ALBANY — The New York State Senate decisively rejected a bill on Wednesday that would have allowed gay couples to wed, providing a major victory for those who oppose same-sex marriage and underscoring the deep and passionate divisions surrounding the issue.

The 38-to-24 vote startled proponents of the bill and signaled that political momentum, at least right now, had shifted against same-sex marriage, even in heavily Democratic New York. It followed more than a year of lobbying by gay rights organizations, who steered close to $1 million into New York legislative races to boost support for the measure.

Senators who voted against the measure said the public was gripped by economic anxiety and remained uneasy about changing the state’s definition of marriage.

“Certainly this is an emotional issue and an important issue for many New Yorkers,” said Senator Tom Libous, the deputy Republican leader. “I just don’t think the majority care too much about it at this time because they’re out of work, they want to see the state reduce spending, and they are having a hard time making ends meet. And I don’t mean to sound callous, but that’s true.”

The defeat, which followed a stirring, tearful and at times very personal debate, all but ensures that the issue is dead in New York until at least 2011, when a new Legislature will be installed.

Since 2003, seven states, including three that border New York, have legalized same-sex marriage. But in two of the seven — California last year and Maine last month — statewide referendums have restricted marriage to straight couples, prohibiting gay nuptials. Pollsters say that while support generally is building for same-sex marriage, especially as the electorate ages, voters resist when they fear the issue is being pushed too fast.

In Albany on Wednesday, proponents had believed going into the vote that they could attract as many as 35 supporters to the measure; at their most pessimistic, they said they would draw at least 26. They had the support of Gov. David A. Paterson, who had publicly championed the bill, along with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the Senate Democratic leadership.

The defeat revealed stark divides: All 30 of the Republican senators opposed the bill, as did most of the members from upstate New York and Long Island. Support was heaviest among members from New York City and Westchester County and among the Senate’s 10 black members. Seven of the Senate’s 10 women voted for it.

“I’m a woman and a Jew and so I know about discrimination,” said Senator Liz Krueger of Manhattan.

Senators who are considered politically vulnerable also voted almost uniformly against the bill, including four first-term Democrats. All but one of those whose districts border or lie within the 23rd Congressional District, where the marriage issue erupted in a recent special election, opposed it. In that race, a Republican who supported gay marriage withdrew after an uproar from conservatives in her district.

“I think that there were political forces that in some respects intimidated some of those who voted,” said Mr. Paterson. “I think if there’d actually been a conscience vote we’d be celebrating marriage equality right now.”

While gay rights supporters such as Mr. Paterson had prominently pushed for passage, the opposition was less visible but ultimately more potent. That was reflected in the floor debate Wednesday: Opponents remained mostly silent; all but one of those who spoke on the floor supported the measure.

The state’s Roman Catholic bishops had consistently lobbied for its defeat, however, and after the vote released a statement applauding the move.

“Advocates for same-sex marriage have attempted to portray their cause as inevitable,” Richard E. Barnes, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said in the statement. “However, it has become clear that Americans continue to understand marriage the way it has always been understood, and New York is not different in that regard. This is a victory for the basic building block of our society.”

Several supporters said they felt they had been betrayed by senators who promised to vote yes but then, reluctant to support an issue as politically freighted as same-sex marriage if they could avoid it, switched their votes on the floor when it became evident the bill would lose.

“This is the worst example of political cowardice I’ve ever seen,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat. “Clearly people said things prior to coming to the floor and behaved differently.”

Republican advocates who supported the bill insisted that the agreement they struck with Democrats called for Democrats, who have 32 seats in the 62-member Senate, to deliver enough support so only a handful of Republicans were needed to take such a politically risky vote.

“Several Republicans wanted to vote for this,” said Jeff Cook, a legislative adviser for the Log Cabin Republicans. “But those Republicans aren’t willing to take a tough political vote when the bill has no chance of passage. And that’s the political reality.”

It is rare for legislation to reach the floor in Albany when passage is not all but assured. And initially, gay rights advocates resisted bringing this bill to a vote, fearing the consequences of a defeat. But they shifted that strategy over time, becoming convinced that an up or down vote was necessary so they could finally know which senators supported the bill.

That was in part because gay rights groups, which have become major financial players in state politics, wanted to know which senators they should back in the future and which ones to target for defeat.

Alan Van Capelle, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, New York’s largest gay rights group, hinted that senators who voted against the bill on Wednesday could face repercussions. And Christine C. Quinn, the New York City Council speaker, echoed that sentiment, saying, “Anybody who thinks that by casting a no vote they’re putting this issue to bed, they’re making a massive miscalculation.”

Polls suggest that voters in New York favor same-sex marriage, though the electorate is clearly split. A poll released Wednesday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie showed that 51 percent of registered voters supported same-sex marriage while 42 percent opposed it.

On Wednesday, as news of the vote made its way to demonstrators standing outside the Senate chamber, some erupted in angry chants of “Equal rights!” and surrounded a senator who opposed the measure.

As the Senate tackles the health care bill that may be its most important domestic legislation in a generation, you might have expected thousands of citizens to descend on Capitol Hill to demonstrate, for or against. But the streets outside – and even the Senate floor – aren’t where the action is. The important parts of this debate have moved into the Senate’s back rooms. The great health care debate hasn’t been a triumph of mass politics on either side. Congress isn’t being stampeded by the public into passing a bill – and it’s not being stopped by the public from passing one either.

Instead, the debate has turned out to be a battle of old-fashioned special interests and parochialism. The most important players have been the insurance industry, the American Medical Association, labor unions and AARP, the senior-citizens lobby. As for parochialism, last week’s most blatant action may have been Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s insertion into the bill of a $100 million Medicaid bonus for Louisiana, whose senior senator, Mary Landrieu, has been one of the holdouts.

One reason for this resurgence of backroom politics is simple: Polls show the public to be fairly evenly divided on health care reform and understandably confused by its details. But there’s also a deeper reason. In modern American politics, with its professional lobbyists and millions of dollars in campaign advertising, public opinion isn’t always the most important thing.

For members of Congress who anticipate tough re-election campaigns, what’s most important is not what voters think of health care proposals today, but which interest groups will spend money in their states to shape voters’ perceptions next year. Groups on both sides, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the unions, have already announced millions of dollars in planned advertising spending to do just that.

When he ran for president last year, Barack Obama said he’d try to change that system, in part by keeping his gigantic grass-roots network of campaign supporters together as a new, populist force in the legislative battles to come. But that’s not what happened. Members of Congress and their aides say the Obama organization, rechristened Organizing for America, or OFA, after the campaign, has had negligible effect on the debate.

For most of the year, the group was hobbled by the fact that Obama didn’t have a clear proposal for it to support, beyond a general commitment to (almost) universal health insurance. It did make sure that reform supporters turned out for town-hall meetings over the summer, and it’s running some ads attacking Republican House members in districts that Obama won.

But doing much beyond that has proved difficult, primarily because the most important debate over health care is not between the two parties – Republicans decided early that their goal was simply to stop a bill – but among Democrats. And OFA, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee, has carefully refrained from criticizing any Democratic incumbents. One of its biggest efforts this fall, instead, was organizing rallies and letter-writing campaigns to say “thank you” to House members who voted in favor of health care reform – lobbying with all the bite of a Hallmark greeting card.

OFA was also undercut by Obama’s own strategy for winning health care reform, which began by cutting deals with the most important interest groups – including, initially, the health insurance industry – not by mobilizing public pressure.

Obama’s choice of strategies may well turn out to have been good politics, especially on an issue as complex as health care. Well-funded, well-focused interest groups often wield power more effectively than the general public, even though the public has more at stake.

That’s not a new phenomenon in American politics, but it’s one Obama told his followers he wanted to change. If the president wins a health care bill, it will be a major victory. But he will have won the old-fashioned way, not by reinventing American politics. It will be evidence that Obama, an untraditional candidate, has turned out to be a very traditional president.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. He can be reached at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com.

As a liberal, and an avid news consumer, there is no cable news channel that warms my heart more than MSNBC.

Why do I find MSNBC so appealing? The network made a business decision in recent years that it was good for ratings to move to the political left. With a few exceptions, strong liberal commentators like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and Chris Matthews have become the face of MSNBC.

The same trend is taking place on the opposite side of the cable divide. We’ve known for years that Fox News’ “Fair and Balanced” act was a charade, but since Obama’s election, they’ve taken it to a whole new level.

Fox was instrumental in relentlessly promoting the right-wing “tea parties,” even going so far as to inform its viewers of their times and locations. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been given his own talk show. Glenn Beck has also joined Fox and has seen his ratings skyrocket after labeling the president a racist.

While Fox and MSNBC have shifted further away from the center, CNN has largely stuck to simply covering the news.

Anchors Larry King, Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper rarely promote a politically slanted agenda on their shows. What’s been their reward? Declining ratings.

The trend toward more partisan news is clear. Cable stations are transitioning to more and more commentary, less and less hard news.

I’m not trying to argue that opinions are bad. Heck, I’d be out of a job if we didn’t have opinions in the media. But this trend seems to indicate that news stations are increasingly going to have to “pick sides” or suffer lower ratings, and citizens are getting more news from one-sided sources.

Simultaneously, high-profile stories of late have demonstrated the mainstream media’s obsession with the political angle over substantive discussion and debate.

A perfect example is coverage of the health care issue. Until several weeks ago, the phrase, “the public option is dead” was spouted on cable news, oh, about 10,231 times, by my count. We’ve seen endless stories about the “fate” of this proposal, but it’s hard to remember if there was even a serious and thorough discussion of its merits.

While partisan news sources are on the rise, we are seeing less and less debate of key issues. News channels obsess over the politics of health care — Will it pass? Are there enough votes? Obama’s approval rating is down! — without paying much attention to the actual components of reform.

It’s no wonder then, that less than half of Americans, 47 percent, say they are very or somewhat familiar with the details of the health-care legislation, according to a recent Washington Post survey. While Congress is on the verge of passing the most important reform in decades, most people don’t even know what is in the bill.

Thanks a lot, news media.

As we strive to be informed citizens, it is important that we make extra effort to get a range of perspectives instead of merely “picking a team.” One-sided news is becoming increasingly prevalent. So next time you’re watching MSNBC, consider switching over to Fox during the commercial break (I know it’s painful) just to see what they’re saying, or seek out conservative opinions elsewhere. The same idea applies if Fox News is the channel that warms your heart: Seek out other views.

As far as a robust debate in the news media goes, we can only hope that the recent trend reverses itself and consumers start to reward those programs that go truly in depth on the issues.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

When the Senate begins floor debate on a health-care reform package this week, the outcome is almost certain to rest on decisions made by a handful of moderate Democrats.

None of those Democrats is feeling the heat as intensely as Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), who has become emblematic of the improbable distance that health-care reform has traveled, and how far it still must go before becoming law.

Her vote and that of two other Democrats expressing serious reservations about the legislation — Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (La.) — will determine whether it will garner the 60 needed to break an all-but-certain Republican filibuster.

There are 60 members of the Democratic caucus but one, independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), has threatened to join a GOP filibuster if the final bill contains a government insurance plan, or “public option.” With only a single Republican, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, even considering backing the final product on the floor, the trio of Democratic centrists could make or break the reform effort.

And of those three, only Lincoln must face voters next year.

Hundreds of thousands of Lincoln’s constituents are low-income and lack insurance, the very kind of voters expected to benefit under the Senate bill. Lincoln, a second-term senator, helped write some of the legislation’s key provisions as a member of the Finance Committee, and her sometimes uncomfortable role near the center of the debate could cost her in culturally conservative Arkansas. Despite the potential benefits for many in her state, polls show her support weakening, and constituents are expressing doubts about the proposed overhaul.

The low-profile centrist is being pressed by both sides. Democratic activists are incensed that she has turned against the public option, an idea she once supported. Republicans are casting her cautious approach to the health-care debate in starkly political terms, saying that she is unwilling to put local interests above those of a president who lost the state by a resounding 20 percentage points.

“I want to be a check and balance on Barack Obama’s extreme agenda,” state Sen. Gilbert Baker, a front-runner for the GOP nomination, told reporters last week.

An Arkansas Poll published Nov. 5 found that Lincoln’s job-approval rating had dropped to 43 percent, from 54 percent a year ago. At least seven Republicans are vying to challenge her bid for a third term; Baker raised $500,000 in his first month as a candidate. And if she does not embrace the party line on the health issue, Lincoln could also face a Democratic primary challenger, along with a Green Party opponent in the general election.

“In some ways, there’s not a good vote on this,” said Sen. Mark Pryor (D), Arkansas’s junior senator, who coasted to reelection last year. “You’re going to have detractors on either side, no matter what you do. So I think in the end you have to what you think is right. And I think that’s what we’re all going to have to do.”

The first test for Lincoln could come as early as Friday, when the Senate will vote on whether to bring the bill to the floor. Lincoln told party leaders she would study the final product before committing either way.

“What people want is for us to take our time and not rush into something that we haven’t thought completely through,” she said, shrugging off the pressure as she hurried back to her office after a Senate vote last week.

Although Pryor supports the reform effort, another prominent Arkansan, Rep. Mike Ross (D), voted against the House bill.

“Most people support the need for health-insurance reform; they just think we can do it for less,” Ross said. “They really, as I do, support more choices. They’re just skeptical of a bill that takes 2,000 pages to accomplish that.”

Ross was reluctant to offer Lincoln advice, but acknowledged her predicament. “She represents the whole state. I just represent one-fourth of the state. I’d just be guessing.” But he added: “I think people fear the unintended consequences in a bill this massive.”

Democratic leaders expect Lincoln to stick with them on key procedural votes, but are less confident about winning her support on critical amendments — particularly on the contentious public option.

Lincoln’s record on a government insurance plan has drawn detractors on both sides. In July, she wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan.”

By Sept. 1, she had changed her mind. “I would not support a solely government-funded public option,” Lincoln said at an event in Little Rock. “We can’t afford that.”

In recent weeks, she also has raised concerns about both potential compromise approaches — one that would allow states to “opt out” of a public plan that Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is expected to include in the Senate bill, and a proposal by Snowe, the only Republican still at the negotiating table, to create a public option as a fallback if private insurers do not offer reasonable rates.

In the process, Lincoln has riled liberal groups including MoveOn.org, which is targeting her with radio ads, direct mail and rallies outside two of her Arkansas offices. Perhaps more ominously, MoveOn — working with the liberal group Democracy for America — has amassed $3.5 million in pledges to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who sides with Republicans to block an up-or-down vote on a bill with a public option.

“We think it’s really important for her to see there are negative political consequences to being on the wrong side of this issue,” said Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s campaign director. “There’s no arguing she’s in a conservative state, but she’s going to face a tough election no matter what, and she can’t do it without the base. These are the activists, the people who knock on doors, and she is really running the risk of alienating them.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is also documenting each of Lincoln’s comments on health care to build a case against her. The Republican National Committee released a Web video this week that compares her public-option remarks to Sen. John F. Kerry’s “I actually voted for it before I voted against it” line about Iraq war funding.

For GOP leaders, the best strategy for defeating the Senate bill is to sow doubts among vulnerable Democrats, convincing them that Reid is leading them off a political cliff.

“There’s a great effort under way here to convince their members to ignore public opinion” on health-care reform, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters last week. “I hope it will not be lost on our Democratic friends where the public is, how the public feels about this measure. They’re speaking increasingly loudly that they do not think it ought to pass.”

Recent polls suggest that reform is a difficult sell in Lincoln’s home state. The Arkansas Poll, conducted in mid-October by the University of Arkansas’s Survey Research Center, found that 39 percent of voters support a public option and 48 percent oppose the idea. And respondents split about evenly on the question of whether reform would improve or hurt their quality of care.

“It’s hard to draw firm conclusions,” said Arkansas Poll Director Janine Parry. “People are dissatisfied, but they haven’t signed on with an alternative.” Lincoln, said Parry, appears to be “right with her constituents — convinced that we need to do something, and not convinced it’s this.”

Senior Senate aides said Lincoln helped to shape measures aimed at reducing the cost of such procedures as MRIs and at better coordinating care among doctors, hospitals and nursing homes. And she was the primary sponsor, along with Snowe, of a provision aimed at giving small businesses more health-care choices for employees.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, of the nearly 473,000 Arkansas residents who lacked coverage as of 2008, virtually all would be eligible for federal assistance under the Senate bill — either through Medicaid or through tax credits that would subsidize the purchase of private plans.

“There’s a lot in the bill that will be good for Arkansas,” Pryor said. “But there are a lot of people in our state who are against this bill. Some have very legitimate concerns and ask very good questions. But also some is based on bad information. We have to try to talk to those people.”

If Lincoln supports the Senate bill, she will have to sell it to constituents before they see many of the legislation’s benefits. But she says she is well aware of the challenge. “I have no doubt that I’ll be held accountable on this,” she said. “We’re going to be held accountable on a lot of things.”

By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

As the Senate prepares to take up legislation aimed at overhauling the nation’s health-care system, President Obama and the Democrats are still struggling to win the battle for public opinion. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Americans deeply divided over the proposals under consideration and majorities predicting higher costs ahead.

But Republican opponents have done little better in rallying the public opposition to kill the reform effort. Americans continue to support key elements of the legislation, including a mandate that employers provide health insurance to their workers and access to a government-sponsored insurance plan for those people without insurance.

Over the past few months, public opinion has solidified, leaving Obama and the Democrats with the political challenge of enacting one of the most ambitious pieces of domestic legislation in decades in the face of a nation split over the wisdom of doing so. In the new poll, 48 percent say they support the proposed changes; 49 percent are opposed.

With the bill through the House, Senate Democrats are now looking for the votes to enact their version of the legislation and keep the reform effort moving forward. Whatever the outcome of the health-care debate, it will have a powerful influence in shaping the political climate for next year’s midterm elections.

The House bill contains a highly controversial provision prohibiting abortion coverage for those insured under a new public insurance plan as well as those who received federal subsidies to purchase private insurance. In the poll, 61 percent say they support barring coverage for abortions for those receiving public subsidies, but if private funds were used to pay for abortion expenses, the numbers flipped. With segregated private money used to cover abortion procedures, 56 percent say insurance offered to those using government assistance should be able to include such coverage.

The new poll provides ammunition for both advocates and opponents of reform. For opponents, a clear area of public concern centers on cost — 52 percent say an altered system would probably make their own care more expensive, and 56 percent see the overall cost of health care in the country going up as a result.

Few see clear benefits in exchange for higher expenses. Rather, there has been a small but significant increase in the number (now 37 percent) who anticipate their care deteriorating under a revamped system, putting that number in line with opinion in July 1994, just before President Bill Clinton’s health-care reform efforts fizzled.

Among those with insurance, three times as many continue to see worse rather than better coverage options ahead (39 to 13 percent), and fewer than half of those who lack insurance see better options under a changed system. Six in 10 see it as “very” or “somewhat” likely that many private insurers would be forced out of business by a government-sponsored insurance plan, a potential result that GOP leaders frequently warn about.

But reform proponents have other findings to bolster their case. Two-thirds of those surveyed support one of the basic tenets of the reform plan, a new requirement that all employers with payrolls of $500,000 or more provide health insurance coverage for their employees or face fines.

As in previous polls, a majority supports a government-sponsored heath insurance plan to compete with private insurers, although the percentage supporting the general idea has slipped slightly over the past month to 53 percent. Support for the scheme jumps to 72 percent when the public plan is limited to those who lack access to coverage through an employer or the Medicare or Medicaid systems.

While Americans overall are divided on reform legislation, the Democrats have made some progress among at least one key group. Support among senior citizens, while still broadly negative, is up 13 points since September to 44 percent.

Seniors have also tilted back toward Obama when matched head to head with congressional Republicans on dealing with health-care reform, helping the president to a 13-point advantage over the GOP on this issue.

Republicans appear to be hampered by a widespread perception that they have not offered clear choices: 61 percent of those polled say the GOP is “mainly criticizing” without presenting alternatives to Democratic proposals.

Looking toward next year’s midterm elections, 25 percent say they more apt to back a candidate who supports the proposed health-care changes; 29 percent are less likely to do so. More, 45 percent, say the vote will not make much of a difference. Independents are nearly twice as likely to be swayed away from rather than toward a candidate who supports the changes (31 percent to 17 percent).

Beyond health care, Obama continues to garner broadly positive ratings from the public. His overall approval rating stands at 56 percent, holding steady in Post-ABC polls since the late summer. More, 61 percent, say they have an overall favorable impression of him, and a slim majority continues to see him as “about right” ideologically (four in 10 consider him “too liberal.”

The president, who is on a 10-day visit to Asia, gets his top mark on handling international affairs, and also picks up majority approval on dealing with the threat of terrorism. But Americans are more divided over his performance on other key issues, with nearly even splits in satisfaction with his work on health care, the economy and the situation in Afghanistan. On each of these three issues, intensity runs against the president, with significantly higher numbers expressing “strong” disapproval as strident approval. Obama receives generally negative reviews on his handling of the federal budget deficit, with 53 percent disapproving of his actions on that front.

Obama continues to be lifted by weakness in the opposition. In addition to his double-digit lead over congressional Republicans on health care, the president has a 15-point advantage on handling the nation’s still-struggling economy. More broadly, Democrats continue to have the edge as the party more trusted to deal with the country’s main problems over the next few years and when it comes to being more empathetic and more in tune with people’s values.

But there are also evident signs of an anti-incumbent mood in the new survey, which would disproportionately hurt the majority Democrats next fall should they hold. Most see the country as headed pretty seriously off on the wrong track and half of all Americans say they are inclined to look around for someone new to support for Congress; just 38 percent are inclined to reelect their member of Congress. These numbers are similar to those from November 1993, one year before Republicans took back control of the House and Senate and close to those from May 2006, six months before Democrats re-captured the Congress.

Among independents, nearly two-thirds say they are inclined to seek new representatives. Independents also about evenly divided over which party better represents their personal values and give Democrats a narrow advantage on being more in tune with “needs of people like you.” More than a quarter of independents do not trust either party to adequately deal with the country’s primary concerns in the coming years.

The poll was conducted Nov. 12-15 by conventional and cellular telephone among a random national sample of 1,001 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.

By Yuval Levin | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

All year, leading Democrats from the president on down have argued that the Republican Party is in the midst of a catastrophic civil war. You know the story. Successive election defeats have narrowed the GOP’s ideological range, and now an open struggle is afoot for control of its voice and agenda. Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, it seems, are out to destroy Republican moderates and commit the party to a radical course sure to relegate it to irrelevance. Only a move to the left can save the Republicans.

And, in fact, the new president and Congress had a real opportunity to divide the Republican Party. A moderate stimulus bill that offered a short-term boost and included a meaningful tax-cut component, for instance, might have won a very significant number of Republican votes in Congress last winter and launched a damaging internal GOP battle over the proper role of the opposition. Some restraint on taxes and spending in general, and on health care and energy policy in particular, would also have divided congressional Republicans and left the direction of the party in doubt.

But Washington Democrats chose a different route. While they have been peddling the story of Republican self-immolation, they have actually been creating the conditions for a Republican resurgence. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid have launched the country on a course of massive spending, a dramatic expansion of government, and a slew of new taxes in the midst of a recession. Finding themselves in control of Congress and the White House and so possessed of an unusual opportunity to pursue their ideological agenda, they have sought to make the most of it. But they have misjudged just how far to the left of the country as a whole the Democratic base now resides—and so, rather than strengthen their own brand, they have inadvertently done wonders to build and unify the Republican Party.

In Congress, Republicans now march nearly as one, to a degree not seen in 15 years. Rather than split on the stimulus, conservative and moderate Republicans easily agreed that it went much too far to the left. The bill received zero Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate. On many crucial votes since, and in the ongoing health-care and cap-and-trade debates, Republicans have stood together almost unanimously.

Around the country, the party seems to be regaining its balance. Last Tuesday’s election results were an extraordinary boost for Republicans. They showed that it is not necessary to run away from the party’s conservative brand to win elections. On the contrary, Republicans running as Republicans seem to succeed in the age of Obama, and to attract independent voters in droves.

In Virginia—which went for Obama last year, and elected Democratic -senators in the last two cycles and Democratic governors throughout this decade—-Republican Bob McDonnell ran as a practical conservative with an extensive policy agenda and was elected governor by an enormous 18-point margin. He produced concrete proposals on transportation and education but was also forthright about his conservative views on taxes and his opposition to abortion and gun control. In deeply blue New Jersey, which Obama won last year by double digits, Republican Chris Christie let the incumbent Democrat embrace Obama, refused to run away from his own party, and won the governorship decisively. He, too, is pro-life; he opposed gay marriage and even associated himself with several GOP governors who had refused to accept stimulus funds. Both Republicans won independent voters by roughly a 2-to-1 margin.

In the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District, Democrat Bill Owens defeated Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman a few days after the liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava (who had run to the left of the Democrat on key issues) dropped out of the race. The peculiar circumstances of that contest, with prominent conservatives supporting Hoffman over Scozzafava, have been taken by Democrats eager for good news as proof of a Republican breakdown. The day after the election, White House political adviser David Axelrod even went so far as to say that the victory “should be reassuring to Democrats.”

But, in fact, the message of that race was largely the same as those of New Jersey and Virginia: in this political climate, Republicans can win by nominating an identifiably Republican right-of-center candidate in tune with local voters. It seems clear that had they done so from the outset in upstate New York they would have won there, even though Obama won the district comfortably last year. For decades, almost no New York Republicans have been elected without the endorsement of the state’s long-established Conservative Party—that dynamic in this case hardly indicates new divisions on the right—and Republican leaders this year clearly erred by choosing (without a primary) a candidate well to the left of the district. Even so, Owens defeated Hoffman by a mere 4,218 votes, while Scozzafava, who withdrew at the last minute but still appeared on the ballot, received 6,986 votes. And every poll of the district in recent weeks suggested that the same uneasy mood prevailed there as in New Jersey and Virginia.

That mood is the crucial fact of this moment in our politics. It does not signify a mass migration into Republican ranks, only deep anxiety regarding what the Democrats are up to, and a renewed openness to hear what Republicans have to say. It means that Bush fatigue is in the past, early signs of Obama fatigue are emerging, and Republicans have an opportunity to win independents again if they can speak to their concerns.

Last week’s elections won’t fundamentally transform our politics, but they will likely help the GOP continue to build its strength. They will persuade some serious Republicans around the country to run for Congress next year, now that it’s clear that serious Republicans can win. That is just what happened in the first midterm elections of the last Democratic president’s term: most of the winning candidates in the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress decided to run only after seeing Christine Todd Whitman and George Allen win the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia in 1993.

The results will also make some moderate Democrats very nervous about the health-care and cap-and-trade bills being pursued by their leaders. Both bills are political risks—support for the health-care bill hovers around 40 percent in recent polls and a small majority opposes it, and the higher utility costs that would follow cap-and-trade legislation would surely be deeply unpopular in much of the country. Both would have to be passed on essentially party-line votes, leaving Democrats answerable to voters for their consequences. In both cases, too, last week’s elections will reinforce Republican unity.

The fact is, we remain a two-party nation. Republicans are not in the midst of a destructive civil war, any more than the Democrats were when they kicked out Joe Lieberman in 2006. When it comes to the major debates of the moment—health care, energy, the budget, even most social issues—the Democratic Party is far more divided than the GOP. Republican Party identification remains low (about 25 percent, compared with the Democrats’ 35 percent), but in a country where 40 percent of voters identify as conservative and only 20 percent as liberal (according to a Gallup poll released last month), the more conservative party isn’t going anywhere.

Rather than a civil war, we appear to be witnessing the beginnings of a significant Republican revival. The Grand Old Party is finding its footing again in Congress and the states, and behind the scenes there is a growing intellectual effort to develop the next conservative agenda—focused in particular on easing the burdens faced by middle-class parents and contending with the bleak long-term federal budget outlook. Much work remains on that front, but early indications suggest that this work—substantive policy development, seeking to apply conservative principles to the enormous problems of the moment—not only will help Republicans speak more effectively to middle-class voters, but will also help the party’s conservatives and moderates hone their common voice. Issue by issue, it turns out they don’t disagree all that much.

None of this means that President Obama has lost all his appeal, or that the Democrats don’t have an opportunity to advance their agenda in the coming year. It does mean, however, that liberals in Washington would do well to let go of the Republican breakdown narrative, take a real look at the mood of the country and the state of their own party’s prospects, and pull back to the center—or suffer the consequences.

Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

Growing concern about incivility is one of America’s more appealing trends. Increasingly, individuals and institutions are seeking ways to burnish the golden rule.

The concern isn’t new – professor P.M. Forni started the Johns Hopkins Civility Project 12 years ago and published a book in 2002: “Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct.”

Civility even has a Facebook page called “The Civility Initiative,” where Forni and visitors exchange thoughts on the subject.

But recent events and trends – from rowdy town hall meetings to sideshow rants on television to the outburst of South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson – have brought vague unease about manners into sharper focus.

In Wilson’s home state, University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides has made civility a focal point of the institution’s goals. And an Atlanta public relations executive, Mark DeMoss, has organized a coalition of conservatives and liberals, religious and secular, in his own Civility Project to promote a grass-roots, voluntary effort toward renewed civility.

His Web site ( www.civilityproject.org) urges a voluntary pledge to be civil in discourse and behavior, and to stand against incivility.

President Barack Obama addressed civility directly in his commencement address to Notre Dame earlier this year, and recently said, “One of the things I’m trying to figure out is, how can we make sure that civility is interesting.”

That’s more than enough evidence to declare a trend. But do Americans really want to be civil?

Our nostalgia for civility, some say, is misplaced or at least exaggerated by wishful thinking. Americans have never been exemplars of manners in politics. Often cited are the anti-federalists, though the federalists were hardly rearranging the doilies. In one case, when federalist legislators needed a quorum for a key vote, they dragged anti-federalists from their rooms and locked them in the statehouse.

Imagine the fun we’d have if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi decided to lock their moderate colleagues in the Capitol until they agreed to sign off on health care reform.

During the Andrew Jackson-John Quincy Adams election of 1828, the former general was called a murderer and a cannibal; his wife was accused of being a harlot. Closer to Joe Wilson’s stomping grounds, politics has always been a blood sport and most natives are proud of it. In the election of 1832, mobs assaulted candidates. Not very civil, that.

Nonetheless, something has changed – and what has changed is media. I don’t mean traditional media, the so-called mainstream media everyone loves to hate these days. In fact, old media have strict standards about civility and appropriate language in the public sphere. Such concerns prevented me recently from publishing the obscenity uttered in the Washington Post newsroom that provoked an editor to punch a writer.

Most crucial in the viral growth of incivility are new media – the Internet, the blogosphere and all the social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, and whatever else may have developed since I began typing this page.

Whereas in previous eras an uncivil exchange might be confined to a room, a building or a public square, today’s media technology means that it is captured, amplified, replayed and distributed – perpetually.

There are now Joe Wilson “You Lie” T-shirts and bumper stickers. Meanwhile, a recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that three-quarters of those surveyed were not “outraged” by Wilson’s outburst.

Incivility may be bad form, but it can be good politics. Susan Herbst, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech, is finishing a book on civility in politics in which she argues that civility and incivility are both timeless strategic rhetorical assets. Some people are just more effective at using them.

The real challenge for the civility-minded is that incivility is more exciting. Human beings are drawn to spectacle, as the bookers of Rome’s Colosseum understood. Glenn Beck is proof of the constancy of human nature.

Herbst insists that if we really want civility to prevail, we have to find a way to make it exciting and interesting to young people, and she urges the teaching of debating skills to high school and college students.

“We will never see the sort of civil, thoughtful, inventive debate that enables good public-policy-making until we inspire the young adults in our midst how to pursue it themselves,” she wrote recently for the online publication Inside Higher Ed.

Making debate cool is a challenge, not least because clear thinking is hard work that requires skill and discipline. Perhaps a few Hollywood celebrities might help lead the way? Civility, after all, is nothing but great acting.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

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.

WASHINGTON – The jump in the unemployment rate to 10.2 percent, reported Friday, suggests that the job market could take longer than expected to recover and deepens the pressure on President Barack Obama to come up with more immediate solutions.

The jobless rate crossed into double digits last month, from 9.8 percent in September, the Labor Department reported. That is the highest level since 1983 and evidence that the economy, though expanding, has not yet grown enough to end the brutal conditions facing American workers.

A broader measure of joblessness that includes people working part time for lack of full-time positions and those who have given up looking for work out of frustration rose to 17.5 percent from 17 percent.

Economists have been projecting that job growth would resume early in 2010, and the unemployment rate would start coming down by the middle of the year. But that forecast is in doubt because job losses in the last few months are only decelerating very slowly. Typically after a recession, the jobless rate keeps increasing for a few months, but at a more gradual rate. That tapering off hasn’t happened yet.

“This is the worst labor market most of us have ever seen,” said Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo.

Even the good news in the report wasn’t all that good: Employers slashed 190,000 jobs in the month, the sort of cuts found in a run-of-the-mill recession. That figure seems encouraging only when compared to job losses that ran at several times that rate earlier in the year.

The weak numbers confront the Obama administration with a difficult situation. The economy grew at a 3.5 percent rate in the third quarter, as measured by gross domestic product, and the president and his advisers have presented this as evidence that their policies to arrest the downturn are working.

But 15.7 million Americans were unemployed last month. And in mid-October, a majority of adults viewed Obama’s policies as either making the economy either worse (22 percent) or having no effect (35 percent), according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The administration is pursuing policies that, while less ambitious than the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February, provide targeted help for the economy. On Friday, Obama signed legislation that extends unemployment insurance benefits for up to 20 weeks more and renews an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers while expanding eligibility.

But rather than offering a short-term fix for joblessness, the White House is now more focused on a longer-term strategy for fueling the economic recovery. Speaking in the Rose Garden on Friday, Obama said his economic advisers are weighing additional measures to create jobs, including new infrastructure spending, renovations to make buildings more energy efficient, and additional support for U.S. exports.

Private economists said those initiatives are likely to have little immediate effect. “The impact will be pretty minimal,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “They are good things to do. We should be spending more money weatherizing. It will employ some people.”

Critics, especially on the left, are calling on the president to move faster and take initiatives that pay off sooner.

“Every day, it becomes more urgent that the federal government step up to the plate with bold actions to boost job creation,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. “Those actions should include urgently needed fiscal relief to state and local governments, community jobs programs, additional investments in infrastructure and green jobs and credit relief to small and medium-sized businesses.”

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid surprised political observers everywhere with his announcement that the Senate’s health-reform bill would include a public-insurance option.

Despite polls showing strong public support for the proposal, TV pundits declared the public option dead due to a lack of support among moderate democrats.

Why would these democrats be so antsy about an idea that was backed by strong majority of voters? Insurance companies have been fighting the public option tooth-and-nail and have been lining the pockets of politicians in the process.

Take for example, Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee. He almost single-handedly killed the public option when his influential committee passed a bill replacing it with weaker “co-ops.” Not surprisingly, he has received almost $500,000 in campaign contributions from insurance and other health industry lobbyists and their clients.

Baucus may well be a totally honest guy who simply ignores these hundreds of thousands of dollars when deciding how to vote. It’s possible.

But examples like this help explain Congress’ recent approval rating of 21 percent. While giant corporations shell out millions in lobbying and campaign contributions, average citizens feel ignored. Congressmen and -women, in order to win re-election, spend enormous amounts of time raising money when that time should be spent at town halls getting input from the people they represent.

In order to end special interest dominance of our political process, it’s time Americans consider public financing of federal campaigns.

No existing reform laws have changed the fundamental reality that politicians rely on big donors and spend far too much time raising funds for the next election. One practical solution is the optional Clean Elections system being used in Maine and Arizona.

Under this system, candidates who gather a sufficient number of small contributions from citizens in their district qualify for a grant of public funds to run their campaign. Instead of spending months building connections among wealthy donors, candidates seeking office must go directly to the voters at a grassroots level for support in order to secure funding for their campaigns.

Clean Elections means election outcomes will be increasingly determined by the appeal of a candidate’s message, rather than how much money he or she is able to raise.

One persistent challenge to these sorts of public finance systems has been the Supreme Court. It has ruled that private donations amount to political speech protected by the First Amendment and that “rescue money” provisions are unconstitutional.

Regardless, it’s still possible to set up a public system that is so attractive an option to candidates that it effectively eliminates the incentive for private funding.

Clean Elections has proved to be a successful alternative funding method in Arizona. In 2008, 65 percent of candidates in the state ran as “clean” candidates. While cheaters have occasionally been able to game the system, some tweaks here and there should overcome the issue.

Following the example of Arizona and making improvements over time, Americans should embrace the Clean Elections model as superior to one dominated by the wealthy and special interest groups. Public financing offers great hope of diluting the influence of money in politics and making politicians more connected to their constituents.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

Republicans swept contests for governor in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday as voters went to the polls filled with economic uncertainty, dealing President Obama a setback and building momentum for a Republican comeback attempt in next year’s midterm Congressional elections.

But in a closely watched Congressional race in upstate New York, a Democrat who received a late push from the White House triumphed over a conservative candidate who attracted national backers ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor.

In New Jersey, a former federal prosecutor, Christopher J. Christie, became the first Republican to win statewide in 12 years by vowing to attack the state’s fiscal problems with the same aggressiveness he used to lock up corrupt politicians.

He overcame a huge Democratic voter advantage and a relentless barrage of negative commercials to defeat Jon S. Corzine, an unpopular incumbent who outspent him by more than two to one and drew heavily on political help from the White House, including three visits to the state from President Obama.

“We are in a crisis; the times are extraordinarily difficult, but I stand here tonight full of hope for the future,” said Mr. Christie, 47, who will become New Jersey’s 55th governor. “Tomorrow begins the task of fixing a broken state.”

Mr. Corzine, 62, who entered politics a decade ago after a career at Goldman Sachs, conceded at 10:55 p.m. “It has been quite a journey,” he said. “There’s a bright future ahead for New Jersey if we stay focused on people’s lives, and I’m telling you, I’m going to do that for the rest of my life.”

With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Christie had 49 percent of the vote, Mr. Corzine 44 percent.

In Virginia, where Mr. Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since 1964, Robert F. McDonnell, a Republican and former state attorney general, rolled to victory over R. Creigh Deeds, a veteran state senator.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. McDonnell had 59 percent and Mr. Deeds 41 percent. Mr. McDonnell’s victory, along with Republican victories in the races for attorney general and lieutenant governor, ended eight years of Democratic control in Richmond.

In New York’s 23rd Congressional District, Douglas L. Hoffman, a little known accountant running on the Conservative Party line, conceded after midnight to his Democratic rival, Bill Owens, after driving a moderate Republican from the race.

The three races marked the first major elections since the country plunged into the worst recession in decades, and basic economic issues — job losses, foreclosures, taxes — were front and center.

In Virginia, Mr. McDonnell, avoided divisive social issues, concentrating instead on his plans to create jobs, improve the economy and fix the state’s transportation problems.

In New Jersey, Mr. Christie held Mr. Corzine, a onetime Goldman Sachs chief executive, accountable for rising unemployment, persistent budget deficits, and his failure to gain control over skyrocketing property taxes, the nation’s highest. Voters embraced Mr. Christie even though he offered little detail about how he would fix the state’s chronic financial problems and instead appealed to voters hungry for change.

Voters in both states remained strongly supportive of President Obama, exit polls conducted by Edison Research showed, though they said that was not a factor in their decisions. But independent voters, who in New Jersey favored the president in 2008 and in Virginia split between Mr. Obama and John McCain, delivered strong margins for both Mr. Christie and Mr. McDonnell, the surveys showed.

In New Jersey, a sprawling corruption case begun by Mr. Christie, which culminated in July with the arrests of dozens of politicians and others, appeared to have taken its toll on the Democratic get-out-the-vote machinery. In Hudson County, a party bastion where a number of Democratic officials were charged, only 39 percent of registered voters cast their ballots, county officials said.

The races in New Jersey, Virginia and New York attracted intense interest because they provided the first test of President Obama’s ability to transfer the excitement he unleashed last year to other Democratic candidates.

The White House, to varying degrees, became involved in all three races, worried that defeats would undermine the public’s perceptions of the president’s political clout and his ability to pass major legislation.

With polls of the Virginia race showing Mr. Deeds falling further behind, the White House refrained from an all-out effort on his behalf, though Mr. Obama campaigned with Mr. Deeds twice.

In New York, however, the president’s aides played a pivotal role in helping Mr. Owens over the weekend, engineering a surprise endorsement from the moderate Republican who had abandoned the race under pressure from conservatives.

And in New Jersey, the White House took a firm hand in guiding Mr. Corzine’s re-election campaign, culminating in rallies featuring the president campaigning with the governor in Newark and Camden on Sunday.

The victor in Virginia, Mr. McDonnell, 55, is a social and fiscal conservative, but ran on a more moderate platform that appealed to voters in the suburbs in Fairfax County, where he was raised. By contrast, Mr. Deeds, 51, had a difficult time introducing himself to densely populated Northern Virginia.

Mr. Deeds sought to portray Mr. McDonnell as a radical conservative by publicizing his 20-year-old master’s thesis, which criticized working women and single mothers. But polls showed voters found Mr. Deeds’s commercials too negative.

The New York race emerged in the national spotlight after President Obama appointed the district’s long-serving congressman, John M. McHugh, a Republican, as secretary of the Army. Almost immediately after local Republican leaders chose Dede Scozzafava, a supporter of gay rights and abortion rights who embraced the federal stimulus package, she came under attack by conservatives as heretical.

Leading conservative voices lined up behind Mr. Hoffman, of Lake Placid, and opponents of same-sex marriage and abortion flooded the district with volunteers from across the country.

In the final days of the campaign, Ms. Scozzafava stunned her party by withdrawing from the race and then backing Mr. Owens. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Watertown on Monday to rally Democrats and disgruntled Republicans, but the event drew only about 200 people.

In New Jersey, Mr. Christie attacked Mr. Corzine’s economic leadership, saying he had driven jobs and residents from the state. The governor countered that Mr. Christie offered no viable plan for digging New Jersey out of its enormous financial hole.

Christopher J. Daggett, a former state and federal environmental official, made a splash with a plan to cut property taxes and a strong debate performance, but was hobbled by weak fund-raising. After reaching 20 percent in one public-opinion poll, he failed to break out of the double digits.

New Jersey was a deep-blue state, and Mr. Obama’s election boosted Democratic registration, giving the party a 700,000-vote advantage. Mr. Corzine assailed Mr. Christie, who was named United States attorney by President George W. Bush in 2001, as a philosophical clone of Mr. Bush.

The White House, viewing New Jersey as its best hope for victory, poured resources into the race. The president’s pollster overhauled the campaign’s message, White House aides reviewed Corzine commercials and attended strategy sessions, and cabinet officials lined up to appear at Mr. Corzine’s side.

But Mr. Corzine’s abiding unpopularity — his highest approval rating followed his 2007 car accident and was chalked up to pity — suggested that even “Obama surge” voters who voted for the first time last year could not tilt the outcome in the governor’s favor.

No issue loomed larger in New Jersey than the economy, which Mr. Corzine assured residents in January ranked as his No. 1, 2 and 3 priorities. But Mr. Christie never wavered from a simple strategy: making the vote a referendum on Mr. Corzine and highlighting how his supposed Wall Street financial skills had been a bust for the state.

David Kocieniewski and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg pulled out a narrow re-election victory on Tuesday, as voters angry over his maneuver to undo the city’s term limits law and his extravagant campaign spending provided an unexpected lift to his vastly underfinanced challenger, William C. Thompson Jr.

Unofficial returns showed Mr. Bloomberg with 51 percent and Mr. Thompson with 46 percent. The result will make Mr. Bloomberg only the fourth three-term mayor in the last century.

“Conventional wisdom says historically third terms haven’t been too successful,” the mayor told supporters at the Sheraton New York Hotel in Midtown Manhattan around midnight after a tense night of watching returns. “But we’ve spent the last eight years defying conventional wisdom.”

Still, the margin seemed to startle Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and the city’s political establishment, which had predicted a blowout. Published polls in the days leading up to the election suggested that the mayor would win by as many as 18 percentage points; four years ago, he cruised to re-election with a 20 percent margin.

The billionaire mayor had poured $90 million of his own fortune into the race, a sum without equal in the history of municipal politics that gave him a 14-to-1 advantage in campaign spending.

But the turnout appeared to be on track to be among the lowest in modern New York history as the mayor’s vaunted campaign machinery failed to deliver the surge of supporters his aides had predicted.

“Everybody was shocked,” a Bloomberg aide said.

Mr. Bloomberg had based his third-term campaign largely on the argument that the city has been better run since he ushered in an era of corporate efficiency and nonpartisan leadership at City Hall. He also pointed to his accomplishments in education, crime reduction and public health.

But voters from Park Slope in Brooklyn to Morrisania in the Bronx seemed torn.

While they praised his competence and intelligence, many were put off by what they saw as Mr. Bloomberg’s heavy-handed move to rewrite the law that would have limited him to two consecutive terms, saying it was obviously self-serving. The mayor had previously opposed any undoing of term limits, which voters had approved twice.

“The main reason I didn’t vote for Bloomberg was the term limits,” said Katherine Krase, a 34-year-old professor, voting at her local school in Park Slope.

At the same school, Gerni Oster, 34, said: “I think that Mayor Bloomberg is too egotistical and arrogant for me to vote for at this point.”

Exit polls indicated that 45 percent of voters said that Mr. Bloomberg’s handling of term limits was a factor in their decision not to vote for him, and roughly the same number said the mayor’s spending on the race was an important factor. Nearly 7 of 10 approved of his job performance.

Bill de Blasio and John C. Liu, both Democrats, were elected public advocate and comptroller, respectively.

The results in the mayor’s race are likely to be personally bruising to Mr. Bloomberg, a man of no small ego who told the public last fall that his financial acumen made him uniquely qualified to pull the city out of a deep economic funk.

Already, Democrats seemed emboldened by the outcome.

“We learned tonight that people do not forget easily,” said Representative Anthony D. Weiner, the Queens Democrat who considered, but then decided against, challenging the mayor. “A lot of people, whether they said it to pollsters or not, were offended by the term limits fight.”

And, addressing a crowd at the New York Hilton in Midtown, Mr. Thompson sounded like a man who was planning another campaign.

“The work we started during this campaign doesn’t end tonight, in fact, it’s just beginning,” he said.

Even those who backed the mayor seemed to do so reluctantly.

Stav Brinbaum, 37, a Web producer from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, described his own vote for the mayor as “unfortunate.”

“I feel he bought himself the election,” Mr. Brinbaum said, and “ran a smear campaign against a nonexistent opponent.” But, he added, “He’s doing a really good job.”

“If there were somebody stronger running against him, I would have happily voted for them,” said Paul Ranson, 56, a designer also from Prospect Heights. “But there’s not, so I unhappily voted for Bloomberg.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign managers prided themselves on the their communications strategy, which flooded mailboxes, e-mail inboxes and television screens.

But for some on the receiving end, it was just too much. Ken Ficara, 40, a Web developer from the same neighborhood, remained undecided until the day before the election, when he received six automated telephone calls from the Bloomberg campaign.

He updated his Facebook page, writing: “Mike, the more you call me, the less likely I am to vote for you.”

Still, according to exit polls, Mr. Bloomberg tapped into his historic sources of strength: Staten Island and Queens backed him by comfortable margins, as did Jews, white Catholics and those earning more than $200,000.

Mr. Thompson did best in the Bronx, and ran even with Mr. Bloomberg among voters aged 18 to 29.

Though he drew 46 percent of the vote, residents expressed striking unfamiliarity with him, even after a yearlong campaign.

The son a prominent judge, and a product of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, Mr. Thompson seemed to run a conventional municipal campaign designed for a previous decade, and rarely radiated political hunger. Those who backed the mayor pointed to the qualities that first won them over eight years ago, as he moved from the financial services empire he founded, Bloomberg L.P., to elective office: independence from campaign donors and a no-nonsense management style.

“I thing he’s doing a good job,” Luke Geissbuhler, 39, a cinematographer in Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, said. “It gives me great comfort that he’s less prone to be corrupt by way of his wealth.”

A little more than a year ago, the mayoral field was crowded with ambitious Democrats from City Hall to Congress. But once Mr. Bloomberg engineered the bid to overturn term limits, only Mr. Thompson remained, and for that act of political grit, he earned admiration, though not much public support, from the Democratic establishment.

Yet Mr. Thompson struggled to raise money, pulling in less than $6 million, and failed to communicate his central critique of the mayor: That Mr. Bloomberg had circumvented the will of the voters, who twice approved term limits, and ignored the welfare of working-class New Yorkers, favoring his wealthy friends and developers.

But Mr. Bloomberg was often more adept at framing the debate. He put Mr. Thompson on the defensive early on, challenging his record at the Board of Education and at the comptroller’s office. But what some voters seemed to really remember from the campaign was his spending; the mayor poured some $15,000 an hour into the race in the final months.

“The Yankees buy pennants and we buy mayoralties,” said Mr. Ficara, the Web developer from Prospect Heights.

Reporting was contributed by Flora Fair, Joel Stonington, Mathew R. Warren and Karen Zraick.

Voters seemed wary Tuesday of ballot measures that would cost them money or mandate too much more change.

Kootenai County voters shot down a pair of ballot measures would have increased the sales tax for 10 years to pay for a jail expansion and provide property tax relief.

In Washington, voters turned thumbs down to Initiative 1033, new spending limits on state, county and city governments that elected officials had said were so radical they’d wind up hamstringing services. Voters were narrowly passing Referendum 71, a measure to ratify expanded rights to domestic partnerships, but the final decision might not be known for days.

Spokane city voters were narrowly rejecting a new $33 million bond issue for city fire equipment and stations, but fire officials were trying to remain “cautiously optimistic” that they would gain enough votes in counts in the coming weeks.

There’s no such wait for a proposed change to Spokane’s City Charter: Voters soundly rejected a package of amendments that would have set new rules for wages, workplaces, neighborhood development and environmental protection.

Here’s a rundown of some of the top ballot measures:

Initiative 1033

This was the latest in a long line of attempts by Tim Eyman to put restrictions on government. It tried to attack the ability of the state, counties and cities to spend money, allowing their expenses to go up each year only by a formula that accounts for inflation and population growth. Any money collected above that level would be set aside, and returned the following year as rebates to property taxes.

It drew support from small business coalitions, many Republicans and the populist conservative Tea Party movement. It was blasted by government officials of both political parties in state and local jurisdictions as a dangerous formula in the midst of a recession.

Eyman seemed to acknowledge defeat before the first ballot results were in, e-mailing a copy of his statement to supporters that the campaign was “proud of all our heroic supporters” whatever happened, and listing previous victories at the ballot box. The measure failed decisively in Spokane, Whitman, Garfield and Asotin counties as well as those surrounding the Puget Sound.

Referendum 71

Social conservatives sought to block expanded legal protections for domestic partnerships that the Legislature approved last spring for same-sex couples and seniors who want to live together without getting married. Those rights were labeled “everything but marriage” in the legislation, but opponents said it essentially allows marriage for same-sex couples.

Approving the referendum meant allowing the law to go into effect, while rejecting the referendum rejected the changes.

Supporters of R-71 raised more than $2 million, which fueled a television ad blitz in the month before the election. Opponents of the measure, who had put it on the ballot, raised about $275,000, and concentrated on yard signs and mailings.

The measure was narrowly passing at press time, but sharply dividing the state. Most counties around the Puget Sound were approving the measure, while the remainder of the state’s counties were heavily rejecting it.

Spokane Proposition 4

Named the Community Bill of Rights by supporters, this proposal offered voters the chance to add nine amendments to the Spokane City Charter. It was drafted in a series of meetings sponsored by Envision Spokane with neighborhood groups, labor unions and environmental organizations, and fine tuned through town hall style meetings.

But the breadth of the amendments, which either had to be approved or rejected as a group, prompted criticism from city officials and business organizations. They said it could saddle the city with costs of guaranteeing health care or make businesses uncompetitive. Most of all, they said, it would spawn lawsuits because many of the concepts were untested.

It failed, nearly 3-to-1 in votes counted Tuesday.

“We think the voters of Spokane realized this is a bad idea,” Brian Murray, a campaign manager for one of the opposition groups, said Tuesday night. Spokane Mayor Mary Verner and business leaders have said they’d be willing to sit down with Envision Spokane to discuss other ways to accomplish some of their goals, he added.

But Brad Read of Envision Spokane said the outcome wasn’t surprising considering opponents heavily outspent them and used dire predictions like “Spokane would cease to exist” if the measure passed. Whether the group would accept an offer to discuss other ways to make changes is unclear, Read added, and there is some skepticism that opponents are willing to negotiate seriously.

Spokane Proposition 1

City voters were also asked to approve a $33 million bond issue for new fire engines, equipment and stations. The 10-year bond issue would cost a homeowner $27 for every $100,000 of assessed value of property; it’s designed to replace a bond issue passed in 1999, but raises the cost by about $10 per $100,000. It needed a 60 percent supermajority, and in Tuesday’s tally had collected only 58.6 percent.

Assistant Chief Brian Schaeffer said supporters hoped to close the gap in upcoming ballot counts. If that doesn’t work, the Fire Department will try again, but not before meeting with voters and asking them if the department should take a different direction.

ALBANY, N.Y. – In a Republican Party struggling to find its identity, the surprise withdrawal of the chosen GOP candidate for a New York congressional race – forced by a rising conservative upstart – renews a lingering national debate: Are moderates welcome in today’s Grand Old Party?

The question became even more relevant Sunday when the ex-candidate, state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava, threw her support behind the Democrat in the race rather than the Conservative Party candidate favored by fellow Republicans.

The GOP leadership insisted on Sunday political TV talk shows the party is strong and inclusive while Democrats described a Republican party out of touch with the people.

“We accept moderates in our party, and we want moderates in our party. We cover a wide range of Americans,” Republican House Leader John Boehner said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

But in New York’s rural 23rd Congressional District, the message was clear early: Scozzafava was too moderate; some even used the dreaded “L” word – liberal. Her endorsement of Democrat Bill Owens over Conservative Doug Hoffman only reinforced that perception – even her former campaign spokesman, Matt Burns, said it was a mistake and urged Republicans to back Hoffman.

During the campaign she failed to connect with voters, party officials or, perhaps most important, campaign donors, largely because of her support for abortion rights, same-sex marriage and union rights. That opened the door for Hoffman, who took every opportunity to remind people that Scozzafava was not the kind of Republican they wanted representing their interests in a Democratic-led Congress.

Scozzafava’s husband, local labor leader Ron McDougall, said his wife had been treated “harshly.”

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama isn’t on the ballot. Neither are all members of Congress, nor most governors.

But to varying degrees, the outcome of a few disparate elections Tuesday could provide clues about how people – particularly independents, who typically determine a winner – feel about their country, their president and the party in power one year after Democrats won the White House.

The results also could provide important lessons for Democrats and Republicans a year before the first major electoral test of Obama’s strength: 2010, when there are 37 races for governor, at least 36 in the Senate and all 435 in the House.

This year, Virginia and New Jersey are choosing governors, voters in upstate New York and Northern California are deciding who should fill two vacant congressional seats, and New York City and Atlanta are picking mayors. Maine will vote on whether to permit gay marriage while Ohio will choose whether to allow casinos.

To be sure, these races are hardly bellwethers; people are voting on local issues and personalities. Most voters in Virginia and New Jersey, for example, say their like or dislike of Obama won’t drive their decision. Still, national forces such as the recession are having an effect.

This much is clear: Tuesday will give a picture of public attitudes in certain places and measure which party has energy on its side heading into a high-stakes election year. Some questions will be at least answered partially.

Here’s what to look for:
Obama’s coalition

The president in 2008 won by cobbling together new voters from traditional Democratic base demographics, particularly blacks, youth and Hispanics, along with disaffected Republicans and self-identified independents nationwide and in traditionally GOP-leaning states such as Virginia.

The unknown is whether those voters will stay with Democrats or turn out at all if Obama isn’t on the ballot.

Both embattled Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Democratic candidate R. Creigh Deeds in Virginia desperately need party loyalists and Obama 2008 voters to swamp the polls.

Obama went in big in both states, campaigning on the Democrats’ behalf and allowing his image to be used in TV ads for them, linking himself to their fate.

He didn’t really have a choice. The Democratic base would have chafed at the party standard-bearer turning his back on the rank and file, and Obama’s influence will be questioned regardless of whether Democrats win or lose the races.
Independents

Independents always have heft, but frustration across the country with both Republicans and Democrats is adding to it. How that anger manifests itself could signal anti-incumbent sentiment among a group that leaned left last year. Do independents stay home? Do they vote against the party in power?

Regardless, Democrats and Republicans almost certainly will have to revamp their strategies to ensure they’re attracting both independents and base voters next fall.

Virginia may offer the best measure of independent voters’ sentiments.

This longtime Republican stronghold has become a new swing state in presidential elections largely because of the swiftly growing far-flung suburbs outside Washington that are filled with independent-minded voters. Obama targeted such areas to become the first Democrat to win the state since 1964, and they will determine who wins Tuesday.

Till it’s gone” – Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”

Some conservatives are prematurely salivating over President Obama’s declining poll numbers. According to a recent Gallup daily tracking poll, “the nine-point drop in the most recent quarter is the largest Gallup has ever measured for an elected president between the second and third quarters of his term, dating back to 1953.” That may comfort some Obama opponents, but three years is a long time until the next presidential election, so conservatives and Republicans (not always the same) had better think of a long-range strategy if they want to save the country from the long-term consequences of what many call “socialism.”

Matthew Spalding, of the Heritage Foundation, offers one component of that strategy in his new book, “We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future.” Spalding believes, “America is unique in that universal principles of liberty are the foundation of its particular system of government and its political culture.” He lists them and explains their history: liberty, private property, consent of the governed, equality, natural rights, religious freedom, rule of law, constitutionalism.

Middle-age and older Americans recall that these subjects were part of their high school and college curricula. Younger Americans may be less familiar with them, as the public schools no longer seem to emphasize what once held us together, preferring to teach “diversity” instead.

Six years ago, Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, introduced a bill to require a greater emphasis on American history and civics in public school classrooms. Alexander quoted federal Judge Aleta Trauger, who spoke at a swearing-in ceremony for 77 new citizens in Nashville: “We are Americans because we also share certain fundamental beliefs. We are bound together by the unique set of principles set forth in documents that created and continue to define this nation. We find our heritage and inspiration in the profound words of the Declaration of Independence: ‘All people are created equal and endowed with unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ We pledge allegiance to the Republic as one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. But the greatest expression of our national identity is the Constitution of the United States, which established the responsibilities and rights that go with citizenship.”

All true in the past, but what if today’s schools no longer teach those principles and the Constitution is not supreme? What then?

Last week in New York City, the Children’s Scholarship Fund held a dinner in honor of Eva Moskowitz, who runs the Success Charter Network, which operates four charter schools serving about 1,500 students in Harlem. One of the speakers was Jaime Martinez, an eighth-grader who was rescued, along with his sister, Ashley, from a failing public school where he says he experienced bullying and fighting. Jaime’s grades are up at his Catholic private school; he sings in a choir and takes ballroom dancing lessons. (See his remarks at www.scholarshipfund.org.)

Children’s Scholarship Fund President Darla Romfo wants the education conversation to go “beyond arguments about vouchers, charter schools, and test scores into the newer territory of empowering parents and children with real information about how to choose schools and demand excellence, with the ultimate aim of expanding good options for every child.”

It is this objective that should be embraced by those wishing to “reclaim America,” not only for ourselves, but also for future generations.

If conservatives and Republicans support an exodus from public schools as a strategic goal, they will strike at the heart of liberalism, while simultaneously liberating minorities trapped in failed government schools. To free them and teach them about America and its promise of hope will produce everything they are looking for but can’t find in politics. It will also pay political dividends as children and their parents see which party and persuasion cares about them enough to bring real change to their lives.

It’s either this approach, with results, or continuing to put faith in politicians, who have proved themselves unworthy of such faith. If parents fail to act, they won’t know what they had till it’s gone.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 20, 2009

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public.

Americans remain sharply divided about the overall packages moving closer to votes in Congress and President Obama’s leadership on the issue, reflecting the partisan battle that has raged for months over the administration’s top legislative priority. But sizable majorities back two key and controversial provisions: both the so-called public option and a new mandate that would require all Americans to carry health insurance.

Independents and senior citizens, two groups crucial to the debate, have warmed to the idea of a public option, and are particularly supportive if it would be administered by the states and limited to those without access to affordable private coverage.

But in a sign of the fragile coalition politics that influence the negotiations in Congress, Obama’s approval ratings on health-care reform are slipping among his fellow Democrats even as they are solidifying among independents and seniors. Among Democrats, strong approval of his handling of the issue has dropped 15 percentage points since mid-September.

These numbers underscore the challenges ahead for the president and Democratic leaders in Congress as they attempt to maintain support among liberals and moderates in their own party while continuing to win over at least a few Republican lawmakers.

Overall, 45 percent of Americans favor the broad outlines of the proposals now moving in Congress, while 48 percent are opposed, about the same division that existed in August, at the height of angry town hall meetings over health-care reform. Seven in 10 Democrats back the plan, while almost nine in 10 Republicans oppose it. Independents divide 52 percent against, 42 percent in favor of the legislation.

There are also deep splits in the new poll over whether the proposed changes would go too far or not far enough in expanding coverage and controlling costs. Twice as many see the plan as leaning toward too much government involvement, but since last month there has been a nine-point increase in the number who say government should be more involved.

On the issue that has been perhaps the most pronounced flash point in the national debate, 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. Support has risen since mid-August, when a bare majority, 52 percent, said they favored it. (In a June Post-ABC poll, support was 62 percent.)

If a public plan were run by the states and available only to those who lack affordable private options, support for it jumps to 76 percent. Under those circumstances, even a majority of Republicans, 56 percent, would be in favor of it, about double their level of support without such a limitation.

Fifty-six percent of those polled back a provision mandating that all Americans buy insurance, either through their employers or on their own or through Medicare or Medicaid. That number rises to 71 percent if the government were to provide subsidies for many lower-income Americans to help them buy coverage. With those qualifiers, a majority of Republicans say they support the mandate.
The public option

Faced with a basic choice that soon may confront the administration and Democratic congressional leaders, a slim majority of Americans, 51 percent, would prefer a plan that included some form of government insurance for people who cannot get affordable private coverage even if it had no GOP support in Congress. Thirty-seven percent would rather have a bipartisan plan that did not feature a public option. Republicans and Democrats are on opposite sides of this question, while independents prefer a bill that includes a public option but does not have Republican support, by 52 percent to 35 percent.

But if there is clear majority support for the public option and the mandate, there is broad opposition to one of the major mechanisms proposed to pay for the bill. The Senate Finance Committee suggested taxing the most costly private insurance plans to help offset the costs of extending coverage to millions more people. Sixty-one percent oppose the idea, while 35 percent favor it.

Nearly seven in 10 say they think that any health-care measure would increase the federal budget deficit, a possible concern for Obama. But nearly half of those who see the legislation as growing the deficit also say the increase would be “worth it.”

Concerns about the implications for Medicare continue to cloud the debate. More than twice as many Americans (43 percent to 18 percent) say they think the legislation would weaken Medicare. Despite the dip in opposition to a health-care overhaul among seniors, most, 51 percent, still think reform would hurt the popular program.

Overall, 57 percent approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president and 40 percent disapprove. While those numbers have moved only marginally over the past few months, here, too, are fresh signs of restiveness among the party faithful: “Strong approval” among liberal Democrats is down 16 percentage points over the past month.

On the economy, 50 percent approve of Obama’s efforts, while 48 percent disapprove.

The president receives better marks from all Americans for his handling of international affairs and his performance as commander in chief (57 percent approval on each). Slim majorities also approve of how he is dealing the situation with Iran and his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. A majority disapprove of his work on the federal budget deficit.
Partisan divide

Despite those mixed reviews on domestic priorities, Obama continues to hold a big political advantage over Republicans.

Poll respondents are evenly divided when asked whether they have confidence in Obama to make the right decisions for the country’s future, but just 19 percent express confidence in the Republicans in Congress to do so. Even among Republicans, only 40 percent express confidence in the GOP congressional leadership to make good choices.

Only 20 percent of adults identify themselves as Republicans, little changed in recent months, but still the lowest single number in Post-ABC polls since 1983. Political independents continue to make up the largest group, at 42 percent of respondents; 33 percent call themselves Democrats.

The wide gap in partisan leanings and the lack of confidence in the GOP carries into early assessments of the November 2010 midterm elections: Fifty-one percent say they would back the Democratic candidate in their congressional district if the elections were held now, while 39 percent would vote for the Republican. Independents split 45 percent for the Democrat, 41 percent for the Republican.

The poll was conducted by conventional and cellular telephone from Oct. 15 to 19 among a random sample of 1,004 adults. The margin of sampling error for the full poll is plus or minus three percentage points.

Published Sep 24, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

Next week the Supreme Court will begin its 2009 term, secure in the knowledge that it remains completely misunderstood by the American public. A Gallup poll conducted in September showed the court’s current approval rating—61 percent—to be higher than it’s been in a decade. (Last year that number was 50 percent.) This fall, 50 percent of Americans believe the court is not too liberal or too conservative; that’s up from 43 percent last year. The number of Americans who believe the court is too conservative has dropped from 30 to 19 percent.

All this public admiration for the court’s moderation came the same week the court was hearing a campaign-finance-reform case that may dismantle a longstanding system of campaign-finance restrictions. The issue in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission is not limited to the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law. The reason court watchers got so worked up about this case is that it squarely tests Chief Justice John Roberts’s stated commitments to preserving precedent, deferring to the elected branches, and issuing narrow rulings instead of sweeping ones. Oral arguments revealed that the court’s five conservatives feel nothing but contempt for campaign-finance regulations that demonize corporations, restrict core political speech, and—to quote the chief justice—”put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats.”

But that’s where the public confusion kicks in. In last term’s cases on voting rights, reverse discrimination, and a school strip search, the court opted for narrow, case-specific rulings rather than the sweeping ones foreshadowed by dramatic oral arguments. All this hardly means the 2008 term was a triumph for liberals at the high court. On balance, the term continued a clear trend in which big business always prevails, environmentalists are always buried, female and elderly workers go unprotected, death-row inmates get the needle, and criminal defendants are shown the door. So how to explain these new poll numbers showing that 49 percent of Republicans believe the Roberts Court is too liberal and 59 percent of Democrats believe the court is “about right”?

In part, the numbers reflect a focus on the wrong data; we continue to believe in the court we see on TV. Thus, the highly charged confirmation hearings of Justice Sonia Sotomayor this summer contributed to the idea that the court was swinging leftward, even though it’s clear that her substitution for Justice David Souter will do nothing to alter the balance of the court (indeed, she is generally expected to move the court to the right in some areas of criminal law). Similarly, the refusal of the court to go all the way in the big-banner civil-rights cases last year leads to the broad perception that the court is quite liberal.

To be sure, progressives who claim that the court’s eventual ruling in September’s campaign-finance fracas will conclusively reveal the heart of darkness that lurks inside the Roberts Court are also overstating their case. It’s true that the Roberts Court is a fundamentally conservative creature and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. But as we learned yet again last term, it’s also a court that is deeply aware of, even responsive to, public opinion. This is a court willing to reverse the Warren revolution with a tablespoon instead of a wrecking ball, and that may be too nuanced an approach to be captured in public-opinion polls.

The term that opens next week promises to provide another fistful of cases that will slowly deepen our understanding of the Roberts Court. Among them: yet another challenge to a cross on government property (raising questions about who has standing to be offended by religious symbols); a dispute over the constitutionality of a federal statute criminalizing depictions of animal cruelty; questions about whether juveniles may be sentenced to life without parole; another hot eminent-domain case; and maybe even a quarrel over whether the name “Washington Redskins” is offensive. If the tea leaves are correct, we may also see another confirmation hearing next summer.

As a generation raised on a constant diet of reality television and the inevitable “big reveal,” we will continue to look to the high drama of oral argument and the staged fireworks of judicial-confirmation hearings for our views about the Supreme Court. What really happens at the high court in the coming years will continue to occur by the tablespoon—even if we are too busy with imagined wrecking balls to see it.

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 .

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As UW students flock back to school this week, their representatives in Congress will have recently flocked back to their D.C. offices after an August recess marked by angry town halls and endless health-care ad wars.

President Barack Obama’s signature domestic agenda item has faced a tough road, and no doubt his own strategy and execution is partly to blame. By failing to explain what health-care reform means to those who already possess insurance, the President left a vague plan open to attack.

Such Republican scare tactics and outright lies (see “death panels”) have unfortunately had an impact. They’ve inflamed the passions of anti-Obama activists on the right and sewn doubt in the minds of many Americans about health insurance reform.

The key sticking point in this debate has been the inclusion of a government run “public option” that would compete with private health insurance. While support has declined for the Democratic plan in general, a CBS poll in September showed support for a public option strong at 68 percent. Another poll published in September found that 73 percent of doctors support the public option.

Republicans have used confusion over this proposal to paint the entire reform effort as a “government takeover.” They have constantly claimed that Americans will be forced from their private insurance into a “big government plan.”

I find this to be a strange argument because, as I understand it, you can’t be forced into something that is by definition an option.

The public option is intended to provide competition to private insurance by giving Americans more choices. If people choose to abandon their private insurance for a public option, it’ll be because they make the decision that they can get better care at a lower cost with that plan. It won’t be because the evil, socialist government forced them to do it.

We can all agree that the goals of health reform should be to lower overall costs and increase the quality of care. We can also agree on the general principle that more choice for consumers and competition in the marketplace leads to both lower costs and an increased quality of the product being sold. That’s what the public plan will do; provide another choice to consumers and force private insurers to compete.

For those who suggest that the public option would drive private insurers out of business, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 11 to 12 million people will sign up for it. Not to mention the fact that reform will require everyone to have insurance, similar to the way everyone is required to have auto insurance. With roughly 45 million Americans currently lacking any plan, private insurance companies will be signing up new customers faster than they can take them.

And for those who suggest that the public option would be too costly, the President has said that it must be self-sustaining and funded by those who pay to use it.

We should set up a health-care system that is uniquely American; one that combines the best aspects of our own system (high quality care, innovation) with the best of other systems (universal coverage, lower cost). That’s why Obama is not proposing a government takeover, he’s proposing a government option that will pay for itself and provide more health insurance choices, and thus competition.

If the public option does not survive into the final bill, we will have lost a great tool for controlling health-care costs.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

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By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
September 27, 2009

(NATE BEELER)

A bridesmaid in 2008, he’s laying the groundwork for a successful bid by raising money for GOP candidates, courting party activists, writing a book and getting plenty of face time on TV

Mitt Romney has the look of a man who’s running for president. And if you’re running for president, three years before your party’s nominating convention, it’s absolutely essential to say that it’s way too early to think about running for president. So the former Massachusetts governor demurs when asked his intentions.

“It’s way too early to make that consideration,” Romney says. “Who knows what the future holds?”

Romney is sitting in a suite in Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel, where the next day he will address the annual Values Voter Summit, a gathering of conservative activists sponsored by the Family Research Council. In the suite, across from a credenza stacked with catered sandwiches, Romney’s staff has set up a teleprompter — monitors, those glass panels on high stands, the whole thing — for him to practice the speech.

This stop in Washington is part of Romney’s extensive work on behalf of Republican candidates around the country. On the day we spoke, he appeared at a fundraising breakfast for Virginia Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, and that evening attended a fundraiser for GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell. After the Values Voter Summit, he was off to New Jersey to help out Chris Christie, the Republican currently leading in the governor’s race.

“What’s on my horizon right now is trying to help pick up some seats in 2010, and of course some key races in 2009,” Romney says.

Romney is doing all this work through his political action committee, the Free and Strong America PAC, which he formed in May 2008, not long after conceding to Sen. John McCain in the Republican primary race. The PAC has raised more than $2.3 million and given out about $1.8 million — far more than any other Republican contender’s PAC. In 2008 alone, Free and Strong America endorsed 83 candidates for the House and Senate; Romney attended 34 events for those candidates, in addition to 37 events for the McCain campaign.

Romney is also working on a book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” which will be out next March. He makes clear that he’s writing every word himself. “I didn’t have a writer who interviewed me twice and is now writing the book,” he says. In addition, Romney appears on television to discuss issues of particular concern to him — the stimulus, the takeovers of the auto companies, health care.

So if you list the things politicians do when they’re in the early stages of a presidential run — well, Romney qualifies.

Political action committee? Check.

Fundraising for GOP candidates? Check.

Courting party activists? Check.

Profile-raising book? Check.

TV appearances? Check.

Since he had hoped to be in the White House now, I ask what the first eight months of a Romney administration would have looked like, as opposed to what President Obama has done. “First of all, I would have followed through on his commitment to work on a bipartisan basis,” Romney says. Next, Romney says his stimulus proposal — he does believe we needed one — would have been “far more carefully crafted to create jobs immediately.” Romney would have put stimulus dollars into buying much-needed equipment for the U.S. military, as well as infrastructure projects, and he would also have made tax policy more business-friendly.

What else? “Cap and trade — I wouldn’t even touch that,” Romney says. “It’s the wrong course.” But he would have made health care a major part of his presidential agenda.

“I like what we did in Massachusetts,” Romney says, referring to the universal coverage program he and the Democratic state legislature crafted in 2006. “I think it works in Massachusetts.” Pay close attention to that last part: Romney defends the system in his overwhelmingly Democratic home state, but he’s careful to say that as president, he would give all the states greater flexibility to come up with their own fixes, which might be different from what exists in Massachusetts. The ultimate goal, he says, is “getting government less involved in the health care market.”

If Romney runs, his health care record will likely be a big target for primary opponents. The Wall Street Journal editorial page hates it, and other critics — and rivals — point to its rising costs and potential for abuse. “You want to see what government-run health care looks like?” Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 presidential candidate, asked the crowd at the Values Voter Summit. “A couple of states have tried it, Tennessee and Massachusetts. It bankrupted both states.”

“Not every feature of our plan was perfect,” Romney answers in his own speech to the group, “but it does teach this important lesson: You can get everyone insured without breaking the bank and without a government option.” The plan’s costs, Romney says, have stayed within original projections.

At the end of the Values Voter gathering, when participants voted in a straw poll of possible 2012 contenders, Huckabee took first place, with 28.5 percent of the vote, while Romney took second, with 12.4 percent, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who also appeared in person, took third with 12.2 percent. Huckabee’s win was no surprise; the former preacher has always been able to connect with the heavily evangelical crowd. The fact that Romney, after running hard and spending a reported $42 million of his own money in 2008, and then working assiduously this year, barely nipped Pawlenty, who is exploring a first-time run, was not something that will build confidence among Romney supporters. (By the way, Sarah Palin, who did not speak to the convention, was fourth, with 12 percent.)

It’s hard to predict Romney’s chances in a wide-open Republican primary race. The party has a habit of nominating the candidate who finished second the time before, but for the GOP in 2012 that will be a tricky question. By the end of the ‘08 primary season, Romney and Huckabee had virtually the same number of delegates, and neither man was the clear No. 2. And with his own books, speeches, PAC and TV show, Huckabee will likely be in the mix again.

Romney might benefit from buyer’s remorse on the part of some Republican primary voters. McCain was respected but never well-liked among the Republican base, and when the economy collapsed in the months before the election, some in the GOP regretted not having Romney, the former chief executive officer of Bain Capital and a man who knows business, on the ticket. But it was too late to do anything about it.

There’s also no way to know whether the Mormon factor will again come into play. In 2008, some evangelicals rejected Romney on the basis of his religion, even after he gave a much-publicized speech on the role of faith in his life and in politics. That might still be an issue next time around.

Then there’s the age factor. On Inauguration Day 2013, Barack Obama will be barely into his 50s, while Romney will be nearly 66 years old, placing him in the historical upper reaches of presidential newcomers. But after a life of exercise, no alcohol, no tobacco, no caffeine and a happy marriage, Romney looks exceedingly fit and far younger than his years. None of us knows how long we have on this Earth, but if Mitt Romney keels over any time soon, it will be a major surprise.

Back in the suite at the Omni Shoreham, Romney dodges questions on 2012 but lights up when asked about his 2008 run. “It’s hard work,” he says, “but you get to know the American people in a way I never would have imagined.” Running was an “expanding” experience, Romney says, introducing him to new friends all around the country.

“Let me tell you,” Romney adds with a broad smile, “if you get the chance to run for president, do it.”

Byron York can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His political column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appears on www.ExaminerPolitics.com ExaminerPolitics.com.

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.

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

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

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

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

NEWSWEEK

We should be ashamed of how poorly we have treated President Bush.

That, believe it or not, is the thesis of a bizarre opinion published the day after the election in the Wall Street Journal by one Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, described as an investigative reporter, a lawyer and a former intern for, of all people, John Kerry. It’s one of two rather eye-opening Journal pieces, actually; the second, following just days later, was by a former presidential aide named Jim Towey. Under the headline, “Why I’ll Miss President Bush,” he sang hosannas to the decency and compassion of W., even going so far as to invoke Mother Teresa.

Which is, shall we say, a rather novel take. But it is Shapiro’s piece that will give you whiplash. In his view, Bush has struggled manfully in the service of an ungrateful nation, reached out in a spirit of true bipartisanship and received for his efforts nothing but “crushing resistance” and constant scorn.

Shapiro writes: “The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.”

And reading that, you wonder … well, you wonder a few things.

First, you wonder how old Shapiro is. Because he sounds very young. I’m talking smudge-of-acne- cream-on-the-cheek, fake-ID-at-the-club young. Which, presumably, he is not, given his pedigree.

Then you wonder – fear, might be the better word – if this is but the vanguard of a new wave of revisionism, a pre-emptive strike against history, if you will, to impose a sunnier, more forgiving view on the last eight years than the facts will support. If so, we should gird for a very long rest of our lives.

Finally, you wonder, wearily, if it is really necessary to tally yet again the sins of this president. If George W. Bush’s approval ratings sink any lower, they will emerge in China. That’s not accidental. And when his reign of error ends on Jan. 20, it will come eight years too late and not a millisecond too soon.

For my money, of all the things he has done that have damaged this nation – we’re talking lies and alibis, torture, the loss of American prestige, watching passively as New Orleans drowned, censoring science, politicizing the Justice Department, a ruinous war of choice in Iraq, spending with all the discipline of an 8-year-old in a candy store – arguably the most damaging legacy this president leaves is that he has undermined truth itself. After eight years of Bush/Rove politics, we live now in a nation where fact doesn’t mean a whole lot, where it is OK to believe the “truth” that serves your political ends and jettison any that does not.

Because these days, truth comes in two flavors. We have red truth and blue truth, but we are fresh out of the truth, the facts, unimpeachable and inarguable. Instead, President Bush has overseen a government of legendary intellectual incoherence, where ideology is valued above competence, accountability is valued not at all and one is daily dared to believe the evidence of one’s lying eyes. Bush seems to agree with Stephen Colbert: Reality has a liberal bias.

Now, we are offered one last single-digit salute to our collective intelligence in the form of this grotesque suggestion that we should be ashamed of how we have treated President Bush. If anyone should feel shame, it is Bush and the cadre of sycophants that has enabled him for eight long years.

Of course, as young Mr. Shapiro so vividly reminds us, they don’t know the meaning of the word.

We’ve been walloped in consecutive elections, but we can’t just dwell on the past. The future is already here.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

JIM KUHNHENN ASSOCIATED PRESS

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.

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?

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?”

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.

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?

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

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.

By Chris Cillizza
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama in four key battleground states remains remarkably stable despite a month of politically significant developments, with the Illinois senator running ahead of or even with his Republican rival according to polling conducted by Quinnipiac University for washingtonpost.com and the Wall Street Journal.

In Colorado, Obama takes 49 percent to 45 percent for McCain while in Michigan Obama stands at 48 percent as compared to 44 percent for McCain. The contest in Minnesota, once considered a lock for Obama, is also quite close with Obama at 47 percent and McCain 45 percent. Only in Wisconsin does Obama have an edge — 49 percent to 42 percent — outside the statistical margin of error for the poll.

Those results are remarkably similar to data from July Quinnipiac polls in each of the four states and suggest that despite the massive media coverage surrounding the two parties’ national nominating conventions as well as the vice presidential selections — especially that of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which many presumed would alter the campaign’s dynamic — little has changed in the race for the White House.

The upheaval in financial markets has crystallized the importance of the economy in each of the four states where it is, by far, the most important issue for voters. The results are most pronounced in Michigan, whose economy has been badly crippled with the collapse of its manufacturing and auto industries. Nearly six in ten voters in the Wolverine State cited the economy as the most important issue in their vote; the war in Iraq trailed far behind (12 percent) as did energy policy (10 percent). In each of the other three states more than half of voters named the economy as the most critical issue in the election.

The surveys are part of a four-month long effort to measure voter sentiment in key battleground states that could determine the outcome of the race. The path to the presidency runs through a handful of closely contested states, and the four states surveyed in this project provide a snapshot of where things stand with a little more than a month until Election Day.

The stasis in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin is reflective of a broader national trend that — after several weeks of considerable fluctuation especially following the choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate — has returned to a ballast point with Obama holding a narrow national edge over McCain in most polling.

The latest Gallup tracking poll released Monday put Obama at 48 percent to 44 percent for McCain while a similar tracking survey from Diageo and the Hotline put Obama at 47 percent and McCain at 42 percent.

The closeness of the contest suggests that the 2008 election could well be a carbon copy of the narrow decisions in 2004 and 2000 when George W. Bush eked out victories over his Democratic challengers thanks to wins in the delegate treasure troves of Ohio and Florida, respectively.

Obama’s efforts to expand the playing field have met with mixed results as he has pulled staff out of several states like Georgia, Alaska and North Dakota but remains competitive in several others that have been Republican redoubts in recent years.

In Colorado, where Democrats have made significant gains at the state and federal level in recent years, Obama looks well positioned to be the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to claim the Rocky Mountain State. Democratic Rep. Mark Udall holds a 48 percent to 40 percent edge over former Republican Rep. Bob Schaffer in the state’s open seat Senate race. In the closely contested Minnesota Senate race, GOP Sen. Norm Coleman holds a 49 percent to 42 percent edge over comedian Al Franken.

Virginia, too, looks like a potential pickup for Obama. A new Washington Post survey puts the Illinois Senator at 49 percent while McCain receives 46 percent. If Obama wins the Commonwealth, he would be the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

While McCain’s pick of Palin — and the resultant flood of press coverage — was painted as a game-changing moment in the campaign, there is a little evidence that the Alaska governor has fundamentally altered the contest.

Nearly six in ten voters in each of the four states said that the vice presidential picks “have little to do with” their presidential vote. That number was highest in Wisconsin (65 percent) and lowest in Colorado (58 percent).

Despite the lack of influence on voting patterns, both Palin and Delaware Sen. Joe Biden were widely regarded as strong picks by voters in all four states. Palin’s high water mark was in Wisconsin where 57 percent said she was a “good choice” while just 33 percent said she had been a “bad choice.” In both Colorado and Minnesota, 52 percent of those tested said Biden had been a “good choice” as vice president.

And, McCain’s attempt to shift his message from one of experience to one of change does not appear to be resonating in the battleground states yet. In each the four states polled nearly twice as many voters said that Obama is the “candidate who will bring change” as say the same of McCain.

McCain does, however, enter the first presidential debate — centered on foreign policy matters — with a clear edge over Obama. More than six in ten voters in each of the four states said McCain “better understands” foreign policy matters — including more than three in ten self-identified Democrats. The debate will take place Friday at the University of Mississippi at 9 p.m. ET.

The four polls were in the field from Sept. 14-21. The sample of likely voters varied by state: Michigan 1,364, Minnesota 1,301, Wisconsin 1,313, Colorado 1,418.