by Charles Krauthammer
The Spokesman-Review

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.

In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics – most prominently, rising minorities and the young – would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservatism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia – presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in ’08 for the first time in 44 years – went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 – a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus 4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they’d gone narrowly for Obama in ’08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the ’09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it’s Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.

November ’08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm – and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm – deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years – because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his “New Foundation” for America – from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama’s hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt – the Tea Party demonstrators, the town hall protesters – as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the “rump” rebelled. It’s the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election – and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed – is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

By Michael Scherer

There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments.

For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama’s plan to address schoolchildren — even though the benign contents of the speech were not yet public. “You had to be like, ‘Wait a minute,’” says Gibbs. “This thing has become a three-ring circus.” (See who’s who in Barack Obama’s White House.)

For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a “controversy,” flipped an internal switch. “When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people’s grandmother,” he explains, “the normal rules of engagement don’t apply.”

And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the “32″ alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. “The idea — that the Washington Post didn’t even question it,” Dunn says, still marveling at the decision. (Read Mark Halperin’s grades for the Obama Administration.)

All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to “fact-check” Obama’s many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new “sex clinics” in schools. Obama, fresh from his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to “call ‘em out.”

The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President’s vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration’s critics, including a recent post that announced “Fox lies” and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama’s 2016 Olympics effort.

White House officials offer no apologies. “The best analogy is probably baseball,” says Gibbs. “The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move.”

The general in this war is Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May. She has been a force in Democratic campaigns since the late 1980s and helmed Obama’s rapid-response operation during his run. At the White House, she has become a devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration’s effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network. “It’s opinion journalism masquerading as news,” Dunn says. “They are boosting their audience. But that doesn’t mean we are going to sit back.” Fox News’s head of news, Michael Clemente, counters that the White House criticism unfairly conflates the network’s reporters and its pundits, like Glenn Beck, whom he likens to “the op-ed page of a newspaper.”

As a mother — who plans to transition to a new job later this year in order to spend more time with her 13-year-old son — Dunn is a rarity in the almost all-boys club that is Obama’s inner circle. But her impact on the White House has been unmistakable. Since her arrival, the communications operation has been tightly refocused, with greater emphasis on planning ahead to shape the news cycle and controlling staff contacts with the press. In daily internal meetings, she points out where to strike back or admit error.

It is not hard to awaken her fiercer instincts. “Here in the White House, you are reluctant to feel like you have to go to that place,” she says. “But we have to be more aggressive rather than just sit back and defend ourselves, because they will say anything. They will take any small thing and distort it.” In other words, after eight months at the White House, the days of nonpartisan harmony are long gone — it’s Us against Them. And the Obama Administration is playing to win.

Read a brief history of presidents and the press – see below:

Brief History: Presidents and the Press
By Randy James

Barack Obama: The inescapable president. From Good Morning America to televised town-hall meetings, ESPN to Men’s Health, the leader of the free world misses few chances for free publicity. In his first six months in office, Obama gave three times as many interviews as either of his two immediate predecessors, according to the White House Transition Project. He’s already held more prime-time news conferences than George W. Bush did in eight years.

Presidents weren’t always so eager to meet the press. Thomas Jefferson had little use for the ink-stained wretches, believing newspapers offered “the caricatures of disaffected minds.” During Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, reporters were forced to remain outside the White House gates, until Teddy took pity on them during a rainstorm (the voluble T.R. would later enjoy bantering with scribes while getting a shave). Many Presidents required the press to submit questions in writing and barred them from printing direct quotations; access was so limited the New York Times’s Arthur Krock won a Pulitzer for scoring a sit-down with FDR. Advances in technology have compelled recent leaders to engage with the media more often, albeit reluctantly. Dwight Eisenhower was the first to allow TV cameras into his press conferences; live telecasts, with all their pomp, began with JFK.

The press has only expanded since then, but savvy White House media teams now seize on tactics to reach voters directly. George W. Bush spoke before backdrops bearing the day’s message (like STRENGTHENING OUR SCHOOLS or the notorious MISSION ACCOMPLISHED). And on Sept. 21, Obama becomes the first sitting President to grace David Letterman’s couch–a day after he hits the Sunday-morning news shows. On five networks.

By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Representative Earl Blumenauer should be experiencing the most fulfilling days of his more than 35 years in public service.

The liberal Democrat from Portland, Ore. — known for his bowties, his Trek bicycle and a pragmatic brand of progressivism — embraced Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy early in 2008 and campaigned hard alongside him, steadily gaining confidence that the young senator from Illinois was the ideal liberal remedy to eight years of conservative dominance.

Now political reality has set in, testing Mr. Blumenauer’s faith that Mr. Obama’s election and big Democratic majorities in Congress would yield quick advances in the progressive agenda.

Instead of forging ahead, Mr. Blumenauer, 61, finds himself fighting to retain one of the touchstones for liberals this year, a public insurance option in the health care overhaul, and is watching his hopes of curbing global warming grow cold in the Senate. Mr. Blumenauer, a seven-term congressman, is bracing for a tough vote on sending more troops to Afghanistan while he frets about the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay remaining open.

“It has been a hard landing for a lot of the people that I represent,” Mr. Blumenauer, referring to his largely liberal constituency, said as he assessed the first months of the Obama administration.

As health care legislation moves to the floor with other major issues close behind, the question for Mr. Blumenauer and those who share his ideology will be whether they relent on some of their core beliefs to support less satisfying compromises, despite being in what, on the surface, is a commanding political position.

“It is still something that I am struggling with,” he said.

Mr. Blumenauer is just one example of what might be called the Frustrated Left, a substantial caucus of Congressional Democrats who dreamed that Mr. Obama would usher in a new era of liberal problem-solving only to see Congress and the new administration collide with the old problems of partisanship, internal disagreement and the challenge of mustering 60 votes to get just about anything done in the Senate.

While Congressional leaders try to appease moderate and conservative Democrats who can provide the crucial votes for passage, more liberal Democrats from safer districts sometimes simmer, feeling that they are being taken for granted while it is assumed they will get on board when the time comes.

On health care, Democrats are growing more optimistic that they can find a compromise approach to creating a government-run insurer to compete with the private sector — an issue that as much as any other has split the party’s liberals and moderates — even as progressive voices outside of Congress insist that there be no compromise.

“The fact is that Earl Blumenauer could stop a bill going through that does not have a public option in it,” said Jane Hamsher, founder of the progressive blog firedoglake.com. “Is it his loyalty to the party, partisan politics over principle? We are going to get to see that.”

Mr. Blumenauer strongly favors a public option and in late July was one of more than 60 Democrats who signed a letter to the leadership saying that, essentially, they would not back a final bill without an acceptable public plan. But on health care — as on other domestic issues, global warming and foreign policy — he must weigh whether it makes more sense to take what he can get as opposed to standing firm and perhaps seeing the overall effort collapse.

“It would be very hard for me to do,” Mr. Blumenauer said of voting for a final health care overhaul without a public plan. “But if it gets to the point where the choice is doing some things that will make a significant difference without a public option or letting the whole thing die, that too would be hard.”

Mr. Blumenauer got on board early with Mr. Obama after concluding that he offered the chance for a more decisive change in course than Hillary Rodham Clinton could provide. He first met Mr. Obama at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston and endorsed him in late January 2008.

“There was something going on here, this guy has got some real capacity being able to, I think, connect, communicate,” remembered Mr. Blumenauer.

Mr. Obama won Oregon and Mr. Blumenauer’s district going away, setting sky-high expectations among his followers in the Pacific Northwest.

Mr. Blumenauer, a member of the tax-writing and climate change committees with a devotion to trying to improve the livability of American cities, said he did not think Mr. Obama had shifted his ideological stance since his election and did not blame the president for the problems slowing the liberal agenda. He said he saw a combination of factors — the troubled economy, the sheer scope of the nation’s problems and an unexpected level of Republican opposition — as the culprits.

“The combination of the economic shock and frankly the political upset and outrage has changed the landscape,” Mr. Blumenauer said. “The Barack Obama that I campaigned with is pretty much the same guy. But it is an environment that is unprecedented and would press anyone’s skills.”

Back home, Mr. Blumenauer said his constituents had shown patience with the pace of things, partly, he suggested, because they were so disenchanted with the Bush administration.

Activists and pollsters in Oregon said that they agreed but that the patience of Mr. Blumenauer’s liberal base was not unlimited.

“I think people realize you can’t do everything precisely all at once,” said Steve Novick, a Democratic advocate in Portland who lost a Senate bid in 2008.

Senator Ron Wyden, whose move to the Senate opened up the House seat for Mr. Blumenauer in 1996, said Oregon residents grasped the complexity of the problems facing the country. “Look at what is coming at us: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran,” he said. “There is a sense that there is going to be a lot of heavy lifting, but people want to stay at it until it happens.”

Even with his frustrations, Mr. Blumenauer said that having a Democratic administration had paid tangible benefits. The secretaries of the housing and transportation departments have visited Portland, and he recently hosted Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in his office. “They want to be a partner on the cleanup rather than ignoring it,” he said, referring to environmental cleanup projects in his state.

And though some of his preferred legislative approaches might be stalled or fall victim to compromise, Mr. Blumenauer said he believed that Mr. Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress would ultimately be successful in advancing a liberal agenda on the major issues.

“We are going to be working on climate, on health care, on the economy for every minute of the next two Congresses and beyond,” he said. “Will the public be patient enough? Will the political process hold together?

“This is not going to be easy,” he said, “but I think we are seeing a process that makes me actually optimistic, even though it is not exactly like I would have liked.”

Mr. President, please stay off TV.

By Howard Fineman | NEWSWEEK

Published Sep 26, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He’s a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked “done.” This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he’s not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.

The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words “I” and “my.” (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. It was the winning theme of the 2008 campaign, but that race ended nearly a year ago. The ex-president is now more ex than ever, yet the current president, who vowed to look forward, is still reaching back to Bush as bogeyman.

He did it again in that U.N. speech. The delegates wanted to know what the president was going to do about Israel and the Palestinian territories. He answered by telling them what his predecessor had failed to do. This was effective for his first month or two. Now it is starting to sound more like an excuse than an explanation.

Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.

The model is a man whose political effectiveness Obama repeatedly says he admires: Ronald Reagan. There was never doubt about what he wanted. The Gipper made his simple, dramatic tax cuts the centerpiece not only of his campaign but also of the entire first year of his presidency.

Obama seems to think he’ll get credit for the breathtaking scope of his ambition. But unless he sees results, it will have the opposite effect—diluting his clout, exhausting his allies, and emboldening his enemies.

That may be starting to happen. Health-care legislation is still weeks, if not months, from passage, and the bill as it stands could well be a windfall for the very insurance and drug companies it was supposed to rein in. Climate-change legislation (a.k.a. cap-and-trade) is almost certainly dead for this year, which means that American negotiators will go empty-handed to the Copenhagen summit in December —pushing the goal of limiting carbon emissions even farther into the distance. In the spring Obama privately told the big banks that he was going to change the way they do business. It was going to be his way or the highway. But the complex legislation he wants to submit to Congress has little chance of passage this year. Doing Letterman again won’t help. It may boost the host’s ratings, Mr. President, but probably not your own.

Howard Fineman is also the author of The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country .

Well, we survived August, which is good news. It was not a month that will be recorded in the Enlightened Discourse Hall of Fame. In fact, it was a national embarrassment — not just the steady stream of misinformation about the nature of President Obama’s health-care proposals, but the racism — both overt and opaque — the death threats, the imprecations (calling someone a Nazi is evidence of the evil of banality), the idiots bearing assault rifles at presidential events. As the lunatics took over the asylum, the President’s poll ratings dropped, and the chances for a truly bipartisan health-care-reform effort vanished, if they existed in the first place. Consequently, we have had a back-to-school fusillade of advice for the President from my columnizing peers — and an effusion of premature crowing from conservatives about the collapse of the Obama presidency.

The drop in the President’s poll numbers represents a natural political process. When politicians talk about spending their political capital, they are talking about their poll numbers — and the cliché is somewhat misleading. They are actually investing their political capital, hoping for a greater return if their gamble succeeds. George W. Bush invested his capital in privatizing Social Security, and the stock tanked. Barack Obama is investing in health-care reform. We are at the point of the legislative process where all seems hopeless, but Obama should be heartened by the fact that most of his Republican adversaries oppose the bill for crass political rather than ideological reasons. They assume that if it passes, his investment of political capital will result in higher poll numbers — which means they assume the public will like the changes he is proposing. (See TIME’s photo-essay “The Health-Care Debate Turns Angry.”)

And, I fearlessly predict, the public will. If insurance companies can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, or drop people who get too sick, the public will love it. If health-care exchanges give individuals and small businesses the power to negotiate lower premiums from the insurance companies, people will love that too. Making health care available to everyone, even if some people — young, healthy people — who are not buying in now are told they have to join up, will also be well received. The odds are better than even that a bill containing those provisions will pass in Congress this fall.

But even if most of the noise about Obama is nonsense, there is one area of concern that could affect the ultimate success of his presidency. It is his tendency to overlearn the lessons of past presidencies, especially when those lessons enable him to avoid taking responsibility for tough decisions. It has been widely observed that Obama overlearned the lesson of the Clinton health-care effort by deferring to Congress to write the legislation. It has been less widely observed that the President overlearned the lesson of Bush’s hyperpoliticized Justice Department by leaving to Attorney General Eric Holder the decision about whether to investigate the CIA for torture abuses.

What should the President have done? Well, there’s a path between the 1,300-page Clinton health-care plan and the 1,000-page Henry Waxman plan that will be voted on in the House. The President could have laid out a set of principles and said, “I will veto any bill that doesn’t contain the following …” (Indeed, he still could do so.) They should be clear, simple, popular and achievable. My list would include insurance reform, health-care exchanges, near universal coverage and tort reform. (Obama’s position on tort reform is another abdication of responsibility: he says he’s open to it, knowing the congressional Democrats are closed to it.) (See “Understanding the Health-Care Debate: Your Indispensable Guide.”)

The President’s deferral of responsibility for the CIA investigation is more serious than his health-care meanderings. This is a matter of national security that will directly affect the morale and behavior of our clandestine services. The President can’t say he wants to look forward, not backward, then allow his Attorney General to look backward. The most egregious practices, like waterboarding, were (outrageously) declared legal by the Bush Justice Department. How can you prosecute one interrogator for threatening a prisoner with an electric drill and let others who waterboarded a prisoner 83 times off the hook? Is it right for the interrogators to be prosecuted and the real miscreants — people, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who ordered, and still approve of, the torture — to escape unpunished? Most legal experts believe that such cases would be difficult to prosecute. But whether you favor an investigation or not, this is a presidential decision the President avoided.

In the great sweep of history, this presidency has barely begun. The mistakes Obama has made are rookie mistakes that can be corrected. And the general tendency of his Administration — toward civility, as opposed to the ugliness we’ve seen in the past month — is the right one. But he can’t allow his desire for civility to neuter the requirements of leadership. He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting right now.

Leonard Pitts Jr.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Spin Control is a weekly political column that also appears online with daily posts, videos and reader comments at www. spokesman.com/blogs/ spincontrol. See the McMorris Rodgers video and hear audio from her Colville interview on the blog.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Troup. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

By PHILIP ELLIOTT

WASHINGTON (AP)

Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said Friday that he’s being considered by President Barack Obama for a Cabinet appointment as head of the Commerce Department. Senior Democrats said the New Hampshire senator is among those at the top of a list for the job, although they emphasized that no move was imminent. They spoke on condition of anonymity because no decision has been made and they were not authorized to discuss the administration’s thinking. “I am aware that my name is one of those being considered by the White House for secretary of commerce, and am honored to be considered, along with others, for the position,” Gregg said in a statement. “Beyond that there is nothing more I can say at this time.” A Capitol Hill leadership aide said Thursday evening that Obama had talked with his party’s leaders about the move to appoint Gregg, which could put Democrats within reach of a 60-person, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate if New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch were to name a fellow Democrat. Democrats hold a 56-41 majority in the 100-member Senate, and two independents caucus with them. The Senate seat from Minnesota remains undecided, with Sen. Norm Coleman and challenger Al Franken in a close, court-based contest. Gregg has said he plans to run for re-election in 2010. He was the GOP’s chief negotiator for the $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, a plan unpopular with many Republicans. New Hampshire has been trending toward the Democrats, although independents remain a major force in the “Live Free or Die” state. Obama’s first choice to run the Commerce Department, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, dropped out of consideration amid a grand jury investigation over how state contracts were issued to political donors. White House officials insisted Thursday that no decision had been made. It was also not clear if Lynch — popular, but for many fellow Democrats frustratingly moderate at times — would pick someone out of party loyalty. During the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary, Lynch made positive statements about Republican John McCain and attended one of his signature town halls. He also named GOP star Kelly Ayotte his attorney general as part of a centrist governing style that delivered him re-election with 70 percent of the vote. A member of a New Hampshire political family and a policy wonk, Gregg rose through the Senate ranks to serve as chairman of the powerful Budget Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that funds homeland security. Now in the minority, he is the ranking Republican member on the Budget Committee but still has large sway in the GOP’s response to Obama’s legislative agenda.

Gregg to Be Nominated Tuesday for Commerce Job

By Anne E. Kornblut and Shailagh Murray
President Obama will nominate Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) tomorrow for commerce secretary, a White House official said tonight.

The nomination is the last for Obama’s Cabinet. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) was nominated Dec. 3 to head the Commerce Department, but he withdrew his name from consideration a month later because of a federal investigation involving state government contracts.

Gregg appears willing to take the Commerce job, but he announced one condition today: His replacement in the Senate had to be a Republican.

“I have made it clear to the Senate leadership on both sides of the aisle and to the Governor that I would not leave the Senate if I felt my departure would cause a change in the makeup of the Senate,” Gregg said in a statement.

Over the weekend, White House officials said that Gregg was the leading candidate for the Commerce.

Senate Republicans said they were somewhat mystified by Gregg’s potential move. As the ranking GOP senator on the Budget Committee, Gregg could play a potentially pivotal role in budget and entitlement reform, potentially the most challenging items on Obama’s ambitious to-do list. But if Gregg takes the Cabinet slot, he would likely be replaced as ranking member by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), one of the most conservative members of the Senate with a highly partisan track record.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, declined to answer questions about Gregg during his daily briefing. “Obviously the president has great respect for Senator Gregg. I’m not going to get into personnel announcements before we are there,” Gibbs said. “And as it relates to picking senators in states that need new senators, I think you can rest reasonably assured that this administration has had nothing and wants nothing to do with that going forward. And I would bold and underline that.”

Lynch is widely expected to appoint a Republican to replace Gregg, someone who could be a caretaker in the seat until the next election, in 2010. But Lynch has not officially said so. In a statement on Monday, Lynch said: “We are in the midst of a national economic crisis, and it calls for cooperation on all of our parts. We all need to work together to do what is in the best interest of our country and our state. I have had conversations with Senator Gregg, the White House and the U.S. Senate leadership. Senator Gregg has said he would not resign his seat in the U.S. Senate if it changed the balance in the Senate. Based on my discussions, it is clear the White House and Senate leadership understand this as well.”

Lynch continued: “It is important that President Obama be able to select the advisers he feels are necessary to help him address the challenges facing our nation.”

January 13, 200

By Reed Galen

As President-Elect Obama readies his ascent to the White House less than two weeks from now, it appears that his political acumen extends not only to those in all parts of the Democratic party, but in no small part to Senator John McCain as well. Just three short months ago we were inundated with McCain’s talk of Bill Ayres and ‘That One,’ but an easy détente appears to have developed between the former rivals.

To that end, President-Elect Obama has committed four distinct acts that telegraph his political savvy when it comes to Senator McCain. His first move was to invite McCain to Chicago for a face-to-face meeting soon after the election. This magnanimous and post-partisan action surely played to McCain’s sense that politics has gotten far too ugly for its own good and was probably much appreciated as a sign of respect for the Arizonan personally.

Next, Obama selected Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security. Aside from being qualified for the job on a number of fronts (former US Attorney, state Attorney General, Governor of Arizona, a major border state, etc.) the Obama team again did Senator McCain a favor. With Napolitano firmly ensconced at the Nebraska Avenue headquarters of DHS, Senator McCain’s toughest potential opposition to re-election in 2010 is out of the picture. Having already announced his intention to seek another term in the Senate, this will allow McCain to carry out his Goldwater-esque desire to bring centrism and civility to the Senate and to the GOP.

In another act that was both gracious and pragmatic, the President-Elect helped ensure that Senator Joe Lieberman would retain his Chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. This after Lieberman spent almost two years on the campaign trail in support of his friend John McCain. Rarely hesitating in his criticism of the Obama campaign, Lieberman is lucky to be invited to sit with either caucus.

Lastly, Obama announced that he had selected former Congressman Ray LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, as his Transportation Secretary. Aside from having oversight over that department when he was the Senate Commerce Committee chairman, McCain and LaHood are good friends. McCain must have been pleased with such a choice.

Why, though, would the President-Elect go to all the trouble of giving so much consideration to an opponent whom he soundly defeated? Continuing the thread of wise political judgment that has so far defined his transition, Obama understands that having John McCain as an ally in the United States Senate is a major boon to his policy initiatives. As the recent standard-bearer for the GOP, McCain will be enormously helpful; any Republican imprimatur on Obama legislation could help clear stubborn obstacles. The prospect of having a troika of votes in the Senate (McCain, Lieberman and Lindsay Graham) may have also played into the strategy; pushing a bill from 58 or 59 to the magic level of 60 votes is invaluable as the Democrats stand on the cusp of their magic number.

From Senator McCain’s perspective, this scenario would allow him to return to the role he truly relishes: Being the deal-maker or swing vote in the Senate is much more his style and most importantly to him, keeps him imminently relevant. Acting as manager or administrator is not in McCain’s make-up, nor did he ever seem to enjoy the prospect of having to play that part. In addition, much like the aftermath of the 2000 campaign, 2009 finds John McCain not much a fan of the conservative wing of the GOP nor they of him. In 2001 he went out of his way to break with President Bush and Republicans on tax cuts and spending.

Once again Barack Obama has shown that in addition to his abundant charisma and soaring oratory, he possess deft political skills. One would be hard-pressed to find another recent example of a President (-Elect) and his opponent in the Presidential contest willing to work together, at least in theory. What’s more, now is legacy time for John McCain. With his almost assured re-election next year, it will not be much of a surprise if McCain, more often than not, turns out to be an ally of the Obama Administration.

The Democrats are folding like an ironing board over this Roland Burris business, and for some reason people are surprised.

Just to catch up: The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is in scalding-hot water over allegations he wanted to sell Barack Obama’s still-warm Senate seat. This was discovered via federal wiretaps of the helmet-haired governor’s phone conversations and fueled by some juicy dialogue better suited for fleet week in Manila.

In response, Senate Democrats took a Churchillian stand, vowing that no Blago appointee would ever be accepted by the Senate. No appointee, the Democrats insisted, so tainted with scandal could be allowed to sit in the same chamber that Ted Kennedy calls home.

The party of the infinitely elastic “living Constitution” suddenly planted their flag of principle in the terra firma of constitutional concrete and watched it flap in the hot wind of their political bloviation. Even after Blagojevich announced he was appointing Roland Burris, a respected but unremarkable black Illinois politician, to Obama’s seat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada stood his ground, pronouncing the move “unacceptable.”

But that resolve melted like a Hershey bar in a Nevada parking lot the moment Mr. Burris came to Washington. Apparently, the Constitution wasn’t on the Democrats’ side (Fancy that!) and liberals lacked the stomach to stand in the doorway of the Capitol and block admittance of a black man.

Indeed, that was Blago’s thinking all along. When the Democratic governor announced his decision, he assembled various black Illinois pols to support the move, including Rep. Bobby Rush, a Democrat from Chicago’s South Side and a founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Rush immediately played the race card at the press conference. “There are no African-Americans in the U.S. Senate. And I don’t think any U.S. senator who’s sitting in the Senate right now wants to go on record to deny one African-American from being seated in the U.S. Senate,” he said.

In case you needed a ball peen hammer to drive the point into your forehead, he added: “I would ask you to not hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer …”

Rush assembled more than 60 black ministers Sunday to rally around Burris at a Chicago church. “We are just faced with a hard-headed room of people in the Senate who want to keep an African-American out of the Senate,” Rush said. He condemned the Senate, where until recently Barack Obama served before becoming president of the United States, as “the last bastion of plantation politics.”

And that was all she wrote for Reid, who by next week should be on all fours like Kevin Bacon in “Animal House,” shouting, “Thank you sir! May I have another?” as Burris paddles him.

Now, I certainly understand why Reid & Co. caved. For starters, Reid’s not exactly the brightest crayon in the box.

But why all the fuss in the first place? Isn’t this how it always works? The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, an impressive African-American writer, is amazed that “Reid has been outmaneuvered by the sort of overt, ham-fisted identity politics deployed in the ’70s.”

The ’70s? So this sort of thing stopped more than three decades ago? I had no idea. What planet do my newscasts come from?

I thought this was simply what liberals and Democrats do. When Newt Gingrich introduced the Contract with America, black Democrats denounced it as racist. Charlie Rangel proclaimed, “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.” When impeachment threatened Bill Clinton, he draped himself in black ministers and staffers. The NAACP ran an ad narrated by the daughter of James Byrd, a black man brutally murdered in a hate crime, insinuating that then-presidential candidate George W. Bush’s refusal to support hate-crime legislation in Texas was like murdering her father again. In the recent campaign, nearly the entire liberal punditocracy insisted that opposition to Barack Obama could only be explained by racism, a story line egged on by Obama himself when convenient.

And don’t tell me Blago’s corruption changes the equation. Has anyone read about the baleful history of minority set-aside programs in cities like Chicago? Cronies and grifters are routinely given sweetheart contracts under the guise of fighting discrimination when in reality it’s all a riot of kickbacks, “pay-to-play” and cronyism. People don’t call Jesse Jackson a shakedown artist for nothing.

There are two reasons why this spectacle shocks some liberals. The first is that Blago, Burris and Rush used this tactic on fellow Democrats. And since Democrats can’t be motivated by racism, any ploy like this must be cynical. When the same gambit is used on Republicans, it’s called “speaking truth to power.” Second, some honestly believed that Obama represented a real change of the racial landscape. So far, alas, these folks just look naive.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online. His e-mail address is jonahscolumn@aol.com.

David S. Broder

It was not lost on anyone that the president-elect of the United States, riding the crest of his popularity, and the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate were outsmarted last week by a state politician who won his last election almost 20 years ago.

When and if Roland Burris claims the Senate seat from Illinois formerly occupied by Barack Obama, it will represent the greatest climb-down by an incoming president since Sam Nunn turned Bill Clinton around on the issue of gays in the military at the start of Clinton’s first term.

Fortunately for Obama, the voters are much more concerned with the economy and Obama’s effort to fix it than they are with the infighting over the Illinois Senate seat.

But politicians keep score on each other all the time. And, after a near-perfect month of transition operations, Obama has stumbled twice in two weeks, first being caught unaware by the investigation of Bill Richardson, his choice for commerce secretary, and then being outmaneuvered by Burris and his tawdry sponsor, Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

There are lessons for Obama in both incidents, starting with the importance of really knowing the other players in the game. Obama has had such a rapid rise in national politics that there are many key figures in both parties he barely has had time to size up.

But Richardson was a familiar fellow traveler on the 2007-08 presidential campaign trail, and Obama should have known that there were reports of a grand jury investigation of pay-for-play in New Mexico.

As for Blagojevich, Obama had to know, from his years in Springfield and Chicago, about the governor’s tawdry and ruthless reputation. But Obama seriously underestimated him.

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, got all 50 members of his caucus to sign a statement vowing they would never accept a Senate appointee from Blagojevich’s tainted hands, after prosecutors had published excerpts of wiretaps in which the governor had salivated obscenely over the way he could cash in on Obama’s Senate vacancy.

Obama personally endorsed that hard-line stand against seating anyone “tainted” by Blagojevich, issuing a statement that backed Reid and the others. But Burris was no more impressed than Blagojevich had been.

When the governor called the senators’ bluff, Burris launched a public relations blitz on television, insisting that it would be unfair to punish him for the governor’s alleged sins. Ignored for the moment was the fact that Burris had been rejected by the voters in three straight Illinois Democratic gubernatorial races and in one primary for mayor of Chicago. Had the Democrat-controlled Legislature ordered a special election, the odds against Burris would have been enormous.

But Burris’ ego is limitless. And it turned out that Reid had, once again, failed to do his homework or line up his votes. When Chicago black congressman Bobby Rush played the race card, questioning why anyone would stand in the way of Burris succeeding Obama as the lone African-American senator, you could feel a wave of anxiety go through Democratic ranks.

Soon, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the outgoing chairman of the Rules Committee and a potential candidate for California governor next year, publicly called on Reid to relent. The Congressional Black Caucus weighed in on Burris’ behalf. By the time Burris sat down with Reid and Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, the fight was effectively over and Burris was gracious about accepting their surrender. Obama conceded as well, saying that if the Senate seated Burris, “then I’m going to work with Roland Burris just like I work with all the other senators.”

Obama justifiably figured that Burris was not worth a knockdown fight when he has so many bigger battles ahead of him. But the lesson that other politicians have drawn is that Obama may not always be able to count on his congressional allies and they may not be able to count on him. That is not the way he wanted to begin.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

GOP Asked to Help Design Bill; $300 Billion in Tax Cuts Sought

By Paul Kane, Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 6, 2009; A01

President-elect Barack Obama arrived on Capitol Hill yesterday and immediately set to work reassuring skeptical Republicans about his massive economic stimulus package — part of a campaign that earned him praise for seeking their input but questions from those averse to hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending.

Pitching a plan that is expected to include $300 billion in tax cuts, Obama pledged to consult Republican leaders, who until yesterday had been left out of negotiations between the president-elect’s advisers and congressional Democratic staff.

“The monopoly on good ideas does not belong to a single party. If it’s a good idea, we will consider it,” Obama told House and Senate leaders at an hour-long closed-door meeting, according to one attendee.

Obama, making his pitch two weeks before taking office, won generally favorable reviews from GOP leaders, particularly because of his decision to increase the tax-cut ratio to 40 percent of the overall package.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters they were convinced that Obama was sincere in his invitation to let Republicans help craft the nearly $800 billion package to create jobs and lift the nation out of recession. But they also expressed concerns about the size of the package, as well as particular elements under discussion between Obama and Democratic lawmakers.

“I remain concerned about wasteful spending that might be attached to the tax relief. Simply put, we should not bury future generations under mountains of debt,” Boehner said.

Boehner suggested the legislation would likely be signed into law by mid-February, but the president-elect said yesterday that he would like the House and Senate to present him with a bill by the end of January or beginning of February.

“The economy is very sick,” Obama said. “The situation is getting worse. . . . We have to act and act now to break the momentum of this recession.”

As described by his advisers, Obama is proposing a package of tax cuts to benefit families and businesses. Like the overall spending proposal, the tax cuts would be designed to put cash in people’s pockets over the next two years and kick-start the economy.

Working families would be eligible for a tax credit worth up to $1,000. Individuals would be eligible for a $500 credit.

Businesses would get an extension of expired tax breaks from the 2008 stimulus package signed by President Bush, including a “bonus depreciation” break that allows businesses to write off more of their purchases more quickly and an increase in small-business expensing limits. Businesses could apply current losses to taxes paid back as far as five years ago, reaping an immediate cash windfall. And they would receive a $3,000 tax credit for every job they create or preserve.

Key details of the stimulus proposal remain unresolved. For instance, upper-income individuals would not be eligible for the income tax credit, but the income threshold for phasing out the benefit has not been set. Obama officials said it would likely be about $200,000 a year, the range set during the campaign.

Obama officials said they tried to keep the package ideologically neutral, rejecting an option supported by many progressives to make people who are not working eligible for a “refundable” tax credit. And they passed up conservative provisions such as estate tax relief and capital gains tax cuts that disproportionately benefit wealthier individuals.

After a lunchtime session with his economic advisers, Obama rejected suggestions that the tax cuts were designed to win over GOP votes. “The notion that me wanting to include relief for working families in this plan is somehow a political ploy, when this was a centerpiece of my plan for the last two years doesn’t make too much sense,” he told reporters.

Some prominent Republicans expressed reservations about the tax proposals’ specifics. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, said he hadn’t studied the list of proposed cuts, but that he favored reducing corporate and capital gains taxes, and providing more generous small-business incentives. And, he said, “These changes should be permanent, rather than just temporary.”

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the senior Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, said he would prefer a tax package that is “inclusive rather than exclusive” and that offers relief to “as many as taxpayers as possible.” One option, according to a senior Grassley aide, would be to include a $75 billion provision to prevent the alternative minimum tax from applying to millions of additional families.

It is also not clear that tax cuts are the most effective way to win GOP votes. Two key Republican moderates in the Senate — Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, both of Maine — have not focused on tax breaks as the best solution to the economic crisis.

In a letter to Obama last month, Collins outlined her stimulus priorities as transportation construction projects, energy-efficiency investments and a temporary increase in Medicaid assistance to states. In conversations with Obama and his Treasury secretary-designate Timothy F. Geithner, Snowe has urged the inclusion of unemployment assistance, mortgage relief for strapped homeowners and programs to ease the credit crunch facing small businesses.

“With more than 10.3 million people currently out of work, Congress must swiftly enact economic recovery legislation that will create jobs, assist the unemployed and reduce the devastating rate of home foreclosures,” Snowe said.

Obama bounced across the Capitol yesterday to take part in three meetings, beginning with a one-on-one meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the morning and a sit-down in the early afternoon with Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The final meeting was with the bipartisan leadership from both chambers.

Democrats described the atmosphere as markedly different than the confrontational tone of recent battles with the Bush White House, in part because the new administration is run by former senators.

“They understand the Senate, they understand the Capitol. It wasn’t as if someone new was coming to town,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the majority whip and close Obama ally, said afterward.

Some Republicans, while saying they were pleased by Obama’s attempt to open dialogue, questioned whether the spending side of the plan would be transparent enough. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, pledged to put details of the spending plan online, including the creation of a monitoring system for the progress on some of the projects, according to one attendee.

Some independent analysts joined GOP aides in questioning Obama’s tax credit for job creation, saying it’s unclear how such a provision would be crafted.

“When somebody lays off 10,000 people but hires back 1,000, should they get a tax credit? That doesn’t really seem fair,” said Leonard Burman, a director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. “The problem with these things is defining what qualifies.”

Meanwhile, some Republicans and moderate Democrats are pushing Obama to commit to addressing the nation’s long-term budget problems even as his stimulus package pushes the government deeper into debt. With congressional budget analysts expected to announce later this week that this year’s deficit is likely to soar well over $1 trillion, a commitment to reducing future deficits is critical, said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

“At some point here, you have to pivot and face up to these long-term problems,” said Conrad, who along with Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) is proposing a commission to re-examine the expensive entitlement programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

By Michael D. Shear and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 5, 2009

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to be commerce secretary, withdrew from consideration yesterday, citing an ongoing federal “pay-to-play” investigation involving one of his political donors as a significant obstacle to his confirmation.

Richardson, 61, who competed unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, becomes the first political casualty in Obama’s Cabinet, and his withdrawal marked the first visible crack in what had been one of the smoothest presidential transitions in modern history.

The former energy secretary and U.N. ambassador under President Bill Clinton was positioned to become the highest-profile Hispanic in Obama’s administration. But Richardson made it clear yesterday that he thought confirmation was far from a sure thing, even with Democrats firmly in control of the Senate.

“Given the gravity of the economic situation the nation is facing, I could not in good conscience ask the President-elect and his administration to delay for one day the important work that needs to be done,” Richardson said in a statement.

The New Mexico investigation, which began last summer, focuses on whether Richardson’s office urged a state agency to hire a California firm as a result of generous contributions from the company and its president to political action committees established by the governor.

Richardson insisted that he and his staff “have acted properly in all matters” and predicted that the investigation would exonerate him. But he said the probe could take weeks or months, potentially holding up his Senate approval. Instead, Richardson said he will remain “in the job I love as governor of New Mexico.”

He called Obama on Friday to advise him of his plans, and the president-elect accepted the decision “with deep regret,” according to a statement issued yesterday. Aides said no one in Obama’s transition pressured Richardson to drop out.

No clear replacement for Richardson at the Commerce Department emerged yesterday, but sources close to the transition said Obama would move quickly to find one.

A grand jury in Albuquerque is looking into whether CDR Financial Products received a contract with the New Mexico Finance Authority because of pressure from Richardson or other state employees. CDR made $1.48 million advising the authority on interest-rate swaps and refinancing of funds related to $1.6 billion in transportation bonds, state officials confirmed.

The Beverly Hills-based firm and its president, David Rubin, together gave $100,000 to Sí Se Puede and Moving America Forward, both PACs started by Richardson, shortly before winning the lucrative state contract, records show.

The federal probe heated up considerably last month, just around the time Obama announced Richardson as his choice for commerce secretary, according to sources familiar with the investigation. New subpoenas were issued, and testimony was scheduled from officials at J.P. Morgan Chase who worked for the state with CDR and from the director of Richardson’s political action committees.

CDR’s selection drew FBI interest because the firm did not make an initial list of the most qualified bidders. The bidding was reopened for review, and a state committee headed by one of Richardson’s former top aides later helped select CDR.

A legal source familiar with the investigation said yesterday that FBI agents, working on the Senate’s behalf and conducting a background check of Richardson for the Commerce job, conveyed to Obama’s transition team the seriousness and significance of the Albuquerque grand jury probe.

The agents are said to have communicated that the governor’s top aides — and even Richardson’s actions — were under scrutiny. At least two sources familiar with the investigation said some evidence raises concern about the propriety of the Richardson administration’s interactions with a donor.

Obama aides declined to comment on any conversations the transition team may have had with the FBI about the investigation.

The inquiry springs from a long-running nationwide investigation by the Justice Department into “pay-to-play” practices in local government bond markets. Federal investigators are questioning whether financial firms have lavished politicians with money and gifts in exchange for high fees on work advising municipal and local governments on investments.

In mid-December, Richardson spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said the governor was “aware of questions surrounding some financial transactions at the New Mexico Finance Authority” and expected state officials to cooperate fully.

CDR’s attorney, Richard Beckler, declined several weeks ago to elaborate on the investigation, but he told a Washington Post reporter Dec. 15 that the company “has always tried to abide by these byzantine campaign finance regulations and is cooperating fully with this investigation.”

The suddenness of Richardson’s withdrawal renewed questions about the Obama team’s vetting procedures. The New Mexico investigation had been publicized since the summer, yet aides to the president-elect said yesterday that they were not aware of the matter when Richardson was nominated. Richardson advisers insisted that the governor had relayed information about the investigation to transition officials before his name was announced.

“I think our vetters have done a good job,” incoming Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs said last night, crediting the “impressive . . . totality of our Cabinet picks.”

A senior transition aide said yesterday that Richardson had assured the team that he would emerge unscathed by the investigation and that there was no reason to think otherwise. “But it became clear that confirmation hearings would have to be delayed until the investigation was complete and that would take six weeks or, perhaps, longer. Governor Richardson concluded that this was too long, and he decided to withdraw,” the aide said.

Gallegos, the Richardson spokesman, said yesterday that the governor considered asking Obama to delay sending his name to Capitol Hill until the case was concluded.

“He was hopeful that his name would be cleared and it would be wrapped up before his confirmation,” Gallegos said. Over the weekend, when it became clear that would not happen, Richardson decided to withdraw, Gallegos said.

Obama praised Richardson yesterday and said that he looked forward to having the governor serve his administration in some capacity.

Staff writer Chris Cillizza contributed to this report.

HONOLULU — In the days after Barack Obama’s election as president, Rahm Emanuel, a top adviser, suggested to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois that Mr. Obama’s Senate seat should be filled by Valerie Jarrett, a confidante of Mr. Obama.

In that same week, as word of her potential interest in the Senate seat spread throughout the Chicago political world, Ms. Jarrett spoke with a labor union official in Illinois who said he had spoken to the governor about the possibility of appointing her to the seat. During that conversation, the union leader mentioned that Mr. Blagojevich had his eye on a possible cabinet position in the Obama administration.

The contact was among the findings of an internal report released Tuesday, compiled by lawyers for the president-elect. The report concluded that Mr. Emanuel had as many as six conversations with the governor’s office about the Senate vacancy, but that Mr. Obama had none, and that neither Mr. Emanuel, Ms. Jarrett, nor any other Obama associates had any talks about a deal in which Mr. Blagojevich would benefit from appointing someone to the Senate seat.

Mr. Blagojevich was charged by federal prosecutors in Chicago this month on a variety of corruption counts, including an alleged effort to trade the appointment to the Senate seat for a job or money. The report also disclosed that Mr. Obama, Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Jarrett were questioned by federal prosecutors last week in the corruption inquiry of the governor. Mr. Obama’s two-hour interview took place in his Chicago office, aides said, and he was not under oath or considered more than a witness in the case.

Mr. Obama did not speak about the matter on Tuesday. He continued his vacation in Hawaii, where he attended a memorial service for his grandmother, who died just before the election.

Ms. Jarrett, a longtime Chicago friend of the Obama family who will serve as a senior adviser in the White House, had no communication with Mr. Blagojevich or his aides, the report said. But it said that three days after the election, she spoke with Tom Balanoff, president of the Illinois chapter of the Service Employees International Union, about the Senate seat and the governor’s ambitions to serve in the Obama administration as secretary of health and human services.

This conversation, outlined for the first time, could be of interest in the criminal case against Mr. Blagojevich, who was recorded on the same day as the Jarrett-Balanoff meeting in wiretapped phone calls expressing an interest in a job with an arm of the union in exchange for a possible Senate appointment. According to an affidavit, Mr. Blagojevich was also captured on tape that day telling an unnamed adviser that he was willing to “trade” the appointment for the cabinet post.

“Ms. Jarrett did not understand the conversation to suggest that the governor wanted the cabinet seat as a quid pro quo for selecting any specific candidate to be the president-elect’s replacement,” Gregory B. Craig, who has been designated by Mr. Obama as his White House counsel, wrote in the report. “At no time did Balanoff say anything to her about offering Blagojevich a union position.”

The Obama transition team delayed the report’s release at the request of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who wanted to interview prospective witnesses before it was made public. The delay prolonged questions on whether any Obama aides acted improperly in dealing with the governor’s office.

In the conversations with Mr. Blagojevich immediately after the election, Mr. Emanuel recommended Ms. Jarrett for the Senate seat, the report said, a position that later turned out to be contrary to Mr. Obama’s wishes.

“In those early conversations with the governor, Mr. Emanuel recommended Valerie Jarrett because he knew she was interested in the seat,” the report said. “He did so before learning, in further conversations with the president-elect, that the president-elect had ruled out communicating a preference for any one candidate.”

Mr. Emanuel was not available to answer a reporter’s questions on Tuesday, aides said, because he had left for a planned holiday trip to Africa with his family.

The report suggested that Mr. Obama had been more involved in thinking about his Senate successor than his public statements about the topic had indicated.

The report said that after Ms. Jarrett took herself out of the running for the Senate seat, citing Mr. Obama’s preference that she work for him in the White House, Mr. Obama authorized Mr. Emanuel to pass on the names of four people he considered highly qualified to take over his seat: Daniel W. Hynes, the state comptroller; Tammy Duckworth, the state veterans affairs director; and Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Chicago Democrats.

Mr. Obama later offered two other names, it said: Attorney General Lisa Madigan of Illinois and the Chicago Urban League president, Cheryle R. Jackson.

Those names were passed along by Mr. Emanuel in four calls to John Harris, the governor’s chief of staff, from early November through Dec. 8, one day before Mr. Blagojevich and Mr. Harris were arrested.

Mr. Emanuel, an Illinois congressman, was one of the few members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle who had a working relationship and talked occasionally with Mr. Blagojevich. But his contact with the governor was “totally appropriate,” Mr. Craig told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

The only other name mentioned in the report was Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend of Mr. Obama, who was approached by a Blagojevich aide immediately after the election. The aide, the report said, “wanted to know who, if anyone, had the authority to speak for the president-elect.”

“The president-elect told Dr. Whitaker that no one was authorized to speak for him on the matter,” the report said. “The president-elect said that he had no interest in dictating the result of the selection process, and he would not do so, either directly or indirectly.”

From Rev. Wright to Rev. Warren
by William Kristol 12/29/2008

You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced or heard a pitch about life insurance. There’s a table, some off-brand mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.

To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can’t quite put your finger on it …

“It’s like the set of The Office,” someone offers.

Bingo.

It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt’s — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza? A hutch?

But he doesn’t seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot taken the day he played pickup with the University of North Carolina hoops team. (”They are so big and so fast and so strong, you know.”) Then, since those two items basically exhaust the room’s décor, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It’s a mind-boggling journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk. (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)

“It is not clear that the economy’s bottomed out,” he begins, understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment spike in more than 30 years.) “And so even if we take a whole host of the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered.” That worries him. Also Afghanistan: “We’re going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.

“And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation,” Obama continues, sailing on through the horribles. “And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago.”

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes and the whimper of environmental collapse. That’s just for starters; we’ll hear the unabridged version shortly.

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. It’s unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama’s face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn’t sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

But crisis has a way of ushering even great events into the past. As Obama has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That’s why he’s here and why he doesn’t care about the furniture. We’ve heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We’ve observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity. (See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.)

The real story of Obama’s year is the steady march of seemingly impossible accomplishments: beating the Clinton machine, organizing previously marginal voters, harnessing the new technologies of democratic engagement, shattering fundraising records, turning previously red states blue — and then waking up the day after his victory to reinvent the presidential-transition process in the face of a potentially dangerous vacuum of leadership. “We always did our best up on the high wire,” says his campaign manager, David Plouffe.

Obama’s competence fills him with a genuine self-confidence. “I’ve got a pretty healthy ego,” he allows. That’s clear when he offers a checklist for voters to use in judging his performance two years from now. It’s quite an agenda. Listen: “Have we helped this economy recover from what is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Have we instituted financial regulations and rules of the road that assure this kind of crisis doesn’t occur again? Have we created jobs that pay well and allow families to support themselves? Have we made significant progress on reducing the cost of health care and expanding coverage? Have we begun what will probably be a decade-long project to shift America to a new energy economy? Have we begun what may be an even longer project of revitalizing our public-school systems?”

There’s more: “Have we closed down Guantánamo in a responsible way, put a clear end to torture and restored a balance between the demands of our security and our Constitution? Have we rebuilt alliances around the world effectively? Have I drawn down U.S. troops out of Iraq, and have we strengthened our approach in Afghanistan — not just militarily but also diplomatically and in terms of development? And have we been able to reinvigorate international institutions to deal with transnational threats, like climate change, that we can’t solve on our own?”

And: “Outside of specific policy measures, two years from now, I want the American people to be able to say, ‘Government’s not perfect; there are some things Obama does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel like the government’s working for me. I feel like it’s accountable. I feel like it’s transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a President and an Administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information.’”

Can he really achieve all that? Plenty of voters will be happy if he aces only Item 1 on his list. But the essence of both Obama’s strength and his promise is that, according to a recent poll, a strong majority of Americans believe he will accomplish most of what he aims to do. For having the confidence to sketch that kind of future in this gloomy hour and for showing the competence that makes Americans hopeful that he will pull it off, Barack Obama is Time’s Person of the Year for 2008.

I. Simple Competence
In some tellings, Obama’s journey to the white house started with his little-noticed but carefully nuanced speech against the Iraq war in 2002. In other versions, it began with his electrifying address to the Democratic Convention in 2004. Those moments blazed with potential, true, but something more was necessary: a certain appetite among the electorate. The country had to be hungry for the menu he offered, and in that sense, his path’s true beginning lay in the drowned precincts of New Orleans in the sweltering, desperate late summer of 2005.

Hurricane Katrina blew away the last gauzy veil from an ugly specter of executive incompetence in American politics. When the people of New Orleans needed leadership, the Republican Administration in Washington proved useless. The Democratic governor and mayor were pitiful. At long last, our government was united — but under an appalling banner of fecklessness. The moral bankruptcy of the spin doctors was laid bare: no soul remained gullible enough to believe that Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

After Katrina, demand collapsed for the very qualities that Obama lacked as a candidate: empty boasts, finger-pointing, backstabbing and years of experience inside a government that couldn’t deliver bottled water to the stranded citizens of a major U.S. city. Spare us the dead-or-alive bravado, the gates-of-hell bluster, the melodrama of the 3 a.m. phone call. A door swung open for a candidate who would merely stand and deliver. Simple competence — although there’s nothing simple about it, not in today’s intricate, interdependent, interwoven, intensely dangerous world.

See pictures of Barack Obama’s campaign behind the scenes.

See pictures of Obama on Flickr.

His official theme was change, but a specific kind of change: the nuts-and-bolts kind you can see and measure. Voters were invited to believe because Obama kept delivering the goods. Certainly he made mistakes and gave up on some ideas while doubling back on others — his promise to stick to the existing campaign-finance system, for example. On the whole, though, he was a doer. Obama told people that a black man could win white votes. In Iowa he proved it. He said a broad-gauge campaign could win in GOP strongholds; along came Indiana and Virginia and North Carolina. He declared that a new approach to politics would topple the old Clinton-Bush seesaw, and topple it he did. He sank the three-pointer with the cameras rolling. Made a speech in a football stadium feel intimate. Some might say these are not exactly Churchillian achievements, but in the land of the hapless, the competent man is king. In the end, his campaign e-mail list numbered some 13 million people, of whom more than 3.5 million put actual skin in the game — money, volunteer hours or both. Obama’s most formidable opponent, Hillary Clinton, tried to convince voters that he was all talk and no action, a vessel empty but for intoxicating fumes. Yet he was the one whose campaign ran like clockwork, while hers was a fratricidal mess. And by Nov. 4, the strongest party in the U.S. was no longer the Republican Party or the Democratic Party; it was the Obama Party.

II. Filling the Vacuum
“A presidential campaign is like an MRI of the soul,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. “And one of the great revelations of this process, certainly the most thrilling revelation to me, was to learn what a great manager this guy is. We had no way of knowing that when we started. When he decided to run, we had no political infrastructure at all. There was just a handful of us, and we were setting off to challenge the greatest political operation in the Democratic Party.”

Keep in mind that Obama, as Rudy Giuliani put it at the Republican Convention in September, had “never led anything, nothing, nada” — certainly not a sprawling organization spread from coast to coast. But he did have a philosophy of leadership, which he explains like this: “I don’t think there’s some magic trick here. I think I’ve got a good nose for talent, so I hire really good people. And I’ve got a pretty healthy ego, so I’m not scared of hiring the smartest people, even when they’re smarter than me. And I have a low tolerance of nonsense and turf battles and game-playing, and I send that message very clearly. And so over time, I think, people start trusting each other, and they stay focused on mission, as opposed to personal ambition or grievance. If you’ve got really smart people who are all focused on the same mission, then usually you can get some things done.”

Stop and look back at those last few words, because they are a telltale sign of Obama’s pragmatism. A persistent question during the campaign — it became the heart of John McCain’s message in the closing weeks — was whether Obama was some kind of radical, a terrorist-befriending socialist masquerading as Steady Freddy. As he builds his Administration, though, he is emerging as a leader who just wants to “get some things done.” (Read “The New Liberal Order.”)

Obama is a businesslike boss. He prefers briefing papers tightly written and shows up for meetings fully prepared. He expects people to challenge him when they think he is wrong and to back up their ideas with facts. He’s not a shouter — “Hollering at people isn’t usually that effective,” he explains — but if he thinks you’ve let him down, you’ll know it. “What was always effective with me as a kid — and Michelle and I find it effective with our kids — is just making people feel really guilty,” he says. “Like ‘Boy, I am disappointed in you. I expected so much more.’ And I think people generally want to do the right thing, and if you’re clear to them about what that right thing is, and if they see you doing the right thing, then that gives you some leverage.”

Again, take a second to reread, this time the bit where he says “people generally want to do the right thing.” Trust of this kind has been in short supply for many years in American politics, where the dominant attitude is that every disagreement is a sign of bad faith and every opponent is assumed to be malevolent. Obama’s attitude was ridiculed as kumbaya naiveté during the campaign, but trust proved to be essential to his victory. His campaign entrusted millions of volunteers with unprecedented authority to download information about prospective voters, to assign themselves to make phone calls and canvass their own neighborhoods and apartment buildings, and to keep the campaign abreast of their progress. A typical presidential effort is top-down, intensely protective of its data and strategies. Obama’s approach seemed to court mischief or even chaos. “There was a lot of snickering among the political pros,” says Plouffe. “They couldn’t believe that we were giving people we didn’t know access to our data and trusting them to handle it honestly. But it was enormously important because it made people feel that much more accountable: ‘These are my three blocks, and everyone’s counting on me.’”

See pictures of Obama on Flickr.

See the Six Degrees of Barack Obama.

Yes, Obama could talk — like nobody’s business — but talk didn’t win the election. According to the daily tracking polls, the tumblers clicked into place precisely at the moment the financial hurricane hit, when the wizards of Wall Street proved as incompetent as Oz and neither the President nor the leaders of Congress nor the Treasury boss nor Senator McCain could deliver a rescue package. When this group failure provoked a stock-market crash in early October, Americans asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Astounding as it would have seemed scant months before, their gaze fell on the one fixed point in the widening gyre: a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. (See pictures of Barack Obama’s family tree.)

III. Fear Itself
As White House Chief of Staff during the final years of the Clinton Administration, John Podesta became accustomed to short nights and emotional roller coasters. Still, he found it a bit strange to be headed to the airport in the predawn darkness of Nov. 5 — just a few hours after the election of a Democratic President. Was Obama really going to chair a major strategy session the morning after winning the longest and most grueling campaign on record? How about a day off?

Long before Election Day, Obama decided that an ordinary transition wouldn’t do. Given the shaky economy and two wars, he knew that the winner of the election — whoever it turned out to be — would face instant and daunting challenges. He wanted to be ready. “What I was absolutely convinced of was that, whether it was me or John McCain, the next President-elect was going to have to move swiftly,” Obama recalls. He deployed Podesta in midsummer to lead an unusually elaborate preparation for a possible Obama presidency. McCain accused him of overconfidence and vanity, of measuring the Oval Office drapes. To Obama, it was simply a matter of prudence. (See pictures from the historic Election Day.)

Podesta had long been planning the return of a Democrat to the White House, and his think tank, the Center for American Progress, was already preparing detailed briefings on conditions in the various departments of government. As the financial system went into free fall in September, Podesta’s team pressed the FBI to work overtime on security screenings of potential Obama nominees. Now, as he boarded a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago, Podesta carried a list of more than 100 candidates who had passed their background investigations and were ready for confirmation on Day One. Instead of taking a day off, the new President-elect celebrated his victory with a five-hour meeting.

Obama had been pondering whether he should step to center stage or wait in the wings as the turbulent last months of the Bush Administration played out. His aides were all over the map. Some advised him to go quietly about his business in Chicago and insist that America has just one President at a time. For Obama to succeed, they argued, the country needed to see his Inauguration as a clean break, a new sunrise. Others floated the idea of immediately starting the First Hundred Days, perhaps asking George W. Bush to appoint Obama’s choices to key offices so that they could get to work by late November.

Obama was leery of appearing to shoulder responsibility for problems before he had any real authority to fix them. Bush’s bank of political capital was busted, and Obama wasn’t about to take ownership of the toxic assets. On the other hand, he didn’t want to repeat the dysfunctional transition of power from Herbert Hoover to Roosevelt in the dark hours of the Great Depression. F.D.R.’s silence between his election and his Inauguration may have deepened the crisis. By 5 p.m. on Nov. 5, when Podesta walked out of that meeting — not 24 hours after the polls closed — Obama was far ahead of the normal transition process, having homed in on finalists for many of his key staff and Cabinet positions. But he hadn’t yet decided how public to be about it.

Within two days, however, events forced his hand. On Friday, Nov. 7, Obama convened a meeting of his economic advisers in Chicago, and the tone of their comments was chilling. The stock market was plunging; credit remained tight; fresh unemployment numbers were shocking. “There was just a very dramatic deterioration” in the days after the election, says Timothy Geithner, Obama’s choice for Treasury Secretary. On previous occasions when the group had gathered, someone could always be counted on to find potential upsides in dismal forecasts, while Paul Volcker, the 81-year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve, reliably closed each meeting with a gloomy soliloquy. On this day, though, there was no positive scenario for Volcker to deflate. Everyone in the room was grim.

See pictures of the global financial crisis.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

Obama opened the meeting by reflecting on his dilemma: act now or wait until January? By the end of the session, he had concluded that, like it or not, he must “accelerate all of our timetables,” as he put it, “in appointments not just on the Cabinet but also our White House team, in structuring economic plans so that we can start getting them to Congress and hopefully begin work — even before I’m sworn in — on some of our key priorities around the economy, on laying the groundwork for a national-security team that can take the baton in a wartime transition.” There was no time for the “traditional postelection holiday.” Vacations would have to wait until Christmas.

Transition is such a gentle word. We make the transition from youth to adulthood or from the dinner table to the den. For Obama, though, the concept was freighted with danger. “He was very focused on the basic perils of the gap between the election and the Inauguration, at a time when the economy was clearly deteriorating and the markets were very fragile,” Geithner explains. In certain powerful respects, Obama felt compelled to begin his presidency immediately. Markets needed to size up his economic team and hear what he planned to do. Congressional leaders, contemplating a colossal economic-stimulus package, needed to know where he was headed. Military leaders, key allies and opportunistic enemies were all keen to know just how dovish the anti-Iraq-war President intended to be. Obama concluded that hanging back would create a dangerous leadership void in the short-term and compound his troubles come January. And nothing that has happened since that Nov. 7 decision — the crisis at Citigroup, the drama of the automakers or the assault on Mumbai — has made the transfer of power look any less perilous.

He could not have predicted when he set out to become President that he would face such circumstances. The distance from the birth of his campaign to these first days of his fledgling presidency could be counted in months but measured in light-years. When he announced his candidacy on a frigid morning in Springfield, Ill., in 2007, Iraq was a disaster, and the Dow was still headed upward past 14,000. So this moment was a test not only of his speed but also of his flexibility. Obama proved lithe, indeed, persuading Robert Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, to remain in his post and asking Clinton, a constant critic of Obama’s foreign policy views during their primary battle, to be his Secretary of State. Priority 1 was the economic team, however. There his task was to find a mix of people familiar enough to signal stability but fresh enough to promise change, and to design a stimulus strategy dramatic enough to inspire markets to swallow their panic. (See pictures of Obama’s White House team.)

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Obama delivered. Having promised to govern from the middle, he rolled out a bright purple team of economic advisers, neither red nor blue. Geithner had served in various posts under both Bush and Bill Clinton. As president of the New York Fed, he was well known to Wall Street but relatively unknown on Main Street — just the blend of experience and newness that Obama was seeking. His budget director, Peter Orszag, had fans across the political spectrum, and his in-house oracle, Volcker, was a Democrat who fought inflation alongside Ronald Reagan. Larry Summers, named to run the economics team from the White House, was a Clinton stalwart.

Unveiling these and other picks at a series of daily press conferences, Obama assured the public that he wanted to move fast, so fast that trainloads of money might be ready for him to dispatch across the country with a stroke of his pen on Inauguration Day. The idea of another wave of spending horrifies America’s surviving conservatives, but most economists support it — some with enthusiasm, some with resignation. Obama realized that the stimulus package could be a vehicle for launching his broad domestic agenda. His ambitious campaign promises — to reform health care, cut taxes for low- and moderate-income earners and steer the U.S. toward a new energy economy — had seemed doomed by the yawning budget deficit (some $200 billion a month, according to the latest projections). But call these projects “stimulus,” and suddenly a ship headed for the reef of economic disaster might sail through Congress flying the flag of economic recovery. With even Republican economists talking about hundreds of billions in new spending, the sky’s the limit. A dream of health-care reformers — electronic medical records — is now economic stimulus because Obama will pour money into hospitals for computers and clerical workers. His tax cut is stimulus because it puts spending money in the pockets of working Americans. His pledge to repair the nation’s infrastructure is a stimulus plan for construction workers, while his energy strategy is stimulus for the people who will modernize government buildings, update public schools and improve the electrical grid.

See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

Of course, the bullet points are easy to list; far harder is the task of spending vast sums — perhaps $1 trillion over two years — efficiently, effectively and quickly enough to spur the economy. Washington’s three goblins — waste, fraud and abuse — are watching with hungry eyes. Obama has cast Orszag as a flinty keeper of the purse strings, but he has no intention of letting his opportunity go by. “I don’t think that Americans want hubris from their next President,” Obama says, noting that McCain received nearly 47% of the vote last month. However, “I do think that we received a strong mandate for change. And I know that people have said, ‘Well, what does this change word mean? You know that it’s sort of ill defined.’ Actually, we defined it pretty precisely during the campaign, and I’m trying to define it further for people during this transition,” he says. “It means a government that is not ideologically driven. It means a government that is competent. It means a government, most importantly, that is focused day in, day out on the needs and struggles, the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.”

IV. Into the Breach
More than 75 years ago, a new president took the oath of office amid economic catastrophe and admonished the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Today generations of Americans are experiencing a harsh tutorial in the true meaning of that resonant diagnosis. Fear is kryptonite to the economy, which cannot operate efficiently without broad and well-founded confidence — that wise investments will gain value, that balance sheets mean what they say, that contracts will be honored and bills paid.

The events of the past autumn produced the sharpest drop in consumer confidence ever recorded, and a similar wave of fear cratered credit markets. Obama notes the very real structural flaws in the economy, but he is also aware of the role that fear plays. “Nobody trusts other people’s books anymore. And people decide, ‘Well, I’m just going to hold on to my cash for a while,’” he explains. “And that compounds the crisis. And all that results in a contraction in lending, in consumer spending, which then has a real impact on Main Street. And so what starts off as psychological is now very real.”

Just like our banks and our carmakers, America’s shattered confidence is in serious need of a bailout. And the thing about competence is that it nourishes fresh confidence. “Yes, we can” is both an affirmation of optimism and the essential claim of the competent. When the slogan is rooted in a record of accomplishment — when tomorrow’s yes-we-can is backed up by yesterday’s yes-we-did — confidence and competence begin to feed on each other. This virtuous cycle of possibility isn’t the whole of leadership, but it is an important part and perhaps the element most needed in today’s sea of troubles. (See pictures of Obama’s nation of hope.)

After the election, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart convened one last focus group to ask Virginia voters why a state that gave Bush an 8-point victory four years ago chose Obama by 6 points this time. Their responses clustered around the crucial connection between competence and confidence. They told Hart they were drawn to Obama’s self-assured and calming personality. They felt he was “honest,” a “straight shooter” — in other words, a person who does what he says he will do. Their confidence in Obama wasn’t starry-eyed; they hadn’t been swept away by his stadium speeches. They saw a man who can get some things done, at a time when so many of their leaders, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street, cannot. He made moderates feel hopeful, and even among many core Republicans who did not ultimately vote for him, Obama inspired admiration. Viewing these comments through the results of his national surveys, Hart discerned a surge of good feeling that he had not seen in a generation: “a sense of real hope,” he says, “and the kind of broad bipartisan support that has not been in evidence since the 1980 Reagan election.”

Obama has begun to turn his thoughts to his Inaugural Address. According to strategist Axelrod, he is looking for the right mixture of bracing and boost in a speech that will be “both sober and hopeful.” He may signal a new day by announcing a plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which aides say is in the works. As the gray Chicago sky frowns outside his conference-room window, Obama rehearses his message. Americans “should anticipate that 2009 is going to be a tough year,” he says. Then he adds, “If we make some good choices, I’m confident that we can limit some of the damage in 2009. And that in 2010 we can start seeing an upward trajectory on the economy.”

A few days after this interview, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich reminded the country that some aspects of politics will never change. Government is a human enterprise, after all, and Obama, like everyone else, is bound by its limits and subject to human frailty. Nevertheless, if he has shown anything this year, Obama has made it clear that he knows how to write new playbooks and do things in new ways. Which is a compelling quality right now. His arrival on the scene feels like a step into the next century — his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his world is networked, and his spirit is democratic. Perhaps it takes a new face to see the promise in a future that now looks dark. What’s in store for Obama’s America? “I don’t have a crystal ball,” he says. But the measure of his success in menacing times can be found in the number and variety of people who consider the question with eagerness alongside their dread.

—David Von Drehle with reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Duffy / Washington

See pictures of Obama’s college years.

See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Washington Times Editorial

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

ALBANY — Caroline Kennedy, the deeply private daughter of America’s most storied political dynasty, will seek the United States Senate seat in New York being vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Froma Harrop
The Providence Journal
December 12, 2008

Have New York Democrats lost all self-respect? Their excited talk of whether Caroline Kennedy is “interested” in Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat makes you wonder. The late John F. Kennedy’s daughter has made at least one feeler phone call to New York Gov. David Paterson. And Uncle Teddy, the Massachusetts senator, is busy pulling the levers to slip her in. The seat will be vacant upon Clinton’s confirmation as secretary of state.

This unsavory spectacle has been upstaged by the wild drama in Illinois, where Gov. Rod Blagojevich is being accused of trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. The doings in New York are not blatant corruption, but they are corrosive to our democratic ideals. Lest anyone forget the point of the American Revolution, our representatives are not chosen by hereditary succession, which, to quote Thomas Paine, “is an insult and imposition on posterity.”

Of course, Caroline can ask for whatever she wants. The astounding part is that the idea of such a request hasn’t been laughed out of the news pages.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, against all evidence, touts Caroline as “a very experienced woman.” Her government service starts and ends at raising private money for the New York City schools. While a worthy endeavor, it’s a socialite’s job.

For nearly four decades after her father’s assassination, Caroline commendably resisted the call to become a Democratic Party ornament. Then at the 2000 Democratic convention, she stepped on the stage to the tune of “Camelot” and, with no little presumption, thanked the American people for “sustaining us through the good times, and the difficult ones, and for helping us dream my father’s dream.” Then she introduced “Uncle Teddy.”

Women’s groups have been eager to see Clinton replaced by another female. The Feminist Majority and the National Organization for Women had already endorsed Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman who has represented parts of Manhattan and Queens for 15 years.

But if Caroline Kennedy wants the job, all bets are off, according to Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal. “You’re talking to someone who thinks Ted Kennedy is the most effective senator there,” Smeal actually told the New York Times.

Here you have it. Without a second thought, feminists talk of throwing a seasoned, self-made professional overboard to make room for a Kennedy princess.

Uncle Ted has been reminding Democrats that Caroline would be backed by – as the Times straightforwardly put it – “the Kennedy family’s extensive fundraising network.” That’s nice, but this is New York state, where electing a Democrat requires no miracle.

Set aside whether any seat should be gender-specific. It certainly shouldn’t be genealogy-specific. But that’s one of Caroline’s selling points, at least from the Kennedy perspective. The seat was held for three years by her uncle Robert F. Kennedy, who was killed in 1968. For this reason, RFK’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also eying the seat for himself. (Perhaps he could be made ambassador to France, instead.)

Hey, what about the Moynihans? Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan occupied that Senate chair for more than 20 years. No Moynihan has yet come forward to claim it as a family possession to be handed down unto the generations.

Are we really having this conversation?

Paterson says he hasn’t decided whom he will choose, though he notes that Caroline is “thinking about” the Senate position. According to the Times, “Some influential Democrats have privately suggested that given the buzz set off by Ms. Kennedy’s emergence, the governor would have little choice but to appoint her if she decided she truly wanted the job.”

Actually, he does have a choice.

Can New York Democrats summon up some dignity? We shall see.

Trial judge postpones pleas

Mohammed

Carol Rosenberg
McClatchy
December 9, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Confessed al-Qaida kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four accused co-plotters offered Monday to plead guilty to orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a move that could leave President-elect Barack Obama to decide whether to execute them.

The surprise turnabout came in what was meant to be a routine pretrial hearing.

The Pentagon seeks the death penalty for all five men. And the trial judge postponed any pleas until lawyers sort out two key issues at the first U.S. war crimes tribunals since World War II: whether two of the five men are mentally competent to join the others in admitting to their roles in the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil; and whether the 2006 act of Congress that created the war court allows accused terrorists charged in a capital case to submit guilty pleas, without a jury of at least 12 U.S. military officers present to hear them and the evidence.

Victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, among five the Pentagon sponsored to observe the hearings, offered opposing views on the prospect of executions.

“If there ever was a case that warranted the death penalty, this is the one,” declared Hamilton Peterson, who lost his parents aboard United Airlines Flight 93.

“They do not deserve the glory of execution,” said Alice Hoagland, whose son Mark Bingham died on the same flight, struggling with the hijackers to crash the airliner in a Pennsylvania field.

“We should ensure that these dreadful people live out their lives in an American prison, totally under the control of the people they profess to hate,” she added.

The defendants made no explicit mention of the death penalty, or “martyrdom” as Mohammed calls it, in an appearance before the tribunal judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley.

Instead, the judge asked each man whether he wanted to waive his right to challenge the charges, and whether he believed prosecutors could prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“I understand,” Mohammed replied, going first. “I hope that you will assign a proceeding in the near future, as fast as possible, to get over with this play.”

Mohammed earlier had declared his distrust of the system and said he would not distinguish among any of the Americans staging the trial – from judge and defense attorney to President George W. Bush and “the CIA, who tortured me.”

The spy agency has confirmed it waterboarded Mohammed into confessing to plotting a worldwide string of terror, before his transfer to the prison camps here two years ago.

Added Yemeni Ramzi Binalshibh, accused of helping the Hamburg, Germany, suicide squad: “We the brothers, all of us, we would like to submit our confession.”

Nothing will happen soon. The judge instructed prosecutors to research and write a brief on whether the legislation that created the war court envisioned letting an accused plead guilty in a death penalty case.

Moreover, the judge said he would not accept guilty pleas from co-defendants Binalshibh and Saudi Mustafa Hawsawi until the court resolves questions on their mental capacity to stand trial.

The prison camp has Binalshibh on psychotropic drugs. He allegedly helped a Hamburg al-Qaida cell, whose members became some of the hijackers. The health issue of Hawsawi, the plot’s alleged financier, is contained in a still-classified memorandum his Army defense attorney filed with the court.

Mohammed appeared as his own attorney on Monday, his fourth hearing meant to set conditions for the joint conspiracy trial alleging the five conspired to have suicide squads hijack airplanes and then strike the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Ultimately, the commander in chief has the last say on execution, and the case involving Mohammed and his four accused co-plotters is not likely to be settled before Bush leaves office Jan. 20.

Judge Henley disclosed the five men made their offer, signed by each alleged Sept. 11 conspirator on Nov. 4 – Election Day – after prison camp guards arranged for a rare joint meeting of the group.

December 04, 2008

By Carl Leubsdorf

Tuesday’s Senate runoff victory in Georgia gave Republicans a small bright spot after their devastating electoral setbacks.

But there is probably more bravado than reality in Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ claim that his triumph will ensure a “balance of government” when President-elect Barack Obama take office.

The claim stems from the fact that, without Georgia and the unresolved Senate race in Minnesota, the Democrats remain two seats short of the 60 needed to prevent procedural roadblocks by a united minority.

But the political climate and economic crisis will make it far harder for Mr. Obama’s opponents to employ the obstructionist tactics they used so successfully when Democrats enjoyed only a modest margin the past two years and the GOP held the White House.

Even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is talking more of using the GOP’s 41 seats to influence the new president’s course, rather than block it. In fact, all signs are that the Democrats have enough votes to help Mr. Obama pass both a massive economic stimulus package and the energy and health insurance measures he pledged in the campaign.

In the House, a Democratic majority of nearly 260 members should enable the new administration to prevail consistently, even if it occasionally loses some of the more conservative Democrats.

And while Senate rules permit greater resistance, reality suggests it won’t be that easy. A main reason is that the 41 or 42 GOP senators include hard-line conservatives from heavily Republican states in the South and moderates from predominantly Democratic states in the Northeast.

At least for the first year or two, it seems unlikely that moderates like Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Ohio’s George Voinovich, Minnesota’s Norm Coleman and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter would try to prevent votes on major Obama proposals and nominations.

Other Republicans – like Texas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison and, more importantly, Arizona’s John McCain – are likely to reflect public disdain for seeking political gain with confrontational tactics.

Interestingly, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the only remaining major GOP officeholder in a state once solidly Republican, has seconded the Democratic call for a large-scale stimulus program.

It’s no coincidence that he’s up for re-election in 2010.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has shrewdly tapped into the public mood by stressing repeatedly the need to reach across party lines. Other presidents have done so before, only to fall victim to excessive partisanship on their side or from their opposition. This time, the political fallout from such tactics might be more severe.

The question is how long Mr. Obama can benefit from such a mood. Traditionally, presidents are lucky if their honeymoons last until the August congressional recess of their first year.

Democratic pollster Peter Hart conducted a recent focus group for the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center among “swing” voters who backed Mr. Obama. Results suggest the economic crisis may give him more time.

These voters, Mr. Hart concluded, “recognize the mess he is inheriting, and their expectations are reasonable and not excessive. The judgments about him are more likely to be based on the way he approaches the problems and not by instantaneous results.”

Ultimately, the natural political order will reassert itself. Mr. Obama’s public support may fade; Republicans will seek ways to revive their fortunes.

By the time he enters his third year in 2011, he may need 60 Senate votes more than now. But while the opposition party usually rebounds in the next midterm election, more 2010 Senate races loom on Democratic than Republican turf.

Sen. John Cornyn, the new chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, will have his hands full trying to stem the Democratic tide, especially if Mr. Obama retains popular support.

Until then, Tuesday’s GOP victory in Georgia seems likely to be seen as more significant in underscoring the party’s hold on Dixie than in erecting a barrier to the new administration.

More on RCP: Austin, TX Aims to Be Green Energy Capital

Public works projects at heart of plan he outlines on radio

Lori Montgomery
Washington Post
November 23, 2008

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama is developing a plan to create or preserve 2.5 million jobs over the next two years by spending billions of dollars to rebuild roads and bridges, modernize public schools, and construct wind farms and other alternative sources of energy.

The plan, which Obama announced Saturday during the weekly Democratic radio address, is more expansive – and undoubtedly more expensive – than anything proposed so far to revive the nation’s deteriorating economy. Obama said the darkening economic outlook demands that Washington act “swiftly and boldly” to diminish the risk that the nation “could lose millions of jobs next year.”

“The news this week has only reinforced the fact that we are facing an economic crisis of historic proportions,” Obama said, citing chaotic financial markets, rising jobless claims and the specter of a “deflationary spiral that could increase our massive debt even further.”

He provided few details and no price tag, but said his economic team is working on “a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face that I intend to sign soon after taking office.”

While cast as a response to a rapidly worsening crisis, the plan could enable Obama to shift massive sums to domestic priorities that Democrats say have long been neglected, such as health care and education. It also could provide seed money to reshape major U.S. industries, hastening the production of wind and solar energy and fuel-efficient cars, for example. Obama said the plan would be “a down payment on the type of reform my administration will bring to Washington.”

Obama has scheduled his second formal news conference since the election for Monday to introduce his economic team, including Federal Bank of New York President Timothy Geithner, Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, and Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, a Clinton administration Treasury chief who is expected to serve as a top Obama White House economic adviser.

Obama’s advisers are coordinating with Democrats in Congress to craft a proposal intended to spur economic activity. Congressional leaders have said they hope to pass it shortly after the new Congress convenes next year and have it on Obama’s desk soon after he takes office on Jan. 20.

Obama’s address echoed many of the same ideas Democrats on Capitol Hill have been advocating for nearly a year.

Obama said his plan would launch “a two-year nationwide effort to jump-start job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy. We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels,” as well as producing fuel-efficient cars.

“These aren’t just steps to pull ourselves out of this immediate crisis; these are long-term investments in our economic future that have been ignored for far too long,” he said.

Economists have called on the federal government to spend at least $150 billion and as much as $500 billion to ease the effects of what is expected to be the most painful and prolonged recession since World War II. A stimulus package signed by President Bush in February cost $168 billion.

House Democrats have been talking about a new package worth at least $150 billion, and possibly much more. During the presidential campaign, Obama proposed a two-year, $175 billion stimulus package with money for cash-strapped state governments and infrastructure projects as well as a $1,000 tax credit for working families.

The campaign did not release an estimate of the number of jobs that his proposal would create. But congressional aides who have been involved in developing stimulus proposals said that any plan to create 2.5 million jobs is likely to be significantly larger – probably well over $200 billion, or between 1 percent and 2 percent of the gross domestic product.

Such a plan would be bold by historic standards. President Bill Clinton, facing a weak economy when he took office in 1993, proposed a $16 billion stimulus package, which was blocked in the Senate. Obama’s proposal would be an order of magnitude larger, even when adjusted for the larger size of today’s economy.

Some economists have compared Obama’s proposals to the spending spree President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched during his early months in office in 1933. Roosevelt offered jobs programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and cash for public-works projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, in hopes of easing the pain of the Great Depression.

While the stimulus plan Obama discussed on the campaign trail included tax cuts, he did not mention any changes in tax policy in his address Saturday. But House Democrats say they expect to push much of Obama’s tax-cutting agenda along with a stimulus measure in January. That could mean enacting legislation that would extend Bush tax cuts for families who earn less than $250,000 past the 2010 expiration date.

By Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; A01

Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D) defeated Sen. Ted Stevens, ending the tenure of the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, after the counting of more ballots yesterday gave him a larger lead than the number of votes still untallied, Alaska elections officials said.

Begich’s win gives Democrats control of 58 seats in the Senate, including two independents who caucus with them. That is two shy of the number needed to prevent Republicans from filibustering, with two races still undecided. Democrats have not controlled 60 seats since 1978.

Begich leads Stevens by more than 3,700 votes, according to the Alaska secretary of state. Gail Fenumiai, the head of the state’s election division, said about 2,500 absentee votes from overseas and Alaska’s most remote regions remain to be counted.

The Democrat’s lead thus far — 47.8 percent to 46.6 percent — puts him beyond the margin of victory that would allow Stevens to call for a state-funded recount of the ballots.

“I am humbled and honored to serve Alaska in the United States Senate,” Begich said in a statement declaring victory. “It’s been an incredible journey getting to this point.”

Alaska voters “wanted to see change,” he told reporters in Anchorage. “Alaska has been in the midst of a generational shift — you could see it.”

The race was closely watched, in part because Alaska had not sent a Democrat to Congress in nearly three decades, while Stevens was vying to become the first convicted felon to win election to the Senate. He was convicted last month on seven felony counts of failing to disclose more than $250,000 in gifts.

Begich is the son of Nick Begich, the House member from Alaska who disappeared in 1972 on a flight with House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-La.). Both were presumed dead. No Democrat has represented Alaska in its two Senate seats and one House seat since Sen. Mike Gravel was defeated by Republican Frank Murkowski in 1980.

Begich ran as a conservative Democrat, supporting gun owners’ rights and additional domestic drilling for oil production, including in wildlife areas where most Democrats have opposed drilling.

However, the race always focused on Stevens, with the campaign virtually stopping during his four-week trial. The candidates debated once, just days before the election. Begich sought to pay respect to Stevens’s long service to the state, contrasting that with the recent allegations against him.

“He’s done a lot for our state, and I’ve shared Alaska’s respect for him. The past year has been a difficult one for Alaska. With the verdict, we can put this behind us,” Begich said in an advertisement that aired the final weekend before Election Day.

Stevens, who is in Washington for this week’s lame-duck session, said yesterday that either his campaign or the Alaska Republican Party would definitely ask for a recount if the final margin fell within the needed 0.5 percent of the votes cast.

Still to be settled are races are in Minnesota and Georgia. Minnesota officials formally began a recount yesterday in the race between Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken; the Republican finished 206 votes ahead of the onetime comedian out of 2.9 million ballots cast. In Georgia, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) faces a Dec. 2 runoff against former state representative Jim Martin. Chambliss held a 110,000-vote margin on election night, but his share of the vote did not reach 50 percent, as required by state law.

Stevens, who turned 85 yesterday and was appointed to the Senate in 1968, told reporters yesterday that he was exhausted and had not slept well since his indictment in late July. He added that he had led “three lives”: as a senator, a criminal defendant and a candidate for office.

“I wouldn’t wish what I’ve been through on anyone, [not] my worst enemy,” said Stevens, who says he is considering appealing his convictions.

Stevens, an iconic figure who helped lead Alaska to statehood in the 1950s, served as chairman of the appropriations, commerce and ethics committees in his 40-year tenure in the Senate. He was known for steering hundreds of billions of dollars to his home state for projects.

But the earmarked projects also drew the scrutiny of federal investigators.

Bill Allen Jr., the former chief executive of an oil services company, Veco, pleaded guilty in May 2007 to bribing a host of Alaskan officials. He testified at Stevens’s trial that his company oversaw a massive reconstruction of the senator’s home outside Anchorage, raising the A-frame house on stilts and building an entire new floor and wrap-around deck beneath it.

Stevens was charged with not reporting the home rebuilding and other assorted gifts from Allen and other powerful friends on his Senate financial disclosure forms.

A federal jury in the District convicted Stevens on Oct. 27, eight days before most voters would go to the polls in Alaska. He faces a potential jail term, but sentencing has not been set.

Stevens said yesterday that he could not talk about his legal battle, neither with reporters nor even in a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans.

Outside the GOP meeting, he said he planned to tell his colleagues, “It’s a nice day. It’s a really nice day.”

The death and rebirth of American liberalism both began with flags in Grant Park. On Aug. 28, 1968, 10,000 people gathered there to protest the Democratic Convention taking place a few blocks away, which was about to nominate Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, thus implicitly ratifying the hated Vietnam War. Chicago mayor Richard Daley had warned the protesters not to disrupt his city and denied them permits to assemble, but they came anyway. All afternoon, the protesters chanted and the police hovered, until about 3:30, when someone climbed a flagpole and began lowering the American flag.

Police went to arrest the offender and were pelted with eggs, chunks of concrete and balloons filled with paint and urine. The police responded by charging into the crowd, clubbing bystanders and yelling “Kill! Kill!” in what one report later termed a “police riot.” Across the country, Americans watching on television gave their verdict: Serves the damn hippies right. Democrats, who had won seven of the previous nine presidential elections, went on to lose seven of the next 10.

Forty years later, happy liberals mobbed Grant Park, invited by another mayor named Richard Daley, to celebrate Barack Obama’s election. This time the flags flew proudly at full mast, and the police were there to protect the crowd, not threaten it. Once again, Americans watched on television, and this time they didn’t seethe. They wept. (See pictures of Obama’s Grant Park celebration.)

The distance between those two Grant Park scenes says a lot about how American liberalism fell, and why in the Obama era it could become — once again — America’s ruling creed. The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America’s last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. And the Obama majority is sturdy for one overriding reason: liberalism, which average Americans once associated with upheaval, now promises stability instead.

The Search for Order
In America, political majorities live or die at the intersection of two public yearnings: for freedom and for order. A century ago, in the Progressive Era, modern American liberalism was born, in historian Robert Wiebe’s words, as a “search for order.” America’s giant industrial monopolies, the progressives believed, were turning capitalism into a jungle, a wild and lawless place where only the strong and savage survived. By the time Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression, the entire ecosystem appeared to be in a death spiral, with Americans crying out for government to take control. F.D.R. did — juicing the economy with unprecedented amounts of government cash, creating new protections for the unemployed and the elderly, and imposing rules for how industry was to behave. Conservatives wailed that economic freedom was under assault, but most ordinary Americans thanked God that Washington was securing their bank deposits, helping labor unions boost their wages, giving them a pension when they retired and pumping money into the economy to make sure it never fell into depression again. They didn’t feel unfree; they felt secure. For three and a half decades, from the mid-1930s through the ’60s, government imposed order on the market. The jungle of American capitalism became a well-tended garden, a safe and pleasant place for ordinary folks to stroll. Americans responded by voting for F.D.R.-style liberalism — which even most Republican politicians came to accept — in election after election. (Read a TIME cover story on F.D.R.)

By the beginning of the 1960s, though, liberalism was becoming a victim of its own success. The post–World War II economic boom flooded America’s colleges with the children of a rising middle class, and it was those children, who had never experienced life on an economic knife-edge, who began to question the status quo, the tidy, orderly society F.D.R. had built. For blacks in the South, they noted, order meant racial apartheid. For many women, it meant confinement to the home. For everyone, it meant stifling conformity, a society suffocated by rules about how people should dress, pray, imbibe and love. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society spoke for what would become a new, baby-boom generation “bred in at least modest comfort,” which wanted less order and more freedom. And it was this movement for racial, sexual and cultural liberation that bled into the movement against Vietnam and assembled in August 1968 in Grant Park.

Traditional liberalism died there because Americans — who had once associated it with order — came to associate it with disorder instead. For a vast swath of the white working class, racial freedom came to mean riots and crime; sexual freedom came to mean divorce; and cultural freedom came to mean disrespect for family, church and flag. Richard Nixon and later Reagan won the presidency by promising a new order: not economic but cultural, not the taming of the market but the taming of the street.

See scenes from voting day.

See the campaign in T shirts.

The Receding Right
Flash forward to the evening of Nov. 4, and you can see why liberalism has sprung back to life. Ideologically, the crowds who assembled to hear Obama on election night were linear descendants of those egg throwers four decades before. They too believe in racial equality, gay rights, feminism, civil liberties and people’s right to follow their own star. But 40 years later, those ideas no longer seem disorderly. Crime is down and riots nonexistent; feminism is so mainstream that even Sarah Palin embraces the term; Chicago mayor Richard Daley, son of the man who told police to bash heads, marches in gay-rights parades. Culturally, liberalism isn’t that scary anymore. Younger Americans — who voted overwhelmingly for Obama — largely embrace the legacy of the ’60s, and yet they constitute one of the most obedient, least rebellious generations in memory. The culture war is ending because cultural freedom and cultural order — the two forces that faced off in Chicago in 1968 — have turned out to be reconcilable after all.

The disorder that panics Americans now is not cultural but economic. If liberalism collapsed in the 1960s because its bid for cultural freedom became associated with cultural disorder, conservatism has collapsed today because its bid for economic freedom has become associated with economic disorder. When Reagan took power in 1981, he vowed to restore the economic liberty that a half-century of F.D.R.-style government intrusion had stifled. American capitalism had become so thoroughly domesticated, he argued, that it lost its capacity for dynamic growth. For a time, a majority of Americans agreed. Taxes and regulations were cut and cut again, and for the most part, the economic pie grew. In the 1980s and ’90s, the garden of American capitalism became a pretty energetic place. But it became a scarier place too. In the newly deregulated American economy, fewer people had job security or fixed-benefit pensions or reliable health care. Some got rich, but a lot went bankrupt, mostly because of health-care costs. As Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker has noted, Americans today experience far-more-violent swings in household income than did their parents a generation ago. (See pictures of the 1958 recession.)

Starting in the 1990s, average Americans began deciding that the conservative economic agenda was a bit like the liberal cultural agenda of the 1960s: less liberating than frightening. When the Gingrich Republicans tried to slash Medicare, the public turned on them en masse. A decade later, when George W. Bush tried to partially privatize Social Security, Americans rebelled once again. In 2005 a Pew Research Center survey identified a new group of voters that it called “pro-government conservatives.” They were culturally conservative and hawkish on foreign policy, and they overwhelmingly supported Bush in 2004. But by large majorities, they endorsed government regulation and government spending. They didn’t want to unleash the free market; they wanted to rein it in.

Those voters were a time bomb in the Republican coalition, which detonated on Nov. 4. John McCain’s promises to cut taxes, cut spending and get government out of the way left them cold. Among the almost half of voters who said they were “very worried” that the economic crisis would hurt their family, Obama beat McCain by 26 points. (See pictures of Obama’s campaign.)

The public mood on economics today is a lot like the public mood on culture 40 years ago: Americans want government to impose law and order — to keep their 401(k)s from going down, to keep their health-care premiums from going up, to keep their jobs from going overseas — and they don’t much care whose heads Washington has to bash to do it.

Seizing the Moment
That is both Obama’s great challenge and his great opportunity. If he can do what F.D.R. did — make American capitalism stabler and less savage — he will establish a Democratic majority that dominates U.S. politics for a generation. And despite the daunting problems he inherits, he’s got an excellent chance. For one thing, taking aggressive action to stimulate the economy, regulate the financial industry and shore up the American welfare state won’t divide his political coalition; it will divide the other side. On domestic economics, Democrats up and down the class ladder mostly agree. Even among Democratic Party economists, the divide that existed during the Clinton years between deficit hawks like Robert Rubin and free spenders like Robert Reich has largely evaporated, as everyone has embraced a bigger government role. Today it’s Republicans who — though more unified on cultural issues — are split badly between upscale business types who want government out of the way and pro-government conservatives who want Washington’s help. If Obama moves forcefully to restore economic order, the Wall Street Journal will squawk about creeping socialism, as it did in F.D.R.’s day, but many downscale Republicans will cheer. It’s these working-class Reagan Democrats who could become tomorrow’s Obama Republicans — a key component of a new liberal majority — if he alleviates their economic fears. (See pictures of former Presidents Clinton and Bush.)

Obama doesn’t have to turn the economy around overnight. After all, Roosevelt hadn’t ended the Depression by 1936. Obama just needs modest economic improvement by the time he starts running for re-election and an image as someone relentlessly focused on fixing America’s economic woes. In allocating his time in his first months as President, he should remember what voters told exit pollsters they cared about most — 63% said the economy. (No other issue even exceeded 10%.)

In politics, crisis often brings opportunity. If Obama restores some measure of economic order, kick-starting U.S. capitalism and softening its hard edges, and if he develops the kind of personal rapport with ordinary Americans that F.D.R. and Reagan had — and he has the communication skills to do it — liberals will probably hold sway in Washington until Sasha and Malia have kids. As that happens, the arguments that have framed economic debate in recent times — for large upper-income tax cuts or the partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare — will fade into irrelevance. In an era of liberal hegemony, they will seem as archaic as defending the welfare system became when conservatives were on top.

See pictures of the world reacting to Obama’s win.

See pictures of presidential First Dogs.

A New Consensus
There are fault lines in the Obama coalition, to be sure. In a two-party system, it’s impossible to construct a majority without bringing together people who disagree on big things. But Obama’s majority is at least as cohesive as Reagan’s or F.D.R.’s. The cultural issues that have long divided Democrats — gay marriage, gun control, abortion — are receding in importance as a post-’60s generation grows to adulthood. Foreign policy doesn’t divide Democrats as bitterly as it used to either because, in the wake of Iraq, once-hawkish working-class whites have grown more skeptical of military force. In 2004, 22% of voters told exit pollsters that “moral values” were their top priority, and 19% said terrorism. This year terrorism got 9%, and no social issues even made the list.

The biggest potential land mine in the Obama coalition isn’t the culture war or foreign policy; it’s nationalism. On a range of issues, from global warming to immigration to trade to torture, college-educated liberals want to integrate more deeply America’s economy, society and values with the rest of the world’s. They want to make it easier for people and goods to legally cross America’s borders, and they want global rules that govern how much America can pollute the atmosphere and how it conducts the war on terrorism. They believe that ceding some sovereignty is essential to making America prosperous, decent and safe. When it comes to free trade, immigration and multilateralism, though, downscale Democrats are more skeptical. In the future, the old struggle between freedom and order may play itself out on a global scale, as liberal internationalists try to establish new rules for a more interconnected planet and working-class nationalists protest that foreign bureaucrats threaten America’s freedom.

But that’s in the future. If Obama begins restoring order to the economy, Democrats will reap the rewards for a long time. Forty years ago, liberalism looked like the problem in a nation spinning out of control. Today a new version of it may be the solution. It’s a very different day in Grant Park.

Beinart is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

By Nikita Stewart and Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 18, 2008; A01

District and federal officials are preparing for as many as 4 million people for the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, a crowd that would be three or four times larger than previous big events on the Mall.

Only a fraction of those people will be close enough to get a good look at the action. But officials are planning extra JumboTrons at the Mall and along the inaugural parade route so that spectators can feel a part of the historic day.

“The Mall actually may be the best seat in the house. . . . It’ll kind of be like the world’s biggest stage and auditorium on January 20th,” said Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), adding that the crowd projections have emerged in briefings conducted by federal and local officials.

All plans are pending approval of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, to be set up by Obama, which determines the size and nature of the inaugural festivities, Fenty said. But District officials have met several times with the Secret Service and other agencies.

The Secret Service is taking the lead in overseeing security and other logistics. Even for a city that has hosted vast throngs for marches, protests, celebrations, funerals and inaugurations, this will be an unprecedented test of planning and resources. The question arises: Can the city handle it? Can millions of people fit downtown?

Or, could there be another Meltdown of ‘76?

That year, a million spectators were expected on the Mall to celebrate the Bicentennial. Transit officials urged people to take public transportation and promised special service. But there was nothing special about the Fourth of July traffic jam, which stranded cars and buses for hours.

District and federal officials blamed a flawed and smaller mass transit system for the 1976 embarrassment. They expressed confidence that they can handle this January’s events. At the same time, they know that Inauguration Day 2009 will be one of a kind.

For example, Fenty said, officials expect people to camp overnight, starting Jan. 19, to get as close as possible to the swearing-in viewing area and parade route.

The next several weeks will be spent figuring out how to change the comprehensive playbook that has been used in the past.

“We have a great blueprint from years past, and we will follow that,” the mayor said. “But we will start to make exceptions and deviations because, by everyone’s estimation, we will have crowds that will be two, three, maybe even four times as large as the largest inaugural. . . . One of the biggest exceptions would be to open up the Mall.”

Officials are talking about opening large sections of the Mall east of the Washington Monument, a space normally used for staging the many components of the inaugural parade, Fenty said. That would make the Mall a viewing area that experts said could accommodate several million people — significantly more than in the past. Officials have not said where the parade groups will gather instead.

The changes would not affect the 240,000 people who will get free tickets in the space closest to the swearing-in ceremony.

The mayor said visitors will have a difficult choice between getting the best possible views of the swearing-in or the parade.

“The parade route will be completely filled way before the inaugural speech even happens,” said Fenty, who was a D.C. Council member in 2005, the most recent inauguration. “That’s something people will have to think about, whether they want to see the parade firsthand or see the inaugural swearing-in and speech. You can’t do both.”

Obama is known for choosing venues where he can address huge crowds. In August in Denver, he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination with a speech before 84,000 at Invesco Field. On election night, about 200,000 jammed Chicago’s Grant Park for his victory speech.

“The word we’re getting from them, nothing formal yet, is that they want to open this up to as many people as possible,” Fenty said. “We will follow their lead.”

Peter V. Ueberroth, former chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said that fewer — not more — leaders should take charge in a crowd of such size. Ueberroth, who helped guide the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, said security and transportation officials must be closely coordinated, sharing a command headquarters. In this case, the Secret Service will coordinate a unified command center.

It does not appear that the 300 acres of the Mall in the two-mile stretch from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial has ever been filled with people, according to Terry Adams, a National Park Service spokesman.

The 1995 Million Man March, which drew about a million people, give or take a few hundred thousand, filled two-thirds of the one-mile section between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, according to photographs taken at the time. Farouk El-Baz, a Boston University expert who analyzed the crowd size, estimated that the entire two-mile stretch is so open that it could hold 3 million people.

“There should be no concern about the number of people. Particularly since this one will be a celebratory gathering. People will be up. They will be pleasant to each other,” El-Baz said.

The biggest inaugural crowd appears to be the 1.2 million people who are said to have attended events at the 1965 inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson, according to police and past news accounts. In those days, the swearing-in was held in the more limited area around the east front of the Capitol, where it had taken place since 1829, according to Beth Hahn of the Senate Historical Office.

It was not until the 1981 inauguration of Ronald Reagan that the swearing-in was moved to the Capitol’s west front, where larger audiences could spread onto the Mall.

Faulty mass transit, not space, was the downfall of the July 4, 1976, Bicentennial celebration. Metro ran mostly bus service, which fell into chaos in the traffic jam. Metrorail was in its infancy, with only a 4.6-mile stretch of the Red Line functioning.

Today, with a seasoned and robust subway system, officials are again urging people to take public transit. Once downtown, however, people will face much tighter security than in 1976, as well as world-class traffic problems. Many blocks will be off limits Jan. 20.

“If we can get the doors closed, we will move,” Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel said. Metro’s biggest crowd, recorded July 11, was 854,638 passengers.

The fact that Jan. 20, a federal holiday in the Washington area, falls the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday means that the crowd’s arrival might be spread over a four-day weekend. At the same time, the crowd will be packed with out-of-towners and many people attending their first inauguration, creating the potential for confusion.

Those who dare to drive downtown on Inauguration Day will face a monumental parking challenge.

The security zone, which has not been determined, could eat up much of the parking downtown, said Andrew Blair, vice president and secretary of the Washington Parking Association and president of Colonial Parking. The industry is preparing for caravans of buses, he said, adding that the Colonial-run parking lot at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium will have well over 800 buses.

For those who are making their plans ahead of time, there are 95,000 hotel rooms in the metropolitan area, tourism officials say, in addition to the thousands of basements, spare rooms and sublet homes and apartments that will be available for inauguration-goers. The city is accustomed to hosting 15 million visitors annually.

Security, emergency and logistical crews will be bolstered by about 5,000 members of the military and 4,000 additional officers from 93 law enforcement agencies across the country, officials have said.

Presidential inaugurations aren’t just logistical challenges. They shape the start of an administration and provide a chance for the District to shine before a worldwide audience. A major mishap could tarnish the image of the city, the mayor and the organizers, and much is riding on success.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime” experience, Fenty said.

Staff writer Eric M. Weiss contributed to this report.

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The Roundtable

SAN FRANCISCO — In one of the nation’s largest displays of support for gay rights, tens of thousands of people in cities across the country turned out in support of same-sex marriage on Saturday, lending their voices to an issue that many gay men and lesbians consider a critical step to full equality.

The demonstrations — from a sun-splashed throng in San Francisco to a chilly crowd in Minneapolis — came 11 days after California voters narrowly passed a ballot measure, Proposition 8, that outlawed previously legal same-sex ceremonies in the state. The measure’s passage has spurred protests in California and across the country, including at several Mormon temples, a reflection of that church’s ardent backing of the proposition.

On Saturday, speakers painted the fight over Proposition 8 as another test of a movement that began with the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969, survived the emergence of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and has since made enormous strides in societal acceptance, whether in television shows or in antidiscrimination laws.

“It’s not ‘Yes we can,’ ” said Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco city supervisor, referring to President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign mantra. “It’s ‘Yes we will.’ ”

Carrying handmade signs with slogans like “No More Mr. Nice Gay” and “Straights Against Hate,” big crowds filled civic centers and streets in many cities. In New York, some 4,000 people gathered at City Hall, where speakers repeatedly called same-sex marriage “the greatest civil rights battle of our generation.”

“We are not going to rest at night until every citizen in every state in this country can say, ‘This is the person I love,’ and take their hand in marriage,” said Representative Anthony D. Weiner of Brooklyn.

In Los Angeles, where wildfires had temporarily grabbed headlines from continuing protests over Proposition 8, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa addressed a crowd of about 9,000 people in Spanish and English, and seemed to express confidence that the measure, which is being challenged in California courts, would be overturned.

“I’ve come here from the fires because I feel the wind at my back as well,” said the mayor, who arrived at a downtown rally from the fire zone on a helicopter. “It’s the wind of change that has swept the nation. It is the wind of optimism and hope.”

About 900 protesters braved a tornado watch and menacing rain clouds in Washington to rally in front of the Capitol and on to the White House. “Gay, straight, black, white; marriage is a civil right,” the marchers chanted.

In Las Vegas, the comedian Wanda Sykes surprised a crowd of more than 1,000 rallying outside a gay community center by announcing that she is gay and had wed her wife in California on Oct. 25. Ms. Sykes, who divorced her husband of seven years in 1998, had never publicly discussed her sexual orientation but said the passage of Proposition 8 had propelled her to be open about it.

“I felt like I was being attacked, personally attacked — our community was attacked,” she told the crowd.

And while some speakers were obviously eager to tap crowds’ current outrage, others took pains to cast the demonstrations as a peaceful, long-term, campaign over an issue that has proved remarkably and consistently divisive.

“We need to be our best selves,” said the Rev. G. Penny Nixon, a gay pastor from San Mateo, Calif., who warned the San Francisco crowd against blaming “certain communities” for the election loss. “This is a movement based on love.”

The protests were organized largely over the Internet, and featured few representatives of major gay rights groups that campaigned against Proposition 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote after trailing for months in the polls. The online aspect seemed to draw a broad cross-section of people, like Nicole Toussaint, a kindergarten teacher who joined a crowd of more than 1,000 people in Minneapolis.

“I’m here to support my friends who are gay,” said Ms. Toussaint, 23. “I think my generation will play a big role.”

The big crowds notwithstanding, it has been a tough month for gay rights. Proposition 8 was just one of three measures on same-sex marriage passed on Nov. 4, with constitutional bans also being approved in Arizona and Florida. In Arkansas, voters passed a measure aimed at barring gay men and lesbians from adopting children.

That vote was on the minds of many of the 200 people who protested Saturday in front of the State Capitol in Little Rock. One of those, Barb L’Eplattenier, 39, a university professor, said some of her gay friends with adopted children were fearful of state action if they appeared in public. “They think their families are in danger,” said Ms. L’Eplattenier, who married her partner, Sarah Scanlon, in California in July.

The protests over Proposition 8 also come even as same-sex marriages began Wednesday in Connecticut, which joined Massachusetts as the only states allowing such ceremonies. By contrast, 30 states have constitutional bans on such unions.

At a Boston rally on Saturday, Kate Leslie, an organizer, said the loss in California had certainly caught the attention of local gay men and lesbians who have had the right to marry since 2004.

“You’re watching people who could be you and are part of your community being stripped of their rights,” Ms. Leslie said. “And in some ways that’s why so many people are infuriated in Massachusetts and willing to stand up for a rally.”

In California, a State Supreme Court decision legalized same-sex marriage in May. As many as 18,000 couples married, some traveling from other states to tie the knot. Such marriages may be challenged in court.

David McMullin, a garden designer from Atlanta, was one of those who made the trip, marrying his partner in Oakland, Calif., in September, in part to let their two adoptive children feel part of a married family.

“We just want our kids to know we’re O.K.,” said Mr. McMullin, who had come to a protest in front of the Georgia State Capitol. “We have rights as people even if we don’t have rights as citizens.”

Supporters of the proposition have repeatedly argued that Proposition 8 was not antigay, but merely pro-marriage.

“The marriage is between a man and women,” said Frank Schubert, the campaign manager for Protect Marriage, the leading group behind passing Proposition 8. “If they want to legalize same-sex marriage, they are going to have to bring a proposal before the people of California. That’s how democracy works.”

Equality California, a major gay rights group here, indicated this week that it would work to repeal Proposition 8 if legal challenges fail.

Such dry approaches seemed a million miles away, however, from the boisterous scene in front of San Francisco City Hall on Saturday, where as many as 10,000 people gathered, carrying signs, American flags and even copies of their marriage licenses.

One of those was Lawrence Dean, 57, who had married his partner, Steven Lyle, in San Francisco in July. It was the fifth time that the couple of 19 years had held a ceremony to announce their commitment, and, of course, accept wedding gifts.

“If we keep this up, maybe I won’t have to again,” Mr. Dean said, looking out at the protest. “I have enough pots and pans.”

Reporting was contributed by Robbie Brown from Atlanta; Steve Barnes from Little Rock; Christina Capecchi from Minneapolis; Francesca Segrè from Los Angeles; Katie Zezima from Boston; Ashley Southall from Washington; Steve Friess from Las Vegas; and C. J. Hughes from New York.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is among the names surfacing during the debate over Republican Party leadership. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Halimah Abdullah
McClatchy
November 16, 2008

WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan is in the crosshairs as various segments of the GOP mount a campaign to give a party still reeling from presidential and congressional election losses an image makeover.

Duncan, whom some fellow Kentucky Republicans call “Mr. Inside,” is closely allied with President Bush. That connection, coupled with the push to distance the party from an unpopular administration, has turned the race for the committee chairmanship into a symbolic fight over the ideological soul of the party.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has emerged from the fray as a voice of change, promising to get the party back on track. Supporters are pushing him as a possible replacement for Duncan.

“The Republican National Committee has to ask itself if it wants someone who has successfully led a revolution,” Randy Evans, Gingrich’s friend and legal counsel, told several media outlets last week. “If it does, Newt’s the one.”

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis and Republican leaders from Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina also are gunning for the post.

While Duncan hasn’t officially made a bid for the chairmanship and Gingrich says he’s uninterested in it, supporters nonetheless are lobbying on their behalf. Members will vote on a new chairman in January.

In the meantime, Duncan and Gingrich are making the rounds, discussing the state of the party with anyone who’ll listen.

Their approaches are starkly different.

“The Republican Party, right now, is like a midsized college team trying to play in the Super Bowl,” Gingrich said Friday. “We have to be honest about our shortcomings as a governing party. … You have to see the 2006 and 2008 losses together and recognize that the Republican Party has a performance failure, and the American people, who have not changed ideologically, are sending a message that they want a performance change.”

Duncan was more nuanced during an interview last week with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell attributing losses to “the national mood,” but saying that the nation is still center-right and the fundamental principles of the nation remain unchanged.

The battle over GOP leadership reflects profound problems within the party, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Republicans, he said, need to find leadership that better reflects the nation’s changing demographic.

“They lost badly for the second election in a row,” Sabato said. “Historically, two things happen when a party loses badly. There’s a long period of introspection, where the leaders ask, ‘What did we do wrong?’ and ‘Can we change?’

“Second, there’s a search for new leaders that can generate change for an election win.”

Reaction is strong to America’s first black president

This undated file photo provided by Gary and Alina Grewal, of Hardwick Township, N.J., shows a charred cross that had been burned on the lawn of their home after they placed a banner congratulating President-elect Barack Obama. Associated Press (File Associated Press )

Jesse Washington
Associated Press
November 16, 2008

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama.” Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.

There have been “hundreds” of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: “I hope Obama gets assassinated.” That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law’s front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.

She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear.

“I can’t say that every white person in Snellville is evil and anti-Obama and willing to desecrate my property, because one or two idiots did it,” said Millner, who is black. “But it definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they’re capable of and what they’re really thinking.”

Potok, who is white, said he believes there is “a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them.”

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: “I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.

“If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama’s) church being deported,” he said.

Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is “the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War,” said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. “It’s shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries.”

“Someone once said racism is like cancer,” Ferris said. “It’s never totally wiped out, it’s in remission.”

If so, America’s remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler, of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama’s victory.

Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP calling for a town hall meeting to address complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school Nov. 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia.

The student’s mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: “Whether you like it or not, we’re in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision.”

Other incidents include:

•Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: “Let’s shoot that (N-word) in the head.” Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.

•In Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool.” Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. “Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count,” the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written “Let’s hope someone wins.”

•Racist graffiti was found in places including New York’s Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and “Go Back To Africa” were spray- painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

•Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted “assassinate Obama,” a district official said.

•University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. “It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork,” Houston said.

•Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported.

•Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.

•A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted “Obama.”

•In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his windshield, saying, “Now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house.”

Emotions are often raw after a hard-fought political campaign, but now those on the losing side have an easy target for their anger.

“The principle is very simple,” said B.J. Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book “A Peacock in the Land of Penguins.” “If I can’t hurt the person I’m angry at, then I’ll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race.”

October 27, 2008

by Martha Rough

Last Sunday, I cried for America. I didn’t cry for the money we’ve lost in our current economic turmoil or because of predictions Obama will win the election or out of concern that America is losing status in the world. No, any one of these events was not the cause of my tears, rather they are symptoms. My tears were tears of grief, tears of guilt, and tears of fear, for the very idea of America as envisioned by our Founders, appears to be very endangered these days.

As I watch the financial crisis unfold and reflect on its causes, and as I watch the news coverage of the campaigns and listen to the polls, I find myself asking, “Have Americans truly grown weary of the responsibility of freedom?”  “Responsibility?” you may ask, “Is freedom not a right?” Rights always include responsibilities; they are two sides to one coin. What I fear is that in today’s culture, too many of us have forgotten that the responsibility associated with freedom should be an important part of the conduct of our daily decisions. Too often we consider this responsibility only in times of war and military threat. Furthermore, I fear that in today’s crisis, the responsibility seems too much.
Closely considered, you can see that freedom is the foundation of all the unalienable rights sought by the Founders. All they wanted from King George III or anyone else was to be left alone, left alone to live freely in the manner of their choosing, freely choosing how to build their own lives and happiness. In return, they recognized the duty to leave others alone as well; plus, they assumed the responsibility for the choices they made with the situations life brought them. They wanted nothing more than freedom to work, to worship, to think, to try, to fail, and to try again, to go from being poor to being wealthy, and no doubt, they accepted, too, that they were free to go from being wealthy to being poor, if their decision-making led them there. For a century and a half, we built on this heritage of freedom and refined and enhanced it by ending slavery and extending the freedom to live as one wished equally to all.

Such freedom demands that we choose everything wisely and carefully, keeping in mind and accepting the risks and uncertainties of the future alongside the hopes and gratifications of today. Freedom demands our attention at all times. It is impacted by how we work, how we eat, how we vote, how we invest, how we spend, how we do anything. Truly, the dollars we spend and the actions we take are mighty powers, if we use them wisely and responsibly. Personal responsibility is key to maintaining freedom.  Has this price of freedom become too much?
Apparently, it has. Polls verify that the people want government to fix the economy, solve their health care problems, save their home loans and incomes, cut their taxes, and more. In America today, the scope of rights to which people feel entitled has expanded radically. Certainly, health care, higher education, home ownership, financial security, and, even, wealth were all goals that the Founders would say any citizen should be free to pursue, but the Founders knew that remaining free would mean the responsibility for achieving those goals lay with the individual. We imperil our most precious right, the right to freedom, with these new demands, and the peril stems from the responsibility side of the rights coin. Once these goals become rights to which everyone is entitled, who is responsible for providing them?
Unlike the unalienable rights which demand no positive contribution from others, the ideas and longings listed above would be positive rights. In other words, someone gets a right fulfilled, but someone else must provide for it. The problem with positive rights is they always infringe on the negative rights of someone in some way. How?  The unalienable rights leave us to work, dream, build, and enjoy the fruits of our efforts. Our newly sought-after rights take some of these fruits of our neighbor’s labor, thus diminishing his or her freedom to work and enjoy. Such policies clearly, then, infringe on liberty, but even the folks who stand to benefit from such policies lose some of the joy of their basic rights. By eliminating the need to pursue happiness and replacing it with an entitlement, the citizenry is robbed of the satisfaction of personal achievement and accomplishment. Not only do we lose this satisfaction that only we can truly bestow on ourselves, but those who achieve lose the rewards and incentives that have been the impetus for the innovation and entrepreneurship that have provided countless benefits to the world.
When we consider the uncertainty we live with these days, we can see where voters might be motivated to make demands for positive rights. The outlook for our individual and collective financial lives is bleak and miserable. The pundits as much as the populace seem at a loss. It appears that no one knows how to fix this. Furthermore, most of us feel we have done our part, working and caring for our families, so the need to assign blame to Bush or corporate fat cats or unqualified borrowers is understandable; but as Mama always said, “For every finger of blame you point, there are three pointing back at you.”  Despite all the good things we do day in and day out, for quite a while now, plenty of us have seen the signs of trouble brewing, yet we have not spoken out or acted. We have known that Americans, individually and as a nation, have become credit junkies. We have given our politicians a pass, sending not even one concerned letter, about questionable, though well-meaning, policies. Why give loans to unqualified consumers?  Why not help them become qualified, instead?  We have invested in fast growing stocks to build portfolios as quickly as possible, ignoring the risk and the notion of real value in ways not dissimilar to the speculators whose greed and denial drive them to addictive levels of trading. We have built a house of cards, a fairy tale economy, but now we just want someone to fix it for us.
What I fear is that Americans have reached a precipice, a tipping point as defined by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestseller. Our times and the prognosis for America are confused and uncertain. The Bush administration has already injected the government into private enterprise, a move that, if permanent, is a definite step toward socialization. The current financial crisis, however, is only the latest piece in a jigsaw puzzle that has been taking shape for decades. The idea that we are all entitled to have whatever we want while we do whatever we want to do grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Since then, American culture has been deemed bad for the environment, bad for our image in the world, unfair and mean to anyone middle class and below. The degree of loathing of the American way has intensified steadily and unhealthily, shifting focus away from the vision of what we have been at our best and what we can be when we fulfill our legacy. This message has permeated popular culture, promoted by college professors, the news media, the movie industry, and liberal politicians. Americans have been sold the idea that we have to change. And, change is likely to be the order of the day on November 4. The idea of change has never stuck or been as enticing as now.  Obama’s Main St. versus Wall Street rhetoric and the idea of electing the first Black American to the Presidency, an act that should serve to heal some very old wounds, have Americans sold on the idea of change.
But I won’t be voting for Barack Obama, though I have seriously entertained the idea throughout much of the last year and a half. You see, when I first started listening to Obama’s message, I was hopeful that he held the same appreciation of the Founders’ vision of freedom and responsibility as I do, but the revelation of his policies tells me that he favors positive rights and the idea of absolute equality much more than he values freedom. Maybe he truly believes that government can create both, but history teaches us otherwise. We can never make or keep everyone’s status equal.  The classless society is never really classless, and, in the end, the citizenry forfeits its freedom for nothing.
I wonder how far left the country would move under an Obama Presidency. Several conditions make a substantial shift not only quite possible, but very probable.  First, he would have no check placed on him by Congress since the Congressional majority favors positive rights and follows two leaders whose modern liberalism matches Obama’s. Additionally, this group of legislators has called to overtly impede freedom of speech and of the press with the Fairness Doctrine and has worked to curtail Second Amendment rights to bear arms.
Next, the press, except for Fox, will not place any checks on Obama. The press is supposedly our “fourth estate,” meant to serve the interest of the people. Rather than serve, the press works to lead the people, especially in matters of politics and social change. If you doubt the media bias in this campaign, just look at the contributions that the Obama campaign has received from media sources. The parent companies of CNN, NBC, and CBS have all made sizable contributions to the Obama campaign and none to McCain. In fact, several recent comments from the Obama camp and the lack of news coverage about them have given me serious pause. The most troublesome came from Joe Biden at the Seattle fundraiser where he said Obama would be tested. The media played the comment about Obama’s mettle to the hilt. What few people know is that Biden went on to talk about how the decisions that he and Obama would have to make would most likely be unpopular and questionable. He was asking the supporters to keep the faith and fervor they have had during the campaign in the future. Obama, according to Biden’s comments, would need their support, with “the use” of their “influence in the community.”  I worry about a ticket that asks for such blind faith without any explanation and that escapes without more media scrutiny.
Furthermore, consider the array of Hollywood stars who support Obama. Frankly, none of them share my hopes for America. They subscribe to the negative view of our country, all while many of them reap the rewards of its liberty, making as much money or more as the corporate CEOs they demonize, and growing just as wealthy as the fat cats of Wall Street. What is particularly perplexing is that none of them seems to worry about Obama spreading their wealth around. Perhaps they will benefit from their close association to the candidate.
The collision of this election and the current economic crisis is what worries me most and makes me very fearful that Americans will opt for being taken care of because they will think their futures are more certain. But, we should always be careful what we ask for; we might just get it. Look at what our demands from government have done for us already. Even when spending for the war is factored out, Americans make more demands from the government than we are paying for. That is why our government has a budget deficit and owes money to others around the world. Indeed, some steps to prevent an outright depression were essential because global economic disaster will most surely set the stage for global conflict. For the government to solve the crisis single-handedly, though, without increasing our debt to other countries or driving up inflation will be nearly impossible. The value of the dollar has suffered drastically which adds to my worries, because a traumatized currency threatens the whole system. Vladmir Lenin recognized this, saying, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”  This fiscal instability and demands for more and more positive rights via socialized programs puts us at a precipice. America seems too closely leaning toward the brink to socialism.  Will Barack Obama push us over?  I do not know, but the evidence suggests that the conditions for such a plunge are much more likely with Obama than with John McCain.  In these unsure times, I will err on the side of caution. I will vote for John McCain, not because he has a perfect record, but because I feel much more certain that his appreciation of rights and mine are the same.
Borrowing from Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, I find myself wondering, “Are equality and certainty so dear, or ease so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of freedom?”  Any teenager longing to be on his or her own recognizes that they will never have full freedom as long as their parents support them. When people invest in you, they own part of you. Any 17-year-old can tell you that. Kids know you can have someone take care of or you can have your freedom, but you really can’t have both.
Over the last week, I’ve ventured to share these points with others, dared to vocalize my worries even with folks I knew would disagree with me. I am heartened to find that I am not alone with these concerns. There are others also focused on the health of American freedom. Still, I fear how close we are to the edge, to the fall of American freedom as envisioned by our Founders, fought for by our fathers and grandfathers, nurtured by our mothers and grandmothers. I still carry a guilty fear that I will face them someday and have them say that I, that we, did not do enough to save the best dream humankind has ever birthed.
Maybe my thoughts won’t count for much.  I’m an average middle-American school teacher.  My husband and I did not grow up with money.  In fact, we were both relatively poor, but our homes were rich in care, and we were raised with an ethic of self-responsibility. The possibilities afforded to us by freedom have enriched our lives in every way.
Last week, I cried for America. Today, I am writing for America, pouring my heart out to America, praying for American freedom, asking my fellow Americans to keep Liberty’s torch undampened and burning bright.  Our freedom, the very idea of America, is worth the effort.

Skeptics Challenge Assumptions Made

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 29, 2008; A02

Could the polls be wrong?

Sen. John McCain and his allies say that they are. The country, they say, could be headed to a 2008 version of the famous 1948 upset election, with McCain in the role of Harry S. Truman and Sen. Barack Obama as Thomas E. Dewey, lulled into overconfidence by inaccurate polls.

“We believe it is a very close race, and something that is frankly very winnable,” Sarah Simmons, director of strategy for the McCain campaign, said yesterday.

Few analysts outside the McCain campaign appear to share this view. And pollsters this time around will not make the mistake that the Gallup organization made 60 years ago — ending their polling more than a week before the election and missing a last-minute surge in support for Truman. Every day brings dozens of new state and national presidential polls, a trend that is expected to continue up to Election Day.

Still, there appears to be an undercurrent of worry among some polling professionals and academics. One reason is the wide variation in Obama leads: Just yesterday, an array of polls showed the Democrat leading by as little as two points and as much as 15 points. The latest Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll showed the race holding steady, with Obama enjoying a lead of 52 percent to 45 percent among likely voters.

Some in the McCain camp also argue that the polls showing the largest leads for Obama mistakenly assume that turnout among young voters and African Americans will be disproportionately high. The campaign is banking on a good turnout among GOP partisans, whom McCain officials say they are working hard to attract to the polls.

“I have been wondering for weeks” whether the polls are accurately gauging the state of the race, said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. Borrowing from lingo popularized by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Schier asked what are the “unknown unknowns” about polling this year: For instance, is the sizable cohort of people who don’t respond to pollsters more Republican-leaning this year, perhaps because they don’t want to admit to a pollster that they are not supporting the “voguish” Obama?

If so, that could mean the polls are routinely understating McCain’s support. “I have no evidence that this is happening,” Schier said, but he added: “I’m still thinking there’s a 25 percent chance that this is a squeaker race and McCain pulls it out.”

Other experts are less uncertain. Ruy Teixeira, a political demographer at the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, said averaging the daily polls points to “pretty much the same thing — that the race is pretty stable and that Obama has a stable lead. Typically, when you are this far ahead at this point, it’s hard to lose.”

“It is very unlikely that we are going to get surprised by a last-minute movement,” said John R. Petrocik, chairman of the political science department at the University of Missouri. “Obama has been running six to eight points ahead for the better part of two weeks, and it’s hard to imagine that turning around.”

The McCain campaign’s case that the race is closer than many polls suggest appears to rest largely on the proposition that the composition of the electorate this year will closely resemble that in 2004.

McCain pollsters do anticipate that turnout could be even higher this year than the robust turnout four years ago, but they also expect that Democratic gains among African American voters and younger voters will be offset by higher turnout among more Republican-leaning voters. They also assert the race is tightening in battleground states, with independent voters increasingly receptive to McCain.

“As other public polls begin to show Senator Obama dropping below 50% and the margin over McCain beginning to approach margin of error with a week left, all signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday,” McCain pollster Bill McInturff wrote in a memo released last night by the campaign. Obama officials voiced confidence in their ultimate victory but said they have always expected the election to be close.

To buttress its point of view, the McCain team points to results reported yesterday by the Gallup organization, whose daily tracking poll showed Obama up 49 percent to 47 percent using Gallup’s traditional turnout model, which assumes that turnout will follow the patterns of past elections. Obama has a larger lead, seven points, using a model that allows a higher presence of first-time voters.

A Pew Research Center poll released yesterday shows a 15-point lead for Obama, a result based on relaxed criteria for when to consider an African American respondent a likely voter, said Andrew Kohut, president of the center. He said the poll shows that roughly 12 percent of the electorate this year is black, up from 2004, with a similar increase among younger voters. Kohut defended this approach, saying there are historically high levels of interest in this contest among both demographic groups. At the same time, he added, “we’ve consistently shown less enthusiasm and engagement among Republicans than is typical, and the composition of the electorate shows that.”

Kohut said several variables signal Obama has not convinced voters, such as a large number of respondents in the Pew poll who see the Illinois Democrat as a risky choice. But Kohut said the odds are against “a huge shift” in voter preferences by Election Day.

Some polls show Obama with a healthy lead even without an assumed surge in African American and young voters. Obama’s seven-point lead in the Washington Post-ABC News poll is not premised on disproportionately higher turnout among those demographic groups. The poll’s turnout model currently shows that 10 percent of likely voters are black, compared with the 11 percent who voted in 2004, according to the network exit poll. Voters younger than 30 make up 16 percent of the Post-ABC sample, little different from the 17 percent four years ago.

Post polling director Jon Cohen said the survey designers “carefully consider a range of likely voter scenarios and use our best judgment. Our polling throughout the campaign has been on target and, we believe, helpful to understanding what is really happening. I hope it stays that way.”

He noted that to address “one potential pitfall,” The Post and ABC conduct interviews with a random selection of those who have only cellular phone service alongside a traditional random sample of those with residential phone service. One recent criticism of current polling has been that it does not accurately capture the sentiments of those who primarily use cellphones.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Both time and events have dimmed those defining moments that early on revealed the difference between the two presidential aspirants. Not only did the financial crisis arrive but so, in her uproarious way, did Sarah Palin. Tuesday’s debate between two candidates paralyzed by caution altered nothing. It was a relief, of course, not to hear about Sen. McCain’s record as a “maverick” — a word that would, in a merciful world, be banned from public discourse for the next decade. It was too much to expect Barack Obama to spare us further recitals of the McCain-Bush connection.

AP

The single constant in the eternal election remains the media, whose activist role no one will seriously dispute. To point out the prevailing (with honorable exceptions) double standard of reporting so favorable to Mr. Obama by now feels superfluous — much like talking about the weather. The same holds true for all those reports pointing to Mr. Obama’s heroic status outside the United States — not to mention the cascade of press analyses warning that if he fails to win election, the cause will surely be racism.

None of this means that the media’s role will go unremembered — who will forget MSNBC news, voice of the Obama campaign? Never has a presidential election produced more fodder for the making and breaking — or tainting — of reputations.

The same is true of news sources making far greater claims to fairness. So it was only slightly startling to read a New York Times forecast (Sept. 22) about the presidential debate to come in which reporter Katharine Q. Seelye declared, ” . . . Mr. Obama should expect Mr. McCain to question his credentials for the job at every turn — and to distort his views, as Mr. Romney insisted he did.”

That first debate brought the usual legions of commentators — among them CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour. John McCain, she pointed out, had stumbled over Ahmadinejad’s name, and as he was supposed to be the expert on foreign policy, it made her giggle.

“That’s not fair — people make mistakes all the time,” Anderson Cooper shot back. But Ms. Amanpour, whose capacity for sustained levels of bombast is one of the wonders of the world, was having none of it.

She would go on to raise the theme so central to the Obama campaign, and held, as revealed truth, by the politically progressive everywhere — that the U.S., fallen low in the eyes of the world, is now in dire need of moral salvation. Everywhere she went in America, Ms. Amanpour declared, she found “desperate Americans” — desperate, that is, about the low esteem in which the country was held, desperate to have a president who would lift America up.

Mr. Obama could not have said it better himself. He is the leading exponent of the idea that our lost nation requires rehabilitation in the eyes of the world — and it is the most telling difference between him and Mr. McCain. When asked, in one of the earliest debates of the primary, his first priority should he become president, his answer was clear. He would go abroad immediately to make amends, and assure allies and others in the world America had alienated, that we were prepared to do all necessary to gain back their respect.

It is impossible to imagine those words coming from Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama has uttered them repeatedly one way or another and no wonder. They are in his bones, this impossible-to-conceal belief that we’ve lost face among the nations of the world — presumably our moral superiors. He is here to reform the fallen America and make us worthy again of respect. It is not in him, this thoughtful, civilized academic, to grasp the identification with country that Mr. McCain has in his bones — his knowledge that we are far from perfect, but not ready, never ready, to take up the vision of us advanced by our enemies. That identification, the understanding of its importance and of the dangers in its absence — is the magnet that has above all else drawn voters to Mr. McCain.

Sen. Obama is not responsible for the political culture, but he is in good part its product. Which is perhaps how it happened that in his 20 years in the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright — passionate proponent of the view of America as the world’s leading agent of evil and injustice — he found nothing strange or alienating. To the contrary, when Rev. Wright’s screeds began rolling out on televisions all over the country, Mr. Obama’s first response was to mount a militant defense and charge that Rev. Wright had been taken out of context, “cut into snippets.” This he continued to do until it became untenable. Then came the subject-changing speech on race. Such defining moments tell more than all the talk of Sen. Obama’s association with the bomb-planting humanist, William Ayers.

These sharp differences between the candidates as to who we are as a nation may not seem, now, as potent an issue for voters as the economy, but they should not be underestimated. This clash — not the ones on abortion or gay marriage — is the root of the real culture war to play out in November.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

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

Richards/Getty

Sarah Palin holds baby Trig following Thursday night’s vice presidential debate.

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

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?”

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.”

Beth Fouhy
Associated Press
September 27, 2008

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., left, and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., face off at a presidential debate at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., Friday. (Associated Press)

OXFORD, Miss. — John McCain accused Barack Obama of compiling “the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate” tonight in their first debate of a close campaign for the White House. The Democrat shot back, “Mostly that’s just me opposing George Bush’s wrong-headed policies.”

Obama said his Republican rival has been a loyal supporter of the unpopular president across the past eight years, adding that the current economic crisis is “a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies promoted by President Bush and supported by Sen. McCain.”

The two men clashed over spending, taxes, energy and — at length — the war in Iraq during their 90-minute debate.

McCain accused his younger rival of an “incredible thing of voting to cut off funds for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,” a reference to legislation that cleared the Senate more than a year ago.

Obama disputed that, saying he had opposed funding in a bill that presented a “blank check” to the Pentagon while McCain had opposed money in legislation that included a timetable for troop withdrawal.

In 2002, befoere he was a member of Congress, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq, while McCain voted to authorize the war as a member of the Senate.

“You were wrong” on Iraq, Obama repeated three times in succession. “John, you like to pretend the war began in 2007.”

McCain replied that Obama has refused to acknowledge the success of the troop buildup in Iraq that McCain recommended and Bush announced more than a year ago.

The two presidential candidates stood behind identical wooden lecterns on stage at the performing arts center at the University of Mississippi for the first of three scheduled debates with less than six weeks remaining until Election Day. The two vice presidential candidates will meet next week for their only debate.

The 47-year-old Obama is seeking to become the nation’s first black president. McCain, 72, is hoping to become the oldest first-term chief executive in history — and he made a few jokes at his own expense.

“I’ve been around a while,” he said at one point. “Were you afraid I couldn’t hear you?” he said at another after Obama repeated a comment.

It was a debate that almost didn’t happen. McCain decided at the last minute to attend, two days after announcing he would try to have the event rescheduled if Congress had not reached an agreement on an economic bailout to deal with the crisis now gripping Wall Street.

The two men were pointed but polite as they covered most issues, although at least once, McCain sought to depict his rival as naive on foreign policy. That was particularly true when it came to Obama’s statement that it might become necessary to send U.S. troops across the Pakistani border to pursue terrorists.

“You don’t say that out loud,” retorted McCain. “If you have to do things, you do things.”

McCain also seemed eager to demonstrate his knowledge of foreign policy, recalling the names of three former leaders of the Soviet Union in one sentence.

Moderator Jim Lehrer’s opening question concerned the economic crisis gripping Wall Street. While neither man committed to supporting bailout legislation taking shape in Congress, they readily agreed lawmakers must take action to prevent millions of Americans from losing their jobs and their homes.

Both also said they were pleased that lawmakers in both parties were negotiating on a compromise.

McCain made a point of declaring his independence from Bush.

“I have opposed the president on spending, on climate change, on torture of prisoners, on Guantanamo Bay, on a long — on the way that the Iraq War was conducted. I have a long record and the American people know me very well … a maverick of the Senate.”

He jabbed at Obama, who he said has requested millions of dollars in pork barrel spending, including some after he began running for president.

As he does frequently while campaigning, the Republican vowed to veto any lawmaker’s pork barrel project that reaches his desk in the White House. “You will know their names and I will make them famous,” he said.

The stakes were high as the two rivals walked on stage. The polls gave Obama a modest lead and indicated he was viewed more favorably than his rival when it came to dealing with the economy. But the same surveys show McCain favored by far on foreign policy.

Both candidates had rehearsed extensively, Obama prepping with advisers at a resort in Clearwater, Fla., and McCain putting in debate work at his home outside Washington.

The two presidential hopefuls are scheduled to debate twice more, at Belmont University in Nashville on Oct. 7 and at Hofstra University in Hempsted, N.Y., on Oct. 15. Vice presidential contenders Sarah Palin and Joe Biden are to square off in a single debate Oct. 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.

Now for the Important Part:  Who Won?

Opinion #1:  McCain

Oxford, Mississippi — A few minutes after the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama ended here on the campus of the University of Mississippi, I asked close McCain adviser Charlie Black whether Obama had performed as McCain’s debate team had anticipated.

“No, no,” Black said emphatically. “I never expected Sen. Obama to spend the entire debate on the defensive, and he did. He did.”

“I think Senator McCain’s absolutely right that we need more responsibility…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the earmarks process has been abused…”

“He’s also right that oftentimes lobbyists and special interests are the ones that are introducing these…requests…”

“John mentioned the fact that business taxes on paper are high in this country, and he’s absolutely right…”

“John is right we have to make cuts…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families…”

“John — you’re absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say…”

“Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran…”

Add it all up, and Obama was undeniably, and surprisingly, deferential to a man who in the past Obama has said “doesn’t get it.” Moments after the debate ended, I asked David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, whether Obama had simply been too nice (not a question one often gets to ask in these situations). “The bottom line is, I don’t think the American people want us to disagree just for the sake of being disagreeable,” Axelrod told me. “I think he made a very strong case, absolutely.”

Well, you wouldn’t expect Axelrod to admit that his guy messed up. But here’s a prediction: The next time McCain and Obama meet in debate, on October 7 in Nashville, start a drinking game in which you take a big swig every time Obama says, “John is absolutely right.” I’ll bet you get to the end of the debate without ever lifting a glass – Disclaimer from Kautzman  DO NOT DO THIS – JUST IN CASE HE IS WRONG, I DO NOT WANT TO ADVOCATE UNDERAGE DRINKING.

But Obama’s problem wasn’t just saying “John is right” too many times. He also let McCain control the discussion even when — especially when — the conversation turned to issues that play to Obama’s strength. The debate was scheduled to focus entirely on foreign policy and national security, but for obvious reasons moderator Jim Lehrer devoted the first half-hour to the current financial crisis. Polls show Obama with a pretty big lead on economic issues, and yet McCain was able to turn the discussion — ostensibly about the $700 billion bailout proposal — into an extended examination of federal spending and earmarks, two issues about which McCain has strong feelings and a good record. When McCain pointed out that Obama had asked for $932 million in earmarks — “nearly a million dollars a day for every day that he’s been in the United States Senate” — Obama answered weakly that yes, the process has been abused, “which is why I suspended any requests for my home state, whether it was for senior centers or what have you, until we cleaned it up.” Not his best moment.

When the debate came around to the topic of the evening, McCain outshone Obama on topics like Russia and Pakistan while hitting him over and over for his comments, made in earlier Democratic debates, that he would meet Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without precondition.” On Iraq, the two men fought to a draw, with McCain arguing that Obama was wrong on the surge and Obama arguing that McCain was wrong on the war. It seems unlikely they will change anyone’s mind about that.

The bottom line was that Obama did well enough, but McCain did better. A number of post-debate observers suggested that Obama might emerge the winner on these topics because he was able to stand alongside McCain and argue as an equal despite McCain’s greater experience. Maybe viewers will handicap the contest that way, but if they judge it straight, McCain will come out on top.

One odd thing about the debate was that it never touched on the fact that it almost didn’t happen. McCain’s go-to-Washington-to-fix-the-bailout-and-postpone-the-debate gambit was the talk of political insiders before the debate, but once the discussion began onstage, it nearly disappeared altogether. “Yes, I went back to Washington, and I met with my Republicans in the House of Representatives,” McCain said at one point. (How surprised those House Republicans will be to learn that they are McCain’s Republicans.) But after that brief remark, McCain never mentioned it again, nor did Obama.

Perhaps that’s because the fact that the debate was held, and the world didn’t end, showed that there was no need to postpone it, but the fact that progress had been made in Washington showed that McCain was right to abandon his debate prep to play a role in the bailout talks. Both McCain and Obama turned out to be half right and half wrong.

And in the end, what a mistake it would have been for McCain to have stayed away from this debate. Several hours before it began, when it was finally clear that there was going to be a debate at all, the Obama campaign sent an e-mail to reporters attempting to lower expectations for their man’s performance. Nobody paid much attention; it was, after all, an entirely unremarkable bit of pre-spin. But in this case, it turned out to be right.

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.

Opinion #2:  Obama

Obama Wins Debate On Tactics and Strategies

By Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 2, 2008; A01

With the vice presidential candidates set to square off today in their only scheduled debate, public assessments of Sarah Palin’s readiness have plummeted, and she may now be a drag on the Republican ticket among key voter groups, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Tonight’s heavily anticipated debate comes just five weeks after the popular Alaska governor entered the national spotlight as Sen. John McCain’s surprise pick to be his running mate. Though she initially transformed the race with her energizing presence and a fiery convention speech, Palin is now a much less positive force: Six in 10 voters see her as lacking the experience to be an effective president, and a third are now less likely to vote for McCain because of her.

A month ago, voters rated Palin as highly as they did McCain or his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, but after weeks of intensive coverage and several perceived missteps, the shine has diminished.

Nearly a third of adults in a new poll from the Pew Research Center said they paid a lot of attention to Palin’s interviews with CBS News’s Katie Couric, a series that prompted grumbling among some conservative commentators about Palin’s competency to be the GOP’s vice presidential standard-bearer. The Pew poll showed views of Palin slipping over the past few days alone.

In the new Post-ABC poll, Palin matches the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., on empathy, one of McCain’s clear deficits against Obama, while fewer than half of voters think she understands “complex issues.”

But it is the experience question that may prove her highest hurdle, particularly when paired with widespread public concern about McCain’s age. About half of all voters said they were uncomfortable with the idea of McCain taking office at age 72, and 85 percent of those voters said Palin does not have the requisite experience to be president.

The 60 percent who now see Palin as insufficiently experienced to step into the presidency is steeply higher than in a Post-ABC poll after her nomination early last month. Democrats and Republicans alike are now more apt to doubt her qualifications, but the biggest shift has come among independents.

In early September, independents offered a divided verdict on Palin’s experience; now they take the negative view by about 2 to 1. Nearly two-thirds of both independent men and women in the new poll said Palin has insufficient experience to run the White House.

Obama was able for the first time to crack the 50 percent mark, albeit barely, on whether he has the experience to be president following Friday’s presidential debate, and the question is one of Palin’s central challenges as she prepares to face Biden in prime time before a national television audience.

More than two-thirds of voters in the Pew poll said they plan to watch the debate, far more than said they were going to turn on the vice presidential debate four years ago. The expectations are that Biden, a six-term senator, will win: Voters by a 19-point margin think he will prove to be the better debater.

In the new Post-ABC poll, majorities of conservatives and Republicans maintain that Palin has the necessary experience to step in as president, though those numbers are also down somewhat from early last month.

But a third of independent voters now indicate they are less likely to support McCain because of Palin, compared with 20 percent who said so in an ABC poll a month ago. Palin now repels more independents than she attracts to McCain. The share of independent women less apt to support McCain because of the Palin pick has more than doubled to 34 percent, while the percentage more inclined to support him is down eight points.

White Catholics, another important group of swing voters, also are now more likely to say that Palin dampens their support for McCain.

Still, nearly half of both white Catholics and independents said she does not affect their votes. Even more, about six in 10, said Obama’s pick of Biden did not change their chances of voting Democratic.

The history of vice presidential picks suggests they are rarely consequential, and in a July Post-ABC poll, the nominees’ choice for No. 2 was last on a list of 17 items voters said might sway their decisions.

The reaction to Palin, however, has been uncharacteristically strong.

Nearly three in 10 independent women have intensely unfavorable opinions of her, more than twice the proportion holding such views of Biden. And a majority of Democratic women now have “strongly unfavorable” views of Palin, up sharply from just after she accepted the nomination.

Among all voters, 29 percent have “strongly favorable” views, and an exactly offsetting number hold intensely negative ones. Attitudes toward Biden are more subdued.

Overall, 51 percent of voters view Palin favorably; for Biden, that number is a bit higher at 57 percent.

The vice presidential hopefuls run about evenly among all voters and among independents on the question of whether they “understand the problems of people like you.” That is an important factor for the GOP ticket, as McCain continues to trail Obama as the candidate more in tune with the financial problems Americans face.

White married women are particularly likely to see Palin as in touch, as three-quarters said she understands their concerns. At the same time, a majority of such women do not think Palin has enough experience to be a good president. (White married women support the GOP ticket by a 20-point margin.)

Palin runs far behind Biden on another important attribute: About three-quarters of those surveyed said he understands complex issues, compared with 46 percent who said so of her.

On the eve of the presidential election in 2000, 76 percent said Al Gore had a solid grasp of hard issues; 60 percent said so of George W. Bush.

Despite Palin’s slip in public assessments, the boost she has provided among some core segments of the GOP base has not faded. Enthusiasm for McCain’s candidacy among Republicans, conservatives and white evangelical Protestants climbed sharply after the party’s convention in St. Paul, Minn., where Palin made her debut, and it has held relatively steady since.

But even within these Republican strongholds, questions about Palin’s experience are fairly common. About four in 10 conservatives and white evangelical Protestants, three in 10 Republicans and a quarter of GOP women said she does not have the necessary experience.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone Sept. 27 to 29 among a random sample of adults nationally, including interviews with 1,070 registered voters. The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Error margins for subgroups are higher.

Kathleen Parker
September 27, 2008

If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream – away from Sarah Palin.

To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president – and possibly president – is to risk being labeled anti-woman.

Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.

Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick – what a difference a financial crisis makes – and a more complicated picture has emerged.

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her.

And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).

Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood – a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate.

Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity:

“Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman – and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket – we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

September 27, 2008

By Jack Kelly

One wonders how Sen. Joe Biden can talk so much with his foot in his mouth.

“We’re not supporting clean coal,” the Democratic vice presidential candidate said while campaigning in Ohio last week. “No coal plants here in America.”

Coal mining is an important industry in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, all tightly contested states in this election, so Sen. Biden’s remarks were impolitic. Especially so since Sen. Obama supports clean coal technologies.

“Obama’s Department of Energy will enter into public-private partnerships to develop five ‘first of a kind’ commercial scale coal-fired plants with clean carbon capture and sequestration technology,” the Obama-Biden campaign Web site says.

Sen. Obama’s efforts Tuesday to depict Sen. John McCain as too quick to oppose a federal bailout of insurer AIG were undermined when he was reminded by NBC’s Matt Lauer that Sen. Biden had said the same thing on the same day.

“I thought it was terrible,” Sen. Biden told CBS news anchor Katie Couric in an interview broadcast Monday. “If I had anything to do with it, we never would have done it.”

Sen. Biden was referring to an Obama ad that mocked Sen. McCain as an out of touch old fogy because he doesn’t use a computer.

The ad was terrible. (Sen. McCain doesn’t use a computer because his war injuries prevent him from typing on a keyboard). And it testifies to Sen. Biden’s basic decency that he thought so. But there are some opinions you just don’t voice.

In the same interview, Sen. Biden told Ms. Couric: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t become president until three years after the stock market crashed in 1929. Television didn’t go into widespread commercial use until years after FDR died in 1945.

Sen. Biden has said something foolish or indiscreet so often the Republican National Committee has started a “Biden Gaffe Clock” to chronicle them all. Can you imagine the media frenzy if it were Sarah Palin who was saying these things?

Sen. Biden wasn’t chosen to provide comic relief. Sen. Obama thought his 35 years in the Senate, most of it on the Foreign Relations Committee, of which he is now chairman, would give the ticket foreign policy credentials Sen. Obama himself lacks.

The most hypocritical of the legion of double standards employed by the news media in this campaign is that a paucity of experience in foreign policy is considered disqualifying in the Republican candidate for vice president, but inconsequential in the Democratic candidate for president.

Sarah Palin’s only claim to experience in national security policy is that as governor of Alaska, she’s head of the state’s National Guard, and she has a son in the Army. That’s mighty thin gruel. Sen. Obama has served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee since coming to the Senatebut hasn’t shown up for many hearings in the last two years. If you think inexperience in foreign policy is a bad thing to have a heartbeat away from the presidency, why is it acceptable to put inexperience directly into the White House?

Gov. Palin has been in public life longer than Sen. Obama. She served four years on the city council in Wasilla, eight years as that town’s mayor, a year as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and the last 22 months as governor of Alaska.

Sen. Obama served eight years in the Illinois legislature and a little less than four in the U.S. Senate, of which he’s spent most of the last two running for president.

All but four years of Gov. Palin’s public career has been spent in the executive branch. Sen. Obama has no experience in the executive branch, nor any private sector managerial experience except for his role in the failed Chicago Annenberg Challenge, about which he is reluctant to talk because it brings up his association with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers.

As mayor, Sarah Palin managed explosive growth in Wasilla while cutting property tax rates 40 percent. As governor, she worked out a deal to build a natural gas pipeline to the lower 48 that her predecessors had been trying, and failing, to do for 35 years.

Sen. Obama’s tenure in the Illinois legislature was noted chiefly for his having voted “present” a remarkable 130 times. His brief time in the U.S. Senate has been devoid of significant accomplishment.

Sen. Obama argues judgment is more important than experience, and Sen. Biden is living proof that experience without judgment is not a pretty thing.

The most important decision Sen. Obama has had to make as a presidential candidate was his selection of a running mate. He chose Sen. Biden. Inexperience and bad judgment is the worst combination of all.

You must know the old joke:
A young man returns home from a job interview at a radio station, dejected. His mother sees his sunken face and understands immediately that something has gone wrong.

“My son! The sport’s announcer’s job—you didn’t get it? Nobody knows more about sports than you! How could they reject you?”

The son: “Mom, it was anti-sss …. anti-ssssssss … anti-sssssssssss … anti-SSSSEMMM-itism.”

Democrats are already preparing their excuses for the possible defeat of Barack Obama in November. That was an important column Bob Shrum just wrote. True, the column offers Barack Obama unfortunately little guidance as to how to win the election. But it does offer an all-purpose excuse if Obama should lose: racism. Some might say that five weeks in advance is a little early to be developing rationalizations for defeat. And others might say that a candidate who has consistently led in almost every poll since early summer has little need for rationalizations. But those who say these things do not know the Democratic Party!

Maybe I am unfair here, but to an outsider it seems that Democrats see these quadrennial presidential contests not as trials between two parties with the voters deciding, but as trials of the voters! Are the voters good enough, decent enough, unprejudiced enough to vote Democratic? Or will they succumb to their lower natures and vote Republican?

At the end of Hunter S. Thompson’s book on the 1972 campaign, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Thompson listens to the news reports declaring Richard Nixon’s re-election and thinks: “Okay, we are a nation of used car salesmen.” Not for him the thought that there might have been anything wrong with George McGovern or the party that nominated him! If I fail … it shows there’s something wrong with you.

That mode of thinking is obviously very condescending. Less obviously, it is very self-defeating. Suppose the voters are just as lunk-headed as Thompson and (depending on the outcome) Bob Shrum believe. What follows? Yes, another couple of decades of massive illegal immigration may well create a very different electorate. Until then, however, these are the voters you have got. The only route to political power is through convincing them; abusing them does not help with that work.

Even more counter-productive, the blame-the-voters mindset relieves candidates of responsibility for developing and articulating acceptable policies. Barack Obama faces other challenges in this campaign than his race.

Obama is running as the more pacifist candidate in a country where the more nationalist candidate has won every presidential election since 1816. He is running as the more economically collectivist candidate in a country where the more economically individualist candidate has won seven of the 10 elections since 1964. He is a more remote and inaccessible personality and he has a radically less impressive resume than his rival. His personal story not only lacks the heroism of John McCain’s, but it is punctuated with odd gaps and unanswered questions. Obama still has not delivered a fully plausible account of his relationships with such figures as Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. Perhaps the most immediately damaging fact about Obama’s candidacy, however, was his decision not to reach out to his principal party rival, even though she won very nearly as many Democratic votes as he did.

Obama may be The One. But he is far from a perfect candidate, regardless. And Democrats do neither him nor themselves any favors when the only flaws they can see are the flaws in this democracy’s ultimate decision-makers: their employers, the voters.

— DAVID FRUM, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of 6 books, including most recently COMEBACK: Conservatism That Can Win Again. In 2001-2002, he served as speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. In 2007, he served as senior foreign policy adviser to the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign. He blogs daily at Frum.NationalReview.com.