Offensive raises serious questions

Robert H. Reid
Associated Press
March 31, 2008

BAGHDAD – The Iraqi capital locked down by curfew. U.S. diplomats holed up in their workplaces, fearing rocket attacks. Nearly every major southern city racked by turmoil. Hundreds killed in less than a week.

A declaration Sunday by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to pull his Mahdi Army fighters off the streets may help bring an end to the wave of violence that swept Baghdad and Shiite areas after the government launched a crackdown against militias in Basra.

That will ease the violence which has killed more than 300 people. But it won’t bring an end to the power struggle between Shiite parties that triggered the confrontation.

Nor will it ensure government control of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and headquarters of the vital oil industry.

And it could leave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki politically weakened because he put his prestige on the line with promises to crush Basra’s “criminal gangs,” some of which he said were “worse than al-Qaida.”

The crackdown has dragged the United States into a bloody inner-Shiite fight at a time when the Bush administration would prefer to talk about success against Sunni extremists and argue that Iraq is finally on the road to stability.

Instead, the bloody confrontation serves as a reality check – even as top U.S. officials in Baghdad prepare to brief a skeptical Congress starting April 8 about prospects for bringing home troops. President Bush called the Basra crisis “a defining moment” because the government was finally taking on the Shiite militias.

But the crisis speaks volumes about the reality of Iraqi society and raises new questions about the effectiveness of the country’s leadership as America debates whether continuing the mission here is worth the sacrifice.

Iraqi and American officials portrayed the crackdown as a move to crush outlaw militias – some with close ties to Iran – that have effectively ruled the streets of the country’s second-largest city for nearly three years.

Many of those armed groups are without question deep into oil smuggling, extortion, murder and robbery.

But the picture is more complex. It involves deep-seated rivalries within the majority Shiite community.

Numerous other militias and armed groups operate in Basra and elsewhere in the south – some with close ties to political parties in the national and provincial governments.

All signs indicate the crackdown was directed primarily at the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of al-Sadr’s political movement. The Sadrists believe the goal was to weaken their movement before provincial elections this fall. Al-Sadr’s followers expect to make major gains in the regional voting at the expense of al-Maliki’s Shiite partners in the government.

That points to a significant difference between the Shiite crisis and the war against Sunni insurgents. Al-Qaida has been severely weakened because it lost much of its support within the Sunni community.

By contrast, al-Sadr’s movement commands a wide following, especially among impoverished Shiites who feel estranged from Shiite parties that appeal more to better-educated urban classes.

For months, al-Sadr and other Shiite parties have been locked in a power struggle for control of the Shiite south – which contains the bulk of the country’s oil reserves as well as major religious shrines.

In August, al-Sadr proclaimed a unilateral cease-fire nationwide in an effort to reorganize the force and rein in factions that had branched out into crime.

U.S. commanders acknowledge that truce helped bring down violence in Baghdad.

Nonetheless, U.S. and Iraqi forces continued to chip away at the Sadrists with raids and arrests in Baghdad and elsewhere. American officials insist the target was not al-Sadr’s movement, but Iranian-backed renegades.

Al-Sadr’s followers didn’t see it that way.

Once the crackdown began in Basra, they rose up all over the Shiite heartland, launching rockets into the Green Zone in Baghdad, firing on American patrols and burning offices of al-Maliki’s political party.

The fact that al-Maliki apparently miscalculated the response casts doubt on his judgment and raises serious questions about his commitment to national reconciliation.

Despite the Mahdi Army’s unsavory image, a number of key U.S. commanders have long maintained that it is a mistake to demonize the entire Sadrist movement, which enjoys a substantial following among millions of Iraqi Shiites.

The Basra confrontation also served as a test for U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, which are majority Shiite and include many al-Sadr supporters.

In the campaign’s first days, Iraqi forces made little headway against Mahdi fighters, who unleashed rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire every time government troops tried to enter their neighborhoods.

The headquarters of the Iraqi army’s Basra operation has come under fire regularly since the fighting began. Iraqi commanders have had to turn to the British and American warplanes to take out militia fighters blocking their advance.

At least a dozen police, including some elite commandos, defected to the Sadrists in Baghdad. AP Television News video showed Mahdi fighters in Basra unloading weapons from an Iraqi army vehicle.

The vehicle didn’t have a scratch on it, suggesting it was either abandoned by the Iraqi soldiers or delivered to the Mahdi Army.

(Ms.)Froma Harrop

March 31, 2008

The stock market hasn’t been this nasty since the 1970s. House prices continue their dive, and consumer confidence has gone splat. The rocketing federal budget deficit will probably orbit Mars by the time the government finishes cleaning up the mess left by the housing bubble it so blithely let fester.

Good job, fellas. The Bush administration doesn’t have a heckuva lot of credibility left on economic matters. But some members think they have one little ideological game left to play. Scare people out of their wits about Social Security.

For Americans up to their eyeballs in debt – or whose dreams of leisure rested on rising house prices – Social Security remains a star of stability in the rising gloom. Fortunately, Social Security is doing just fine.

But the financial geniuses in the Bush administration still want to mess with it. And the only way they can stampede the public into doing something stupid to Social Security is to portray the program as a very sick patient needing to be saved.

Economist Dean Baker has spent long years trying to save Social Security from its would-be surgeons. A founder and director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, Baker continually tracks the tireless efforts to undermine confidence in the program – often helped by liberals swept up in the phony panic.

Consider the comments following the Bush administration’s new report on Social Security and Medicare. “In fewer than 10 years,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warns, “cash flows are projected to turn negative – meaning that we will draw upon general revenues to support withdrawals from the (Social Security) Trust Funds in order to pay current benefits.”

Paulson is referring to 2017, when Social Security payroll taxes may no longer be able to cover benefits owed retirees. To keep the program on track, he says, the tax may have to be raised or the benefits cut.

“I think this is really dishonest,” Baker told me. “2017 means zero to the program.”

True, the government must dip into the Trust Funds – which hold the Social Security surplus – in 2017. “But that’s the reason we built up the surplus,” Baker notes.

“When we got to 1982, the thing was literally out of money,” Baker recalls, “but no one missed a check.” Congress and the Reagan administration responded by raising the Social Security payroll taxes and starting to save for the future challenge. Enough money now sits in the Trust Funds to get us to 2041, the program’s trustees report.

That the government would someday have to “support withdrawals from the Trust Funds” hasn’t been a secret for 25 years. Nor is this merely a matter of Americans repaying themselves, as many conservatives argue.

The money in the Trust Funds, Baker notes, came from the very regressive payroll tax on workers. The general funds that support the withdrawals come from the very progressive income taxes – which also cover investment income.

What should we do about Social Security?

“I would just say, ‘Let’s sit on this,’ ” Baker answers. If come 2030 Americans see problems looming, he adds, “we can do something.”

Much could change in over 20 years. Productivity gains have helped fewer workers pay for more retirees in the past and could in the future. And longer life spans may also alter the dynamics.

“How long into their lives should someone born in 2020 work?” Baker asks. “I have no idea.”

If politicians want to agonize over retiree benefits, they have their hands full with Medicare. Paying for that program will be a bear of a problem. But they should keep their paws off Social Security.

Presidential candidates, please take note.

Kathleen Parker

March 31, 2008

Barack Obama’s race speech didn’t adequately answer the key question of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but his comments were revelatory in important ways.

What Obama highlighted, if indirectly, is the dormant disconnect between much of black and white America. And what he revealed, if accidentally, is that he has contributed to that disconnect as a passive participant.

We need to talk, Obama says. So let’s talk.

What has become clear in the several days since Obama’s speech in Philadelphia is that blacks and whites see things differently – in some cases, as different as black and white.

To the average white American, especially one who doesn’t subscribe to the fire-and-brimstone school of religious expression, Wright is an unfamiliar character. He may be a Christian but his orientation is African and he speaks the language of white conspiracy.

What was jolting for many whites wasn’t that Wright has a following – to each his own – but that Obama, a man who intends to lead an entire country, found a home among the pews of Wright’s church. That Obama eventually distanced himself from some of Wright’s rhetoric only raises the second question: What took so long?

How can anyone sit in a church where the minister says, for instance, that the U.S. government invented the AIDS virus to kill blacks? Obama may have been too young or too naive at some point along his 20-year relationship with Wright, but eventually, shouldn’t the man who became an Illinois state senator and then a U.S. senator and then a presidential contender have spoken up before he was forced to?

Those are reasonable questions, but they are mostly white questions.

Blacks have others. Obama was correct when he said that Wright, though sometimes wrong, spoke to deep wounds and a history most whites don’t like to examine too closely.

The historical experience of blacks and whites in this country couldn’t be more different. Whites know it intellectually, but blacks feel it viscerally. No matter how many books we read or movies we watch, whites can never quite grasp what it is to be black or to be descended from people who were denied their humanity and enslaved by whites with the benign approval of the state.

But we didn’t do it, we protest. Our children aren’t guilty. When is enough enough? Why must preachers such as Wright insist on fanning those flames?

White Americans want to put race behind them, to move on. And many had hoped Obama was the man to make that happen. The big surprise was learning that he belongs to a church where the past is loudly present. Obama gave himself away when, in his speech, he paraphrased William Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

Black history, meanwhile, makes it possible for many to accept the theory advanced by Wright that white men invented the AIDS virus to destroy black populations. After all, the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis study, in which about 400 black men with syphilis were left untreated and uninformed as part of an experiment, was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service.

Given that history, the AIDS theory doesn’t require much of a leap for many in the black community. The AIDS virus has hit African-Americans harder than any other group. For blacks in the United States, HIV/AIDS is a leading cause of death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though blacks account for about 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 49 percent of those who get HIV and AIDS.

Whites account for 31 percent.

A white person might view these statistics on the CDC Web site and understand that blacks suffer more in part because of barriers such as poverty, sexually transmitted disease and cultural stigmas that put blacks at higher risk. Blacks – especially those under the spell of Wrighteousness – might view the same information and at least wonder if something else is going on.

So, yes, there is work to be done. Between a history of distrust born of painful experience – and people like Wright who keep that history alive and well-stoked – racial harmony will require more than hope. It will also require that people like Obama speak up and object to harmful rhetoric, sooner rather than later, even if it hurts the ones he loves.

There’s a reason why it’s lonely at the top.

Kathleen O’Brien
Newark Star-Ledger
March 29, 2008

When you were a kid, did you ever have an uncle who got drunk at family gatherings and started handing out $20 bills to all the kids?

Even as a child you knew it probably wasn’t right, but you were glad to have the money anyway.

That’s the reaction most of us have to this bogus “Economic Stimulus Payment” soon coming to our mailboxes.

We know it’s stupid, we know it’s wrong, but when that check arrives in the mail, we have no intention of saying, “Return to sender.” We’re cashing that baby.

There are many obvious flaws with the payments as public policy, yet we discovered even one more when chatting with our accountant.

Get this: We don’t qualify for the $300 “child tax credit” for our daughter because she is over the age of 17. Never mind that she (and her college tuition) are costing us more now than at any point during her diaper years. Never mind that we still claim her as a dependent on our taxes.

Then we learned something even weirder: She might get the money!

“Blockbuster and Panera Bread will be thrilled,” said my husband.

She worked two jobs last summer – good for her – so she had more than $3,000 in earned income. That meant the government might place her in the category of the working poor – people who work but don’t make much money.

But … but … she isn’t poor. True, she doesn’t have a lot of money, but she doesn’t have a lot of expenses, either. She’s a dependent with free room and board. Her earnings go to gas and shampoo and movie tickets. (And conditioner, don’t forget conditioner.)

When we first learned of this possibility a month or so ago, we scoffed. The federal government couldn’t possibly be this stupid, we said. I asked a business editor about it. He was dubious. “I doubt they’re going to blanket college campuses with $300 checks,” he said.

Still, there was this bit of internal logic: If we weren’t getting money on her behalf, maybe that meant she’d be getting some herself.

She even received one of those “Important Message from the IRS” fliers at the same time ours arrived. It wasn’t very helpful; we both received the same message. But it added to the general impression that perhaps the feds were alerting her about these upcoming payments because she might be entitled to one.

Like any other red-blooded Americans, we started spending it in our minds.

Eventually it occurred to us that something might be gained by reading the notice. Buried in the fine print was this wet blanket: “Individuals cannot receive a payment if they can be claimed as a dependent of another taxpayer.” I take that to mean neither she nor we will receive $300 to reflect the cost of her care.

So now our household is like the kid at the end of the line at the family party. Just as it’s his turn to get the $20 from the drunken uncle, the uncle sobers up and closes his wallet.

The kid knows he was never entitled to the money, and handing it out to everyone was a stupid idea that would probably get someone in trouble eventually. But still … (whine alert!) … everyone else got the money. And it would’ve bought a lot of conditioner.

Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
March 29, 2008

Would God ever damn America? Is there anything we have done or could do as a nation that might court such severe judgment from an almighty, or is there a peculiar American exemption from God’s wrath? The prediction of God’s damnation for bad behavior is made in both black and white churches.

Clearly no less an authority on such matters than the Rev. Pat Robertson, who didn’t think the latter when he blamed the ravaging effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Lord’s retribution toward those who “shed innocent blood.” Robertson’s reference to legalized abortion cited a passage from Leviticus that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright also might have been noting when he sermonized: “The government … wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” a reference to African-Americans sacrificed on ghetto streets.

While the “innocents” about whom they spoke are different, the scriptural reference seems to be the same. As Robertson put it, preserved in a video clip posted on the Internet by Media Matters: “I was reading yesterday … about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood … ‘the land will vomit you out,’ ” which he related to attacks “either by terrorists or now by natural disaster.”

Robertson, a firm ally of Republican administrations, has not always warmed to the presumed GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, although the two recently have mended their strained relationship. However, in this season of pastor baiting, McCain has his own problem, having expressed his thrill in receiving “the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee.”

Hagee, citing a planned “homosexual parade,” had previously told National Public Radio that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment of the people of New Orleans for “a level of sin that was offensive to God.” Obviously, the almighty with whom Hagee is on intimate terms is in need of MapQuest, given that New Orleans’ gay neighborhoods were among the ones least impacted by the hurricane.

Hagee long has been denounced by Catholics for labeling the Vatican “The Great Whore” and blaming Hitler’s genocidal policies on his having “attended a Catholic school as a child.” The one that has some current relevance to the Iraq disaster is Hagee’s blasting the Roman Catholic Church for sponsoring the Crusades, which “plunged the world into the Dark Ages.”

In a warning that imperial adventures lose some of their luster with the passage of time, Hagee wrote in his book, “Jerusalem Countdown”: “The brutal truth is that the Crusades were military campaigns of the Roman Catholic Church to gain control of Jerusalem from the Muslims and to punish the Jews as the alleged Christ killers on the road to and from Jerusalem.” What will future theologians say about Bush’s crusade to liberate Iraq, shedding the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents?

I know what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would say were he alive today, for it would be consistent with his denunciation of the Vietnam War in a sermon at New York’s Riverside Church a year before his assassination. Recounting his difficulty in spreading the message of nonviolence and personal responsibility to the very ghetto youth that the Rev. Wright has worked with for four decades, King stated, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

King delivered that speech the year Wright ended his six years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy, for which he received three commendations from President Lyndon Johnson, whom King was confronting. No doubt Wright was influenced by King’s oratory decrying “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens … in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” And neither could Wright.

I respect Barack Obama’s right to repudiate his pastor’s comments, as he did, but I respect even more his refusal to throw the man overboard in a practice we witnessed all too often with the Clintons when they came under right-wing attacks. Hillary did it again, Tuesday, telling the right-wing Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board that Wright: “would not have been my pastor.”

So she says, but the record shows she was there in the White House on Sept. 11, 1998, when her husband posed for a photo with Wright and was grateful for his support in the midst of that wrath-of-Leviticus blue dress flap. Ingrate.

March 29, 2008

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad new authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system.

The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the nation’s hodgepodge of financial regulatory agencies, which many experts say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they set off what is now the worst financial calamity in decades.

Democratic lawmakers are all but certain to say the proposal does not go far enough in restricting the kinds of practices that caused the financial crisis. Many of the proposals, like those that would consolidate regulatory agencies, have nothing to do with the turmoil in financial markets. And some of the proposals could actually reduce regulation.

According to a summary provided by the administration, the plan would consolidate an alphabet soup of banking and securities regulators into a powerful trio of overseers responsible for everything from banks and brokerage firms to hedge funds and private equity firms.

While the plan could expose Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds to greater scrutiny, it carefully avoids a call for tighter regulation.

The plan would not rein in practices that have been linked to the housing and mortgage crisis, like packaging risky subprime mortgages into securities carrying the highest ratings.

The plan would give the Fed some authority over Wall Street firms, but only when an investment bank’s practices threatened the entire financial system.

And the plan does not recommend tighter rules over the vast and largely unregulated markets for risk sharing and hedging, like credit default swaps, which are supposed to insure lenders against loss but became a speculative instrument themselves and gave many institutions a false sense of security.

Parts of the plan could reduce the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is charged with maintaining orderly stock and bond markets and protecting investors. The plan would merge the S.E.C. with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates exchange-traded futures for oil, grains, currencies and the like.

The blueprint also suggests several areas where the S.E.C. should take a lighter approach to its oversight. Among them are allowing stock exchanges greater leeway to regulate themselves and streamlining the approval of new products, even allowing automatic approval of securities products that are being traded in foreign markets.

The proposal began last year as an effort by Henry M. Paulson Jr., secretary of the Treasury, to make American financial markets more competitive against overseas markets by modernizing a creaky regulatory system.

His goal was to streamline the different and sometimes clashing rules for commercial banks, savings and loans and nonbank mortgage lenders.

“I am not suggesting that more regulation is the answer, or even that more effective regulation can prevent the periods of financial market stress that seem to occur every 5 to 10 years,” Mr. Paulson will say in a speech on Monday, according to a draft. “I am suggesting that we should and can have a structure that is designed for the world we live in, one that is more flexible.”

Congress would have to approve almost every element of the proposal, and Democratic leaders are already drafting their own bills to impose tougher supervision over Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and the fast-growing market in derivatives like credit default swaps.

But Mr. Paulson’s proposal for the Fed echoes ideas championed by Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

Both see the Fed overseeing risk across the entire financial spectrum, but Mr. Frank is likely to favor a stronger Fed role and to subject investment banks to the same rules that commercial banks now must follow, especially for capital reserves.

The Treasury plan would let Fed officials examine the practices and even the internal bookkeeping of brokerage firms, hedge funds, commodity-trading exchanges and any other institution that might pose a risk to the overall financial system.

That would be a significant expansion of the central bank’s regulatory mission.

When Fed officials agreed this month to rescue Bear Stearns, once the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, they pointedly noted that the Fed never had the authority to monitor its financial condition or order it to bolster its protections against a collapse.

In two unprecedented moves, the Fed engineered a marriage between JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns, lending $29 billion to JPMorgan to prevent a Bear bankruptcy and a chain of defaults that might have felled much of the financial system.

For the first time since the 1930s, the Fed also agreed to let investment banks borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from its discount window, an emergency lending program reserved for commercial banks and other depository institutions.

But Mr. Paulson’s proposal would fall well short of the kind of regulation that Democrats have been proposing. Mr. Frank and other senior Democrats have argued that investment banks and other lightly regulated institutions now compete with commercial banks and should be subject to similar regulation, including examiners who regularly pore over their books and quietly demand changes in their practices.

In a recent interview, Mr. Frank said he realized the need for tighter regulation of Wall Street firms after a meeting with Charles O. Prince III, then chairman of Citigroup.

When Mr. Frank asked why Citigroup had kept billions of dollars in “structured investment vehicles” off the firm’s balance sheet, he recalled, Mr. Prince responded that Citigroup, as a bank holding company, would have been at a disadvantage because investment firms can operate with higher debt and lower capital reserves.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, has taken a similar stance.

“Commercial banks continue to be supervised closely, and are subject to a host of rules meant to limit systemic risk,” Mr. Schumer wrote in an op-ed article on Friday in The Wall Street Journal. “But many other financial institutions, including investment banks and hedge funds, are regulated lightly, if at all, even though they act in many ways like banks.”

Mr. Paulson’s proposal is likely to provoke bruising turf battles in Congress among agencies and rival industry groups that benefit from the current regulations.

Administration officials acknowledged on Friday that they did not expect the proposal to become law this year, but said they hoped it would help frame a policy debate that would extend well after the elections in November.

In a nod to the debacle in mortgage lending, the administration proposed a Mortgage Origination Commission to evaluate the effectiveness of state governments in regulating mortgage brokers and protecting consumers.

The bulk of the proposal, however, was developed before soaring mortgage defaults set off a much broader credit crisis, and most of the proposals are geared to streamlining regulation.

This plan would consolidate a large number of regulators into roughly three big new agencies.

Bank supervision, now divided among five federal agencies, would be led by a Prudential Financial Regulator, which could send examiners into any bank or depository institution that is protected by either federal deposit insurance or other federal backstops. It would eliminate the distinction between “banks” and “thrift institutions,” which are already indistinguishable to most consumers, and shut down the Office of Thrift Supervision.

Any effort to merge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission with the S.E.C. is likely to provoke battles.

Yet another proposal would, for the first time, create a national regulator for insurance companies, an industry that state governments now oversee.

Administration officials argue that a national system would eliminate the inefficiencies of having 50 different state regulators, who have jealously guarded their powers and are likely to fight any federal encroachment.

Arthur Levitt, a former S.E.C. chairman who has long pushed for stronger investor protection, said his first impression of the plan was positive. Even though the S.E.C.’s powers might be reduced, Mr. Levitt said, the plan would create a broader agency to regulate business conduct in all financial services.

“It’s a thoughtful document,” he said. “I’m intrigued by the fact that it puts an emphasis on investor protection, and that it establishes an agency specifically for that purpose, which would operate across all markets. I think that’s a very constructive first step.”

Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008

By Joe Klein

Unlike Barack Obama, Bill Clinton does not believe in “the fierce urgency of now.” The former President has an exquisitely languid sense of how political time unfurls. He understands that those moments the political community, especially the media, considers urgent usually aren’t. He has seen his own election and reelection—and completing his second term—pronounced “impossible” and lived to tell the tale. He remembers that in spring 1992 he had pretty much won the Democratic nomination but was considered a dead man walking, running third behind Bush the Elder and Ross Perot. He knows that April is the silly season in presidential politics, the moment when candidates involved in a bruising primary battle seem weakest and bloodied, as both Hillary Clinton and Obama do now. It’s the moment when pundits demand action—”Drop out, Hillary!”—and propound foolish theories. And so I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I’m slouching toward, well, a theory: if this race continues to slide downhill, the answer to the Democratic Party’s dilemma may turn out to be Al Gore.

This April promises to be crueler than most. The two campaigns have started attacking each other with chainsaws, while the Republican John McCain is moving ahead in some national polls. At this point, Clinton can only win the nomination ugly: by superdelegates abandoning Obama and turning to her, in droves—not impossible, but not very likely either. Even if Clinton did overtake Obama, it would be very difficult for her to win the presidency: African Americans would never forgive her for “stealing” the nomination. They would simply stay home in November, as would the Obamista youth. (Although the former President is probably thinking: Yeah, but John McCain is a flagrantly flawed candidate too—I’d accept even a corrupted nomination and take my chances.)

Which is not to say that Clinton’s candidacy is entirely without purpose now that she is pursuing a Republican-style race gambit, questioning Obama’s 20-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright. Democrats will soon learn how damaging that relationship might be in a general election. They’ll also see if Obama has the gumption to bounce back, work hard—not just arena rallies for college kids but roundtables for the grizzled and unemployed in American Legion halls—and change the minds that have turned against him. The main reason superdelegates have not yet rallied round Obama is that the party is collectively holding its breath, waiting to see how he performs in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana.

He will probably do well enough to secure the nomination. But what if he tanks? What if he can’t buy a white working-class vote? What if he loses all three states badly and continues to lose after that? I’d guess that the Democratic Party would still give him the nomination rather than turn to Clinton. But no one would be very happy—and a year that should have been an easy Democratic victory, given the state of the economy and the unpopularity of the incumbent, might slip away.

Which brings us back to Al Gore. Pish-tosh, you say, and you’re probably right. But let’s play a little. Let’s say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let’s also assume—and this may be a real stretch—that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they’d have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party—and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? Of course, Obama would have to be a party to the deal and bring his 1,900 or so delegates along.

I played out that scenario with about a dozen prominent Democrats recently, from various sectors of the party, including both Obama and Clinton partisans. Most said it was extremely unlikely … and a pretty interesting idea. A prominent fund raiser told me, “Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place.” A congressional Democrat told me, “This could be our way out of a mess.” Others suggested Gore was painfully aware of his limitations as a candidate. “I don’t know that he’d be interested, even if you handed it to him,” said a Gore friend. Chances are, no one will hand it to him. The Democratic Party would have to be monumentally desperate come June. And yet … is this scenario any more preposterous than the one that gave John McCain the Republican nomination? Yes, it’s silly season. But this has been an exceptionally “silly” year.

By JAMES GLANZ and STEVEN LEE MYERS

BAGHDAD — American-trained Iraqi security forces failed for a third straight day to oust Shiite militias from the southern city of Basra on Thursday, even as President Bush hailed the operation as a sign of the growing strength of Iraq’s federal government.

The fighting in Basra against the Mahdi Army, the armed wing of the political movement led by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, set off clashes in cities throughout Iraq. Major demonstrations were staged in a number of Shiite areas of Baghdad, including Sadr City, the huge neighborhood that is Mr. Sadr’s base of power.

Although Mr. Bush praised the Iraqi government for leading the fighting, it also appeared that the Iraqi government was pursuing its own agenda, calling the battles a fight against “criminal” elements but seeking to marginalize the Mahdi Army.

The Americans share the Iraqi government’s hostility toward what they call rogue elements of the Mahdi Army but will also be faced with the consequences if the battles among Shiite factions erupt into more widespread unrest.

The violence underscored the fragile nature of the security improvements partly credited to the American troop increase that began last year. Officials have acknowledged that a cease-fire called by Mr. Sadr last August has contributed to the improvements. Should the cease-fire collapse entirely, those gains could be in serious jeopardy, making it far more difficult to begin bringing substantial numbers of American troops home.

Although Sadr officials insisted on Thursday that the cease-fire was still in effect, Mr. Sadr has authorized his forces to fight in self-defense, and the battles in Basra appear to be eroding the cease-fire.

During a lengthy speech at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, Mr. Bush praised Iraq’s government for ordering the assault in Basra and portrayed the battle as evidence that his strategy of increasing troop strength was bearing fruit.

“This offensive builds on the security gains of the surge and demonstrates to the Iraqi people that their government is committed to protecting them,” he said.

“There’s a strong commitment by the central government of Iraq to say that no one is above the law.”

Mr. Bush also accused Iran of arming, training and financing the militias fighting against the Iraqi forces.

Mr. Bush spoke after three days of briefings with senior advisers and military commanders on the situation in Iraq and the options for reducing the number of American troops there beyond the withdrawals already announced. It was one in a series of speeches he has been giving to build support for his policy before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Iraq, testifies before Congress next month.

In a videoconference with the president on Monday, General Petraeus recommended taking up to two months to evaluate security in Iraq before considering additional withdrawals, officials said Monday.

On Thursday, medical officials in Basra said the toll in the fighting there had risen to about 100 dead and 500 wounded, including civilians, militiamen and members of the security forces. An Iraqi employee of The New York Times, driving on the main road between Basra and Nasiriya, observed numerous civilian cars with coffins strapped to the roofs, apparently heading to Shiite cemeteries to the north.

Violence also broke out in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, Baquba and other cities. In Baghdad, where explosions shook the city throughout the day, American officials said 11 rockets struck the Green Zone, killing an unidentified American government worker, the second this week.

Another American, Paul Converse of Corvallis, Ore., an analyst with a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, died of wounds suffered in a rocket attack on Sunday, a spokeswoman for the agency said Thursday.

The Iraqi government imposed a citywide curfew in Baghdad until Sunday.

Thousands of demonstrators in Sadr City on Thursday denounced Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has personally directed the Basra operation, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who leads the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a political party that is a crucial member of the coalition keeping Mr. Maliki in power.

The Supreme Council’s armed wing, the Badr Organization, is one of the most powerful rivals of the Mahdi Army in Basra, where Shiite militias have been fighting among themselves for years to control neighborhoods, oil revenues, electricity access, the ports and even the local universities.

The third powerful element in the city is the Fadhila Party, which split from the Sadrists years ago and has its own militia. The three parties are expected to be rivals in the next round of provincial council elections, now scheduled for October. Many Sadr supporters pointed to those elections, and the possibility that their party might gain a majority of the seats, as a motivation for the Basra assault.

That assertion was rejected by Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister’s political adviser, who said that the deteriorating security situation in Basra had left Mr. Maliki no choice but to act.

Witnesses in Basra said there was little evidence that security forces had moved the Mahdi Army out of neighborhoods they had long controlled. In the western Hayaniya neighborhood, where the Mahdi Army has fought with security forces, only gunmen and a few residents were seen on Thursday. Mahdi checkpoints were highly visible, often consisting of at least half a dozen fighters armed with weapons like rocket-propelled grenades.

“The gunmen are not allowing any military convoys to pass near the area,” said Ameen Ali Sakran, a Hayaniya resident.

Alaa Abdul Samad, an educational supervisor who lives in the Mahdi-controlled Kibla neighborhood a couple of miles south of the city center, said he had not seen any official army vehicles during the assault.

“The gunmen have controlled even the Kibla police station and taken all its weapons,” Mr. Samad said. “The area is now in the hands of the militias, and there is no army except some of the helicopters that fly around.”

Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Mohammed, the director of military operations in Iraq, echoed other Iraqi and American officials on Thursday by saying that the operation was not specifically aimed at the Mahdi Army but at any “criminals” who would not lay down their weapons. But witnesses said there was little fighting in neighborhoods that had been controlled by the Badr and Fadhila militias.

Estimates by Basra residents of how much of the city is in the Mahdi Army’s hands ranged from 50 percent to much higher. “We have soldiers in Basra, and they are doing fine,” said a militiaman in Baghdad named Abu Ali, who identified himself as a division commander for the Mahdi Army. “They are in full control.”

Those estimates of how much of the city was under Mahdi control were disputed by Mr. Rikabi. “No, this is not true, this is not true,” he said, though he offered no specific estimate.

But in another indication that parts of the south were slipping from the government’s hands, a major oil pipeline near Basra was struck with a bomb around 10 a.m. on Friday, igniting a huge fire, said Sameer al-Magsosi, a spokesman for the Southern Oil Company. Before the recent security gains, the southern pipelines had been frequent targets of insurgents, smugglers and militias, but few strikes had been recorded in the past year.

Mr. Bush, speaking at the National Air Force Museum, said he would not announce any decisions on the future in Iraq until after General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker briefed Congress on April 8 and 9.

As before, however, he made it clear that he intended to maintain the maximum force needed to achieve what he called “a strategic victory.”

“As I consider the way forward, I will always remember that the progress in Iraq is real, it’s substantive, but it is reversible,” he said. “And so the principle behind my decision on our troop levels will be ensuring that we succeed in Iraq.”

One protester in Sadr City, Wissam Abdul Zahra, 27, made it clear that despite the wider implications of the Basra assault, he viewed it as a simple matter of local politics and power.

“We are expressing our freedom to defend the rights of our brothers in Basra under the pressure of Maliki and the Badr brigades.” he said. “They want to knock down the Sadrists before the provincial elections.”

Even the youngest participants in the protest seemed to have absorbed some of the reasons for the criticism.

“I watch the news with my family, and I see that Maliki is fighting the innocent people in Basra,” said Muhammad, 12. “I don’t understand it all, but it looks bad to me.”

James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and Steven Lee Myers from Ohio. Reporting was contributed by Qais Mizher, Ahmad Fadam, Mudhafer al-Husaini, Hosham Hussein, Erica Goode and Karim al-Hilmi, and employees of The New York Times from Basra, Kut, Baghdad, Hilla, Kirkuk and Diyala Province.

David S. Broder
Washington Post
March 27, 2008

Jim Naughton and John Mashek are two of the smartest political reporters of the past generation. Naughton is a veteran of the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer and of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a journalism think tank. Mashek came out of North Dakota and Texas and, after a distinguished career, retired from U.S. News & World Report.

The two are also noted for their wicked senses of humor, but they weren’t kidding when they met during Mashek’s annual excursion to the Phillies’ training camp in Clearwater, Fla., and applied themselves to solving the problem of the embattled Florida and Michigan delegations to the Democratic National Convention.

As you know, those two states have been disciplined for jumping ahead of their assigned primary dates. The DNC stripped them of their delegates, and so far plans for a revote or some other device to get them into the Denver convention hall have been stymied by legal and political disputes.

Mashek sent me an e-mail this week outlining the compromise solution he credits to Naughton. They accept the widespread view that Obama is likely to finish the primary season in June leading the delegate race, but be short of the 2,024 votes needed for nomination.

Clinton is pressing to seat both delegations, which would give her two more victories in vital battlegrounds. She left her name on both ballots, though she joined Obama in observing the DNC ban on campaigning in those states. Obama was on the Florida ballot, and his supporters in Michigan had recourse to an uncommitted slate. But he trailed in both states and, understandably, is not eager to see Clinton’s popular vote and delegate totals swell.

So here is the Naughton plan: Because Florida and Michigan both knowingly violated the party rules, they must be punished by having the size of their delegations cut in half. But he would let the remaining 183 delegates chosen in the disputed primaries take their seats and vote on the platform or almost any other issue – except those that impact directly on the presidential nomination.

When we talked, I told Naughton it was a clever solution. What I didn’t tell him was that for weeks, I have been screwing up my courage to write about a crackpot solution of my own, one that would appeal only to the most desperate Democrats.

Almost 50 years ago, I went to Austin to cover a Texas Democratic state convention. As usual, the liberals, led by the redoubtable Frankie Randolph, of Houston, were thoroughly outvoted and humiliated by the party regulars supporting Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn.

After their final overwhelming defeat on some platform or rules dispute, Randolph led her embattled ragtag army out of the convention hall and across an open field. Then they reconvened at what they called a “rump” convention of their own, and passed everything they wanted to pass, while damning the powers that be.

So here’s my idea. When the Florida and Michigan delegates arrive in Denver, they should present their credentials to the convention and – assuming Obama leads in the results from the other primaries and caucuses – prepare to be turned down. Then they walk out, “rump” in a nearby hall, and do their business, including casting mock votes for president.

TV would cover the spectacle, and the rhetoric would flow.

It would not satisfy those Florida and Michigan voters who claim the party is “disenfranchising” them, but their grievance really is with the leaders of their states who got caught trying to jump the line.

For the disputed delegates, however, all the other perks of convention week would still be available – the parties, the schmoozing, the press interviews.

I can even imagine that the moment the presidential roll call is over, the floor manager of the winning candidate would seize the microphone, move to suspend the rules, and suggest a unanimous vote to invite “our absent friends from Michigan and Florida to come join us” in their seats on the convention floor.

Smiles. Embraces. Blessed harmony. Anyway, it’s better than a lawsuit.

Troop strain increasing, Joint Chiefs tell Bush

Robert Gates, left, and U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen stand with President Bush Wednesday. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Robert Burns
Associated Press
March 27, 2008

WASHINGTON – Behind the Pentagon’s closed doors, U.S. military leaders told President Bush Wednesday they are worried about the Iraq war’s mounting strain on troops and their families. But they indicated they’d go along with a brief halt in pulling out troops this summer.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff did say senior commanders in Iraq should make more frequent assessments of security conditions, an idea that appeared aimed at increasing pressure for more rapid troop reductions.

The chiefs’ concern is that U.S. forces are being worn thin, compromising the Pentagon’s ability to handle crises elsewhere in the world.

Wednesday’s 90-minute Pentagon session, held in a secure conference room known as “the Tank,” was arranged by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to provide Bush an additional set of military views as he prepares to decide how to proceed in Iraq once his troop buildup, which began in 2007, runs its course by July.

“Armed with all that, the president must now decide the way ahead in Iraq,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell. The discussion covered not only Iraq but Afghanistan, where violence has spiked, and broader military matters, said Morrell, who briefed reporters without giving details of the discussion. Some specifics were provided by defense officials, commenting on condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.

The Joint Chiefs are particularly concerned about Afghanistan and an increasingly active Taliban insurgency.

The United States has about 31,000 troops in Afghanistan and 156,000 in Iraq.

U.S. forces in Iraq peaked at 20 brigades last year and are to be cut to 15 brigades, with a total of about 140,000 combat and support troops, by the end of July. A key question facing Bush is whether security conditions will have improved sufficiently by then to justify more reductions.

Gates has said he would like to see the total drop to 10 brigades by the end of this year, but that now looks unlikely.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has proposed what is commonly called a “pause” to assess the impact of having withdrawn five combat brigades since December. He has argued that it would be reckless to shrink the American force so rapidly that the gains achieved over the past year are compromised or lost entirely.

Bush is expected to endorse Petraeus’ approach. If, as expected, Petraeus is given until August or September to weigh the effects of the current round of reductions, then it is unlikely that the force would get much below 15 brigades by the time Bush leaves office in January.

In their session with Bush, the chiefs laid out their concerns about the health of the U.S. force, several defense officials said.

“The conversations today with the Joint Chiefs were much broader than just Iraq,” Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, said later. “It was a step-back look of what are the challenges we face here in the next decade.”

The president is to give a speech today in Ohio on the political and economic situation in Iraq.

Clashes spread across Iraq

Al-Maliki issues ultimatum to militants

Iraqi men greet U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Brian Flading as he patrols in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday. Associated Press (Associated Press ) Related news Saddam funded lawmakers’ trip » WASHINGTON – Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers, including one from Western Washington, during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. » The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution. » Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam’s regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil. » The lawmakers are not named in the indictment, but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott, of Washington, David Bonior, of Michigan, and Mike Thompson, of California. None was charged, and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators “have no information whatsoever” any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.

Leila Fadel
McClatchy
March 27, 2008

BAGHDAD – With the United States providing air cover and embedded advisers, the Iraqi government on Wednesday expanded its offensive against Shiite Muslim militias from the port city of Basra to the capital of Baghdad – and many of the provinces in between.

The day saw street battles in Baghdad and Basra, mortar attacks by Shiite rebels against Baghdad’s Green Zone, bombing by U.S. aircraft and encounters that left government tanks in flames. More than 97 people were reported killed and hundreds were wounded since the operation began early Tuesday. Two U.S. soldiers were killed by hostile fire in separate attacks Wednesday in Baghdad, the military said.

In Baghdad, at least nine Iraqi civilians were killed and 42 were wounded in mortar attacks, police said. The Mahdi Army, loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, opened fire on civilians in downtown Baghdad and clashed with Iraqi security forces in Kadhemiya in north Baghdad.

In Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, clashes between the Mahdi Army and Iraqi security forces supported by U.S. forces left at least 20 dead and 115 injured. By early afternoon, people took to the streets in protest of the Iraqi government.

Mortar rounds crashed into the heavily fortified Green Zone for the third straight day, injuring three U.S. government employees, all U.S. citizens, said U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo.

Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who’s directing the operation from Basra, gave the armed groups 72 hours to give up their weapons and surrender without consequences, warning that they’d be treated as outlaws if they didn’t.

But al-Sadr demanded that al-Maliki leave Basra and send a parliamentary delegation to hold a dialogue. Al-Maliki immediately rebuffed the demand.

Al-Maliki appears to be taking a huge risk in confronting the volatile city, which is dominated by the Mahdi Army.

There were growing signs that al-Sadr’s cease-fire, which he declared in August and renewed in February, was unraveling. The cease-fire is one of the principal reasons for the downturn in violence and U.S. troop deaths this year.

“I hope they will stay with the freeze, but I’m not sure currently if the Jaysh al Mahdi (Mahdi Army) is still freezing its activities,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, al-Maliki’s adviser.

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 26, 2008; A01

Sen. Barack Obama offers himself as a post-partisan uniter who will solve the country’s problems by reaching across the aisle and beyond the framework of liberal and conservative labels he rejects as useless and outdated.

But as Obama heads into the final presidential primaries, Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have already started to brand him a standard-order left-winger, “a down-the-line liberal,” as McCain strategist Charles R. Black Jr. put it, in a long line of Democratic White House hopefuls.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he took in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care and an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. “The evidence is that the more [voters] have been learning about him, the more his coalition has been shrinking,” Clinton strategist Mark Penn said.

The double-barreled attack has presented Democratic voters with some persistent questions about Obama: Just how liberal is he? And even if he truly is a new kind of candidate, can he avoid being pigeonholed with an old label under sustained assault?

Despite being rated the most liberal senator in 2007 by the National Journal, Obama has sought to confound easy categorization. While his record and platform mostly adhere to a left-leaning Democratic model, he has cast them as a common-sense response to the Bush administration. His ability to appeal to independents and even Republicans has been one of his main attractions for Democrats eager to retake the White House, and a cause for concern among some GOP leaders.

At the same time, the criticism from the McCain and Clinton operations draws a quick rebuttal from Obama’s campaign. His strategists recognize that Democratic voters and the superdelegates who may end up deciding the hotly contested nomination are concerned about the electability of a candidate tagged with the “liberal” label that has fatally wounded nominees such as John F. Kerry, Michael S. Dukakis and Walter F. Mondale.

“While there’s no doubt that Obama comes from a progressive bent, he’s got a very rich and thoughtful approach, and that’s the reason why you have both Democrats and Republicans who’ve worked with him who say positive things about him,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. He chided the Clinton camp for warning about Obama’s liberalism, saying she would be subject to the same critique.

“The Republican Party would very much like to run against Hillary Clinton . . . and would have no trouble taking individual votes to create the kind of caricature they want to create,” he said. “It’s laughable to suggest that somehow she would be impervious to that. She wouldn’t be. They would have a field day.”

Obama’s elusiveness until now has been a source of frustration for Clinton. While her campaign now argues that Obama is too liberal, Clinton has mixed this message by attacking from the left on several issues, such as suggesting that he is weak on abortion rights, too fond of Ronald Reagan and too timid on health-care reform.

“The frustration that the Clinton campaign has felt . . . comes very much from trying to attack him from the left and right along the traditional spectrum,” said Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration. “But he’s playing an entirely different game, and they don’t know how to play that game.”

In most major areas, Obama has taken positions that would seem to conform to the Republican stereotype of a liberal. Like Clinton, he favors expanding the government’s role in delivering health care, and would pay for that by ending President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. He would go a step further than Clinton by lifting the limit on income taxed for Social Security, now $100,000, to set that program on firm footing.

He strongly supports abortion rights and spoke out against a Supreme Court ruling last year that upheld a ban on the procedure that some call “partial-birth” abortion. He favors allowing illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses (after some hesitation, Clinton came out against that). He is outspoken on civil rights, and he has opposed Bush’s judicial picks, staying out of a bipartisan effort to approve some nominees. While he supports the death penalty for the most “heinous” crimes, as a Senate candidate in 2004 he expressed support for strict gun control, decriminalizing marijuana and ending federal mandatory minimum prison sentences, issues he now rarely raises on the trail.

On foreign policy, he balances his opposition to the Iraq war with plans to intensify the pursuit of al-Qaeda. But he has opened the door to Republican caricature with his call to negotiate with hostile governments, and has been endorsed by the activist group MoveOn.org.

As some Republicans see it, the only things keeping Obama from being branded as one of the most liberal top presidential contenders ever are his pragmatic tone and conciliatory rhetoric.

“His personal countenance and the way he speaks and comes across is anti-ideological,” said Peter H. Wehner, who served as Bush’s deputy assistant. “He radiates a kind of reasonableness and fair-mindedness. He has the capacity to give voice to another person’s argument even as he disagrees with them. All those things work in his favor and make it more difficult to pin an ideological label on him.”

That said, Wehner added, Obama is vulnerable because he can point to no major area where he has broken with liberal orthodoxy, as Bill Clinton did with welfare reform in his 1992 campaign.

Obama indicated early last year that he might push merit pay for teachers, which is unpopular with teachers unions, but he makes little mention of that now. The one point in his stump speech where he presents himself as speaking hard truths is in telling automobile executives that they must improve fuel efficiency — already a popular idea with Democrats.

Obama’s allies insist that he does have an independent record, as he worked with Republicans in Illinois to change laws regarding campaign finance and the death penalty and in the Senate on ethics reform and nuclear proliferation. They also note that his “most liberal” ranking in the National Journal was slanted by the many votes he missed while campaigning. “He really is about bringing people together. He has strong views about things but is willing to listen and work with people with different views, rather than demonizing people,” said Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), an Obama supporter.

Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and an informal Obama adviser, said the candidate is imbued with a respect for the free market and personal choice that liberals do not always share. This can be seen, he said, in Obama’s decision not to mandate individual health insurance in his coverage plan, unlike Hillary Clinton; his opposition to her plan to limit mortgage interest rates to prevent bankruptcies; and his vote with Republicans for the Class Action Fairness Act, which made it more difficult for plaintiffs to sue corporations.

Sunstein views Obama as a “visionary minimalist” who seeks to pursue ambitious goals that people can agree on outside the strictures of ideology.

“He’s really not an old-fashioned liberal at all,” Sunstein said. “He’s a market-oriented Democrat from the University of Chicago with strong religious convictions.”

Further confounding the liberal framing, Reich said, is Obama’s multiracial background and the historic nature of his candidacy, which may distract from the usual political definitions. “Voters are amazed. They say, ‘Here’s the son of a black African and white Kansan, brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia, a star at Harvard Law School.’ It’s not a traditional biography,” Reich said. “So right away people are open to the reframing that he’s offering.”

Supporters also argue that the liberal tag will not stick to Obama partly because the public climate has shifted toward him amid widespread disillusionment with Republican policies, scrambling traditional notions of right and left. “There’s growing dismay about the war in Iraq as it enters year six, and a sense that we’ve neglected some real basic necessities in this country,” said Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D), one of Obama’s key red-state backers. “He’s not out of step with what I hear people being worried about.”

This is how Obama casts his agenda on the stump. His proposals are mostly from the Democratic canon — annual increases in the minimum wage, higher pay for teachers, a $4,000 tuition tax credit — yet he presents them as practical solutions whose appeal should be obvious to anyone, not as the product of one end of the political spectrum.

He mocked the emerging GOP criticism in a speech last month in Austin. “Oh, he’s liberal. He’s liberal,” he said. “Let me tell you something. There’s nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics. It’s common sense. . . . There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has health care. We are spending more on health care in this country than any other advanced country. We got more uninsured. There’s nothing liberal about saying that doesn’t make sense, and we should do something smarter with our health-care system. Don’t let them run that okey-doke on you!”

Some on the right agree that Obama does not entirely fit the liberal mold. Stuart Butler, at the Heritage Foundation, said Obama reminds him of the inner-city advocates Butler worked with in the 1980s on issues such as housing vouchers, who worried more about whether solutions were effective than what their ideological roots were.

Andrew G. Biggs at the American Enterprise Institute said he had initially been reassured by the moderate profile of Obama’s economic advisers, and assumed he had taken some of his more liberal positions for political reasons.

But whatever Obama’s motivation, Biggs said, his platform is still liberal. “He’s taken all these left-wing positions, and how do you get out of it later?” he said. “He doesn’t have the appearance of a tax-and-spend liberal . . . but if the essence of being a tax-and-spend liberal is a lot of taxes and spending, that’s what he comes down to.”

Among those watching the criticism take shape is Dukakis, whose campaign ran aground 20 years ago after Republicans were able to paint the former Massachusetts governor, a relatively moderate technocrat, as a weak-willed lefty. He is confident that Obama can avoid the tag, but only if he is prepared to fight back more than Dukakis did.

“What’s conservative about invading Iraq? What’s conservative about a $400 billion deficit?” Dukakis said. “The terms have lost their meaning.”

Democratic candidates’ versions of economic policy built on big lie

Tom Walsh
March 26, 2008

I would be a lot more worked up about getting Michigan and Florida delegates seated at the Democratic National Convention this summer if we were hearing a coherent economic policy from either of the two remaining candidates.

Instead of a clear vision for how the United States can compete in the global economy of today and tomorrow, however, U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are selling voters a big lie, especially in struggling industrial states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The big lie goes like this: We can turn back the clock to a time when high-paying factory jobs were plentiful. A time when workers without college degrees still could have a nice home, a couple of new cars, a boat and a place Up North.

A time when Big Labor and Big Business would jaw for a while about how to divvy up the Big Profits of the American auto giants, steelmakers and airlines that ruled the world, and then promise comfy pensions and health care for life to all.

We can turn back the clock. All we have to do is scrap or renegotiate those awful free trade agreements, especially that nasty North American Free Trade Agreement that allows greedy companies to ship our good jobs off to other countries.

Obama and Clinton tried hard to out-anti-NAFTA each other, but the rhetoric was empty if not dishonest. Obama himself got tripped up on the duplicity, when word leaked that one of his aides had quietly reassured a Canadian diplomat that President Obama wouldn’t really backtrack on NAFTA, that his words were only campaign rhetoric.

Clinton, in a Detroit campaign stop, cast us poor Michiganders as victims of “unfair trade policies,” even though NAFTA was passed in 1994 thanks to strong support from her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, and a memorable debate triumph by then-Vice President Al Gore over NAFTA opponent H. Ross Perot.

The reality of NAFTA is that total trade, productivity and incomes rose smartly in each NAFTA nation in the decade after the treaty was signed. And while some Michigan factory jobs are disappearing because products are imported from nations with lower labor costs, we cannot bring them back by pretending that Russia is communist, China is a closed market and India is a British colony.

Job dislocation always has been part of the U.S. economic journey, as farmhands, cotton-pickers and television factories gave way to new technology or lower costs abroad.

Indeed, Trade Adjustment Assistance – training and payments provided to workers who lose jobs as a direct result of import competition – wasn’t invented as a response to NAFTA. It’s been around since the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Let’s push all the candidates to get real about training our workers to excel in a changing world.

Thomas Sowell
March 26, 2008

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.

Some are saying that Sen. Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.

It makes a good story, but it won’t stand up under scrutiny.

Obama’s own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, “I chose my friends carefully,” he said in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”

These friends included “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets” – in Obama’s own words – as well as the “more politically active black students.” He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Obama began seeking out in college – members of the left, anti-American counterculture.

In Shelby Steele’s brilliantly insightful book about Obama – “A Bound Man” – it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were – and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.

The irony is that Obama’s sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleonlike change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man’s talent and a warning about his reliability.

There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That’s bringing us all together?

Is “divisiveness” defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Wright?

One sign of Obama’s verbal virtuosity was his equating a passing comment by his grandmother – “a typical white person,” he says – with an organized campaign of public vilification of America in general and white America in particular, by Wright.

Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.

Among the many desperate gambits by defenders of Obama and Wright is to say that Wright’s words have a “resonance” in the black community.

There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan’s words had a resonance among whites, not only in the South but in other states. Some people joined the KKK in order to advance their political careers. Did that make it OK? Is it all just a matter of whose ox is gored?

While many whites may be annoyed by Wright’s words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.

Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites, that the deck is stacked against them? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, however much audacity it may have.

Ben Feller
Associated Press
March 25, 2008

WASHINGTON – Marking a grim milestone, a determined President Bush declared Monday the lives of 4,000 U.S. military men and women who have died in Iraq “were not lost in vain.” The White House signaled anew that additional troops won’t be pulled out soon.

A roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four U.S. soldiers Sunday night, pushing the death toll to 4,000.

That number pales compared with those of other lengthy U.S. wars, but it is much higher than many Americans, including Bush, ever expected after the swift U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago.

Bush proclaimed the end of major combat operations in Iraq in May 2003. Almost all of the U.S. deaths there have happened since then.

“One day people will look back at this moment in history and say, ‘Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come,’ ” Bush said after a State Department briefing about long-term diplomacy efforts.

“I have vowed in the past, and I will vow so long as I’m president, to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain – that, in fact, there is an outcome that will merit the sacrifice,” Bush said.

The news of 4,000 dead in Iraq came the week after the war rolled into its sixth year, dominating most of Bush’s presidency. Almost 30,000 U.S. service members have been wounded in the war.

The number killed in Iraq is far less than in other modern American wars.

In Vietnam, the U.S. lost more than 58,000 troops, passing the 4,000 mark in 1966 as deaths rose quickly along with escalating American involvement.

Early in April, Bush is expected to announce the next steps in the war, and he is likely to embrace a pause in any troop withdrawals beyond those scheduled to end this July.

Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail continue to push for a faster end to the war. But Bush still has the upper hand for 10 months.

“Americans are asking how much longer must our troops continue to sacrifice for the sake of an Iraqi government that is unwilling or unable to secure its own future,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She said the cost to the U.S. reputation is immense, and the threat to the economy at home is unacceptable.

Meanwhile, both Democratic presidential contenders made note of the 4,000 deaths.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told a campaign audience in Pennsylvania that she would honor the fallen by ending the war and bringing home U.S. troops “as quickly and responsibly as possible.”

Her rival for the nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, said, “It is past time to end this war that should never have been waged by bringing our troops home, and finally pushing Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future.”

The Associated Press count of 4,000 deaths is based on U.S. military reports and includes eight civilians who worked for the Department of Defense.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed.

March 26, 2008

By MICHAEL KAMBER and JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD — Heavy fighting broke out Tuesday in two of Iraq’s largest cities, as Iraqi ground forces and helicopters mounted a huge operation to break the grip of the Shiite militias controlling Basra, and Iraqi forces clashed with militias in Baghdad. The fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war.

The battles, along with indications in recent weeks that militia and insurgent attacks had already been creeping up, raised fears across Iraq that Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite cleric, could pull out of a cease-fire he declared last summer. If his Mahdi Army militia does step up attacks, that could in turn slow American troop withdrawals.

There were also serious clashes in the southern cities of Kut and Hilla.

In Basra, American and British jets roared through the skies, providing air support for the Iraqi military. A British Army spokesman for southern Iraq, Maj. Tom Holloway, said that while Western forces had not entered Basra, the operation already involved nearly 30,000 Iraqi troops and police forces, with more arriving. “They are clearing the city block by block,” Major Holloway said.

The scale and intensity of the clashes in Baghdad kept many residents home. Schools and shops were closed in many neighborhoods and hundreds of checkpoints appeared; in some neighborhoods they were controlled by the government and in others by militia members.

Barrages of rockets and mortar shells pounded the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. An American military spokesman said there were two minor injuries to civilians in the Green Zone.

Even before the crackdown on militias began on Tuesday, Pentagon statistics on the frequency of militia and insurgent attacks suggested that after major security gains last fall, the conflict had drifted into something of a stalemate. Over all, violence has remained fairly steady over the past several months, but the streets have become tense and much more dangerous again after a period of calm.

It is not clear how responsible the restive Mahdi militia commanders are for stalling progress in the effort to reduce violence. In recent weeks, commanders have protested continuing American and Iraqi raids and detentions of militia members.

If the cease-fire were to unravel, there is little doubt about the mayhem that could be stirred up by Mr. Sadr, who forced the United States military to mount two bloody offensives against his fighters in 2004 as much of the country exploded in violence.

Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister’s political adviser, and other Iraqi officials said that just how the unrest in Baghdad was related to the crackdown in Basra was unknown.

Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood that is the center of the Mahdi Army’s power, was sealed off by a cordon of Iraqi troops and what appeared to be several American units. A New York Times photographer who was able to get through the cordon found more layers of checkpoints, each one run by about two dozen heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters clad in tracksuits and T-shirts. Tires burned in the city center, gunfire echoed against shuttered stores, and teams of fighters in pickup trucks moved about brandishing machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“We are doing this in reaction to the unprovoked military operations against the Mahdi Army,” said a Mahdi commander who identified himself as Abu Mortada. “The U.S., the Iraqi government and Sciri are against us,” he said, referring to a rival Shiite group whose name has changed several times, and is now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has an armed wing called the Badr Organization.

“They are trying to finish us,” the commander said. “They want power for the Iraqi government and Sciri.”

Basra, which until 2005 enjoyed relative peace, has since been riven by power struggles among the Mahdi Army and local Shiite rivals, like the Badr Organization and a militia controlled by the Fadhila political party, a group that split from the Sadr party.

In the weeks leading up to the operation, Iraqi officials indicated that part of the operation would be aimed at the Fadhila groups, which are widely believed to be in control of Basra’s lucrative port operations and other parts of the city. The ports have been plagued by corruption, draining revenue that could flow to the central and local governments. But the operation also threatens the Mahdi Army’s strongholds in Basra.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government depends on support from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq but is less dependent now on coalitions with the Mahdi Army.

In Basra, Iraq’s most important oil-exporting center, thousands of Iraqi government soldiers and police officers moved into the city around 5 a.m. and engaged in pitched battles with Shiite militia members who have taken over big areas of that city.

The Basra operation, which senior Iraqi officials had been signaling for weeks, is considered so important by the Iraqi government that Mr. Maliki traveled to the city to direct the fighting, several officials said.

Although Sadr officials said the cease-fire was still in effect, on Monday Mr. Sadr called for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in response to what his followers said was an unwarranted crackdown. Some Mahdi commanders referred to an edict by Mr. Sadr saying their militias had the right of self-defense.

A member of Mr. Sadr’s political party in Basra, Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Bahadli, complained bitterly about the enormous operation, claiming that it was aimed at innocent people in Basra.

“We never witnessed such attacks even under the regime of Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Bahadli said. “Maliki gave orders and said, ‘Erase them.’ ”

But Mr. Maliki said in a statement that the operation was intended to root out “outlaws” who, he said, were working with local confederates inside and outside the government.

“The federal government, pressed by its obligations to support the local government in Basra and support its officials, has decided to restore security and stability and impose the law,” the statement said

An American military official said the American-led coalition forces had provided air transportation for the operation and were keeping “quick reaction forces” on standby.

The official said coalition forces had supported Iraqi security forces in clashes around Sadr City with “special groups” — a term reserved for what American commanders say are Iranian-backed Shiite splinter groups, which include portions of the Mahdi Army.

“A coalition forces helicopter also engaged targets north of Sadr City in support of this operation,” the official said, asserting that despite the fighting, most of Baghdad had been peaceful and that there were still signs of progress on security in most areas of Iraq and its capital.

“We feel that the cease-fire is being honored” by those loyal to Mr. Sadr, the official said. The cease-fire, he said, “is in the best interest of all Iraqis.”

Many places in Baghdad were tense. At a checkpoint downtown, a policeman’s radio crackled with the news of the sniper shooting of a police officer in a nearby neighborhood. “We’ve heard that Sadr has canceled the cease-fire, is this true?” he asked motorists whose car he was searching.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, the military said an American soldier was killed in Baghdad about 5 p.m. No other details were provided.

Witnesses in Basra said jets flew overhead as armored vehicles raced through the city and machine gun and canon fire reverberated through the streets. Civilians took refuge in their homes. Iraqi television showed images of civilian gunmen with grenade launchers taking up positions and ambulances ferrying the wounded to hospitals.

On Tuesday night, after about six hours of silence, armored vehicles and helicopters could again be heard moving through the city, witnesses said. Gunfire and shelling could be heard to the north.

In Baghdad, some areas were deserted as clashes broke out across the city. In downtown Baghdad, checkpoints blocked sparse traffic every 100 yards.

Saeed Ammar, a government employee, said he was standing near policemen in the Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday morning when he was approached by Mahdi Army members. “They told me not to stand near checkpoints. They said, ‘We are waiting for the word from Moktada Sadr to attack the checkpoints — it may come at any moment.’ ”

Despite the armed actions by many Sadr followers, members of Mr. Sadr’s party said the cease-fire was still in effect and called for peaceful civil disobedience. In Najaf, hundreds of followers carrying Korans and olive branches mounted a sit-in, chanting, “No to occupation, no to terrorism.”

Sahar Gani, a teacher, was taking students home along a nearly deserted Baghdad sidewalk. “The security situation is getting worse day by day,” she said. “The city is getting very bad now. We’ve been through this before, so we find it natural. But we don’t know what to do.”

Reporting was contributed by Joao Silva, Anwar J. Ali and Hosham Hussein from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Basra, Hilla, Diwaniya and Kut.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Carl P. Leubsdorf
Dallas Morning News
March 24, 2008

WASHINGTON – For the third time since World War II, Americans are picking a new president amid sharp national divisions over a bloody, financially draining war in Asia.

In 1952 and 1968, the opposition party won the White House by capitalizing on anti-war frustration over stalemates in Korea and Vietnam and promising to end those involvements.

Now, as the nation enters its sixth year of the fighting in Iraq that began with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Democrats hope to repeat that pattern. But while there is considerable evidence they can do so, polls also show that attitudes are not clear-cut about the war that has killed and wounded thousands and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

A majority of Americans think the war was a mistake. And while one poll shows an even split over whether to stay or leave, others show that the main division is over how quick U.S. withdrawal should be.

“People want this resolved, and they want troops coming home,” says GOP pollster Bill McInturff.

At the same time, the public thinks the yearlong military “surge” is making progress in curbing violence. Two surveys showed that the public thinks the candidate best equipped to handle Iraq is the one who strongly backed the surge and has echoed the Bush administration’s warnings against an early troop withdrawal, Republican John McCain.

That may explain why McCain showed no hesitation in heading to Baghdad this week at almost the same time that Vice President Dick Cheney was there and echoing the administration’s optimism over the situation in Iraq.

“The surge is working,” McCain said. “We are succeeding.” But he warned that al-Qaida is not yet defeated and that a continuing U.S. military effort is necessary.

McCain’s rivals continue to draw sharp rhetorical lines between their calls for a phased withdrawal and his adherence to the administration’s more cautious approach on U.S. troop levels.

Declaring that the surge has not achieved its goal of prompting political progress, Hillary Clinton says she would begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops within 60 days of taking office. Barack Obama has promised to withdraw all U.S. combat troops within 16 months of becoming president.

Both candidates stop short of advocating total withdrawal of all American forces and concede that a pullout will take some time. Still, there is a clear contrast between their view and McCain’s.

So far, the Arizona senator is benefiting from his long identification with the issue and his military background. But the political impact of Iraq next fall is likely to reflect what Americans want to happen in the future.

Given that, it’s hard to see more voters favoring a slower rather than a faster pullout, especially independents whose anti-Iraq stance was a major reason they voted Democratic in last year’s midterm elections.

Ironically, many both in and out of the current administration believe next year’s reality will be different from this year’s rhetoric.

They think McCain will have to cut the U.S. role faster than he says and that events and military advice will force the Democrats to move more slowly.

It’s hard to see a President McCain moving faster than either Democrat, in part because Obama and Clinton will want to cut war costs to finance domestic measures such as health care.

Meanwhile, a related issue this fall could be the administration’s effort to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government on a legal basis to ensure the continued presence of U.S. forces. The administration sees it as a way to preserve options, but many Democrats think it’s an effort to tie the hands of the next administration.

Even if the country votes Democratic this November, concedes Sen. James Webb of Virginia, “it will be much harder to turn this thing around” than to continue the current policy. But the lesson of 1952 and 1968 is that a vote to change parties will be the best way to force an eventual policy shift.

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
March 24, 2008

We’ve all seen or heard about them. Perhaps they are friends or family members who have demonstrated financial irresponsibility: a college student who has a budget and quickly exceeds it on wild partying; a cousin or best friend who asks for a “loan” and then never pays it back; people whose credit cards are maxed out and they can’t afford the finance charges.

Government behaves similarly, playing any or all of those roles. It now resembles an irresponsible parent, spending the children’s wages and inheritance as if there were no tomorrow. Republicans lost the spending issue – and their congressional majority – because they behaved like overspending Democrats. Now Democrats in the House are going the Republicans one better. They are promising to increase spending should they win the White House and maintain their congressional majority.

According to an analysis of the fiscal 2009 House Democratic majority’s federal budget by Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, ( www.heritage.org), every American household would pay on average $3,100 more in federal taxes. That amounts to $1.265 trillion more over five years and $3.911 trillion over 10 years. Worse (if that’s possible), the Democratic budget proposal increases discretionary spending by 8 percent and does not eliminate even one wasteful program. It also ignores the coming explosion in the cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

None of these increases will be paid for by “soaking the rich” with new tax increases. That means more borrowing from countries that don’t have America’s best interest as a priority, more inflation and a weaker dollar.

The spending virus has so permeated Congress that members won’t even go on the wagon during an election year. The bipartisan DeMint-McCaskill budget amendment that would have required a one-year moratorium on earmarks was soundly defeated 71-29. This is how little respect most members have for those whose money they take through taxation, spending it like frat boys on a weekend bender.

The Washington Examiner newspaper determined that the longer someone serves in the Senate, the more likely they are to favor spending more money and to oppose any suggestion that they stop. According to the Examiner, “the average seniority of senators voting for DeMint-McCaskill was 12 years, while opponents averaged 22 years in the Senate.” All three presidential candidates returned from the campaign trail to vote for the measure. Sen. John McCain is far more credible on spending reductions than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and the moratorium was about slashing earmarks, not the big-ticket items most in need of reform, but getting any politician on record favoring spending reductions (and then following through to see if they mean it) is worth something.

This year, according to Heritage, the federal government will spend $25,117 per household.

The excuse one hears most often is that there is no place legislators can cut spending.

Really?

Last year, says the Heritage Foundation, the government made at least $55 billion in overpayments; the Pentagon spent almost $1 million shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida. Even the coming postal rate increases aren’t that high.

Washington spends $60 billion per year on corporate welfare compared with $50 billion on homeland security. Suburban families are receiving large farm subsidies for the grass in their backyards, subsidies that many of these families never requested and do not want. More than half of all farm subsidies go to corporate farms with average household incomes of $200,000.

And then there is my personal favorite: Government auditors spent the last five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them – costing taxpayers $123 billion per year – fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve.

This is outrageous. That our elected officials participate in this sham and then claim they can’t afford to cut anything ought to disgust us all, especially when some are planning to spend even more. It demonstrates that a government program is proof of eternal life in Washington.

Policy changes make it tougher to designate need for protection

Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post
March 23, 2008

WASHINGTON – With little-noticed procedural and policy moves over several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Controversies have occasionally flared over Interior Department officials who repeatedly overruled rank-and-file agency scientists’ recommendations to list new species, but internal documents also suggest that pervasive bureaucratic obstacles were erected to limit the number of species protected under one of the nation’s best-known environmental laws.

The documents show that personnel were barred from using information in agency files that might support new listings, and that senior officials regularly dismissed the advice of scientific advisers as President Bush’s appointees rejected or moved slowly on petitions to list imperiled plants and animals under the 35-year-old law. Officials also changed the way species are evaluated – by considering only their current range, not their historical range – and put decisions on other species in limbo by blocking citizen petitions that cause legal deadlines.

As a result, listings plummeted. During Bush’s more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago.

In a sign of how contentious the issue has become, the advocacy group WildEarth Guardians filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking a court order to protect 681 Western species all at once, on the grounds that further delay would violate the law. Among the species cited are tiny snails, vibrant butterflies and a wide assortment of plants and other creatures.

“It’s an urgent situation, and something has to be done,” said Nicole Rosmarino, the group’s conservation director. “This roadblock to listing under the Bush administration is criminal.”

Developers, farmers and other business interests frequently resist decisions on listing because they require a complex regulatory process that can make it difficult to develop land that is home to protected species. Environmentalists have also sparred for years with federal officials over implementation of the law.

Nevertheless, former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton added an average of 58 and 62 species to the list each year, respectively.

One consequence is that the current president has the most emergency listings, which are issued when a species is on the very brink of extinction.

And some species have vanished. The Lake Sammamish kokanee, a landlocked sockeye salmon, went extinct in 2001 after being denied an emergency listing, and genetically pure Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits disappeared last year after Interior declined to protect critical habitat for the species.

Administration officials – who estimate that more than 280 domestic species should be on the list but have been “precluded” because of more pressing priorities – do not dispute that they have moved slowly, but they dispute the reasons.

Bush officials say they are struggling to cope with an onslaught of litigation, but internal documents and several court rulings have revealed steps the administration has taken to make it harder, and slower, to approve listings.

Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall said his agency, which decides on most proposed listings of endangered species and their critical habitat, has been hamstrung by a slew of lawsuits and has just begun to dig out. He told the House Appropriations interior subcommittee last month that his agency will make decisions about 71 species by Oct. 1 and an additional 21 species a year later.

“Lawsuits, starting in the early ’90s, have really driven things,” Hall said, adding that the administration has tried to keep species from declining to the point where they need to be listed. “I’m feeling pretty good we’re back on track to do the job the way it’s supposed to be done.”

In court cases, however, a number of judges have rejected decisions made by Hall’s agency and have criticized their slow pace. On March 5, a U.S. district judge in Phoenix ordered Interior to re-designate bald eagles in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert as threatened after the agency delisted the entire species last summer.

In the Obama-Clinton Battle, Race & Gender Pose Two Great Divides for Black Women
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 24, 2008; C01

Woman has an ocean of wrongs too deep for any plummet, and the Negro, too, has an ocean of wrongs that cannot be fathomed. There are two great oceans; in the one is the black man, and in the other is the woman. . . . I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit.”

– Lucy Stone, 19th-century abolitionist and suffragist, after women were excluded from the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote.

The “isms” have once again been pitted against each other. Sexism or racism — which ism is deepest? All things being equal, should a woman or a black man be lifted to the presidency? Which “first” is the imperative first?

The admonitions of white feminists urging black women to vote gender over race have cracked open a scab, a festering sore, that had crusted over the history of this country’s competing isms. A scab that covered the lingering tension between some white feminists and some black women, with their dual historic burden of race and gender. It is black women, after all, who have faced both sexism and racism in their lives.

In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, which ism goes first? Some women fear the question, say it is divisive, explosive, should never be asked. But it has been asked — in the recent writings of feminists including Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. The question is ripe, reeling under the surface, discussed with muffled outrage by black women grown weary of white feminists seeming to tell them what to do.

* * *

Alice Thomas, who is black, is thinking about the question, talking about the campaign, about Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. About the recent comments by Geraldine Ferraro and the exhortations of some feminist leaders.

A law professor at Howard University’s School of Law, Thomas lives in Northwest Washington, in an upper-middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood with grand houses and big trees that blow with the sway of affluence. Most of the prominent white feminists are affluent, too. But their language, their mission, says Thomas, do not resonate.

“I never felt a kinship with white feminists. There never was a time when I felt something familiar when I heard Gloria Steinem,” she says. “I always thought these same women went home and slept with those men who were discriminating against me. I wanted to say, ‘Could you talk to him on the pillow tonight?’ ”

“I felt they were women who had the luxury of taking on battles a little at a time. . . . With the presidential election, NOW has taken a position against Barack Obama in favor of Hillary, making that a feminist stand. To take a position opposite Barack is to take a position opposite my family and our community.”

She says her grade-school son looks at the Obama campaign with wide eyes and now believes he could grow up to be president. The white feminists, she says, have had the opportunity to have their boys dream that dream realistically for decades.

Seated at a restaurant, she looks out onto Connecticut Avenue. Black and white people walk by. The day is an awful shade of gray.

“I’m not going to stand against him simply because there is a woman on the other side. It means so much more for me if Barack wins than if Hillary wins. I don’t pick Hillary because she is a woman and I am a woman. I don’t pick Barack because he is black and I am black. I pick Barack because he is a man of substance.”

* * *

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.

– Gloria Steinem

Steinem’s recent op-ed piece in the New York Times infuriated many black people. She argued that black men were given the right to vote before women, but failed to mention the lynchings that made it potentially fatal to take up that right.

“The thing that ends up being curious to me is what people like Gloria Steinem advocate,” says Lisa Crooms, a black woman who is director of the Constitutional Law Center at Howard University School of Law.

“They should know better,” she says of the white feminists. “That is the most disheartening thing for me: ‘We white women do this and you black women don’t get it.’ I thought folks had learned those lessons in intro to women’s studies courses. . . . I thought it was something white women got, but clearly they didn’t. Something didn’t translate.”

Black women say the pangs they feel in this debate of the competing isms have been sharpened as the campaign rhetoric has intensified.

“White feminists reduce everything to their cultural experience,” says Arica Coleman, 46, a professor of black American studies at the University of Delaware. “We had a different battle. We are fighting a war on two fronts, being both female and being black. I know when I walk into any office or anywhere, people see my skin color first and automatically make assumptions.”

“I wish people would stick to the issues, and the ultra-feminists would stop crying wolf because their girl is not winning,” Coleman says. “Obama is not crying racism.”

NOW President Kim Gandy says the lines drawn between sexism and racism and white women and black women are not that clear. “I think people are still thinking about racism and sexism because they still exist,” she says. “I wouldn’t call it a dichotomy. The camps are quite diverse. There are African American women who support Hillary Clinton and white women who support Barack Obama. The campaigns crossed those racial and gender lines.”

To the question of which ism has the greater burden to overcome, Gandy says, “I say that is unknowable. Having never experienced racism, I couldn’t express an opinion about that.” She says the greater burden depends on experience and perspective. “To suggest there is a competition between racism and sexism is delightful to people who would see us divided from each other,” she says. “Until we as a country recognize the intersection of those isms and the terrible damage they do, we will not be as great as we could be as a nation.”

* * *

Never has a campaign given voters who were not white men such power to participate in the “politics of identity.” Blogs have exploded with people of all identities explaining why they favor one Democratic candidate over the other. Black women have been particular targets, with bloggers attacking them for deciding that voting for a black candidate was more important than voting for a woman.

And some black women have asked how they split their identities. Are they black first or women first? To which group do they pledge allegiance? Does the term feminist apply only to white women? Can a woman be black and feminist at the same time, even if she hardly understood Betty Friedan’s 1963 feminist classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” which asked the bored housewife’s question: “Is this all?”

Avis Jones-DeWeever, director of research at the National Council of Negro Women, says the answer lies in perspective. “That was Betty Friedan’s truth. That was her experience of feeling bound by the limitations of being a housewife. That was not the typical truth for the black woman.”

Jones-DeWeever says many black women worked outside the home out of necessity, a fact that seemed to be ignored by arguments made at the height of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

“You had a push by white women to get out in the workforce. That is fundamentally a different experience,” Jones-DeWeever says. “Black women were always in the workforce. Even if part of that workforce was the work of raising white women’s children. Our perspectives are different. There is the feeling that some second-wave feminists view life through a binary perspective; the male and female being the only line of division in their society.”

The lines are more complex for women of color. “Personally, for me, I feel it cuts both ways,” Jones-DeWeever continues. “In my experience, if I was to weigh the two, I would say race has had a greater impact on issues in my life. I am black. Both of my parents were educated in segregated schools in Virginia. . . . There was a lot of brouhaha about the Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright’s statements in the news. He was saying Hillary was never called the N-word. I was first called the N-word in fourth grade and the last time I was called the N-word was in graduate school.”

Race cuts even deeper now. Jones-DeWeever is raising two sons, 4 and 11. Her personal choice for president is Obama. “I worry about them as young black men driving a car,” she says. “What will happen when they get pulled over by the police? I am realistic about what I need to teach them about how to conduct themselves in that situation. Those are issues most white women and white mothers don’t have to be concerned about, life and death issues that will impact their children.”

Latifa Lyles, vice president of membership of NOW, says sexism is a huge problem in the country, a learned behavior that doesn’t seem to provoke as much outrage. “I am an African American woman,” Lyles says. “There is not a day when I don’t think of both.”

Overt racism is less prominent, she says. “In my experience, I am more likely to see some kind of sexist incident than a racist incident. Because of the prevalence, people become more desensitized to it. If someone says something more overtly racist, I would have a much stronger reaction to it because I’m not used to hearing overtly racist comments.”

Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard’s Law School, says white women and black women have had different relationships to power. White women, she says, have had a greater access to it.: “They were sleeping with power. Even though they were disadvantaged in terms of access to conventional opportunities to their mates, they were also in an intimate relationship with power.”

Guinier, who is black, was once nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration, but her name was withdrawn after controversy erupted over her writings on affirmative action. “For black women, power was not represented by their mate or by their father or by their uncle, which is not to say — I am by no means excusing sexism within the black community or the fact there is violence against women,” Guinier says. “It extends beyond any particular identity. I am trying to make this larger point that quote-unquote the man had a different footprint in the black community than in the white community.”

* * *

In her book “Ain’t I a Woman,” black feminist bell hooks says there is a fragile bond between white and black women’s rights advocates. And that bond has been broken again during this presidential campaign, some women say, as it was during the first women’s rights movement in the late 1800s, during the second wave of women’s rights in the 1960s and ’70s, and then during the “mommy wars” that still rage today.

“There are a fair number of women of color who would consider themselves to be feminists who have no time and interest in struggling with white women anymore,” Crooms says. “Some people come from the view that if there is truly a difference between what is offered as mainstream white feminism and black feminism, black feminists are trying to figure out how we as black people can move forward as a community. We are not interested in fanning the flames between black women and black men. . . . Racism and sexism impact people differently. . . . You have race injuries. You have sexism injuries. Pick between the two? No, it’s not like that.”

No one profits when oppressed people are split against each other, says Patricia J. Williams, author, columnist and professor of law at Columbia University. She argues there is often an ideological agenda involved when people claim that racism is no longer a major force in this country.

That is what Ferraro’s recent comments seemed to imply, that race had become an advantage: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman. . . . he would not be in this position,” Ferraro said.

Says Williams, who is black: “One ubiquitous subtext of the black-man-trumps-white-woman calculus is that it’s easier to be a black man than it is to be a white woman or, even more reductively, that sexism is worse than racism. . . . That in turn fuels the not-so-coded diminishment asserting that Obama is getting ‘preferential’ treatment in the media; that he’s simultaneously ‘entitled’ and ‘elite’ yet ‘unqualified’ and ‘not ready.’ A lot of this debate as it is currently framed is a product of a very segregated society.”

* * *

Robin Morgan, an author and founder of the Women’s Media Center, recently wrote an essay titled “Goodbye to All That (#2),” a reprise of her 1970 denunciation of sexism. In her latest manifesto, published online last month, she argued that she would vote for Clinton because of the historical importance of overcoming sexism.

“I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote — until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being called ‘race traitors,’ ” she wrote. “So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar — slavery –which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.”

Morgan, who is white, received a flood of reaction, from women who thanked her for expressing what they needed to hear, from younger women saying they were tired of older feminists shoving the movement down their throats, from a black man who said he would be overjoyed to see a black family in the White House.

“I certainly won’t begrudge a woman’s desire to want to see a woman in the White House and basing, at least in some measure, her choice on such a possible milestone of achievement,” he wrote in an online response. “What I take absolute exception to in this article by Mrs. Morgan however is the need to run down Obama for sake of supporting Hillary.”

Morgan says she was not trying to run Obama down but trying to make a point about lingering sexism. She says she “cut her political eyeteeth in the civil rights movement.” She agrees that racism is a major wound in this country’s history and still is today. The society’s consciousness about racism is nowhere near where it should be, but it is higher than it is about sexism, she asserts.

“Sexism is not as high as yet,” Morgan says. “It is still there. It is still pervasive. It is so pervasive, sometimes you can’t see it standing out from the background.

“Anything that can be interpreted as racist in the campaign is leapt upon and should be,” Morgan says. “Stuff that is blatantly sexist is not leapt upon. It’s often ignored, trivialized and laughed away.”

Only now has it been highlighted after “women said, ‘Excuse me!’ ” Morgan says the attacks on Clinton have ranged from trivialization to outright venom. “The Hillary Clinton nutcracker doll being sold in airports. They would not dare do that with a Stepin Fetchit doll in the image of Senator Obama. And they shouldn’t do that and there would be national outrage, and there should be national outrage.”

Still, it is never a good idea to compare human suffering, Morgan says. “The only people in a position to say which bigotry they suffered worst from would be African American women. Some say they have suffered more from racism. And others, like Shirley Chisholm, said they have suffered more from sexism. That is not for me as a European American woman to say.”

Mary Frances Berry remembers those heated discussions of the 1970s, when Chisholm became the first black woman to run for president.

“Shirley Chisholm and I had long conversations about whether sexism or racism is a bigger barrier,” says Berry, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “She said to me when she was running for president she found out how much sexism was a barrier. The reaction of men to the fact she was going to run for president almost floored her. Other black politicians couldn’t understand why she thought she could run for president. That campaign didn’t go anywhere.”

But Berry says it’s dangerous to raise questions pitting sexism against racism. “I think anytime people who have been in subordinated groups start debating about whose discrimination is the worst is a problem,” she says. “What they should do is reconcile the differences. Everybody has had something happen in their history. That’s why it’s called subordination.”

Ralph Nader tells NEWSWEEK that voters need options at the ballot box. Options like him.

Howard Fineman

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:33 PM ET Mar 15, 2008

If there were a Mount Rushmore of reform, Ralph Nader’s profile would be on it. But now, at 74, he is known less as the father of the consumer and public-interest law movements than as a perennial—and controversial—presidential candidate. Many Democrats blame him for the George W. Bush presidency, arguing that, in 2000, Nader siphoned away thousands of Florida votes that would have given Al Gore a clear-cut victory there. Unapologetic and energetic, Nader sat down with NEWSWEEK’s Howard Fineman last week to discuss why he is running again. Excerpts:

Fineman: Do you think personal behavior should be a test by which we measure public officials or candidates for public office?
Nader: If what [Eliot Spitzer] did … was basically something that compromised his public policies, or what he proposed or what he didn’t propose, then that would move it to a much higher level. But at the present time, we’re not seeing the kind of outrage vis-à-vis politicians whose behavior results in devastating consequences—economic, health and safety—to the public the way the media and others zero in on personal moral turpitude.

Don’t you feel the least bit of guilt or responsibility for the fact that George W. Bush—whom you describe, essentially, as a war criminal—is president?
I think the Constitution says that we all have an equal right to run for election. And if that’s so, we have an equal right to try to get votes from one another … But more important is, would Al Gore have been president if there was no Electoral College? Yes, because he won the popular vote … So, let’s focus on the Electoral College and stealing elections instead of focusing on small parties who have every First Amendment right to try to run and make this country a better place to live.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said that they want to begin pulling troops out of Iraq immediately. John McCain has said that we may have to keep troops in Mesopotamia for 100 years. Isn’t that alone enough to make a lot of people who might support you, and even you, say, “Well, maybe we ought to throw our support to the Democrats”?
I don’t believe Obama and Clinton, that they want to get out of Iraq and they actually will get out of Iraq … There is no way, given their behavior in the Senate, which is about all we can predict from, when they supported again and again the funding for this criminal, unconstitutional, boomer-anging war in Iraq, that they are going to, if they reach the White House, actually have a six-month—or some specific—deadline.

Is Clinton right when she says Obama’s semi-antiwar candidacy, shall we say, is based on one speech that he gave in 2002?
He could have raised the issue of why George W. Bush, who thinks this is a great fight for democracy and freedom—and it’s worth the sacrifice, as he’s told us many times—doesn’t urge Jenna and Barbara to join the armed forces, as the children of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower did.

Should Hillary be urging Chelsea to volunteer for military service?
Any time the Congress and the White House gets this country into war, there should be a statute that moves immediately to conscript all military-age, able-bodied children of members of Congress, the president and the vice president.

Are there any corporations that you think are good citizens?
Oh, yes.

How does News Corp. do?
[Rupert] Murdoch has basically commodified the news. He has basically suppressed the highest traditions of journalism, from objectivity to challenging the powers that be, and he has taken advantage of the public airwaves … and engaged in soliloquies of extraordinary abuse of people who cannot fight back.

Are they still your publisher?
I think they own HarperCollins, yeah. It’s hard to escape the conglomerate web.

Is that the best part of the conglomerate web to have your books published by?
They publish anticorporate books, not just mine. So, they have a good distribution system.

It is certainly the role of reform-minded candidates to push the major parties to innovate. But isn’t that only going to work if they are afraid they might lose?
My concern is not them. My concerns are the voters and giving voters a broader choice when they go to the ballot box in state after state. We, for example, want to reduce the bloated military budget, which is full of waste … They’re not talking about that: McCain, Obama and Clinton.

You’ve done more than one life’s worth of work. Why go do this at this point?
Well, you’re asking a personal question. So I will give you an unusual personal answer. I have a very deep well of empathy, and I take my motivation from what I see around the country. And I’ll give it to you just briefly, statistically: 47 million people who make less than $10.50 an hour—six and a half, seven, eight dollars an hour before deductions; 45 million people without health care, 18,000 of whom die every year, according to the National Academy of Sciences, because they can’t afford health care; 13 million children who go to bed hungry every night; 45 million people in dire poverty; 58,000 people who die from workplace-connected diseases and trauma every year, according to [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration]; 65,000 people who can’t breathe, and die because of air pollution. I mean, do I have to go on? I mean, just what more evidence is needed that each and every one of us who has an ability to improve his or her country has got to do what they have to do within the confines of the Constitution and rule of law and freedom of speech?

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123487

Barack Obama’s church is under scrutiny. But what’s it really like on the inside?

Lisa Miller

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 3:11 PM ET Mar 15, 2008

The year was 1971, race riots flared across the country, and on the South Side of Chicago a tiny church was dying. Many blacks, disillusioned by their ministers’ failure to bring home the promises of the civil-rights movement, were abandoning Christianity. They converted to Islam or Judaism or fringe sects—or refused to go to church at all. This particular congregation was looking for a pastor to lead them through these troubling times, and before they launched their search, they wrote a blue-sky description of the community they wanted to be: we want to “serve as instruments of God and church,” the statement said, and we want to “elimin[ate] those things in our culture that lead to the dehumanization of persons.” They wanted to be Christian, in other words. And they wanted to keep fighting.

On New Year’s Eve, the search committee interviewed its final candidate. Jeremiah Wright Jr. was a young pastor enrolled at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Wright belonged to a group of black intellectuals who embraced “black liberation theology,” the idea that blacks shouldn’t have to choose between “Malcolm and Martin,” as the theologians put it. They could be Christian and black; they could be black and proud. When Barack Obama responded to the altar call at Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, he was responding, in part, to that message.

Wright built Trinity into a huge church, with 8,500 people coming to worship on Sundays. Earlier this month, after a yearlong transition, Wright handed his pulpit over to the young and charismatic pastor Otis Moss III. In his heyday, Wright was a forceful presence, calling for divestment from South Africa as early as 1983. By keeping the problem of racism alive with provocative sermons, Wright encouraged his flock to “speak truth to power” and to always identify, like Jesus, with the marginalized of society. In the context of Trinity’s South Side neighborhood, where about 20 percent of residents are on welfare and the same number are unemployed, the church and its messenger were rarely controversial.

But now, in the larger context of Obama’s run for the Democratic nomination, they are. Last Thursday, snippets of a few of Wright’s more incendiary sermons circulated online, including one in which the pastor calls out Hillary Clinton for being part of the white establishment—”Hillary ain’t never been called a n–––––”—and another in which the pastor says, “God damn America … for killing innocent people.” He also calls the 9/11 attacks “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” The next day Obama released a statement about Wright on the Huffington Post. “I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy,” he wrote. He said further that he hadn’t been in the room when the offending comments were made and that he and his family looked forward to continuing their relationship to the church through its new pastor. Later, a spokesman announced that Wright would no longer serve the campaign in any advisory capacity.

Still, the clips triggered unease among whites, reopened divisions within the black community and provoked politically loaded questions about the nature of Obama’s relationship with Wright. Obama has said he found his Christianity at Trinity, and he credits the title of his book “The Audacity of Hope” to a sermon he heard Wright preach. Wright married the Obamas and baptized both their children. But the senator has tried throughout his campaign to distance himself from some of Wright’s more controversial statements, notably Wright’s praise of Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. (Wright is like “an old uncle who sometimes will say things I don’t agree with,” Obama has said.) When pressed, Obama said at the last Democratic debate that he would reject and denounce Farrakhan’s inflammatory rhetoric.

Always a volatile combination, race and politics is particularly vexing for Obama, who, with his message of unity, hopes to transcend it all. The Wright and Farrakhan controversies force voters to look at Obama through the lens of their racial or cultural identity, and in a tightly contested race, Obama can’t afford to alienate anybody. The question for him now is whether his connection to Wright will hurt his ability to appeal to the best in people.

Wright declined to be interviewed, but on a recent Sunday morning between services, Moss spoke to NEWSWEEK. Trinity has been mischaracterized by the press, he says: the church is “very much in the traditional vein of the African-American church. Caring for seniors, loving our young people, and the focus on Christ and the cross is central to this church.”

Trinity was founded in 1961, the first black church in the United Church of Christ. (UCC members are Congregationalists, mainline Protestants who trace their history to John Cotton and the Puritans of New England.) The earliest members of Trinity were “teachers, people with middle-class jobs, resistant to doing anything radical in terms of justice,” says church historian Julia Speller, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a member of Trinity. But as the 1970s dawned, values within the church began to change. According to Speller’s book “Walkin’ the Talk,” the congregation was beginning to believe that it couldn’t continue to do Christ’s work and not speak out against racism and injustice. What Wright gave the congregation, Speller says, was a “sense of beauty about who they were.” In 1978, Wright broke ground on a new sanctuary big enough to hold 900 people. In 1994, he built the existing one, which seats 2,500.

As a leader, Wright defied convention at every turn. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year, he recalled a time during the 1970s when the UCC decided to ordain gay and lesbian clergy. At its annual meeting, sensitive to the historic discomfort some blacks have with homosexuality, gay leaders reached out to black pastors. At that session, Wright heard the testimony of a gay Christian and, he said, he had a conversion experience on gay rights. He started one of the first AIDS ministries on the South Side and a singles group for Trinity gays and lesbians—a subject that still rankles some of the more conservative Trinity members, says Dwight Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a church member.

Barack Obama walked into Trinity when he was 27. He was a secular person, raised by a mother who would now be called “spiritual, not religious.” According to “The Audacity of Hope,” he realized that his secular upbringing was hurting his work as a community organizer. It was keeping him at a distance from the religious people he was trying to help. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama describes the feeling he had when he heard Wright preach: “I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story.”

In the African-American church tradition, pastors rely frequently on the stories of the Old Testament—stories of liberation and struggle—to reach their people. “The Audacity to Hope,” the Wright sermon that so inspired Obama, is a discussion of the Biblical character Hannah, who, though she was barren, prayed for a child. Wright uses Hannah as a metaphor for the black people who pray for deliverance even though it seems unattainable.

Friends of the church like to speculate about what, exactly, drew Obama in. Hopkins thinks it’s the erudition of the preachers. “Historically, African-American churches have had a strong anti-intellectual bent. There’s a saying, ‘Too much learning blocks the burning.’ Trinity has the learning and the burning.” But Melissa Harris-Lacewell thinks it’s something else, a connection to the black experience that Obama lacked as a child. “I really see Trinity for Barack as being part of his continuing adult choice to be a black man,” says Harris-Lacewell, who attended Trinity for a time and is now a professor at Princeton.

In the lobby before the 11 o’clock service on a recent Sunday, people mingle, chatter, hug and kiss. In the sanctuary, the 300-member gospel choir is overpowering; the soloists outclass anything on “American Idol.” When Moss, who is 37, starts preaching, the congregation rises to its feet. On this particular Sunday, Moss exhorts the congregation to pause when it can and, like Moses’ sister, Miriam, praise God for its blessings. “Excuse me,” he shouts, “I just have to praise the Lord.” A generation younger than Wright, Moss does not have the same rough edges. A former track star, he peppers his sermons with references to athletes and hip-hop artists; his mission, he says, is to reach out to the young people on the South Side who are unchurched.

Neither Moss nor anyone connected with the church will distance themselves publicly from Wright—nor will they rebuke their pastor for praising Farrakhan. (Last week, while commentators were calling Wright a “racialist,” the black church community stood by him. “Some of us wish we had the nerve that Jeremiah had,” says James Forbes, senior minister emeritus of Riverside Church in Manhattan.) Last fall, in an article in a magazine linked to Trinity, Wright lauded Farrakhan as a giant of the African-American religious experience. On the South Side, where all religious leaders are committed to keeping black men off drugs and out of prison, they have to work together, explains Moss. “We approach all people with unconditional love,” Moss tells NEWSWEEK. “[Farrakhan] is a neighbor in our community.”

Trinity members point out that Obama is not the first presidential candidate to have an alliance with a controversial minister, nor is he the first to have a connection, however tenuous, to Farrakhan. In 1996, while running for re-election, Bill Clinton sent out a mass mailing to friends and prospective donors—including one to the Nation of Islam. In it, he invited Claudette Muhammad, who at the time was chief of protocol, to be on his steering committee. “It is my way of saying thank you for your past friendship and it is my way of asking you to join me in this new campaign,” he wrote. Muhammad reprinted the letter in a memoir; a spokesman for Clinton declined to comment.

A member of Trinity since she was a teenager, Speller, of the Chicago Theological Seminary, is anguished over the scrutiny her church is facing. When asked whether there’s a double standard at her church about hate talk—is hate talk OK when directed at some groups, but not at others?—she pauses. The context here is Farrakhan, but in light of Wright’s video clips, her answer fits: “Is there an assumption that because of the hate talk, nothing good can come from him? And if there is that assumption, is it a fair assumption?” Fair or not, it’s one Barack Obama is going to have to contend with.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123604

The last time the court issued a major decision on the right to bear arms was in 1939, when criminals wore fedoras.

Dahlia Lithwick

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:52 PM ET Mar 15, 2008

This week the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the most important gun-control case in 69 years. And almost lost amid all the political posturing on both sides of the case about the constitutional contours of the “right to bear arms” is the quiet, crucial fact that the high court is about to step into a cultural conflict for the first time in 69 years.

Think about it: abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action, separation of church and state, the death penalty. The court has waded into almost every hot-button social issue dividing this country.

And both conservatives and liberals suspect that in doing so, the high court has messed things up. Its most acerbic conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, says the court should not conduct itself like an unelected superlegislature. It’s not for the court to invent new rights, it’s for the people: “You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it.”

A growing number of legal thinkers, including the University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein, agree that judicial “minimalism” is preferable to resolving sprawling social problems with broad moral judgments. Many of the country’s pre-eminent liberal scholars believe that matters as important as abortion and segregation were better left up to the democratically elected branches; that the broad brushstrokes of the Warren Court launched a backlash still being felt today.

With District of Columbia v. Heller, these court critics may have fished their wish. The case tests the constitutionality of D.C.’s sweeping gun ban prohibiting handgun possession at home unless guns were registered before 1976, and requiring all guns—including rifles and shotguns—to be unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. Last year, by a 2-1 vote, a federal appeals court struck down the ban, claiming that the Second Amendment confers upon “the people” an individual right to bear arms, rather than a collective right to arm its militias.

Still, the most dramatic aspect of Heller may well be that the last time the Supreme Court issued a major proclamation on the right to bear arms, it was 1939 and the criminals in question sported fedoras and drove Packards. That makes this case a natural experiment in what happens when the Supreme Court butts out. If the gun fight is any indication, it’s not clear democracy moves to the driver’s seat when the court lets go of the wheel.

The Supreme Court determined in 1939 in U.S. v. Miller that an individual right to a gun had no “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” and thus the Second Amendment did not confer individual rights to guns. The court followed this with many decades of constitutional radio silence on the subject. When faced with opportunities to revisit Miller, the court either upheld it or declined to hear appeals that would raise it. In the wake of that silence, 10 of the 12 federal appeals courts also sided with this “collective rights” view of the Second Amendment.

But in the face of the courts’ quiet resistance, a well-funded and powerful lobby group, the National Rifle Association, forcefully and effectively pushed the claim that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. Four million-plus-members strong, the group has handed out millions of dollars and is credited with winning the 2000 election for George W. Bush. Whatever financial or political clout it has exhibited pales next to its legal influence: polls show that while a slight majority of Americans would support stricter gun laws, about 75 percent of them believe the Constitution confers a personal right to own a gun.

The vacuum created by the courts was filled not only with special-interest groups but, more recently, with legal academics intent on preserving strong individual rights under the Constitution. And according to Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at SUNY Cortland and author of “The Politics of Gun Control” (2003), the failure of the Supreme Court to revisit the question of the Second Amendment for decades in fact created “the allegation of some legal pathology; that the court was avoiding it or embarrassed by it.” That embarrassment prompted an important liberal thinker, Prof. Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, to pen a 1989 law-review article in favor of a “strong reading” for the individual-rights theory of the Second Amendment. Other prominent liberals and libertarians have followed, many less interested in reshaping modern gun-control policy than insider constitutional housekeeping: you can’t be for strong individual constitutional rights, and treat the Second Amendment like elevator music. But when Robert Levy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the engine behind the Heller lawsuit, determined the time was ripe to challenge the D.C. gun ban in court, one of the factors motivating him was this intellectual shift in the liberal academy.

So long overdue is Supreme Court scrutiny in Heller that the Bush administration has staked out one position, while Dick Cheney has taken another (rumors surfaced last week that the administration might change its position again at oral argument). But the more interesting question is whether, absent judicial pronouncements, large constitutional matters will be thrashed out by the people and the democratic process or by well-funded interest groups and well-meaning academics.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123509

By MATT APUZZO
The Associated Press
Friday, March 21, 2008; 5:14 PM

PORTLAND, Ore. — Bill Richardson, the nation’s only Hispanic governor, backed Barack Obama for president Friday, moved to deliver his much-coveted endorsement by the senator’s speech about race.

The New Mexico governor joined Obama at spirited rally Friday and said the Illinois senator demonstrated his leadership abilities this week with his speech on race. “You are a once-in-a-lifetime leader,” the governor said from the stage. “Above all, you will be a president who brings this nation together.”

Richardson dropped his own bid for the nomination in January. His support for Obama comes during a tough period for the senator. Although he still leads Hillary Rodham Clinton in delegates, Obama has seen his lead in national polls wither in the fallout from divisive remarks by his former pastor.

Richardson was relentlessly courted by both candidates and his support for Obama provides him a potential counterweight to Clinton’s strength among Hispanic voters.

It wasn’t the first time racial concerns had helped to drive a prominent backer to Obama. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy was moved to drop his neutrality and side with Obama in part because of what he saw as Bill Clinton’s racially tinged criticisms of the senator.

Richardson heaped praise on Obama’s speech about the nation’s racial divide, the candidate’s attempt to contain damage from his former pastor’s comments.

“As a Hispanic-American, I was particularly touched by his words,” Richardson said. “Senator Obama has started a discussion in this country that is long overdue and rejects the politics of pitting race against race.”

The governor backed Obama despite his earlier statements that Democratic superdelegates, of which he’s one, should pick sides based on the votes of their state or constituency. By that reasoning, he might have been expected to support Clinton because she won the New Mexico contest.

As a superdelegate, the governor plays a part in the tight race for nominating votes and could bring other superdelegates to Obama’s side. He also has been mentioned as a potential running mate for either candidate.

No primaries are scheduled until Pennsylvania’s on April 22, a gap Obama hopes to use for such announcements to assert that he is the front-runner for the nomination. Oregon hold its primary May 20.

Richardson backed Obama despite his ties to Clinton and her husband, the former president. Richardson served as ambassador to the U.N. and as secretary of the Energy Department during the Clinton administration. Last month, Richardson and former President Clinton watched the Super Bowl together at the governor’s residence in Santa Fe.

Richardson praised Hillary Clinton as a “distinguished leader with vast experience.” But the governor said Obama “will be a historic and great president, who can bring us the change we so desperately need by bringing us together as a nation here at home and with our allies abroad.”

The Clinton campaign publicly dismissed the endorsement, after the New York senator failed to win it for herself.

Citing Clinton’s victory in New Mexico in February, senior strategist Mark Penn said, “Perhaps the time when he could have been most effective has long since passed.”

Richardson bristled at that statement, which he said was a stereotypical suggestion that he was only valuable in states with large Hispanic populations. Obama wants Richardson to help boost his foreign policy credentials, which Clinton has described as lacking.

Obama said Richardson “frankly has more concrete accomplishments on the international stage than my opponents, Democrat or Republican.”

Richardson was a roving diplomatic troubleshooter when he was a congressman from New Mexico, negotiating the release of U.S. hostages in several countries and meeting a rogue’s gallery of U.S. adversaries, including Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama has the judgment and courage we need in a commander in chief when our nation’s security is on the line,” Richardson said. “He showed this judgment by opposing the Iraq war from the start, and he has shown it during this campaign by standing up for a new era in American leadership internationally.”

Obama embraced the endorsement of an accomplished figure who “understands the importance of restoring diplomacy as a central part of our national security strategy.”

Both men have proposed negotiating with enemies as well as friends, while Clinton has emphasized the need to press for changes in repressive or hostile regimes before engaging with them at the presidential level.

There were also personal aspects to Richardson’s swing behind Obama. He noted that both are the sons of one foreign-born parent _ Obama’s father was from Kenya, Richardson’s mother was from Mexico.

And Richardson told of the time, during one of the many Democratic debates, when his attention wandered and he didn’t hear the question that came at him. Obama, then his rival, bailed him out by whispering to him that it was about Hurricane Katrina.

“He could have thrown me under the bus,” Richardson cracked, “but he stood behind me.”

Among veterans of the once-crowded field of Democratic presidential hopefuls, Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut is the only other one who has taken a side so far. Dodd also endorsed Obama.

John Edwards, the strongest performer among the nomination dropouts, has also been wooed by Clinton and Obama but he’s not announced an endorsement.

___

Associated Press Writer Barry Massey in Santa Fe, N.M., contributed to this report.

© 2008 The Associated Press

Obama’s Speech Driven by Necessity
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 20, 2008; A04

The pattern in Campaign 2008 is that nothing lasts; nothing has a shelf life of more than half a day. Cable and the Internet simply churn information too quickly. In this age of the continuous news cycle, the new pushes out the old regardless of significance or importance.

In that context, it is worth returning to Sen. Barack Obama’s Tuesday speech on race and the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., a speech and a subject not likely to disappear anytime soon. The question is which will last longer — Obama’s eloquent words about racial divisions and reconciliation or questions about his relationship with a man whose words have shocked the country.

In so many ways, Obama’s speech was remarkable: ambitious, lofty, gritty, honest and unnerving. In tone and substance, and in the challenge he laid down to the country about the need to somehow move beyond the racial stalemate, it was the kind of speech Americans should expect of a presidential candidate or a president.

Obama (Ill.) was uniquely equipped to give this speech. As the child of a mixed-race couple — a black Kenyan father who abandoned his wife and young son, and a white American mother who raised him with the help of her Kansas parents — he has struggled with this topic his entire life. His emergence in this presidential campaign is in no small measure the result of successfully making that journey.

Obama has lived in black and white throughout his life, and it seemed as if everything he had seen and absorbed and internalized about the divisions between the races went into what he said on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. As he has shown at other moments in the campaign, his gifts of intelligence, of reasoning and of language are considerable. Both what he said about race and the way in which he said it showed political and intellectual heft. Which is why the address has drawn considerable praise, as a model of what political rhetoric should seek to attain.

But, at heart, this was a speech designed for a political purpose, and Obama may have received more credit than he deserves for taking up the subject. Sitting in the small auditorium on Tuesday, watching Obama speak in what seemed like deliberately flat and unemotional tones, there was no way to think about the address as other than a political rescue mission. And on that there is no simple verdict, only lingering questions.

Obama said that the politically easy thing would be to hope that the firestorm triggered by video excerpts from Wright’s sermons would somehow fade away. Instead, he said, the Wright controversy provided the pretext for — even demanded! — a more honest confrontation of the racial divisions that persist and a more open-minded understanding by whites and blacks of why bitterness and anger exist on each side of that divide.

Obama obviously knew better than to pretend that the ugly controversy would somehow disappear. Wright, in fact, had created the most serious crisis Obama has faced in this campaign, and no amount of wishing would change that fact. The candidate rightly understood the threat to his candidacy and immediately told his advisers that he wanted to deliver a major speech on the subject. By enlarging the discussion, he hoped to defuse what was most dangerous to his political aspirations: his long association with a prominent figure who has said things that many Americans — white and black — find repulsive.

Democratic strategists see the dangers ahead for Obama. While not lethal to his hopes of winning the Democratic nomination or the presidency, they say, the damage could be lasting. “This has tarnished Obama’s image, though certainly not in a fatal way, and we will see it used by the GOP repeatedly if he is the nominee,” one strategist said in an e-mail on Wednesday. “At the end of the day, I believe whoever the Democratic nominee is will win, but those who think that, if Obama is the nominee, he won’t have Clinton-like negatives by Election Day are naive. This whole episode underlines that point.”

Another Democratic strategist offered this thought late Tuesday. The speech was one of the best ever given on the topic of race in America, he noted, but the controversy over Wright will dog Obama in a general election campaign and could hurt him in the nomination battle, depending on how superdelegates react to it and weigh whether Obama or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) would be the stronger nominee against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Still another simply noted that Obama and his campaign team will need to return to this problem, as good as the speech may have been. In other words, it is not going away.

What cannot be known at this point is how the episode is resonating around the country among independents or those who were once called Reagan Democrats. Has Obama reached them in a way that inspires their confidence that he is perhaps uniquely equipped not just to start a conversation but to lead the country to a new, if still imperfect, place in racial relations? Or has he simply raised doubts among them about who he is?

What made Tuesday’s speech so difficult for Obama was the challenge of trying to speak through the anger — the anger of Wright’s words and the anger among those now first exposed to them — and move the country and the conversation to a different level. That was doubly difficult because his relationship with Wright is so personal that trying to explain Wright was not enough; he also had to explain something about himself. Rhetorically, he accomplished it, but it is not certain by any means that he did the same politically.

Obama’s hope is that what would be lasting from this experience would be a renewed effort by the country to speak with honesty and goodwill about the state of race relations. History suggests it may quickly tire of taking on something that arduous. The danger is that what might last are the images of his Chicago pastor — edited and reedited into television ads, YouTube videos and an endless stream of e-mails delivered quietly into the computers of millions of Americans. That would be good neither for Obama nor for the goals he talked about on Tuesday.

March 20, 2008

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush used the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq on Wednesday to make the case for persevering in a conflict that could have many more anniversaries. Democrats accused him of lacking a strategy to win and withdraw.

Mr. Bush, speaking before members of the armed forces and defense officials at the Pentagon, said in his frankest acknowledgment yet that the costs of the war, in lives and money, had been higher and longer lasting than he had anticipated.

But he remained unwavering in his insistence that the invasion of Iraq, which began in March 2003, had made the world better and the United States safer.

“Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting, whether the fight is worth winning, and whether we can win it,” he said. “The answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win.”

The anniversary starkly illustrated the divide between Mr. Bush and Democrats, who control Congress — and between the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona, and the two senators seeking the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At a community college in Fayetteville, a military town in North Carolina, Mr. Obama noted that the war in Iraq had now lasted longer than the Civil War, World War I and World War II, though it has been fought on a scale far below those conflicts.

“Where are we for all of this sacrifice?” he said. “We are less safe and less able to shape events abroad. We are divided at home, and our alliances around the world have been strained.”

Mrs. Clinton, appearing at an American Legion post in Huntington, W.Va., argued for a cautious withdrawal of troops that would begin within 60 days of her taking office. “Every one of you who has served knows with drawing troops can be as dangerous as inserting them,” she said.

By contrast, Mr. McCain, who visited Iraq this week, issued a statement saying that the United States and its allies in Iraq stood “on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism.”

The anniversary, as it has in the past, galvanized the war’s critics and, to a lesser degree, its supporters. Mr. Bush gave his speech as sporadic, relatively small but raucous protests erupted in Washington and in other cities, leading to dozens of arrests.

“How much longer?” read a banner along the president’s route to the Pentagon across the Potomac.

Iraq has receded somewhat as an issue in the campaign. And the scale and fury of antiwar protests appeared to have diminished from just a year ago, before Mr. Bush ordered “a surge” of still more American troops to Iraq that has resulted in a decline in overall violence there.

Still, the war stirs intense emotions on both sides. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said the war had damaged the country’s reputation, strained its military and now threatened its economy.

“With the war in Iraq entering its sixth year,” she said in a statement, “Americans are rightly concerned about how much longer our nation must continue to sacrifice our security for the sake of an Iraqi government that is unwilling or unable to secure its own future.”

Mr. Obama criticized his rivals for their initial votes for the war. “Here is the stark reality,” he said. “There is a security gap in this country — a gap between the rhetoric of those who claim to be tough on national security, and the reality of growing insecurity caused by their decisions.”

He also seized on a gaffe Mr. McCain made Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when he confused the main sects of Islam and the support for each from Al Qaeda, a Sunni dominated group, and Iran, a majority Shiite nation. Mr. McCain corrected his statement after Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who is traveling with him in the region, whispered in his ear.

“Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades,” Mr. Obama said.

He said that as commander in chief he would begin withdrawing a brigade or two each month starting immediately. His plan, he said, would reduce the American force to only the number required to secure the American Embassy and maintain a counterterrorist force.

Even that, he acknowledged, would take until 2010.

The number of troops in Iraq is at the center of the administration’s attention. The top American commander there, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is scheduled to appear before Congress in April to present his recommendations on what to do after a withdrawal of the 30,000 troops ordered to Iraq by Mr. Bush last year.

Those troops brought the total to a peak of more than 160,000; by summer, roughly 140,000 are expected to remain. Military and administration officials have indicated that there should be a pause in any further reductions to see if security in Baghdad and other cities deteriorates.

One administration official said Wednesday that the outstanding question was how long a pause would last.

Mr. Bush said he had made no decision but indicated that he would be reluctant to hasten withdrawals. “Any further drawdown will be based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders,” he said, “and they must not jeopardize the hard-fought gains our troops and civilians have made over the past year.”

Mr. Bush announced the war’s start from the Oval Office on the night of March 19, 2003, declaring that the United States would “not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” (It later became clear that those weapons did not exist.)

His remarks each March 19 since have paralleled the ups and downs of the war.

In 2004, he appeared in the East Room of the White House with dozens of foreign diplomats and cast the war as “the inescapable calling of our generation.” By 2006, with the insurgency worsening along with ethnic and sectarian violence, he spoke for two minutes on the South Lawn and spent most of that time talking of soldiers’ sacrifices. “It’s a time to reflect,” he said.

Mr. Bush’s speech will be his last address as president on the anniversary, and he reflected at length on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the rise of the insurgency, the lurch toward civil war, and the decision to send more troops. The latter he declared a success, saying that it led the way to the decision by many Sunni Arabs to switch allegiances and join American forces against extremists that American officials say are foreign led. He called that the “the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden.”

“The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists’ defeat,” he added.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who declared in June 2005 that the insurgency was in “its last throes,” also acknowledged that the war had “lasted longer than I would have anticipated,” but he, too, defended the effort and brushed aside antiwar sentiment.

When told in an interview with ABC News that two-thirds of Americans said the war was not worth fighting, Mr. Cheney replied, “So?” When pressed, he added, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Fayetteville, N.C., and Patrick D. Healy from Huntington, W.Va.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Fayetteville, N.C., and Patrick D. Healy from Huntington, W.Va.

Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008

By James Poniewozik

On Feb. 5, I woke up, went for a run, showered, had a yogurt smoothie, took the kids to school and voted for Barack Obama. Only one of those facts is worth your knowing, and it is the one that most journalists would never tell you.

In today’s confessional era, reporters disclose private matters ranging from marriage to stock ownership. Everything except voting. Some refuse to vote at all—like Washington Post editor Len Downie, who told NPR, “I didn’t want to take a position, even in my own mind” on elections. (To which I say, Anyone who can perform that kind of self-hypnosis should get into the lucrative smoking-cessation business.) More commonly, reporters vote but keep it to themselves. At the New York Times, even opinion columnists are forbidden to endorse candidates.

It wasn’t always so, but as grubby “reporters” evolved into white-collar, credentialed “journalists,” it has become a tradition—a pointless one. If a tech writer told you he had no preference between Macs and PCs and chose not to use a computer in the interest of impartiality, you would rightly consider him an idiot. But politics is not consumer journalism, right? Right—it’s more important, and transparency in it is more essential.

The reasons not to say whom you’re voting for boil down mainly to the interests of journalists, not those of readers and viewers. It would be a pain in the neck. Campaign sources would mistrust you. Radio hosts and bloggers would have a field day. Readers would become suspicious.

But more suspicious than they are already? The biggest reason to go open kimono is that the present system does what journalism should never do: it perpetuates a lie. Modern political journalism is based on the bogus concept of neutrality (that people can be steeped in campaigns yet not care who wins) and the legitimate ideal of fairness (that people can place intellectual integrity and rigor over their rooting interests). Voting and disclosing would expose the sham of neutrality—which few believe anyway—and compel opinion and news writers alike to prove, story by story, that fairness is possible anyway. Partisans, bloggers and media critics are toxically obsessed with ferreting out reporters’ preferences; treating them as shameful secrets only makes matters worse.

And let’s be honest about the worry that lies behind that reticence: What happens when the public finds out the press is full of Democrats? (An msnbc report last year found that of more than 100 journalists who made political donations, the vast majority gave to the Dems.) If people knew this—or knew, say, that a certain cable-news network tilted pro-Bush—would they trust us less? Hey, maybe they should. And maybe we should view their criticism as a help, not an annoyance.

Mainstream media organizations are all for interactivity when it means getting our audience to work for free—uploading video or volunteering prose on our websites. If we can outsource the news, why not outsource news criticism? Getting stories right takes constant attention. Let the audience help, by critiquing, analyzing and hectoring from as informed a basis as possible. Arguing that offering more information makes us less credible is not just absurd but antijournalistic. When else do reporters argue that their audience must be protected from knowledge?

Opinion is not itself dangerous. Hidden opinion is, as is journalism slanted to reflect it. I’ve critiqued Obama’s campaign videos favorably but also criticized the press for its swooning coverage of him. I don’t know if that makes me fair. But you can judge for yourself, and you should.

Of course, it’s easy for me to be sanctimonious: I’m a pop-culture columnist, not a campaign reporter. The logistics of disclosing votes would be a problem; no one wants to slog through countless articles giving the writers’ electoral history back to college. But the online magazine Slate handled this by doing a poll of its staff before the 2000 and 2004 general elections. It is the sort of thing websites and blogs are made for. The main reason it won’t happen with the mainstream media soon, however, is simple: the other guy isn’t doing it. Ultimately, it’s about money—you’d risk losing half your audience.

But for the larger journalism business to stay relevant (and profitable), doing it could be a very good thing. The partisans who hate the media for our perceived politics are a relatively small, vocal group. More widely damaging, in the age of authenticity, is phoniness—in this case, acting as if we were dispassionate marble gods. It’s time to leave that Potemkin Olympus and admit that, like responsible citizens, we care about elections. And then prove that, like responsible professionals, we care about the truth more.

Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
March 18, 2008

In his several explanations and denunciations of his longtime pastor, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama asks us to believe that he never heard any of the sermons in which the Rev. Jeremiah Wright asked God to damn America.

Neither was he present, he says, for the Rev. Wright’s message in which he said America got what it deserved on Sept. 11 because we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II and have bombed other countries.

He apparently also missed the one about how America created AIDS. The implication appears to have been that it was a plot to wipe out blacks because the disease disproportionately affects African Americans.

Other church members must have told Obama what the Rev. Wright said, or he could have viewed the sermon on the church’s Web site. It appears many others besides just the Rev. Wright share this point of view. If one looks at the video, church members are standing, shouting approval and applauding. This is not one man speaking for himself. From the reaction, one can fairly conclude he is speaking for most, if not all, of the congregation. But not for Barack Obama, he says.

A statement issued by the church Sunday accused critics of attacking “the legacy of the African-American Church.” That is like excusing racism in some Southern white churches 50 years ago because of a “legacy” of bigotry. Hate from a preacher – black or white – can never be justified.

I have attended enough churches over the years that if I missed a Sunday service at which the pastor had said something as incendiary as the Rev. Wright, I would have heard about it and done more than denounce it. I would have left that church. Obama says the Rev. Wright is a “Bible scholar” and has spoken at seminaries around the country. He specifically mentioned Union Theological Seminary, which is theologically and politically liberal. Liberal seminaries teach a “social gospel” that is more social than gospel and more the earthly agenda of the Democratic Party than the Kingdom of God.

As the left attempts to peel off religious voters from their ties with the Republican Party, which has used and abused them, they are encountering some of the same pitfalls experienced by conservatives. These include outrageous statements from their own preachers. In the ’60s, some conservative preachers denounced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him a fellow traveler with communists. They opposed integration as “unbiblical.” In the late ’70s, they began a too-close association with Republican politicians who were all too happy to have their votes, but advanced little of their agenda, either because they could not, or because they would not.

The voice that black people should be listening to is not the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but Bill Cosby. At Jesse Jackson’s 33rd annual Rainbow/PUSH Coalition conference in Chicago in 2004, and at many other venues, Cosby called on his fellow blacks to stop blaming the “white man” for their problems. Cosby suggested most of the problems in black America are caused by “what we are doing to ourselves.”

This is the attitude that appeals to others, especially whites, and makes them want to help poor blacks escape poverty. Blaming whites for black problems may empower the speakers, but it repels people who genuinely want to assist the disadvantaged.

Obama says the Rev. Wright is no longer among his campaign’s “spiritual advisers.” Obama should not be asked which of the Rev. Wright’s outrageous statements he disagrees with, but rather which ones he does agree with. That Obama remains a member in good standing of Trinity United Church of Christ indicates that he prefers the company of many people who have demonstrated that they believe what their pastor has said.

The religious left will get no further than the religious right in its attempt to use government and political power rather than the power of God. Political power can only empower itself and that is not real power. As with the right, the religious left will sully its primary message in favor of another kingdom (the world) and another king (a presidential candidate), which violates several biblical admonitions. By rejecting those admonitions, they are setting themselves up for frustration, disappointment and failure.

Associated Press
March 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court today upheld the state of Washington’s open primary election system, a setback for the Republican and Democratic political parties in the state.

By a 7-2 vote, the court says the state may use a primary system that allows the top two vote-getters to advance to the general election, even if they are from the same party.

Washington never held a primary under the new system because of legal challenges.

“Wow!” Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed said when told of the decision. “That’s terrific! It means the people of the state of Washington are going to be able to control who gets elected through this process.”

Reed said the top-two system will take effect with the August primary election.

“This is a victory for the state of Washington,” he said.

Reed said the ruling sets a precedent that will allow other states to break political party control on primary elections.

“I think we’ll see it around the country,” he said.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that overturning Washington’s plan would have been an “extraordinary and precipitous nullification of the will of the people.”

In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said Washington’s system would cause a political party to be associated with candidates who may not represent its views. Scalia was joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Under Washington’s system, all candidates for a particular office may list their political party preference after their names.

Lawyers for the political parties said David Duke has identified himself as a Republican, despite GOP repudiation of his racial views, while perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has called himself a Democrat, despite wide disagreement with Democratic leaders.

In his majority opinion, Thomas wrote that “there is simply no basis to presume that a well-informed electorate will interpret a candidate’s party-preference designation to mean that the candidate is the party’s chosen nominee” or that the party approves of the candidate.

Thomas added that “we cannot strike down” Washington’s plan “based on the mere possibility of voter confusion.”

The major parties challenged the law in federal court, asserting a First Amendment right to select their own nominees without outside interference.

The top-two plan was created after state voters approved a law in 2004 allowing them to pick their favorite candidate for each office. The top two vote-getters would advance to the November general election, even if they are from the same party.

A federal judge and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down the election plan.

Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna argued there was no evidence that the parties would be harmed, since they can publicize through advertising and other means which candidates they support.

Tuesday’s decision is the second of two this year on the rights of political parties. In New York, the justices said the state’s method of electing trial judges, which gives party bosses effective control of the process, does not violate the Constitution.

The top-two plan was intended as the replacement for Washington’s old “blanket primary,” in which voters could vote for one party for governor and another party for the state legislature, for example.

The Supreme Court threw out blanket primaries, to which the political parties also objected, in a case from California in 2000. The Washington state government and the Washington State Grange have been sparring with the political parties ever since. The Washington State Grange advocates for farmers and has a long history of supporting populist ballot measures.

The cases are 06-713, Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, and 06-730, Washington et al. v. Washington State Republican Party.

By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 18, 2008; A04

The contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination raced to inject themselves into the debate over the credit and housing crisis yesterday, slamming the Bush administration’s failure to do more to avoid a crisis as the economy once again surged to the forefront of the campaign.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) had expected to focus on Iraq this week, marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion with a renewed debate over which candidate foresaw the war’s consequences and who could end it more effectively. But Clinton’s policy address on Iraq at George Washington University yesterday was immediately followed by a news conference dominated by economic questions.

“I am reminded every day as I meet with families and listen to their stories that the effective functioning of our financial markets isn’t just about Wall Street. It’s about Main Street,” Clinton said before reeling off examples of voters ranging from construction workers to college students she had met who were struggling to make ends meet.

Obama, campaigning in Monaca, Pa., was also peppered with questions about the Federal Reserve Board’s intervention this weekend in the collapse of the Wall Street investment firm Bear Stearns and a second emergency interest rate cut.

“I think there is no doubt we are teetering on a potential crisis on Wall Street that could have ramifications all over the country. We have a credit market that is locked up,” he said. “Until people have a sense that there is a floor, until they have a sense that the existing debt that’s out there has all been accounted for, we’re going to continue to have some very, very severe problems.”

For Obama, Clinton and the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the gyrations of the credit crisis have helped to reshape the playing field for the campaign season. In January, Obama and Clinton were prepared for a detailed debate on their respective universal health-care proposals, noted Jason Furman, a Brookings Institution economist and former economic adviser to Sen. John F. Kerry’s 2004 campaign. Instead, they argued about economic stimulus proposals. McCain’s surprise visit to Iraq this weekend, meanwhile, was virtually lost amid coverage of J.P. Morgan Chase’s fire-sale purchase of Bear Stearns under Fed supervision.

“This is clearly the biggest substantive issue of the campaign right now,” Furman said.

“The red phone is ringing at 3 a.m.,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) quipped yesterday, referring to Clinton’s controversial television advertisement that questioned Obama’s readiness to deal with a foreign policy crisis.

Both campaigns began the week attempting to bolster their candidates’ economic credentials — at times pushing the boundaries of fact. Both candidates have now endorsed legislation unveiled last week by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that would allow the Federal Housing Administration to guarantee new mortgages for lenders willing to help homeowners facing foreclosure.

Clinton tossed in that she had spoken yesterday morning to Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about the Fed’s actions.

“Those 3 a.m. calls can be about economic crises as well as national security ones, because it’s all intertwined today,” she said.

The housing crisis has been the subject of a simmering dispute between Clinton and Obama for weeks. Obama has criticized Clinton’s proposal to freeze foreclosures for 90 days and subprime mortgage rates for five years, saying her plan would send interest rates for new and refinanced mortgages skyrocketing.

But to the surprise of many Democratic campaign strategists, neither candidate has consistently sustained a focus on the economy — despite a barrage of polling data showing it has vaulted over the Iraq war in the past four months as the most pressing concern of voters. Last Thursday, both Obama and Clinton were on Capitol Hill when Dodd and Frank unveiled their legislation that would expand the government’s intervention in the crumbling housing market. Neither of them showed up at the news conference, nor have they come forward with new proposals since the contagion in the mortgage market spread to Wall Street.

“Our campaign for over a year has been very worried about how severe the housing crisis would be and its impact on the general economy,” said Gene Sperling, a Clinton economic adviser. But he added: “It’s been more of a continuing series of discussions and decisions about when to put forward proposals.”

Clinton stuck with her Iraq speech yesterday morning, castigating what she described as the “Bush-McCain Iraq philosophy” of “keeping troops in Iraq for up to 100 years if necessary.” She also continued her criticism of Obama as a rhetorical foe of the Iraq invasion who was reluctant to go beyond speeches until it became politically expedient to do so.

Obama fired back, saying, “The truth is, the judgment of Hillary Clinton and John McCain gave President Bush a blank check for war.” He, too, will shift his focus from the economy today with an address on race in Philadelphia, where he will explore his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a controversial Chicago pastor.

Murray is traveling with the Obama campaign.

March 18, 2008

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — In the days immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, members of President Bush’s war cabinet declared that it would be impossible to deter the most fervent extremists from carrying out even more deadly terrorist missions with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Since then, however, administration, military and intelligence officials assigned to counterterrorism have begun to change their view. After piecing together a more nuanced portrait of terrorist organizations, they say there is reason to believe that a combination of efforts could in fact establish something akin to the posture of deterrence, the strategy that helped protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear attack during the cold war.

Interviews with more than two dozen senior officials involved in the effort provided the outlines of previously unreported missions to mute Al Qaeda’s message, turn the jihadi movement’s own weaknesses against it and illuminate Al Qaeda’s errors whenever possible.

A primary focus has become cyberspace, which is the global safe haven of terrorist networks. To counter efforts by terrorists to plot attacks, raise money and recruit new members on the Internet, the government has mounted a secret campaign to plant bogus e-mail messages and Web site postings, with the intent to sow confusion, dissent and distrust among militant organizations, officials confirm.

At the same time, American diplomats are quietly working behind the scenes with Middle Eastern partners to amplify the speeches and writings of prominent Islamic clerics who are renouncing terrorist violence.

At the local level, the authorities are experimenting with new ways to keep potential terrorists off guard.

In New York City, as many as 100 police officers in squad cars from every precinct converge twice daily at randomly selected times and at randomly selected sites, like Times Square or the financial district, to rehearse their response to a terrorist attack. City police officials say the operations are believed to be a crucial tactic to keep extremists guessing as to when and where a large police presence may materialize at any hour. “What we’ve developed since 9/11, in six or seven years, is a better understanding of the support that is necessary for terrorists, the network which provides that support, whether it’s financial or material or expertise,” said Michael E. Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

“We’ve now begun to develop more sophisticated thoughts about deterrence looking at each one of those individually,” Mr. Leiter said in an interview. “Terrorists don’t operate in a vacuum.”

In some ways, government officials acknowledge, the effort represents a second-best solution. Their preferred way to combat terrorism remains to capture or kill extremists, and the new emphasis on deterrence in some ways amounts to attaching a new label to old tools.

“There is one key question that no one can answer: How much disruption does it take to give you the effect of deterrence?” said Michael Levi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a new book, “On Nuclear Terrorism.”

The New Deterrence

The emerging belief that terrorists may be subject to a new form of deterrence is reflected in two of the nation’s central strategy documents.

The 2002 National Security Strategy, signed by the president one year after the Sept. 11 attacks, stated flatly that “traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents.”

Four years later, however, the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism concluded: “A new deterrence calculus combines the need to deter terrorists and supporters from contemplating a W.M.D. attack and, failing that, to dissuade them from actually conducting an attack.”

For obvious reasons, it is harder to deter terrorists than it was to deter a Soviet attack.

Terrorists hold no obvious targets for American retaliation as Soviet cities, factories, military bases and silos were under the cold-war deterrence doctrine. And it is far harder to pinpoint the location of a terrorist group’s leaders than it was to identify the Kremlin offices of the Politburo bosses, making it all but impossible to deter attacks by credibly threatening a retaliatory attack.

But over the six and a half years since the Sept. 11 attacks, many terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, have successfully evaded capture, and American officials say they now recognize that threats to kill terrorist leaders may never be enough to keep America safe.

So American officials have spent the last several years trying to identify other types of “territory” that extremists hold dear, and they say they believe that one important aspect may be the terrorists’ reputation and credibility with Muslims.

Under this theory, if the seeds of doubt can be planted in the mind of Al Qaeda’s strategic leadership that an attack would be viewed as a shameful murder of innocents — or, even more effectively, that it would be an embarrassing failure — then the order may not be given, according to this new analysis.

Senior officials acknowledge that it is difficult to prove what role these new tactics and strategies have played in thwarting plots or deterring Al Qaeda from attacking. Senior officials say there have been several successes using the new approaches, but many involve highly classified technical programs, including the cyberoperations, that they declined to detail.

They did point to some older and now publicized examples that suggest that their efforts are moving in the right direction.

George J. Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in his autobiography that the authorities were concerned that Qaeda operatives had made plans in 2003 to attack the New York City subway using cyanide devices.

Mr. Zawahri reportedly called off the plot because he feared that it “was not sufficiently inspiring to serve Al Qaeda’s ambitions,” and would be viewed as a pale, even humiliating, follow-up to the 9/11 attacks.

And in 2002, Iyman Faris, a naturalized American citizen from Kashmir, began casing the Brooklyn Bridge to plan an attack and communicated with Qaeda leaders in Pakistan via coded messages about using a blowtorch to sever the suspension cables.

But by early 2003, Mr. Faris sent a message to his confederates saying that “the weather is too hot.” American officials said that meant Mr. Faris feared that the plot was unlikely to succeed — apparently because of increased security.

“We made a very visible presence there and that may have contributed to it,” said Paul J. Browne, the New York City Police Department’s chief spokesman. “Deterrence is part and parcel of our entire effort.”

Disrupting Cyberprojects

Terrorists hold little or no terrain, except on the Web. “Al Qaeda and other terrorists’ center of gravity lies in the information domain, and it is there that we must engage it,” said Dell L. Dailey, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief.

Some of the government’s most secretive counterterrorism efforts involve disrupting terrorists’ cyberoperations. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, specially trained teams have recovered computer hard drives used by terrorists and are turning the terrorists’ tools against them.

“If you can learn something about whatever is on those hard drives, whatever that information might be, you could instill doubt on their part by just countermessaging whatever it is they said they wanted to do or planned to do,” said Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, director of cyberoperations for the Air Force and a former deputy director of the antiterrorism office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Since terrorists feel safe using the Internet to spread ideology and gather recruits, General Schissler added, “you may be able to interfere with some of that, interrupt some of that.”

“You can also post messages to the opposite of that,” he added.

Other American efforts are aimed at discrediting Qaeda operations, including the decision to release seized videotapes showing members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leaders, training children to kidnap and kill, as well as a lengthy letter said to have been written by another terrorist leader that describes the organization as weak and plagued by poor morale.

Dissuading Militants

Even as security and intelligence forces seek to disrupt terrorist operations, counterterrorism specialists are examining ways to dissuade insurgents from even considering an attack with unconventional weapons. They are looking at aspects of the militants’ culture, families or religion, to undermine the rhetoric of terrorist leaders.

For example, the government is seeking ways to amplify the voices of respected religious leaders who warn that suicide bombers will not enjoy the heavenly delights promised by terrorist literature, and that their families will be dishonored by such attacks. Those efforts are aimed at undermining a terrorist’s will.

“I’ve got to figure out what does dissuade you,” said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the Joint Chiefs’ director of strategic plans and policy. “What is your center of gravity that we can go at? The goal you set won’t be achieved, or you will be discredited and lose face with the rest of the Muslim world or radical extremism that you signed up for.”

Efforts are also under way to persuade Muslims not to support terrorists. It is a delicate campaign that American officials are trying to promote and amplify — but without leaving telltale American fingerprints that could undermine the effort in the Muslim world. Senior Bush administration officials point to several promising developments.

Saudi Arabia’s top cleric, Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Asheik, gave a speech last October warning Saudis not to join unauthorized jihadist activities, a statement directed mainly at those considering going to Iraq to fight the American-led forces.

And Abdul-Aziz el-Sherif, a top leader of the armed Egyptian movement Islamic Jihad and a longtime associate of Mr. Zawahri, the second-ranking Qaeda official, has just completed a book that renounces violent jihad on legal and religious grounds.

Such dissents are serving to widen rifts between Qaeda leaders and some former loyal backers, Western and Middle Eastern diplomats say.

“Many terrorists value the perception of popular or theological legitimacy for their actions,” said Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser. “By encouraging debate about the moral legitimacy of using weapons of mass destruction, we can try to affect the strategic calculus of the terrorists.”

Denying Support

As the top Pentagon policy maker for special operations, Michael G. Vickers creates strategies for combating terrorism with specialized military forces, as well as for countering the proliferation of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Much of his planning is old school: how should the military’s most elite combat teams capture and kill terrorists? But with each passing day, more of his time is spent in the new world of terrorist deterrence theory, trying to figure out how to prevent attacks by persuading terrorist support networks — those who enable terrorists to operate — to refuse any kind of assistance to stateless agents of extremism.

“Obviously, hard-core terrorists will be the hardest to deter,” Mr. Vickers said. “But if we can deter the support network — recruiters, financial supporters, local security providers and states who provide sanctuary — then we can start achieving a deterrent effect on the whole terrorist network and constrain terrorists’ ability to operate.

“We have not deterred terrorists from their intention to do us great harm,” Mr. Vickers said, “but by constraining their means and taking away various tools, we approach the overall deterrent effect we want.”

Much effort is being spent on perfecting technical systems that can identify the source of unconventional weapons or their components regardless of where they are found — and letting nations around the world know the United States has this ability.

President Bush has declared that the United States will hold “fully accountable” any nation that shares nuclear weapons with another state or terrorists.

Rear Adm. William P. Loeffler, deputy director of the Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction at the military’s Strategic Command, said Mr. Bush’s declaration meant that those who might supply arms or components to terrorists were just as accountable as those who ordered and carried out an attack.

It is, the admiral said, a system of “attribution as deterrence.”

March 18, 2008

With the Dow Jones industrial average up slightly more than 21 points by the end of trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, it may have looked like a calm day on Wall Street.

But under the surface, the scene was far from serene. After policy makers hastily arranged a sale of the embattled investment bank Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase over the weekend, stocks and other financial instruments fluctuated wildly during much of the day as investors started worrying about who and what would be next in the line of fire.

Traders beat down stocks like Lehman Brothers and commodities like oil and wheat.

After a shaky opening, the worst fears of a market plunge were avoided. Although Federal Reserve officials do not place much significance in the performance of markets in a single day, they took some comfort from the fact that many markets were relatively stable on Monday after the initial fall.

In early trading Tuesday, Asian markets rose for the first time in four days, led by financial companies.

But nervousness pervaded Wall Street despite efforts by the Fed and the Bush administration to soothe investors and assure them that Washington will do everything in its power to restore order to the financial system.

“There is something mixed up in the market,” said Edward Rombach, an analyst at Thomson Financial. “The market is eating itself up.”

In the case of Lehman Brothers, some investors fear that the firm is vulnerable to the same ills that undid Bear Stearns. Like Bear Stearns, Lehman is small and more reliant on the mortgage business than its rivals. Its defenders, though, say that Lehman is much better positioned to ride out the financial storm.

And even as nerve endings remained frayed, there were a few notable signs of improvement on Wall Street, Mr. Rombach and other specialists noted. Particularly encouraging was the sharp narrowing of the spread between ultra-safe Treasuries and bonds backed by Fannie Mae, the government-chartered buyer of mortgages — a sign that investors are willing to consider riskier investments.

If that move toward a more normal assessment of risk persists, it could help drive down interest rates on home loans in the coming days.

The broad Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, meanwhile, closed down less than 1 percent, recovering much of its losses from early in the day and bucking a strong downdraft from Europe and Asia.

Specialists say their biggest worry now is not whether the economy is already or will soon be in a recession. Far more fundamental and troubling is the health of the financial system that greases the wheels of capitalism.

“Recessions come and go — that is something investors can deal with,” said Marc D. Stern, chief investment officer at Bessemer Trust, an investment firm in New York. “The bigger issue is, Can our financial system be restored to a sense of normalcy? In recent weeks we have been moving away from that, which is potentially very serious.”

Mr. Stern said he was encouraged by the Fed’s response to the problems at Bear Stearns. In addition to facilitating the firm’s sale to JPMorgan, the central bank also started directly lending to securities firms, something it has not done since the Depression of the 1930s.

The policy-making committee of the Fed is expected to cut its benchmark short-term interest rate at a scheduled meeting on Tuesday by as much as one percentage point, from the current 3 percent, making it cheaper for banks to borrow from each other.

Since last summer, the Fed has tried many approaches to ease the strain in the credit markets. It has cut its benchmark rate from 5.25 percent in a series of jagged steps. It has aggressively lent money to banks and accepted lower-quality collateral that might not even be tradable in the market.

Despite those efforts, financial conditions have worsened. And specialists say the latest measures might meet the same fate if banks and securities firms do not put to work the new money the Fed is offering to lend to them.

“The Fed can do no good at all if they effectively print money and give it to the banks, and the banks dig a hole in the ground and put it in there,” said Donald Brownstein, president of Structured Portfolio Management, a hedge fund in Stamford, Conn., that specializes in mortgage securities.

Other investors are worried that the Fed’s extensive intervention will put the central bank at risk of significant losses and that it will create a “moral hazard” by bailing out institutions that should be allowed to fail. And some complain that the Fed’s backing for a $30 billion loan to Bear Stearns by JPMorgan shifts all the risk to Washington while keeping the profits on Wall Street.

“The government is taking all the downside and none of the upside,” said Douglas A. Dachille, chief executive of First Principles Capital, a bond trading firm.

On Wall Street, however, the Fed’s moves, especially its decision to lend directly to 20 securities dealers, were welcomed.

“They stand committed to protect the system,” said Richard S. Fuld Jr., the chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers. Mr. Fuld said the Fed had eliminated the liquidity concerns that had cast a pall over brokerage firms like his. He also said his firm, the biggest underwriter of mortgage securities on Wall Street during the housing boom, had plenty of cash and access to safe securities it could sell if it needed to raise money. Investors, however, did not see it that way. Shares of Lehman fell $7.51, or 19 percent, to $31.75. The stock is down 51.5 percent for the year and is among the worst performers in the stock market.

Another financial firm that found itself under assault was MF Global, one of the world’s biggest commodities brokers. Its shares fell $11.30, or 65 percent, to $6.05, on rumors that it was losing clients and rival firms were refusing to deal with it.

Last month, MF Global announced that a trader had lost $141.5 million betting on wheat futures with money he did not have. The firm had turned off risk controls for some traders because the controls slowed transactions.

Reassurances from the New York Mercantile Exchange and the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission that MF Global remained on sound footing did little to stem the negative sentiment.

MF also appears to be suffering from broader worries that commodities have become speculative bubbles.

Crude oil, for instance, was up nearly 90 percent on Friday from a year ago. On Monday, oil futures fell 4.1 percent, or $4.53, to $105.68 a barrel. Most commodities, with the exception of hogs, gold and nickel, fell on Monday. A Goldman Sachs index that tracks raw materials had its biggest one-day drop in more than three years.

Many investors have been betting that oil, wheat and other commodities will buck other investments on the belief that growth abroad, particularly in China and India, will sustain demand in the face of the housing-led downturn in the United States.

But skeptics say the slowing demand here will push down prices on commodities markets in the United States and in other countries, many still highly reliant on American consumers.

“Wall Street likes a good growth story,” said Tobias Levkovich, the chief equity strategist at Citigroup. “And that’s the argument for global growth — they will keep growing irrespective” of the United States.

Stock markets in China and India suffered the biggest losses on Monday. The Shanghai A share market was down 3.6 percent, the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong was down 5.2 percent and the Nifty index in India was down 5.1 percent. Early Tuesday, the Shanghai A was drifting lower, but the Hang Seng was trading slightly up and the Nikkei in Japan was up nearly 1.5 percent.

Investors in the region were also troubled by a weekend of news reports of unrest in Tibet and adjacent Chinese provinces.

“Local investor sentiment is not good,” said Ricky Chan, a stockbroker at Phoenix Capital Securities Ltd. in Hong Kong. “The Hong Kong market is really caught in the middle between happenings in China and the United States.”

Jenny Anderson, Keith Bradsher, Michael M. Grynbaum and David Leonhardt contributed reporting.

He can sit back while the Dems tear each other to shreds.

Michael Hirsh

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Updated: 11:52 AM ET Mar 14, 2008

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama show few signs that they’re aware of it, but the general election campaign has already begun. And appropriately for the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, the pair have begun to destroy each other like the two crazy Irish cats of Kilkenny. The upshot is that both of them are already losing the general to John McCain. By the time the Democratic convention rolls around in August and the nomination is finally awarded, the battle may already be over.

Obama’s advisers point out, rightfully, that the Clinton campaign started this downward drift toward mutually assured destruction, Democratic-style, with its now infamous “red phone” ad before the critical Ohio and Texas primaries. Subtly but with devastating impact, the TV commercial raised questions about Obama’s preparedness to be commander in chief. The Obama campaign responded by effectively branding Hillary Clinton a liar about her own record. “As far as the record shows, Sen. Clinton never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue—not at 3 a.m. or at any other time of day,” top Obama adviser Greg Craig—a former close friend of Hillary’s—wrote this week in a widely circulated memo.

Winning elections is about setting the agenda and, while creating a positive image of oneself, negatively defining one’s opponent in the minds of the voters. This is happening for McCain—having Obama defined as unready and Hillary as lacking in integrity—without his having to lift a finger. If the current campaign keeps up—and there’s every sign it will—it’s likely that by summer irrepressible doubts about both Dems will have been lodged in the minds of the electorate.

That’s no small thing. Especially in this age of terror and economic uncertainty, voters don’t want doubts. They will want to pull the lever for the most trustworthy candidate. And who’s making himself seem trustworthy? Why, John McCain, of course. Next week he’s off to Europe and the Mideast to confer with “leaders I have strong relationships with,” as he put it to reporters the other day.

We have been here before, most recently in 2004. Within days of his securing the nomination on Super Tuesday in March of that year, John Kerry became the victim of a vicious Karl Rove-orchestrated plan to paint the Democrat as a flip-flopper. The bewildered Kerry, and his even more clueless advisers, Bob Shrum and Tad Devine, failed to respond for months, while their candidate was relentlessly tarred by the GOP attack machine. “Wait until the fall,” one Kerry adviser responded sagely when I asked why they weren’t counterattacking more. But by the time the Democrats gathered in July for their convention, the GOP-inflicted image of Kerry had taken hold. That’s why the Swift Boat attacks against Kerry’s war record in August were so powerful. So many voters already saw him as a waffling wimp that, despite his clear heroism and uncontested Silver Star in Vietnam, they easily bought into the slander. In the last six weeks of the fall campaign Kerry finally changed course and came out swinging, but by then it was far too late.

A similar process is underway now, but the Republicans don’t need Karl Rove this time around. Both the Clinton and Obama camps do worry about the consequences in the fall, and Obama’s advisers hope, wishfully, that the Clintonites will stop the bloodletting that they began. The likelihood, however, is that the Hillary camp will only step things up. She knows that while he leads in pledged delegates, by winning most of the big Blue states she has racked up a big lead in the potential electoral votes any Democrat will need to win in November. As Marie Cocco of the Washington Post Writers Group wrote the other day, “In this sense, Pennsylvania is where Obama’s back, and not Clinton’s, is up against the wall.”

And so let us return to our St. Paddy’s Day sermon. Children who are familiar with this nursery rhyme already understand more, perhaps, than the two leading Democratic candidates for president. To wit: “There once were two cats of Kilkenny/Each thought there was one cat too many/So they fought and they fit, and they scratched and they bit/Till excepting their nails and the tips of their tails/Instead of two cats there weren’t any.”

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
March 15, 2008

The abrupt resignation of Adm. William Fallon as the head of Central Command almost got lost amid the breaking news of Barack Obama’s victory in the Mississippi primary and Eliot Spitzer’s resignation as governor of New York. But it’s a much more consequential development – in the foreign and military policy of the Bush administration in its final year in office and in the relations between civilian commanders and military officers in the long run of American history.

Though everyone involved denies it, Fallon was kicked out for insubordination, or something very close to it. His conduct became impossible to overlook after the publication of a jauntily written article in Esquire by Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of “The Pentagon’s New Map.”

Barnett paints Fallon as a seasoned officer who coolly and wisely has been frustrating President Bush’s desire to invade Iran. He points out that Fallon opposed the surge in Iraq ordered by Bush in January 2007 and that he has tried to rein in Gen. David Petraeus, whose leadership of the surge has produced such impressive results. He seems to take it for granted that readers will applaud Fallon for opposing a move that converted likely defeat to a high chance of success.

Fallon also made it plain that he wants to withdraw troops from Iraq, as soon as possible – even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved Petraeus’ request for a pause after currently scheduled troop withdrawals end in July.

Fallon is not the first subordinate to work openly to undercut the commander in chief. The authors of the National Intelligence Estimate headlined a conclusion that Iran had abandoned part of its nuclear program, while underplaying the more important news that the mullahs were continuing the critical parts of the nuclear program and retained the capacity to rev up the rest quickly at any time. Leaks from the State Department and CIA have been clearly designed to frustrate administration policy.

Civilian and military, those who have been undercutting administration policy do so in the belief that their views are more in the nation’s interests than the conclusion of the Texas cowboy whom the voters somehow elected president. State and CIA are filled with professionals educated in elite universities dominated by the left and, while not as wacky as their professors, have come away with the default assumption that liberals are always right. Many military officers, who increasingly have graduate degrees from such universities, seem to have imbibed similar habits of mind.

In addition, officers assigned to regional commands seem, like diplomats assigned to one area, inclined to go native. As head of Pacific Command, Fallon (at least as Barnett paints him) seemed transfixed on cooperating with China; at Central Command, he came to believe that pressuring Israel toward a settlement with Palestinians was the way to solve every problem in the region. After all, those are the things the Chinese and Arab military officers he’s been interfacing with have told him.

In my view, Bush has been unduly tolerant of the efforts of civilian career professionals to undercut his policies. But Fallon’s abrupt resignation suggests that he and-or Gates decided that things had gone too far when a commanding military officer was lionized for opposing the president’s policies in the pages of Esquire.

One of the firmest principles of American public life, established with great deliberateness by George Washington, is civilian control of the military. The vast majority of American military officers over our history have honored and cherished that principle. Fallon, as portrayed by Barnett, seemed to relish brushing it aside.

My guess is that Gates, who was a career professional and whose memoir stresses the continuity of U.S. government policy in different administrations, decided that enough was enough.

Tough questions remain about how civilian commanders should choose and interact with military professionals. Bush’s record, in my view, has been far from ideal. He has seemed content with letting others choose military commanders and then accepting their advice with little of the abrasive interaction recommended by Eliot Cohen in his 2002 book “Supreme Command.” Only after the debacle of the 2006 elections did he call on David Petraeus.

One wonders how much he pondered the installation at Central Command of Petraeus’ critic Fallon. It is surely a difficult thing for civilian presidents to choose able and apt military commanders – looking back in our history Franklin Roosevelt seems to have been the only commander in chief who had a consistent record of doing so early on. But at least Bush – and Gates – have rectified what they must now consider a mistake. And they have reaffirmed the ancient principle of civilian control.

Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post
March 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – Diesel-powered locomotives, ships, ferries and tugboats will have to eliminate 90 percent of the soot and 80 percent of the nitrogen oxides in their exhaust by 2030 under tougher air-pollution standards issued Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Today EPA is fitting another important piece into the clean diesel puzzle by cleaning emissions from our trains and boats,” EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said, adding that the nation’s “diesel rule has reached its final stop on its journey to deliver cleaner air to all Americans.”

Over the past decade, pollution from diesel-powered cars, sports-utilities, trucks and off-road vehicles has been cut by a series of rules that curb emissions of fine particles and smog-causing chemicals.

Environmental groups, which had criticized the EPA this week for setting new limits on smog-causing ozone at a level higher than recommended by the agency’s independent scientific advisers, applauded Friday’s action.

“Our children, and our children’s children, will grow up in an era where diesel engines are no longer associated with these noxious black plumes of smoke,” said Janea Scott, a staff lawyer with the group Environmental Defense. She added that the reductions ordered by the EPA “are challenging but achievable.”

The new standards will yield $8.4 billion to $12 billion in health benefits and prevent 1,400 premature deaths annually by the time they are in full effect in 2030, Johnson said. He estimated that they will cost industry $740 million to implement.

The EPA accelerated its original proposed deadline for cutting nitrogen oxides by two years; the rules will take effect in 2014 for vessels and in 2015 for locomotives.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, shown at a funeral in 2000, has been been a source of controversy for the Obama campaign. Associated Press (File Associated Press )

Peter Slevin
Washington Post
March 15, 2008

CHICAGO – The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the former pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, is no longer affiliated with Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign after coming under fresh scrutiny Friday for controversial comments that the Illinois Democrat called “inflammatory and appalling.”

Wright, who presided over Obama’s wedding and supplied the “audacity of hope” line that has become a signature for the candidate, has been a source of controversy for Obama for some time because of the often inflammatory nature of some of his sermons.

Last month in a meeting with Jewish leaders in Cleveland, Obama said Wright was “like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don’t agree with.”

But more examples of Wright’s rhetoric surfaced this week, including a speech Wright delivered in 2006 at Howard University in which he said: “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country was run. … We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.” The speech was quoted in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal.

In a letter to the Huffington Post Web site Friday afternoon – and later in an interview on MSNBC – Obama went much further than he previously had gone in distancing himself from Wright. “All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn,” Obama wrote. “They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country.”

In the MSNBC interview, Obama said he did not “repudiate the man” and added: “I have known him 17 years. He helped bring me to Jesus and helped bring me to church. He and I have a relationship – he’s like an uncle who talked to me, not about political things and social views, but faith and God and family. He’s somebody who is widely respected throughout Chicago and throughout the country for many of the things he’s done not only as a pastor but a preacher.”

But earlier in the evening Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor had alerted reporters that Wright will no longer serve in an unpaid and largely ceremonial role on an Obama campaign leadership committee. “Rev. Wright is no longer serving on the African American Religious Leadership Committee,” Vietor wrote in an e-mail.

Marco Picone, right, and Michael McDonnell, of Lehman Brothers MarketMakers, consult at the New York Stock Exchange on Friday.Associated Press (Associated Press )

Neil Irwin and Tomoeh Murakami Tse
Washington Post
March 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve took the extraordinary step Friday of providing emergency funding to one of Wall Street’s venerable firms, Bear Stearns, after it ran out of cash to repay its lenders.

The Fed used a little-known power it last exercised in the 1960s to stem a run on Bear Stearns that could have sent multibillion-dollar losses cascading across the world financial system, causing more failures on Wall Street and threatening to choke off global economic growth.

The Fed’s action, arranged in a series of predawn deliberations Friday, is one of the most significant government efforts to save a private firm in modern times.

Critics characterized the Fed’s move as a bailout that inappropriately intrudes on the free market and could lead banks to keep taking risks like those that imperiled Bear Stearns. Other analysts said the action was necessary, given the precarious state of world financial markets.

“We’re on a knife’s edge,” said Eugene White, an economics professor at Rutgers University who studies financial crises. “The danger is if people’s confidence is lost in a place like Bear Stearns, no one will lend to anybody.”

Markets tumbled in the hours after the funding plan was announced, with the Dow Jones industrial average finishing the day down 1.60 percent, or nearly 195 points.

Bear Stearns’ stock fell more than 47 percent.

As Bear’s troubles deepened in recent months, it increasingly turned to overnight loans. But on Wednesday and Thursday, its lenders lost faith, and many refused to lend it any more money. That set off a frantic search for cash, including negotiations between executives of Bear and other Wall Street titans.

In the middle of the night, Bear and J.P. Morgan struck a deal. Bear would be willing to put up some of its assets as collateral in exchange for cash from the Fed. The transaction would be routed through J.P. Morgan, which, as a commercial bank, has access to the Fed’s discount window. That would give Bear time to raise financing through the private sector.

“What this is is a bridge to more-permanent solutions,” Bear Stearns chief executive Alan Schwartz said during a conference call Friday afternoon.

But the deal still needed the Fed’s approval. In a series of conference calls from about 3 till 7 a.m., leaders of the central bank discussed whether to exercise an authority granted the Fed in the 1930s – and not used in four decades – to approve the loan.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn, New York Fed President Timothy F. Geithner and Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh conferred in those early-morning hours on calls, which also included Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Undersecretary Robert K. Steel. The Treasury Department had no formal role in the plan, but Fed leaders consulted Paulson and Steel for their expertise and to get their support.

If they allowed Bear to fail, it could drag the rest of Wall Street with it. A major financial institution would have gone from being worth $8 billion to worthless, literally overnight.

In normal times, they would be inclined to let capitalism do its work. But markets are so jittery that the policy-makers concluded investors would refuse to make short-term loans to the other big Wall Street banks that rely on such debt, driving them under, too. The stock market could have experienced a collapse of 1987 proportions, and untold damage may have been done to the wider U.S. economy.

They weighed those fears against the fact that making the loan would put government money at risk. The New York Fed will accept collateral from Bear – long-term investments viewed as safe – in exchange for the short-term loan. In theory, that should protect the government against losses. But if the value of the collateral drops, the Fed could end up losing money.

And Fed officials worried about “moral hazard,” the notion that other companies might behave irresponsibly if they think they too could get government help if times turn bad.

The Fed’s board of governors voted 4-0 in favor of the loan at around 9 a.m. (The fifth Fed governor, Frederic S. Mishkin, was traveling.)

Some analysts said the Fed’s effort, coupled with two major actions in the past week to restore order to credit markets, has undermined its credibility.

“There is a growing sense in the market that the Fed is becoming increasingly inept or unable to really do much about this situation,” said James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management.

Federal securities regulators and the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn are investigating what Bear executives told investors about the health of its hedge funds in a pivotal April 25 conference call.

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
March 12, 2008

I admit that I’m curious.

What, exactly, is included in $5,500-an-hour sex? Does the woman sweat Dom Pérignon? Are you massaged with an oil distilled from the tears of virgins? Do you get a complimentary big screen?

There are, of course, more important questions raised by the stunning implosion of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s political career this week after he was named by federal officials as a customer of a high-priced prostitution ring. Still, the question that intrigues me most has nothing to do with politics. It is, rather, how?

How can a man do such a thing to his family? How can he do it to himself?

Yes, I know the popular wisdom: All men are canine. But the popular wisdom doesn’t answer the questions. Even if you believe every man is a slut helplessly in thrall to carnal wants – and I don’t – it does not explain this. After all, the issue here is not sex. With apologies to Bill Clinton: It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

Consider the astonishingly lost list of high public officials and self-appointed moralists found – or in a few cases, strongly suspected – to be preaching one set of values while living another. It starts, of course, with the aforementioned Bill Clinton, whose indiscretions precipitated a constitutional crisis. But the list also includes: Jesse (”keep hope alive”) Jackson, Larry (”wide stance”) Craig, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, former Spokane Mayor Jim West, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Newt Gingrich, numerous priests of the Roman Catholic Church (It’s 10 o’clock – do you know where your altar boy is?), Strom Thurmond (apparently, he liked integration more than he let on), Mark Foley, Rudy Giuliani, New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey (some of us pronounce it, “McGreasy”), Gary Condit, Dan Burton, Bob Packwood and Henry (”a youthful indiscretion”) Hyde.

And that’s just in the past decade or so. Go back a few years more and you’ve got Jim Bakker, Wilbur Mills, Gary Hart and Jimmy Swaggart, crying tears that would shame a crocodile. Go back even more and you find John F. Kennedy and Thomas Jefferson.

Point being, yes, I know there’s nothing new about hypocrisy. There is, however, something new about this era of cell phone cameras, 24/7 news cycles, YouTube, diminished privacy and intrusive journalism. You’d think a smart man (that’s not an oxymoron, right?) would realize this and adjust accordingly. You’d think he would have sense enough to pack it – either the career or the extracurricular activities – in.

Instead, with an arrogance that beggars description, with a hubris that blots the sun, they try to game the system. And when it catches up with them, they don’t even bear the greatest cost. No, that’s borne by wives who must stand, dead-eyed and humiliated, by their sides through the ritual of apology, by children who must go to school the day after, by constituents who believed and now see that belief betrayed.

Do you know how hard it is to believe? To overcome cynicism and inertia and place fragile trust in the hands of someone who claims to represent values higher than expedience and self? Do you have any idea how much a fool you feel to see that belief, tenderly given, callously trampled? Do you know how much less likely you are ever to give belief again?

And finally, do you know how much it damages us, the larger us, when faith is calcified by cynicism? When we become unable to believe?

I don’t know what the governor received when he – allegedly – paid $5,500 for an hour of a prostitute’s time.

I hope it was worth it.

Our View: Ahern, in talk with teens, offers free speech lesson

March 12, 2008

The seven young people representing Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest traveled to Olympia for a firsthand lesson in civics. They came away with a firsthand understanding of free speech.

They hoped to lobby state Rep. John Ahern, R-Spokane, for more money for sex education. Ahern had other plans. In a meeting in his office with the teens, he said repeatedly: “By the way, I need to find out how many unborn babies were killed by Planned Parenthood.”

A parent of one of the teens filed a complaint with the Legislative Ethics Board. Last week, the board announced its dismissal of the complaint. Board attorney Mike O’Connell explained: “The legislator is entitled to his opinion and … there’s no ethical provision which addresses language which some people think to be offensive.”

The teens may be disappointed that Ahern wasn’t sanctioned. But their disappointment should be tempered by the lifelong lessons offered to them in that Jan. 21 meeting with the 6th District lawmaker.

The teens belong to Planned Parenthood’s advisory board. More and more agencies and organizations are asking teens to join their boards as advisory or full-fledged members. Teens add a different perspective, and they learn how adults function in the business and civic arenas. It isn’t always impressive.

Ahern discovered his foot in his mouth a few times this legislative session. And he seemed more amused than remorseful, though he did apologize for wondering, during a hearing on a gay rights bill, what would prevent a person from registering a dog as a domestic partner.

Ahern isn’t apologetic about his behavior with the students. He said he believes the parent who filed the complaint made a mountain out of a molehill. The students, according to the complaint, found Ahern’s words threatening, offensive and abusive. But the ethics board rightly found that Ahern’s words constituted his opinion, and opinion is protected speech.

Women and men in the United States have the right to speak eloquently or stupidly, profoundly or crudely. They also have a right to speak first and think later.

The teens can learn from Ahern what not to do when they become legislators visited by young people from their districts: Don’t speak abusively, even though you possess the ability – and the right – to do so.

Trudy Rubin
March 12, 2008

Americans are beginning to understand that the struggle against Islamic extremists hinges heavily on the fate of Afghanistan.

That country got shortchanged by our focus on Iraq and is slipping back under Taliban control. But Afghans can push back if they get the right kind of aid from the United States and the international community.

That’s the message I got from Suraya Pakzad, a brave Afghan activist for women’s rights. She was on her way to Washington to receive the State Department’s International Women of Courage award from Secretary Condoleezza Rice and to meet President Bush.

Pakzad, a university graduate and mother of six, started helping Afghan women in 1998, when the Taliban had shut all girls schools and confined women to their homes. She and her friends set up 10 underground girls schools in Kabul, at great risk. Then they started at-home income-generating projects for the girls’ mothers.

After the Taliban fell, Pakzad established the Voice of Women Organization and moved it to Herat in western Afghanistan, where services for women lagged far behind those in Kabul.

Women’s gains since the Taliban’s fall have been mainly symbolic, she says, especially in rural areas. Poverty is rising, and few jobs are available. She recalled seeing women working 11 hours a day for $2 in terrible conditions cleaning goat hair for pashmina scarves.

Although girls schools are now permitted, many families are afraid to send their children because security is deteriorating. In some areas, girls are being killed to discourage female education.

So Pakzad’s organization is trying to provide job training for women and help them market products they make themselves. “If you help the mother find work, then the child can go to school and the woman can find her own position in the family,” she says.

Her group also works to provide legal and social protections for women. They run a safe house in Herat – one of only five in the country – that takes in victims of domestic violence, enforced marriage, and those released from jail whose families have rejected them.

In a traditional society, such women are often rejected by their families, and are at risk of being murdered by family members. VWO aims to provide them with job skills, which may make it possible for some to be reaccepted by relatives.

But the demand for such services far outstrips capacity. Pakzad’s group can shelter only 25 women on a long-term basis and has reintegrated 235 with their families in Herat since 2006.

NGO staff are also putting themselves at risk. The family of one woman who escaped a brutal husband threatened by cell phone to kidnap Pakzad’s 11-year-old son. City police protection was available for only a day, she said, if she herself paid the police.

I asked Pakzad what kind of U.S. aid she thought could best address Afghanistan’s problems. Her answer was swift.

First, she said money to create new job opportunities should go through Afghan nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). “Money that goes through the (central Afghan) government goes through a long bureaucratic process. Afghan NGOs know the priorities in each province.”

Such funds could help, for example, to create small factories, open small businesses or help Afghans build capacity in areas such as animal husbandry, rather than import food. Micro-credit loans to rural women would also help, allowing them to buy a cow or chickens that could produce income.

Right now, she says, villagers help the Taliban, and grow poppy, “because they think they will get security and food.” The Taliban pays better than the Afghan government pays the police.

That could change if jobs were created in rural areas. “The community will not support the Taliban if they have alternatives,” she says flatly.

When it comes to security, she goes on, economic aid is much more effective than bombing raids on Taliban sites that kill many innocent victims: “When bombs hit civilians they create a wall between the government and the people, and the people start helping the Taliban.”

Pakzad would also like to see more money go to Afghan NGOs to educate men about women’s rights. She says that when she goes to villages and explains that educating women can increase family income and improve life for children, many elders are convinced.

The type of high-impact help Pakzad proposes would go directly to village people, rather than via foreign contractors or corrupt Afghan officials. As Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., points out, what we’ve spent on six years of Afghan reconstruction equals “what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq.”

Let’s hope Rice and Bush get the message: It’s time to start helping courageous Afghans help themselves.

Stephanie Desmon
Baltimore Sun
March 12, 2008

About 1 in 4 teenage girls in the United States – and nearly half of black girls – has at least one sexually transmitted disease, according to a study released Tuesday, providing the first national snapshot of infection rates among this age group.

Those numbers translate into an estimated 3.2 million adolescent females infected with one of the four most common STDs – many of whom may not even know they have a disease or that they are passing it to their sex partners.

“What we found is alarming,” said Dr. Sara Forhan, a researcher with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the study’s lead author. “This means that far too many young women are at risk for the serious health effects of untreated STDs, including infertility and cervical cancer.”

The study’s authors analyzed data on 838 girls between ages 14 and 19 who participated in the 2003-04 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an annual study that assesses a broad range of health issues. For the analysis, the teens were tested for human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, trichomoniasis and herpes. By far, the most common sexually transmitted disease was HPV. Of those infected, 15 percent had more than one STD.

“It shows that what people have always suspected is true,” said Dr. Emily J. Erbelding, an infectious-diseases specialist at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. “Sexually transmitted infections have been called a hidden epidemic, because a lot of these conditions are going to be asymptotic when they’re diagnosed, but they’re highly common.”

The overall figures could be slightly higher, because other sexually transmitted diseases – syphilis, HIV and gonorrhea – were not included in the study, although experts say the prevalence is low for those infections among adolescents. The study did not include teenage boys.

Forhan said she was surprised to see how readily the risk to young women appears. Of those in the study who said they had one sexual partner in their lifetime, the prevalence of STDs was 20 percent, she said.

While parents may be surprised by the study, it’s a reflection of what doctors have been seeing in their practices in recent years, said Dr. Ligia Peralta, chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at the University of Maryland Hospital for Children in Baltimore. In a small study done among girls at in her university clinic in 2000, primarily black teens, 90 percent of the sexually active teens had HPV.

She called the CDC study “critical information for parents” and encouraged them to use this knowledge to be sure their daughters are being properly screened and taught about protection and prevention. She said parents need to know that the average age of a girl’s first sexual intercourse is 15.

N.Y. governor was repeat prostitution customer, may have spent $80,000

MSNBC News Services

updated 9:25 a.m. PT, Wed., March. 12, 2008

ALBANY, N.Y. – New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned on Wednesday, completing a stunning fall from power after he was nationally disgraced by links to a high-priced prostitution ring.

“I look at my time as governor with a sense of what might have been,” Spitzer said, with his expressionless wife Silda standing at his side. “There is much more to be done, and I cannot allow my private failings to disrupt the people’s work.”

Democratic Lt. Gov. David Peterson will become governor when Spitzer’s resignation is made effective on Monday, March 17. Paterson will be New York’s first black governor.

The scandal erupted two days ago when allegations surfaced that the 48-year-old Spitzer spent thousands of dollars on a call girl at a swanky Washington hotel on the night before Valentine’s Day.

Spitzer was more composed than he was at his appearance two days ago, when he looked pale, drawn and glassy-eyed. The couple stood quietly Wednesday, inches apart; they never touched as they entered or left the room.

His wife took deep breaths as hundreds of photos were taken at close range. Each of Spitzer’s words was accompanied by a rush of camera clicks.

“I’m deeply sorry that I did not live up to what was expected of me,” Spitzer said.

Prior to making the formal announcement in his office, Spitzer and his family had been secluded in their Fifth Avenue apartment. Republicans had been talking impeachment, and few if any fellow Democrats came forward to defend him.

Repeat customer
Investigators said Tuesday Spitzer was a repeat customer who spent tens of thousands of dollars — perhaps as much as $80,000 — with the prostitution service over an extended period of time.

On Monday, prosecutors said in court papers that Spitzer had been caught on a wiretap spending $4,300 with the Emperors Club VIP call-girl service, with some of the money going toward a night with a prostitute named Kristen, and the rest to be used as credit toward future trysts. The papers also suggested that Spitzer had done this before.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a law enforcement official said Tuesday that Spitzer, in fact, had spent tens of thousands of dollars with the Emperors Club. Another official said the amount could be as high as $80,000. But it was not clear over what period of time that was spent.

Still another law enforcement official said investigators found that during the tryst with Kristen on the night before Valentine’s Day, Spitzer used two rooms at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington — one for himself, the other for the prostitute. Sometime around 10 p.m., Spitzer sneaked away from his security detail and made his way to the room where she was waiting, the official said. The three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Details in court papers
In the court papers, an Emperors Club employee was quoted as telling Kristen that Client 9 — Spitzer, according to investigators — “would ask you to do things that … you might not think were safe,” and Kristen responded by saying: “I have a way of dealing with that. … I’d be, like, listen, dude, you really want the sex?”

A law enforcement official said Tuesday the discussion had to do with Spitzer’s preference not to wear a condom and the call-girl’s insistence that he use one.

Spitzer’s vast personal wealth would have made it easy for him to spend thousands of dollars on prostitutes. The scion of a wealthy Manhattan real estate developer, Spitzer reported $1.9 million in income to the IRS in 2006.

Spitzer’s many enemies from Albany and Wall Street were emboldened, and some of his friends went from shock to outrage.

“Particularly because of the reform platform on which he was elected governor, his ability to govern the state of New York and execute his duties as governor have been irreparably damaged,” said Citizens Union, a good-government group that supported the crusading attorney general for governor in 2006 and provided critical support in his effort to reform Albany. The group had also urged him to resign.

Case against Spitzer
The case against Spitzer, a 48-year-old married man with three teenage daughters, started when banks noticed frequent cash transfers from several accounts and filed suspicious-activity reports with the Internal Revenue Service, a law enforcement official told the AP. The accounts were traced back to Spitzer, prompting public corruption investigators to open an inquiry.

Spitzer has not been charged, and prosecutors would not comment on the case. Michele Hirshman, Spitzer’s former deputy attorney general and now a member of the high-powered New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, has been retained to represent the governor.

Assembly Republican leader James Tedisco warned Tuesday that if Spitzer had not resigned within 48 hours, he would call for impeachment. But any impeachment would have faced a difficult road in the Democrat-controlled Assembly, where articles of impeachment would require a majority vote to go to a trial. A trial would have been decided by a combined vote of the full Senate, which has a slim GOP majority, and the Court of Appeals.

Tedisco was an early target of Spitzer’s abrasive and uncompromising style in Albany. In a private call, an angry Spitzer once described himself to Tedisco as a “steamroller” — he attached a profanity for emphasis — and warned: “I’ll roll over you and anybody else.”

Late Tuesday, freshman Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand became the first Democratic member of New York’s congressional delegation to mention resignation. “This is very grave and sad news,” she said. “If these serious allegations are true, the governor will have no choice but to resign.”

On Wall Street, where Spitzer built his reputation as a crusader against shady practices and overly generous compensation, cheers and laughter erupted Monday from the trading floor when news broke of his potential ruin.

Many in the financial industry had long complained that the man known as “Mr. Clean” and the “Sheriff of Wall Street” was a sanctimonious bully who was just trying to advance his political career. Many Wall Streeters were delighted to see him get his comeuppance.

“The irony and the hypocrisy is almost too good to be true,” said Bryn Dolan, a fundraiser who works with many Wall Street employees.

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N.Y. Governor Apologizes for ‘Private Matter,’ Does Not Resign
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 11, 2008; A01

New York Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer’s political future was thrown in doubt yesterday after he was identified as an anonymous client heard on a federal wiretap arranging to pay money and buy train tickets for a high-priced New York prostitute to meet him at a downtown Washington hotel.

A person familiar with the case said Spitzer was one of the unnamed clients of a New York area prostitution ring mentioned in federal court documents unsealed last week. Spitzer, a rising star in the Democratic Party who has been in office for 14 months, did not directly address the allegations in a hastily called news conference, and he made no mention of resigning. But as he dropped from public view, canceling all of his planned events, his political career seemed in limbo last night amid speculation that he was preparing to step down.

“I have acted in a way that violated the obligations to my family and that violate my, or any, sense of right and wrong,” Spitzer, 48, said in a terse public statement, with his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, at his side. “I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard that I expect of myself.”

His political opponents in the state legislature were already calling for his resignation. Even sympathetic analysts said the governor — after a series of scandals and bruising battles with the legislature — does not have a reservoir of goodwill to draw upon that might help him overcome this latest controversy.

“This is not even a nail in the coffin — this is a spike,” said Douglas Muzzio, a political science professor at Baruch College. “It would be difficult for him to govern. His moral authority is nonexistent.”

A 1910 federal statute called the Mann Act prohibits traveling across state lines to engage in prostitution. Also, Republicans in Albany said that if the governor tries to keep his job, they will probably question whether his state police bodyguards, who provide him 24-hour protection, were complicit in his actions, and whether state money or facilities were used.

“I can’t see him getting through this,” said state Sen. Martin J. Golden (R), a former police officer. “Interstate transportation for sexual purposes is a federal crime. . . . We all think now he’s negotiating a plea.”

Spitzer has not been charged with any crime. The U.S. attorney’s office in New York had no comment on the case.

If Spitzer does resign, he would be replaced by Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, scion to a well-connected Harlem political family and the state’s senior African American elected official. Paterson, who is legally blind, would be New York’s first black governor.

The wiretap was set up as part of a federal investigation of an exclusive prostitution ring, known as Emperors Club VIP. It charged well-heeled clients as much as $5,500 an hour for “exclusive, beautiful, educated companions of fine family and career backgrounds” while ensuring “privacy and discretion when dating and traveling,” according to the company’s Web site.

The site used a series of diamonds next to photographs of the women to rate them, with those having the most diamonds commanding the highest prices. The site has been shut down.

Last Thursday, federal authorities — using an agent posing as a client and wiretaps that recorded about 5,000 calls — arrested four people in connection with the prostitution ring. They included the alleged ringleaders in New Jersey, Mark Brener, 62, and Cecil Suwal, 23, known as “Katie,” who ran day-to-day operations. Also arrested were Tanya Hollander, 36, of Rhinebeck, N.Y., and Temeka Rachelle Lewis, 32, of Brooklyn.

The charge sheet for the four provided details about clients soliciting women. They included an unidentified “Client-9,” who called Lewis to say that he had sent a package, believed to be a monetary deposit, and wanted to have a prostitute named “Kristen” take the train from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to Union Station in Washington on Feb. 13 and meet him in Room 871 of a hotel in the District.

A source familiar with the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Client 9 was Spitzer.

On Sunday, Spitzer reportedly told his staff that he had been implicated in the prostitution ring, the New York Times reported on its Web site.

The Washington hotel was later identified as the Mayflower, and by evening, tourists were already snapping pictures of the city’s latest iconoclastic monument to scandal.

According to the details in the charge sheet, Client 9 appeared to be a regular user of the Emperors Club VIP services. When Lewis, awaiting the deposit, asked whether the client had used the correct mailing name, Client 9 replied, “Yup, same as in the past, no question about it.”

When the client asked which woman would be coming to Washington, Lewis told him it was Kristen, and Client 9 expressed some evidence of familiarity, saying, “Great, okay, wonderful.” He later asked Lewis to remind him what Kristen looked like, and was told she was a petite, pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches tall and 105 pounds.

The client also asked Lewis if he could give Kristen “extra funds” as a deposit for future services. Lewis explained that it was not standard practice, but that she was willing to make an exception for Client 9.

Spitzer’s travel schedule shows he spent the night of Feb. 13 in Washington to attend a congressional hearing the next day, Valentine’s Day. Spitzer was not initially scheduled to appear at the hearing on the state of the bond industry, held by the Financial Services subcommittee on capital markets, insurance and government-sponsored enterprises. But committee staff members said Spitzer called to insist on coming to testify, and they ended up pushing back the New York insurance superintendent to make room for the governor’s last-minute appearance.

Spitzer made a name for himself as New York’s crusading attorney general, taking on white-collar criminals and prosecuting securities fraud cases. He also broke up two prostitution rings.

Spitzer ran for governor in 2006 as a reformer who would shake up the sometimes gridlocked politics of Albany, and his landslide 69 percent of the vote was the largest margin ever in a New York gubernatorial race. But his popularity quickly waned as he became enmeshed in scandals and political missteps, including allegations that his staff used New York state troopers to collect potentially damaging political information against his chief rival in Albany, Joseph L. Bruno, the state Republican leader. Spitzer later apologized to Bruno.

As evidence of his tough-minded, no-compromise style, Spitzer also famously told James Tedisco, the State Assembly Republican leader: “I’m a [expletive] steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else.”

Spitzer also proposed a plan to give state driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. But that created a national firestorm of protest, and complicated the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who was asked in an early debate whether she supported it and is seen as having flubbed her answer.

“His whole first year has been in incredibly contentious relationships,” said Eric Lane, a law professor at Hofstra University.

Staff writers Carrie Johnson in Charlottesville and Jonathan Weisman and Petula Dvorak in Washington contributed to this report.

Candidate Criticizes Ambitious Bear Study
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 10, 2008; A01

WEST GLACIER, Mont. — If you’ve heard Sen. John McCain’s stump speech, you’ve surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal,” he jokes, “but it was a waste of money.”

A McCain campaign commercial also tweaks the bear research: “Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable.”

Actually, it was a scientific and logistical triumph, argues Katherine Kendall, 56, mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project.

Kendall is one tough field biologist: She’s rafted wild rivers, forded swollen streams and hiked through remote backcountry for weeks at a time. She goes to places inhabited by all manner of large creatures with sharp teeth. She was once charged by an enraged grizzly. She stared the bear down.

So she can handle a growling politician — even one now poised to become the Republican nominee for president.

“It’s pretty cool that we pulled it off,” Kendall said of her project while giving a tour of the rugged terrain near Glacier National Park. “Nobody got seriously hurt. We collected a ton of bear hair. We stayed on budget.”

McCain, who has railed against government pork for two decades, cites three beneficiaries of what he calls wasteful spending in his TV ad “Outrageous.” One is the infamous “bridge to nowhere,” a project in Alaska, pushed by the Republican congressional delegation, that would link a sparsely populated island with the mainland. Another is a museum at the site of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, which would be supported with a million-dollar earmark co-sponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

And the third is the grizzly project. McCain has been jabbing rhetorically at Kendall’s study since it began in 2003, including from the floor of the Senate:

“Approach a bear: ‘That bear cub over there claims you are his father, and we need to take your DNA.’ Approach another bear: ‘Two hikers had their food stolen by a bear, and we think it is you. We have to get the DNA.’ The DNA doesn’t fit, you got to acquit, if I might.”

Kendall, on orders from her superiors, will not directly respond to McCain (”I really can’t wade into that”), but she clearly doesn’t find his jibes amusing, much less accurate. The truth is, her project is focused not on the DNA of grizzly bears, but on counting them.

As a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, she set out to get the first head count of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. She and her co-workers at the USGS have used DNA primarily as a bear-identifying tool. Her project also employed barbed wire and homemade bear bait brewed up from rotten fish and cattle blood.

“There’s never been any information about the status of this population. We didn’t know what was going on — until this study,” Kendall said.

This was an astonishingly ambitious research project involving 207 paid workers, hundreds of volunteers, 7.8 million acres and 2,560 bear sampling sites. The project did not cost $3 million, as McCain’s ad alleges, but more than $5 million, including nearly $4.8 million in congressional appropriations. It had a strong advocate in Congress in Montana’s three-term senator, Conrad Burns, a Republican who was defeated in his reelection bid in 2006.

Burns is now chairman of McCain’s campaign in Montana.

Grizzly bears in northwest Montana are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. But Kendall’s project — the results of which will be published soon in a scientific journal — revealed that there are more grizzlies than anyone had realized. That suggests that three decades of conservation efforts, costing tens of millions of dollars, have paid off.

This could have long-term implications for the Northern Divide grizzlies, possibly including their removal someday from the threatened list. Delisting them would restore management of the bears to state control after decades of federal oversight.

“It was extremely well executed and well worth the money,” said Sterling Miller, a bear researcher working for the National Wildlife Federation. “Someone like McCain should be delighted, in fact. The Endangered Species Act works.”

Ex-Cheerleader vs. Mama Bear
Kate Kendall grew up in Falls Church and attended George Marshall High School. “Cheerleader Turns Bear Biologist,” she said, writing her own headline.

She has spent 33 years with the federal government, mostly studying bears. She commutes to Glacier National Park every day from her home in Columbia Falls. It’s a spectacular place to work, but, like so many scientists these days, she spends most of her hours staring into a computer screen. Still, she is ready at a moment’s notice to slap on cross-country skis and go just about anywhere. She’s dressed for the field: Gore-Tex jacket, trusty 25-year-old snow boots.

She’s not afraid of bears but respects them. She knows what it’s like to spend the night wide awake in a backwoods shelter with bear spray at the ready.

“When they’re aggressive, they’re on all fours, they’ve got their ears back, and they’re charging you. I happen to know,” she said.

She discovered that in Yellowstone National Park in 1981. She and a colleague surprised a female bear and her cub. Both animals were fleeing. Oh, neat, Kendall thought — bears! But it turned out the mother was just stashing the cub in a safe spot. Mama bear returned and charged Kendall.

There was no tree to climb. Running would have been pointless.

“You can’t outrun a grizzly bear. They can run 35 miles an hour.”

So she stood her ground and made a lot of noise.

The bear stopped and turned away.

Hiking back out of the woods, Kendall had a thought: Maybe she should become the kind of biologist who studies mice.

How Many Bears in the Woods?
Protecting bears is, in a sense, a way of protecting everything else around them. They’re an “umbrella species,” as conservationists put it.

“They are these very flexible, intelligent animals who can survive just about anywhere. There are brown bears that survive in the Gobi Desert,” Kendall said.

Why count them?

“We just can’t be managing in the dark for another 25 years,” she said.

Bears are hard to count because they’re not like buffalo grazing on open range. They live, as has been widely noted, in the woods.

They are also shy, unless they’re surprised. Padding around quietly in hopes of sneaking up on grizzlies would not be a smart way for researchers to conduct a census of Ursus arctos horribilis. Kendall does not venture into bear country without shouting loudly every couple of minutes: “Hey, bear!”

The secret to counting bears is obtaining hair. One way is to pluck it off of “rub trees,” which bears use for marking territory. The other trick is to use a string of barbed wire to make a pen. Place some stinking bear bait in the center, and the bear will slip under (or sometimes, if the bear is huge, over) the wire. Snagging hair that way doesn’t hurt the animal.

In 2002 Kendall and her colleagues proposed using such hair traps to count bears in Glacier National Park and the nearby wilderness. Multiple state and federal agencies backed the plan. So did Montana’s governor at the time, Judy Martz, a Republican, who asked the congressional delegation for support. The project found a powerful ally in Burns, who chaired the subcommittee overseeing the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey. Burns, Kendall said, added $1 million to the USGS budget in 2003 and pushed through add-ons for the next four years.

That got the attention of McCain, who every year puts out a list of what he considers egregious or laughable pork-barrel projects. He has gone after wasteful military projects and corporate tax breaks, but for rhetorical purposes he’s shown a fondness for mocking money spent on dubious-sounding projects involving plants and animals.

He has criticized the $2 million spent on Oregon’s Groundfish Disaster Outreach Program, the $280,000 spent on asparagus technology in Washington state, the $600,000 for peanut research in Alabama.

“One of our all-time favorites, made famous a number of years ago, is money that was spent to study the effect on the ozone layer of flatulence in cows,” McCain said in 2003. “One always wondered about the testing procedures used to determine those effects on the ozone layer.”

For McCain, bears have been, like cows and peanuts and asparagus, good material.

But he didn’t try to block the grizzly funding by offering an amendment to remove it from the 2003 appropriations bill. And ultimately he voted for the bill.

A Senate aide to McCain said the senator objects to the way that pork — which he views as money not requested by the administration or properly authorized by Congress — is slipped into bills via add-ons and earmarks. “Senator McCain does not question the merits of these projects; it’s the process that he has a problem with,” the aide said.

The Dangers of Collecting Hair
Kendall put together a study area of 12,127 square miles, dividing the territory into 640 cells, each about five miles square. Her plan called for workers and volunteers to go into each cell with bait and barbed wire and set up several hair traps. Moreover, they had to revisit each cell three times, collecting hair and relocating the traps.

Can’t be done, some researchers thought.

“How are you going to get back there to do it?” wondered Wayne Kasworm, a bear expert with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “You have to go back to these places multiple times.”

As a woman in a male-dominated field, Kendall was used to being underestimated. But she also thought of all the things that could go wrong. She would be sending people to places 30 miles from the nearest road. And they’d be carrying bear bait.

The stuff reeked to high heaven. Her recipe: Dump cattle blood and whole fish into separate 55-gallon drums and age for a year. Then blend fish with a sheetrock mud mixer. Strain fish solids from liquid, and mix liquid with the rotten blood.

“It is difficult to convey the stench of this operation to anyone that was not there,” Kendall reports.

The bottles of bait sometimes get hot and explode upon opening. Jeff Stetz, Kendall’s deputy, has had bear bait sprayed in his face, which quickened his step on the way back to civilization.

And never mind the grizzlies: The Montana backcountry has many creatures with sharp teeth and questionable dispositions. A moose can stomp a person. A rutting elk is no bargain. And cougars will stalk a hiker.

Someone could burn up in a wildfire.

Or drown.

“I was worried about people getting killed in river crossings,” Kendall said.

All through 2003 and 2004 she worried — until the day it was over, and she had 33,741 samples of hair to send off for lab analysis.

That hair represented 563 different grizzly bears. That’s just a minimum. Some bears left hair at multiple sites. By studying that pattern, Kendall can estimate how many bears there are in the entire ecosystem.

“By repeatedly sampling, we can estimate the number of bears that we didn’t catch,” she said.

Kendall may retire after she publishes a few more scientific papers emerging from her project. But she is still brimming with research ideas — one, for example, inspired by something the bears kept doing. They would notice the researchers’ motion-sensitive cameras, and walk up and lick them.

“We should do a slobber sample study for DNA next time. You can get really good DNA from spit,” she said.

She hasn’t yet figured out the funding.

President’s aide says CIA needs ‘valuable tool in the war on terror’

Dan Eggen
Washington Post
March 8, 2008

WASHINGTON – President Bush today will veto legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics and will argue that the agency needs to use tougher methods than the U.S. military to wrest information from terrorism suspects, administration officials said.

Bush’s decision to veto an intelligence authorization bill that contains the waterboarding provision is the subject of his weekly presidential radio address, to be broadcast today, the White House said.

“The bill would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror: the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Friday.

Although long expected, Bush’s formal move to veto the bill reignites the Washington debate over the proper limits of U.S. interrogation policies and whether the CIA has engaged in torture by subjecting prisoners to severe tactics, including waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning.

The issue also has potential ramifications for GOP presidential nominee John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of coercive interrogation tactics who nonetheless backed the Bush administration in opposing the CIA waterboarding ban. The Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, both support the ban, though neither was present for last month’s Senate vote for the bill that Bush is to veto.

The legislation would have limited the CIA to using 19 less-aggressive tactics outlined in a U.S. Army field manual on interrogations. Besides ruling out waterboarding, that restriction would effectively ban temperature extremes, extended forced standing and other harsh methods that the CIA used on al-Qaida prisoners after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush and his aides have argued that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program” was crucial in uncovering terrorist plans and averting deadly plots. CIA Director Michael Hayden has also spoken out against the Senate bill and defended the methods as lawful and effective.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Hayden said the Army manual guidelines were intended for “a different population of detainees, a different group of interrogators, and for different intelligence needs” than those of the nation’s chief spy agency. The CIA has not specified all the tactics it wants to keep using but says it no longer uses waterboarding. Administration officials have not ruled out using the tactic again.

Many Democrats and human-rights groups say the tactics are often counterproductive and that, regardless, they constitute illegal torture under U.S. and international law. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday that Bush has “compromised the moral leadership of our nation,” and said the administration is ignoring the advice of military experts who oppose harsh techniques.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggested that those who support harsh methods simply lack experience and do not know what they are talking about.

“If they think these methods work, they’re woefully misinformed,” Soyster said at a news briefing called in anticipation of the veto. “Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world.”

In two separate forums earlier this week, FBI Director Robert Mueller III and Navy Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, commander of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, defended the efficacy of less-coercive, “rapport-building” interrogation tactics.

“We get so much dependable information from just sitting down and having a conversation and treating them like human beings in a businesslike manner,” Buzby told reporters in a conference call Thursday.

March 8, 2008

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — The worst fears of consumers, investors and Washington officials were confirmed on Friday, as deepening paralysis on Wall Street collided with stark new evidence of falling employment and a likely recession.

In a report that was far worse than most analysts had expected, the Labor Department estimated that the nation lost 63,000 jobs in February. It was the second consecutive monthly decline, and the third straight drop for private-sector jobs.

Even before the bad news on jobs emerged, the Federal Reserve was already racing to ease the latest crisis in the credit markets, where seemingly rock-solid companies have been caught short because the markets are devaluing the collateral they had posted to back billions of dollars in loans. Much of that collateral consists of mortgages.

In a surprise announcement early Friday, the Federal Reserve said it would inject about $200 billion into the nation’s banking system this month — with more to come after that — by offering banks one-month loans at low rates and in return letting them pledge mortgage-backed bonds and even riskier assets as collateral.

Though monthly payroll data are notoriously volatile and subject to revision, the jobs report was so bleak that many of the few remaining optimists on Wall Street threw in the towel and conceded that the United States was already in a recession.

“Godot has arrived,” wrote Edward Yardeni, who had been one of Wall Street’s most relentlessly upbeat forecasters. “I’ve been rooting for the muddling through scenario. However, the credit crisis continues to worsen and has become a full-blown credit crunch, which is depressing the real economy.”

The convulsions in the credit markets were spurred in part when Thornburg Mortgage, one of the nation’s biggest independent mortgage lenders, and Carlyle Capital, the offspring of one of the country’s largest private equity firms, failed to meet demands by lenders to post more cash or pledge other assets, also known as margin calls, on debts that had been backed by packages of mortgages.

Fed officials said Friday that they were not pumping money into the system in response to the poor jobs data but rather to the growing unwillingness or inability of investors to finance even routine business deals. Fed officials have long feared that anxiety about credit losses would create a “negative feedback loop,” or self-perpetuating spiral of rising unemployment, more home foreclosures and yet more credit losses.

“You have big credit losses that make it harder to get new credit, which means the economy starts to slow down and foreclosures go up,” said Nigel Gault, a senior economist at Global Insight, a forecasting firm. “Then you get even bigger credit losses, which makes banks even less willing to lend and you keep spiraling down.”

The Fed’s problem is that its main weapons against a downturn — lower interest rates and easier money — are ill suited to a crisis that stems from collapsing confidence about credit quality.

Even though the central bank sharply cut short-term interest rates twice in January and clearly signaled that it would cut them again on March 18, rates for home mortgages have risen and rates for many forms of commercial loans have jumped sharply.

“There has been a tug of war under way between deteriorating credit conditions and monetary policy,” wrote Laurence H. Meyer, a former Fed governor and now a forecaster at Macroeconomic Advisers. As a result, he said, credit conditions have remained almost as tight as ever.

The darkening economic outlook, coming just nine months before presidential elections, puts enormous pressure on President Bush and could pose a problem for Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Typically, the party in power has not been able to hold onto the White House when the economy is in a recession in an election year.

President Bush, in a hastily arranged appearance before television cameras on Friday afternoon, acknowledged that the economy had slowed but predicted that it would get a lift this summer from the $168 billion stimulus package of tax rebates and temporary tax cuts that Congress recently passed.

“Losing a job is painful, and I know Americans are concerned about the economy,” Mr. Bush said.

“The good news is, we anticipated this and took decisive action to bolster the economy, by passing a growth package that will put money into the hands of American workers and businesses.”

Edward P. Lazear, chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the White House had downgraded its earlier forecasts but still believed that the tax rebates of up to $1,200 for many families will help the economy escape a recession.

“There is no denying that when you get negative job numbers, realistically the economy is less strong than we had hoped it would be,” Mr. Lazear said. “The question is how quickly will it pick up. We think it will pick up — as I mentioned, we think it will pick up by the summer.”

Few private forecasters were so buoyant. Many firms had already concluded that a recession was under way. Within minutes of the new report on employment, many in the dwindling pool of optimists changed their positions.

Mr. Yardeni was hardly alone. Just one minute after the Labor Department published its report at 8:30 a.m., JPMorgan Chase reversed its stance, declaring that a recession appeared to have begun. Lehman Brothers switched its position as well.

Unemployment typically starts to rise only after a recession has started, and it keeps climbing for many months after the economy has hit bottom and begun to recover.

Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, noted that private-sector payroll employment has now declined by an average of 47,000 a month — a decline that has been followed by a recession every time it has happened in the last 50 years. In each of those recessions, Mr. Ashworth added, the job market recovered only after monthly job losses peaked at 200,000 jobs.

Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, had already sent clear signals in recent weeks that the central bank was ready to reduce the overnight federal funds rate when policy makers meet on March 18.

Since August, the Fed has sharply cut overnight rates five times, to 3 percent from 5.25 percent, and investors have been all but assuming that the central bank would reduce them by at least another half a percentage point, and perhaps three-quarters of a point, at the next meeting.

But by Thursday, Fed officials had become increasingly alarmed that rates for many kinds of lending were skyrocketing as investors demanded steep risk premiums that are normally associated with a serious economic recession.

What particularly alarmed Fed officials was that the margin calls on Carlyle Capital and Thornburg Mortgage had stemmed from plunging confidence about the value of highly conservative mortgages that were guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage companies.

If investors lose confidence in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have become the only major remaining source of mortgage financing in recent months, Fed officials fear that home sales and housing prices could plunge further and foreclosures could climb even higher than they already have.

On Thursday, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that about 7.9 percent of all loans — a record high — were past due or in foreclosure. Until the third quarter of last year, the rate had not climbed above 7 percent since 1979.

Home prices are falling in almost every part of the country, a phenomenon that Fed officials and many other experts until recently thought was all but impossible, and some analysts now predict that average home prices will ultimately fall 20 percent from their peak in 2006.

The effect is reducing household wealth. According to data this week from the Fed, net household wealth declined by $900 billion in the fourth quarter of last year.

Indeed, the ratio of homeowners’ equity to the value of their homes fell below 50 percent for the first time in history last year, according to the Fed. Far more alarming, however, is that about 30 percent of all homes bought in 2005 and 2006 are “under water,” meaning they have mortgages that are higher than their resale value.

“We’re at the beginning of the bursting of the housing bubble,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research organization in Washington. “The rate of foreclosures is just going to increase as time goes on.”

Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, noted that the housing calamity thus far has occurred even though unemployment is still low, at just 4.8 percent. But a surge in joblessness would almost certainly lead to more foreclosures and more downward pressure on home prices.

“A downside risk that we do need to consider is whether a rising unemployment rate generated by slow growth will force some people to sell their houses, creating further downward pressure on housing prices,” Mr. Rosengren said in an interview.

In opening up its monetary spigots on Friday, the central bank left little doubt that it wanted to increase the money for mortgage lending.

Its first move was to offer up to $100 billion through the Term Auction Facility, a program created in December that allows any bank or savings and loan to bid for loans at what amounts to wholesale rates and allows them to pledge a wide variety of securities — including mortgage-backed securities that are not tradable at the moment — as collateral.

The central bank’s other new initiative is to lend an additional $100 billion in March through its open-market operations. That money is available only to primary dealers, a few dozen major investment banks, but the loans can be secured by certain mortgage-backed securities, like those issued by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Fed officials said they were prepared to infuse even bigger sums of money into the financial system if they see a need, and the central bank said it was in “close consultation with foreign central bank counterparts” — a hint that it might seek support from other central banks if the credit problems persist.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

The search for a way out of the Democrats’ dilemma.

Eleanor Clift

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Updated: 11:56 AM ET Mar 7, 2008

No matter who wins the remaining primaries, there’s no way for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to capture enough delegates to reach the magic number of 2,025 needed to secure the Democratic nomination. The decision will then fall to the superdelegates, elected officials and party people often demonized in the media as hacks or backroom operators. A majority of them will swing behind one or the other candidate—likely Hillary Clinton—boosting her over the top even if she lags behind Barack Obama in the pledged delegate count.

And they will do this dastardly deed behind closed doors, in the electronic equivalent of the smoke-filled room, plotting over cell phones and making their decision based on implied favors and self-interest. This is the nightmare scenario. The good news for Democrats is that the excitement of two historic candidates generated hundreds of thousands of new voters; the bad news is half of them won’t show up in November. But wait, things could get worse, or maybe better, depending on your perspective.

What happens if the superdelegates are just like the rest of the voters—i.e., they can’t definitively decide between these two candidates? “What happens if they split the superdelegates?” asks an adviser to the Clinton campaign. The roughly 350 superdelegates who have not yet endorsed are all free agents. There’s nothing that says they have to act in concert, and they’ll work to avoid anything that fuels conspiracy theories. “My real worry is there is no back room,” says this adviser. Clinton says she’ll go all the way to the convention in August. If there’s a stalemate, the superdelegates could decide to pass on the first ballot to test the candidates’ strength at that juncture. We could then be way back to the future, the first time in the modern reform age that a candidate is not chosen on the first ballot.

If that happens, the convention could turn to a compromise candidate. Al Gore is the most obvious and perhaps the only contender who could head off a complete meltdown in the party. After all, he already won the popular vote for the presidency. It was only because of a fluke at the Supreme Court that he was denied his turn at the wheel. No one could deny that he’s ready on day one to assume the presidency. “It’s the rational choice if this turns into a goddamn mess, which it could,” says the Clinton adviser, who doesn’t want to be quoted seeming to waver about Clinton’s chances of securing the nomination.

Gore has kept his silence throughout the Democratic nominating season. But his name will surely surface as his party ponders the possibility that they will not have a nominee by the time the convention rolls around—especially since John McCain enjoys a huge head start in launching his general-election campaign. We have the Ted Kennedy forces to thank for the freedom of choice that all delegates enjoy, not just the supers. In 1980, Kennedy argued for an open convention, while President Carter was determined to keep convention delegates bound. With a 600-delegate margin over Kennedy, Carter prevailed. As a result, any delegate voting against the candidate he or she was elected to represent could be replaced by an alternate and thrown off the convention floor. The rule was strict and enforceable. Kennedy couldn’t dislodge any of the Carter delegates. Two years later, after Carter lost the election, the phrase “in all good conscience” was inserted into the rule, belatedly giving delegates the latitude Kennedy had sought.

What does that phrase mean? In the eyes of the Clintonites, it holds the promise of some room to maneuver en route to the nomination. By the time August rolls around, if public opinion polls show John McCain beating Obama by 15 points, then what does a delegate or a superdelegate “in all good conscience” do? This week’s general-election matchups with John McCain have Obama up by 12 points and Clinton up by 6, but that could change with Clinton pounding away at Obama’s inexperience on national security. She’s shameless, telling a military audience this week that she and McCain bring a lifetime of experience to the job of commander in chief, while all Obama brings is a speech. An unbloodied Obama fares better against McCain, but where will he be after Clinton is through with him?

The two contested nominations of the modern era—Kennedy-Carter in ‘80 and Reagan-Ford in ‘76—offer clues as to what may lie ahead. In each case, the candidate with the most pledged delegates going into the convention won the nomination. Each then went on to lose the general election. Clinton backers point to the Reagan model. Governor Reagan stayed in the fight all the way to the convention. He had a hundred delegates fewer than Ford, roughly the same deficit Clinton has today. Reagan helped insure his party’s defeat but nailed the nomination four years later.

With the lines hardening between the Clinton and Obama camps, neither is inclined to yield. “They both have such a strong claim on the nomination, it would be dumb for either one of them to give up,” says the Clinton adviser, predicting that for the first time in the modern “reform” era, the Democrats may select a nominee on the second ballot. Who it will be is anybody’s guess.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/119851

March 7, 2008

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — With the two Democratic presidential candidates in near-deadlock and battling for every delegate, party leaders and the rival campaigns started searching in earnest on Thursday for a way to seat barred delegations from Florida and Michigan. But they remained deeply divided over how to do so.

After weeks in which the issue hovered in the background, it shot to the forefront of the Democratic race as it became apparent that the delegates at stake could be vital in influencing whether Senator Barack Obama or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the nomination.

Mrs. Clinton won the most votes in primaries in Florida and Michigan in January. But the states held their contests earlier than allowed by the Democratic National Committee’s rules, leading the party to strip them of their delegates to the nominating convention. Neither candidate campaigned actively in the two states, and Mr. Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan.

Mr. Obama has maintained a slim but steady lead over Mrs. Clinton in delegates awarded by voting in the primaries and caucuses of other states. The Clinton campaign is hoping she can translate her advantage in the popular vote in Florida and Michigan into a big share of their combined 367 delegates.

The fate of those disputed delegates has emerged as a battle between the candidates that could be as important as their next big primary contest, in Pennsylvania next month.

But though the states, the party and the candidates have all suggested that they have no choice but to find a solution and that they are open to another round of voting, much remains to be settled. Among the issues are what kind of contests to hold, when to hold them, how to allocate the delegates and, critically, who picks up the multimillion-dollar tab in each state.

“I’ll leave it up to the Democratic National Committee to make a decision about how to resolve it,” Mr. Obama told ABC News on Thursday night. “But I certainly want to make sure that we’ve got Michigan and Florida delegates at the convention in some fashion.”

The campaigns are not negotiating with each other, but are talking through surrogates and party leaders about a variety of options.

Aides to Mrs. Clinton, brimming with confidence after primary victories in Ohio and Texas this week, signaled that they were open to a revote under certain conditions. Aides to Mr. Obama were warier, sensing that the recent change in the electoral and psychological dynamic could work against him in any new election in those two states, Democrats said.

In the contests in January, Mrs. Clinton prevailed in Florida by 50 percent to 33 percent over Mr. Obama. In Michigan, where Mr. Obama’s name was not on the ballot, Mrs. Clinton took 55 percent of the vote while “uncommitted” won 40 percent.

“We haven’t ruled out rerunning these contests,” said Harold Ickes, a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton and her chief delegate hunter. “We’ve said we think it should be settled. We believe some configuration could be devised that each party is not happy with but each party is willing to accept.”

In a sign of growing involvement by party leaders, Speaker Nancy Pelosi met privately Thursday with Mr. Ickes and Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, and discussed, among other topics, the Florida and Michigan primary problem, the tone of the campaign and the role of superdelegates. At an earlier news conference, Ms. Pelosi said that the Florida-Michigan issue was a matter of party rules but that she hoped a solution could be found before the party’s convention.

David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, floated the idea of allocating the delegates from the two states 50-50, which would erase Mrs. Clinton’s hypothetical advantage and essentially make the two states meaningless in the competitive delegate count. It would, however, allow Michigan and Florida delegates to participate in the national convention.

Even if Florida and Michigan conduct new elections, it is unlikely that either candidate will have enough pledged delegates to win the nomination outright, advisers to both campaigns say. But their relative strength in pledged delegates could affect their ability to attract support from superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders whose choices are likely to determine the outcome.

If the results of the two primaries are allowed to stand and Mr. Obama is awarded the delegates won by “uncommitted” on the Michigan ballot, Mrs. Clinton would pick up 64 delegates toward the 2,209 that would be needed to secure the nomination if the full Florida and Michigan delegations were seated, according to calculations by her campaign. Mr. Plouffe said he believed Mrs. Clinton’s net advantage would be slightly smaller.

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, said on Thursday that it was up to the states, not the national party, to come up with a solution. But Mr. Dean ruled out seating the delegations based on the voting in January.

“You can’t change the rule in the middle of the game,” he said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” program.

Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat, and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, a Republican, have jointly called on the national party to resolve the situation. Aides to both said on Thursday that they were seeking a solution that did not require either state to pay for new elections.

Ms. Granholm, a Clinton supporter, said Thursday that there would be a noisy protest at the Democratic convention if the Michigan delegation was not seated. But she left open the possibility of a new Democratic primary, as long as the taxpayers or the state party do not have to foot the bill.

“If there is a redo, it has to be inclusive,” she said. “Whatever it is would have to be a primary-like election.”

Florida officials said rerunning a statewide primary could cost as much as $18 million, which some state officials consider prohibitive. “A revote is not going to happen,” said Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a supporter of Mrs. Clinton.

Michigan officials did not estimate the cost of a new election, but party leaders involved in negotiating a solution said that a full statewide election, as opposed to a caucus, could cost as much as $10 million.

A group of Michigan Democratic party elders have been meeting quietly for weeks seeking a solution to the deadlock. The members, all of them officially neutral in the primary, include Senator Carl Levin; Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick; Ron Gettelfinger, the head of the United Auto Workers; and Debbie Dingell, a top General Motors executive, Democratic National Committee member and the wife of Representative John D. Dingell.

“However it gets resolved,” Ms. Dingell said. “it must be a consensus involving all parties, result in the entire delegation being seated, be supported by both candidates and the D.N.C. and be practical and affordable.

“There is also strong consensus that Michigan undertook this because we believe the current system is broken and we believe there must be real and fundamental change in the process and it must be addressed.”

In Florida, Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat who supports Mrs. Clinton, and the state party chairwoman, Karen Thurman, who is neutral, said the national party or some other source should pay for any do-over. Both insisted that Florida’s delegates must be seated, even if that meant allocating the delegates according to the Jan. 29 results.

“If we don’t do anything, we’re looking at a train wreck,” Mr. Nelson said. “I’m hoping reasonable heads with prevail and will see the Democratic Party doesn’t want to be at the convention in Denver two months out from the general election and having a major intraparty fight with two of the biggest and most important states in electing the next president.”

Peter S. Goodman contributed reporting from Michigan, and Carl Hulse from Washington.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

March 6, 2008

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and CARL HULSE

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victories in the primaries on Tuesday barely dented Senator Barack Obama’s lead in delegates, but they seemed to slow the Democratic Party establishment’s move in his direction while giving her campaign time to try to turn the race in her favor.

Mrs. Clinton’s victories in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island cut into Mr. Obama’s delegate lead by 15 delegates at most, and by as few as 5, depending on the final accounting in Texas, which was expected Thursday afternoon.

Mr. Obama now has 1,299 delegates, compared with 1,180 for Mrs. Clinton, based on a count of pledged and projected delegates prepared by The New York Times. A candidate needs 2,025 to claim the nomination, a figure that neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Obama can reach without the votes of so-called superdelegates — party officials and elected Democrats who are awarded automatic seats.

Both campaigns maneuvered for advantage on Wednesday after Mrs. Clinton’s strong showing, and they prepared for the next big showdown, in Pennsylvania, where the political demographics and issues are similar to those in Ohio.

Mr. Obama said he planned to be more aggressive in going after Mrs. Clinton in response to her attacks, setting the groundwork for a tough competition that made some Democrats nervous that the party would bloody itself.

The Clinton campaign suggested it would press on with its efforts to claim delegates from Florida and Michigan, two states where she won primaries that were held in defiance of the Democratic National Committee’s approved calendar and where neither candidate campaigned actively. Mr. Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are embracing sharply different approaches as they try to capture the nomination and rally superdelegates behind them. For Mr. Obama, it is a matter of delegate math as he argues that superdelegates should support whoever has won the most elected delegates after the primary season ends in June. For Mrs. Clinton, it is trying to build momentum — and making a case that she is more electable — to persuade superdelegates to support her.

The prospect of a protracted battle at time when Republicans were coalescing around Senator John McCain of Arizona, who secured his party’s nomination on Tuesday, created unease among at least some Democrats.

“I don’t think anybody I have talked to, whether they are a Hillary supporter, agnostic or an Obama supporter, wants to see this go to the convention, given the opportunity we have to capture the White House,” said Representative John B. Larson, Democrat of Connecticut, Obama backer and member of the House leadership.

But for now at least, aides to both campaigns said, Mrs. Clinton appeared to have frozen the race in place, and slowed the flow of superdelegates into Mr. Obama’s camp. Mr. Obama’s aides had hoped that a poor showing by her on Tuesday would result in a quick move of superdelegates to him.

“Everybody is sort of taking a deep breath right now,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and an Obama supporter.

In a sign of difficult times ahead, there was more pressure on the Democratic Party to devise a way to seat delegations from Michigan and Florida. The governors of both states — Charlie Crist of Florida, a Republican, and Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan, a Democrat, issued an unusual joint statement urging the Democratic National Committee to find a solution for seating the delegations.

“It is intolerable that the national political parties have denied the citizens of Michigan and Florida their votes and voices at their respective national conventions,” Mr. Crist and Ms. Granholm said.

Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, responded by suggesting that the party was open to a solution that would seat the states’ delegations provided they agreed to “follow the rules.”

In Washington, members of the Michigan and Florida Congressional delegations were meeting Wednesday night to discuss ways to resolve the impasse. Democratic Party officials in Michigan have been considering holding a caucus-style election, and a spokeswoman for Ms. Granholm said she was open to the idea as long as no public money was used. Such a caucus has also been discussed for Florida.

In this uncertain atmosphere, several Democrats said they were looking to party leaders to prevent a divisive fight that could last through the summer. But other Democratic leaders argued that the party should let the remaining contests play out.

“I think that the electoral process has to work its way,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “There are still many voters unheard from.”

Mr. Obama’s supporters have argued that the superdelegates should rally around the leader in delegates at the end of the voting. They predicted that Mr. Obama would make up the delegates he lost on Tuesday with coming contests in Mississippi, with a heavily black electorate, and Wyoming, which has caucuses, a process that draws more committed voters, who have tended to support Mr. Obama.

Beyond that, the campaigns offered a taste of what was ahead. Mrs. Clinton’s aides said the results in Ohio and Texas showed that voters had concern about Mr. Obama’s credentials as commander in chief — and that would be a major problem if he ended up facing Mr. McCain.

“Let me state it categorically: This party is not going to nominate somebody who hasn’t passed the commander-in-chief test,” said Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director. “If he can’t convince Democrats in Ohio and Texas that he can be commander in chief, he is not going to be nominee of our party.”

Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s vote in favor of the Iraq war as evidence that she had failed the same test. “The fact remains, on the single biggest issue she’s ever had to deal with, she made a dramatically bad decision,” Mr. Axelrod said. Exchanges like this fed concern among some Democrats that the party had taken a wrong turn on the road to the general election. But other Democrats said that such a debate would in fact benefit the party, keeping Democrats in the spotlight, energizing voters and giving the ultimate nominee a testing that would come in handy.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who left the Democratic presidential race after losing in Iowa, said he was not worried about the consequences of the primary fight.

“I think people are getting a little too excited about it,” Mr. Biden said, suggesting that the emphasis on the Democratic contest may make it hard for Mr. McCain to be heard in the coming weeks. “I think the party is absolutely, positively united in its desire to win the White House. I don’t think there will be any problem getting back together.”

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said, “The sooner obviously this is resolved, it may be the better.”

“On the other hand,” Mr. Hoyer added, ”it is going to be a great deal of attention paid to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton over the next few weeks as well.”

Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

By Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 6, 2008; A01

For the bruised and bitter staff around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tuesday’s death-defying victories in the Democratic presidential primaries in Ohio and Texas proved sweet indeed. They savored their wins yesterday, plotted their next steps and indulged in a moment of optimism. “She won’t be stopped,” one aide crowed.

And then Clinton’s advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit.

With a flurry of phone calls and e-mail messages that began before polls closed, campaign officials made clear to friends, colleagues and reporters that they did not view the wins as validation for the candidate’s chief strategist. “A lot of people would still like to see him go,” a senior adviser said.

The depth of hostility toward Penn even in a time of triumph illustrates the combustible environment within the Clinton campaign, an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination. Clinton now faces the challenge of exploiting this moment of opportunity while at the same time deciding whether the squabbling at her Arlington headquarters has become a distraction that requires her intervention.

Many of her advisers are waging a two-front war, one against Sen. Barack Obama and the second against one another, but their most pressing challenge is figuring out why Clinton won in Ohio and Texas and trying to duplicate it. While Penn sees his strategy as a reason for the victories that have kept her candidacy alive, other advisers attribute the wins to her perseverance, favorable demographics and a new campaign manager. Clinton won “despite us, not because of us,” one said.

Sifting through the data yesterday, her divided circle offered other theories. Some credit field operatives who set up organizations in record time. Others cite strong Hispanic outreach in South Texas that held off a late Obama push. And even some Penn opponents grudgingly cite his television commercial that asked which Democrat is more prepared for a 3 a.m. crisis call at the White House.

In the days leading up to the Ohio and Texas contests, Clinton presented herself as the victim of media bias and displayed a sense of humor on “Saturday Night Live” at the same time her staff was holding daily conference calls attacking Obama on his trade record and for his ties to an indicted real estate developer. The yin-yang approach — going positive and negative at the same time — may not have been deliberate, but it seemed to work.

“There has been a long-term disagreement on strategy over whether to focus on character . . . or raising questions about Senator Obama,” said one top Clinton aide who was at the core of the fight. “What’s happened over the last two weeks is we’ve done both.”

One of Clinton’s favorite books is “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet, and she assembled her own team of advisers knowing their mutual enmity in the belief that good ideas come from vigorous discussion. But while many campaigns are beset by backbiting and power struggles, dozens of interviews indicate that the internal problems endured by the Clinton team have been especially corrosive.

They fought over Penn’s strategy of presenting Clinton as a strong commander in chief rather than trying to humanize her, as aides such as admaker Mandy Grunwald and chief spokesman Howard Wolfson wanted to do. They fought over deployment of assets and dwindling resources, pointing fingers over the failure to field organizations in many states. They fought over how to handle former president Bill Clinton and his habit of drifting away from his talking points into provocative territory.

At the center of much of this turmoil has been Penn, the rumpled, brusque, numbers-crunching strategist respected even by his foes for his intelligence, if not his social graces. A trusted adviser to the Clintons since helping orchestrate Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996, Penn mapped out a strategy emphasizing strength and experience but, in the view of critics, did not adjust adequately when it became clear that voters wanted change.

“I think about all camps think it’s Mark’s fault,” said a Clinton White House veteran close to the campaign. “I don’t think there is a Mark camp.” Another person who has advised the senator from New York said: “Penn should have been let go. He failed the campaign in developing a message and evolving the message as things changed.”

But there is a Penn camp, however small, that believes in his message of strength, experience, and fear of recession and crisis — and its most important members are Bill and Hillary Clinton. Three times, campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle and senior adviser Harold Ickes tried to hire another national pollster so Penn would not be the one to test his own message, campaign sources said, and three times they were rejected. When the candidate forced out Solis Doyle last month after a string of defeats, the departing manager said Penn should also be fired, to no avail, sources said.

Penn declined to respond when reached yesterday, but he has been firing back in conversations with compatriots in recent days, arguing that he never had control of the campaign’s finances or organization, instead blaming Ickes, Solis Doyle and her deputy, Mike Henry, who resigned. “Mark Penn’s point is: ‘I didn’t do any of the spending,’ ” said a campaign colleague who has heard the argument. “Penn’s whole point is: ‘To say I had control of the money is crazy. Patti was in charge.’ ”

And so strangely enough, a moment of victory for the Clinton camp somehow feels less than victorious. “Mark blames Patti and Patti blames Mark in a circular firing squad,” said an adviser who has worked for both Clintons and watched Penn, Solis Doyle, Ickes, Wolfson, Grunwald and others go at it for months. “What they don’t realize is that everyone else blames them — all of them.”

‘Resentment Within the Campaign’
The Centennial Hotel in Concord, N.H., was a grim place the night of Jan. 7. Fresh off a third-place finish in Iowa on Jan. 3, Clinton looked as though she would lose the New Hampshire primary the next day, a defeat that could be fatal to her presidential bid. Penn sat on his bed in his hotel room and drafted a plan for how to go forward.

He had no idea whether he would be around to execute such a strategy. Exasperated, Hillary and Bill Clinton were sketching out a staff shake-up. They would bring in former aides, such as Douglas B. Sosnik and Steve Ricchetti, two of the “White Boys,” as her staff still called his advisers from their White House days. Hillary Clinton would ask her former chief of staff, Maggie Williams, to effectively take over, although Solis Doyle would keep her title. “People are telling me the campaign’s not working, and I’ve got to show I’m making changes,” Clinton told aides.

When word got around, there was a “parade to the doorstep” of the candidate by other top aides urging her to keep Solis Doyle or accept their resignations, a senior adviser said. “There was virtual universal agreement that if there was fault, it should be laid at the door of Mark Penn, not Patti Solis Doyle,” the adviser said. “People thought change should be made, but the wrong person was being fired. And it created enormous resentment within the campaign.”

Penn has been a lightning rod ever since the 1996 campaign. More comfortable with data than people, he promoted a centrist approach that was policy-driven and successful but bloodless. He earned a passel of enemies along the way. Longtime Clinton advisers such as Ickes, James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, John Podesta and Paul Begala openly despise him, and some even nicknamed him “Schlumbo.” Ickes and others tried unsuccessfully to get Penn fired from Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign.

Penn did not make a lot of new friends in his latest campaign, arguing against any apologies for Clinton’s vote to go to war with Iraq and generating resentment with PowerPoint survey presentations that did not give colleagues the data they sought. He chastised a campaign aide who described him in a campaign document as “pollster” instead of his title “chief strategist.” At the same time, Penn’s firm has taken in $10 million from the campaign, the vast bulk of which has gone to direct mail and polling, with about $240,000 for the consulting team. But defenders point to the strategist’s record of success and say opponents are too focused on personality.

In the end, New Hampshire delivered a stunning upset victory for Clinton, and she pulled back on part of her shake-up plan. The newcomers would come on board, but everyone already there would stay. “I’m not dead,” a relieved Penn told a colleague as votes came in. Williams joined the team but was assigned to specific projects such as youth outreach and surrogate speakers.

The campaign managed to build on its momentum by going next to Nevada, where it won another surprise victory on Jan. 19 despite Obama’s support from key unions. But next up was South Carolina, where the African American vote was dominant in Democratic primaries. A serious debate ensued about how much to invest in the state. Strategists wanted to target specific congressional districts where they might pick up delegates but limit their time there.

“Bill Clinton just aggressively disagreed,” said a top campaign official involved in the discussion. “He was like, ‘No, I’m going to South Carolina and it’s stupid to cede it.’ I think it was personal for him. He was not about to lose the African American vote he had spent so long” courting. So he went to South Carolina and stayed.

The campaign had long ago discovered its limitations in dealing with the former president. He was, after all, no ordinary candidate’s spouse. Her aides had become irritated trying to prod his staff to hire a new press secretary and complained that they had a hard time getting one of their own people onto his airplane to keep him on message. For their part, Bill Clinton’s people viewed her staff warily, grousing that they never consulted him through much of 2007 or even showed him a calendar of events.

“The greatest challenge going into the campaign,” a senior campaign aide said with a sigh, “was the management of Bill Clinton.”

That seemed evident in South Carolina. The former president had grown frustrated that the campaign had not aggressively challenged Obama and so took it upon himself to go after the senator from Illinois, but in the process his comments unwittingly triggered an uproar that many Clinton advisers think the Obama campaign fanned by — in their view — twisting his words to paint him unfairly as a racist.

The Clinton camp ended up spending nearly $7 million in South Carolina, but Obama won in a landslide. On Jan. 26, the day of the election, Penn sent an e-mail to the senior campaign staff comparing Obama’s victory there to Jesse L. Jackson’s two wins in the 1980s. Bill Clinton made the same comparison to reporters that day, generating even more anger among African Americans who perceived it as a way of marginalizing Obama by portraying him as a black candidate who appeals only to black voters.

As Clinton strategists woke up the next morning, they realized that the African American constituency, a backbone of the Democratic coalition, was permanently lost to her. Only then were some of his closest former aides, such as Sosnik, former White House lawyer Cheryl D. Mills and fundraiser Terence R. McAuliffe, tapped to talk with him about reining in his rhetoric, and a daily conference call was established to try to enforce it.

“You had your Hillary people, and you had your Bill people,” said the top campaign official. “There were some crossovers, but very few. The Hillary people could never tell him to cut the [crap] because they were Hillary people — and vice versa.”

‘This Can’t Be Happening’
As one of his generation’s smartest political strategists, Bill Clinton understood without anyone telling him that he had damaged the campaign, distracting the public at a time when his wife should have been reintroducing herself with the New Hampshire and Nevada victories at her back. If he did not, he got a powerful wake-up call.

During South Carolina, Clinton friends in Massachusetts such as longtime operative John Sasso and former Kennedy family aides began blitzing the Arlington headquarters with warnings that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) was planning to endorse Obama. But the camp was slow to react, they complained. “People in Boston were apoplectic,” a Clinton fundraiser said. “I got the sense it never got high enough up in the organization. And then they realized, ‘Oh, my God, this can’t be happening.’ ”

Once it fully dawned on the campaign that the head of the nation’s most storied Democratic family planned to pass the torch to Obama, both Hillary and Bill Clinton called to try to change his mind. Kennedy, who according to sources close to him was offended by remarks that seemed to diminish his brother John F. Kennedy’s role in civil rights, gave Bill Clinton an earful about his rhetoric.

A Clinton aide called it “a very testy conversation.” Another said the former president adamantly denied making offensive remarks. “There’s nothing I said that was racial,” the aide quoted Clinton as saying. But it was too late, and Kennedy’s endorsement two days after South Carolina was a heavy blow.

Hillary Clinton had little time to turn things around before Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, and a campaign that had raised more than $100 million in 2007 suddenly found itself short of money. Ickes and Solis Doyle went to the Clintons for a loan to pay for television ads. The candidate was exasperated. “God, I’ve raised all this money,” she exclaimed, according to one person informed about the conversation. “What have you guys done with it?”

The Clintons lent the campaign $5 million, and Solis Doyle and Henry focused resources on a dozen battleground states, mainly large ones such as California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, as well as Arizona and New Mexico, with large Hispanic populations. But they essentially did not compete in smaller states holding caucuses. Clinton, feeling burned by Iowa, had become allergic to caucuses, deeming them unfair.

Ickes and political director Guy Cecil argued that such states were important because even if she lost, she would pick up delegates with a strong showing. That would soon become clear. Clinton racked up big wins in California, New Jersey and even Kennedy’s Massachusetts. But she lost the caucus states, and because of the party’s proportional rules, it cost her.

“That was one of the biggest blunders we had,” a senior official said.

Obama invested in Idaho, for example, while Clinton did not, and as a result he won 15 delegates to her three. In New Jersey, on the other hand, Clinton won 59 delegates to 48 for Obama. So the net 12 delegates Obama picked up in Idaho offset the 11 net delegates she earned in the much bigger state of New Jersey.

“You end up canceling out everything we had done in New Jersey,” said Hassan Nemazee, the campaign’s finance co-chairman. “All that work in New Jersey was essentially nullified.”

‘Oligarchy at the Top’
Ickes was characteristically blunt on the conference call after Super Tuesday. It was quite likely that Clinton would lose the next 11 contests, colleagues recall him saying. Cecil had submitted plans for post-Feb. 5 states, but they had been rejected. The campaign had not initially thought the nomination battle would go beyond Super Tuesday and it was out of cash. “We were running on fumes,” one aide said.

Nerves were raw by this point. Penn and Grunwald engaged in a 15-minute squabble that later made it into the media over which ad to run in Virginia. He wanted an ominous one called “Freefall” that warned of bad economic times, while she wanted one called “Can Do” featuring the candidate talking against patriotic music about solving problems. Cecil grew so exasperated, he stood up and left. “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to people in the room. “You guys need to grow up. You’re acting like kids. I’ve got work to do.”

A more explosive example of the stress came a few days later. Phil Singer, the campaign’s deputy communications director, emerged from a meeting on Feb. 11 and without explanation started angrily cursing the war room. “[Expletive] all of you,” he shouted, according to a witness, then stormed out and did not return for several days.

Penn was growing increasingly aggravated by what he saw as an untenable management structure, which another aide described as an “oligarchy at the top.” Penn had no real people of his own on the inside and chafed whenever Solis Doyle or Ickes got involved in his sphere. At one point, he and Ickes, who have been battling each other within the Clinton orbit for a dozen years, lost their tempers during a conference call, according to two participants.

“[Expletive] you!” Ickes shouted.

“[Expletive] you!” Penn replied.

“[Expletive] you!” Ickes shouted again.

By now, Williams had decided it was untenable to stay unless she was really running the campaign. Clinton called Solis Doyle on Feb. 9 as she was losing three more states, and the decision was announced the next day when she lost a fourth. It was painful for both, because Solis Doyle had worked for Clinton most of her adult life. Henry, her deputy, turned in his resignation letter the next day and stayed just long enough to see out three more losses, in Virginia, Maryland and the District.

Solis Doyle built a massive organization with more than 1,000 people on the payroll virtually overnight, and she was popular with a lot of colleagues. But there was a strong faction that resented her for shutting out experienced advisers from Clinton’s Senate office, including chief of staff Tamera Luzzatto, health-care specialist Laurie Rubiner, communications adviser Lorraine Voles and longtime spokesman Philippe Reines. She also irritated colleagues by running late and frequently canceling appointments, and she drew fire for the campaign’s financial problems.

If Solis Doyle was like Clinton’s daughter, Williams was like her sister. She let aides vent and express their views, but then quickly made decisions. She impressed aides and supporters looking for a stronger hand. “Maggie said, ‘I am ready for this fight,’ and the room burst out into applause,” Robert Zimmerman, a top Clinton fundraiser, recalled of her introduction to supporters via speakerphone. “It reflected the desire to see the campaign really engage in an aggressive issue debate.”

She inherited a campaign well behind Obama in upcoming states. “Until we got to the 6th or 7th of February, there was no Hillary Clinton campaign in Wisconsin or most other states,” said Joe Wineke, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Obama outspent Clinton on the air in Wisconsin by $1.5 million to $300,000, he said, and scored a strong victory on Feb. 19.

For all their conflicts, senior Clinton advisers agreed that the campaign hit rock bottom in Wisconsin. Only after that did the team, tattered and exhausted, begin to pick itself up. News of Clinton’s loan to her campaign touched off a frenzy of Internet fundraising as supporters who assumed she had enough money rushed to contribute, the first success she has had in the sort of grass-roots fundraising Obama has mastered.

In Austin on Feb. 21, Clinton had a solid debate performance, although her aides groaned as she accused Obama of offering “change you can Xerox.” The line, advisers said, was offered during debate preparation by Bruce Reed, a Clinton White House official, but onstage it came across as forced and drew boos.

In the end, ironically, it was male voters who saved Clinton. A confluence of factors in the final 10 days — her advertising strategy, her renewed communications push, her shaken-up team — restored her in one of her weakest demographics in Ohio and Texas. Her victories quieted talk both inside and outside the campaign that she should drop out.

Yet renewal has come so late that advisers worry it may be too difficult to overtake Obama. “There was an arrogant attitude on the part of the campaign for many months,” one lamented. “And now we’re in a fight for our lives.”

Staff writer Matthew Mosk contributed to this report.

By Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, March 5, 2008; A01

As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton raced from border towns on the Rio Grande to farm communities in the Midwest trying to salvage her troubled presidential campaign in recent days, advisers at her Arlington headquarters were awash in mixed feelings about whether she should go on.

Decisive victories in both Ohio and Texas, they agreed, would justify staying in the race until the next big primary in Pennsylvania in seven weeks. Defeats in both of the big states would spell the end. But the prospect of a split decision or close results generated sharply different judgments from her strategists about her future.

Clinton wiped away the debate last night with a robust victory in Ohio and a narrow win in Texas. But as she vowed to keep campaigning, the tight vote in Texas signaled she may yet face a tough decision in coming weeks. The slim margin in the Texas popular vote and an additional caucus process in which she trailed made clear that she would not win enough delegates to put a major dent in Sen. Barack Obama’s lead. And regardless of the results, she emerged from the crucible of Ohio and Texas with a campaign mired in debt and riven by dissension

Clinton plans to use her triumphs in Ohio and Texas, as well as in Rhode Island, to argue that she still has a credible claim to the Democratic nomination, despite the delegate math. Many in her circle believe she finally recaptured momentum on the campaign trail in recent days and managed to put Obama on the defensive by questioning his readiness to serve as commander in chief. If nothing else, they hope she has earned a new lease to make her case to the nation.

Appearing before jubilant supporters in Columbus last night, an energized Clinton seized on the Ohio victory and declared that she will go “all the way” to the White House. “Keep on watching,” she said. “Together, we’re going to make history.”

As the results came in, aides reported that the dark mood that has clouded her campaign headquarters for weeks had finally lifted, and talk of dropping out was fading. “It means she goes on,” a senior campaign strategist said on the condition of anonymity. “All the late-breaking voters went with her, and the next batch of states favor her. He is starting to get scrutiny like he has never seen before, and he is out of material to talk about on the trail.”

Another Democrat who has advised her noted that Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, have made a career of refusing to give in when the establishment has counted them out. “She doesn’t give up,” the Democrat said. “He doesn’t give up.”

Critical to Clinton’s prospect of victory are the superdelegates, the nearly 800 elected officials and party leaders who can vote any way they choose. Her campaign envisions what aides call a “buyer’s remorse” strategy of raising enough doubts about the first-term senator from Illinois through increasingly vigorous attacks and tougher media scrutiny to convince the superdelegates that it would be too risky to nominate him.

That reflects the recognition that it would be enormously difficult for Clinton to overtake Obama in the pledged delegates chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses. By some calculations, Clinton would need to win more than 60 percent of the vote in the dozen contests remaining between now and June 7 to catch Obama in pledged delegates — a steep challenge given that, so far, she has won that much in only one state, her onetime adopted home of Arkansas. Even in New York, where she is a sitting senator, she won 57 percent of the vote. She won 55 percent in Michigan, where Obama was not even on the ballot.

“Her durability is impressive if not astonishing, but she is still looking at some pretty cold, hard numbers in the race,” said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist who initially ran the 2004 primary campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). “She’s running out of time, she’s running out of space.” He described a Clinton nomination even with wins in Texas and Ohio as “impossible, really.”

Steve McMahon, another Democratic strategist who is not working for either candidate, said the odds are long. “It’s difficult to see how the math works for Senator Clinton,” he said. “If you look at most models out there circulating, the one thing that’s consistent is that she has to perform pretty strongly in order to have any hope of making up the deficit among elected delegates.”

Still, Clinton supporters said yesterday’s results suggested that Obama has not been able to close the deal, leaving her an opening. “She has lost 11 states in a row — and the closest was Wisconsin, which she lost by 17″ percentage points, said Paul Begala, who was a White House aide to her husband. “The theory of momentum suggested Obama should roll up equally large margins today, but voters seem to want to keep this race going. I suspect Senator Clinton agrees with them.”

Indeed, Clinton had hinted Monday that she was ready to keep the race going. “I’m just getting warmed up,” she said. She seemed to surge on the strength of attacks on Obama’s leadership preparation, conflicting statements about the North American Free Trade Agreement and connections to fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko, whose trial on unrelated extortion and money laundering charges opened Monday.

But candidates rarely admit they are considering dropping out until the moment they do. And Clinton, until the Ohio results came in, deflected questions about her plans yesterday, saying that she did not like to make predictions when asked repeatedly what she would do if she lost Texas, Ohio or both.

“No person has ever won the White House without winning the Ohio primary in either party, so I think Ohio is pretty important,” Clinton said in an interview with the NBC affiliate in Columbus. “The voters are not ready for this to be over. They want to be sure they are picking the person who would be the strongest nominee against John McCain.”

Clinton has been counting on Ohio and Texas to vault her back into contention after losing every contest since Super Tuesday on Feb. 5. Her strong showings in those states may now help curb what some Clinton strategists had expected to be escalating calls from senior Democrats to end her campaign in the interest of pulling the party together to face McCain, the Republican nominee. But Obama’s allies said they would try to avoid piling on, recognizing that it might only prod her to stay in.

“I don’t think anybody in the Obama campaign is going to tell her to get out,” said former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), an Obama supporter. “Only Hillary can decide what’s right and what her future course should be. It becomes increasingly difficult to see mathematically how she can do it, but there may be other reasons to stay involved other than winning the nomination.”

Her organization, though, is drained of money and energy. Outgunned by Obama in the fundraising department, the Clinton campaign is carrying millions of dollars in debt, although officials would not say how much, and it threw everything it had into Texas and Ohio. Campaign aides expressed optimism that she will draw a new infusion of money after these primaries and have enough to go forward, although that remains unclear.

Perhaps just as significant, many on her team appear exhausted and dispirited. Advisers have not waited for Ohio and Texas to launch into a furious debate about whom to blame for her problems. Senior advisers described the infighting as debilitating and destructive, with some members of her inner circle barely speaking to one another. Many fault Mark Penn, the campaign’s chief strategist, for crafting a message they said did not match the mood of the year. Penn’s allies blame other advisers for mismanaging campaign finances and not putting organizations on the ground in many caucus states.

As recently as last week, there were divisions among top advisers over which advertisement to use against Obama — one attacking his Iraq war position, or one featuring a “3 a.m. call” to the White House that describes Clinton as better prepared to be president. The latter advertisement won out. But Clinton advisers were infuriated about the original debate, blaming Penn for encouraging her to cling to an unsuccessful argument — that Obama’s deeds have not matched his stated opposition to the Iraq war.

And even though Penn claimed credit for the phone-call ad, senior Clinton advisers expressed confusion over whether Penn or Austin ad guru Roy Spence had made it. Penn’s allies said he made the ad — and insisted on airing it over the objections of other senior advisers, including Mandy Grunwald, who is technically in charge of ad making. Penn wrote the ad, his allies said, and Grunwald reluctantly made it, but then tried to get it spiked.

The sniping over the ad was the latest expression of divisions within a team that has never been cohesive. Advisers complained bitterly about one other, and stories in the media delineated their differences. Several people inside the campaign said earlier that if Clinton won last night, it would be despite her campaign, not because of it.

Moving forward, Clinton officials think she will probably lose the next two contests, in Wyoming on Saturday and Mississippi on Tuesday. Their firewall, they hope, is Pennsylvania on April 22, giving Clinton time to continue raising doubts about Obama’s experience, questioning his sincerity about toughening trade laws and appealing to women in a state that mirrors Ohio’s working-class demographics. Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a strong Clinton ally, believes he could engineer a victory for her.

“The streak of losses has been snapped,” one adviser said last night. “I think we touched bottom a week ago, and we’ve been coming back up, and the question was: Did we have enough time? And so far, based on the results, we did.”

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 3, 2008; C01

During a campaign stop in Ohio last week, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Barack Obama about what he called “an attempt by conservatives and Republicans to paint you as unpatriotic.”

Tapper’s litany: “That you didn’t put your hand over your heart during the national anthem, that you no longer wear an American flag on your lapel pin, that you met with some former members of the Weather Underground, and now they are questioning your wife’s comments when she said she hasn’t been proud of the U.S. until just recently.”

Obama dismissed the criticism as “nonsense.” But did the exchange mark the end of a long period in which the media have gone easy on the man who could all but clinch the Democratic nomination in tomorrow’s primaries? Are the media going to change the environment that prompted Kristen Wiig, playing a CNN anchor on “Saturday Night Live,” to declare that she and her colleagues “are in the tank for Obama”?

The Illinois senator still hasn’t faced the sort of negative onslaught that generally envelops presidential front-runners. But after a year of defying the laws of journalistic gravity, he is being brought back to earth.

Some of this involves recycled reporting that didn’t get much traction the first time around. Within the last two weeks, ABC’s “World News” has done a story on Obama voting “present” nearly 130 times as an Illinois legislator, two months after that information was on the New York Times front page. “NBC Nightly News” has followed up a two-week-old Times piece about Obama compromising on Senate legislation affecting a nuclear energy company that contributed to his campaign. A “CBS Evening News” segment reviewed a series of negative points — Obama’s controversial pastor, his ties to indicted fundraiser Tony Rezko, voting present, the nuclear contributions and the lack of a flag pin.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton maintains the media have “consistently examined both his public and personal record.” Burton calls suggestions of soft treatment “a false premise that is advocated by a couple of members of the media and the Clinton campaign. The investigative teams at the networks, major national news organizations and the Chicago papers would take great issue with the notion they haven’t examined Barack Obama’s record.” The Chicago newspapers have been the most aggressive by far.

Some conservative commentators, after years of obsessing over Hillary Clinton, are now training their fire on Obama. Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham, appearing at a John McCain event, generated a wave of coverage last week by challenging the media to “peel the bark off Barack Hussein Obama.”

In his Times column, Bill Kristol picked up on Obama’s comment in October that he views wearing a flag pin as a substitute for true patriotism. “Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin,” Kristol declared.

Erick Erickson, editor of the blog RedState, wrote that voters should be wary of “the liberal anti-gun former cokehead whose feminist wife hates America.”

Michelle Obama became talk-show fodder when she said on Feb. 18 that “for the first time in my adult life, I’m really proud of my country.” But for the following week, there was no mention of the flap in a Washington Post or New York Times news story, although the Los Angeles Times jumped on the controversy.

There was also little pickup when the Politico reported that a decade ago Obama visited Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, the 1960s radicals whose Weather Underground group was involved in two dozen bombings. And the issue of Obama’s dealings with Rezko all but vanished after a brief flurry until the run-up to his trial, which begins today.

Similarly, there was scant media mention of Louis Farrakhan’s support for Obama until Tim Russert challenged the senator to repudiate that support at last week’s MSNBC debate — making Russert the target of some liberal bloggers who say he went overboard on the issue.

Would Clinton have skated as easily if she were found to have visited radicals tied to violence? Or bought land from an indicted businessman, as in the Rezko case? Or if the pastor of her church had talked about “this racist United States of America,” as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who heads Obama’s church, has?

That is hard to imagine. Clinton’s complaints about media imbalance are buttressed by a new study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs. From Dec. 16 through Feb. 19, it says, the three network newscasts aired reports that were 84 percent positive for Obama and 53 percent positive for Clinton. She scored higher on evaluations of policy and public performance, but that amounted to only 10 percent of the coverage.

On Friday, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told reporters there was a “staggering” gap between the Rezko coverage and the volume of questions he fielded about her indicted fundraiser, Norman Hsu. Yet Clinton’s team angered the press again by not telling traveling reporters in Texas that she was flying to New York to appear on “SNL” — intelligence they had to learn from Obama aides.

Still, after a year in which Obama was hailed as the second coming of JFK, will his Teflon coating now be scratched? Tapper says he asked Obama about his patriotism “because obviously Democratic voters think the nominee should be someone who is able to withstand Republican conservative attacks.” He says he noticed such criticism spreading on talk radio, cable shows and blogs, and “to act as if we can ignore other parts of the media because we’re snobby about it . . . then we’re irrelevant, because we’re missing part of the story.

“It’s very difficult to argue that the level of scrutiny of Barack Obama has been the same as the level of scrutiny of other candidates.”

But, Tapper says, holding Obama accountable is difficult because he speaks to reporters infrequently.

RedState’s Erickson says the media haven’t really focused on Obama’s positions. “I’ve spent the last six months accumulating stuff from his voting record. This is an opportunity to define him,” he says.

Erickson concedes that his “cokehead” crack was a distraction, saying he would not join the ranks of partisan commentators who “write in such a hyperbolic way that it destroys their credibility. It’s going to be the template, as with the Clinton-haters, for the Obama-haters to report on the salacious and the rumors.”

But the media don’t need to descend into Rumorland to give a candidate a hard time. After Russert raised the issue of Obama’s pastor at the debate, CNN did a piece on the senator’s relationship with Wright, an admirer of Farrakhan. (Obama says they disagree on some issues.) The Washington Post, followed by the Times, ran a story on Obama trying to reassure Jewish leaders about his commitment to Israel, a controversy that had been brewing for months.

One overlooked aspect of Obama’s success may be his skill at defusing hostile media inquiries. He preempted critics by calling his dealings with Rezko a “boneheaded mistake.” He has talked about the danger of spending “too much time arguing with the refs,” says a new book by Chicago reporter David Mendell. The question is whether Obama can resist that temptation if journalists start tackling him more often.

So Much for Diplomacy
Sam Zell, the Chicago businessman who now owns the Tribune Co., recently hurled an obscenity at a photographer for one of his papers, the Orlando Sentinel. Zell apologized, and editors at the Los Angeles Times, the largest Tribune paper, issued a memo saying it was all right for the boss to curse but not the employees.

Some staffers in the company’s Washington bureau certainly felt like uttering expletives — and one female staffer was left in tears — after a Zell visit last week. The new boss complained about the size of the Times’ 47-person contingent, saying that far fewer reporters were covering California’s Orange County and perhaps the numbers should be reversed.

Doyle McManus, the Times bureau chief, tried to reassure his demoralized staff afterward. In a memo, McManus said Zell’s comments “shouldn’t be taken literally. . . . Sam Zell likes to say his role is to throw bombs and shake people up.” On that point, he succeeded.

Cruelty to Animals
California’s North County Times has fired an editor with a warped sense of humor. As a joke, the unnamed editor mucked with a wire-service account of a news conference on pet spaying at which a Los Angeles City Council member “held a kitten,” changing the verb to “strangled.” The paper apologized for the “terrible mistake.”

Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008

By Michael Kinsley

Republicans have pulled some dirty tricks before: Swift Boats, Watergate, you name it. But this time they have gone too far. In its desperate hunger for victory at any cost, the Republican Party is on the verge of choosing a presidential candidate, John McCain, who is widely regarded (everywhere except inside the Republican Party itself) as honest, courageous, likable and intelligent.

Have they no shame?

More important: Have they no principles? In a properly functioning two-party democracy, each party is supposed to nominate a person whom members of the other party will detest. Ordinarily this is not a problem. In recent years, the basic principles of each party have been anathema to the other. If a candidate in addition has a personality that gives the opposition fits, or a few character flaws it deplores, that is gravy. Indeed, since Ronald Reagan (who last ran for office a quarter-century ago), the parties haven’t even liked their own candidates all that much. The dilemma of liking the opposition candidate just hasn’t arisen.

There is a word for it when a political party chooses a presidential candidate with more appeal in the opposition party than in his own. That word is cheating. For heaven’s sake, if the Republicans want to keep the White House that badly, why don’t they just nominate Hillary Clinton and be done with it?

As a lifelong Democrat, I have wallowed in the luxury of voting against some of the most unappealing politicians in American history, starting with Richard Nixon and ending (so far) with George W. Bush. I am surely going to vote against McCain, but it is going to take work, and there will be moments of doubt. This will be no fun. Doubts are for independents.

Only a couple of years ago, there were noises that McCain might admit he was much too nice to be a Republican and might run for President as an independent–or even as a Democrat. Democrats swooned and said they would vote for McCain because he was “honest.” McCain is perceived as authentic, which is a deeper form of honesty than mere truth-telling. He says he’s antiabortion? Oh, he doesn’t mean that. Among current or recent figures in American public life, only Colin Powell shares McCain’s mystical ability to make liberals believe he secretly agrees with them, no matter what he actually says. And Powell has to work at having it both ways. For McCain, it’s a gift. Mitt Romney demonstrated that there are limits to how many brazen flip-flops the voters will tolerate. But when people believe you are telling the truth if you agree with them and lying if you disagree, you don’t need to flip-flop.

What a brilliant bluff the Republicans have been acting out these past couple of years! It’s like the elaborate hoax in the movie The Sting. They had us convinced that their nominating process was some version of the Salem witch trials, testing the candidates for any sign of heresy and hanging or drowning the ones who flunked. Then they choose the very guy many Republicans most suspect of being a witch. If you doubt that the whole thing was staged, just consider who the runner-up was. How could a party truly dedicated to self-destruction through ideological purity end up with the choice of McCain or Romney?

If the Democrats nominate Hillary, both parties will have chosen candidates who are intensely loathed by more than a few of their own members. But the parallel stops there. McCain is widely admired among Democrats, and many Democratic Hillary haters will be happy to vote for him. By contrast, there is no constituency for Hillary among Republicans who can’t stand McCain. Nor, for that matter, will many of them vote for Barack Obama.

If it’s Hillary, people’s growing dislike of Bush, his horrible war, his crumbling economy, his tiresome smirk, will help McCain. Even though McCain is the candidate of the President’s party and even though he is the biggest supporter of the Iraq war outside of the Administration, McCain is the one who will seem like a new broom that sweeps clean. Hillary, meanwhile, has been transformed by the Washington press corps in the past few weeks from the first woman with a serious chance of becoming President into a two-headed monster always referred to as “the Clintons.”

I cannot believe that a man as fine and decent as McCain would want to become President by the underhanded tactic of accepting the nomination of a party that loves him only for his appeal to the opposition. If McCain were half the principled gentleman he pretends to be, he would drop out now in favor of Rush Limbaugh. Now there’s a Republican you can sink your teeth into.

Conservative slogans sound anachronistic in the context of today’s problems, like an old TV show from the 1970s.

By Fareed Zakaria

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:02 PM ET Feb 16, 2008

Conservatives are a gloomy bunch at the moment. Many believe that their party—the Republican Party—has lost its way and that it has done so by abandoning its principles. Aside from his foreign policy and Supreme Court appointments, conservatives find little to love about George W. Bush. His signature domestic policies include a vast expansion of government-financed health care (prescription-drug benefits), and increased funding for education while halfheartedly promoting vouchers and school choice. Bush also signed into law campaign-finance reform and supported a proposed immigration bill that would have allowed illegal aliens a path to citizenship. The Republican Congress is even worse, having indulged in an orgy of irresponsible spending. And now the party is set to nominate John McCain as its presidential nominee, a man who on several key issues has broken with Republican orthodoxy and voted with Democrats. For conservatives, a return to principles is the only way to be returned to power.

David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, begs to differ. “On the contrary,” Frum writes in his smart new book, “Comeback,” “the evidence suggests that a more consistent, more principled, more conservative administration would have been even more soundly rejected by the public than the unpopular Bush administration ever was.” As Frum documents, every Bush policy that conservatives decry is in fact wildly popular. Public support for prescription-drug benefits ranges from 80 to 90 percent. And every Bush policy conservatives favor is regarded by the public with great suspicion. A majority of Americans regard the Bush tax cuts as “not worth it,” and would prefer increased spending or balancing the budget to cutting taxes. In the one area where Bush remains unfailingly popular with conservatives—foreign policy—public support has also collapsed. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who believe that military force can reduce the risk of terrorism dropped sharply between 2002 and 2006, from 48 percent to 32 percent.

Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age—a time when socialism was still a serious economic idea, when marginal tax rates reached 70 percent, and when the government regulated the price of oil and natural gas, interest rates on checking accounts and the number of television channels. The culture seemed under attack by a radical fringe. It was an age of stagflation and crime at home, as well as defeat and retreat abroad. Into this landscape came Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, bearing a set of ideas about how to fix the world. Over the next three decades, most of their policies were tried. Many worked. Others didn’t, but in any event, time passed and the world changed profoundly. Today, as Frum writes, “after three decades of tax cutting, most Americans no longer pay very much income tax.” Inflation has been tamed, the economy does not seem overregulated to most, and crime is not at the forefront of people’s consciousness. The culture has proved robust, and has in fact been enriched and broadened by its diversity. Abroad, the cold war is won and America sits atop an increasingly capitalist world. Whatever our problems, an even bigger military and more unilateralism are not seen as the solution.

Today’s world has a different set of problems. A robust economy has not lifted the median wages of Americans by much. Most workers are insecure about health care, and most corporations are unnerved by its rising costs. Globalization is seen as a threat, bringing fierce competition from dozens of countries. The danger of Islamic militancy remains real and lasting, but few Americans believe they understand the phenomenon or know how best to combat it. They see our addiction to oil and the degradation of the environment as real dangers to a stable and successful future. Most crucially, Americans’ views of the state are shifting. They don’t want bigger government—a poll last year found that a majority (57 percent) still believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life—but they do want a smarter government, one that can help them be safe, secure and well prepared for political and economic challenges. In this context, conservative slogans sound weirdly anachronistic, like watching an old TV show from … well, from the 1970s.

“The Emerging Democratic Majority,” written in 2002, makes the case that perhaps for these broad reasons, the conservative tilt in U.S. politics is fast diminishing. It gained a brief respite after 9/11, when raised fears and heightened nationalism played to Republican advantages. But the trends are clear. Authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note that several large groups have begun to vote Democratic consistently—women, college-educated professionals, youth and minorities. With the recent furor over immigration, the battle for Latinos and Asian-Americans is probably lost for the Republicans. Both groups voted solidly Democratic in 2006.

Political ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. They need to meet the problems of the world as it exists. Ordinary conservatives understand this, which may be why—despite the urgings of their ideological gurus—they have voted for McCain. He seems to understand that a new world requires new thinking.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112770

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The race would pit change vs. experience, fresh vs. tested, green vs. gray.

By Jonathan Alter

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 12:03 PM ET Feb 16, 2008

The democratic race isn’t over yet. Hillary Clinton may still prevail. But the debate featuring Barack Obama and John McCain has already begun. The good news is that a contest between them has the potential to be spirited without being ugly. It may even focus on issues that actually matter to Americans. Imagine that! Instead of an examination of Al Gore’s personality traits (2000) or a refighting of Vietnam (2004), we may get a real debate about war and peace, taxes and spending, duty and hope. Or maybe I’m dreaming.

The contrast is already stark. Obama is 46 and looks 40; McCain is 71 and looks closer to 80, though he’s got more energy than someone half his age. Their matchup would represent the largest age gap between major-party presidential candidates in American history. The campaign would pit change vs. experience, fresh vs. tested, green vs. gray. Once their niceties about one’s heroism and the other’s inspiration are dispensed with, Obama would try to make the Arizona senator look like a hypocritical, clueless and warlike geezer, while McCain would suggest that the Illinois senator is a naive, liberal and dreamy kid.

The night of the Chesapeake primaries offered a preview. Obama reminded a Wisconsin crowd that McCain had recently said we might be mired in Iraq for 100 years. He suggested that his early stance against the war would strike a better contrast with McCain than Hillary’s early support. He also signaled that he would hit McCain for reversing his opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts. Obama quoted McCain as saying in 2001 that the tax cuts offended his “conscience” because “so many of them go to the most fortunate.” But that was then. “Somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, the Straight Talk Express lost its wheels,” Obama said, trying to make McCain look like just another status quo politician. Every effort by McCain to consolidate the conservative base will be met with a fusillade from the Democrats, with even his position on torture subjected to charges of flip-flopping. Expect to hear references to “Bush-McCain policies” ad nauseam.

Because Obama isn’t the surefire nominee, McCain hasn’t gone after him hard yet. But surrounded (unhelpfully) by geriatric politicians in Virginia last week, he argued that when a politician offers “only rhetoric” instead of “sound and proven ideas,” the result “is not a promise of hope. It is a platitude.” This line of attack hasn’t worked well for Hillary; voters like platitudes if they’re musical enough. Even so, McCain may have some presentational advantages that go beyond his compelling personal narrative. He does especially well in town-hall settings, where he deftly deploys his quirky charm to engage with (and often win over) people who disagree with him on many things. Obama’s campaign “is beginning to approach the level of a messianic complex,” says one McCain aide who doesn’t want to go public before the Democrats settle on their nominee. “McCain’s is about putting the country first. I like that contrast.”

Their differences on some big issues are negligible. With any luck, they’ll try to outdo each other on expanding national service. Immigration is unlikely to play a major role, absent a third-party effort. But should Obama opt out of public financing of his fall campaign, as his aides hinted last week, McCain will pounce. Besides pork-barrel spending, campaign-finance reform is the only domestic issue where McCain works up any real passion. That’s a problem, because he’d better find some on health care and come up with a more convincing plan, pronto. On the faltering economy, likely to be central, neither man has any management experience. The question is who can better fake a deep knowledge he doesn’t possess, with the edge going to Obama as the change agent.

To compensate for the huge gap in national-security experience, Obama might pick retired general Anthony Zinni, Sen. Jack Reed (a decorated Vietnam veteran) or former senator Sam Nunn as his running mate. He would stress homeland security, crushing Al Qaeda and how McCain’s support for the Iraq War has harmed the military and cost trillions that could be better spent at home. The last argument would be used to blunt any GOP attack on the high cost of Obama’s liberal social programs. (The $233 million Alaska “bridge to nowhere” that McCain complains about incessantly is equal to less than 18 hours in Iraq.) McCain will put plenty of distance between himself and Bush on the war’s execution. And he’ll slam Obama for being willing to sit down with dictators without preconditions, a sign, he’ll say, that the junior senator isn’t ready.

Neither Obama nor McCain is a natural counterpuncher or champion debater. Obama has lost most of the Democratic debates to Clinton on points. In their 2000 debates, McCain was bested by Bush. Others will try to poison the process. Assorted scum will falsely call Obama a Muslim or McCain the “Manchurian candidate.” Independent “527″ committees may even try to fling mud-ball ads featuring Obama’s black-nationalist pastor or McCain’s “cover-up” of live POWs. But that will all likely be background noise to a substantive choice between two decent men—unless one of them is a woman.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112778

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Be serious! Give us access! The roots of the Clinton-media tension.

By Evan Thomas

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 1:57 PM ET Feb 16, 2008

If Hillary Clinton loses the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, it is a good bet that she, or her minions, will cast a measure of blame on the press. Bill Clinton has already started making excuses, complaining that the media has given Obama a free ride. Though Hillary handed out chocolate Valentines to members of her traveling press corps, any embers of romance between the former First Lady and the Fourth Estate have long since died. It is also true, as Clinton spokesman Jay Carson tells NEWSWEEK, that the press is “obsessed” with Obama.

Nonetheless, the bad blood between the Clintonistas and the media has less to do with any personal failings of the Clintons themselves—or the foibles of individual reporters and editors—than it does with a poisonous, and predictable, dynamic between the press and presidents that goes back at least a half century. It’s a good guess that the current media darlings, Obama and John McCain, will experience the fickleness of the press before too long.

The last president who liked and enjoyed reporters (some of them, anyway) was John F. Kennedy. Chief executives ever since have felt surrounded and beleaguered within months, if not days, of taking up residence in the White House. If they have seemed paranoid at times, it may be because they had real tormenters in the basement of the West Wing, ready to pounce on their hypocrisies. How presidents handle the ordeal of press coverage can be revealing of character. Some pretend to shrug it off better than others. The Clintons have been theatrical in their resentments and aggressive about pushing back. But in the realm of press relations, the most important difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama or John McCain is that she has lived for eight years in the White House and they have not.

The estrangement between presidents and the press is particularly painful because the relationship often begins as a love affair. The press swooned over the young Bill Clinton. Many reporters and pundits, tired of 12 years of Reagan-Bush, saw Clinton, only 45 when he began his run in 1991, as a fellow baby boomer who was going to rejuvenate and make more realistic and relevant the liberalism of the 1960s. They learned to put up with “Saturday Night Bill” when, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, some tapes surfaced of Clinton sweet-talking a woman—not his wife—named Gennifer Flowers. But by the summer of 1992, the romance with the press was back in full bloom. The week of the Democratic convention, NEWSWEEK ran a cover showing a vibrant Bill and his running mate, Al Gore, under the line YOUNG GUNS. (At the Republican convention in August, NEWSWEEK put President George H.W. Bush on the cover with his dog Millie. DOG DAYS, read the headline.) Clinton’s presidential honeymoon was over almost before it began. The White House stumbled in ways that now seem minor and forgettable—by, for instance, nominating as attorney general a woman, Zoë Baird, who had hired illegal aliens as nannies and chauffeurs for her kids. The press clucked and thundered. THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PRESIDENT was Time’s cover line in June 1993. NEWSWEEK’s cover showed a picture of Clinton looking haggard, and asked WHAT’S WRONG?

THE Clintons were not naive about the media. The First Lady suggested moving the press room out of the West Wing and into the Old Executive Office Building down the block. When this idea didn’t fly, Clinton’s then press secretary, George Stephanopoulos, closed the door between the press room and his warren of offices: reporters yowled as if he had just erected the Berlin wall. Reporters can be soothed with food and wine, but only briefly. In June, the Clintons held six small dinners in the White House for various pundits and reporters. I went to one of them and weakly joked to President Clinton, “Well, we’re co-opted now.” He responded, unsmiling, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Whitewater, a tangled financial scandal, broke in the winter of 1994, and the Clintons descended into the bunker for good. Hillary was feeling burned by a New York Times Magazine cover story in which she had opened up about her spiritualism and been mockingly dubbed “Saint Hillary.” When press adviser David Gergen suggested that the White House make available its Whitewater files to The Washington Post—to show there was nothing to hide—the First Lady nixed the idea.

Former presidential adviser Dick Morris (now a ferocious critic of the couple) tells NEWSWEEK the Clintons talked about why they were getting such bad press, and Hillary speculated that certain journalists were jealous of the Clintons’ success. “They are all our age,” said Hillary, according to Morris. President Clinton zeroed in on Howell Raines, an Alabama native and New York Times editorial page editor who was roasting the president daily. “He had to leave the South to make good and I never had to,” Morris says Clinton said. Morris also says that when Gen. Colin Powell began flirting with a presidential run in the summer of 1995, Clinton warned that the press would not ask tough questions of a black man. “Bill would be furious that the media was giving him a free pass,” says Morris. “Consider the source,” says Carson.

Once scorned or reviled former presidents have a way of becoming elder statesmen. Clinton, out of office, morphed into a globe-trotting do-gooder, expansive and relaxed, even with reporters. Hillary Clinton came into her own as a U.S. senator, not as charismatic as her husband, but still solid and respected, even by reporters. But as a presidential candidate, Hillary was back to the old psychodrama, running as a once and future queen in a Restoration drama. Her basic pitch—ready on day one—is the same one used by George H.W. Bush when he ran for president in 1988. Hillary has been unlucky to have a rock star as an opponent, the kind of dazzling orator who is bound to make her seem plodding by comparison. Obama appeals to the young millennial-generation reporters who fill the seats on press planes, just as Bill Clinton struck a chord with baby boomers 16 years ago. Her campaign has arguably alienated reporters by stonewalling them at times, but the relationship between the press and the Clintons is complicated—more in the nature of a bad marriage than a cold war.

Republicans express their disdain for reporters by ignoring them. The Bush 43 White House appointed press secretaries who were intentionally kept uninformed about the inner doings of the Oval Office. The Clintons have more-intimate ties to the media establishment. Stephanopoulos was a true Clinton insider before he took over briefing the press every day. He yelled at reporters, but also gossiped with them and became a newsman himself (now ABC’s chief Washington correspondent). Hillary’s close confidant Sidney Blumenthal is a former journalist, and Clinton’s admaker, Mandy Grunwald, is married to a veteran journalist and former NEWSWEEK correspondent, Matt Cooper. Familiarity seems to have bred contempt in Grunwald: she can be disdainful of the press. (She may be reflecting her boss’s view that the press is fundamentally not serious about reporting the substance of policy.) Clinton campaign officials have not hesitated to go over the heads of reporters and complain to their editors; the reporters regard this, not unreasonably, as an intimidation tactic.

In the long run-up to the Iowa caucuses, the Clinton campaign herded reporters, sometimes rudely, away from the candidate. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, vented against the press for favoring Obama. When he began to not so subtly play the race card by comparing Obama with Jesse Jackson, the press backlash was indignant and gleeful. President Clinton’s baiting backfired in South Carolina, and it seemed to some pundits that the Clinton machine was not so fearsome after all.

By then, Hillary Clinton had begun schmoozing with reporters again, going back into the press section of the plane and showing her jollier side. (The belly laugh is genuine.) But it may be too late. While it is not true that the press has “gone easy” on Obama—his slender record has been and will be scrubbed—the press helped fuel his momentum with mostly positive coverage.

A Clinton aide, speaking anonymously to hide his bitterness, predicted that Obama would get his comeuppance if he wins the nomination. “The one person the press corps likes more than Obama is John McCain,” the aide says. Maybe so, but it doesn’t really matter, because the press is almost certain to turn on both men. Digging through the personal record, searching for human flaws, is what reporters do when they cover presidential campaigns, and the critical skepticism only deepens when the winner occupies the Oval Office.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/112842

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