Kautzman's AP GO PO Blog

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