We can go to the moon, split atoms to power submarines, squeeze profits from a 99 cent hamburger and watch football highlights on cell phones. But the most successful democracy in human history has yet to figure out how to conduct a proper election. As it stands, the American voting system is a worrisome mess, a labyrinth of local, state and federal laws spotted with bewildered volunteers, harried public officials, partisan distortions, misdesigned forms, malfunctioning machines and polling-place confusion. Each time, problems pop up on the margins; if the election is close, these problems matter a great deal. Republicans and Democrats predict record turnouts, perhaps 130 million people, including millions who have never voted before. The vast majority will cast their votes without a hitch. But some voters will find themselves at the mercy of registration rolls that have been poorly maintained or, in some cases, improperly handled. Others will endure long lines, too few voting machines and observers who challenge their identities. Long a prerogative of local government, the patchwork of election rules often defies logic. A convicted felon can vote in Maine, but not in Virginia. A government-issued photo ID is required of all voters at the polls in Indiana, but not in New York. Voting lines are shorter in the suburbs, and the rules governing when provisional ballots count sometimes vary from state to state. As Americans cast their ballots on Nov. 4, here are some problems that threaten to throw this election to the courts again.

1. The Database Dilemma

“Joe the plumber” is not registered to vote. Or at least he is not registered under his own name. The man known to his mother as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who has become a feature of John McCain’s stump speech, is inscribed in Ohio’s Lucas County registration records as “Worzelbacher,” a problem of penmanship more than anything else. “You can’t read his signature to tell if it is an o or a u,” explains Linda Howe, the local elections director.

Such mistakes riddle the nation’s voting rolls, but they did not matter much before computers digitized records. The misspelled Joes of America still got their ballots. But after the voting debacle in 2000, Congress required each state to create a single voter database, which could then be matched with other data, such as driver’s licenses, to detect false registrations, dead people and those who have moved or become “inactive.” In the marble halls of Congress, this sounded like a great idea — solve old problems with new technology. But in the hands of sometimes inept or partisan state officials, the database matches have become a practical nightmare that experts fear could disenfranchise thousands.

In Wisconsin, an August check of a new voter-registration database against other state records turned up a 22% match-failure rate. Around the time four of the six former judges who oversee state elections could not be matched with state driver’s license data, the board decided to suspend any database purges of new registrants. But database-matching continues elsewhere. In Florida, nearly 9,000 new registrants have been flagged through the state’s “No Match, No Vote” law. (Their votes will not be counted unless they prove their identity to a state worker in the coming weeks.) In Ohio, Republicans have repeatedly gone to court to make public a list of more than 200,000 unmatched registrations, presumably so that those voters can be challenged at the polls, even though most of them, like Joe, are probably legit. “It’s disenfranchisement by typo,” explains Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting issues.

Elsewhere the purges are peremptory. A county official in Georgia this year removed 700 people from voter lists, even though some of those people had never received so much as a parking ticket. Another Georgia voter purge, which seeks to remove illegal immigrants from the rolls, has been challenged by voting-rights groups that say legal voters have been intimidated by repeated requests to prove their citizenship. Back in Mississippi last March, an election official wrongly purged 10,000 people from the voting rolls — including a Republican congressional candidate — while using her home computer. (The names were restored before the primary.)

With just days until the election, the scale of the database-purge problem is unknown. Millions have been stripped from voter rolls in key states, but the legitimacy of those eliminations remains unclear. The sheer volume of state voter checks against the federal Social Security Administration database, however, has raised concerns. Six states that are heavily using the federal database were recently warned by Social Security commissioner Michael Astrue about the danger of improperly blocking legitimate voters. “It is absolutely essential that people entitled to register to vote are allowed to do so,” he said in October.

2. ‘Mickey Mouse’ Registrations And Polling-Place Challenges

Thanks to a few bad apples, ACORN is no longer just an oak-tree nut. McCain blames the group for “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.” Members of Congress have demanded investigations. The fbi is asking questions. Republican protesters have started crashing political events in squirrel costumes.

Yet the problem of registration fraud is age-old. For decades, both parties and many other groups have paid people to go out and register new voters. In the case of acorn, a community group that represents low-income and minority communities, this led to a massive registration drive this year, which signed up 1.3 million new people, mostly in swing states. The problem is that a small fraction of those new voters don’t exist. That’s because the 13,000 part-time workers conducting the acorn registration drive were paid on a quota system, providing them a clear incentive to fabricate registrations. Across the country, registrars have flagged thousands of acorn forms as suspect. In Florida, “Mickey Mouse” tried to register with an application stamped with the acorn logo. The starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys signed up to vote in Nevada. But there’s a difference between registration fraud and voter fraud; the latter has not been documented on any significant scale in decades. Phony registrations are difficult to translate into fraudulent votes. Under federal law, new registrants still have to provide election officials with identification before casting their first ballot. Unless Mickey Mouse has an ID, the chance that he’ll vote is slim.

Democrats complain that trumped-up charges of voting fraud could scare people from the polls. On the other hand, the acorn effect makes elections suspect — and that’s bad for everyone. Republicans in several key swing states have argued that the false registrations make it necessary to monitor polls and challenge suspect voters. If that happens on a grand scale, the voting process could become more like running a gauntlet than exercising a right, with polling-place delays and confrontations that could scare people off or just lead them to conclude it’s not worth the time.

3. Bad Forms

Until the palm beach county butterfly ballot had its 15 minutes of fame, few believed that bad design could determine the fate of the world. But then a local election official created a form that confused elderly voters, causing thousands to mark both Al Gore and another candidate on the same form, disqualifying enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House.

Eight years later, punch-card ballots are mostly a thing of the past, but bad design lives on. This summer, the McCain campaign sent poorly designed absentee-ballot forms to more than 1 million voters in Ohio. The form included a redundant box for voters to check if they were “qualified electors.” Though the box was not required by law, the Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, rejected thousands of otherwise complete forms with unchecked boxes. Luckily for the voters, the state supreme court stepped in to overrule Brunner’s order, which it noted “served no vital public purpose or interest.” A lawsuit has yet to be filed in a similar case in Colorado, where Republican secretary of state Mike Coffman, who is running for Congress, ruled that more than 6,400 new registrations should be rejected because people failed to check a box before providing the last four digits of their Social Security number. Again, the box was redundant, since new registrants provided all the other required information, yet Coffman has declared the forms incomplete and sent letters alerting voters that they have just a few days to fix the mistakes or be left off the rolls.

4. The Voting-Machine Fiasco

As soon as the last chad was counted in Florida, Congress got to work on a new law that authorized $3.9 billion to buy new, high-tech voting equipment. On the whole, the new machines were an improvement over the old punch cards and levers, but many parts of the country now find themselves yearning for the old problems of paper.

About one-third of voters this fall will use electronic machines, usually touchscreen systems that produce no paper record of the vote. If the machines are miscalibrated, they are known to malfunction, sometimes causing the selection of one candidate to show as a vote for another. But the bigger concern, which has been echoed by computer scientists, is that the machines have no independent paper backup. A memory failure or a corruption of the data leaves no route for a recount. The 2006 congressional election in Florida’s 13th District produced the nightmare scenario. Republican Vern Buchanan won the contest by a margin of 369 votes. But in a single, Democratic-leaning county, more than 18,000 voters mysteriously failed to record a selection in the congressional race, an undervote as much as six times the rate of other counties. There is no way to know for sure what, if anything, went wrong.

Since that election, several states, including Florida and California, have required paper records for all electronic-voting devices. A bill in Congress that would mandate paper records of all machines nationwide has gathered 216 co-sponsors, including 20 Republicans.

Meanwhile, 11 million people live in counties that will use lever machines or punch-card ballots this year, even though the congressional deadline to replace that equipment passed in 2006.

5. Unequal Distribution of Resources

This summer, a local democratic county clerk in Indiana noted a surprising increase in new registrations from the area around Ball State University. He suggested that a new early-voting location be set up on campus. But the county’s Republican chairwoman, Kaye Whitehead, opposed the plan, calling it a “political ploy” that would encourage students to vote in exchange for freebies like hot dogs. “This is a serious election,” she told the local newspaper, before the lone Republican on the election board blocked the site. “You need voters who are informed.”

Partisan squabbles about access occur regularly across the country, often with major effects on Election Day. In 2004 lines in Ohio’s Franklin County led some Democrats to complain that Republicans were using resources to affect the outcome of the vote. While suburban precincts had enough machines so voters didn’t have to wait, largely Democratic precincts in Columbus had lines with four-hour waits — often in the rain. Bipartisan estimates suggested that between 5,000 and 15,000 voters gave up on waiting and never voted. But even the question of which precincts get election machines is a maze: in Wisconsin, one voting machine is required for every 200 voters registered in a precinct. In Virginia, by contrast, the law calls for one machine for every 500 to 750 voters, depending on the size of the precinct. In Colorado, which saw six-hour waits for ballots in 2006, the law simply calls for a “sufficient” number of voting booths.

6. New Burdens of Proof

The sisters of the holy cross in notre Dame, Ind., don’t have much use for driver’s licenses. Or at least that’s what a dozen of the nuns thought on May 6, when they went to vote in the presidential primary. They were each turned away as a result of a recently established ID-check requirement at Indiana polls.

In the intervening months, the elderly sisters have all had a chance to get government identification. But an explosion in voter-identification laws has raised the prospect that thousands will turn up to vote next month and find themselves turned away. Federal law now requires that all first-time voters who register by mail provide some sort of identification either when they register or when they vote. But states have applied that rule in markedly different ways. In Pennsylvania, first-time voters can use a firearm permit or a utility bill to identify themselves, and longtime voters don’t have to show anything at all. In Georgia and Florida, gun permits don’t help; all voters must show a state or federal photo ID at the polls. In Indiana, residents who attend state schools can use their student IDs in many cases, but students who attend private schools cannot. The laws have been established to prevent voter fraud, but some experts worry that voter suppression will result. “There is very little evidence of widespread voter fraud,” says R. Michael Alvarez, co-director of the Caltech/mit Voting Technology Project. “Imposing these additional barriers doesn’t seem terribly justified.”

How big a barrier? A 2001 study found that 6% to 10% of the voting-age population lacks driver’s licenses or other state-issued IDs. The most reasonable worry is that many local ID requirements are not well known to voters, which could lead to significant numbers of people leaving the polls frustrated on Election Day without casting their ballot. That should not happen: in all states, voters without IDs are permitted to cast a provisional ballot. But in many states, for the ballot to count they must bring a valid ID to election officials within days after the election, proving that they are the person they claim to be.

7. Confusing Rules, Bad Information

As election day nears, dirty tricks surface. Flyers are left on cars telling Democrats that they should vote on Wednesday, not Tuesday. Anonymous automated phone calls warn people that they will be arrested at the polls or that their polling places have moved. The impact of such gambits is usually small, and in an increasing number of states, such tricks are punishable by law.

A more insidious type of misinformation starts months earlier with local officials. Last March, the president of Colorado College in Colorado Springs received a letter from the El Paso County clerk, Robert Balink, warning that out-of-state students cannot register to vote if their parents claim them as dependents in another state. This was false. The registrar of elections for the area around Virginia Tech issued other confusing messages to students there, obliquely suggesting that their parents’ tax status could be jeopardized based on vague state-board-of-elections guidelines.

A widely circulated anonymous e-mail warns voters that they will be turned away from polling places if they wear a barack obama button or a john mccain T shirt. This is true in only a minority of states. In Virginia, for instance, wearing a candidate’s T shirt or button can get you tossed from a polling place. After agreeing to the policy, Virginia Board of Elections officials said decisions about what to do will be subject to the interpretation of local poll workers and judges — which is a pretty good metaphor for the controlled electoral chaos that is about to unfold all over America in a few short days.

—with reporting by Marti Covington and Maya Curry / Washington

John McCain’s “Joe the Plumber” would no doubt like to have a beer with Sarah Palin’s “Joe Six-Pack.” In truth, Joe Wurzelbacher isn’t a licensed plumber and Joe Six-Pack is a horrible cliché, but no matter. They’re cultural kin to the iconic “Average Joe” who was part of Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” in the early 1970s and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the 1980s. But conservative majorities come and go. If the polls are to be believed, today’s hard-strapped Joes have more in common politically with Joe Biden. And millions of them are preparing to do something that they never thought they’d do in a million years—vote for a black guy with the middle name Hussein for president of the United States.

Even if Joe stays Republican, Barack Obama will still likely win. That’s because he has built a huge base of non-Joes—better-educated, younger whites, as well as women and minorities. These voters are the future of the electorate and they’re progressive. If they turn out in the numbers expected, they could restructure American politics for a generation.

For all the statistical permutations, analyzing the makeup of the American electorate for the past half-century is fairly simple. About 40 percent of voters are reliable Democrats (whether they call themselves liberals or not), 40 percent are conservative Republicans (a term starting to lose its coherence), and the shape of our politics is determined by the 20 percent in the middle, mostly independents.

Since about 1980, we’ve been living in a center-right America, but we’re center-center now, and likely headed left. Even if McCain pulls an upset, the Democratic Congress would nudge him leftward on issues like alternative energy and taxes (and his health-care plan would be DOA). Should Obama win, he will press hard for his ambitious agenda, even, aides say, at the risk of being a one-term president. Then it would all be about execution.

If Obama moves “smart left” next year, he will have succeeded in rewriting the American social contract—the obligations of the government to the people on the economy, energy, health care and education. But if we see a revival of the dumb left with old-fashioned capitulation to interest groups and a series of rookie mistakes on foreign policy, even a big Democratic victory next month would be a speed bump on the Ronald Reagan highway.

Most voters are neither Limbaugh dittoheads nor ACORN activists. They’re pragmatic centrists who decided they liked Obama when he reminded them more of Will Smith than Jesse Jackson. They liked that he tried to calm their fears rather than express their anger. But this election is about something deeper than temperament. When people are scared, whether it’s after 9/11 or heading into a recession, they turn to government for protection. Cultural issues like gay marriage and resentment of elites fade. Even though voters don’t trust Washington any more than Wall Street, it’s their only option.

The question for the new president then becomes not whether he’s moving too fast but too slow. The test becomes whether he can use the powers of government to act on behalf of the American people. That is a fundamentally liberal idea.

Obama is lucky. Had Wall Street collapsed in 2009 instead of 2008, he would have had a much harder time shifting the political center of gravity. The critically important fact for Obama’s agenda is that a conservative Republican (President Bush) is the one who has essentially nationalized banks with more than a trillion dollars in public money. That discredits the GOP argument on spending but also on the proper role of government, which is essentially what separates liberals and conservatives on domestic issues. If Obama offers a big, budget-busting program next year, it will more likely be seen as fair than irresponsible.

At every campaign stop last week, McCain derided Obama’s statement to Joe the Plumber that we should be “spreading the wealth around.” In the old center-right world, such an idea would be offensive to many voters because it sounds socialistic—grabbing money from taxpayers and putting it in someone else’s pocket. But the cold war is over (taking the sting out of cries of socialism), and a lot has changed in the past month. Using taxpayer dollars to bail out colossally greedy and incompetent bankers is “spreading the wealth around,” too. Voters are beginning to figure that if banks facing bankruptcy deserve the government’s help, maybe people facing bankruptcy do as well.

Jon Meacham is right that by the standards of a European-style welfare state, we will always be a relatively conservative country. But closer to home, the norm has not been consistently conservative over the course of the 20th century. If anything, the nation was more often center-left. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives—the “People’s House”—for six straight decades between 1930 and 1994 (with only a short exception). While many were Southern conservatives on race, the huge chunks of progressive legislation they swallowed over many years could choke an elephant.

When the GOP finally did get full control of Capitol Hill in 1994, what did they do with it? The reign of Tom DeLay was not conservative in any way that Edmund Burke would recognize. He led a band of radical Republicans who actually shut down the Congress to intervene in the case of a brain-dead woman in Florida— a move that will likely be remembered as the high-water mark of theocratic power in the United States.

At the presidential level, two Republicans, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, left almost every major element of the New Deal in place and added their own initiatives that sound right out of the 2008 Democratic Party platform. (Ike’s Interstate Highway System was the mother of all infrastructure projects, and Nixon gave us the Environmental Protection Agency.) Every GOP effort to undermine Social Security—the great emblem of domestic liberalism—failed by huge margins between 1936 and 2005. For all his talk, Ronald Reagan failed to reduce the size of government, much less dismantle the welfare state. His acolytes did succeed in the semantic crusade of wrecking the word “liberal,” though liberal-bashing is no longer potent politically in any large state except Texas.

The Schlesinger theory of the cycles of history still makes the most sense. Over the past century, we’ve moved in roughly 30-year cycles, from the Progressive Era to the laissez-faire 1920s to the New Deal to the Reagan years. As it happened, Arthur Schlesinger’s timing was a bit off. He dated the last burst of liberalism to the mid-1960s and thus expected a revival in the 1990s. But the conservative era arguably began in 1978 when Rep. William Steiger won approval of a bill that cut the capital-gains tax from 50 percent to 25 percent. We’re now exactly 30 years down the road from that.

Does that mean the country is still center-right if we fail to restore confiscatory tax levels? Hardly. Just because Democrats aren’t stupid enough anymore to go the Walter Mondale route and promise to raise everyone’s taxes doesn’t mean they are conceding the ideological argument. In fact, Obama has neutralized or even turned the tax issue to his advantage with positions on taxing the rich that would have once been easily dismissed as class warfare. And with his hawkish comments on bombing Pakistan if necessary to kill Osama bin Laden, we are moving past the time when a credible commitment to defend the United States militarily was the exclusive province of the Republican Party.

History does not repeat itself, but it can have a familiar ring. In the 1920s, Americans essentially believed that the private sector could solve any problem. After the Depression began, Congress was still deeply unpopular, as it is today. But once Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and proved in his first 100 days that he could dent the problem, the center moved left. While the Depression didn’t actually end for another eight years, the American people felt that at least the government was on their side.

Reagan’s revolution in 1980 was so striking that it conditioned a whole generation to believe it was permanent. Many scholars even believed the GOP had an “electoral lock” on the presidency—an insurmountable geographical advantage in the Electoral College. Bill Clinton’s victories in 1992 and 1996 didn’t do much to change the map; he won both times with less than 50 percent of the vote, thanks to the presence of independent Ross Perot in those races.

Perot’s agenda—reducing the deficit—became Clinton’s. James Carville joked bitterly that he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market because Wall Street was getting all the loving attention of the Clinton administration. The strategy paid off: the budget was balanced (in part through tax increases begun under President George H.W. Bush) and the economy surged. But Clinton ended up a bit like the character in the poem “Miniver Cheevy” by Edward Arlington Robinson. Miniver felt he was born too late for King Arthur’s Camelot; Clinton felt the same way about the ambitious Camelot of the 1960s.

Now we’re confronting a big deficit again—seemingly a recipe for a Democratic president to pull his liberal punches once more. But the political context has changed in ways that would give a President Obama more running room. Instead of a Democratic Congress that’s out of gas after 40 years in power, as Clinton faced, Obama would have allies on Capitol Hill determined to prove that they can address problems in a practical way. Instead of an almost religious devotion to the libertarian ideas of Alan Greenspan, we’re moving back toward what might be called neo-Keynesian economics. And instead of the unobstructed opposition of a new media powerhouse (talk radio), Obama would have the help of more than 2.5 million small contributors, eager to use the Web to mobilize on behalf of his program.

If he wins, Obama could run aground in a thousand ways next year. He will have to possess all the dexterity he’s shown during the campaign, and then some. If he fails to deliver, the country will go back to the center-right. But if he gets a few big things enacted in his first year, Barack Obama would have a fighting chance to move the country to a new place, or at least one we haven’t seen for a while. Leftward ho!

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Senate Democrats don’t need 60 seats to reach their magic number.

By Bruce Reed
Posted Monday, Oct. 20, 2008, at 5:51 PM ET

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A fortnight away from the electoral abyss, conservatives are down to their last flare: warning what Democrats might do if there aren’t enough Republicans left in Washington to stop them. Friday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “A Liberal Supermajority,” predicted “a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy” not seen since 1933 or 1965. Conservative columnist Mona Charen recently suggested that with a 60-seat, filibuster-proof Senate, Democrats would destroy talk radio, bring on an economic depression, and usher in a “crypto-socialist” era.

For the next two weeks, panicky conservatives no doubt will invoke the number 60 with a dread once reserved for 666. Perhaps looking for a backup plan to keep us up late on election night, the press has chimed in as well, dubbing 60 the “magic number.”

While Democrats have scores of reasons to smile these days, conservative Cassandras can calm down. The number 60 is neither magical nor menacing. Senate Democrats will be able to accomplish a great deal whether or not they win a filibuster-proof majority—and the toughest votes will still be tough even if Democrats win this election by a country mile.

Although not a magic number, 60 is certainly a novel one. Neither party has crossed the 60-seat threshold since the four years after Watergate, when the Senate was a vastly different place. Even in a banner year, Democrats would have to run the table to reach that mark this time around. Congressional Quarterly’s latest tip sheet projects a Democratic gain of five seats with another four tossup races and three Republicans leading but not out of the woods.

The real reason Senate Democrats are looking forward to this election isn’t the remote shot at a supermajority. It’s that however the tossups break, Democrats should wake up Nov. 5 with what really matters—a governing majority. When this tumultuous decade began, the Senate was split 50-50. Democrats gained control in 2001 and 2006 but both times by the barest of margins supplied by independents. From the standpoint of governing, the measure of this year’s progress is not so much how close Senate Democrats get to 60 as how far they can get from 50.

In the unlikely event that Democrats reached 60, what would it mean? To be sure, a cloture-sized majority would make a difference on some party-line questions that tend to get bogged down for partisan rather than ideological reasons—for example, voting rights for D.C. Prolonged confirmation battles, already infrequent, would become even more so.

But reaching 60 seats won’t suspend the laws of political gravity for Senate Democrats, nor will keeping Democrats in the 50s do much to ease Senate Republicans’ pain. Here’s why:

* On tough votes, the real magic number is 50. To get around the 60-vote hurdle, the Senate long ago established the budget reconciliation process, a fast-track procedure that cannot be filibustered and requires a simple majority. Not every matter is germane under reconciliation, but the questions with the greatest fiscal consequence are.

On the most contentious economic debates of the past two decades, the pass-fail line has been 50, not 60. In 1993, Vice President Al Gore cast the deciding vote to squeak Bill Clinton’s pivotal economic package through the Senate, 51-50. Senate Republicans used reconciliation to pass the Bush tax cuts.

For an Obama administration, the real benefit of getting to 60 is that on tough economic votes, it would be that much easier to get to 50. Even with 57 Senate Democrats in 1993, it took all of Clinton’s powers of persuasion and a last-minute plea to then-Sen. Bob Kerrey to pass his economic plan by a single vote.

* Democrats don’t need to win 60 seats to reach 60 votes. For all the deep partisan divisions in Washington, most issues that come before the Senate don’t produce straight party-line votes. This year, half a dozen Republicans joined Democrats to come within three votes of breaking a filibuster of the Lily Ledbetter equal-pay bill. The seats Democrats already appear set to pick up should ensure that bill reaches the next president’s desk.

Indeed, Republicans’ biggest worry may not be how many seats Democrats win this year but how hard it will be to keep their own troops in line next year. A banner Democratic year will spell more GOP defections ahead. In 2010, Republicans will have to defend 19 Senate seats, the Democrats just 15. Vulnerable incumbents who watched their colleagues fall in 2008 may start showing a maverick streak. If you can’t beat a supermajority, join one.

On some ideas with broad public support, such as the expansion of children’s health insurance, many Senate Republicans already folded their hand. The better Democrats do this year, the harder it will be for conservatives to revive the over-my-dead-body caucus that Phil Gramm formed to block Clinton’s stimulus and health care plans in the early ’90s.

* Bush is leaving Democrats a big tent—and an even bigger mortgage. For Congress and the new administration, the economic crisis—not the size of the majority—will be both the biggest constraint and the greatest action-forcing mechanism. A host of economic numbers will affect Democrats’ fortunes more than whether their Senate caucus is over or under 60: how much unemployment goes up, how soon the housing and stock markets settle down, how sharply out-year revenue and deficit forecasts turn south. Republicans need not worry that Democrats will have a blank check; the Bush administration left behind an empty checkbook.

* Misery loves company. If Republicans are afraid of languishing on the sidelines, they can take heart: Democrats won’t let them. Democrats will have good reasons, both practical and political, to reach across the aisle. As both parties have learned in the past month, digging out from under this economic crisis will require more pain than either party alone can bear. With a great deal of arm twisting, congressional Democrats might have been able to pass last month’s rescue package without Republican votes. But on a matter of such consequence, they were right to insist on bipartisan buy-in.

In the next few years, there are bound to be more tough votes like that one. Democrats won’t want to go it alone, even if they have the numbers to do so. With so much at stake, Americans will have zero tolerance for political games. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warning to both parties still rings true: In the long run, the sweeping changes the country needs can succeed only with broad bipartisan support.

Red- and purple-state Democrats will be especially eager to keep Obama’s promise of working across party lines to get the job done. It won’t be lost on the new Democratic majority that in the last three decades, control of the Senate has changed hands more often (1980, ‘86, ‘94, 2001, ‘02, and ‘06) than control of the White House. Not so long ago, Democrats were the ones fretting about the GOP winning a filibuster-proof Senate. Come November, Democratic senators will be delighted to have all the extra company, but even with 60 seats, they’ll still be eager to hold onto their own.

 

 

Bruce Reed, who was President Clinton’s domestic policy adviser, is president of the Democratic Leadership Council and editor-in-chief of Blueprint magazine. E-mail him at thehasbeen@gmail.com. Read his disclosure here.

By Charles M. Madigan

October 20, 2008

The earth may be about to shift under American politics.

The pieces are in place for realignment. There is a simple way to understand what that means by looking at presidents associated with realignments.

Try these: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

Who you are determines whether this is good or bad news. The most important thing to remember is that no one will be able to say on Nov. 5 whether a realignment has happened or not, although certainly a number of people will say it has.

It takes a long time to measure realignment. Political scientists are still arguing about whether there was a realignment under McKinley.

A lot of people are disturbed by the possibility of realignment, largely because realignments change the direction of politics and government so completely that what comes after one bears little resemblance to what happened before.

It would be nice to think that it’s just one politician who is responsible for all of this. If that were the case, it would not be Sen. Barack Obama. It would be President George W. Bush.

Why?

Realignments need a series of components, with an important one being a flash point. They also tend to follow cycles. The other parts include changes in voting behavior, usually the arrival of a new bloc of voters (young people this time around) and, over a longer period of time, changes in attitude toward government.

Lincoln had emancipation and the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt had reform. Franklin Roosevelt had the Great Depression. Reagan had the Iranian hostage crisis and the sense that Jimmy Carter had become powerless.

The next president, Obama or not, will have Bush, who has presented at least four realignment-level disasters: The U.S. knew Osama bin Laden was threatening an attack and could not stop it; the wars in Iraq (early on) and Afghanistan (later and now); the pathetic inability of the federal government to respond to the damage of Hurricane Katrina; and, now, the collapse of the economy.

One would have been enough.

Put the four together and they create an undeniable swelling statistical wave. Four of every five people don’t like the direction the nation has taken. That’s all the fuel anyone needs for change.

If this theory about the election is correct, Nov. 4 may open an era of civic engagement, a change that will replace what we have had since the era that began with Reagan’s election to the White House, an era defined by ideals.

“Ideals” is not a good or a bad word in this context. It is just a description. It’s better to use examples to show the differences in these eras.

The era of civic engagement under Lincoln led to emancipation of black people and the salvation of the Union. Under Teddy Roosevelt, it led to crackdowns and regulation of the robber barons whose excess had defined the end of the 19th Century. Franklin Roosevelt’s civic era delivered the Tennessee Valley Authority, Social Security and an assumption that government was responsible for helping people.

By contrast, prayer in school, anti-abortion legislation, prohibitions aimed at gay behaviors and lifestyles and arguments that government should have less influence on people’s lives are some of the earmarks of ideals eras.

Charles M. Madigan, a professor at Roosevelt University, is writing a book about the presidential campaign.

Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report
October 20, 2008

Can Joe Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber from Ohio, change the course of this campaign? That’s one question that was raised at the third presidential debate. Wurzelbacher is the man who, in a moment caught on YouTube, confronts Barack Obama on his plan to raise taxes on people like him. Obama, sotto voce, replies that he wants to “spread the wealth around.” In the third consecutive week in which the headlines of the financial crisis have prompted both candidates to denounce “Wall Street greed,” the image of those whom Obama would tax higher was suddenly not an investment banker but a plumber.

The conventional wisdom going into the final debate was that the financial meltdown has pretty much finished off John McCain’s campaign and has made an Obama victory inevitable. The polls – not just the national tracking polls but those in critical states – have supported this view unequivocally. The Democratic Party entered this campaign year with impressive advantages that have been undercut by one surprising development after another – the protracted and bitter contest for the Democratic nomination, the success of the surge strategy in Iraq, $4-a-gallon gasoline, the overgrandiosity of the Obama campaign.

Yet the narrow lead that McCain had after the conventions vanished (if the tracking polls can be trusted) precisely on Sept. 18, the day that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke observed a coagulation of credit that threatened to bring down the economy and, in response, advanced the 1.0 version of their financial bailout/rescue package.

In the days that followed, voters seemed to be unnerved by McCain’s impulsiveness and reassured by Obama’s calmness. A majority reverted to the default mode of those long-ago days before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary: In bad times, throw the candidate of the in party out and put the candidate of the out party in.

It is obvious that the economic platform of neither candidate was fashioned with anything in mind quite like the situation the nation now faces. Obama’s cadre of sophisticated economists, if they knew that we would be facing a recession with the potential of ripening into something more dire, would hardly have recommended raising taxes, even on the evil rich like the deposed Lehman Brothers CEO (a Democratic contributor) or Joe the Plumber (more inclined to Republicans). Nor would they have advocated, absent the demands of the unions which do so much to finance and man Democratic campaigns, opposing the Colombia Free Trade Agreement or renegotiating NAFTA.

Decision time: Both Obama and McCain have recently advanced additional economic planks to help hard-pressed, middle-class Americans. But neither can claim to have contributed much in the way of substance to the actual steps that Paulson and Bernanke – and, critically, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown – have taken to get credit circulating in the blood veins of the economy once again. The fact is that neither Obama nor McCain knows precisely what he would do upon taking office Jan. 20, and voters may sense that it is naive to expect they should.

Democratic spin artists have dismissed McCain’s attacks on Obama as distractions amid a possible economic disaster, and I suspect they will be proved right. Yet it remains the case that about half the voters have doubts about Obama.

In three debates, the spin artists go on, Obama has shown that he more than meets the minimal standards for the office, as Ronald Reagan did in the single debate in 1980, and in a year like that one, in which most voters want the in party out, that will be enough. But the 1980 debate was on the Thursday before the election, and the decisive swing came over the weekend. Voters took almost every minute they could. Will they take more time this year, and give some thought to Joe the Plumber?

Our View: Statistics aren’t as black and white as some say

October 20, 2008

Nobody likes to pay taxes. Governing without them would be a snap, but it can’t be done. Cutting taxes is cheered. Raising them is jeered. It is an emotional issue and one that is susceptible to demagoguery and deception.

Which are you most likely to believe?

A. Only four other states impose heavier taxes than Washington state.

B. Thirty-four states tax their citizens more than Washington state.

Most people are predisposed to answering A, because they’ve probably heard a politician or initiative hawker proclaim that Washington ranks fifth in taxation. The editorial board has heard this a few times during endorsement interviews.

Tim Eyman, who runs a full-time initiative business, says it all the time. Never mind that such a fact would not speak ill of his continual efforts to lower taxes. How can a guy who claims to have saved the taxpayers more than $11 billion also claim that we’re still crushed by taxes? It’s like a police chief pointing to record arrests but claiming that the city is just as scary as ever.

The answer, as you might have guessed by now, is B. The state has the 35th highest level of personal taxes and is in a statistical tie with Mississippi, at 8.9 percent of total income. The national average is 9.7 percent. The answer is at the Tax Foundation’s Web site, but you’ll also find that Washington is ranked fifth when factoring in federal taxes. That’s because the federal income tax is progressive, meaning that the rich pay at a higher rate than the poor.

Washington state has a lot more rich people than Mississippi. They send a lot of money to the U.S. Treasury. But it is a statistical crime to include their federal taxes in a calculation of the level of personal taxation imposed by state and local governments.

Look at it this way: If Bill Gates Jr. moved to Spokane, the city would shoot up in the rankings of most-taxed. But nobody’s taxes would change.

Because this is such an emotional issue, it’s important to know the facts. State and local governments have been relatively prudent when it comes to taxes. We are not advocating any general tax increases. We are not calling for tax cuts. But we do think it’s important for citizens to know where we are, especially as governments grapple with a sagging economy.

Be on the lookout for politicians who sign pledges to never increase taxes. “No new taxes” is as thoughtless as no new bonds or no levies or no new service cuts. It’s putting on blinders before viewing the big picture.

Balancing budgets is hard. Sometimes a tax increase would be foolhardy, but there are instances when a tax increase is merited. President Reagan agreed to multiple tax increases, including a bump in the payroll tax that bolstered Social Security. Politicians who say they’ll never raise taxes won’t be at the table when the concessions on spending and other budget decisions are hammered out.

Pragmatic conservatives in this region have advocated tax increases to help the mentally ill and to sustain bus service. Business leaders statewide got behind the nickel gas-tax increase.

They looked at the facts and then made a decision. That’s the kind of leadership we need.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Democrat Barack Obama more than doubled his fundraising record with a mammoth September haul topping 150 million dollars to use in the final stretch of his White House campaign, aides said Sunday.

In a video message to supporters, campaign manager David Plouffe said Obama now had more than 3.1 million donors each contributing on average less than 100 dollars.

“Because of your great generosity we had a record-breaking September,” he said as he prepared to file the month’s fundraising figures with the Federal Election Commission.

“We are going to report tomorrow to the FEC that we raised over 150 million dollars in September which has allowed us to run such a strong campaign in all of these battleground states.”

October 19, 2008

By David Shribman

PHOENIX — Here comes the campaign’s last offensive.

It is a massive outpouring of manpower and money, canvassing and calling, designed to get every last supporter to the polls on Election Day. Four years ago a similar effort increased turnout by 8.3 percent in the 17 states regarded as battlegrounds. The fact that Republican gains were greater than Democratic gains contributed to President Bush’s re-election.

Predicting turnout is only slightly less foolish than predicting the Dow Jones industrial average, but it’s likely the voting rate will be around what it was in 2004, when 60.7 percent of eligible Americans went to the polls, the highest percentage since 1968, when turnout was 61.9 percent. The highest turnout ever was nearly 65 percent in 1960 — a slightly misleading figure, because African-Americans were considered eligible to vote but were in fact almost universally prevented from doing so in the South. Thus the real turnout figure for 1960 may be as high as 67 percent.

No one expects turnout to reach those levels in 2008. But it is true that how an election turns out depends in large measure on who turns out.

That said, beware the groups — there will be dozens — who claim they are responsible for the election of the next president; John L. Lewis thought he and his mine workers deserved credit for Franklin Roosevelt’s victory in 1936. It’s never that simple. Catholics, who voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush against the Catholic John F. Kerry in 2004, did not elect Bush. Neither did evangelicals, or white men who own guns or college graduates, all of whom gave Bush majorities.

“There is no single constituency that makes a difference,” says Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate. “It is always a combination of things.”

So here is a menu of turnout considerations. Put them together or mix and match them to elect the next president:

Black voters
About 85 percent of the black vote customarily goes to the Democratic candidate. Bush had unusually low levels of African-American voters, winning only 8 percent in 2000 and 11 percent four years later. The first black presidential nominee likely can count on 90 percent of the black vote as a floor, not a ceiling.

For years, politicians have been warning Democrats not to take the black vote for granted. This year the stakes are unusually large, for a surge in black voting in certain key states — Virginia, where blacks represent almost 20 percent of the population, and even Indiana, where blacks are only 8 percent of the population — could turn the tide for Barack Obama. Other Obama targets may include North Carolina (21 percent black) and Georgia (29 percent black), where the Democratic ticket faces an uphill but perhaps not insurmountable path.

Young voters
These voters — remember that someone who was part of the youth vote in one election may graduate out of that pool in the next — turned out heavily in 2004, with an even higher turnout among educated young people. Indeed, voters aged 18 to 24 increased their participation to the highest level since 1992 — an increase bigger than any other group.

In six of the last eight elections, the Democrats have won the youth vote. Obama may not need to take it by a larger cushion than the 54-45 margin John F. Kerry won in 2004, as long as he does well in narrowly defined pockets in swing states.

In short, it doesn’t matter whether Obama does well among students at NYU or UCLA; he will win New York and California in any case. But if Obama’s get-out-the-vote efforts in Charlottesville, the Research Triangle, Boulder, Madison, and Hanover and Durham, N.H., are strong, he could be better positioned to win Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.

Reagan Democrats
These voters, traditionally Democratic but drawn into the GOP by Ronald Reagan’s toughness on national-security issues and his impatience with social liberalism, are harder to predict. But while their economic interests in 2008 may tug them toward the Democrats, they may be skittish of Obama and his air of elitism — which is why Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has emphasized that theme this autumn.

Although the definition of a “Reagan Democrat” is elusive, there likely are more men than women among them. One slice of these voters is whites who don’t hold college degrees. McCain’s lead among them has dropped by about half between September and early this month, to about the margin President Bush won in 2004, but not as big as Bush won in 2000, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll. How Reagan Democrats break may tell us a lot about how Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Missouri break next month.

Niche voters
Each swing state has its own peculiar demographic and geographic composition. Black voters, for example, aren’t the only group whose turnout may make a big difference in Virginia. Turnout in the northern part of the state, principally the Washington suburbs, which have been becoming bluer with the years, is critical, but then again so is turnout among military families near the massive Naval installations on the coast and among voters in southwestern Virginia, both of which will likely come in strongly for Sen. John McCain.

One especially peculiar battleground for turnout and for support is the independent vote in New Hampshire. Nationally, the movement of independent voters to Obama is strong; the swing in the Illinois Democrat’s direction was 17 points in a two-week period ending in early October, according to the Journal/NBC survey.

In New Hampshire, the situation is far more complex. Many independent voters sided with McCain when he won the 2000 and 2008 Republican primaries but helped contribute to the Democrats’ general election victory in the Granite State in 2004. (Many also voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, depriving Vice President Al Gore of the state’s four electoral votes — and probably the election.) They could swing either way this year — and each camp will try to get a larger share of its independents to the polls than its rivals.

In its last weeks, this campaign has become a ground game.

PHILADELPHIA — Senator Barack Obama is days away from breaking the advertising spending record set by President Bush in the general election four years ago, having unleashed an advertising campaign of a scale and complexity unrivaled in the television era.

With advertisements running repeatedly day and night, on local stations and on the major broadcast networks, on niche cable networks and even on video games and his own dedicated satellite channels, Mr. Obama is now outadvertising Senator John McCain nationwide by a ratio of at least four to one, according to CMAG, a service that monitors political advertising. That difference is even larger in several closely contested states.

The huge gap has been made possible by Mr. Obama’s decision to opt out of the federal campaign finance system, which gives presidential nominees $84 million in public money and prohibits them from spending any amount above that from their party convention to Election Day. Mr. McCain is participating in the system. Mr. Obama, who at one point promised to participate in it as well, is expected to announce in the next few days that he raised more than $100 million in September, a figure that would shatter fund-raising records.

“This is uncharted territory,” said Kenneth M. Goldstein, the director of the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin. “We’ve certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But we’ve never seen in a presidential race one side having such a lopsided advantage.”

While Mr. Obama has held a spending advantage throughout the general election campaign, his television dominance has become most apparent in the last few weeks. He has gone on a buying binge of television time that has allowed him to swamp Mr. McCain’s campaign with concurrent lines of positive and negative messages. Mr. Obama’s advertisements come as Republicans have begun a blitz of automated telephone calls attacking him.

The Obama campaign’s advertising approach — which has included advertisements up to two minutes long in which Mr. Obama lays out his agenda and even advertisements in video games like “Guitar Hero” — has helped mask some of Mr. Obama’s rougher attacks on his rival.

“What Obama is doing is being his own good cop and bad cop,” said Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of CMAG, who called the advertising war “a blowout” in Mr. Obama’s favor.

Based on his current spending, CMAG predicts Mr. Obama’s general election advertising campaign will surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign by early next week. Mr. McCain has spent $91 million on advertising since he clinched his party’s nomination, several months before Mr. Obama clinched his.

The size of the disparity has even surprised aides to Mr. McCain, who traded accusations with Mr. Obama over the advertising battle in this week’s debate, with Mr. Obama telling Mr. McCain that “your ads, 100 percent of them have been negative” and Mr. McCain saying that “Senator Obama has spent more money on negative ads than any political campaign in history.”

The most recent analysis of the presidential advertisements by the University of Wisconsin, based on the period from Sept. 28 through Oct. 4, found that nearly 100 percent of Mr. McCain’s commercials included an attack on Mr. Obama and that 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s advertisements, which were more focused that week on promoting his agenda, included an attack on Mr. McCain.

That finding reflected the McCain campaign’s strategy of trying to make Mr. Obama an unacceptable choice in the eyes of undecided voters and Mr. Obama’s goal of making undecided voters comfortable with him.

But the Wisconsin Advertising Project says that since Mr. Obama wrapped up the Democratic nomination in June, 54 percent of Mr. McCain’s advertisements have been completely focused on attacking him, roughly a quarter have mixed criticism of Mr. Obama with a positive message about Mr. McCain, and 20 percent have been devoted solely to promoting Mr. McCain.

In the same period, the study found that 41 percent of Mr. Obama’s advertisements had been devoted solely to attacking Mr. McCain, one-fifth mixed criticism of Mr. McCain with a positive message about Mr. Obama, and 38 percent were solely devoted to promoting Mr. Obama.

The group reported that Mr. Obama has also had several weeks in which his advertising was nearly 100 percent negative or contrast advertisements, though considerably fewer such weeks than Mr. McCain has had.

The percentages do not reflect the vastly greater number of spots run by Mr. Obama. But Mr. Goldstein said Mr. McCain had shown more purely negative advertisements than Mr. Obama had, in spite of Mr. Obama’s spending advantage.

Here in Philadelphia, the biggest media market in a critical state, both candidates showed a mix of positive and negative advertisements on Friday. The spots seemed to show up across the dial as regularly as the affable Geico gecko or the ambling ne’er-do-wells of FreeCreditReport.com.

During “Dr. Phil” on the CBS affiliate here, Mr. Obama showed a minute-long positive commercial recounting “one of my earliest memories: going with Grandfather to see some of the astronauts, being brought back after a splashdown, sitting on his shoulders and waving a little American flag.”

But minutes earlier during the late afternoon news on the NBC station, Mr. Obama had criticized Mr. McCain over a health care plan that an announcer alleges “could leave you hanging by a thread.”

Toward the end of the 4 p.m. newscast on the CBS station, Mr. McCain ran one of his rare purely positive spots, speaking directly into the camera and telling viewers, “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they?” He promises, “I have a plan for a new direction for the economy.”

But on the NBC affiliate an advertisement approved by Mr. McCain was tying Mr. Obama to Antoin Rezko, a Chicago real estate developer convicted of fraud who is listed as among the friends Mr. Obama is said to reward “with your tax dollars.”

That spot was co-sponsored by the Republican National Committee, which is allowed to split the costs with Mr. McCain on an unlimited number of advertisements, helping him to double the number of advertisements he can buy.

Mr. McCain has used such advertisements to keep up with Mr. Obama’s advertising in vital cities like this one, where the campaigns have combined to spend the most in the general election but where Mr. Obama has recently outpaced Mr. McCain by nearly two to one. But such advertisements come with a caveat: they must include a reference to Congressional issues and leaders, making the message generally less direct.

The spot with Mr. Rezko also shows the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, and Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.

But for every city like Philadelphia, in a state Mr. McCain views as important to his chances for victory, there are those like Miami, Washington and Chicago, where Mr. Obama has often been able to run advertisements nearly unopposed. Washington and Chicago are particularly expensive, and Mr. Obama will easily win both. But their stations reach parts of the contested states of Indiana and Virginia.

Mr. McCain is also getting help from the Republican Party’s independent advertising unit, but it cannot coordinate with the party leadership or Mr. McCain’s campaign, meaning it is not always in line with Mr. McCain’s campaign message. And a smattering of outside groups are running hard-charging advertisements against Mr. Obama, but he has the money to immediately meet those attacks with spots directly addressing their charges.

Now spending almost as much as he can in local television markets, Mr. Obama has increased his advertising on the broadcast television networks, including on National Football League games and soap operas.

“They’re doing the networks” said Mr. Tracey, of CMAG, “because they’ve saturated these markets and they’re looking for more time.”

Last Sunday, Mr. Obama bought so heavily on football games and other nationally televised programs that, according to CMAG, he spent $6.5 million on a day when Mr. McCain spent less than $1 million.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Paul Greenberg

COMMENTARY:

There was a small but revealing moment on the final night of the editorial writers’ convention here in Little Rock not long ago.

Our distinguished guest speaker of the liberal persuasion was waxing nostalgic for the heady time when the old Fairness Doctrine ruled the airwaves and all was right with the world of broadcast opinion. For in those days impartial government bureaucrats enforced the rule that, for every opinion voiced on radio and television, equal time had to be allotted to its opposite, and all was right with the world.

It all sounds fair enough – like so many abstract doctrines – if you didn’t have to live with it. To appreciate, and apprehend, how the “Fairness” Doctrine really operated, just listen to one of my heroes in this business – Nat Hentoff, a true liberal who has seen it all in his couple of lifetimes in Medialand:

“I was in radio under the reign of the Fairness Doctrine, at WMEX in Boston in the 1940s and early ’50s,” he remembers. And being Nat Hentoff, he naturally aired a few of his opinions from time to time. Uh oh. “Suddenly Fairness Doctrine letters started coming in from the FCC and our station’s front office panicked. Lawyers had to be summoned, tapes of accused broadcasters had to be examined with extreme care; voluminous responses had to be prepared and sent. After a few of these FCC letters, our boss announced that there would be no more controversy of any sort on WMEX. We had been muzzled.”

The Unfairness Doctrine had claimed another victim. Which was just the way the mainstream media wanted it. Why debate others’ ideas when it was so much easier to stifle them with lawyer letters?

It was a deliberate strategy. To quote one of the Democratic Party’s apparatchiks back then, Bill Ruder: “Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too costly to continue.”

It worked. Broadcast opinion was soon largely reserved for the right people with the right opinions, that is, moderately leftish ones. Or what our guest speaker called “legitimate” news outlets – like the New York Times instead of all those loudmouths agitating over the airwaves.

The gamut of political opinion on the television networks, all three of them in those pre-cable days, ran roughly from center to left-of-center.

This is the period today’s nostalgic gliberals refer to as The Golden Age of television news. Golden for their opinions, anyway. At a time when the tube was still the dominant, shaping medium, ABC, NBC and CBS were the holy trinity. Any other viewpoint was considered less than respectable, even heretical, or just ignored. Which was easy to do if they couldn’t be aired.

There was but one Truth in those days and Walter Cronkite was its prophet. They called him the most trusted man in America, and doubtless he was, for though he had imitators, he had no real competition. How things have changed. Mr. Cronkite tried writing a syndicated column not long ago and it fell flat.

Because in this age of alternatives like 24/7 television news, radio talk shows all over the dial, and the ubiquitous Internet with all its bloggers, one for every taste and many with no taste at all, there is a multiplicity of other viewpoints to choose from. And lots of fact-checkers out there to catch us all. Just ask Dan Rather, formerly of CBS.

Wild and crazy thing, the First Amendment, when it burgeons in all its glory. It produces the widest variety of fruits, or just fruitcakes, for you can’t have liberty without inviting license. But I’ll gladly bear the abuses to enjoy the freedom.

There are always those who’d like to improve on freedom of speech. Shut up, they explain. All they want is what’s fair, meaning their idea of what’s fair. There’s a difference.

They sigh for the good old days when riffraff like Rush Limbaugh and numerous imitators could be shut out of the public discourse. It is those who claim to speak for The People who resent it most when people choose to listen to somebody else.

We knew who our betters were in the good old days, when we tuned in to find out what was politically correct long before it had acquired that label. No wonder our current elite, or those who would like to be, dream of restoring the Fairness Doctrine in all its constricting glory.

On his Web site, Barack Obama says the country should “clarify the public interest obligation of broadcasters who occupy the nation’s spectrum.” I’m not sure what that means, but I have an idea. The senator can put all the lipstick he wants to on the Fairness Doctrine, but it would still be unfair. Those who wax sentimental for it mystify me. I would much prefer to win a fair fight, or even lose one, rather than tie the other guy’s hands. For the best response to an idea one detests is not to suppress it, but to offer a better idea. It’s only fair.

Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Organization’s voter drive is at center of controversy

Greg Gordon
McClatchy
October 18, 2008

WASHINGTON – The furor over the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now’s national voter registration drive exploded with new controversies Friday, including a call by Barack Obama for an independent prosecutor, a Supreme Court ruling over voter access and the disclosure of a death threat against an ACORN worker.

What remains unclear is whether the presidential campaigns of Democrat Obama and Republican John McCain will reach a truce over voter access to the polls by Election Day or whether their legal and rhetorical battles will persist to the finish line – or beyond.

Republicans allege that ACORN is engaged in rampant voter fraud, but they’ve offered no proof of such a systematic effort. The GOP does have evidence that some of the group’s 13,000 canvassers submitted fraudulent applications, but ACORN says it alerted authorities to most of the phony forms.

Democrats counter that the GOP is trying to whip up fears of voter fraud so it can knock students and low-income minorities off the voter rolls to enhance McCain’s chances of victory.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled an attempt by Republicans to challenge the validity of 200,000 voter registrations in Ohio, saying that the party lacked the standing to sue.

The Republicans had sued to force Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, to provide county election officials with lists of registrants whose personal information did not exactly match Social Security or driver’s license data, a step that would leave those voters vulnerable to eligibility challenges.

Tensions began to escalate Thursday with disclosures that the FBI is investigating ACORN and the possibility that it’s engaged in a vote-fraud scheme.

On Friday, Obama’s legal counsel, Robert Bauer, wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, charging that the inquiry is politically motivated and that it risks repeating the 2007 scandal over the Bush administration’s politicization of the Justice Department.

Bauer asked Mukasey to broaden a special prosecutor’s investigation to examine the origin of the ACORN inquiry.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, except to say: “We will review the letter.”

Earlier Friday, ACORN told McClatchy that one of its senior staffers in Cleveland had received a death threat and that its Boston and Seattle offices had been vandalized sometime Thursday, reflecting the mounting tensions over the group’s role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote.

ACORN attorneys drafted a letter alerting the FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division of the incidents, said Brian Kettenring, a Florida-based spokesman for the group.

Kettenring said that a senior ACORN staffer in Cleveland, after appearing on television this week, got an e-mail that said she “is going to have her life ended.” A female staffer in Providence, R.I., got a threatening call from someone who said words to the effect of “We know you get off work at 9,” then uttered racial epithets, he said.

McClatchy is withholding the women’s names because of the threats.

Separately, vandals broke into the group’s Boston and Seattle offices and stole computers, Kettenring said.

The incidents came the day after McCain charged in the final presidential debate that ACORN’s voter-registration drive “may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history” and may be “destroying the fabric of democracy.”

McCain’s comments provoked a response from ACORN.

“I would not say that Senator McCain is inciting violence,” Kettenring said, “but I would say that his statements about the role of this manufactured scandal were totally outlandish.”

Senator John McCain used the final debate of the presidential election on Wednesday night to raise persistent and pointed questions about Senator Barack Obama’s character, judgment and policy prescriptions in a session that was by far the most spirited and combative of their encounters this fall.

At times showing anger and at others a methodical determination to make all his points, Mr. McCain pressed his Democratic rival on taxes, spending, the tone of the campaign and his association with the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers, using nearly every argument at his disposal in an effort to alter the course of a contest that has increasingly gone Mr. Obama’s way.

But Mr. Obama maintained a placid and at times bemused demeanor — if at times appearing to work at it — as he parried the attacks and pressed his consistent line that Mr. McCain would represent a continuation of President Bush’s unpopular policies, especially on the economy.

That set the backdrop for one of the sharpest exchanges of the evening, when, in response to Mr. Obama’s statement that Mr. McCain had repeatedly supported Mr. Bush’s economic policies, Mr. McCain fairly leaped out of his chair to say: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

Acknowledging Mr. McCain had his differences with Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama replied, “The fact of the matter is that if I occasionally mistake your policies for George Bush’s policies, it’s because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people — on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities — you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush.”

The debate touched on a wide variety of issues, including abortion, judicial appointments, trade and climate change as well as the economy, with the candidates often making clear the deep differences between them.

But it also put on display the two very different temperaments of the candidates with less than three weeks until Election Day. The lasting image of the night could be the split screen of Mr. Obama, doing his best to maintain his unflappable demeanor under a sometimes withering attack, and Mr. McCain looking coiled, occasionally breathing deeply, apparently in an expression of impatience.

Sitting side by side with only the host, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, between them on the stage at Hofstra University, Mr. McCain made clear from the start that he was going to follow the prescriptions of many of his supporters — among them his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska — and try to put Mr. Obama on the defensive and shake him from his steady debate style.

Seizing on an encounter in Ohio this week with a voter — Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber — who told Mr. Obama that he feared that his tax policies would punish him as a small-business owner, Mr. McCain pressed his attack on Mr. Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. Mr. Obama’s plan would raise taxes on filers earning more than $250,000 a year, a category that includes some small businesses, but would cut taxes on households earning less than $200,000 a year.

Seeking to suggest that Mr. Obama would hurt the economy and many entrepreneurs, Mr. McCain said, “The whole premise behind Senator Obama’s plans are class warfare — let’s spread the wealth around,” repeating a phrase Mr. Obama had used to Mr. Wurzelbacher in explaining the rationale for his upper-income tax increase.

“Why would you want to do that — anyone, anyone in America — when we have such a tough time, when these small-business people like Joe the Plumber are going to create jobs unless you take that money from him and spread the wealth around,” Mr. McCain said.

The plumber came up directly or indirectly 24 times during the debate, an Everyman symbol of the divide between the candidates on how best to address the economy.

As he has done in previous encounters, Mr. Obama looked into the camera and repeated his plan: “Now, the conversation I had with Joe the Plumber, what I essentially said to him was, five years ago, when you weren’t in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then. And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now.”

Coming on a day that the Dow Jones average had one of its worst drops in history, Mr. Schieffer tried something other moderators had failed to do this fall: get the two candidates to enumerate which proposals they would specifically have to postpone or cut in the face of an economic environment that has changed drastically since they first drew up their plans.

Neither man went very far, though Mr. McCain perhaps offered a more detailed list. Repeating his pledge of an across-the-board spending cut, he said, “Well, one of them would be the marketing assistance program. Another one would be a number of subsidies for ethanol.”

Mr. Obama, for his part, specifically cited the “$15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies,” a component of the Medicare program. But, he said more generally, “we need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don’t work, and I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page. Programs that don’t work, we should cut.”

Still, though the winner of this election will inherit the most sweeping federal intervention in financial markets in at least three generations, the debate, while not short of policy discussions, was at least as much about the styles of the two men as they engaged one another.

In the days before the debate, Mr. Obama had appeared to have goaded Mr. McCain, saying in an interview with ABC News that he did not know why Mr. McCain had not personally made an issue of Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Ayers, with whom he worked with on two nonprofit boards, in their last debate considering that Mr. McCain’s campaign had done so repeatedly in recent weeks.

And there was some degree of anticipation over whether Mr. McCain would do so this time. He did, though only after a bit of prompting from Mr. Schieffer, who, in a question about the tone of the campaign directed at both men, asked Mr. McCain specifically, “Your running mate said he palled around with terrorists.”

Mr. McCain initially did not address that point directly.

But as Mr. Schieffer seemed prepared to move to another topic, Mr. McCain returned to Mr. Ayers on his own. Mr. McCain seemed most agitated in that moment, saying: “I don’t care about an old, washed-up terrorist. But as Senator Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship. We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with Acorn, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

He was referring to a community activist group that focuses on housing issues and has been running voter registration efforts in many states that have drawn accusations of fraud.

Mr. Obama’s aides said during the day that he was preparing for the Ayers question.

“Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago. Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts,” Mr. Obama said. “Ten years ago, he served and I served on a board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan’s former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.”

On Acorn, Mr. Obama said, “Apparently what they have done is they were paying people to go out and register folks. And apparently some of the people who were out there didn’t really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names. Had nothing to do with us. We were not involved.”

Speaking of his involvement with the group, he said, “The only involvement I’ve had with Acorn was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people register at D.M.V.’s.” Mr. Obama’s campaign made some payments to an affiliate of Acorn.

Mr. Obama said sternly as Mr. McCain bristled, “And I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Senator McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me.”

In a Florida Retirement Community, Residents Are Uncharacteristically Split

By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 15, 2008; A01

SUN CITY CENTER, Fla. — The sign over the woodworking shop says “Sawdust Engineers,” and there was a time when the men now bent over the tools used to put on ties or make sales calls, building their pensions so they could one day leave the rat race for this warm world of unbroken sunshine.

“Retirement is the best!” says Jerry Decker, 73, one of the Sawdust Engineers tinkering in the wood shop at this over-55 retirement community of 19,000 residents outside Tampa.

But the tranquillity of palm trees and wine gatherings that sustained Decker’s dreams all those years in the snow has been upended by the financial crisis. Even here in paradise, nothing is for sure anymore.

“Who isn’t afraid of getting a ‘Dear John’ letter from GM saying your pension is in danger?” he asks. “You look at all these companies and what they are doing. We worked so hard to put them first, and it’s just not right for them to be reneging.”

The other men share the outrage, spitting out the names of corporations and their golden parachutes and lavish indulgences.

“I wasn’t invited to the AIG spa weekend, were you?” one asks aloud. “You didn’t get the manicure?” another asks.

“If we ran a household like they ran their company, you’d be bankrupt in five months.”

The Sawdust Engineers should be an easy sweep for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. All five are Korean War veterans and registered Republicans. George W. Bush nailed every one of their votes. But three weeks before the election, only three of them are supporting McCain.

Sun City Center is in the hard-fought electoral quadrant in Florida known as the I-4 corridor, home to 43 percent of the state’s voters. The Republican Party has always counted on the retirees here to deliver in bulk, but this year a more severe calculation is at play. To win Florida, McCain needs to capture a bigger slice of older voters than President Bush won in 2004 to offset the high numbers of young voters supporting Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.

“I’m ready for a change,” says Ed Bearer, a retired public school teacher from Delaware who recently received a letter saying his wife’s medical expenses may no longer be covered under his pension plan. “McCain turns me off. I can’t explain it,” he says. He’s voting for Obama.

That leaves Jerry Decker. Last week, during the second presidential debate, Decker kept waiting for McCain to come out swinging. “What he should have said was ‘We’re going to prosecute AIG to the fullest extent,’ ” Decker says. Instead, only vague promises to clean up corruption.

It’s easy to see why Decker wants more heat from a candidate when his own steady discipline is compared with the reckless indulgence of Wall Street. For years, Decker brown-bagged his lunch, even when he went over to the corporate tower as a director of human resources for Formica Corp. His wife, Jeannie, was his barber. The Deckers had one son and the family lived fully but frugally: They were the ones on the side of the ski mountain with their lunch and cans of soda packed from home. Jeannie watched the budget, and for more than two decades she gave her husband $25 each Friday for his weekly spending money.

“It wasn’t a sacrifice,” Decker says. “We had a game plan to spend our retirement together.”

But the game plan for many of the couple’s friends at Sun City Center has been jeopardized by the financial meltdown. Decker hears the stories in the wood shop. Guys who took their company’s advice and converted their pensions to 401(k) plans only to watch their holdings diminish by half when the market plunged. Jeannie tells him that some of the women are skipping their weekly trips to the beauty parlor and letting their hair go gray. More people their age are bagging groceries at the nearby Publix supermarket, and foreclosure signs, once unthinkable, are popping up in the trim Bermuda grass.

“I still believe in our country,” Decker says. “But Jeannie and I don’t have time to rebound. When you are 72 and 73, you don’t have time to recoup.”

‘A Nice Legacy for Our Kids?’

The storefronts at the strip plazas serving Sun City Center say it all: pulmonary clinics, laser surgery, Beltone hearing aids, oxygen tank rentals, a Bob Evans and numerous pharmacies. Retirees zip around in golf carts, many of them outlandishly customized, including one that looks like a giant sombrero, complete with fringe. But spare these folks the Florida retiree jokes — they’ve heard them all. Giving a tour of the aquatic facility, information director John Bowker mentions that four seniors have died in the Jacuzzi. “The most common sound around here is an ambulance,” he says.

Once a solid hub of conservative retirees from the Midwest, Sun City Center has in recent years been set upon by newcomers who make for a less cohesive voting group — “liberal Northeasterners,” says Dee Williams, president of the Sun City Center Republican Club since 1991. In other words, blue-staters.

The influx of Democrats and McCain’s tepid style of campaigning have Williams concerned enough to shoot off SOS e-mails to the Florida Republican Party warning that her turf cannot be taken for granted. “McCain is not bringing passion,” says Williams, 80, sitting in her living room of blue sofas. “He has to convey to the public that what we are doing with the bailout, we had to do.”

In her Missouri twang, Williams makes a direct appeal to her candidate: “You better get off your duff and show some fire. Send Sarah [Palin] and her husband to Michigan. If you are going to give up Michigan and you lose Florida, you lose.”

The same morning Jerry Decker and the Sawdust Engineers are tinkering in their wood shop, a group of women called the Weavers are at their looms elsewhere in the activities center expressing ambivalence about McCain.

“He’s flat, he’s old, he doesn’t seem enthused,” says Jane Bolder, 69, a registered independent who twice voted for Bush because of his tax policies. Voting for McCain, she says, would be a no-brainer if he had picked Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman as a running mate instead of Alaska’s Gov. Palin. “I can’t imagine sending Palin, with her cliches, et cetera, to negotiate or meet with leaders of other countries,” she says.

Obama has struggled to capture older white voters, and Bolder epitomizes their hesitance about him. “He has pizazz, but he has a lot of plans to spend a lot of money,” she says. “The health plan is more geared toward government control. He wants to raise capital gains taxes. Where is the money going to come from to pay for health care?”

Outside, the aqua aerobics class is full tilt with women in water wings dancing to Abba’s “Mamma Mia” while golf carts are nosed up to the state-of-the-art gym. The computer room is packed. Bridge starts at 2. To write off this population as a monolithic voting bloc is a mistake: Ages here range from 55 (known as the “babies”) to 95. They TiVo, they download, and most important, they are inveterate consumers of information.

The one common experience that sears the majority here is the Great Depression. The tanked economy has transcended their usual single-issue focus on health care or Social Security. They are worried, even mournful, about the country that is being passed on to their children and grandchildren. The surface anger is directed at reckless corporations and lack of oversight, but the deeper emotions eventually come out.

“Our debt is in the trillions,” Decker says. “Is this a nice legacy for our kids? We’re worried about our granddaughter, the kind of medical care she’ll have. Will there be a Social Security for her? Will there be pensions?”

It’s 4:30 in the afternoon, and the Deckers are having their ritual glass of wine when Jerry leaps up from a chair in the living room and points out the sliding glass door. “Look at that gator!” he shouts. “He’s on the sixth fairway!” A 10-foot alligator is walking toward the lake.

The couple steps outside. “Oh, look, he’s gonna stop and see Betty,” Jeannie says.

The alligator pauses at lake’s edge next to a white bird. “Isn’t that majestic?” Jerry says, in awe.

The Deckers find everything about Sun City Center pretty majestic. They moved here from Delaware in 2005, and it was a long time coming. After they married in 1960, they put a plan together: save as much as possible so they could enjoy retirement. Jeannie was a registered nurse and Jerry worked for various corporations. Now they swim, fish in the Gulf of Mexico, line-dance, hit the Ringling Museum of Art and even ride the log flume at Busch Gardens.

Both voted for Bush but felt somewhat duped when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. “Being an old Army guy, I remember saying to Jeannie, ‘I hope he’s right, but we gotta support him 100 percent,’ ” Decker says. “Turns out the weapons weren’t so mass after all.”

The Deckers favor abortion rights and stem cell research, but restoring financial solvency is what matters most to them.

“McCain has that built-in integrity because of what he went through as a POW,” Jerry says. “But I wish he would have gotten on the bandwagon on the other issues — the golden parachutes — and come out swinging.”

And yet he is not ready to commit to Obama.

“First of all, his presence and rhetoric are marvelous,” Jerry says. “But once you get beyond that, what is there? I’m concerned with his associations in the past, the minister and ACORN.” Decker is referring to Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who cursed the nation from the pulpit, and the candidate’s work with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now that critics say pressured banks into lending money to unqualified low-income home buyers.

Meanwhile, a widow friend of the Deckers just learned that her husband’s benefits plan with a Big Three automaker is dropping her medical coverage.

“Doggone it, this was the agreement at the start, that we’ll take care of you,” Jerry says. “You didn’t mind working for 35, 40 years because you say to your wife, ‘Honey, we are gonna get all of these things in retirement.’ ”

The Deckers are better positioned than most. Eighteen months ago, when Jerry noticed the country’s debt shooting up and the glut of overpriced houses, he pulled their money from the stock market and invested in certificates of deposit and long-term annuities, a move that preserved their retirement savings.

Their glass of wine finished, they watch “NASCAR Now” as they do every weekday at 5 and then “Pardon the Interruption.” Jeannie makes a shrimp salad for dinner while the Florida sky turns pink.

By 6:30 the next morning they are headed out for their three-mile walk. The moon bounces off campaign signs in the cool grass. Back home they eat breakfast and Jerry becomes engrossed in an article in the morning paper about Hobson’s choice and the 2008 presidential election. “It means you have a choice between two undesirable options,” Jerry tells Jeannie. “That defines our dilemma perfectly.”

It’s ‘Scary What’s Going On’

As the Deckers clear away their breakfast dishes, Dee Williams is in another part of Sun City Center preparing to canvass for McCain. Armed with printouts of addresses of registered Republicans, the president of the local Republican Club hops in her golf cart and hits the gas.

“If Obama becomes president, I’m scared of the march down the road to socialism,” Williams says. Not that she has been that thrilled with Bush. “He didn’t know what a veto pen was. He didn’t have the guts to stop the spending habits.”

McCain is the only hope. She parks the golf cart in front of a peach-colored house with flamingos carved into the burglar bars. “I just love cul-de-sacs,” Williams says. A woman tentatively opens the door.

“I’m Dee Williams, your precinct chairman,” she says, handing the woman a McCain-Palin packet.

“It’s kinda scary what’s going on,” the woman says.

Williams offers encouragement. “Yes, we have to get out the vote,” she says.

Back in the golf cart, she recounts McCain’s appearance the night before at a campaign stop in Minnesota where he reassured a voter that Obama is not an Arab and that there is no reason to fear him.

“Why didn’t he say, ‘There’s no reason to be scared of him, but be scared of his policies’? ” Williams says. “My daughter Kim called and said, ‘I think this man is going into dementia.’ ”

Williams is disappointed that Palin bypassed Sun City Center on a recent swing through the Tampa Bay area for a rally at a public park in a neighboring county.

“Our people are too old to show up at some park and sit on the ground,” Williams says. “You can’t take our vote for granted. These people here are darned independent.”

She rings the bell of a house with a Jaguar in the garage and flowering jasmine wrapped around a lamppost. The woman who answers the door makes a grave forecast for the Republican Party:

“I’m for these guys, but I don’t think they’ll win.”

Trying to Decide

With his $25 allowance in his wallet, Jerry Decker takes the golf cart up to Home Depot. He whirs along the smooth roads, waving to friends, adjusting his baseball cap. Retirees used to move to Sun City Center and pay cash for their houses. Now mortgages are common; more than two dozen homes are in foreclosure.

When Jerry was a boy in the 1930s, his father told him that the bank had come for their furniture because of a missed payment of $2.50, and the lesson stuck with him: Don’t rely on the government and don’t rely on credit.

What he wants is a commander who will address the country and talk honestly. He and his wife will watch the third and final presidential debate and try to make up their minds. More pieces of the puzzle.

“Jeannie said it best,” Jerry says. “She said, ‘No one has stood up and said: I made a mistake.’ ”

He parks the golf cart outside Home Depot and inside he grabs some weedkiller before catching sight of a display of Eco-Smart light bulbs on sale. He looks at the box and checks the sign. “Six forty-five, that’s a pretty good price,” he says.

At the register, he greets the cashier. “Hello, young lady, can you keep me under $10?”

She smiles. “No, it’s $12.97.”

When he gets home, Jeanne is setting out their Saturday lunch: half a tuna sandwich each and sliced peaches. “Honey, I brought you a present,” he calls, coming through the garage door. “And these were on sale.”

Jeannie studies the light bulbs.

The purchase leaves Jerry with $12.03 for the week, but that’s his business. “I’ll make it,” he says. “Oh, sure.”

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

McCain holds final fundraiser for RNC

Matthew Mosk
Washington Post
October 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – Sen. John McCain stepped into a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt in New York Tuesday night for what was likely to be his last fundraiser of the 2008 presidential campaign.

But while the event, which was expected to net between $8 million and $10 million for the Republican National Committee, will provide a much-needed infusion for the GOP nominee, it will do little to whittle down the massive financial advantage that Sen. Barack Obama is using to dominate the electoral landscape.

Exactly how much money Obama has raised will not be clear until next week, when the two campaigns are required to report their September fundraising totals to the Federal Election Commission, although some strategists are openly speculating that he could approach $100 million for the month. That would shatter a record Obama set in August, when he brought in $67 million.

As the first presidential candidate to run a general-election campaign entirely with private donations, Obama has a significant fundraising advantage and is using that imbalance to swamp McCain on the airwaves and in building turnout operations coast to coast.

Voters in large swaths of Florida will see Obama television commercials dozens of times before catching sight of a McCain ad. A drive across Virginia will wend past 51 Obama field offices, compared with 19 for McCain. “It’s given them resources to compete in multiple battlegrounds in all dimensions – on the ground, through the mail, with media, everything,” Chris Kofinis, a Democratic political strategist, said of Obama’s fundraising success. “I think people will look back and say this was one of the most pivotal decisions in his campaign.”

Since accepting $84 million in public funds, McCain has been barred from raising money for his own campaign. He has sought to keep pace with Obama’s effort by hosting RNC fundraisers like Tuesday night’s event in New York. The party committee raised $66 million in September and has begun to expand its presence on television with ads featuring blistering attacks on Obama.

At the same time, the RNC is leading an effort to challenge the legality of millions of dollars in “un-itemized” donations that Obama has collected. Under FEC rules, his campaign does not have to document the names of donors who give less than $200.

The RNC is keeping a growing list of phony donors and unexplained credit card charges that they believe point to more than a simple inability by the Obama team to keep track of all the money flowing in. Steve and Rachel Larman, a Missouri couple who vote Republican, told local reporters that they found a $2,300 charge for a donation to the Obama campaign on their credit card statement that they could not explain. Patricia Phillips, a Virginia Republican, had a similar experience, she said, when she opened her MasterCard statement last month to discover a $5 charge from the Obama campaign. “I thought, ‘Oh, my! This is not from me,’ ” she said.

Other donations have arrived under such obviously bogus names as Edrty Eddty and Es Esh.

Experts called it a common problem on an uncommon scale – while there have always been donors who, for a host of reasons, tried to circumvent federal election rules and give campaign contributions without providing their real names, they are more frequent with Obama because of the volume of donations his campaign is processing.

“I’m sure they have a system in place to screen out improper donations,” said Scott Thomas, a former FEC chairman. “Their problem is they have such a massive donor base and so many of these coming in that it’s hard to keep up.”

Obama campaign aides said they have followed a policy of sending immediate refunds to people who contact the campaign to say that they have been charged for a contribution they did not make. “While no organization is protected from Internet fraud, we have taken every available step to root out improper contributions, updating our systems when necessary,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

So far, the complaints have not prompted FEC action. And Obama’s controversial decision to forgo public funding and instead raise money on his own is paying huge dividends.

The most noticeable evidence of his spending advantage has been on the airwaves, where, in some states, Obama been running seven or eight times as many commercials as McCain. Evan Tracey, an analyst with the Campaign Media Analysis Group, called the disparity stunning.

“McCain’s in a shouting match with a guy holding a bullhorn,” Tracey said.

Video games sport ads for Obama

An ad for presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama is seen in the XBox360 Live version of “NBA Live 08.” Eighteen video games will feature Obama ads in the next few weeks. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Devlin Barrett
Associated Press
October 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – Too busy playing video games to watch presidential ads on television? Barack Obama has found you, too, by becoming the first presidential candidate to buy ad space inside a game.

Eighteen video games, including the extremely popular “Guitar Hero” and “Madden 09,” will feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign in the final weeks before the election. The ads – appearing on billboards and other signage – remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign Web site that encourages people to register for early voting.

Obama campaign officials said the video game ads target 10 states that allow early voting, including several battleground states: Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado.

“These ads will help us expand the reach of VoteforChange.com, so that more people can use this easy tool to find their early vote location and make sure their voice is heard,” said Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro. The campaign did not say how much it cost to launch the ad blitz on gamers.

The idea of embedding advertising temporarily inside a video game is relatively new, having only begun about 18 months ago, and Obama is the first presidential candidate to buy space, according to Holly Rockwood, a spokeswoman for Electronic Arts Inc., whose company is featuring the Obama ads in nine of its games.

The Democrat’s ads are aimed primarily at game players who like sports, including NASCAR, the NBA, the NHL and skateboarding.

Rockwood would not say how much the ads cost, but she said they are running on the Xbox Live versions of the game through Nov. 3. They began earlier this month.

“It reaches an audience that is typically hard to reach: young males, roughly 18 to 34,” Rockwood said. “That’s very appealing to our advertisers.”

Rockwood declined to say how much revenue the company generates from selling ad space in its games.

For those who still associate video games with clunky “Pac-Man” or “Space Invaders” consoles, here’s how in-game advertising works: The Xbox 360 console connects to the Internet, so it can be updated with new features, including ads. In the case of “Burnout: Paradise,” the game came out in stores in January, but the Obama ads were only inserted this month.

Added seats still short of majority in Parliament

Supporters cheer as results are posted at Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s election headquarters Tuesday in Calgary. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Rob Gillies
Associated Press
October 15, 2008

OTTAWA – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the first major world leader to face voters since the global financial meltdown, led his Conservative Party to victory in Tuesday’s election but was forecast to fall short of a majority in Parliament.

The election agency reported on its Web site that the Conservatives had won or were leading in races for 143 of Parliament’s 308 seats, an improvement over the 127 seats the party had in the previous Parliament.

But, based on results obtained directly from election officials, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. predicted the Conservative Party would not win the 155 seats needed to govern on its own. That would force it to again rely on opposition support to pass budgets and legislation – as it has had to since a 2006 election victory.

Harper had called elections early in hopes of getting his party a majority, but the Conservatives sought to put a good face on the results, pointing to their increased number of seats.

“Every other incumbent government in the Western world is in serious political trouble with the economic situation,” Conservative legislator Jason Kenney said. “Ours is probably the only one that could be re-elected – let alone with an increased mandate.”

The Liberal Party, long Canada’s top party, suffered a severe drubbing, dropping about two dozen seats from 95 in the previous Parliament, according to the election agency. Bloc Quebecois led for about 50 seats, the New Democrats just less than 40 and independent candidates two.

Election figures gave the Conservatives about 37 percent of the total vote, the Liberals 27 percent, Bloc Quebecois 10 percent, New Democrats 18 percent and others 8 percent.

The party winning the most seats generally forms the government, with its leader becoming prime minister. The opposition parties could unite and topple Harper if they won enough seats for a majority, but analysts said that was unlikely because the parties have no tradition of forming such coalitions.

The opposition Liberals have typically been the party in power, forming the government for most of Canada’s 141 years. But the left-of-center vote was divided among four parties.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion’s campaign was hindered by his unpopular plan to tax all fossil fuels except gasoline and by perceptions he is a weak leader. A former professor from French-speaking Quebec, Dion also suffered in other regions because he frequently mangles English grammar and his accent makes him hard to understand.

Analysts said Harper wanted the election before the economy got worse and ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, which could put a Democrat in the White House and encourage Canadians to choose a more liberal government.

Assessment comes as Petraeus takes charge of U.S. forces in region

Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
McClatchy
October 15, 2008

WASHINGTON – A growing al-Qaida-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army’s reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America’s key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence, says a soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment.

A U.S. official who participated in drafting the top secret National Intelligence Estimate said it portrays the situation in Pakistan as “very bad.”

Another official called the draft “very bleak,” and said it describes Pakistan as being “on the edge.”

The first official summarized the estimate’s conclusions about the state of Pakistan as: “no money, no energy, no government.”

Six U.S. officials who helped draft or are aware of the document’s findings confirmed them to McClatchy Newspapers on the condition of anonymity. An NIE’s conclusions reflect the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

The NIE on Pakistan, along with others being prepared on Afghanistan and Iraq, will underpin a “strategic assessment” of the situation that Army Gen. David Petraeus, who is about to take command of all U.S. forces in the region, has requested. The aim of the assessment – seven years after the U.S. sent troops into Afghanistan – is to determine whether a U.S. presence in the region can be effective and if so what U.S. strategy should be.

The findings also are intended to support the Bush administration’s effort to recommend the resources the next president will need for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at a time the economic crisis is straining the Treasury and inflating the federal budget deficit.

The Afghanistan estimate warns that additional American troops are urgently needed there and that Islamic extremists who enjoy safe haven in Pakistan pose a growing threat to the U.S.-backed government of Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.

The Iraq NIE is more cautious about the prospects for stability there than the Bush administration and either John McCain or Barack Obama have been, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. will be able to redeploy a significant number of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan anytime soon.

Together, the three NIEs suggest that without significant and swift progress on all three fronts – which they suggest is uncertain at best – the U.S. could find itself facing a growing threat from al-Qaida and other Islamic extremist groups, said one of the officials.

About the only good news in the Pakistan NIE is that it’s “relatively sanguine” about the prospects of a Pakistani nuclear weapon, materials or knowledge falling into the hands of terrorists, said one official.

However, the draft NIE paints a grim picture of the situation in the impoverished, nuclear-armed country of 160 million, according to the U.S. officials who spoke to McClatchy.

The estimate says that the Islamist insurgency based in the Federally Administered Tribal Area bordering Afghanistan, the suspected safe haven of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, is intensifying.

However, according to the officials, the draft also finds that the Pakistani military is reluctant to launch an all-out campaign against the Islamists in part because of popular opposition to continuing the cooperation with the United States that began under Pervez Musharraf, the U.S.-backed former president, after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Anti-U.S. and anti-government sentiments have grown recently, stoked by stepped-up cross-border U.S. missile strikes and at least one commando raid on suspected terrorist targets in the FATA that reportedly have resulted in civilian deaths.

The Pakistani military, which has lost hundreds of troops to battles and suicide bombings, is waging offensives against Islamist guerrillas in the Bajaur tribal agency and Swat, a picturesque region of the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan.

U.S. officials said insurgent attacks on Pakistani security forces provoked the Pakistani army operations.

Economy Remains Top Voter Concern

By Chris Cillizza
washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, October 14, 2008; 6:32 AM

Barack Obama widened his lead considerably over John McCain in four key battleground states during the past three weeks, providing further evidence that the economic crisis has greatly enhanced the Democrat’s advantage with just 21 days left before Election Day.

Obama holds double-digit margins over McCain in Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin and carries a nine-point advantage over his Republican rival in Colorado, according to polling conducted by Quinnipiac University for washingtonpost.com and the Wall Street Journal.

Obama’s ascendancy in these key states mirrors his growing lead in national polling. The latest Washington Post/ABC News survey put Obama at 53 percent to McCain’s 43 percent, while the daily Gallup tracking poll showed Obama holding a similar lead of 51 percent to 41 percent on Monday.

The latest polling confirms that the financial crisis and stock market crash that has gripped Wall Street and Washington over the past month has increased the importance of economic matters to voters — particularly in the industrial Midwest — and accrued almost exclusively to Obama’s benefit.

In Michigan, more than six in ten voters said the economy was the “single most important issue” in deciding their vote. Among likely voters, Obama increased his lead over McCain from a four-point edge in a late September Quinnipiac poll to a whopping 16-point lead in the most recent survey.

Obama’s 54 percent to 38 percent lead in Michigan helps to explain why McCain decided to pull down his ads and pull out the majority of his campaign staff from the Wolverine State last week — choosing to fight, instead, in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Maine.

The data was similar in Wisconsin and Minnesota where Obama gained 10 points and nine points, respectively, in his margin over McCain since the September Quinnipiac poll; the Illinois senator led McCain in Wisconsin 54 percent to 37 percent, and held a 51 percent to 40 percent edge in Minnesota.

In both states, 58 percent of the sample cited the economy as the leading issue affecting their vote — nearly six times as many as named any other issue. The Wisconsin number represents a significant shift from the seven-point advantage the Quinnipiac poll showed for Obama in the Badger State in the third week of September. It also stands in contrast to other recent poll data, including a CNN/Time poll done earlier this month, that showed Obama leading 51 percent to 46 percent.

The surveys also indicate that Obama is significantly more trusted on economic issues than McCain. In Wisconsin, 53 percent said Obama “better understands the economy” while just 32 percent chose McCain. The numbers were not much better in Michigan (52 percent Obama/35 percent McCain), Minnesota (49/34) or Colorado (51/39).

A majority of voters in each state said McCain had not shown “effective leadership” in dealing with the financial meltdown. Throughout the past several weeks, McCain has condemned financial executives on Wall Street, offered a few proposed remedies for the crisis, and briefly suspended his campaign to return to Washington to take part in White House talks over a $700 billion rescue plan.

McCain also is being badly hamstrung by a national political environment tipped heavily against his party. Just one in four voters in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin approve of the job President Bush is doing — a number reflected in the Post/ABC News national poll where just 23 percent of voters voiced approval for Bush’s performance.

For all of the media focus on the presidential debates — the third and last of which will be held tomorrow at Hofstra University in New York — the encounters seem to have had little effect in persuading voters.

In each of the four states, between 71 percent and 75 percent of voters said they watched the second presidential debate in Nashville, Tenn., last Tuesday night. And yet, in each of the four states more than eight in ten voters said the debate did not change their vote.

Nearly half of the voters in each state thought Obama had done a better job in the Nashville debate while less than one in five voters said McCain had won the debate.

The Republican problems in these four battleground states weren’t limited to the top of the ticket.

In Colorado’s open seat Senate race, Democratic Rep. Mark Udall holds a commanding 54 percent to 40 percent lead over former Republican Rep. Bob Schaffer. In Minnesota, Sen. Norm Coleman (R) has slipped into a dead heat with his Democratic opponent Al Franken; Franken stands at 38 percent to 36 percent for Coleman and 18 percent for independent candidate Dean Barkley.

The polls were conducted from Oct. 8-12. The sample sizes were: 1,019 likely voters in Minnesota, 1,201 likely voters in Wisconsin, 1,088 likely voters in Colorado and 1,043 likely voters in Michigan. Each has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Insiders say ticket must strike balance

John McCain greets volunteers at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., on Sunday. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Liz Sidoti
Associated Press
October 13, 2008

INDIANAPOLIS – Three weeks before the election, Republicans are growing increasingly concerned about John McCain’s ability to mount a comeback, questioning his tactics and even his campaign’s main thrust in a White House race increasingly focused on economic turmoil.

“He has to make the case that he’s different than Bush and better than Obama on the economy,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of more than a dozen prominent Republicans who in interviews during the past week expressed concern over the course of McCain’s bid. “If he doesn’t win that case, it’s all over, and it’s going to be a very bad year for Republicans.”

Several Republicans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid angering McCain, said the campaign should have sought to plant doubts about Obama’s associations with 1960s-era radical William Ayers and others months ago. Doing so now, they said, makes the 72-year-old McCain come off as angry, grouchy and desperate.

Rather, these Republicans said, McCain needs to strike a balance in his tone – appearing presidential while also questioning Obama’s readiness to serve and judgment to lead. And several said McCain should close the campaign on an honorable note.

“He doesn’t need an attack strategy, he needs a comeback strategy,” said Alex Castellanos, a longtime national GOP media consultant who worked for Mitt Romney in the primaries.

The unsolicited advice comes as McCain campaign officials become increasingly discouraged. From junior aides to top advisers, the frustration is palpable. Some argue the media isn’t giving McCain a fair shake and are weary of the increasingly problematic environment working against the GOP. Tensions have grown over how hard to go after Obama amid concerns about irreparably damaging McCain’s straight-shooter reputation.

And the candidate himself, the target of a negative whisper campaign in the 2000 GOP primary, appears conflicted on the campaign trail. He’s cheery and smiling during question-and-answer sessions with crowds but becomes visibly annoyed – even surly – when he reads aloud scripted attacks on Obama and Democrats.

Despite polls showing Obama with a lead nationally and challenging for states long in the Republican column, no Republican interviewed said the race was lost. They said McCain can prevail if he presents himself as the optimistic visionary the public wants in deeply worrisome economic times.

“He needs to come forward with a serious new plan and announce it in a serious manner,” said Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign. “McCain cannot outdo Obama in just expressing outrage over Wall Street greed.”

The candidates meet Wednesday in their third and final debate; it’s McCain’s best chance to make a lasting impression.

“He has an opportunity to step up and be a forceful leader during these challenging times,” said Ron Kaufman, a veteran party operative who also worked for Romney. “McCain got the nomination because that’s what his brand is, but somehow it’s gotten muddled.”

Senior advisers insist McCain is trying to be such a leader. They note that his daily speeches are devoted heavily to the economy, including taxes and health care, and that he’s been rolling out a series of prescriptions. They complain McCain’s not getting credit for those and argue that the media holds McCain to a higher standard than Obama, who they contend is getting a free pass.

Over the past week, McCain also has been assailing Obama’s character in speeches and TV ads. They include one that, with little proof, accuses Obama of lying about his association with Ayers and assails Democrats as irresponsible liberals on the economy.

Some Republicans want McCain to keep it up, though strike a balance.

Michael Steele, the former Maryland lieutenant governor and chairman of the candidate-recruiting organization GOPAC, said McCain must reassure people with a “clear and concise” economic message but also needs to “smack the other guy around a little bit.”

Ohio GOP chief Bob Bennett said the campaign must do more to “close the sale” on what McCain would do as president. But he also said: “I think he needs to get tougher.”

Others say the only thing McCain can do is hope Obama makes a huge mistake or an outside event changes the race.

“Winning the campaign is totally out of McCain’s hands,” said Matthew Dowd, President Bush’s senior political strategist in 2004, who now shuns the party label.

Michael Barone
October 11, 2008

“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

That’s what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign e-mails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg’s WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama’s relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago – papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN’s phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest e-mails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg’s example: We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.

Other Obama supporters have threatened critics with criminal prosecution. In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Obama that were “false.” I had been under the impression that the Alien and Sedition Acts had gone out of existence in 1801-02. Not so, apparently, in metropolitan St. Louis. Similarly, the Obama campaign called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Obama’s ties to Ayers.

These attempts to shut down political speech have become routine for liberals. Congressional Democrats sought to reimpose the “fairness doctrine” on broadcasters, which until it was repealed in the 1980s required equal time for different points of view. The motive was plain: to shut down the one conservative-leaning communications medium, talk radio. Liberal talk-show hosts have mostly failed to draw audiences, and many liberals can’t abide having citizens hear contrary views.

Corporate liberals have done their share in shutting down anti-liberal speech, too. “Saturday Night Live” ran a spoof of the financial crisis that skewered Democrats like House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank and liberal contributors Herbert and Marion Sandler, who sold toxic-waste-filled Golden West to Wachovia Bank for $24 billion. Surprising, but not for long. The tape of the broadcast disappeared from NBC’s Web site and was replaced with another that omitted the references to Frank and the Sandlers. Evidently NBC and its parent, General Electric, don’t want people to hear speech that attacks liberals.

Once upon a time, liberals prided themselves, with considerable reason, as the staunchest defenders of free speech. Union organizers in the 1930s and 1940s argued that they should have access to employees to speak freely to them, and union leaders like George Meany and Walter Reuther were ardent defenders of the First Amendment.

Today’s liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

Associated Press
October 11, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sarah Palin unlawfully abused her power as governor by trying to have her former brother-in-law fired as a state trooper, the chief investigator of an Alaska legislative panel concluded today. The politically charged inquiry imperiled her reputation as a reformer on John McCain’s Republican ticket.

Investigator Stephen Branchflower, in a report by a bipartisan panel that investigated the matter, found Palin in violation of a state ethics law that prohibits public officials from using their office for personal gain.

The inquiry looked into her dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, who said he lost his job because he resisted pressure to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with the governor’s sister. Palin says Monegan was fired as part of a legitimate budget dispute.

The report found that Palin let the family grudge influence her decision-making even if it was not the sole reason Monegan was dismissed. “I feel vindicated,” Monegan said. “It sounds like they’ve validated my belief and opinions. And that tells me I’m not totally out in left field.”

Branchflower said Palin violated a statute of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

“I disagree,” said Palin attorney Thomas Van Flein. “In order to violate the ethics law, there has to be some personal gain, usually financial. Mr. Branchflower has failed to identify any financial gain.”

The statute says “any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that (public) trust.”

Palin and McCain’s supporters had hoped the inquiry’s finding would be delayed until after the presidential election to spare her any embarrassment and to put aside an enduring distraction as she campaigns as McCain’s running mate in an uphill contest against Democrat Barack Obama.

But the panel of lawmakers voted to release the report, although not without dissension. There was no immediate vote on whether to endorse its findings.

“I think there are some problems in this report,” said Republican state Sen. Gary Stevens, a member of the panel. “I would encourage people to be very cautious, to look at this with a jaundiced eye.”

The nearly 300-page report does not recommend sanctions or a criminal investigation.

The investigation revealed that Palin’s husband, Todd, has extraordinary access to the governor’s office and her closest advisers. He used that access to try to get trooper Mike Wooten fired, the report found.

Branchflower faulted Sarah Palin for taking no action to stop that. He also noted there is evidence the governor herself participated in the effort.

Wooten had been in hot water before Palin became governor over allegations that he illegally shot a moose, drank beer in a patrol car and used a Taser on his stepson.

In proceedings revealed by the report, former Alaska State Trooper Col. Julia Grimes told investigators that Sarah Palin called her in late 2005 to discuss why Wooten hadn’t been fired, and Grimes told her the inquiry was confidential by law.

“Her questions were how can a trooper who behaves this way still be working,” Grimes said. “I asked her to please trust me, that because I can’t tell her details I would ask her to please trust me that I would take the appropriate action if and when I knew what the findings were. … I couldn’t have another conversation with her about it because, again, it’s protected by law.”

Grimes said Todd Palin also contacted her by telephone in late 2005 to discuss the confidential investigation of Wooten.

Wooten’s disciplinary case was settled in September 2006 — months before Palin was elected governor — and he was allowed to continue working as a trooper.

After Palin’s election, her new public safety commissioner, Monegan, said he was summoned to the governor’s office to meet Todd Palin, who said Wooten’s punishment had been merely a “slap on the wrist.” Monegan said he understood the Palins wanted Wooten fired. “I had this kind of ominous feeling that I may not be long for this job if I didn’t somehow respond accordingly,” Monegan told the investigator.

For months afterward, Todd Palin filed complaints about Wooten, saying he was seen riding a snowmobile after he had filed a worker’s compensation claim and was seen dropping off his children at school in his patrol car. Monegan said Wooten’s doctor had authorized the snowmobile trip and his supervisor had approved his use of the patrol car. Monegan said Alaska’s attorney general later called him to inquire about Wooten, and Monegan told him they shouldn’t be discussing the subject.

“This was an issue that apparently wasn’t going to go away, that there were certainly frustrations,” Monegan said. “To say that (Sarah Palin) was focused on this I think would be accurate.”

WASHINGTON (AP) – Already advertising at record levels, Barack Obama has scheduled a half-hour commercial for prime time on Oct. 29, six days before Election Day.

Obama campaign officials said the campaign had secured a 30-minute block of time at 8 p.m. on CBS and NBC. CBS already was juggling its lineup to accommodate the Democratic presidential candidate, moving back an episode of “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”

Such a vast purchase of commercial time is a multimillion-dollar expense, but Obama has been spending dramatically on ads, overshadowing rival John McCain and the Republican National Committee.

Short political spots have been the traditional way for politicians to communicate with voters. But a prime-time, sitcom-length commercial would provide Obama an opportunity to make a closing argument to the entire country.

“It’s a luxury to be able to afford that kind of communication,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic media consultant who was a senior adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

That Obama has the ability to buy such a huge block of prime time is a testament to his prodigious fundraising. He has not been shy about spending it.

On Monday, for instance, he spent $3.3 million in a single day of TV advertising. At that rate he will spend more than $90 million on ads through Election Day _ more than all the money Republican rival John McCain has to spend on his entire fall campaign.

McCain’s ad spending Monday totaled about $900,000 and the Republican National Committee weighed in with about $700,000 worth.

All whopping numbers, but the disparity between Obama and the Republicans is so wide that it has allowed Obama to spend in more states than McCain, to appear more frequently in key markets and to diversify his message by both attacking McCain and promoting his own personal story.

With national and state polls showing him building a broader lead over McCain, Obama has switched to a more positive pitch. Last week, only 34 percent of his ads attacked McCain directly while virtually all of McCain’s ads attacked Obama, according to a study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

One of Obama’s most recent ads comes as McCain makes an issue of Obama’s connections to 1960s radical Bill Ayers and as McCain’s running mate, Sarah Plain, argues that Obama “is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.”

The ad bespeaks Americana. In it, Obama recalls being a child, sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders and waving an American flag as they watched astronauts return from a splashdown. “And my grandfather would say, ‘Boy, Americans, we can do anything when we put our minds to it.’”

The ad offers a direct response to Palin. But it also illustrates Obama’s continuing need as an African American to reassure voters about his candidacy.

On Friday, the Republican National Committee will start running a TV ad in Indiana and Wisconsin seeking to sow doubts about Obama’s political upbringing, linking him to Ayers and other Chicago figures. “The Chicago Way. Shady politics. That’s Barack Obama’s training,” the ad says.

Boosted by an economy in crisis and a saturation of advertising, Obama has built up his margins over McCain in Democratic-leaning battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. He has tilted Republican-leaning states such as Colorado and New Mexico toward his side. And he has created contests in such reliably Republican states as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.

By now, McCain’s allies had hoped the Arizona senator would have established his dominance in states President Bush won in 2000 and 2004, and would have focused on winning two of the three key Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.

But McCain stopped advertising in Michigan, Obama leads in Pennsylvania and he has the edge in Ohio.

“Money doesn’t always mean victory, but it means that you have more options to cover more of the battlefield,” Republican strategist Terry Holt said. “We’re going to have to win with less.”

Less is right. Obama is outspending McCain in practically every one of the 14 states the two camps are contesting. One exception is Iowa, where McCain spent more than Obama even though Obama has been sitting on a comfortable lead in the polls.

Meanwhile, Obama’s ability to spend is restrained only by his ability to raise money.

He is the first major party candidate to decline public financing in the general election, leaving him free to spend as much as he can raise. McCain, on the other hand, is limited to spending only the $84 million in public funds he accepted to cover all his costs in September and October.

The RNC is helping with its own resources. It raised a record $66 million in September. Obama has not disclosed his September finances; he doesn’t have to until Oct. 20, when financial reports are due to the Federal Election Commission.

Even with their combined resources, McCain and the RNC trailed Obama in ad spending last week by more than $6 million.

“That is a message imbalance that you just can’t overcome,” said Evan Tracey, head of TNS/CMAG.

___

AP Television Writer David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.

Erwin Chemerinsky
October 10, 2008

Why are the two major presidential candidates virtually ignoring the importance of this election in determining the composition of the Supreme Court and the future of constitutional law? One of a president’s most long-lasting legacies is in the judges he places on the bench. Justice John Paul Stevens, now 88, was appointed by President Ford in 1975. If John G. Roberts Jr. remains on the court until he is 88, he would be chief justice until 2043.

Although the candidates’ mentions of the issue have been few, it is clear that there is a sharp difference between them as to what type of individuals they would name to the Supreme Court. John McCain has said that he would appoint individuals like Roberts and Samuel A. Alito Jr., and that he admires the judicial philosophies of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Barack Obama voted against the confirmation of Roberts and Alito and has said that he would appoint justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

The issue of judicial appointments is particularly important in this election, because there are almost sure to be vacancies on the Supreme Court during the next presidential term. It seems unlikely that Stevens will remain on the court until 2013, when he would be 93. Ginsburg is 75, and there is speculation that she might retire. It also has been widely rumored that David H. Souter wants to retire and go home to New Hampshire.

If McCain gets to replace any of these justices, let alone more than one, there likely would be dramatic changes in many areas of constitutional law. There are almost certainly four votes on the current court – Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito – to overrule Roe v. Wade and allow the government to prohibit abortion. In light of McCain’s emphatic opposition to abortion rights, he likely would appoint the decisive fifth vote to end constitutional protection of those rights. Obama, by contrast, would almost certainly appoint individuals who would reaffirm Roe.

The disagreements between McCain and Obama about issues of constitutional law extend far beyond just abortion rights. McCain said that the Supreme Court’s decision in June protecting the right of those held as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to have access to federal court hearings was one of the worst in history. Obama praised it for upholding the rule of law and ensuring compliance with the Constitution. Because it was a 5-4 decision that included Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg in the majority, McCain’s replacing even one of these justices could cause the court to reverse itself.

Likewise, a McCain appointment to the high court probably would cast the fifth vote to overrule the court’s 2003 decision to allow colleges and universities to consider race in admissions to achieve diversity.

The presidential candidates likely have made a political calculation to avoid discussion of judicial picks, because the issue is not paramount to the all-important undecided, swing voters.

Moreover, the candidates – especially Obama – seem to want to avoid the underlying constitutional issues. For example, Obama rarely emphasizes his support for abortion rights, being content to say that the goal should be to decrease the number of abortions. Nor does he see political gain in defending affirmative action or the rights of suspected terrorists.

But this strategy may be a serious miscalculation in what is likely to be a very close election. Each candidate needs to turn out his base of support, which does care about this crucial issue. Equally important, there may be appeal to key groups of undecided voters, such as Republican women, Hispanics and younger voters.

Even with the economic crisis and the war in Iraq as dominant political issues, there is time to discuss the president’s role in filling judicial vacancies. The stakes are no less than the content of constitutional rights for a generation to come.

Cal Thomas
October 10, 2008

The audience at the second presidential debate/town hall meeting was, supposedly, made up of “undecided” voters. Anyone who is undecided less than a month before the election hasn’t been paying attention and ought to be disqualified from voting at all. The questions were terrible, the answers worse.

Why were there no questions about the Supreme Court, abortion, or immigration – three extremely hot topics? There was nothing about Barack Obama’s leftist friends, like William Ayers. Was Tom Brokaw trying to protect Obama on these important issues and associations?

Listening to the questions (and the answers) was like watching TV poker. A questioner made a bid on, say, the mortgage crisis or health care. What will the candidates do for me? Obama would make a bet that his proposal was best and McCain would raise him. Inexplicably, McCain called for a reduction in federal spending as one way to begin fixing the spiraling economy, while he simultaneously proposed $300 billion in new spending to bail people out of mortgages they cannot afford. Do we need “real estate agent” added to the growing list of things government does not do well?

In none of the questions from the “undecideds” (or answers from the candidates) was there a suggestion that people should do more for themselves and be encouraged and rewarded (lower taxes?) for making right decisions. In none of the answers was there a challenge for Americans to rise above their circumstances and rebuild what might have gone wrong in their own lives. We left accountability and personal responsibility at Oprah’s altar long ago. There is no better example of our entitlement mentality than on an Oprah show a few years ago when she gave cars to women who needed them, only to have some of the recipients complain that they had to pay a tax on the vehicle. They thought Oprah (or General Motors) should have paid the tax on their free car.

To ask people to take charge of their own lives is now deemed “insensitive” and “uncaring.” The government is your keeper, you shall not want.

Did anyone detect a hint of optimism in anything the candidates said? Why didn’t McCain, especially, list the number of economic downturns and recessions that America has overcome? Why didn’t he mention the sharp drop in the stock market after 9/11 and note how it came roaring back? It was the same with the savings and loan debacle in the late ’70s and early ’80s. This is America. We always come back. If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere; shining city on a hill; bootstraps; we shall overcome. Rather than wallow in misery (and those who lived through the Great Depression would have gladly swapped places with us if they’d had a time machine), modern politicians too often indulge the indolent and self-absorbed.

McCain missed a grand opportunity to call Obama’s tax-and-spend plans “voodoo economics” (or would someone call that “racist,” as House Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank has called those who questioned Fannie Mae’s loans to minorities whose income and credit worthiness would have disqualified them for loans in more fiscally responsible times?).

Why didn’t McCain challenge Obama’s promise to cut taxes for the middle class? As Jack Kemp and Peter Ferrara wrote in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, 20 percent of the middle class pay only 4.4 percent of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 40 percent of earners pay no taxes at all. To say that only “the rich” should pay more and that those who pay little or no taxes should get a check to make things “fair” is George McGovern redistributionism, even socialism. That economic model was soundly rejected in 1972 and in subsequent elections. McCain should propose ways to allow more people to become rich. We should reject Obama’s plan to penalize those who have worked hard to become well off. That’s real fairness.

Individual initiative, risk-taking, an entrepreneurial spirit and optimism are what built and have sustained America through many challenges over the last 232 years. Government can’t produce those qualities in any of us. We must produce and renew them in ourselves. Maybe we’ll hear some of that in the third and final debate, but with both candidates largely repeating what we’ve heard before, I’m not looking for vision, or soaring and substantive rhetoric.

October 09, 2008

By Steven Stark

It doesn’t matter how many negative ads are broadcast or how many moose are slain on the tundra, candidates and their actions don’t transform our politics nearly as much as outside events and circumstances do. Thus, if Barack Obama ends up winning a substantial victory next month, it may as much mark a revolutionary turning of the page in our politics as it would be a triumph for him. A decisive Obama win could have profound effects for at least a generation, ushering in a new political era marked by Democratic Party dominance (and triggered by the failures of George W. Bush).

Our presidential politics tend to be fairly consistent, divisible into eras clearly defined by national traumas that radically redraw party lines. The Civil War not only gave birth to the Republican Party, for instance. It also launched a long era during which the GOP’s supremacy on the presidential level was rarely challenged. Of 18 elections held from 1860 through 1928, the GOP won 14. The Republicans lost only when the Democrats nominated an extremely conservative candidate (Grover Cleveland — who won twice) or when the Republicans split themselves in half (1912, with the effects extending to the 1916 election).

But the Great Depression redefined the political landscape (with an assist from Herbert Hoover’s initial bumbling reaction to the crisis), giving the Democrats the upper hand in almost a mirror image of what had previously transpired. From 1932 through 1964, the Democrats won seven of nine elections. They ultimately lost power in that period after the GOP nominated Dwight Eisenhower, an apolitical national hero whose ideology was so amorphous that even the Democrats had sought him as a national candidate shortly before he began his political career as a Republican.

In 1968 the political map again dramatically changed, when the unrest caused by the Vietnam War — combined with conservative reaction to the civil-rights revolution — gave the Republicans another demographic and cultural advantage. Beginning in that year and continuing until our most recent election, the Republicans have won eight of 11 presidential contests. Modern Republican dominance has, in fact, been broken only when both the Democrats nominated a more conservative candidate from the GOP’s southern base (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) and when the GOP was either split in half (thanks to the candidacy of H. Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996) or the nation was facing the aftermath of the only presidential resignation in history (1976, following the bowing out of Richard Nixon two years before).

History in the making?

Statistics confirm the uphill road Democrats have faced in every election in this modern era. Since 1968, the party’s presidential nominees have polled above 50 percent just once — in 1976, and then only barely.

If 2008 were to follow that pattern, Barack Obama — from the northern, liberal wing of his party — would seem to have little chance to win. Even if he could somehow upset the recent trend, history suggests that he couldn’t garner much more than 50 percent of the vote. But that may happen this year. And if it does, it could signal that a new era of Democratic political dominance, last seen in the 1960s, has arrived.

Perhaps when historians look back at this election, they will see this one — not 2004’s — as the first real post-9/11 contest, with the nation having taken several years to come to terms with the trauma and the meaning of that event. So let’s posit a scenario. Over the past eight years, the reaction of the Bush administration to both 9/11 and the current financial mess has been, ironically, one that is traditionally Democratic: running huge deficits while creating vast new government interventionist bureaucracies to deal with homeland security and the credit crisis. The current administration also decided that this new era required an expensive, expansionist foreign policy, fighting “terror wars” on various fronts.

Now, the public may be in the process of deciding that, if a new era requires a more activist and expansionist government, Democrats are better equipped to handle these tasks. Voters may also decide that they are willing to accept the “risk” of a far more rapid military withdrawal from Iraq — which is, after all, the major foreign-policy difference between the McCain and Obama candidacies. Right now, Obama’s alternative looks attractive, especially given that military action always carries a huge price tag in what may be a coming age of austerity.

And then there’s the credit crisis which has just hit; admittedly, its effects may not be known for months or even years. But if Obama is able to win big because of it, it could serve as the final crystallizing event that allows the Democratic Party to reap the benefit for years to come. If that should happen, George W. Bush may be forever linked with Herbert Hoover. How’s that for a legacy?

OCTOBER 9, 2008

Its activist role has been the single constant in this eternal election.

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

WASHINGTON

Some of John McCain’s friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.’s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.’s no-brains governing.

But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor.

John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater.

It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater’s home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.’s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock). Sulfurous Atwater-style rumor-mongering by Bush supporters — that McCain had come home from a Hanoi tiger cage with snakes in his head — aimed to stop him during that primary after he had zoomed in New Hampshire.

Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man. In the 1988 campaign, the Machiavellian ran to help George Bush Sr. defeat Michael Dukakis with this unholy quintet of charges:

The Democrat was a ’60s-style liberal who would raise taxes and take away guns. He was weak and would not protect the country militarily. He was a member of the elite “Harvard Yard’s boutique.” He had a foreign-sounding name and was not on “the American side.” He was on the side of the Scary Black Man.

Sound familiar?

Certainly, at some level, John McCain must be disgusted with himself for using the tactics perfected by the same crowd that used these tactics to derail him in 2000. He’s now curmudgeonly, even hostile, toward the press — the group he used to spend hours with every day and jokingly describe as his base.

He unleashed Sarah Palin to slime their opponent and suggested that the Democrat with the foreign-sounding name who came from the Harvard Yard boutique is not on the American side.

Campaigning last weekend, Palin cast their Democratic rival as “someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

The woman is sounding more Cheney than Cheney. Palin said that Obama’s relationship with the former Weatherman William Ayers proved that he did not have the “truthfulness and judgment” to be president. Asked by William Kristol if the Rev. Jeremiah Wright should be an issue, she said, “I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more.”

Atwater gleefully tried to paint Willie Horton as Dukakis’s running mate. With a black man running, it’s even easier for Atwater’s disciple running McCain’s campaign to warn that white Americans should not open the door to the dangerous Other, or “That One,” as McCain referred to Obama in Tuesday night’s debate. (A cross between “The One” and “That Woman.”)

On Monday, McCain made Obama, who has been campaigning for almost two years now, sound like an ominous intruder, questioning his character and motives, telling a New Mexico crowd that “even at this late hour in the campaign, there are essential things we don’t know about Senator Obama …

“All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government? What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama?”

The new McCain TV ad, “Dangerous,” calls Obama “dishonorable,” “dangerous” and “too risky for America.”

McCain aides have been blunt in their need to change the subject from the economy. But, as with Bush Senior’s re-election campaign, slithery character attacks don’t scare as well when Americans are already scared about keeping their jobs and retirement savings. Maybe that’s why McCain didn’t bring up Ayers or Wright during the debate, instead leaving it to Sarah Barracuda.

Palin finally took questions on Tuesday from her traveling press corps on her campaign plane. Asked if she thought Senator Obama was dishonest, McCain’s Mean Girl meandered:

“I’m not saying he’s dishonest, but in terms of judgment, in terms of being able to answer a question forthrightly, it has two different parts to this. The judgment and the truthfulness and just being able to answer very candidly a simple question about when did you know him, how did you know him, is there still — has there been an association continued since ’02 or ’05, I know I’ve read a couple different stories. I think it’s relevant.”

Of course she does.

A boring debate ends in a lot of bad feelings.

By Byron York

This was the worst-moderated debate in the history of presidential debates,” one McCain campaign insider told me just moments after John McCain and Barack Obama left the stage at Belmont University in Nashville. “The audience and the American people should feel robbed — that the one opportunity they had to ask questions of the presidential candidates was taken from them by Tom Brokaw.”

Before the debate, there had been lots of talk about how the town-hall format would favor McCain, who has done hundreds of town halls in his 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Ten days ago, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe tried to set expectations sky-high when he said, of Tuesday night’s debate, “We will be a decided underdog in that encounter. John McCain is the undisputed town hall champion.”

But the town halls in which McCain has done well have been free-wheeling affairs, with no moderators, no filters, and a lot of personal and sometimes decidedly quirky questions. And plenty of follow-up questions, too. Any reporter who has followed McCain around has seen him engage in a long back-and-forth with a voter who was agitated about this or that topic — and then, perhaps, speak even more to the voter after the event ended. It’s McCain’s ideal way to connect with voters.

But this debate wasn’t that, and perhaps it couldn’t be. The stakes were too high, the time too limited, and the rules (agreed upon by both sides) too carefully negotiated for there to be a truly loose exchange of views. It’s also true that for much of the night Brokaw seemed to ask a question of his own for every question that came from the audience or from the Internet. If McCain’s advisers were hoping for a genuine New Hampshire voter-interaction town hall experience, they didn’t get it.

Of course, neither did Obama, but after the debate Camp Obama didn’t seem nearly as unhappy. They didn’t see the debate as a true town hall — the kind of event Obama has declined to participate in with McCain — but they weren’t particularly bothered. “Any moderator is going to take the agreement and shape it to an event,” a senior Obama aide told me. “We’re certainly not looking for excuses tonight the way the McCain camp may be.”

But they were looking for good talking points, and they think they might have found one in McCain’s reference to Obama as “that one.” Discussing the energy bill, McCain had said, “You know who voted for it? You might never know — that one,” pointing to Obama. “You know who voted against it? Me.”

“That was a fairly telling moment,” the Obama adviser told me. “In the last debate, [McCain] couldn’t look [Obama] in the eyes, and in this one he couldn’t even say his name….Voters pick up on those things.”

McCain’s aides say he meant no disrespect. “I think [McCain] was trying to be funny,” the McCain adviser told me. “I don’t think he was trying to be pejorative. I wish he hadn’t done that, but it’s just how it came out. I think he was trying to be funny.”

Team Obama wasn’t buying it, because they thought the “that one” episode wasn’t the only example of what they viewed as McCain’s hostility. “McCain simply isn’t comfortable being around Obama at this point,” the Obama adviser told me. The adviser brought up the end of the debate, when “Obama sticks out his hand to McCain and McCain kind of nudges Cindy there, so that Obama shook Cindy McCain’s hand.” The implication was that McCain so dislikes Obama that he wouldn’t even shake his hand. But McCain and Obama had already shaken hands and briefly embraced immediately after the debate ended — in fact, they were standing so close to each other that Brokaw had to ask them to separate so that he could see the TelePrompter. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a snub.

But it’s still true that there aren’t exactly warm feelings between the two campaigns. How could there be? And on this night, you know when advisers are talking so much about atmospherics that perhaps neither side feels the actual debate accomplished very much. It was, as many commentators judged it, a pretty dull affair.

“The game plan going in was to connect with the audience, connect with the American people on the economic crisis and to contrast how we would handle the crisis with how Obama would,” the McCain insider told me. It’s not clear whether McCain succeeded at that, but he did make the only real news of the evening when he advocated a new program that would — well, let McCain say it himself:

“As president of the United States,” McCain announced, “I would order the secretary of the Treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes — at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those — be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.” McCain’s proposal — he said it would be “expensive,” but didn’t say how expensive — was a simplified version of an idea floated by the economist Martin Feldstein, and it has not, up until now, been part of the daily back-and-forth out on the campaign trail. Obama didn’t respond; we’ll see what he says in coming days.

Beyond McCain’s new plan, and the various instances of alleged ill will between the candidates, there really wasn’t much else that was noteworthy in Nashville Tuesday night. There were no new lines of argument and no gloves-off references to William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, or any other Obama associates. Before the debate, McCain aides suggested to me that there wouldn’t be any serious fisticuffs because the format wasn’t conducive to that sort of thing. And indeed, there were none. So now, if McCain wants to come out swinging, he has one more chance, at the last debate, scheduled for next Wednesday at Hofstra University in New York.
—Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

October 05, 2008

By Rod Dreher

John McCain is probably going to lose this election. The economic crisis, which he is ill equipped by training and interests to handle, threatens to wipe out his campaign. Though Barack Obama has shown no greater insight or skill in handling the looming disaster, Mr. McCain’s personal deficit on economic policy redounds to his opponent’s benefit.

But Mr. McCain has gifts that Mr. Obama does not, convictions and leadership traits that the country could very soon need more desperately than a policy expertise. Mr. McCain should risk that Americans don’t want to be mollycoddled and manipulated. He would do well to buy commercial time on national television and deliver a speech that goes something like this:

My friends, I am neither young nor eloquent, handsome nor smooth. But I have lived a long life, much of it in service to America in war and in peace. And I have always stood for straight talk. There has been no time in our nation’s recent history when the American people more needed to hear the plain truth from their leaders. A fundamental reason our country faces economic catastrophe is that we have built our lives around running from truths about the American way of life.

Washington has run from the truth. Wall Street has run from the truth. And if we’re honest with ourselves, all of us have, in one way or another, run from the truth.

We have accepted the lie that we can live exactly as we want to live, with no concern for the consequences. We have taken the blessings of liberty and prosperity and turned them into a curse of debt slavery – bondage that will be visited on our children, and our children’s children, if we don’t change.

Everybody has a theory about how we got into this mess, and it’s usually one that absolves them and their party from blame. My friends, I’m here to tell you that this crisis is the Republicans’ fault. It’s the Democrats’ fault. It’s the fault of every one of us who believed in the fairy tale of a free lunch.

It’s time for all Americans to take responsibility for what we’ve done. It’s time for all Americans to pull together to help our families, our neighbors and our country through hard times.

I will not lie to you and tell you that the road ahead will be easy. I will not insult you by giving you simple villains, simple heroes or simplistic solutions. As the song says, everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die. My fellow Americans, all of us must sacrifice to endure the trials that history sends our way and to rebuild our nation on a solid foundation of honor, truth and plainspoken virtue.

I know something about sacrifice. And I know something about the way life can break your pride. I was a cocky Navy aviator who thought he was invulnerable. Then I was shot out of the sky and spent five years in prison. That experience did not kill me. It made me stronger. It taught me how much I loved my God, my family and my country – and what trials I could endure for the sake of that love.

I am a patriot. I believe we are a nation of patriots, of men and women who are ready and willing to put country first. But over the years, our leaders, Republican and Democratic, have asked us to do little more than to go shopping, to vote for them and to blame other people for what’s wrong with America. Anything to keep us from facing the truth and changing our ways.

As your president, I will ask you to do hard things. I, too, will do hard things for the good of this great nation. Serious times call for serious leadership. In his first speech as prime minister, with his free nation facing the might of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill refused to mislead the British people about the gravity of their situation. We remember today his words to them: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Churchill did not give cheap optimism. He, too, had fought and suffered for his nation, both on the battlefield and in Parliament. He had known the joy of victory and the humiliation of defeat. What Churchill, from his incomparable experience, could offer his people was the gold standard of hope. Hope is the conviction that whatever suffering we must go through, goodness and right shall prevail.

Today, when I survey the gathering storm, I am certain that if we, the people, stand together without fear or favor, victory will be ours. I ask you to give me the privilege of leading this great nation in a time when heroes will be made, and all good men and women must come to the aid of their country.

Thank you, and God bless America.

October 05, 2008

By David Ignatius

“Piece by piece, the nation’s credit structure was becoming paralyzed. Crisis was in the air, but it was a strange, numbing crisis. … It was worse than an invading army; it was everywhere and nowhere, for it was in the minds of men. It was fear.”

— James MacGregor Burns, “Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox.”

WASHINGTON — It may be the end of an economic era on Wall Street, as commentators have noted over the past few weeks. But it is not yet the beginning of a new political era in Washington. In that gap lies the opportunity for Barack Obama to explain to the nation how he proposes to make a new start.

The frantic debate over the $700 billion bailout plan has obscured the reality that a new framework for recovery will have to be built by the next administration. The crisis package is important, but it’s the political equivalent of an overnight loan, a short-term fix to keep the system functioning. The definition of the new era — the post-crash era — hasn’t really begun.

To win, Obama will need to give voters a clearer sense of how he will govern in this new era. He still talks like a lawyer, making debating points and rebutting arguments, but not explaining how he will rebuild a shaken and traumatized country. This “vision thing” will become all the more important in coming weeks, as the economic crunch moves from Wall Street to Main Street and the country begins to feel real pain.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is the obvious model for a new president taking office amid severe economic difficulty. But what are the lessons that FDR teaches?

A first FDR decision, before he took office, was that he wouldn’t get caught up in the flailing rescue measures of the lame-duck Hoover administration. Then, as now, the problem was a paralyzing credit crisis. A desperate Hoover sent Roosevelt a handwritten note on Feb. 18, 1933, pleading with him to endorse a common program to restore confidence: “The major difficulty is the state of the public mind, for which there is steadily decreasing confidence in the future.”

Roosevelt ignored the plea. He felt that working with the discredited Hoover would undermine public support for his own recovery program when he took office a few weeks later.

By backing the Bush rescue plan, Obama has lost that complete freedom of action. But he didn’t really have a choice. More worrisome is that he hasn’t yet articulated a larger plan for economic reconstruction. Indeed, he ducked the issue in the first presidential debate. That’s a mistake.

A second Roosevelt lesson is that the heart of the problem is psychological. As FDR wrote his March 4, 1933, inaugural address, he had open a volume of Thoreau with the passage, “nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” That became the famous, ringing line: “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Within a few days, he had received half a million enthusiastic letters and telegrams.

A third FDR precept was to accompany his ringing words with decisive actions. Roosevelt announced a “bank holiday” his second day in office, making a virtue of the fact that panic-stricken banks had shut their doors. By the end of his first week, he had passed an emergency banking bill that reopened the banks on what the public perceived as sounder footing. The bill passed Congress in just eight hours. A GOP floor leader, Rep. Bertrand H. Snell, said simply: “The house is burning down, and the president of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire.”

A final FDR lesson is that in crisis, it’s sometimes better to go by instinct than to wait for a systematic plan. FDR considered sending Congress home after it passed the emergency banking bill so that he could come up with a comprehensive recovery proposal. Instead he went piecemeal, cobbling together the package of 15 major bills that made up the famous “First Hundred Days.”

Roosevelt understood that it was a confidence game. He surrounded himself with smart people and good ideas. But his real success in 1933 was that he conveyed to a frightened country that he knew what he was doing, and never let on the fact that he was, as his biographer Burns says, “playing by ear.” It’s that sense of pitch that the public wants to see in Obama.

Sunday, October 5th 2008, 9:54 AM

After the vice presidential debate ended, as the TV jurors started delivering their verdicts, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden were joined on stage by their families. Nothing unusual there - except the history-making picture of Palin hugging her 5-month-old son while sharing chitchat with Biden.

Freeze the frame and savor its remarkable collection of milestones.

They start with the fact that Palin is only the second woman to be on a major-party national ticket. She is the first who would take office as the mother of five children, the oldest being 19.

RELATED: PALIN GETS STYLE POINTS AND SLIM WIN OVER BIDEN IN DEBATE

Her baby, Trig, has Down syndrome, and her oldest daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and unmarried. They are both firsts, as far as we know, for any major-party nominee. Oh, and her husband, Todd, is part Eskimo.

History doesn’t just happen in the 2008 campaign. It is happening in mind-numbing, holy cow, what-next bunches.

The changes are coming so fast we hardly take notice. Is America really going to elect a black President? Two years ago, that was unthinkable. Now it’s very likely as Barack Obama has seized the momentum 30 days from the election.

RELATED: PALIN’S NOD TO EXTRA CREDIT WOWS KIDS

But before we sprain our shoulders patting ourselves on the back for our color-blind, bias-free selves, let’s acknowledge that certain prejudices are far from taboo. In fact, in some quarters they are ascendant and celebrated.

I’m thinking of the overt, outrageous prejudice that infuses some of the contempt on the left for Palin. Scrape away the surface excuses and much of it is because she is a Republican. And an anti-abortion one at that. How dare she!

That the bias comes from people we think of as sophisticated makes it disappointing, but not surprising. After all, contempt for Republicans is the only socially acceptable prejudice remaining among many educated people today.

A celebrated retired journalist, a man I’ve long admired, was surprised when I told him I hadn’t decided whom to vote for. “You’re too smart to vote for John McCain,” he said, thereby insulting 50 million Americans.

RELATED: PALIN UPSET OVER MICHIGAN PULLOUT

A well-to-do, middle-aged professional woman who identifies herself as very liberal casually declared at a recent social gathering that Palin was unqualified to be vice president. “Look at all those children; she would be neglecting them,” the woman said, before adding she herself has five grown daughters.

I could hardly contain myself. “How,” I managed to say relatively calmly, “would you feel if a man just said what you said?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything; I was just thinking of the children,” she said sheepishly.

Of course she was thinking of the children. And Jimmy the Greek was just talking history when he discussed slavery and black anatomy and Al Campanis was misunderstood when he said blacks lacked the “necessities” to be baseball executives.

Those unmaskings of raw bigotry came on TV 20 years ago. Times change, and so does prejudice. And not all sightings are dramatic.

George W. Bush appointed the first two black secretaries of state, but does anyone on the left regard him as a racial trailblazer? When I raised that question to another liberal, she dismissed the idea, saying Bush “never thought about race.”

That exchange took place three years ago, but I still can’t grasp her logic. How does she know what Bush thought? Why would it be more important than what he does?

A similar blind spot toward the political “other” explains much of the contempt for Palin. If she were a Democrat, her unusual life would be spun into a compelling narrative that would make her the darling of the coastal elite.

How she’s raising that lovely brood of kids, her care for that severely handicapped baby, her relationship with that rugged hubby who often cares for the kids and is part native, her unlikely rise through the political minefields, her tough knocks and gutsy performance on the national stage - all would be testament to a breakthrough of historic proportions we would be ordered to celebrate in the name of diversity and equality.

Yes, I know there are many legitimate reasons to vote against her and McCain. And I am not arguing for a second they should be supported, least of all because of her gender.

But couldn’t we all at least acknowledge Palin’s moment and what it means for America?

Apparently not. She must lose, the liberal narrative goes, because she is unqualified, case closed.

Some day, we will look back with disgust at the abuse Palin has taken and wonder how it could happen in this great nation, circa 2008.

Spare me. We already know the answer.

mgoodwin@nydailynews.com

BACKGROUND:  September 30, 1999

By STEVEN A. HOLMES

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

”Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer. ”Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.”

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.

”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

Under Fannie Mae’s pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 — a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.

Home ownership has, in fact, exploded among minorities during the economic boom of the 1990’s. The number of mortgages extended to Hispanic applicants jumped by 87.2 per cent from 1993 to 1998, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. During that same period the number of African Americans who got mortgages to buy a home increased by 71.9 per cent and the number of Asian Americans by 46.3 per cent.

In contrast, the number of non-Hispanic whites who received loans for homes increased by 31.2 per cent.

Despite these gains, home ownership rates for minorities continue to lag behind non-Hispanic whites, in part because blacks and Hispanics in particular tend to have on average worse credit ratings.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

October 5, 2008

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

The turmoil on Wall Street and the weakening economy are changing the contours of the presidential campaign map, giving new force to Senator Barack Obama’s ambitious strategy to make incursions into Republican territory, while leading Senator John McCain to scale back his efforts to capture Democratic states.

Mr. Obama has what both sides describe as serious efforts under way in at least nine states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including some that neither side thought would be on the table this close to Election Day. In a visible sign of the breadth of Mr. Obama’s aspirations, he is using North Carolina — a state that Mr. Bush won by 13 percentage points in 2004, and where Mr. Obama is now spending heavily on advertisements — as his base to prepare this weekend for the debate on Tuesday.

By contrast, Mr. McCain is vigorously competing in just four states where Democrats won in 2004: Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, followed by Wisconsin and Minnesota. His decision last week to pull out of Michigan reflected in part the challenge that the declining economy has created for Republicans, given that they have held the White House for the last eight years.

But Mr. McCain’s abrupt decision, which caught many members of his own party by surprise, also underlined the tactical political squeeze he finds himself in: by using his fund-raising advantage to compete in so many places, Mr. Obama has forced Mr. McCain to spend money to hold on in what had been viewed as safe Republican states, like Indiana and Missouri, while limiting Mr. McCain’s ability to play offense on Democratic turf.

Mr. Obama now has a solid lead in states that account for 189 electoral votes, and he is well positioned in states representing 71 more electoral votes, for a total of 260, according to a tally by The New York Times, based on polls and interviews with officials from both campaigns and outside analysts. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

Mr. McCain has solid leads in states with 160 electoral votes and is well positioned in states with another 40 electoral votes, according to the Times tally, for a total of 200. Just six states representing 78 electoral votes — Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia — are tossups.

Mr. Obama appears to have significantly more options to reach the 270 threshold, particularly if Mr. McCain fails to win any states that Democrats won in 2004, like Pennsylvania, where the Republican ticket has been competing especially vigorously.

That said, the margin in many of these states remains relatively tight, and the field could certainly shift again in the final weeks, as the presidential candidates engage in two more debates and as Mr. McCain steps up his attacks on Mr. Obama, as his aides said he planned to do.

Mr. McCain’s advisers said their hope was that the issue of the economy would recede somewhat from the public consciousness, now that Congress has passed a bailout plan, and open the way to try to turn the contest back into a referendum on Mr. Obama’s credentials. They argued that given everything that had happened, Mr. McCain remained in easy distance of Mr. Obama, evidence of what they said were underlying problems with his appeal.

“Senator Obama has more money than God, the most favorable political climate imaginable — a three-week Wall Street meltdown and financial crisis — and with all that, the most margin he can get is four points?” said Bill McInturff, one of Mr. McCain’s pollsters. “That does speak to the questions there are about lack of experience, his candidacy, and other things that make people say, ‘Gosh, is he really ready?’ ”

Mr. Obama in particular is moving to seize on what both sides think could be a decisive moment in this campaign, using Wall Street as a way to focus attention on related concerns, like Social Security and health care.

Campaigning on Saturday, Mr. Obama told several thousand supporters in Newport News, Va., that Mr. McCain’s health care plan was outdated and had hidden tax increases that would erode companies’ coverage for workers and leave millions of people uninsured.

He called it an “old Washington bait and switch,” adding, “He gives you a tax credit with one hand but raises your taxes with the other.”

Mr. Obama is now running advertisements aimed at elderly voters in South Florida, Las Vegas and Reno, Nev., invoking the Wall Street crisis in criticizing Mr. McCain’s support for allowing individuals to choose to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds as an alternative to Social Security. The advertisements assert that the approach will “gamble with your life savings.” (That claim has been described by independent monitoring organizations as deceptive.)

In Florida, voters will begin receiving mailings from Mr. Obama on Monday warning about what they describe as a McCain plan to tax health care benefits “for the first time ever.” A new advertisement released on Friday, using clips from the vice-presidential debate on Thursday night, makes the same attack on Mr. McCain. In Nevada, advertisements are geared toward the mortgage crisis in a state that has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country.

In Virginia, voters stung by fuel costs received a brochure saying, “While you’re running on empty, Exxon made $4 billion in one month,” pointing out that Mr. McCain promised tax breaks to oil companies. (The tax cuts are not specifically for oil companies but are part of a broader proposal to reduce corporate tax rates, including those for alternative energy companies.)

It is health care, advisers said, that they believe resonates more than other issues for Americans who are worried about their economic condition. It is a less-threatening way to talk about the economy — showing pictures of shuttered banks, for example, could create more worry — that aides said tested well across demographic groups, but particularly among older voters who have been slower to warm to Mr. Obama.

“One of the biggest economic anxieties that people have is the cost of health care,” said Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, a Democrat in a state where Mr. McCain is making a strong challenge to Mr. Obama. “There is a great deal of uneasiness.”

Mr. McCain’s advisers said that more than anything, it was the bad economy in Michigan, staggered by declining sales of American-made automobiles, that convinced them they had no hope of winning a state that once had been high on their list of targets. Beyond that, they said the Wall Street downturn was hurting Mr. McCain in Florida — where the mortgage crisis has been particularly acute — a state where they were once confident that they could hold off Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama opted out of the federal campaign finance system, which limits spending to $84.1 million, in the belief that he would be able to raise far more than that and outspend Mr. McCain.

Mr. Obama has used his cash advantage both to expand the size of the campaign field — it seems a good bet that Mr. Obama would not be spending money in Missouri if he had an $84.1 million limit — but also to outspend Mr. McCain in battleground states. In Florida over the past two weeks, Mr. Obama has spent $5.3 million on television, compared with just under $1.1 million by Mr. McCain, said Evan Tracey, the head of CMAG, a company that monitors political advertising.

Mr. Tracey said Mr. Obama had been steadily increasing his national television advertising budget by 20 percent each week this fall.

Mr. Obama is making a sustained effort to capture from the Republican column Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. He is putting effort into Missouri and Montana, and though those seem like longer shots, Mr. McCain campaigned in Missouri last week, and Republicans are buying advertising time there.

“That is a lot of defense that John McCain is going to have to play,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager.

Of the four Democratic states where Mr. McCain is competing, his aides said he viewed Pennsylvania — the biggest of them — as offering him the best chance. Mr. Obama lost the Democratic primary there to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Robert A. Gleason Jr., the state’s Republican chairman, said that recent polls suggesting that Mr. Obama was building a lead were misleading, noting that the state was filled with the kind of blue-collar voters with whom Mr. Obama has struggled for much of the year to connect. “Obama is not catching on here,” Mr. Gleason said.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, did not dispute Mr. Gleason’s suggestion that Mr. Obama was not as strong in that state as some polls suggested. “I think they know they have catch-up to do here,” Mr. Rendell said. “Senator McCain has been here 17 times since June.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign said that he had been there seven times since the end of the primary season, June 3.

Mr. Rendell said an unusually long one-minute advertisement Mr. Obama produced, which showed him talking directly into the camera about the economic crisis, was one reason polls were showing increasing strength for Mr. Obama in the state.

The McCain campaign’s announcement that it was pulling out of Michigan — the kind of news that can be dispiriting to supporters and contributors — reflects the period the campaign has entered, when it is difficult if not impossible to do the kind of feints and bluffs about where the candidate is playing. (For a while, Mr. Obama’s aides claimed he would be competing in Georgia and even spent some money there before pulling out over the summer.)

With limited time and money left, it now becomes quickly apparent when a candidate takes down his television advertisements or cancels a campaign trip, as Mr. McCain did to Michigan this week. Mr. McCain’s associates said they put the news out on the day of the vice-presidential debate in hopes of minimizing attention to it, though inevitably, it fed the perception that Mr. McCain’s campaign was going through a difficult stretch.

Yet in a sign of how closely contested the campaign remains, both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama have sent people and money into Maine and Nebraska, two states where electoral votes are split, to try to peel off a single electoral vote, with Mr. Obama hoping to pick up one in a particular region of Nebraska, which is otherwise reliably Republican, while Mr. McCain is trying the same thing in Maine, which has gone Democratic in recent presidential elections.

That is not a fanciful battle: There are plausible outcomes that would leave the two men with a 269-269 electoral vote tie, forcing the election into the House of Representatives.

Mr. McCain sent workers from Michigan to Maine, focusing specifically on the state’s rural 2nd Congressional District. And Mr. Obama has added an office filled with organizers in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Omaha, where a large voter registration drive has been under way for weeks.

“I think we’ve got a shot at that,” Mr. Obama said in an interview in the summer about the Nebraska vote. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Michael Doyle
McClatchy
October 5, 2008

WASHINGTON – A business-friendly Supreme Court will start another season Monday on familiar turf.

With a closely watched case involving cigarette advertising, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will resume the corporate focus that’s marked his three-year tenure. The cases may not sound sexy, but they can be crucial for companies and consumers alike.

“The question,” noted Robin Conrad, the executive vice president of the National Chamber Litigation Center, “comes down to who gets to regulate business.”

So far, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear some 41 cases for the 2008-09 term, which begins on the traditional first Monday morning in October. The National Chamber Litigation Center, the increasingly active litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has identified at least 16 of these as business cases.

The court typically hears about 75 cases each term, and some of the most important disputes may not have matured yet. The justices will continue adding cases through early next year.

Unlike recent years, the court hasn’t yet scheduled a Guantanamo Bay or obvious national-security case, though they might yet arise. The culture war issues, including abortion, bandied about by presidential candidates are nowhere to be seen yet, although there’s one case involving dirty words on television. Other high-profile disputes, including all-but-certain legal challenges to the new $700 billion financial bailout package, remain dormant.

“It’s going to take a while (for the bailout law) to get to the Supreme Court,” former Solicitor General Paul Clement predicted.

The pending business interests, meanwhile, revolve around high-dollar, dry-sounding issues such as pre-emption.

The term’s inaugural case, for instance, called Altria Group v. Good, will determine whether federal authority freezes out consumers from challenging cigarette advertising in state courts. A similarly themed case, Wyeth v. Levine, centers on state vs. federal authority over drug labeling.

The facts can be gruesome. Vermont resident Diana Levine lost her right arm below the elbow after the allegedly unsafe injection of a medicine. The implications may be sweeping. Nearly 30 groups – ranging from the California Medical Association to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, of California, and Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida – have filed friend-of-the-court briefs, known as amici curiae, in Wyeth.

“This case may win the amici sweepstakes for this term,” joked David Vladek, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

The pre-emption theme surfaces in different ways, though the core principle remains the same. As Conrad put it: Who gets to regulate?

In Altria, for instance, three Maine residents claim that the manufacturer of Marlboro Light and Cambridge Light cigarettes – the firm more commonly known as Philip Morris – deceptively advertised the cigarettes as essentially safer. The tobacco company and business allies including drug manufacturers argue that a federal cigarette-labeling law blocks smokers from taking action under state deceptive-practices laws.

Every Supreme Court term contains a surprise or two, but handicappers already are predicting some likely winners and losers. Count business among the probable winners. In the past two terms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has prevailed in 21 out of 31 cases in which it’s filed briefs.

“This is a court that feels comfortable with business,” said lawyer Beth Brinkmann, who’s argued numerous cases before the high court.

Individual case winners also might be predictable. Next Wednesday, for instance, the justices will hear in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council a challenge that some label as the Pentagon v. whales.

The Navy’s 3rd Fleet wants to use mid-frequency active sonar for training exercises off the Southern California coast. Environmentalists contend that the underwater sonar emissions disrupt whales, dolphins and other marine mammals. The legal question, one being closely watched by timber companies, builders and others, is when “emergency circumstances” can overcome a court’s injunction.

In a wartime case coming out of the often-reversed 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where a Navy victory is simultaneously a win for business interests, the odds appear set.

“For the whales, it’s not looking so good,” Georgetown law professor Lisa Heinzerling said.

David Broder
October 5, 2008

ST. LOUIS – The McCain campaign, perhaps fearful of the reviews Sarah Palin would receive for her part in Thursday night’s debate here, deployed a trio of almost-vice-presidential candidates to persuade reporters that she had passed her big test. Rudy Giuliani was in one corner of the “spin” room, Joe Lieberman in another and Lindsey Graham in a third. All three are favorites of John McCain and conceivably could have wound up on his ticket had he not been captivated by the governor of Alaska.

As it turned out, the effort was not needed. Palin did just fine on her own, and so did Joe Biden, her sparring partner and the veteran senator from Delaware. In fact, the surprise of the night was that the candidates for the No. 2 job were much livelier and more impressive on the Washington University stage than Barack Obama and McCain had been when they met at Ole Miss.

In a session that was faster-paced and friendlier than the presidential debate, Palin and Biden smiled often at each other while exchanging glances and verbal blows. It was a reminder that politics can be fun – as well as informative.

But it created a mystery of its own. Why in the world has the McCain campaign kept Palin under wraps from her debut at the Republican National Convention until this debate? What were they afraid of?

I asked that question of Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign manager, and he disputed the premise. Schmidt said Palin has answered “hundreds” of press questions – which will come as news to the reporters who have been traipsing around the country with her. Going into the debate, she had done exactly three television interviews – with ABC, CBS and Fox – and not held a single news conference.

Graham, who has traveled the world with McCain and knows him as well as anyone, was more forthcoming when I put the question to him. “I think they thought she needed time for briefings on the issues that were new to her,” he said. But then he added: “This campaign will go down in history as stupid if they don’t unleash her now.”

That is an understatement. McCain has been battered in the past two weeks by the collapse of big chunks of the American economy. His effort to get out in front of the wreckage by suspending his campaign and returning to Washington backfired when House Republicans balked at endorsing the administration’s rescue plan.

Polls in half a dozen battleground states suddenly showed Obama with larger leads, and just hours before Palin and Biden took up their places, word circulated that McCain was pulling his ads out of Michigan, where he had hoped to make a stand.

If ever a candidacy needed bolstering, it was this one. And based on what she showed against Biden, Palin might be able to deliver some help.

Going into the debate, the fear among Republicans was that Palin would look as shaky as she did in some of her answers to Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson. Their hope was that Biden would overplay his hand and come across as a bully.

She wasn’t shaky and Biden didn’t bully.

Those of us who know and admire Joe Biden were happy that a big national audience got to see him at his best – a sentimental, smart, decent and generous guy.

But he was no better than Palin. She appeared cool as a cucumber, comfortable with her talking points and unrattled by anything that was thrown at her.

My strong hunch is that these debates are not turning out to be defining events, in part because partisans of both sides can find genuine reason to think their favorites did well, but mainly because external forces – especially the dramatic economic distempers – are much more powerful than the words of the political players.

Michael Barone
October 5, 2008

Politics ordinarily have a certain predictability. Yet presidential politics this year have often seemed to resemble what science writer James Gleick described in his book “Chaos.”

“Chaos,” he quotes one physicist as saying, “eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.” Time and again this year, unpredicted and seemingly unpredictable developments have reshaped the presidential race. And they don’t appear to stop coming.

At the beginning of the year, things seemed fairly simple.

Democrats had a big lead in party identification and appeared headed to victory. Democrats seemed likely to settle on a nominee quickly, while Republicans were predicted to be heading for a long, drawn-out primary fight. But three developments changed the shape of the race, to the benefit of Republicans.

First, John McCain clinched the Republican nomination early, while Democrats suffered through a protracted battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. With help from the Republicans’ winner-take-all delegate allocation rules, McCain was able to convert razor-edge victories in primaries to an unassailable lead in delegates. Over the objections of radio talk-show hosts, Republicans nominated the only candidate, it seems in retrospect, with a chance to win. Meanwhile, Democrats clashed in tribal warfare that inevitably left some in the party unhappy with the nominee.

Second, the success of the surge strategy in Iraq managed to penetrate through a media blackout to the voting public. This undermined the appeal of Obama’s call for rapid withdrawal. Obama still can argue that he was right in opposing the war. But McCain can argue that he was right in supporting the surge and that Obama was wrong in opposing it and predicting it would fail. An issue that looked like a big negative for McCain now looks to be a wash.

Third, $4-a-gallon gasoline converted voters from opposing offshore oil drilling to supporting it. McCain nimbly switched.

Congressional Democrats dug in their heels and blocked a vote on the issue, then beat a partial retreat. Obama was stuck on the short side of public opinion.

Political maneuvering further evened the scales. After the McCain campaign pointedly made fun of the grandiosity of the Obama campaign, Obama cast his acceptance speech as a partisan attack rather than an appeal to what Americans have in common. McCain, by choosing Sarah Palin, invigorated the party base and put energy and his maverick reformer role on the front-burner.

But chaos, it turns out, does not favor just one side. The credit crisis in the last two weeks of September raised an issue that has, so far at least, helped Obama. McCain railed against Wall Street and called for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. Obama argued that the crisis showed the failure of Reaganite deregulation.

McCain unaccountably failed to make his strongest argument. The roots of the crisis lie in both parties’ encouragement of greater homeownership. But at critical points, notably in 2005, some Republicans, including McCain, called for tighter regulation of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This was resisted by Democrats, with no demur from Obama.

Nor did McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign and return to Washington help him. Democrats said he broke up a deal, though none had been made. He did help draw House Republicans into negotiations. But the suboptimal performance of administration and legislative leaders on both sides of the aisle resulted in the House vote on Sept. 29 rejecting the rescue package. Any chance McCain could take credit was gone.

Current polls show Obama with a significant lead nationally and ahead in states like Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina that George W. Bush carried comfortably in 2000 and 2004. McCain has finally put up ads arguing that he sought regulation of Fannie and Freddie, but they may be two weeks too late.

Now, McCain needs to do more than pick off two or three states that seem narrowly in the Obama column. He needs to change the whole tenor of the campaign. He will get a chance to do so in the two remaining presidential debates, but Obama’s smooth performance in the first debate suggests that may be difficult.

Chaos has already given McCain and his party a lift up three times and then knocked them down. Is it possible that there is more chaos ahead?

Gov. Sarah Palin used a steady grin, folksy manner and carefully scripted talking points to punch politely and persist politically at the vice-presidential debate on Thursday night, turning in a performance that her rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., sought to undermine with cordially delivered but pointed criticism.

If the issues and positions were familiar to many viewers — on taxes and the economy, energy and oil, same-sex marriage, Iraq and Afghanistan — it was Ms. Palin’s debut in a nationally televised debate that made for unusual theater. And Ms. Palin, a former small-town mayor, was unlike any other running mate in recent memory, using phrases like “heck of a lot” and “Main Streeters like me” to appeal to working-class and middle-class voters who feel abandoned by Washington.

Mr. Biden, a six-term senator who has twice sought the presidency, remained forceful and composed against an opponent who proved difficult to attack, given that she is a newcomer and a woman in an arena long dominated by men.

Focusing his attacks on the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, Mr. Biden only occasionally lost patience with Ms. Palin’s debating tactics, as when she used Mr. Biden’s words against him.

In the only vice-presidential debate of the campaign, at Washington University in St. Louis, Ms. Palin exceeded expectations in this highly anticipated face-off, though those expectations were low after she had stumbled in recent television interviews. She succeeded by not failing in any obvious way. She mostly reverted to and repeated talking points, like referring to Mr. McCain as a “maverick” and the Republican ticket as a “team of mavericks,” while not necessarily quelling doubts among voters about her depth of knowledge.

Instead Ms. Palin emphasized her down-home qualities and her membership in the middle class, a group that she and Mr. Biden sparred over repeatedly during their 90-minute encounter.

“Go to a kids’ soccer game on Saturday and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, ‘How are you feeling about the economy?’ ” Ms. Palin said. “And I’ll betcha you’re going to hear some fear in that parent’s voice, fear regarding the few investments that some of us have in the stock market — did we just take a major hit with those investments?”

Mr. Biden, standing at a lectern a few feet from Ms. Palin’s, replied with one of his characteristic strategies in the debate: portraying Mr. McCain as unaware or unmoved by voters’ problems and as an ally of the deeply unpopular President Bush.

“It was two Mondays ago John McCain said at 9 o’clock in the morning that the fundamentals of the economy were strong,” Mr. Biden said. “Eleven o’clock that same day, two Mondays ago, John McCain said that we have an economic crisis. That doesn’t make John McCain a bad guy, but it does point out he’s out of touch. Those folks on the sidelines knew that two months ago.”

Rarely has a vice-presidential showdown been packed with such political importance. Ms. Palin’s unsteady performances in recent interviews turned this debate into can’t-miss television, but they have also raised questions — from conservatives, among others — about the soundness of Mr. McCain’s judgment in picking a relative newcomer as his running mate. Recent polls have suggested that his shifting statements on the economic bailout talks in Washington have not reassured some of these conservatives, raising the stakes for Ms. Palin to deliver steady, informed answers and repartee in the debate.

Mr. Biden’s aides had their own concerns before the debate, worrying that a single gaffe by him could shift the onus off Ms. Palin. They worried that even the slightest miscalibration of his tone, body language and mien could imply condescension or worse toward Ms. Palin and become the story of the night.

With both candidates keeping their cool and addressing each other politely with honorifics — Mr. Biden said “Sarah Palin” at one point and then correct himself with “Governor Palin” — there was a certain symmetry to the debate.

Both candidates have a son preparing to serve in Iraq. Every time Mr. Biden seemed to criticize Mr. Bush, Ms. Palin would mention “mavericks.” And when Mr. Biden criticized the Bush administration at one point, Ms. Palin replied: “Say it ain’t so, Joe. There you go again, pointing backwards again.”

The two candidates have both faced personal challenges, too: Ms. Palin’s baby son has Down syndrome, while Mr. Biden, in the 1970s, lost his wife and daughter in a car accident. As he recalled that time and the near-death of one of his sons, Mr. Biden briefly choked up — the one moment of raw emotion in an otherwise stable debate between two fairly disciplined candidates.

“The notion that, somehow, because I’m a man, I don’t know what it’s like to raise two kids alone, I don’t know what it’s like to have a child you’re not sure is going to make it,” Mr. Biden said. “I understand as well as, with all due respect, the governor or anybody else, what it’s like for those people sitting around that kitchen table. And guess what? They’re looking for help.”

The extraordinary interest in Ms. Palin’s performance elevated the debate into nothing less than a cultural event. Viewers flocked to their Facebook and MySpace pages to critique her answers, her poise and even her hair; others lamented Senator Barack Obama’s choice of Mr. Biden instead of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, an agile debater who could go gender-to-gender against Ms. Palin. Even a “Palin Bingo” card was in circulation on the Internet, with participants told to check off trademark words of Ms. Palin’s when she uttered them, like “bad guys,” “pro-life” and “mayor.”

If Ms. Palin suffered in rapid-fire news media interviews in which she was the sole person in the spotlight, she fared much better at Thursday’s debate, where half of the questions were posed first to Mr. Biden — which, in turn, meant that Ms. Palin had 90 seconds to prepare her answer or riposte. Indeed, in her political campaigns in Alaska, Ms. Palin came across as confident and on point, as she did for the most part against Mr. Biden.

“I do respect your years in the U.S. Senate, but I think that Americans are craving something new and different and that new energy and that new commitment that’s going to come with reform,” Ms. Palin said. “I think that’s why we need to send the maverick from the Senate and put him in the White House, and I’m happy to join him there.”

Although Ms. Palin name-dropped several times, presumably to show fluency in foreign affairs, she did not always drop the right name. At one point, she referred to the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, as “McClellan.”

Ms. Palin also tended to seize on a single point or phrase of Mr. Biden or the moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS, and veer off on her own direction in her 90-second answer. Asked whether the poor economy would cause Mr. McCain to cut his spending plans, Ms. Palin picked up on Mr. Biden’s discussion of energy to criticize Mr. Obama’s positions on energy and talk about her fights against oil companies in Alaska.

In response to a question about her views on an exit strategy in Iraq, Ms. Palin championed Mr. McCain’s support for the “surge” of American troops there; hailed “a great American hero,” Gen. David H. Petraeus; and attacked Mr. Obama’s Senate vote against federal financing for troops in Iraq, which Mr. Biden also once criticized.

After that, Mr. Biden turned to the moderator and said, “Gwen, with all due respect, I didn’t hear a plan.”

“Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq,” Ms. Palin shot back. “You guys opposed the surge, the surge works, Barack Obama still can’t admit that the surge works.” (Mr. Obama has said in recent weeks that the surge had worked beyond most people’s expectations.)

Fifty-five minutes into the debate, Mr. Biden seemed to lose his patience after Ms. Palin recalled, as she had a couple of times before, that Mr. Biden had praised Mr. McCain’s views or actions in the past and added, “I respect you for acknowledging that.”

Mr. Biden replied by linking Mr. McCain with Mr. Bush more crisply than he had done previously in the debate.

“The issue is how different is John McCain’s policy going to be than George Bush’s,” Mr. Biden said. “I haven’t heard how his policy is going to be different on Iran than George Bush’s. I haven’t heard how his policy is going to be different with Israel than George Bush’s. I haven’t heard how his policy in Afghanistan is going to be different than George Bush’s. I haven’t heard how his policy in Pakistan is going to be different than George Bush’s.

“It may be, but so far it is the same as George Bush’s.”

Mr. Biden also turned tougher in the final half-hour after Ms. Palin had, several times, referred to Mr. McCain as a “maverick.”

“He’s not been a maverick when it comes to education — he has not supported tax cuts and significant changes for people being able to send their kids to college,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s not been a maverick on the war. He’s not been a maverick on virtually anything that generally affects the things that people really talk about.”