 for Obama, with almost 300 still to be awarded.

Obama advisers said that he would emerge from Tuesday’s voting with 847 delegates to Clinton’s 834, giving him a lead of 910 to 882 among pledged delegates. The Clinton campaign said it did not have final projections but estimated that the margin between the two would be in the single digits.

Beyond the delegates awarded on the basis of the primary and caucus results, Clinton has a lead among the 796 superdelegates — party officials, members of Congress, governors and others — who automatically have voting status at the Democratic National Convention and are not bound by the results of contests in their states in deciding whom to support.

There is no official count of these delegates, but various news organizations are reporting that Clinton leads Obama by about 90 superdelegates, with about 450 not publicly committed. Clinton got an early jump on Obama in the competition for superdelegates, but the senator from Illinois has begun to catch up as he has amassed endorsements from mainstream party figures.

Given how competitive the race is, many superdelegates may remain neutral to see whether one of the two candidates gains a clear advantage. That, Democratic strategists said, would require Clinton or Obama to go on a lengthy winning streak that would include victories in the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries. Obama is making a big play for Texas, with plans to open 10 offices there in the days ahead.

“If you notice, we have been closing the gap steadily,” Obama said. “I think we will continue to close the gap.”

There is another delegate wild card looming: what to do with the delegations from Michigan and Florida. Both states were sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee for moving their primaries into January in violation of party rules and were stripped of their delegates. Clinton won both states and has said she wants their delegations — representing a potential three-figure swing in delegates — seated at the national convention in Denver. Democrats want to avoid an ugly credentials fight at the August convention and are calling on DNC Chairman Howard Dean to defuse the issue well beforehand.

The Super Tuesday outcome offered a vivid illustration of how the Democratic Party’s rules for proportional distribution of delegates prevents a winning candidate from gaining a decisive advantage over a strong challenger in the race for delegates and explains why neither candidate is likely to gain enough delegates to secure the nomination before the last primary in early June.

But even as they sorted through the results, both Clinton and Obama quickly pivoted to the next races on the calendar. Obama headed to Louisiana, where 67 delegates are at stake on Saturday, while Clinton turned her focus to the “Potomac Primary,” in which Maryland, Virginia and the District will vote Tuesday.

Obama, at a news conference before leaving his home town of Chicago, described Clinton as the “front-runner in every single contest.” The Clinton campaign predicted that Obama would win the races immediately ahead, continuing a game of expectations management that has been waged for more than a month.

“Senator Clinton is a formidable opponent,” Obama said. “She’s got a familiar and well-appreciated name. She’s got a political machine honed over two decades.”

At her campaign headquarters in Arlington, Clinton defended her maneuver, executed last month but kept under wraps until yesterday, to add money to her campaign coffers. News of the $5 million transfer came as a surprise to Clinton donors who had assumed her campaign, which raised $100 million last year, would keep pace with Obama’s. Earlier this month, Obama announced that he had raised $32 million in January alone, and aides said he took in an additional $3.5 million yesterday.

Clinton said she moved her own money last month “because I believe very strongly in this campaign.”

“We had a great month fundraising in January, broke all the records, but my opponent was able to raise more money and we intend to be competitive,” she said. “The results of last night proved the wisdom of my investment.”

Terence R. McAuliffe, Clinton’s campaign chairman, said the team had raised at least $13 million in January, and noted that figure did not include the loan.

It was unclear whether news of Clinton’s financial stresses would affect her fundraising. Top fundraisers said they did not learn of her move until after Super Tuesday’s contests, suggesting that the campaign was aware it could be a public relations blow.

The campaign has revealed little about its finances after a significant outlay for advertising, travel and field work on Super Tuesday But yesterday, campaign officials confirmed that members of Clinton’s campaign staff had agreed to work without taking any pay.

Mark Aronchick, a Pennsylvania fundraiser who attended a victory party at the Manhattan Center in New York with many of the campaign’s $100,000 “Hillraisers” on Tuesday night, said the subject of her loan never came up in conversation during the party. “To the contrary, the mood was euphoric, and the temperature I got from the fundraising folks was just, it was high-fives, and ready to rock,” Aronchick said, adding that he is not concerned about the development.

“My guess is that the thinking was: Well, if you’ve raised that much money, then Hillary will put more money into the campaign, too,” Aronchick said. “It’s like, ‘Ante up.’ ”

But Clinton finance co-chairman Hassan Nemazee spent yesterday taking calls from donors who wondered what to make of the senator’s decision.

“What I told them was: We will not be uncompetitive for lack of resources. We will have what it takes to compete in February and March, and right through April if it takes that,” Nemazee said. Joe Trippi, an adviser to John Edwards until he dropped out of the race, said the loan is a sign of trouble. “It means she’s at a tremendous disadvantage moving forward,” he said. “The worst thing to be is an 800-pound gorilla who’s out of money. The cultural shock for the campaign is incredible.”

Staff writers Anne E. Kornblut, Dan Balz and Perry Bacon Jr. and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Bush’s order too late to impede most earmarking by Congress

Sacramento Bee
February 6, 2008

The following editorial appeared Sunday in the Sacramento Bee.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush promised “unprecedented” reform of congressional earmarking. That’s the practice through which members of Congress sneak in pork-barrel spending projects that have never received a hearing, never been debated and are not in the text of a bill.

Bush has signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to ignore all earmarks that are not in the text of a law. That’s fine; Congress should debate these projects in the open and hold a public vote. But this effort comes a little late in his presidency. It was also more than a bit lame, considering that it won’t take effect until October 2009, months after he leaves office.

Earmarking is hardly new, but the real problems with the practice were ushered in by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, after Republicans took control of the House in 1994. According to the Congressional Research Service, earmarks that year totaled 4,100. By 2000, they had risen to 6,100.

But it was during the Bush era, with Congress and the presidency in the hands of one party, that earmarks really got out of hand. By 2002, earmarks totaled 10,500, rising to a record 15,500 by 2006, more than tripling since 1994.

What changed? In addition to the traditional practice of steering earmarks to home districts, members of Congress targeted projects to out-of-district lobbyists and private firms that contributed to their political campaigns.

Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., is an example. After San Diego defense contractor Brent Wilkes organized fundraisers and contributions, Doolittle helped win $37 million in earmarks from 2002 to 2005 for Wilkes’ firm for technology the Defense Department hadn’t requested. This had no benefit for constituents of Doolittle’s district.

In some cases, this practice edged into bribery. Former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., was convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors in exchange for inserting earmarks into bills.

When Democrats won the House majority in 2006, they promised reform. They eliminated about 10,000 earmarks that had been proposed by the previous Congress for the 2007 budget. But that welcome change is proving short-lived. While earmarks dipped to 2,700 in 2007, they’re getting out of hand again – rising to 11,700 for the 2008 budget year. And Democrats are using loopholes to flout the spirit of new rules that are supposed to require earmarks to be in appropriation bills and open to challenge on the floor.

It is lack of public scrutiny and debate that allows stealth spending projects to divert money from real budget priorities to low-priority earmarks. The public will have to demand that Congress reverse this return to business as usual. Bush’s action comes too late to have much effect.

President’s budget is an outrage

Froma Harrop
The Providence Journal
February 6, 2008

President Bush’s budget will top $3 trillion. It envisions massive deficits for fiscal years 2008 and 2009 – nearly matching the record in 2004, when the federal budget went $412 billion into the hole.

The average American might properly ask, “Shouldn’t we at least have something to show for all this?” Even the basics are missing – for example, health coverage for all children, a serious effort against global warming, bridges that don’t fall down. Where has the money gone?

David Cay Johnston provides some answers in his angry and brilliant book, “Free Lunch.” An ace investigative reporter, Johnston explains: “From those leaves in the park to textbooks to highway bridge maintenance to food safety inspections, money is dwindling because so much has been diverted to the already rich through giveaways, tax breaks and a host of subsidies that range from the explicit to the deeply hidden.”

These diversions started in the Reagan years, according to Johnston, and Democrats have played their part. But the massive transfer of national wealth to the tippy-top became religion under Bush.

Johnston recalls Bush’s famous remarks to a white-tie crowd at the Waldorf-Astoria during his 2000 campaign. Referring to his audience as the “haves and have-mores,” he said “some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

Bush gave the “base” some very big tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. The cuts were supposed to boost the economy and probably helped, but they never generated enough revenue to pay for themselves. When higher collections helped lower the 2005 and 2006 deficits, the administration credited tax-cutting magic. Most economists disagreed, citing an upswing in the business cycle, bolstered by a housing bubble.

And contrary to conservative legend, the Bush “reforms” did not raise the overall income tax burden of the very rich. The administration cleverly claims that the share paid by the top 40 percent is higher than it was in 2000 – which is true. It neglects to add that families at the tiny pinnacle – the top tenth of 1 percent (who made at least $1.7 million in 2005) – have seen their tax burdens decline significantly. In 2005, this group of 300,000 men, women and children made nearly as much money as all 150 million Americans in the lower half.

So the high earners below this super-elite accounted for the entire heavier burden of the top 40 percent. These are the members of the upper middle class – the doctors, lawyers and businesspeople who have to work for their money.

As Johnston brutally documents, the free-market posturing of the Bush administration is a total sham. The government has become the enricher of the already rich, not the other way around.

For the connected, government gives away public land at deep discounts. It jiggers the tax code to make moving factories to China more profitable. It undoes safety regulations that subtract from the bottom line. It weakens consumer protections, letting financial institutions prey on the unsophisticated and the not-very-bright. In fine-print legislation, it shifts risk from corporate managers onto investors and makes the taxpayer cover mistakes. There’s a reason why the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled to 35,000 since Bush took office.

The rising cost of Medicare is troubling and must be addressed. But isn’t it interesting that Bush sees this middle-class entitlement as the budgetary outrage that needs his immediate attention? His budget would make deep cuts in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and eliminate a $301 million program that trains pediatricians at children’s teaching hospitals.

That’s stuff for the ordinary folks. The have-mores will do just fine.

Trudy Rubin
The Philadelphia Inquirer
February 6, 2008

There’s another election happening this month that may be as important to Americans as Super Tuesday. I refer to parliamentary elections on Feb. 18 in Pakistan.

Pakistani elections will play a crucial role in that country’s ability to combat a growing threat from jihadis. Even as progress has been made in combating al-Qaida in Iraq, the organization has been sinking deeper roots in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghanistan border.

Thousands of Taliban, and other militants, are also based there and are setting off suicide bombs in Pakistan’s cities. Jihadis probably killed former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the civilian leader most committed to fighting them if her party won the elections. And unlike Iraq, Pakistan is a country with nukes.

The country has become further destabilized by the political machinations of President Pervez Musharraf. He’s been stumping Europe’s capitals and the Davos World Economic Forum trying to convince the world’s leaders he will permit free and fair elections. His message: Elections don’t really matter, because only he can secure Pakistan.

Don’t believe it. The elections do matter, and the White House had better be prepared for a post-Musharraf Pakistan.

I say that even though Musharraf put on a strong show at Davos, appearing on two panels and giving one very long and impassioned breakfast presentation. With his British accent and crisp military bearing, he made a strong impression on rooms packed with CEOs from America, Europe and Asia, especially because Pakistan’s economy has improved during his tenure.

Musharraf admitted no mistakes, not in permitting the jihadi insurgency to grow on his watch, nor in sacking his Supreme Court when it was about to rule his re-election unconstitutional. “There is a degree of misperception about Pakistan,” he insisted at the Davos breakfast. “We are the victims since 1979.”

He blamed the growth of the jihadi threat, with some justification, on U.S. and Saudi funding in the 1980s for Islamic militants in Afghanistan. The militants were fighting against Soviet occupation. After Soviet troops left, those militants morphed into al-Qaida; the chaos in Afghanistan also spawned the growth of the Taliban.

“After 1989, everyone left the scene,” Musharraf said, “including the United States. We were used and we were ditched.” He never mentioned that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies helped the Taliban and other radical groups, as a hedge against India.

Pakistan is now suffering the blowback from its own actions, as these militants align themselves with al-Qaida. Critics also charge that the jihadis still have sympathizers within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. Musharraf denied this.

“The deliberate nurturing of jihadism by the state,” says well-known Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, “has … produced extremism inside parts of the military and intelligence.” Hoodbhoy worries such penetration could compromise Pakistan’s protection for its nukes.

Musharraf also denied he had violated the constitution by sacking the judges. And he insisted that Pakistan’s elections would be free and fair. He was asked whether he might reinstate the judges to restore confidence in the electoral system (since any violations will be appealed to the courts). He retorted sharply: “Don’t impose Western human-rights considerations and standards on the whole world. Pakistan has a different environment.”

What Musharraf did not convey is the anger that the sacking of the court has aroused across Pakistan. This adds to the host of grievances, some contradictory, that a broad majority of the public now holds against him: that economic gains don’t benefit the poor, that he is too pro-American, that he may have conspired in Bhutto’s murder. (This is highly unlikely, but many of her supporters think it is so.)

So Pakistan’s elections have become a litmus test for an increasingly unpopular leader. No one will believe the elections aren’t rigged. If opposition parties don’t receive a majority, their followers are likely to go to the streets. Musharraf will try to carry on and divide the opposition. Political instability will make it harder to fight the jihadis. Some Pakistanis tell me the army, at some point, will have to tell Musharraf he must go. This is not something the United States can, or should, push for, but it seems likely.

So Americans should be watching the Pakistani elections, and the post-election, for signs of what will come after Musharraf. The central fight against al-Qaida will depend on the results.

Our View: For better or worse, Paul outside media spotlight

February 6, 2008

So which Republican candidate for president drew about 900 people on 48 hours’ notice to a Spokane appearance on a snow-clogged day? The same one who raised more money that any other GOP candidate in the third quarter of 2007.

Ron Paul supporters know the answer, and they’re not surprised many people would get it wrong. Their attitude about Paul’s media coverage is nicely captured in a recent letter in this paper:

“The question is no longer ‘Who is Ron Paul?’ It’s ‘Where is Ron Paul?’ Fox News failed to invite him to the last Republican debate in New Hampshire. MSNBC invited him to their debate but pretended he wasn’t there. Other media outlets (including print) have ignored his campaign for president as much as possible, barely even mentioning his second-place finishes in Nevada and Louisiana.”

While it’s true that the good news about a long-shot candidacy gets relatively scant attention, it’s also true that bad news won’t be treated to the daily media inquiries faced by those with a realistic chance of winning.

Take, for instance, the issue of bigoted comments that appeared in newsletters under Ron Paul’s name. In early January, the New Republic magazine dug up some editions from the late 1980s and early 1990s and printed much of what was written.

Now, imagine the media frenzy had the newsletters appeared under the name of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain or Mitt Romney. Imagine them being tethered to a description of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as “our annual Hate Whitey Day” or a suggestion that the Los Angeles riots stopped because “it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.”

Would they be able to attribute the problem to “bad editing,” as Paul did in Spokane? Would they be able to keep the author or authors’ names secret when explaining that they did not write the articles?

Not a chance. They’d get the typical scandal treatment. Quotes from those newsletters would be featured day and night on TV news channels. Print outlets would launch investigations to unearth the culprits. Supporters would not be able to toss off the comments as old news. They would have to face up to the reality that unless a more detailed explanation was forthcoming, their favorite candidate was toast.

Such is not the case with Ron Paul. The adoring throngs continue to show up in person and spread the word via the Internet. And the money continues to pour in. That’s not to say that some fans are not troubled. For instance, libertarian-minded Reason magazine has written supportive articles about Paul’s candidacy, but the editors have made it clear that the bigoted writings are a big problem and they’d like more answers.

So while Paul and his supporters continue to clamor about media inattention, maybe they ought to be quietly grateful.

N.Y. Senator Withstands Push By Surging Rival in Key Battlegrounds
By Dan Balz and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 6, 2008; A01

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won victories over Sen. Barack Obama in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York last night, giving her presidential campaign a crucial boost. But Obama countered by winning of a string of states, including the general election battleground of Missouri, in the seesaw race for the Democratic nomination.

The results ensured that the fierce contest for delegates will continue into critical primaries in Texas and Ohio on March 4, and possibly beyond, in what has become the party’s most competitive race in at least a quarter of a century.

Clinton claimed four of the five biggest prizes in Super Tuesday’s 22-state Democratic competition. She also captured Arizona, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Those victories helped stem what appeared to be gathering momentum around Obama’s candidacy since he won in South Carolina on Jan. 26.

But Obama won in more places than his New York rival, racking up victories in his home state of Illinois, as well as Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota and Utah. His narrow victory in Missouri came after Clinton appeared on the brink of winning there. Only the outcome in New Mexico remained unresolved early this morning.

In many of the states Clinton won, Obama had surged from far behind to narrow the gap in the days before Super Tuesday. Her ability to hold off his charge brought a sense of relief to her campaign advisers, but the likelihood that neither would emerge with a significant advantage in delegates was a sign that their roller-coaster competition would continue.

Clinton appeared before supporters in New York shortly before the polls closed in California, thanking her supporters for voting “not just to make history, but to remake America.” Saying that Republicans want “eight more years of the same,” she added, “They’ve got until January 20th, 2009, and not one day more.” She also presented herself as a candidate who “won’t let anyone Swift-boat this country’s future.”

Obama, who was in Chicago, came out later and, while congratulating Clinton on her successes, drew a contrast with his rival, saying voters in November deserve a clear choice between the Republican and Democratic nominees.

“It’s a choice between going into this election with Republicans and independents already united against us, or going against their nominee with a campaign that has united Americans of all parties, from all backgrounds, from all races, from all religions, around a common purpose,” he said. “It’s a choice between having a debate with the other party about who has the most experience in Washington, or having one about who is most likely to change Washington, because that’s a debate that we can win.”

Clinton and Obama were fighting not just for state-by-state victories but also for an advantage in the nearly 1,700 delegates up for grabs yesterday. Aides to both candidates said that, regardless of how the two carved up the states, neither would emerge with enough of an edge to claim a substantial advantage.

Delegate tallies lagged well behind the state-by-state results, given the complex formulas the Democrats use to determine the allocation.

Clinton’s victory in Massachusetts was especially sweet for her campaign, coming despite endorsements of Obama by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry and Gov. Deval L. Patrick that gave him hope for substantial momentum heading into yesterday’s primaries.

Her advisers called it “the biggest surprise of the night.” Obama advisers had warned that Clinton’s lead may be too large to overcome, but the loss was nonetheless a disappointment to his campaign.

Though the Clinton team immediately hailed Massachusetts as an upset, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said in an interview just after the race was called that he was “not surprised at all” by her win in the state. Clinton won the Bay State largely on the strength of her support from women, who made up more than half the electorate from coast to coast.

Exit polls from the National Election Pool showed Clinton with a double-digit lead among women in the state, where she attended college as an undergraduate. She also won among self-identified independents, normally a solid constituency for Obama.

“We feel quite good about how those returns have come in,” Mark Penn, the chief strategist for Clinton, said in a conference call with reporters shortly after 10 p.m. As he spoke, cheers erupted in the background at the campaign’s headquarters in Arlington.

Penn argued that people who made up their minds late were trending toward Clinton, though early exit data suggested there was an even split between the two.

In a race that will come down to delegates, Clinton officials said they will wait to see results from all the states before declaring a delegate count — but predicted she would ultimately be ahead.

“By the end of today, with pledged delegates and superdelegates, we expect to be ahead of Senator Obama in overall delegates,” said Guy Cecil, Clinton’s field director.

In the South, Clinton more than held her own. She lost Georgia — one of only a few states where she lost among women; the same was true in Illinois — but triumphed in Arkansas, her former home state, and Oklahoma and Tennessee. And the race continued to split along racial lines, as Obama won about eight in 10 African Americans, a trend that put him over the top in Georgia and Alabama.

Still, he won nearly four in 10 white voters in Georgia and fared better among white men there than he had in an earlier racially polarized race in South Carolina, giving his campaign a chance to claim that he had broadened his support in the intervening weeks. Victories in Connecticut and North Dakota bolstered that claim.

The race in Missouri remained close even as other states were called; an early tally in Clinton’s favor proved premature as the night wore on. But the state reflected a wider sweep for Obama among African Americans: He won more than three-fourths of the state’s black voters, while Clinton beat him among senior citizens by a margin of 2 to 1.

The demographics of the Democratic race suggested a contest that is dividing along racial and gender lines, as Clinton won 7 in 10 white women in New Jersey, as well as three-quarters of Hispanic women.

The candidates divided men in New Jersey evenly. In Tennessee, Clinton won white voters of all ages; Obama won blacks across the board. Similar splits occurred in California, where black voters chose Obama 5 to 1. But the two split the white vote in California, where Clinton made up the difference by winning Hispanics 2 to 1.

Twenty-two states held Democratic contests yesterday, with 1,681 pledged delegates to the party’s national convention in Denver at stake. The 22 states account for 52 percent of all pledged delegates awarded during the nomination battle.

There will be 4,049 delegates attending the national convention; a candidate needs 2,025 to secure the nomination. Of that total, 3,253 are pledged delegates, which means their votes are determined by the caucus or primary results in their state. The remainder are superdelegates, who are free to vote for whomever they prefer.

Going into yesterday’s balloting, Obama had 63 delegates to Clinton’s 48 in the first four party-sanctioned contests of the year — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Clinton held a lead among superdelegates. Various news organizations count the distribution of superdelegates differently, but Clinton is widely agreed to lead Obama by a margin of about 90.

Clinton voted in New York yesterday morning and spent most of the day conducting interviews, her voice on the verge of vanishing after days of cross-country campaigning. “The stakes are huge,” she said as she cast her ballot at an elementary school near her Chappaqua home.

Obama voted in his home town of Chicago, at an elementary school in the Hyde Park neighborhood.

Throughout the day, Clinton advisers worked to play down expectations. Even before any polling stations were closed, Penn and senior adviser Howard Wolfson held a conference call with reporters to announce that Clinton had agreed to a series of debates between now and the March 4 primaries and invited Obama to join her. Doubting that they would be able to pull off a decisive victory yesterday — and with a slate of races in the weeks ahead that they believe will skew in Obama’s favor — the Clinton campaign is now banking on doing well in Texas and Ohio on March 4. Penn said Clinton would participate in an ABC News debate Sunday, a Fox News debate Monday in Washington, a Feb. 27 CNN debate in Ohio and a Feb. 28 MSNBC debate in Houston.

“The campaign believes it’s critically important that we continue the debates between Senator Obama and Senator Clinton,” Penn said. “We think it’s critically important that people get to see the candidates face to face.”

Obama advisers declined to commit to a new round of debates. The next important competitive contests will be next Tuesday, when Maryland, Virginia and the District will hold primaries.

Staff writers Perry Bacon Jr., with Clinton, and Shailagh Murray, with Obama, and polling director Jon Cohen polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta and research director Lucy Shackelford in Washington contributed to this report.

Calm down. The GOP’s demise isn’t as imminent as some would have it.

By Karl Rove

NEWSWEEK

Feb 2, 2008

“We are at the end of the Reagan era.” Or, at least, that is the claim of voices as diverse as Newt Gingrich and Ed Rollins on the right and Sen. Chuck Schumer and pollster Stanley Greenberg on the left. It is true the Republican Party is having difficulty retooling its message for the 21st century. But so is the Democratic Party.

Every presidential election is about change, and no more so than at the end of a two-term president’s time in the White House. Parties have to constantly update themselves if they hope to remain relevant. The difficulty for both Republicans and Democrats is that our political system is at a point where more than the normal amount of party growth and development is needed. Both parties are suffering the consequences of seeing substantial parts of their 20th-century agendas adopted; both parties are struggling to fashion new answers to the new challenges of a young century.

But that’s not to say that the Reagan legacy is exhausted. Ronald Reagan’s legacy was not simply that he was “a campaigner and orator of uncommon skill,” as Don Campbell argued last week in USA Today. President Reagan’s gifts to the Republican Party were ideas: growing the economy through tax cuts, limiting government’s size, forcefully confronting totalitarian threats, making human rights a centerpiece of America’s foreign policy, respecting unborn human life, empowering the individual with more freedom. Those ideas endure. They give Republicans a philosophical foundation on which to build. The Reagan coalition has a natural desire to stick together. Fiscal, defense and values conservatives have more in common with each other than with any major element of the Democratic Party’s leadership.

Democrats have a similar philosophical storehouse in the ideas of FDR and LBJ. Both expanded the size and scope of the federal government and saw it in almost an entirely positive light: as an agent of economic redistribution from the rich to the less affluent, as a provider to the poor and the disabled and as an enforcer of equal rights and equal justice. The Democratic Party has two challenges. One is that the modern economy has led voters to prefer markets, decentralization and consumer choice far more than centralized control by government and the substitution of “expert” decisions for those of the individual. The other challenge is that many in that party mistake the “Third Way” tactics of the Clinton years for a substantive approach to governing. Triangulation—making yourself look good at the expense of allies and adversaries in both parties—is lousy for providing coherent answers to modern issues.

Why then the media’s recent fascination with the supposed demise of the Republican Party? What are the reasons given for why, at least when it comes to the Republicans, “the party’s over,” as NEWSWEEK recently pronounced? First, we are told the GOP nomination has not been won “fairly quickly,” as in recent contests. This is a horrible misremembering of history. The senior Bush took 45 days after the first contest to secure the nomination in 1988. It took Bob Dole 35 days to become the presumptive nominee in 1996. The current president took 45 days to clear the field in 2000. The first contest this year was on Jan. 3. Let’s at least give the process until the middle or end of February before pundits start predicting doom because of how long it’s taking. And if the Republican nomination not being settled is evidence of disaster, what does the Democratic nomination being up for grabs say? It’s normal for both parties’ nominees to be undecided at this point. The season is not moving too slowly. If anything, it is moving too quickly this time, with 38 contests in the first 33 days.

Second, we are told recently by Susan Page, also in USA Today, that “never before in modern times has there been such a muddle,” and then by Jon Meacham in this magazine that the “chaotic nature of the Republican primary race” means “the party of Reagan is now divided in ways it has not been in more than a generation.” Many who witnessed the primary battles of 2000, 1996, 1992 or 1988 might disagree. By their nature, primary races are chaotic. Then a nominee emerges, and the chaos recedes (most of the time). If spirited competition on the Republican side is evidence of a crackup, then what about the Democratic battle? It is focused more and more on race and gender, and Hillary Clinton has the highest negatives of any candidate at this point in an open race for the presidency. The Democratic House and Senate have plummeted to the poorest congressional approval ratings in history.

Third, we are told Democrats have raised more money. You will search in vain for a similar declaration of last rites for the Democrats in 2000 when Republicans outraised them. And having more money doesn’t decide the contest. Consider 2004, when Democratic presidential candidates, committees and 527s outspent their Republican counterparts by $124 million—and lost. Besides, the RNC has nearly eight times the cash on hand as the DNC. Just a month has passed since voting began, and nine months remain before November. Let’s see what happens to Republican bank accounts as the year goes on.

Maybe we are not seeing the crackup of the GOP. Rather, America is more likely to be at the start of an intense and exciting election. The contest will be hard fought, the actions of the candidates each day hugely significant. It’s far too early to draw sweeping conclusions about the health of either party; the presidential race, after all, has barely begun.

Lots of surprises lie ahead.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107568

By MICHAEL LUO

DENVER — After devoting two years and more than $35 million of his money trying to win his party’s nomination for the presidency, Mitt Romney and his advisers face the possibility that his effort could end with the nominating contests on Tuesday.

Senator John McCain of Arizona has won a series of major primaries and landed big-name endorsements as he seeks to present himself as the Republican Party’s putative nominee.

Operating in survival mode, Mr. Romney’s circle of advisers has come up with a detailed road map to try to salvage his campaign. The plan is complete with a new infusion of cash from Mr. Romney, a long-term strategy intended to turn the campaign into a protracted delegate fight and a reframing of the race as a one-on-one battle for the future of the party that seeks to sound the alarm among conservatives about Mr. McCain.

The advisers have drawn up a list of states, dividing and ranking them into those considered relatively easy and inexpensive targets, along with a broader grouping of more costly battlegrounds where the advisers hope that Mr. Romney can be competitive.

Some states like Arizona and Arkansas, the home states of Mr. McCain and Mike Huckabee, respectively, are largely written off.

The question is whether the planning, along with the campaign’s one trump card, the candidate’s vast wealth, can overcome the growing sense of inevitability that has begun to attach itself to Mr. McCain.

Complicating the outlook, Mr. Romney’s campaign has been racked by infighting over advertising strategy between some senior advisers, including some consultants who joined the campaign after leaving Mr. McCain’s.

Polls in many major primary states on Tuesday, including California, the linchpin of Mr. Romney’s strategy, where he is spending $1.7 million on advertising, according to a rival campaign, show Mr. McCain with a comfortable lead. He also appears to hold significant edges in New York and New Jersey, winner-take-all states where many former backers of Rudolph W. Giuliani have joined the McCain camp.

The endorsement by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California boosts Mr. McCain there, and the national news media buzz contributes to the air of a coronation.

“I don’t think anyone should write Mitt Romney’s obituary yet,” said Todd Harris, a political consultant who worked on Fred D. Thompson’s campaign. “He can be a compelling candidate with a ton of money. But at some point if he’s not winning, the entire rationale for his campaign becomes that he is a well-funded candidate who’s not John McCain, and that’s not enough.”

Another unforeseen complication is the funeral on Saturday of Gordon B. Hinckley, president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Salt Lake City. The funeral, taking Mr. Romney off the trail on the most important weekend of campaigning so far, will draw attention once again to Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith.

His advisers point to some signs of hope in an election cycle in which conventional wisdom has often been turned upside down. They say they are starting to see a groundswell of opposition to Mr. McCain among conservative leaders, as well as at the grass roots, especially on talk radio.

The day after Mr. Romney’s loss to Mr. McCain in Florida, his aides said, the campaign set a record for one-day online contributions, almost $400,000.

Mr. Romney’s advisers are also convinced that their mantra on the economy and bringing change to Washington and the economy remains compelling.

The campaign’s director of strategy, Alex Gage, sent a memorandum to supporters on Thursday that highlighted exit poll data from the previous nominating contests, saying just a few percentage points of support to Mr. Romney from conservatives would swing the nomination to him.

Besides California, the campaign has also bought airtime for commercials in other states as part of a “significant” buy, advisers said, although they declined to say where. A rival campaign also reported that Mr. Romney has bought nearly $350,000 in advertising time to run nationally on the Fox News Channel.

Alex Castellanos, a media strategist for Mr. Romney, said regardless of the delegate count, the winner in California would have the momentum to move on.

“California’s the one to watch,” Mr. Castellanos said.

Rob Stutzman, a senior adviser for the California campaign, said the Republican electorate there was traditionally quite conservative. Mr. Stutzman predicted that Mr. McCain would run into problems because of his moderate stance on illegal immigration.

“The immigration vulnerability is amplified in California for McCain,” he said.

The Romney campaign has had four paid staff members in California since last summer and has been making calls throughout the state since the beginning of January, when absentee voting began.

The field operations are focused on Congressional districts where it believes that organization can have productive effects. The state is set up so that each district is worth the same number of delegates, no matter how many Republicans are in it. A small organizing effort could swing a district.

The Romney campaign is banking on winning Utah, with its heavy concentration of Mormons.

Beyond that, the campaign is also focused on picking off the handful of states holding caucuses or state conventions on Tuesday. The campaign says some minimal organization — it has had at least one paid worker in almost every Feb. 5 state since the fall — and spending can produce results. The states include Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.

Adding Alaska, where Mr. Romney’s son Josh has been dispatched, more than 250 delegates are at stake in this first group of states out of the more than 1,000 delegates up for grabs on Tuesday.

The campaign has then drawn up a broader list of battlegrounds where it believes it can be competitive, including Georgia, Illinois, Missouri and Tennessee. Advertising will most likely be focused on those primary states.

The most serious obstacle in many places is Mr. Huckabee, who continues to pull social conservative voters from Mr. Romney.

“The more the Romney strategy hinges on picking up red states, the bigger a factor Mike Huckabee is going to be,” Mr. Harris said.

In the face of difficult odds, Mr. Romney’s advisers said, he had been the individual raising their morale whenever it sagged. After his weary advisers dozed on the flight from Florida to California on Wednesday, Mr. Romney gathered them at the front of the plane.

Trying to lighten the mood, he turned to Cindy Gillespie, a senior adviser who worked with him in rescuing the scandal-ridden 2002 Winter Olympic Games, and said: “We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Salt Lake was always three steps forward, two steps back.”

By Michael Barone
Just shy of a month ago, after the first votes were cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, it seemed that the Republican Party faced a fluid and fractious nomination contest, while the Democrats faced a clear-cut choice between two not particularly adversarial candidates. What a difference a few weeks can make.

Now it appears that John McCain is on an unobstructed flight path to the nomination, facing a few crosswinds but no serious navigation hazards, while the two leading Democrats, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are on the collision course, with the winner taking on serious and possibly disabling damage. And this in a year when the standard metrics — the job performance rating of the president, judgments about the trajectory of the economy, trends in party identification — have seemed overwhelmingly favorable to the Democrats.

How did this happen? Some will give credit to providence, which saw to it that McCain — whose candidacy seemed terminal last July 1 — was able to duplicate, with lesser percentages, his 2000 victory in New Hampshire, then survive a defeat in his best 2000 state, Michigan, then squeeze out a 33 percent to 30 percent victory over Mike Huckabee in South Carolina and a 36 percent to 31 percent victory over Mitt Romney in Florida.

None of which would have been possible without a collapse in Rudy Giuliani’s support, which was as widely unpredicted as his earlier rise to the top of the polls. Or without the collapse of the candidacy of 2000 McCain supporter Fred Thompson, who led in polls as a noncandidate but lost the lead before he officially declared.

Even so, McCain now seems a prohibitive favorite for the Republican nomination. He leads in just about all the polls in the big states that vote on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. Giuliani has bowed out, and Huckabee’s election night speech reiterated his respect for McCain. Romney alone has the potential to buy enough ads and possibly derail McCain this week. But big-time buys did not win for him in Iowa, New Hampshire or Florida.

In his victory speech, McCain was at pains to pay respect not only to his rivals, but to the concerns of his critics in conservative journals and talk radio. To his undisputed asset as the longtime and persistent advocate of the surge, which has produced such success in Iraq, he added a stern but seldom-before-voiced resolve to appoint judges who would interpret rather than make law. He was paying — for once, and for the time being anyway — heed to his critics at National Review and his boosters at The Weekly Standard. Memo to Rush Limbaugh: You have been heard.

And what were the Democrats up to when the Republicans were receiving the coordinates of a clear flight path? Heading straight toward each other. The Clinton campaign, defeated in Iowa and nearly in New Hampshire, scraping by in Nevada and expecting a clobbering in South Carolina, faced a choice between losing clean and winning ugly. What is amusing is that so many liberal commentators were surprised when the Clinton apparat, with the unhesitation of a shark, chose the latter option.

Bill Clinton and other Hillary Clinton surrogates got busy playing the race card against Barack Obama. They belittled his victory in South Carolina and profited from her victory in Florida — Democratic Party rules forbade candidates to compete — where elderly women, Latinos and Jews, all heavily pro-Clinton (or anti-Obama) constituencies, are heavily represented.

As they will be, to varying extents, in the Super Tuesday states, especially California. Extrapolating from all but one of the Florida results, Clinton will be the big winner there. The exception: Floridians making up their minds at the last minute were evenly split between Obama and Clinton.

Disgust over the Clintons’ tactics has been a staple of liberal magazines and blogs and evidently inspired Edward Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama. Political history mavens will recall that Kennedy, well after he had lost the 1980 nomination to Jimmy Carter, continued his campaign and bitter denunciations all the way to the national convention.

Will he urge such a course on Obama? Hillary Clinton may be content to win ugly. But she may find, as Carter did, that a crash on the runway is not an appealing spectacle.

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Short Calendar Favors Clinton
By Alec MacGillis and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 2, 2008; A01

ALBUQUERQUE, Feb. 1 — Sen. Barack Obama has two opponents: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the clock, which is rapidly running down.

With three days to go before Super Tuesday, when roughly half the delegates in the Democratic presidential contest will be awarded, Obama is racing around the country, still trying to introduce himself to voters, speed-dating style.

On Tuesday, he touched down in his grandfather’s home town, El Dorado, Kan., where many residents did not realize until recently — if at all — that Obama has Kansas roots. From there, it was on to big rallies in Kansas City, Mo.; Denver; and Phoenix, followed by Los Angeles, where he tried during an hour in East L.A. to make an impression on Hispanic voters who know little about him. On Friday: Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Boise.

Polling and election results so far suggest that the more time Obama has to present himself to voters, the better he fares. In each of the first four states where voting was sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee, Clinton maintained essentially level support in polls in the months leading up to the contests, while Obama saw a steady upward trajectory the more he campaigned. In Florida, by contrast, where the candidates did not campaign after the DNC punished the state for moving its primary to January, Clinton soundly defeated Obama, offering a rough gauge on how much the senator from Illinois relies on voter contact.

The compressed primary calendar presents a challenge for all of the remaining candidates, as they try to visit as many as possible of the more than 20 states holding elections or caucuses on Tuesday. But the time crunch is particularly acute for Obama, who, for all the hype around his candidacy, remains far less well known than Clinton. Obama vaulted into contention against her by spending week upon week in Iowa before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. He engaged in an intensive grass-roots effort and visited the smallest towns and the most remote county fairgrounds to introduce himself to voters, who rewarded him with a big win over his rivals.

Now, with far less time and broader territory to cover, he must make do with a radically truncated version of that outreach, relying on a single final visit to big cities to win over voters to whom he remains little more than a first-term senator with an exotic name and a reputation for oratory.

His efforts appear to be paying off, as his standing in polls inches closer and closer to Clinton’s. The question is whether he has enough time to make up the gap.

“The schedule is compressed, so no doubt Senator Clinton has an advantage going into February 5 states,” Obama said during one leg of his travel this week. “She’s better known, and I’m still being introduced to a lot of casual voters in the other states.”

The lack of time concerns Obama’s rank-and-file supporters in the Feb. 5 states, who see him packing arenas this week — 15,000-plus in Denver, 13,000 in Phoenix — yet know that most of those turning out are the converted and that countless more undecided voters will not see Obama make his case in person.

“It worries me. Everyone in Arizona ought to see what we saw today,” said Tim Nelson, a lawyer for the state government, after bringing his 9-year-old daughter to see the candidate in Phoenix.

If a few extra weeks would help Obama, the opposite is true for Clinton, whose advisers would be happy with just a few extra days, they said in interviews Friday.

Clinton at one point declared that she would have the race wrapped up by Feb. 5. Now, her strategists concede, as Obama appears to be closing the gap with her, she needs the days until then to keep pushing her message — outreach that includes visiting critical states and luring former supporters of John Edwards, who ended his candidacy this week. “There are a lot of places to touch,” one strategist said.

After a heavy emphasis on the West Coast this week, Clinton will seek to maintain her national lead between now and Tuesday with a whirlwind travel schedule that extends from Missouri to Massachusetts and is capped off with a 90-minute “national town hall meeting” conducted via satellite Monday night. Her campaign also believes that, with her performance in Thursday’s debate, the senator from New York moved past questions about her husband’s role in the campaign and their approach to African American voters, and is now running on comfortable ground — the issues of health care and the economy.

Still, Clinton strategists are not planning on seeing the nomination contest end on Feb. 5. They are looking ahead to March 4, when both Ohio (161 delegates) and Texas (228 delegates) vote, as the date that could be decisive.

Obama is hardly lacking for public exposure, and he is not relying only on his personal appeals to get voters to the polls. He has well-developed organizations making phone calls and home visits in nearly all of the Feb. 5 states, a growing list of prominent surrogates to campaign on his behalf, and enough money to blanket the country with television ads.

But along the trail there are signs of the ground that Obama has to make up with many voters who have had little experience in casting a meaningful vote in the primaries and have only recently trained their minds on their choices.

In Phoenix, Cynthia and Stuart Preston said that as they were driving to Obama’s rally with their children, they quizzed each other to come up with three of the candidate’s major platform planks. To their surprise, they couldn’t think of them. Despite that, Cynthia Preston said she is supporting Obama. She was drawn, she said, by the “popular movement” behind him.

“I don’t know if he has enough time to detail [his plans in all Feb. 5 states], but if you care enough, you can do the research on your own,” she said.

Aware that many voters still have basic holes in their knowledge of his background, Obama is doing his best to fill them, making sure at nearly every stop to mention details such as his years as a community organizer, the death of his mother at age 53 and the fact that he is a church-going Christian, no matter what the false rumors circulated by e-mail might say. He takes time to describe the family history that led him to where he is today.

“My own family’s journey moved west — from Kansas, where my grandparents met and married, and my mother was born; to the Pacific Coast after World War II; and then across an ocean to Hawaii,” he told his audience in Denver.

At that event, supporter Becky Bowman, of Lakewood, said before Obama’s speech that she figured voters in Colorado could get enough information about Obama on their own. But after witnessing him bring a diverse crowd of thousands to its feet with his characteristically rousing pitch, she wondered about the shortcomings of the rushed itinerary.

Voters “need to know the magic. You can’t do that through little soundbites,” she said. “It’s a problem.”

MacGillis is traveling with the Obama campaign. Kornblut is traveling with the Clinton campaign.

It is a little disturbing for democracy. One candidate could win with some rules and lose with others.

By Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 4:05 PM ET Jan 26, 2008
Even if you do not live in an early-primary state, it’s almost impossible to avoid online polls and “elections.” How much their results square with reality remains to be seen, but one online poll is intriguing less for any predictive power than for what it says about the interaction of math and elections (and I don’t mean the funny way they count votes in Florida). The American Mathematical Society and other scholarly groups have launched a site where you pick your favorite presidential candidate—as well as choose any of eight you deem acceptable and rank them from one to eight. (To play, go to www.amstat.org/mathandvoting.) Now the fun begins. The three different methods produce, when I tried it, at least two different winners.

For anyone who believes in democracy, this is a little disturbing. What it means is that “election outcomes can more accurately reflect the choice of an election rule than the voters’ wishes,” writes mathematician Donald Saari of the University of California, Irvine. One candidate could win with some rules and lose with others. In fact, as mathematicians analyze voting systems, they are turning up other oddities that can yield a “winner” who does not reflect the will of even a plurality, much less a majority. The discoveries are especially relevant this year. “The severity of the problem escalates with the number of candidates,” notes Saari, and one thing this primary season has is a lot of still-viable candidates.

One of the most surprising aberrations mathematicians have found comes in a four-way race. There, of course, one candidate wins a plurality and another comes in last. Saari examines what happens if the third-place candidate drops out and, in the next round of voting, people have the same ordered preference as before (A is the first choice of the most, followed by B, then D). Consider an election with 30 voters, who mentally rank the candidates this way:

Three voters prefer John McCain to Mike Huckabee to Mitt Romney to Rudy Giuliani, in that order.

Six prefer McCain to Romney to Huckabee to Giuliani.
Three prefer Giuliani to Huckabee to Romney to McCain.
Five prefer Giuliani to Romney to Huckabee to McCain.
Two prefer Huckabee to Giuliani to Romney to McCain.
Five prefer Huckabee to Romney to Giuliani to McCain.
Two prefer Romney to Giuliani to Huckabee to McCain.
Four prefer Romney to Huckabee to Giuliani to McCain.

In our system, McCain wins, with nine first-place votes, trailed by Giuliani (eight), Huckabee (seven) and Romney (six). Now let’s say Huckabee drops out. Cross out his name where he came in first, and notice who is now the first choice of his former supporters: two go with Giuliani and five with Romney. That pushes Romney, formerly in last place, to the top, with 11 first-place votes. As the GOP field prunes itself, don’t be surprised if the new leader comes from the back of the pack.

If Super Tuesday produces a clear GOP front runner, he could be one whom many and perhaps most Republicans will have to hold their nose to vote for in November. Our pick-your-favorite system, known as plurality voting, “may produce a winner who is the least acceptable to the majority of [GOP] voters,” says Steven Brams of New York University, a pioneer in the application of math to voting. That happened in the 2000 presidential election, when Ralph Nader got about 95,000 votes in Florida. George W. Bush’s winning margin was about 500. “Since a significant majority of Nader voters preferred Al Gore to Bush,” says Brams, “the winner was the candidate least preferred by most voters.”

One fix for that is approval voting, in which voters choose any number of candidates they deem acceptable. This not only would avert the distortions of 2000, but would let candidates regarded as unelectable draw their true share of supporters. “You don’t have to desert your preferred candidate for fear of ‘wasting’ your vote,” says Brams. Hypothetically, if supporters of Joe Biden, who dropped out of the Democratic race after Iowa, didn’t have to worry that a vote for him might benefit, say, Barack Obama, whom they like less than Hillary Clinton, they could have shown support for their man and his foreign-policy expertise by voting for both him and Clinton. That might have clarified somewhat how much voters value experience. “Election returns would better reflect the overall acceptability of candidates, rather than being distorted by considerations of electability or about wasting your vote,” says Brams. The best-known race decided by approval voting is for secretary-general of the United Nations. That, more than plurality voting, tends to ensure that an extremist candidate cannot best two centrists who split the majority’s vote and let the fringe candidate in.

With three viable Democrats remaining, it’s unlikely that the nominee will be someone whom most Dems rank their least favorite. But with four viable Republicans, that is a real possibility. If Florida 2000 wasn’t enough to get us to re-examine plurality voting, though, grumbling in the GOP ranks probably won’t be either. It is said that a nation gets the leaders it deserves. Maybe we also get the voting system we deserve.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/105586

Packed room cheers at call for end to war

Presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul signs an autograph Thursday in Spokane. The Spokesman-Review (BRIAN PLONKA The Spokesman-Review ) Online Follow news of Ron Paul and the other presidential candidates on our new campaign Web site: s-r.com/elections Inside Paul denies link to controversial newsletters. Clinton, Obama campaigns plan events in Northwest.

Jim Camden
Staff writer
February 1, 2008

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul may be having limited success in presidential contests in recent weeks, but his campaign message of more freedom, less government and an immediate end to the war in Iraq was a huge hit with a Spokane crowd Thursday evening.

An estimated 900 people who packed a ballroom at the downtown Doubletree Hotel shouted approval when he warned that government spending was weakening the country and creating “a nanny state.” They cheered raucously when he called for bringing troops home.

“There’s no need to be fighting all these wars,” he said. “What we need to do is bring the troops home as soon as possible.”

To those who might argue that would result in chaos in Iraq, he countered: “What’s over there now?”

People who say the war must continue are the same ones who were wrong in saying that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, Paul added.

While this may sound like standard criticism of the Bush administration from a Democratic presidential candidate, Paul is seeking the Republican nomination.

As part of that effort, Paul and his campaign urged supporters in the room to attend the Washington state precinct caucuses Feb. 9, the start of the selection of delegates in Washington state.

There’s also a Republican presidential primary on Feb. 19, and the party will use both to award delegates.

But members of the Paul campaign were focused on the caucuses Thursday in an effort to repeat the success of another unlikely Republican candidate in 1988.

In that year, supporters of the Rev. Pat Robertson stunned GOP regulars by turning out at caucuses in large numbers across the state, electing delegates to their county conventions and sticking with the process through the state convention.

The Texas congressman’s speech Thursday was a mix of peace and populism, fiscal conservatism and limited government.

The crowd, some of whom had driven into the city on bad roads and waded across downtown intersections that more resembled slushy ponds, appreciated his message.

“Freedom is popular,” he told the cheering crowd. “It brings people together.”

He returned frequently to foreign policy and the war in Iraq, at one point contending the nation needs to learn a lesson from the 1960s and ’70s and its experience in the Vietnam War.

Americans elected a president in 1968 because they wanted to end the war, but the war continued for years until America eventually lost.

“We lost and we had to come home, and it was an utter tragedy,” Paul said.

But the consequences were not as predicted, all the dominoes didn’t fall and the world didn’t slip into communism, he said. Today the United States trades with Vietnam, and China not only is a major trading partner but it holds much of our debt.

The United States should heed the words of the Founding Fathers, avoid foreign wars and seek only trading alliances, he said.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have had their freedoms curtailed, with enhanced airport security, warrantless searches and laws allowing people to be jailed as enemy combatants, Paul said.

There’s a debate in Washington, D.C., whether a practice known as waterboarding is torture, he said. Anyone who thinks it isn’t should volunteer to try it, he suggested.

The country should abolish the income tax, return to money that is backed by gold and silver, and eliminate the Federal Reserve Board, Paul said.

Although the economy is hurting, it should not bail out the mortgage industry in the current housing crisis.

Instead, it should let the economy work itself out, which might cause difficult times for some people for a year or so, but would result in a stronger country in the end, Paul said.

Bringing U.S. troops home from all foreign stations would boost the economy, he said, because it would result in them, and the country, spending money in America that is being spent overseas.

“We want peace and we want prosperity and we don’t want perpetual war,” he said.

Face-off is last meeting before Super Tuesday

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio sits in the audience during the Democratic presidential debate Thursday in Los Angeles.

Dan Balz and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post
February 1, 2008

LOS ANGELES – Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama set aside personal hostilities here Thursday night but sharply disagreed on who has the better combination of leadership and experience to defeat Republicans in November and lead the country as president.

Heading toward a critical round of primaries and caucuses on Tuesday, the two remaining contenders for the Democratic nomination focused their strongest words on Republicans.

For almost two hours, Obama and Clinton examined their differences on the Iraq war, health care, immigration and governing style, with Clinton emphasizing her lengthy resume and experience and Obama challenging her about judgment and the ability to inspire the country.

“It is imperative that we have a president, starting on Day One, who can begin to solve our problems, tackle these challenges and seize the opportunities that I think await,” Clinton said.

“Senator Clinton, I think, fairly has claimed that she’s got the experience on Day One,” Obama later replied. “And part of the argument that I’m making in this campaign is that it is important to be right on Day One.”

There were occasional barbs, but nothing that approached the candidates’ war of words in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week. When Thursday’s debate ended, the two rose and exchanged private comments amid smiles and laughter.

“We’re having such a good time,” Clinton said toward the end of the forum. “We are. We are. We’re having a wonderful time.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Obama agreed.

The Kodak Theatre, site of the Academy Awards ceremony in the heart of Hollywood, served as the venue for Thursday’s forum and the pre-debate spectacle on the streets outside rivaled Oscar night. Hollywood stars scrambled to get what was considered one of the hottest tickets in town.

On the subject of the Iraq war – arguably the issue that has shaped the course of the Democratic contest – Obama made a crisp if familiar argument: that his judgment about the invasion reflected a broader skill for understanding the world. Obama also said his consistent opposition to the war would make him a stronger candidate in the general election.

“You know, Senator Clinton mentioned the issue of gravitas and judgment,” he said. “I think it is much easier for us to have the argument when we have a nominee who says, ‘I always thought this was a bad idea, this was a bad strategy. It was not just a problem of execution.’ ” Clinton countered that she had believed that sending weapons inspectors back into Iraq at the time Congress approved the war resolution in 2002 was a “credible idea,” repeating her contention that she did not know that Bush was going to invade.

She argued that she believed in “coercive diplomacy,” but when faced with repeated questions about her decision not to support an alternate measure, she sought to focus on comparing their Senate records.

“I certainly respect Senator Obama making his speech in 2002 against the war,” she said. “And then, when he came to the Senate, we’ve had the same policy because we were both confronting the same reality of trying to deal with the consequences of George Bush’s action.”

Early on, the pair sparred over health care, each citing it as an area in which they have policy differences. They dwelled on health insurance, focusing on details and differing on how to bring the most people into a national insurance network. Still, on a night when civility reigned, Obama said that their health-care proposals were about 95 percent similar.

Clinton has not reported amount donated in January

Letta Tayler
Newsday
February 1, 2008

LOS ANGELES – Barack Obama raised $32 million in campaign contributions in January, a record sum that will carry him well beyond next week’s Super Tuesday primaries in what is shaping into a protracted nomination battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Obama’s haul was the most raised by any candidate in one month in this presidential campaign. John Kerry raised more – $44 million – in March 2004, but he already had secured the nomination.

“For a candidate who had no guarantee of getting past Super Tuesday to have raised $32 million in a single month is astounding,” said Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington nonprofit group that tracks money in politics. “It gives Obama tremendous firepower going into Super Tuesday and beyond.”

Obama and Clinton will compete in 22 states holding Democratic primaries or caucuses Tuesday, the largest number on one day in history.

With John Edwards out of the race, Clinton and Obama are in a race for delegates to secure the nomination. Feb. 5 offers the biggest single opportunity for delegates, but it can’t seal the nomination.

In an e-mail to supporters Wednesday evening, the Obama campaign said it had attracted 224,000 new donors in January for a total of more than 700,000 overall. The $32 million raised in one month matches the campaign’s best three-month fundraising period in 2007.

The funds will finance television and radio ads in 20 Super Tuesday states – nearly double the number airing Clinton spots – as well as in seven states holding primaries in mid-February, said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

“Obviously this contest could go on for some time,” Plouffe said ” … We think we’re going to have the resources to conduct vigorous campaigns.”

The Clinton campaign has not released its January fundraising figure, raising assumptions that it hadn’t matched Obama. It sought to minimize Obama’s jackpot, saying votes and delegates matter most.

“We have all the resources we need to compete and win in this contest,” spokesman Blake Zeff said. He noted that polls show Clinton leading in most Super Tuesday states, especially those with many delegates.

But some polls show Obama narrowing the gap. His aides contend his main disadvantage is name recognition, which ads might help.

The funds Obama raised were just for primaries, meaning he could seek more money from his January donors for the general election. Much of Clinton’s campaign war chest can only be used for the November vote, increasing her need to find new donors, Ritsch said.

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 1, 2008; A08

Sen. Barack Obama has launched an eight-figure, 24-state barrage of television advertising, heading into the Super Tuesday contests and beyond, that will carry his message to twice as many states as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ads will reach with her current ad buy.

While Obama (Ill.) plans to spend more than $10 million on a blitz that will run through Tuesday, the two leading Republican presidential candidates are spending far less on the air wars. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who delayed airing any Super Tuesday commercials, plans to spend $2 million to $3 million in the remaining five days and has released only one ad in California. His chief rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), plans a modest buy on national cable networks.

Obama is on the air in all but three of the Feb. 5 states — he is bypassing his home state of Illinois — and is to begin advertising today in Maryland, Virginia and the District, which vote Feb. 12. His latest ad begins with black-and-white images of John F. Kennedy and features the endorsement of the late president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy.

Clinton (N.Y.) countered with new commercials yesterday, one playing on anxiety about the economy — symbolized by a plunging skydiver — and the other, set to patriotic music, carrying an uplifting appeal of the type usually associated with Obama.

Clinton plans to advertise in a dozen of the 22 states that will hold Democratic primaries and caucuses Tuesday, including New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona and California. Clinton, whose aides believe she does not have to prove her readiness for the Oval Office, has yet to make any commitments in subsequent states.

But Clinton is also using some unconventional tactics. Her campaign bought an hour block on the Hallmark Channel to air a portion of the national town hall forum her campaign is mounting, on the eve of the Feb. 5 primaries. Clinton, former president Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, are set to appear.

“We come in at a massive disadvantage for name ID,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said yesterday. “The more people get to know Obama, the better we do. Our supporters want us to be as aggressive as we can in as many places as we can.”

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer brushed off the disparity, noting that Obama is running state-specific testimonials from such politicians as Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.). “The campaigns are at different stages. . . . While Senator Clinton is highlighting the solutions for the economy she’ll deliver as president, Senator Obama is using third-party validators like Governor Napolitano to assuage voter concerns about his readiness to lead,” Singer said.

Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies political advertising, said Obama faces the greater challenge. “People know Hillary,” he said. “You either like her or don’t like her; maybe advertising helps at the margins. Obama really needs to introduce himself.”

Romney’s California ad, which previously aired elsewhere, stresses his business experience while saying that McCain has never run anything. The Associated Press reported that Romney plans to air ads in other unspecified states but that no decision has been made.

McCain’s aides had been preparing for a heavier assault. They note that their candidate won Tuesday’s Florida primary after Romney had spent $5 million on television ads there and McCain less than $2 million.

“We’ve proven we can win races with limited resources,” said Jill Hazelbaker, McCain’s communications director. “We will be visible, regardless of whether we’re on television.”

With McCain making only a token television buy, said Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, Romney may be reluctant to risk more of his personal fortune on commercials. “How much do your odds improve with a big ad buy at this point?” Tracey asked. “He’s not competing against a Clinton or Obama, where money’s not an issue.”

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has made a small national cable buy for an ad that calls for the Internal Revenue Service to be abolished.

While the campaign has been in full swing for nearly a year, analysts say, the latest round of advertising could be pivotal because many voters in the Super Tuesday states are tuning in for the first time.

The Clinton ad featuring the skydiver says that “our economy could be heading into free fall,” citing foreclosures, interest rates and health-care costs. As the skydiver’s parachute unfurls, the spot touts Clinton as “the person you can depend on to fix the economy and protect our future.”

In the other ad, Clinton praises the nation’s “can-do spirit” and, in a veiled swipe at Obama, says: “We know you can’t solve economic problems with political promises.” A third ad quotes from a New York Times editorial endorsing her.

One Obama ad features excerpts of his speech after winning Saturday’s South Carolina primary, in which he declares: “This election is about the past versus the future. . . . Don’t tell me we can’t change. Yes, we can.” In another, he promises a middle-class tax cut and an end to the Iraq war. A third spot is more biographical, with Obama beginning: “My parents weren’t rich. My father left me when I was very young.”

Both Democrats are targeting Hispanic voters. Clinton is running a Spanish-language ad in such states as Arizona and California that says: “Millions of Hispanic families live with the fear of not having health insurance. . . . Hillary is our friend and will help us.”

Obama’s Spanish-language ad, also airing in Arizona and California, features Luis V. Gutierrez, a congressman from Chicago who touts him as a leader on immigration reform. “We know what it feels like being used as a scapegoat just because of our background and last name,” Gutierrez says.