(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Hillary Rodham Clinton remains the national frontrunner in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 42 per cent of respondents would vote for the New York senator in a 2008 primary, up four points since mid-July.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 23 per cent, followed by former North Carolina senator John Edwards with 14 per cent. Support is lower for Delaware senator Joe Biden and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.

On Jul. 28, Edwards defended his call for an increase in the capital-gains tax, saying, "What I say to (Mitt) Romney and (Rudy) Giuliani is all that money that they're making from their investments, (...) I want them to pay their fair share of taxes on those investments."

In last week's Democratic Presidential Debate, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama took different approaches when responding to a question about meeting with the heads of rogue nations. The differences gave pundits something to talk about and the campaigns something to spin. Polling by Rasmussen Reports gave both campaigns something to work with— most Democrats tended to agree with Obama while a plurality of voters leaned more in Clinton's direction.

Even though most Democrats leaned in Obama's direction on the one question, 46% of Democrats name Clinton as the candidate they trust most on national security issues. Just 19% named Obama. Clinton's numbers are so strong among Democrats that she outpolled Rudy Giuliani on the national security question among all voters.

So, when all is said and one, what was the impact of the debate dispute on the Democratic race? There wasn't any. Nothing happened. All the digs and commentary and spin and punditry produced absolutely no substantive change in the dynamic of the race. Clinton remains well out in front, Obama is a distant second, and former Senator John Edwards is an even more distant third struggling for a way to re-enter the top-tier.

Clinton has continued to solidify her lead as she has been doing for months (review long-term trends with the Rasmussen Reports weekly polling update or more immediate reaction with our daily tracking poll).

This news cycle is a pattern that we are likely to see repeated many times in the coming weeks and months. Some event or comment will spark a dust-up between the Clinton and Obama campaigns followed by a flash storm of comments and coverage. Then, the tracking polls will look as if nothing ever happened.

That's because New York Senator Hillary Clinton is the default candidate option for the Democratic Party. She is by far the most well-known person running for President and has been an extraordinarily high profile national figure for fifteen years. Some of next year's voters were in pre-school when Clinton first moved into the White House as First Lady. In recent history, only Richard Nixon was as well-known nationally during his run for the White House. Nobody else even comes close.

The fact that Clinton is so well-known means that there are few surprises. People have opinions about her, many of them strong. Some love her and some hate her. Her favorables have been close to the 50-50 mark all year. The number who would definitely vote for her in a general election has stayed between 28% and 30%. The number who would definitely vote against has stayed between 46% and 48%. Both figures are the highest or nearly the highest for any candidate in either party.

However, while the overall public is divided in its assessment of Clinton, the former First Lady remains very popular in the party she hopes to lead. Currently, 84% of Democrats have a favorable opinion of her.

In this environment, a modest flap over the answer to a debate question in incapable of shifting the playing field. It is hard to imagine any new information that could fundamentally alter the public perception of Clinton. As noted last week, "only a major gaffe or startling policy pronouncement will impact the general public's view of the race.

The bottom line is that the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton unless Barack Obama can show them a definitive reason to change their mind. To use a boxing analogy, Obama needs a knock-out punch because Clinton will win the bout on points.

Three reasons that former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina should be worried about the shape of his bid to win the Democrats' 2008 S.C. presidential primary. Also, three reasons he shouldn't be too concerned.

Reasons to worry

1. Tougher opponents. Although Edwards came from behind to win the 2004 S.C. primary, he faced considerably weaker competition. In 2004, his stiffest challenge for the S.C. crown came from the untested, unknown Wesley Clark, a retired Army general who got into the race late, and the volatile former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean. Going into 2008, Hillary Clinton has a big lead in South Carolina and Edwards also trails Barack Obama.

2. Money, money, money. Edwards raised only $9 million nationally in the second quarter of the year, compared with about $30 million each for Clinton and Obama. While Edwards has raised more money in South Carolina than any other Democrat, his second-quarter take fell more than 75 percent from the first quarter. Meanwhile, Clinton and Obama made gains.

3. The house. The haircuts. It's a difficult pill for some Democrats to swallow that a populist, man-of-the-people candidate has a 28,000-square-foot spread in Chapel Hill, N.C. Don't even mention the $400 haircuts.

Reasons to stay calm

1. Hometown guy. Although he was raised in and represented the Tar Heel state in the U.S. Senate, Edwards was born in South Carolina. His accent, local knowledge and message resonate with many Democratic locals.

2. Comeback kid. Edwards came from behind to win the 2004 primary here, despite being in fifth place just three months before the Feb. 3, 2004, contest. In 2004, Edwards won here after finishing a strong second in the Iowa caucus, and he's currently nursing a slim lead in the Hawkeye State.

3. The team. Edwards' staff and endorsements in South Carolina are second to none. Bill Richardson might have the best team of local Democratic operatives, and Joe Biden and Chris Dodd have most of Fritz Hollings' former network on their team. But Edwards has the combination of staff, volunteers, endorsement and message that could trump them all.

The State, July 30, 2007

U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is sailing right along toward the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

No one is in place to stop her.

Clinton has dominated the four debates conducted thus far featuring the eight Democratic presidential hopefuls.

"Once again she stood out," Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen said of Clinton's performance in Monday night's Charleston debate.

Experts have praised Clinton's overall performance, calling it smooth and warm, reflecting a deep knowledge of the issues.

Her experience manifested itself as she responded to a perennial question: Should we talk to dictators?

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois answered first, saying he would talk to some of the nation's biggest foes in his first year in office. "The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them is ridiculous," Obama said.

Clinton jumped on the remark, saying she'd talk - but not right away and not on their terms.

In a response crafted to exploit her advantage in experience over Obama as well as her grasp of foreign policy, Clinton said, "I don't care to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation worse."

Clinton's poll numbers have strengthened and gone up after each debate. Voters have been impressed with her intellect and cool demeanor. She doesn't get rattled easily.

InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion, an Atlanta-based polling firm, questioned more than 500 S.C. Democratic voters the day after Monday's debate. It showed Clinton crushing Obama 43 percent to 28 percent. Matt Towery, president of InsiderAdvantage, said earlier surveys showed Obama in the lead. The change occurred as more black voters decided on Clinton.

"It does appear that, at this point, she has a pretty good lead," agreed Carol Khare Fowler, chairwoman of the S.C. Democratic Party. "I don't doubt she is ahead."

Fowler predicted the race will tighten up as the 2008 primaries near.

Still, Clinton has run what appears thus far to be a flawless campaign. She has an excellent staff, which includes people who have worked in successful presidential campaigns.

The candidate on the spot is Obama. He presents the greatest threat to Clinton but seems to be losing ground in his effort to overtake his U.S. Senate colleague. After Monday night's debate and Clinton's widening lead over Obama in the polls, some began to wonder whether the Democratic race isn't over.

Many Democrats are saying Obama must make his move soon or be caught up in the Clinton sweep.

Electability is the one issue that could cause Clinton some problems, says College of Charleston political analyst Bill Moore. Polls show more than 40 percent of independent voters don't like the former first lady. "That's a difficult issue to deal with," Moore said. And, he suggested, it might be the only issue that can stop Clinton. "I don't think it's a given that the nomination is hers," Moore said, acknowledging Clinton is in the driver's seat.

But if Obama can't get his campaign for president going in South Carolina, where can he get it going, wonders Towery of InsiderAdvantage. "Obama's first and last stand will be in South Carolina," he predicted.

Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University, noted Clinton has been in the lead since day 1. "It doesn't look like anyone is going to stop her," he added. "It's hers to lose."

BEAUFORT -- Sen. Hillary Clinton's vow to reform government, education and health care found a receptive audience Saturday as the Democratic presidential hopeful spoke to a packed house at the University of South Carolina Beaufort's Performing Arts Center.

"Her message was right on," said Hilton Head Island Democrat Jack Keable, 72, after Clinton's 40-minute speech. "Something needs to be done to change the country back to the way it used to be."

Clinton won over the crowd of more than 500 supporters seated in the auditorium and the roughly 300 people in overflow seating who watched the speech on closed-circuit televisions set up just outside the auditorium.

Clinton spoke of reviving the American dream once present in the politics of civil-rights champions such as Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Clinton said it's time to again dream big. "I was raised in Chicago ... I was raised to believe I can do anything I set my mind to," Clinton said. "I still believe that."

Clinton's speech pushed affordable health care for every American; energy independence and security; raising the income of middle-class families; more affordable colleges; working to enroll all children in pre-kindergarten programs; fighting global warming; repairing foreign policy; and transparency in government.

She also said American troops have fulfilled the objectives of capturing Saddam Hussein and implementing free elections in Iraq and it's now time for troops to pull out. "Our people don't belong in a multi-sided, sectarian civil war," Clinton said to loud cheers and applause.

Several supporters held up red placards that read "Women for Hillary," but Clinton emphasized that being a woman is not what qualifies her to be president. "I am not running because I am a woman; I am running because I think I am the best qualified and most experienced," she said.

Clinton recalled family vacations spent shrimping and fishing on Hilton Head Island 25 years ago. "There was not as much development, not as many golf courses and not as many houses as there are today," Clinton joked.

Beaufort native Etta Mann waited more than three hours for Clinton's arrival at about 2:15 p.m. "For me, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get to see and hear a live presentation by a presidential candidate," Mann said. "I think Hillary Clinton is a classy woman; I like the way she presents herself and I like her platform." Mann, in her 70s, is having a hard time deciding between Clinton and Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who made a campaign stop in Columbia on Thursday. Mann said the next several months would cement her decision. "It depends on what I hear," Mann said.

By Sandra Walsh, Beaufort Gazette, July 29, 2007

The proliferation of presidential debates is the talk of the major candidates and their advisers. Many complain that the encounters are becoming trivialized rituals, featuring too many minor candidates, lots of ego, and little of value. The critics say that debate preparation drains time and energy, that the large number of participants-eight at the last Democratic debate July 23 in Charleston, S.C.-diverts attention from the three or four who have a realistic chance, and that the formats limit the candidates to superficial sound bites. All this was underscored when Sen. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were captured on an open microphone recently discussing their dissatisfaction with the number of participants. The underdogs, naturally, have a different view. Ohio Democrat Rep. Dennis Kucinich argues that "candidates, no matter how important they perceive themselves to be ... should not have the power to determine who is allowed to speak to the American public and who is not."

Why is it so hard to refuse? Strategists for two prominent candidates say none of the major campaigns want to stiff the sponsors, especially news organizations that provide coverage. And no one wants to be called an elitist.

So the free-for-all continues, with another GOP debate set for August 5 in Des Moines and a Democratic debate August 9 in Los Angeles.

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most popular United States presidential contender for Democratic Party backers in Florida, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 46 per cent of likely Democratic primary voters in the Sunshine State would support the New York senator in the 2008 primary.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 15 per cent, followed by former North Carolina senator John Edwards with 13 per cent. Four per cent of respondents would vote for other candidates, and 21 per cent are undecided.

In the sample of Republican Party supporters, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is first with 22 per cent, followed by actor and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson with 21 per cent, Arizona senator John McCain with 13 per cent, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney also with 13 per cent.

Earlier this year, a law passed in Florida mandates for the state's presidential primaries to be held either on the first Tuesday of February, or seven days after the New Hampshire contest. The Republican and Democratic primaries in Florida are tentatively scheduled for Jan. 29, 2008.

In 2004, Massachusetts senator John Kerry won the Democratic Florida primary with 77 per cent of the vote. The Republican contest was cancelled, after incumbent George W. Bush was nominated by the state's party.

Bush is ineligible for a third term in office. The next U.S. presidential election is scheduled for November 2008.

"She's right on that. He happens to be wrong," former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney said of Clinton and Obama following his appearance here at a crowded, downtown restaurant.

Romney's morning speech was filled with criticism of various Democrats, including Clinton. But he saved his harshest words for Obama over his debate answer saying that, as president, he would agree to meet with the leaders of such American adversaries as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela during his first year in the White House.

Clinton pounced on that response, calling it "irresponsible and frankly naive" to make such a commitment, saying there's a danger of the president of the U.S. being used for "propaganda."

Obama reportedly has called it a "fabricated controversy."

"The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them - which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration - is ridiculous," Obama said, according to CNN.

The Obama-Clinton rift intensified on Thursday. Obama said in a speech, "I don't want a continuation of Bush- Cheney. I don't want 'Bush-Cheney lite' " - an apparent reference to Clinton. She responded in a CNN interview, saying: "I've been called a lot of things in my life. Bush-Cheney has never been one of them."

But Romney told reporters this morning that he sides with Clinton on this particular question. He said there should be some contact with adversarial nations, but that it would be wrong to "bestow the dignity of that office" on leaders like Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Fidel Castro of -Cuba, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Romney said Obama's statement is "outrageous, and suggests an agenda that is not in keeping with an agenda focused on building friendships with our allies, creating understanding with other nations. It's a wrong course and he should recognize it and change direction - or simply be rejected."

"Does that mean we don't have any communications with those countries? Of course not," Romney said. "But a presidential contact is as ill conceived as having (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi go to Syria. That was ill conceived, but having a president meet with the authoritarian tyrants of the world is a remarkably poor judgment conclusion."

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News, July 27, 2007

Obama also is up against the formidable Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner who enjoys strong support in the black community and is married to former President Clinton, who is wildly popular in the community.

The Associated Press interviewed Democratic voters across the state, including about a dozen blacks, and found evidence of excitement and doubts.

Obama's plea was directed not only at voters, who will participate in the Jan. 29 primary, but Democratic state Sen. Robert Ford of Charleston. Ford garnered headlines when he said he was backing Clinton in part because he was skeptical that Obama could win the presidency and feared that his nomination could hurt other Democratic candidates. "Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose - because he's black and he's top of the ticket. We'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything," said Ford, who is black. He drew widespread criticism for his comment and later apologized.

But the AP interviews suggested the view is prevalent among blacks, along with concerns across racial lines about whether Obama has enough experience to be president. Greenville County Democratic Party chairman Andy Arnold hears it frequently among blacks, who are supporting Clinton in greater numbers in recent polls.

"A lot of the African-Americans are with Hillary because I think they don't believe white America is ready for a black president," said Arnold, who is white and uncommitted in the race. "They want to win and so in a way, I think it is a barrier to him. And it may be more so in the South where the remnants of the old South are still in the older folks mind. They just can't believe in their right mind that white folks will elect a black man president, so let's not put ourselves through that agony."

Clinton is a favorite of black women in current polls, due largely from goodwill for her husband and her lifelong focus on issues affecting families and children. Much of her lead comes from women and blacks, and it's strongest among black women. According to Associated Press-Ipsos polls taken this summer, 59 percent of black women said they support Clinton and 27 percent Obama.

The South Carolina primary, coming after heavily white Iowa and New Hampshire vote, and Nevada casts its ballots, is crucial for Obama. In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson won the state's primary. The Obama campaign argues that doubts about whether a black man can be elected is not widespread. They cite a Winthrop Poll of South Carolinians in May in which 79 percent of respondents said they think the country will be ready for a black president in the next 12 years. However, the poll did not ask whether they would be ready in 2008.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, the only black member of South Carolina's congressional delegation, said he thinks concerns about the war are more prominent in voters' minds than issues of candidates' race or gender. But he said if anything, Clinton's gender might help her in that regard.

"When it comes to issues of war and peace, women hold out hope for peace more than men do," said Clyburn, who hasn't endorsed a candidate but hasn't ruled out doing so later. "If the election were held today, Clinton would carry the state. It's not going to be held today."

Another candidate, 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, has been arguing that he will be more electable in the South. He denies that's because of Obama's race or Clinton's gender but says it's because they have never run in the South while he won the primary in 2004 and was elected senator in North Carolina.

For Barack Obama, it was strike two. And this one was a right-down-the-middle question from a YouTuber in Monday night's South Carolina debate: "Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?"

"I would," responded Obama.

His explanation dug him even deeper: "The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them -- which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration -- is ridiculous."

From the Nation's David Corn to super-blogger Mickey Kaus, a near-audible gasp. For Hillary Clinton, next in line at the debate, an unmissable opportunity. She pounced: "I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year." And she proceeded to give the reasons any graduate student could tick off: You don't want to be used for their propaganda. You need to know their intentions. Such meetings can make the situation worse.

Just to make sure no one missed how the grizzled veteran showed up the clueless rookie, the next day Clinton told the Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa, that Obama's comment "was irresponsible and frankly naive."

To be on the same stage as the leader of the world's greatest power is of course a prize. That is why the Chinese deemed it a slap in the face that President Bush last year denied President Hu Jintao the full state-visit treatment. The presence of an American president is a valued good to be rationed -- and granted only in return for important considerations.

Moreover, summits can also be traps if they're not wired in advance for success, such as Nixon's trip to China, for which Henry Kissinger had already largely hammered out the famous Shanghai Communique. You don't go hoping for the best, as Hillary's husband learned at the 2000 Camp David summit, when Yasser Arafat's refusal of Israel's peace offer brought Arafat worldwide opprobrium -- from which he sought (successfully, as it turned out) to escape by launching the second intifada. Such can be the consequences of ill-prepared summits.

Obama may not have known he made an error, but his staff sure did. In the post-debate spin room, his closest adviser, David Axelrod, was already backpedaling, pretending that Obama had been talking about diplomacy and not summitry with rogue state leaders.

Obama enthusiasts might want to write this off as a solitary slip. Except that this was the second time. The first occurred in another unscripted moment. During the April 26 South Carolina debate, Brian Williams asked what kind of change in the U.S. military posture abroad Obama would order in response to a hypothetical al-Qaeda strike on two American cities.

Obama's answer: "Well, the first thing we'd have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response -- something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans."

Asked to be commander in chief, Obama could only play first-responder in chief. Caught off guard, and without his advisers, he simply slipped into two automatic talking points: emergency response and its corollary -- the obligatory Katrina Bush-bash.

When the same question came to Clinton, she again pounced: "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate." Retaliatory attack did not come up in Obama's 200-word meander into multilateralism and intelligence gathering.

These gaffes lead to one of two conclusions: (1) Obama is inexplicably unable to think on his feet while standing on South Carolina soil, or (2) Obama is not ready to be a wartime president.

During our 1990s holiday from history, being a national security amateur was not an issue. Between the 1991 death of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attacks of 2001, foreign policy played almost no part in our presidential campaigns. But post-Sept. 11, as during the Cold War, the country demands a serious commander in chief. It is hard to imagine that with all the electoral tides running in their favor, the Democrats would risk it all by nominating a novice for a wartime presidency.

Do the Democrats want to risk strike three, another national security question blown, but this time perhaps in a final presidential debate before the '08 election, rather than a midseason intraparty cattle call? The country might decide that it prefers, yes, a Republican -- say, Sept. 11 veteran Rudy Giuliana-- to a freshman senator who does not instinctively understand why an American president does not share the honor of his office with a malevolent clown like Hugo Chavez.

July 27 (Bloomberg) -- The Pentagon, under pressure to start planning for an Iraq withdrawal whether it begins in two months or two years, may find that getting out will take a lot longer than getting in. U.S. troops will have to contend with terrorist bombs, wilting heat, dangerous roads and logistical logjams that even critics of the war say will make a rapid pullout impossible.

"I thought it would take six months,'' said Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who first advocated withdrawal in 2005. "I found out since then it will take longer than that, the footprint is so much bigger.''

Calls are building in Congress and among Democratic presidential candidates for a drawdown of U.S. forces and for the Pentagon to begin planning how to do it. Two senior Republican senators, John Warner of Virginia and Richard Lugar of Indiana, want to see such a plan by Oct. 16, and Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York also have raised the issue.

While the administration has opposed the Warner-Lugar legislation, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a July 25 letter to Clinton, said the Pentagon is doing "contingency planning'' for how the U.S. would withdraw from Iraq "at the right time.'' The pressure to change course in Iraq is likely to peak in September, when Congress gets a report from two top U.S. officials in Iraq that all sides in the debate have identified as a pivotal moment.

Saigon Lessons

Indelible images of the disorderly final pullout from Vietnam in 1975 are reminders to many of the risks in Iraq. Military planners must "avoid at all costs'' a repeat of the frantic airlift from Saigon, said P.J. Crowley, a retired Air Force colonel and National Security Council official under President Bill Clinton. "Everyone remembers the pictures of the helicopters'' plucking people from the roof of the U.S. Embassy as communist forces captured the city, he said. Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, is now known as Ho Chi Minh City. Retired U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey, one of the top ground commanders of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, said the dangers of a "precipitous'' withdrawal done in nine months or less would be substantial. "It would be a scene of unimaginable chaos, with millions of refugees fleeing the country, and Iraqis who had supported us following our columns going south,'' said McCaffrey, who commanded an infantry division.

Sectarian Lines

As the Iraqi army splintered along sectarian lines, U.S. commanders would be reluctant to turn over equipment to a fractured force and would destroy it instead, McCaffrey said. That in turn would anger Iraqi soldiers. "They wouldn't be throwing roses in our path,'' he said. "They'd be shooting at us the entire way.'' These risks could be reduced by a longer timeline for a withdrawal, McCaffrey and other military experts said. A more measured pace of 20 to 24 months would allow for expanded planning -- and time for the Iraqi army to improve its combat capability, which would increase the chances for a smooth pullout.

Still, even a measured and carefully planned pullout carries risks, the experts say. "We can expect to be attacked by Iraqi factions of all persuasions, whose incentives to prove themselves by demonstrating opposition to the defeated Americans will grow once we announce our departure,'' said Stephen Biddle, a defense analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Standing Guard

While most troops could leave by plane, some soldiers would stay to transport and guard the tanks, Humvees, bomb- detecting "Buffalos'' and other vehicles that must leave by sea. When the U.S. invaded in 2003, the only route into Iraq was from Kuwait, because Turkey refused to allow movement through its territory. There is no certainty that the Turkish government would have a friendlier view of a withdrawal, making it likely that everything going by sea would depart through Kuwait. Troops and equipment traveling that route would be a target for insurgents and their roadside bombs, which currently account for three-quarters of U.S. casualties. One uncertainty is whether insurgents would harass withdrawing Americans -- or hasten their departure by holding back.

'Fanatics'

"If the terrorists were smart, they wouldn't touch us,'' said retired Army General William Pagonis, who supervised the pullout after the 1991 Gulf War. "They would just let us get out. But they don't have a strong chain of command. Down in the lowest ranks are fanatics.'' Sabotage or pilfering would also be a possibility, said retired Vice Admiral Gordon Holder, director of logistics for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2004.

And then there is the U.S. government's bureaucracy: the Agriculture Department and its strict requirements to prevent the importation of any parasites or other crop infestations. What that meant in 1991, Pagonis recalls, was that every piece of military equipment shipped back to the U.S. had to be power-washed twice -- once at the start of the trip to port and again at dockside -- to remove any parasite-bearing desert sand. "That was my nemesis,'' Pagonis said of the department. "They're like gods. If they say that tank doesn't pass, you've got to re-clean it.''

By Ken Fireman, Bloomberg, July 27, 2007

When asked to choose among the leading Presidential candidates, 28% of American adults said that they would trust New York Senator Hillary Clinton the most on national security issues. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% named former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Clinton is the clear frontrunner among Democrats seeking the Party nomination. Giuliani and Thompson top the GOP field.

Results had a strong partisan flavor to them, 46% of Democrats named Clinton as the candidate they trust most on national security issues. Nineteen percent (19%) named Obama and 10% of Democrats prefer Edwards.

On the Republican side, 36% named Giuliani as their top pick, 26% named Thompson, 10% prefer McCain and 5% named Romney.

As for those not affiliated with either major party, 27% named Clinton, 19% picked Giuliani, and 15% prefer Obama. No other candidate reached double digits among the unaffiliateds.

Overall, 49% named a Democratic candidate while 40% picked a Republican. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 46% named a Democratic candidate while 35% named a Republican.

Historically, national security has been an issue dominated by Republicans. Over the last year or two, especially since the Dubai Ports incident, the GOP has lost that advantage. Recent tracking polls have shown the two parties close to parity on this issue while the public generally prefers Democrats on a whole range of issues.

Other data shows that the public is divided as to whether the next President should meet with the leaders of nations such as Syria, North Korea and Iran.

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - More Democratic Party supporters in the United States would like Hillary Rodham Clinton to become their presidential nominee in 2008, according to a poll by TNS released by the Washington Post and ABC News. 39 per cent of respondents would vote for the New York senator in a primary, up four points since June.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 28 per cent, followed by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore with 14 per cent, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards with nine per cent. Support is lower for New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Delaware senator Joe Biden, and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich.

On Jul. 24, Kucinich discussed his chances, saying, "I'm in this campaign to win. People are looking for an alternative. People are now seeing that I was right (to oppose the war in Iraq)."

Angus Reid Global Monitor : Polls & Research, July 26, 2007

Hillary won. Beyond the political and entertainment value of the spat between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Clinton is right on the substance and Obama is wrong about the Iraq war.

Leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is increasing the pressure on Barack Obama, calling him "irresponsible and frankly naive" for a statement he made during the CNN-YouTube debate Monday.

Obama was asked if he would agree without precondition to meet the leaders of the Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in the first year of his administration. He responded: "The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration, is ridiculous." Clinton disagreed: "Well, I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year. I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse."

After Clinton's "irresponsible and frankly naive" comment yesterday, Obama shot back that Hillary Clinton was "irresponsible and naive" for having voted for the Iraq war with an exit plan. The Obama campaign also released a memo accusing Clinton of flip-flopping for criticizing the Bush administration on its lack of diplomacy and now saying she'd not meet with world leaders. The memo called Obama's approach "tough but smart," and Obama himself said the Clinton campaign was concocting a "fabricated controversy."

And he is wrong again.

I've argued before that it makes no difference whether Obama has "experience" in national security -- as the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Powell dream team made abundantly clear, experience is no guarantee of security. But beyond the spat, this is no fabricated controversy. National security is the most important issue of the campaign.

The letter also contains the most explicit admission to date that the Pentagon is in fact planning for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces, with Gates telling Clinton: "You may rest assured that such planning is indeed taking place with my active involvement."

Late Thursday, lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee were told they would get the briefing Clinton had been seeking for months on the issue of troop withdrawal.

Gates, in the three-page missive obtained by The Associated Press, sought to calm a politically stoked exchange between the Pentagon and the Democratic presidential front-runner over planning for the withdrawal of U.S forces from Iraq.

The feud burst into the open last week when Edelman sent a stinging letter to Clinton, a member of the Armed Services Committee who had sought answers in May about how troops, equipment and vehicles would leave Iraq.

Edelman wrote that public discussion of withdrawal "reinforces enemy propaganda that the U.S. will abandon its allies in Iraq" and exacerbates sectarian tensions there. The New York senator said Edelman's answer impugned her patriotism while avoiding serious questions about troop withdrawal plans.

Gates' letter, dated Wednesday, insisted that was not the point of Edelman's missive.

"I emphatically assure you that we do not claim, suggest, or otherwise believe that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies, nor do we question anyone's motives in this regard," Gates wrote.

The Defense secretary both agreed with Clinton that congressional oversight of military planning is needed and at the same time defended Edelman.

"I truly regret that this important discussion went astray and I also regret any misunderstanding of intention," Gates wrote.

"I agree with you that planning concerning the future of U.S. forces in Iraq - including the drawdown of those forces at the right time - is not only appropriate but essential," Gates wrote, adding that Edelman also agrees with that point.

The weeklong back-and-forth underscored the escalating animosity between the Bush administration and the Democratically controlled Congress in the standoff over Iraq policy, and the center seat the divide holds in the 2008 presidential race.

Clinton's spokesman Philippe Reines said the senator was "disappointed that Secretary Gates does not repudiate Undersecretary Edelman's unacceptable political attack." Reines added that Clinton welcomes Gates statement that congressional oversight of the Iraq war is essential. "She continues to believe strongly that there is absolutely no room for impugning the patriotism of those who rightfully engage in congressional oversight," Reines said.

The public feud between the Edelman and Clinton could win her points among anti-war voters and liberal Democrats, a critical constituency in primary voting that has challenged her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war. Facing questions about the war during Monday night's debate, Clinton mentioned the letter and the feud.

Clinton, in a call Friday with reporters, said in response to Edelman's letter that she was "shocked by the timeworn tactic of once again impugning the patriotism of any of us who raise serious questions" about the Iraq war. She was joined in the call by 2004 Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who accused the Bush administration of making "planning a dirty word and an alien concept." She also complained directly to Gates in writing, asking if he agreed with Edelman's comments. Edelman is a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, and served as an ambassador during the Bush and Clinton administrations. Military leaders have long acknowledged that they have plans for all contingencies in the Iraq war - more recently saying they have looked at adding troops, pulling troops out and maintaining current levels.

They have provided no details, and insisted that decisions hinge on the report from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, which is due in September. Both men are to testify before Congress on how the current strategy is working and whether it needs to be revised.

July 25 (Bloomberg) -- McCain is history.

That's the line inside the Republican Party about its former frontrunner for the presidential nomination, John McCain. No name, not even Ron Paul, elicits the snort of contempt you get when you utter that of the senator from Arizona to a Republican operative.

You have to wonder why. Republicans, after all, have long styled themselves as the party of leadership. They did it so much that they irritated almost everyone. Their talk had an empty circularity: someone was a leader because he led. Yet they clung to the word, through the campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

Fast forward to 2008. You may not agree with every one of McCain's positions. But at least he has positions. He is the candidate who is making unpopular, and often right, choices. Just the way a true leader does. Consider pork, the congressional spending on interest-group programs. Lawmakers, with the tacit support of President George W. Bush, have used the excuse of the war in Iraq to spend the past half-decade inserting earmarks and other giveaways into whatever legislation comes before them. McCain, unlike many Republicans, has crusaded over the years against the process. Monday night in a Michigan speech he made a promise: "Give me the pen, and I'll veto every single pork- barrel bill Congress sends me.'' And knowing what we know about McCain, you have to believe him.

Immigration is another example. The nation's feelings on this topic are as inconsistent and hypocritical as the application process for a green card. The "no-more-Mexicans'' impulse, the "we-want-security'' impulse, the "immigrants- bring-growth'' impulse and the "we-want-to-be-kind'' impulse all compete within the collective American breast. What the country needs is someone to construct a law that emphasizes the impulses that make sense. That is what McCain sought to do when he labored in the Senate to pass an immigration bill. His bill created a way to legalize some of the millions of illegal aliens in the country. But the immigration bill proved to be untenable, and the very concept of legalizing illegals toxic. Nonetheless, McCain stuck to his legislating. He even sent his economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, to do battle with the ferocious hosts of conservative-talk radio. That challenge was so great that Holtz- Eakin later said that he would rather test a flame-retardant suit.

On campaign finance McCain likewise shows courage. You may not like McCain-Feingold, his campaign-finance legislation. But at least McCain wrote a law. What's more, he is gracious about the outcome of that law. You don't hear him berating Democrat Barack Obama, even though the senator from Illinois turned out to be the election season's surprise beneficiary of the new rules, receiving millions of dollars in small donations.

To be sure, these stands may just be a function of the office McCain holds. McCain has the advantage of Senate incumbency over Mitt Romney, a former governor, Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor who works as a consultant, and former Senator Fred Thompson, a television and radio star. Of all the Republican candidates or near-candidates, McCain is the only one in a position to write laws and take stands on the thorny issues of our day -- and be held accountable. But then there is Iraq. Again, you might not agree with his support for a continued troop presence, but you have to applaud his consistency. More than rivals, even those who support the war, McCain is credible when he talks about the grueling sacrifice of combat, not to mention time as a prisoner of war. In terms of American credibility abroad, McCain has that too: even al-Qaeda knows well the amount of years he spent in the Hanoi Hilton.

So why not follow the leader? It may be that the party and donors are merely shifting their bets to a figure they feel would be a better leader, Giuliani. Giuliani demonstrated leadership in New York after Sept. 11, but that doesn't compare to what McCain endured.

Maybe the real reason McCain is losing so early is lack of leadership -- not on his part, but on the part of his party and Republican voters.

The two great questions of all elections are "Would this candidate be good?'' and "Would he win?'' The first question is the one that matters more. But at some point in the election cycle madness sets in and only the latter is relevant.

Republicans are so crazed to stay on top in Washington that this time they have let themselves go mad early. The intensity of the contempt toward McCain has less to do with McCain the man than with Republican desperation. Donors sense this and have duly reduced spending, which helps explain why contributions to Campaign McCain have been so disappointing.

What that means is that in the end the Grand Old Party may have a candidate who stands for winning and nothing else. That fact renders the GOP doubly vulnerable to the Democrats.

So maybe Republican party leaders, if you can call them that, should take a last look at McCain. And use the autumn to think hard about what the party stands for. Otherwise McCain isn't the only one who is history in 2008. His party may be too.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) endorsed Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) for president Wednesday, saying the former first lady is best equipped to lead the country.

"This is a very special moment for me because I have the opportunity to endorse the campaign of a U.S. senator who I believe will be the first female president of the United States," Feinstein said. "Hillary Clinton, I believe, has the experience, the heart and the strength to be a great American president. There has been no election for president where change is as defined and necessary as this one. The question is who is best equipped to lead that change. I believe it is Hillary."

Feinstein is the seventh senator to endorse Clinton's bid for the presidency. No other Democrat has the endorsement of more than one senator. Clinton also has the backing of 49 representatives, putting her far ahead of the other Democratic front-runners, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.).

"Dianne and I have fought side by side in the Senate to expand stem cell research, to take care of our veterans when they return home and to stop the privatization of Social Security," Clinton said. "Dianne is such a respected voice in the Senate. I'm honored to have her support as we work together to bring the war in Iraq to an end and deliver the change this country wants."

WASHINGTON - Monday's release marked the fourth consecutive ABC News/Washington Post poll that found Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., with a lead of 15 or 16 points over Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in Democratic presidential nomination matchups featuring all of the active candidates.

The latest poll, conducted last Wednesday through Saturday among 606 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, showed Clinton with 45 percent of the vote, Obama with 30 percent, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards at 12 percent, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson with 3 percent and others with 2 percent or less.

Sixty-eight percent of Clinton voters said they strongly supported their candidate, versus 56 percent of Obama backers. In the February ABC/Post polling, Obama supporters were 4 points more intensively supportive of their candidate than Clinton backers, but in the three successive polls, Clinton's support grew more intense. What started as an edge of 8 points in April was 10 points in June and 12 points in the new poll.

When asked who had the best chance to defeat the Republican nominee in the general election, Clinton beat out Obama again, 43 percent to 27 percent.

Finally, when asked if they were satisfied with the choice of candidates running for the Democratic nomination, 83 percent said they were, while just 16 percent said they were not.

In Pollster.com's moving average of all major national polls, Clinton's lead is a bit narrower, at 12.8 points, but has widened over the last three months.

In Pollster.com's Iowa averages, Edwards leads with 27.8 percent to Clinton's 23.8 percent, with both gradually moving up. Obama is at 17.1 percent, but has been dropping over the last two months.

In the New Hampshire averages, support for Clinton, averaging 34 percent, and Obama, at 22.7 percent, is growing. Obama's numbers are growing faster -- and appear to be coming from a rather precipitous decline by Edwards in the Granite State -- but the Illinois senator still has a lot of ground to cover.

The point of all of this is to note that while Obama is slightly ahead of Clinton in the fundraising side of the race, he does not have the momentum that he had back in the first three months of this year.

Indeed, nationally and in Iowa, Obama is losing ground, not gaining it. One has to wonder when Obama's backers will start leaning on him and his campaign organization, the way anxious investors pressure a company's CEO to improve earnings and stock price. Former Massachusetts GOP Gov. Mitt Romney has shown how a combination of strong organizational efforts and television advertising in early primary states can jumpstart a little-known candidate. Romney's numbers among Republicans are rocketing in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

Likewise, Richardson has shown how just a healthy dose of media with a little organization can send numbers shooting up in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But with significantly greater resources than either Romney or Richardson, Obama has not replicated their early-state success. There was that initial burst of momentum created after he announced his candidacy, but since then things have been relatively flat. This isn't to say Obama's situation can't be turned around. After all, in the last presidential campaign cycle, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was running low on money late in 2003. But he mortgaged his house, then capitalized on late reservations about front-runner Howard Dean to grab the nomination.

As long as he has money, there is a way out, but there would appear to be a recipe problem with the Obama campaign: They haven't figured out where Democratic taste buds are this year.

Conversely, while the Clinton campaign has lacked the cache and pizzazz of the Obama effort, it has cruised along with Prussian efficiency, methodically plodding along, making no major mistakes.

Clinton has gradually and increasingly become more acceptable, wearing down the resistance in the party and, with general election polls now generally showing her even or mostly ahead, they are breaking through outside the party as well.

At some point, we should assume that Clinton or her campaign will stumble; every candidate and campaign eventually does at least once or twice. But, when it happens, will anyone else be in striking distance, and thus able to capitalize?

It's also worth noting that in Iowa and New Hampshire, Richardson's numbers have been moving. Perhaps it is Astroturf rather than true grassroots, but the upward pattern in the polls in those states -- but not nationally -- should be noticed. Somebody usually makes a run from behind, and it might well be the New Mexican, if his early-state numbers are any indication. There is still six months before balloting begins, but this race has begun to take shape.

For some, of course, that shape is a lot better and more promising than for others. As far as Clinton is concerned, she couldn't ask for things to be working out much better. For Obama, something needs to happen.

And for Richardson, one crucial question must be answered: Is this real?

FOR HILLARY CLINTON, the presidency is not in the bag. Even winning the Democratic presidential nomination is considerably less than a sure thing. But of the 18 Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, Clinton is the most likely to be the next president. And she did nothing last night in the bizarre presidential debate in Charleston, South Carolina, to alter that.

Clinton managed to maintain at least the outward appearance of seriousness in a debate that included a taped question from someone dressed as a snowman, another from a sanctimonious Planned Parenthood official who asked if the candidates had talked to their kids about sex, and an especially silly one about whether the candidates would be willing to be paid the minimum wage as president. Most of them lied and said yes.

This was the first of six debates sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. Based on this one, there's a long and tedious season of yakking ahead in the presidential race. With You Tube providing the questions and the candidates offering special one-minute commercials, the idea was to make last night's debate livelier and more fun. Often, though, it was merely unserious, excessively cute, and frivolous.

There was a key moment, however, and once again it pitted Clinton, the New York senator, against Barack Obama, her counterpart from Illinois. The question was whether they'd promise to meet in the first year of their presidency with the leaders of such enemy nations as Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, and Syria.

Clinton benefited from getting to answer after Obama, and she made the most of it. She said, firmly and coolly, that she wouldn't promise to meet with them. Clinton said the new president had to be careful not to be exploited by hostile leaders for propaganda purposes and not to do anything "that would make the situation worse." Before any meeting, she'd have to know "what the way forward would be."

As anti-Iraq war as Clinton has become, she also refused to be drawn into competition with the other candidates over who favored the earliest and most complete withdrawal of American troops. She said it must be done "safely and orderly and carefully," and not merely as quickly as possible.

Clinton said she was "agnostic" on expanding the use of nuclear power and didn't get a chance to spell out her plans on health care. Bill Richardson, eager to out-pander his foes, said "every American deserves the right to the best quality health care." He didn't say how this would be achieved.

The other candidates? Obama, exciting on the stump, was dull in the debate. Mike Gravel seemed quite taken with himself, for no good reason. Dennis Kucinich also exuded enormous self-regard. Edwards oozed insincerity, especially when he said anyone who voted against Clinton because she's a woman or Obama because he's African-American shouldn't vote for him. Joe Biden and Chris Dodd gave reasonable answers, the kind you'd expect from liberal Democratic senators.

Still, there's nothing inevitable about Clinton's winning the Democratic nomination. She's just closer to gaining the presidential nomination than any candidate in either party. In other words, she's got a better shot at being the Democratic nominee than Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson have of becoming the Republican presidential choice.

And then there's the general election race, which favors the Democrat candidate, assuming it's either Clinton or Obama. Yes, Clinton has incredibly high negatives. One national poll found recently that 52 percent of Americans said they'd never vote for her for president. But don't be fooled. The political environment is likely to trump that sentiment.

Unless the national mood changes by November 2008, Democrats will have a large advantage in attracting independent voters. They will have a more excited and involved base. They will have more money. And after the immigration fiasco, they will have the support of a larger chunk of the Hispanic vote than in 2004.

Again, all this doesn't mean Clinton is odds-on to succeed George W. Bush in the White House. It does mean, though, that she has a better chance than anyone else.

By Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard, July 24, 2007

A moment from last night's debate has burst into a full-blown dispute today between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the two leading Democratic presidential candidates. It is their first public wrangling.

Senator Obama said in the debate that he would meet with the leaders of rogue nations; Senator Clinton said she would first make sure that such meetings were not intended as propaganda.

Pundits generally saw hers as the better answer, underscoring her experience on the world stage and at the same time casting Senator Obama as inexperienced.

Today, Senator Clinton drove home the point by directly criticizing Senator Obama's statement. "I thought that was irresponsible and frankly naive," Mrs. Clinton told the Quad-City Times in Iowa.

Mrs. Clinton's comments were her first real critique of Mr. Obama, and the swiftness and surety of them showed how clearly the campaign saw the debate as reinforcing her message: that she has the experience, strength and judgment to become president on Day One. It was also a reminder that the Clinton campaign can be tough.

Senator Obama said, "I would," adding that the notion that not talking to them was punishing them "is ridiculous." He said that former Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy "constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire" because the United States "had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward."

Senator Clinton said: "Well, I will not promise to meet with the leaders of
these countries during my first year. I will promise a very vigorous diplomatic effort," adding: "I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes."

The Clinton campaign saw Mrs. Clinton's answer as showcasing her ability to serve as commander-in-chief and held a conference call this morning for reporters with Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State in the administration of her husband, Bill Clinton. Ms. Albright said that Mrs. Clinton's response was a "very sophisticated answer, which shows an understanding of the whole process."

Just before the call was to begin, the Obama campaign e-mailed a statement to reporters noting that in April, Mrs. Clinton had said: "I think it is a terrible mistake for our president to say he will not talk with bad people." Thus, the Obama campaign said in its statement, Mrs. Clinton's comment in the debate was a "reversal" and showed that she disagreed with Mr. Obama's view that the United States "should use every tool at the president's disposal to address problems before they become threats."

In her interview today with the Quad-City Times, Senator Clinton rejected the notion that she had reversed herself and added that she would not foreclose talks with those leaders. But she would not promise talks within a certain time frame, either, the newspaper said, and she added that Mr. Obama was regretting his answer.

The newspaper subsequently snagged an interview with Mr. Obama. "What she's somehow maintaining is my statement could be construed as not having asked what the meeting was about," Mr. Obama said. "I didn't say these guys were going to come over for a cup of coffee some afternoon," he said. He added: "From what I heard, the point was, well, I wouldn't do that because it might allow leaders like Hugo Chavez to score propaganda points," he said. "I think that is absolutely wrong."

The Clinton campaign said that last night's debate was reminiscent of another debate moment, in April, when Mrs. Clinton showed more practiced judgment in an international crisis.

The candidates were asked how they would respond militarily to a terrorist attack on American soil that was clearly initiated by al Qaeda.

Mr. Obama said: "The first thing we'd have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans."

Mrs. Clinton said: "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate."

By Katharine Q. Seeyle, The New York Times, July 24, 2007

July 24 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton argued she was the most experienced candidate in the presidential race, while main rival Barack Obama told voters he represented the force for change in Washington during the candidates' fourth debate last night.

Clinton, Obama and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards largely refrained from attacks on each other and set out minor differences in how they would approach the war in Iraq, diplomacy and health care.

"The issue is, which of us is ready to lead on day one,'' New York Senator Clinton, 59, said. "I have 35 years of being an instrument and agent of change, before I was ever a public official.''

The debate, sponsored by CNN and Google Inc.'s YouTube video-sharing Web site at the Citadel military college in Charleston, South Carolina, featured video questions from the public on topics including gay marriage, the environment, education, women in the military and Iraq. "As I travel around the country, people have an urgent desire for change in Washington,'' said Obama, 45, a senator from Illinois. "We are not going to fix health care, we're not going to fix energy, we are not going to do anything about our education system unless we change how business is done in Washington.''

"This clearly was the 'Presidential Debate Show,' starring Clinton, Obama and Edwards, co-starring Biden and whoever, with an occasional appearance by Mike Gravel,'' said Robert Thompson, founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

South Carolina

South Carolina is scheduled to hold a primary Jan. 29. A poll by CNN and Opinion Research Corp. taken July 16-18 showed Clinton with backing from 43 percent of Democrats in the state, Obama with 27 percent and Edwards with 17 percent. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points. That mirrors most national polls of the nomination race.

Clinton's performance likely solidified her standing, said Rogan Kersh, a public service professor at New York University.

"She is an extraordinarily disciplined candidate, and tonight was a reaffirmation of that discipline,'' Kersh said. "She's very good at giving responses that are reasonably substantive without giving a lot of sharp angles which opponents can grab on to and get traction to attack her.''

Clinton drew applause with her response to a question from a member of the U.S. military about whether she would be able to deal with leaders in Muslim countries where women are sometimes regarded as "second-class citizens.''

Clinton's Response

She said that she has had many meetings with officials in Arab and Muslim countries. "I believe that there isn't much doubt in anyone's mind that I can be taken seriously,'' she said.

The Democrats said finding solutions to rising health-care costs and gaps in coverage were long overdue. "In this country, no matter who you are, whether you're a ditch-digger, you're a teacher, you're a CEO, you're a waiter, you're a maid, every American deserves the right to the best possible quality health care,'' said New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, 59.

On the Iraq war, Clinton and Obama displayed similar approaches with a call for a phased drawdown of troops and greater diplomacy with countries such as Iran and Syria.

While Richardson and Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich, 60, urged an immediate withdrawal, Joseph Biden, 64, a senator from Delaware, argued that isn't realistic. "We can't just pull out now,'' Biden said. "The truth of the matter is: if we started today, it would take one year, one year to get 160,000 troops physically out of Iraq.''

Clinton said she agreed "The best estimate is that we can probably move a brigade a month, if we really accelerate it, maybe a brigade and a half or two a month,'' she said. "That is a lot of months.''

By Catherine Dodge and Kim Chipman, Bloomberg, July 24, 2007

WASHINGTON -- With more than a year to go before the 2008 elections, Democratic candidates have raised $100 million more in campaign contributions than Republicans, putting them on track to win the money race for the White House and Congress for the first time since the government began detailed accounting of campaign fund raising three decades ago.

Democrats have taken the lead by exploiting widespread disapproval of President Bush and the Iraq war to develop a more robust online network of new, small donors, as well as to gain traction with deep-pocketed business contributors.

If their fund-raising advantage continues -- so far, Democrats have been pulling in about 58% of overall donations to federal-office seekers -- they will have more resources for pricey advertising, organization building and voter outreach next November to buttress their edge in the polls. Moreover, Democrats' focus on small donors leaves them room to raise more cash over the next year, since many contributors have yet to hit the legal limit of $2,300 per candidate per election, and could potentially keep giving.

By contrast, about two-thirds of those contributing to the campaign of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have already hit their maximum; just 8% have given less than $200. Of course, it is still early in the campaign, and big business could well ramp up funding to Republicans, who have been its longtime allies. Moreover, a financial victory doesn't always guarantee electoral victory: Republicans lost control of the House and Senate last year despite outraising Democrats $1.2 billion to $1.1 billion. In fact, candidate and party fund raising is only part of the political balance sheet. Lightly regulated independent groups with wealthy backers can also shape political contests. During the 2004 campaign, advertising by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth damaged Democrat candidate John Kerry's reputation as a war hero.

Balance Their Appeal

Another open question is how long and how well Democrats can balance their appeal to small donors -- often lower- and middle-income households and liberal activists -- with efforts to reach out to more-affluent and conservative business leaders. An early test may be the growing calls in the party to raise taxes on hedge funds and private-equity firms, an industry that has grown increasingly politically active, and has tended to favor Democrats in contributions.

But for now, the political environment strongly favors Democrats. President Bush's low popularity is energizing the Democratic base and damping morale among Republican voters and donors. That could create a situation in which a growing perception of the Democrats' chances for success next year encourages special interests to give them more money, in hopes of winning influence with those expected to be in power. "Money flow shifts with agenda control," says Michael Malbin, the executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, a nonprofit group that tracks political contributions.

So far in the 2008 campaign, Democratic candidates for the White House and Congress, along with the Democratic National Committee and other party committees, have raised a total of $388.8 million, compared with $287.3 million for Republicans, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. The figures include reports filed Friday by the House and Senate party committees for fund raising through June 30.

Should that gap persist through the end of next year, it would be the first time in the 30-year history of the FEC that Democrats outraised Republicans overall in federal elections, says FEC spokesman Bob Biersack.

The disparity is particularly sharp in the presidential race, where the eight Democratic presidential candidates raised $179.3 million through June 30, compared with $118 million for the nine declared Republican candidates. That figure doesn't include former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, who is expected to enter the race around Labor Day, and hasn't yet filed any fund-raising reports.

The Republican money leader, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, lags far behind the top two Democrats, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Obama. Mr. Romney has raised $44 million, including nearly $9 million of his own money, to their $63 million and $59 million, respectively.

The Democratic lead is especially striking because Republicans have long been viewed as closer to affluent donors and corporate sources of campaign cash -- and because 2002 campaign-finance reforms were originally expected to hurt Democrats more than Republicans. Those reforms banned unlimited "soft money" contributions to the parties for political advertising, which sometimes added up to several million dollars. Democrats were relatively more dependent on soft money, which they got mainly from unions and a handful of wealthy liberals, including Hollywood moguls.

Since then, Democrats -- led by Terry McAuliffe, then chairman of the DNC -- have invested heavily in building databases and Internet fund-raising tools to reach out to smaller donors. Mr. McAuliffe has proudly touted his "Demzilla" database, which includes detailed profiles of more than 150 million potential voters and donors and was credited with helping Mr. Kerry come close to matching President Bush in fund raising during the last presidential election.

Internet Activists

Democrats have also benefited because of their comparative strength with Internet activists. While Republican voters tend to gravitate toward traditional media like talk radio, Democratic voters with strong opinions are more likely to go online to read blogs. That, in turn, has led to an explosion in online giving to Democrats, who are building lists of thousands of small-dollar donors for a fraction of the cost of traditional direct mail.

Combined, the three leading Democratic presidential candidates -- Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards -- have raised more than $28 million online through June 30. The top three Republican candidates -- Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Romney, and Arizona Sen. John McCain -- raised $9.4 million online, though that figure doesn't include money Mr. Romney says he raised through a proprietary Web-based software program that lets supporters solicit friends and family for donations.

In addition to online fund raising, Democrats are also gaining among large donors, often with business and regulatory interests that make it important for them to be on the winning side. Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group and other members of the Private Equity Council trade group gave 69% of their $3.4 million in campaign donations to Democrats last year, up from 51% of $2.7 million in 2000, data from the Center for Responsive Politics show. Separate data for large hedge funds show a similar pattern of giving. Other sectors are following suit. The securities industry flipped its allegiance to Democrats in 2006, giving more to Democrats than Republicans for the first time in a decade, the Center for Responsive Politics said.

Switching Sides

Some wealthy Republicans also are switching sides, including business executives who want access to the levers of power, or who simply don't mind crossing party lines to support candidates they like. Many say they are disturbed by the steep growth in government spending under President Bush, as well as the perceived erosion of America's standing in the world.

New York venture capitalist and former American Express Co. Chief Executive James D. Robinson III, a lifelong Republican, says he is backing Mrs. Clinton. "She's been very involved in business development and sensitive to our issues," Mr. Robinson says. Other Republicans supporting the New York Democrat for president include Terrence A. Duffy, executive chairman of CME Group, the Chicago-based commodities market; John Mack, Morgan Stanley Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Jeffrey Volk, who heads Citigroup Inc.'s global agency and trust business.

By Mary Jacoby and Brody Mullins, The Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2007

A steady hand outscores a fresh face in uncertain times, much to the benefit of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race for president. But demand for a new direction is strong, nonetheless - a lurking threat to her front-running candidacy.

Clinton and Barack Obama are tied for support among Democrats who chiefly seek "a new direction and new ideas" in the nation's leadership. By contrast, she trounces him by more than 30 points among those looking more for strength and experience, maintaining the overall advantage she's held all year in ABC News/Washington Post polls.

The challenge for Clinton is that a new direction and new ideas are actually more valued than strong leadership and experience - by 51 percent to 42 percent - among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. That means Clinton's strongest cards are in a weaker suit; if Obama were able either to challenge her on strength and experience, or - more likely - better capitalize on his "new direction" image, the contest could tighten.

As things stand, Clinton's now supported by 45 percent of leaned Democrats, Obama by 30 percent and John Edwards by 12 percent, with all others in the single digits. These numbers have been remarkably steady since February.

STRENGTH and ELECTABILITY - One change is a surge in "strong" support for each of the major candidates, suggesting a hardening of positions as the campaign progresses. Sixty-eight percent of Clinton's supporters now strongly back her, up 15 points to a new high. Fifty-six percent of Obama's backers are strongly behind him, up 13 points from last month.

With Clinton's continued lead comes an aura of electability, at least in her own party.

Fifty percent of leaned Democrats pick her as the candidate who has the best chance to win in 2008, more than twice as many as name Obama. Indeed, three in 10 of Obama's own supporters see Clinton as having the better chance to win.

In all, just 54 percent of Obama's supporters think he has the best chance to win in a general election contest. By contrast, 78 percent of Clinton's backers say she's got the best shot against the eventual Republican nominee.

DYNAMICS - As noted, the Democratic contest has been steady: Clinton has led Obama by 15 or 16 percentage points in each of four ABC/Post polls since he formally entered the race in February. Her 45 percent and his 30 percent support both are numerically their best in ABC/Post polls. Edwards has 12 percent support - he hit 17 percent in April.

But there are changes beneath the surface: One, as noted, is possible hardening of positions as shown by the top candidates' growing "strong" support. Another is that Clinton has smoothed her support profile between the sexes. Last month, she led Obama by 2-to-1 among women, and tied him among men; this month, her edge among women is less overwhelming, but she's recovered among men.

There's also an indication that some of Obama's early novelty may have subsided. In the February and April ABC/Post polls, he came nearest to Clinton among Democrats who were very closely following the race. In the last two polls, in June and now, that's no longer so. Closer interest has not continued to align with better numbers for Obama.

GROUPS - At the same time, these candidates continue to divvy up important Democratic constituencies.

Obama has a slight numerical lead - within sampling tolerances - among African-Americans, and comes close to Clinton among liberals, both core Democratic groups. Obama runs evenly with Clinton, moreover, among college-educated leaned Democrats - and education is a strong predictor of voting.

Clinton has her biggest leads among low-income and low-education groups - not the most reliable voters - and conservatives - not a big group in the Democratic Party. But she also leads particularly among mainline Democrats, 50 percent to 31 percent, as opposed to Democratic-leaning independents; and among seniors, who do tend to turn out.

Obama is much more competitive among independents who lean Democratic, a group that can be difficult to get to the polls in primaries - with the notable exception of the New Hampshire primary.

EDWARDS - Edwards' support profile, while fairly flat and barely in the double digits, does include some differences. He does more than twice as well among men as women - 18 percent support vs. seven percent - possibly a reason his wife has been touting his credentials on women's issues. Despite a populist campaign message based on economic justice, his support is numerically lowest - single digits - among lower-income Democrats, young adults and blacks.
Edwards does not crack into second place in any individual group, though he essentially ties Obama among married men - 20 percent for Edwards, 23 percent for Obama, and 44 percent for Clinton.

COMFORT - Clinton would make history as the first woman presidential nominee, Obama as the first African-American. Most Americans are at least somewhat comfortable with that: Eighty-six percent describe themselves as entirely or somewhat comfortable with an African-American president, 79 percent with a woman president.

There are slight partisan differences on a black president, but bigger ones on the notion of a woman president.

While 89 percent of Democrats describe themselves as comfortable with a woman president, that falls to 62 percent of Republicans, mainly because it's just 54 percent among conservative Republicans. They may be thinking specifically about Clinton, who, for years has been particularly unpopular among conservative Republicans.

It's noteworthy that while substantial numbers of Americans say they'd be at least somewhat comfortable with a black or woman president - or Hispanic at 74 percent - considerably fewer would be "entirely" comfortable with any of these - 56 percent, 54 percent and 44 percent respectively. Should either current Democratic front-runner win the nomination, the dynamics of race and sex could prove critical in the general election ahead.

The Fix is en route to Charleston, S.C., today for another (!) presidential debate. This time it's the Democrats and there's a twist: Instead of a moderator asking questions, the questions will come from people across the country via Youtube. Anderson Cooper of CNN will be on hand to ask follow-ups.

The format of tonight's debate is different, but the issues are likely to be along the same lines that we've seen in the debates to date: The war in Iraq, health care, terrorism and the economy. Let's hope a few of the video questions force the candidates to think a bit on their feet and even engage one another.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: There's been no debate (wink, wink) about the best performer in the first several joint appearances of the the campaign. Clinton has come across as polished, magnanimous and, well, presidential. She also enters tonight's debate on a polling high, as a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey shows Clinton at 39 percent, with Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) at 25 percent and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) at 15 percent.

Barack Obama: Obama's campaign acknowledges privately that debates are not their candidate's preferred format. But to Obama's credit, he has improved over the first several debates and could be poised for a strong showing tonight. Obama, to date, has avoided directly confronting Clinton -- choosing instead to draw implicit contrasts about their respective positioning on the war. There's no question that if he hopes to defeat Clinton next year, he'll have to make his differences with the former first lady more apparent. Does that differentiation process start in earnest tonight?

John Edwards: There is a perception among the political chattering classes that Edwards's campaign is losing momentum. Tonight is a good chance for Edwards to reverse that sentiment with a strong performance. In the first several debates, Edwards struggled for attention, as most of the eyes (and coverage) centered on Clinton and Obama. But Edwards has started to draw sharper contrasts over the past weeks with Clinton and could well use the national platform tonight to take the fight to her. Attacking Clinton directly is a tricky business, however. Just ask Rick Lazio.

Bill Richardson: Richardson's fundraising in the second quarter was surprisingly strong, and his early ads in Iowa and New Hampshire are helping him move up in the polls. And yet, no candidate has been more disappointing in the debates than Richardson. He has looked awkward on stage and unable to trim his answers to the required format. His advisers are no doubt aware of these problems, so look for Richardson to be a bit smoother tonight (it would be almost impossible for him to be less smooth). Expect Richardson also to focus on his plan to remove all troops from Iraq by the end of the year -- an attempt to distinguish his position from those of Clinton, Obama and Edwards.

In response to her questions, Undersecretary Eric Edelman last week sent her a tough-worded letter saying public discussion of such matters "reinforces enemy propaganda."

Clinton called that charge an outrageous political attack, and has asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates for an explanation.

"The need for the committee to know the status of Department of Defense redeployment planning is clear, yet past efforts by individual members to obtain this information were rebuffed," the senators wrote to the chairman, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan.

The Democrats also noted that the issue has already been raised by two senior Republicans. Legislation offered by Sens. John Warner of Virginia and Richard Lugar of Indiana sought to have the Pentagon report to Congress in October on end-of-war planning.

Clinton's very public feud with a senior aide at the Pentagon may boost her standing among anti-war voters and liberal Democrats critical in the Democratic primaries next year. Some anti-war voters are wary of her candidacy because she voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2002.

By Devlin Barrett, Associated Press, July 23, 2007

THE NUMBERS - DEMOCRATS

Hillary Clinton, 36 percent

Al Gore, 14 percent

Barack Obama, 14 percent

John Edwards, 9 percent

No opinion, 14 percent

___

THE NUMBERS - REPUBLICANS

Rudy Giuliani, 30 percent

Fred Thompson, 18 percent

John McCain, 10 percent

Mitt Romney, 9 percent

No opinion, 19 percent

The Quinnipiac poll was conducted July 12-16. For the Democratic candidates, 438 Democratic voters were asked their preference to win the Democratic nomination. For the Republican candidates, 433 Republican voters were asked their preference for the GOP nomination. The margin of sampling error for each group was plus or minus 5 percentage points.

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - In a three-person contest, many Democratic Party supporters in the United States select Hillary Rodham Clinton as their preferred presidential nominee in 2008, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 43 per cent of respondents would like to see the New York senator as their candidate, down five points since June.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 24 per cent, followed by former North Carolina senator John Edwards with 16 per cent.

Earlier this month, former defence under-secretary Eric Edelman questioned Rodham Clinton's call to start planning for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, claiming it "reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq" and "unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks." Rodham Clinton said she was "shocked by the time-worn tactic of once again impugning the patriotism of any of us who raise serious questions (about the Iraq war)."

By a wide margin, Democrats view Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) as the party's candidate best positioned to win the general election, and she holds a double-digit lead over Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in the race for the nomination, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

How competitive the Democratic contest becomes could turn on the question of whether voters are significantly more interested in a fresh face or in a candidate they see as projecting strong leadership.

Clinton enjoys a substantial edge over Obama among the 4 in 10 Democrats who said that in assessing presidential candidates, strength and experience are more important than new ideas or a new direction. Even among the 51 percent who prefer a change-oriented candidate, the core message of Obama's campaign, Clinton runs even with him.

It may be equally important that Clinton's initial support for the Iraq war is not proving a significant impediment to her bid. Clinton has drawn criticism this year for refusing to apologize for her 2002 vote authorizing the use of force, but the poll shows her leading among Democrats who support a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces as well as those who oppose a deadline. She has a 51 percent to 29 percent lead over Obama among those in favor of a complete, immediate withdrawal.

Obama has sought to make his initial opposition to the war an asset in his campaign, but Clinton has become increasingly vocal in criticizing President Bush's management of the war and now supports a timetable for the start of troop withdrawals.

The poll comes as Democrats assemble in Charleston, S.C., tonight for their fourth debate of the year. The two-hour debate, sponsored by CNN and You Tube, will feature questions posted on YouTube, a video-sharing site, by people from around the country in what is likely to be one of the most innovative debate formats to date.

With almost six months of hard campaigning before the first primaries and caucuses, the Democratic race is far from settled.

To close the gap with Clinton, Obama will need to convince more voters that he is the best candidate to offer the country a new direction after the partisan wars of the past decades. He must also neutralize Clinton's advantage among those who emphasize strength and experience, or draw significant numbers of new voters to the primaries. The nomination battle could also be decided on the question of who Democrats believe has the best chance of recapturing the White House after eight years of Republican rule.

Clinton is a polarizing figure, which has raised questions about whether she could win a general election. But Democrats appear to dismiss that argument. Asked which Democratic candidate has the best chance of winning the general election in November 2008, 54 percent said Clinton, more than twice the percentage saying Obama (22 percent). Nine percent think former senator John Edwards (N.C.) would be most likely to win. Among Democratic-leaning independents, 44 percent said Clinton, 25 percent Obama and 11 percent Edwards. Republicans and independents are less convinced that Clinton has the best shot. Among independents, 35 percent cited Clinton as the Democrat with the best chance of beating the GOP nominee and 29 percent said Obama. Among Republicans, 37 percent said Clinton and 33 percent Obama.

At this early stage, Clinton remains the candidate to beat in the Democratic field.

Overall, 45 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents support Clinton to be the party's nominee, with Obama second at 30 percent. Edwards, whose hopes for winning depend heavily on a victory in the Iowa caucuses in January, is at 12 percent. Clinton's margin over Obama has been generally steady since February, just after the two candidates launched their presidential bids.

Clinton leads among both women and men in the new poll, holds a 30-point advantage among those from households with incomes under $50,000 and has a 2 to 1 lead among those with an education of a high school diploma or less. Obama's strength stems from relatively high support among those with higher levels of education and income and from independents -- groups that have helped him achieve record fundraising success. But Clinton is competitive with Obama within these groups as well.

She and Obama split the votes of Democrats with college degrees and of those with household incomes of $50,000 a year or higher. They also have about equal levels of support from Democratic-leaning independents. (Among mainline Democrats, Clinton has an advantage of 50 percent to 31 percent.)

Among whites, Clinton leads Obama by double digits, but the two run nearly neck-and-neck among African Americans: Forty-six percent would vote for Obama and 40 percent for Clinton.

Clinton's backers also tend to be more enthusiastic in their support than are Obama's, but both candidates have solidified some of their support from early June. Two-thirds of Democrats who support Clinton do so strongly, compared with 56 percent of Obama's supporters.

This Post-ABC News poll also gauged how comfortable Americans are at the prospect of a barrier-breaking president. Large majorities said they would be comfortable with a woman, African American or Hispanic president, but fewer would be "entirely comfortable." Eight in 10 said they would be comfortable with a female head of state; 86 percent said so of an African American, as did 74 percent of a Hispanic. But fewer said they would have no reservations: Fifty-four percent would be "entirely comfortable" with a female president, 56 percent with an African American and 44 percent with a Latino. Some of this hesitancy may reflect that the question is no longer hypothetical in a field that features contenders seeking to be the first president who is female (Clinton), African American (Obama) or Latino (Richardson).

Although it is only July, Americans are paying closer attention to this presidential race than they have to past contests. Seventy percent of those surveyed are following the election very or somewhat closely. But far fewer are watching the televised debates. Seventy-three percent have not tuned in to any of the debates, with about half of those who have skipped watching saying it is simply too early in the campaign.

The poll was conducted July 18-21 among a random national sample of 1,125 adults. The results from the full poll have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points; it is four percentage points among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

Monday night, 400 women plan to hold house parties to watch the Democratic candidates debate - twice as many parties as women had for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama on June 24.

Ann Lewis, the senior Clinton adviser in charge of outreach to women, says the campaign will focus on single women this fall. The non-partisan group Women's Voices, Women Vote found that more than 18 million single women are eligible to vote but unregistered. In 2004, the group said, almost 5 million were registered but didn't vote.

Clinton leads all national polls of the Democratic field. She had 45% of the women's vote, vs. 41% overall, in an aggregate of seven USA TODAY/Gallup polls from April 2 to July 8. She did best among women over 65, at 49%, and worst among women 18-29, at 39%.

Obama comes closest to Clinton's organizational efforts. Like Clinton, he has state and county-level networks in early states. He also has a women's policy committee and five regional fundraisers. Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Edwards have high-profile roles promoting their husbands. Elizabeth Edwards said of Clinton in Salon, an online magazine, "I'm not convinced she'd be as good an advocate for women" as John Edwards. That led former president Bill Clinton to say on ABC that no one has "a longer history of working for women, for families and children, than Hillary does."

Jennifer Donahue, a political analyst at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., says Clinton draws big crowds of women but not all are on board. "Female voters want to check her out," she says. "Whether they want to support her or not, they want to see her in person."

You couldn't be doing better raising money than Barack Obama has been. While an experienced, veteran senator and candidate like John McCain is running out of money and firing the staffers who haven't quit themselves- staving off obituaries that are at least in draft form- the young senator from Illinois is literally rolling in the dough. To beat Hillary Clinton in raising money is a very very big deal; to have raised more than Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, both of whom have been in this game for longer than Obama, is a major accomplishment in anyone's book. Obama doesn't have to defend a vote in favor of the war; he's had one wife who is a terrific woman and extraordinarily attractive campaigner; he has adorable children, a very smart staff, and a committed army of Internet fans.

So the question is: where's the surge? Why is the guy who can outraise everybody, who has more donors than anybody, basically stuck in second and not moving in the polls?

It certainly isn't the media's fault. I've never seen anyone get the kind of coverage he does. It's not the fault of his fellow candidates, or the folks on the other side. Other than a spat over a year ago with McCain, and Sen. Joe Biden's inarticulate description of his cleanliness- which hurt Biden and not Obama-no one has laid a glove on him.

Like all the Democratic candidates, he's been calling for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, which obviously requires some planning to accomplish properly, but you don't see the Defense Department goons going after Obama the way they did Hillary this week, accusing her of giving comfort to the enemy. Hillary has a legion of pundits and pontificaters who wake up every morning hoping to fill their space or air time with something she did wrong, but it's hard to find anyone out there doing Obama parodies, or calling him names, or questioning his masculinity, his competence, or his loyalty. Respected and not-so-respected journalists have turned the business of writing books attacking Hillary into a cottage industry, but with Obama, he writes his own books, tells the story his way, and with a little help from Oprah, is on the bestseller list with his memoirs, not ducking the books attacking him.

Nor is it a matter of race, at least if people are being half-honest. In any number of polls, the public, as well as Democrats, are asked if they're ready for a black president or a woman president. And in every one, people are always more accepting of the idea of a black president than they are of the prospect of a woman in the top job. At least in terms of who should be president, sexism tops racism every time.

But then something curious happens. In the same polls, when the same people are asked whether they support Clinton or Obama, Hillary wins handily, beating her rival by as much as 20 points. What gives?

I have a simple answer. Actually, it's not mine, but one I learned from my one-time rival, the late Lee Atwater, the legendary political operative who ran George Bush the elder's campaign against my candidate, Michael Dukakis, back in 1988. Lee had a theory he told me after the election. The way he described it, there's a little boat and in it are the people Americans are willing to accept as qualified to be president. It doesn't mean they like them, doesn't mean they'd ever vote for them, but it means they have passed the essential test of being big enough and capable enough to be in the job. His theory, back then, was that George Bush, even when he was trailing Dukakis in the polls, was always in the boat. Dukakis, he believed, never was. When push came to shove, that meant Dukakis was vulnerable in ways Bush was not; he couldn't withstand mistakes the way Bush could. People might like the idea of a Dukakis better than the idea of a Bush, but Dukakis was easier to destroy, and Bush was always more likely to win. Lee's view was that it was difficult for newcomers to national politics to get in that boat, and relatively easy to push them out when they tried.

Barack Obama is a great first date. He is the smartest, freshest, most exciting new face to come along in politics in years. But he is a new face. It's hard to forget that on 9/11, when Hillary was in the Senate, and Rudy was at Ground Zero, and Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, Barack was in Springfield, Ill., serving as a state senator. He was right about the war in Iraq, as it turned out, but he wasn't there, in the Senate, in the debate, in the place where it mattered.

He's still a first date, and he's not in the boat yet. He can't really prove himself in the Senate. He's hardly there, is junior on every committee, isn't in charge of anything or able to put in the time to make anything happen. The place he has to prove himself is on the campaign. But that requires more than winning the money primary. He needs to prove to people that he belongs on that little boat, a place where Hillary is already sitting, and the former state senator has yet to climb in.

Ironically, he needs precisely the sort of confrontations he has yet to face, crises he has yet to endure, challenges he has yet to surmount, to prove that he is up to a promotion to the hardest job in the world.

The one thing most of us would probably agree upon, regardless of our politics or persuasions, is that the world is a much more dangerous and complicated place than it used to be, or at least than we thought it was. Dealing with invisible enemies who hate us as a matter of religious faith, hate us more than they love themselves or their own children, is nothing less than terrifying.

We are traveling in rough waters, and that makes climbing in to Lee's little boat more difficult than it has ever been. For all his money, Barack has his work cut out for him.

For John Edwards, Iowa is his field of dreams. He built his campaign strategy on the belief that a victory in the Iowa caucuses next January would propel him to front-runner status and position him well for New Hampshire and the crush of Feb. 5 primaries. Statewide polls that often placed him at the top of the pack here suggested that his hard work in Iowa had paid off.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are outspending him, bringing in sophisticated campaign staffs, lining up crucial endorsements and drawing crowds that have numbered in the thousands. Mrs. Clinton generated excitement when she brought in her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to campaign at her side. Mr. Obama has also attracted large crowds, especially on college campuses and among young voters.

"John Edwards cannot take this state for granted," said Peverill Squire, a professor of political science at the University of Iowa and the author of "The Iowa Caucuses and the Presidential Nominating Process."

"He has every reason to be concerned that in the next five months Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will pass him," Professor Squire said. "They are getting more attention and they have a celebrity that he cannot match."

Mr. Edwards acknowledges that he must win in Iowa, which is the only state holding an early presidential contest where he is on equal footing with Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama. "Iowa is crucial for anyone, not just me," Mr. Edwards said in an interview while traveling in a van from Webster City to the roadside hotel where he was staying in Fort Dodge. "It would be hard to win the nomination if you don't win Iowa."

In addition, Mrs. Clinton has lined up endorsements from 14 Iowa lawmakers and from former Gov. Tom Vilsack, who had supported Mr. Edwards in 2004. Mr. Obama has endorsements from three legislators and from the state's attorney general and treasurer. Mr. Edwards has no state-level endorsements, but his campaign said endorsements would be forthcoming.

In Iowa, Mr. Edwards's message is stridently antiwar, and he highlights his support of broader health care coverage and an antipoverty theme, issues intended to resonate with Iowa caucusgoers, who tend to be liberal. Mr. Edwards's situation is a mirror image of his come-from-behind campaign in 2004, when a strong showing in Iowa propelled him to national prominence. He came in second to Senator John Kerry, and the two went on to become the Democratic presidential ticket.

Participants in the Iowa Democratic caucuses - usually 125,000 to 150,000 people - must show up in a public gathering to declare, out loud and in front of their neighbors, who they are supporting. The caucuses are often seen as a winnowing process that separates true candidates from also-rans.

For Mr. Edwards, any winnowing here could be fatal. He trails Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama in financing and in national polls, and some analysts say a poor showing in Iowa will make it difficult for him to rebound, even as he campaigns hard in two other early states: Nevada, which has a strong union presence, and South Carolina, where he holds some regional appeal.

"If Edwards doesn't do well here, he's dead, completely dead," said Dennis J. Goldford, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines. "He can't survive a second or third place showing here. Obama and Hillary can."

"John Edwards's residual support is real," Mr. Vilsack, the former governor, said in an interview, "and if the caucuses were held today, he'd be in good shape; but his challenge is to grow his support beyond what he got in 2004. He can't rely on that support to take him all the way."

On a recent two-day, 10-city tour of rural Iowa, Mr. Edwards stuck to a script. Meetings usually began with Mr. Edwards's bringing greetings from his popular wife, Elizabeth. He then spoke for 5 to 10 minutes and opened the floor to questions, which usually followed a familiar pattern - Iraq, health care and immigration. He always closed by thanking supporters and asking for the votes of those who were still shopping.

Nearly everyone attending the events, whether at the Fort Dodge Library, the Rustix Restaurant in Humboldt or the middle school in Algona, wore John Edwards stickers. But they were not all supporters. McKinley Bailey, 26, who served with the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is a member of the Iowa General Assembly, introduced Mr. Edwards at the Webster City gathering, even though Mr. Bailey, who represents the district, has not endorsed a candidate.

Mr. Bailey said that Mr. Edward's strength in Iowa could also work against him should Iowa voters want a fresh face.

"Iowa voters want someone who can beat the Republicans, and that will determine who will win," Mr. Bailey said. "Edwards's familiarity will help him in rural Iowa, where he can connect with people and make them feel comfortable, but I think that when he gets to the cities, that could be detrimental. People there are looking for something new, and personal relations don't mean as much."

By Leslie Wayne, The New York Times, July 22, 2007

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Hillary Rodham Clinton is holding on to the top position among the Democratic Party's presidential hopefuls, according to a poll by Opinion Dynamics released by Fox News. 39 per cent of respondents would vote for the New York senator in a 2008 primary, down three points since late June.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 23 per cent, followed by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore with nine per cent, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards also with nine per cent. Support is lower for Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and Delaware senator Joe Biden.

On Jul. 19, Kucinich discussed his views on health care, declaring, "Americans spend about $2.2 trillion U.S. a year for health. Now, if all that money went for health care, we'd have enough to cover everything plus vision care, dental care, mental health, prescription drug, long-term care, but 31 cents on a dollar goes for the activities of the for-profit system, so over $600 billion U.S. a year goes for the for-profit insurance companies and, frankly, I don't believe that that's the appropriate way to proceed."

As the Pentagon battles Hillary Clinton on the war in Iraq, Barack Obama argues about kindergarteners. What a contrast.

While the Obama camp struggled to clarify his stand in this minor league squabble, the Clinton campaign is on much bigger turf. In a provocative letter to Clinton, a Pentagon official all but suggested that the New York senator was aiding the enemy in asking for details about contingencies for a withdrawal from Iraq.

Even Obama aides acknowledge they would gladly trade their playground fight with Romney for Clinton's big time debate with military chiefs.

In May, the New York Democrat sought information about the Pentagon's plans for pulling troops out of the war zone. In response to her inquiry, Undersecretary Eric S. Edelman dispatched a letter accusing her of reinforcing "enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies" by discussing a timetable, an answer that Clinton deplored yesterday as "an unacceptable and outrageous political attack."

"Redeploying out of Iraq will be difficult and requires careful planning," Clinton said. "I continue to call on the Bush administration to immediately provide a redeployment strategy that will keep our brave men and women safe as they leave Iraq -- instead of adhering to a political strategy to attack those who rightfully question their competence and preparedness after years of mistakes and misjudgments."

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, 43 percent

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, 27 percent

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, 17 percent

No opinion, 9 percent

THE NUMBERS - REPUBLICAN
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, 30 percent
Arizona Sen. John McCain, 21 percent
Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, 18 percent
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 6 percent
No opinion, 11 percent

OF INTEREST:

Deep ties through her husband's presidency are helping Clinton, who has lagged Obama in building an organization in South Carolina. Obama had been expected to do well in South Carolina, where half of the early voting state's Democratic voters are black. Giuliani appears to have weathered the news of his former state chairman's federal indictment on a cocaine distribution charge. McCain appears to be holding his own despite national and state staff shake-ups.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. Poll was conducted by telephone July 16-18. The poll of 1,052 adults included 432 likely Republican primary voters and 380 likely Democratic primary voters. It has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Eric Edelman, the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, offered a sharply-worded response, saying such discussions boost the enemy. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman wrote. His tough language in a letter obtained Thursday was surprising in part because it came in correspondence with a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which has oversight of the Pentagon.

Clinton responded Friday in a letter to Edelman's boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, asking if he agreed with Edelman's charge. She said Edelman had ducked her questions and "instead made spurious arguments to avoid addressing contingency planning."

"Undersecretary Edelman has his priorities backward," Clinton wrote, calling his claim "outrageous and dangerous."

She repeated her request for a briefing - classified if necessary - on the issue of end-of-war planning. The senator's spokesman Philippe Reines said: "We sent a serious letter to the Secretary of Defense, and unacceptably got a political response back."

As she runs for president, Clinton has ratcheted up her criticism of the Bush administration's war effort, answering critics of her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq invasion by saying she would end the war if elected president. If she wins, Clinton may find herself overseeing a troop withdrawal policy, but others have also raised the issue, including Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana.

Edelman's letter does indicate the Pentagon might be planning how to withdraw, saying: "We are always evaluating and planning for possible contingencies. As you know, it is longstanding departmental policy that operational plans, including contingency plans, are not released outside of the department."

By Devlin Barrett, Associated Press, July 20, 2007

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton often breaks into a big smile, and sometimes even giggles, when audiences applaud a popular part of her stump speech - the moment she says her candidacy may lead to the election of the first female president of the United States.

In highlighting the historic nature of Mrs. Clinton's candidacy, her campaign must strike a delicate balance: appealing to women's pride, while at the same time extending her candidacy beyond sex.

The campaign has recently begun calling homes in New York with a recorded message from Mrs. Clinton. The goal is to raise money and recruit volunteers, but they also test a theme that underscores her sex. In the calls, Mrs. Clinton says that when she becomes president, the listener's daughter, or granddaughter, will walk a little taller.

Campaign officials are taking account of Mrs. Clinton's own history at the polls. For all the natural affinity of women toward her campaign, some are ambivalent, skeptical or even hostile about her - be it her political views or her personality. This is a subject of fascination within the Clinton campaign. Why, some aides wonder, do polls show that some women, particularly those who fit Mrs. Clinton's demographic - married, educated, upper-income and professional - dislike her? Clinton advisers say it often boils down to one of two issues: She is seen as too liberal, or comes across as unlikable. In response, the campaign and Mrs. Clinton emphasize her life story and her accomplishments, while also hitting a grace note or two about the glass ceiling.

"I tell women that as a woman president, she would understand our lives because it's her life, too," said Ellen Malcolm, the president of Emily's List and a national chairwoman of the Clinton campaign. "And then it's quickly on to her qualifications."

Clinton rivals are by no means conceding the women's vote. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico said so explicitly this week, and Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former Senator John Edwards, said in an interview with salon.com that Mrs. Clinton was "just not as vocal a women's advocate as I want to see."

Yet the Clinton campaign is much farther along then any of its rivals in an effort to build uncontestable female support. To get more women to watch her in a televised debate on Monday, for instance, the campaign is organizing about 400 house parties nationwide, all held by women, with guest lists dominated by women.

"If you look at the record on women's issues, I defy you to find anybody who has run for office in recent history whose got a longer history of working for women, for families and children, than Hillary does," Bill Clinton said Thursday in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

On Tuesday, in an interview published in the online magazine Salon, Elizabeth Edwards said that her husband John Edwards would be a more consistent champion for women if elected president. "Keeping that door open to women is actually more a policy of John's than Hillary's," she said, suggesting the New York senator may be avoiding women's issues to "behave as a man."

President Clinton disputed that contention.

"I don't think she's trying to be a man. I don't think it's inconsistent with being a woman that you can also be knowledgeable on military and security affairs and be strong when the occasion demands it.

"I don't consider that being manly. I consider that being a leader," he said.

NEW YORK - Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton now holds a slight lead over top Republican Rudy Giuliani for the first time in a hypothetical 2008 presidential matchup. In fact, to varying degrees, Clinton and fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama beat every Republican candidate they are tested against in the latest FOX News Poll.

Opinion Dynamics Corp. conducted the national telephone poll of 900 registered voters for FOX News from July 17 to July 18. The poll has a 3-point error margin.

President Bush can do little to give Republicans a boost as his own ratings remain dismal. Today, 32 percent of Americans say they approve of the job Bush is doing and 61 percent disapprove. His current approval is just 1 point higher than his record-low 31 percent approval received last month (June 26-27).

Another hurdle for Republican hopefuls is the perception that Democrats in Congress (38 percent) are more optimistic than Republicans in Congress (31 percent) about the direction of the country.

In seven different head-to-head matchups, the poll shows the Democratic candidate tops the Republican. While this had been the case when Clinton was tested against Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, this is the first time she has the advantage over Giuliani.

By a 5 percentage point margin, voters say they would back Clinton over Giuliani (46 percent to 41 percent) if the election were held today. Clinton also leads McCain by 3 points (45 percent to 42 percent), Romney by 15 points (50 percent to 35 percent) and the yet-to-announce Fred Thompson by 9 points (47 percent to 38 percent).

In addition, voters think Clinton would do a better job than Giuliani handling the situation in Iraq (45 percent to 40 percent).

When voters are asked which one candidate they would pick to sit down and have a conversation with, 26 percent say Clinton, 18 percent Obama, 12 percent Giuliani, 8 percent McCain and 7 percent Thompson.

Among Democrats, 41 percent would pick Clinton and 26 percent Obama; no other candidate receives double-digits. Among Republicans, 25 percent say they would want to have a conversation with Giuliani, 15 percent McCain and 15 percent Thompson - and 12 percent of Republicans pick Clinton and 9 percent Obama.

And when asked which candidate they would definitely vote for under "almost any circumstances," once again Clinton tops the list with 17 percent compared to 10 percent for Obama, 9 percent Giuliani, 4 percent Al Gore, 4 percent McCain and 4 percent Thompson.

Democrats are much more definitive here, with 31 percent saying they would definitely vote for Clinton under almost any circumstances and 18 percent for Obama. For Republicans, 18 percent say they would definitely vote for Giuliani under almost any circumstances, 9 percent Thompson and 8 percent McCain.

For Obama, many voters either think he lacks the right experience or are unsure. Just over a third of voters (35 percent) think he has the right experience, including 47 percent of Democrats. In December, 22 percent of voters thought Obama had the right experience.

More voters think Clinton is basing her candidacy on her own experience (45 percent) than on her husband Bill's experience (30 percent); 20 percent say both.

"It is clear that the current climate in the country is helping the Democrats," comments Opinion Dynamics CEO John Gorman. "While the Clinton legacy is a polarizing factor, the Bush presidency may be even more polarizing. Compared to Al Gore's attempt to separate himself from Clinton in 2000, the eventual Republican nominee may face an even harder task."

Nomination Races Mostly Unchanged

Clinton continues to show her strength in the race for the Democratic nomination with a 16-point lead over Obama (41 percent and 25 percent, respectively). John Edwards receives the backing of 12 percent. There is little change when Gore is included in the race: Clinton receives 39 percent, Obama 23 percent, Edwards 9 percent and Gore 9 percent.

Among Republicans, Giuliani remains the front-runner with 27 percent, followed by McCain and Thompson both at 16 percent and Romney at 9 percent. The number of undecided voters has bounced around quite a bit on the Republican side and is up this week to 20 percent from 11 percent in late June. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has little impact on the race. He receives the support of 2 percent, down from 8 percent previously, and putting him below former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 3 percent. A final point on the Republican candidates - more voters think McCain (41 percent) would do a better job handling Iraq than Giuliani (32 percent). This is also true among Republicans: 45 percent think McCain would do a better job and 38 percent say Giuliani would.

By Dana Blanton, FOX News, July 19, 2007

July 19 (Bloomberg) -- A majority of registered voters, 63 percent, said they think New York Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton is likely to be the next U.S. president, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll.

Even 53 percent of Republicans said that Clinton, a Democrat, will win next year's presidential election, according to the survey, compared with 77 percent of Democrats who see her as the winner.

Among likely Democratic primary voters, 43 percent said they would want Clinton to be the party's nominee, compared with 24 percent for Illinois Senator Barack Obama and 16 percent for former North Carolina Senator John Edwards.

Among likely Republican primary voters, 33 percent said they would want former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to be the party's nominee compared with 25 percent who backed former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, who hasn't declared his candidacy, and 15 percent who supported Arizona Senator John McCain.

The survey of 1,554 U.S. adults was conducted July 9-17 and has a margin of error for the entire sample of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Fifty-one percent of voters surveyed said Iowa and New Hampshire, which will cast the first votes in next year's presidential primaries and caucuses, have too much influence in presidential elections.

By Nicholas Johnston, Bloomberg, July 19, 2007

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., announced Wednesday that Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, has endorsed her campaign for president.

Tauscher, a six-term congresswoman, is chair of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.

"America is ready for a leader who will end the war in Iraq and a president who will respect our armed forces and military families," Tauscher said in a statement.

"Hillary Clinton is the candidate with the experience to lead our country, and I'm confident she will make a great president."

By Kevin Yamamura, The Sacramento Bee, July 19, 2007

It was 3:45 a.m. when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, walked through the doors of the cloakroom to take her seat in the back row of the Senate chamber. She was, at this hour, the only Democrat seated at a desk on the Senate floor.

As she rose to speak, she adjusted her papers on the lectern. Suddenly, though, it was no longer her turn. On the other side of the chamber, Senator John McCain of Arizona also was standing and as the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, Mr. McCain had Republican time to use. Turning to a large map of Iraq that rested on an easel, he said: "I urge the indulgence of my colleagues."

For more than 20 minutes, Senator Clinton listened and jotted down notes. She drank enough water for a second glass to be delivered to her Senate desk. Still, she seemed to be far more alert than many of the people who had spent the night in the Capitol.

As a Democratic presidential candidate, Mrs. Clinton is not given special treatment in the Senate. She wasn't sure when, exactly, she would be called to speak. (Hopefully, before the morning news.) So she spent the evening in her small Senate hideaway office. And finally, around 4:15 a.m., she began.

"There are no good answers," Senator Clinton said. "Anyone who stands here and believes that he or she has the truth, the facts and understands both what is going on and what is likely to flow from whatever decision we take is most probably to be proven wrong by reality as it unfolds."

As she endorsed the legislation before the Senate - a plan to begin withdrawing troops within 120 days - Mrs. Clinton spoke slowly and deliberately about Iraq.

"Many of us have been searching for the best approach to take with respect to our involvement in Iraq for a number of years," she said. "But we don't do it with any sense that we know everything that will happen no matter what decisions are taken. But what we do have is a history of miscalculations and mistakes that we are now attempting to deal with."

"The catalogs of miscalculations, misjudgments and mistakes in Iraq shocks the conscience," she said. Then, she went on to mention the looming threat of Iran, saying: "Everybody knows that the Iraqi government is as much a client of Iran as it is an ally of the United States."

With that, her time had concluded. It's not bedtime yet, though. Another vote is coming soon. And a rival presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, is scheduled to speak shortly after dawn.

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - If three residents of the Empire State ran for president in 2008, more voters in the United States would support the Democratic candidate, according to a poll by Blum & Weprin Associates published in the New York Daily News. 40 per cent of respondents would vote for New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton next year.

Republican former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is second with 33 per cent, followed by current New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg-running as an independent-with 10 per cent. 17 per cent of respondents are undecided.

On Jul. 16, former ambassador Joseph Wilson endorsed Rodham Clinton, saying, "She is the one candidate who, in my judgment, understands the need to get Americans out of harm’s way and to move this to a political process. She knows what to do. She has the leadership. On day one, she will be able to reach out to the international community, and I am delighted to fight the fight with her."

Angus Reid Global Monitor : Polls & Research, July 18, 2007

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - More Democratic Party supporters in the United States would prefer Hillary Rodham Clinton as their presidential nominee in 2008, according to a poll by Ipsos-Public Affairs released by the Associated Press. 36 per cent of respondents would vote for the New York senator in a primary, up three points since June.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is second with 20 per cent, followed by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore with 15 per cent, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards with 11 per cent. Support is lower for New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Delaware senator Joe Biden, and Connecticut senator Chris Dodd.

The speed and severity of the unraveling of John McCain's bid for the presidency is nearly impossible to capture-but let me offer one small anecdote that's as revealing in retrospect as it is darkly ironic.

Just four months ago, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard hosted an intimate gathering of operatives from the campaigns of McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney. Despite Giuliani's lead in national polls, the consensus around the table was that McCain was the race's front-runner. His lead in endorsements was noted, as was the strength of his organization and the size of his retinue. ("There's a few people here we haven't hired yet," joked the McCain campaign's chief executive, Rick Davis.) At the end of the session, moderator Mark Halperin, then the political director of ABC News and now at Time, posed a final question to the assembled adjutants, turning first to Davis: "Will the senior campaign team that is currently in place for Senator McCain be in place in December, yes or no?" To which Davis replied, provoking much hilarity, "It will only get bigger."

The temptation here is to describe the peals that attended Davis's self-mockery as prescient, knowing. But the truth is that no one in that room would ever have predicted the staggering meltdown-the anemic fund-raising, which has left McCain's campaign with fewer dollars on hand than Republican no-hoper Ron Paul has, requiring a radical downsizing of McCain's organization; the decline in his poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire, which has left him trailing not only Romney and Giuliani but often ghost candidate Fred Thompson; and now the immolation of his brain trust, which has left him without the counsel of his master strategist, John Weaver-that McCain has suffered since then.

It would be pleasingly counterintuitive to declare that McCain, at this, his lowest moment, is now poised for a miraculous recovery. Indeed, I've been itching to write exactly that all through his recent free fall. But, alas, the contrarian impulse has its limits. Though it's not impossible to conjure a narrative in which McCain wins the nomination, doing so requires half a bottle of Maker's Mark, followed by a nitrous-oxide chaser. A more sober assessment of his predicament suggests the Straight Talk Express may be up on blocks before 2008 arrives-and that, in turn, raises a blunt question for a man who prizes bluntness above all: Why not walk away right now and avoid further humiliation?

It's difficult to imagine a more embarrassing week, of course, than the one he's just endured. A week, that is, in which his campaign was revealed for what it had become: an acrimonious clusterfuck. Here you had a campaign manager, Terry Nelson, the political director for Bush-Cheney 2004, as impervious to the concept of fiscal discipline as his former boss, the president. ("An organization in Alabama?" a Republican strategist marvels. "That's not the Bush-Cheney campaign; it's a parody of the Bush-Cheney campaign.") Here you had Davis, whose fund-raising forecast of $120 million for 2007 was vastly higher than any Republican, let alone McCain, has any hope of achieving. And here you had Weaver, who'd worked with Davis in 2000 and despised him so intensely that when Davis was bequeathed the forced-out Nelson's job, Weaver preferred to abandon his longtime patron rather than carry on.

Operational infighting and disarray are nothing new in presidential machines, particularly when a would-be juggernaut morphs into a sputtering jalopy. "The staffing and budget issues are just symptoms," Dan Schnur, McCain's communications savant in 2000, tells me. "This is what happens when you try to run an Establishment campaign with a non-Establishment candidate. The decision to go that route was understandable, defensible. It's traditionally how you win the Republican nomination. But it was never going to work for McCain, because it isn't who he is."

Needless to say, as wretched as McCain's organization has been, the core of his electoral problems revolve precisely around who he is. His ardent support for George W. Bush's troop surge into Iraq, and his hawkishness on the war in general, have cost him the affection of the moderate Republicans and independent voters who flocked to him in 2000. (They have also turned the media-which in sunnier times McCain referred to as "my base"-against him.) His liberal position on immigration has served as a reminder to hard-line conservatives that he isn't one of them, crippling his efforts to prove otherwise with, for example, his nauseating courtship of the religious right (which wasn't working anyway). Perhaps because of all this, the McCain on display in 2007 has been a grim shadow of his former self: sour, cranky, uninspiring, lifeless, and uncomfortable in his skin.

Dramatic though it was, the McCain staff shake-up is likely to have close to zero effect on any of these factors. So what happens now? It seems to me that there are two broad scenarios, neither of them pretty.

The first scenario is that McCain's campaign collapses ignominiously before the end of the year. For all practical purposes, his operation today is broke, and with the stench of death now shrouding the endeavor, the reluctance of donors to whip out their checkbooks is certain to become even more acute. In a startling burst of candor, Warren Rudman, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire who serves as McCain's national campaign co-chairman, raised this very specter last week. "If he doesn't recover financially and in the polls by the fall, it will be very difficult for him to continue," Rudman told the New Hampshire Union Leader. (When your campaign co-chair starts using the conditional when speaking of your survival, you know that you're in deep caca.) McCain's early exit, naturally, would reshuffle the Republican deck. The most obvious beneficiary would be Giuliani: His social liberalism might appeal to moderates still wedded to McCain-and his increasing bellicosity on foreign policy (please note the recent addition of Norman Podhoretz to his roster of advisers) might attract those who venerate McCain's militarism. Fred Thompson, too, assuming that he enters the race and adopts a hard-line posture on national security, might benefit similarly. And while Romney, whose gathering potency in Iowa and New Hampshire have arguably made him the new front-runner, might reap the fewest migrating voters, the extinction of the McCain opposition-research squad, which has sought relentlessly to poison Romney in the press, would surely be seen as a welcome development by Mr. Headroom.

The second scenario is that McCain survives until January through a combination of creative financing, bare-bones operations, and a root-and-branch strategic rethink. On the money side, the campaign has said it's considering accepting federal matching funds for the primaries, which would immediately bring in $6 million and up to $21 million total. And rumors are circulating that the campaign intends to shift its focus to New Hampshire (the site of his upset of Bush in 2000) and South Carolina (with its large population of veterans), while forgoing Iowa, which McCain skipped last time around and where he’s currently weakest.

For McCain to have any prayer of resurrection will require more than this sort of retooling, however. It will require him to resuscitate his previous image-and for voters to buy it. "Maybe he goes back to the tiniest New Hampshire high-school gym he visited in 1999," posits Schnur. "One of McCain's greatest strengths is his willingness to admit mistakes. He may be the best apologizer in American politics. So he acknowledges the obvious. He says, 'I've been trying to be somebody I'm not. Now I'm starting over.' "

The troubles with this scenario are many and glaring. If McCain does accept public money, his campaign will be bound by state-by-state spending restrictions-many of which are so tight that they would put him at a daunting disadvantage. (The limit for New Hampshire would be a mere $818,000.) Skipping Iowa would increase the chances of a Romney victory there, which would in turn make him all the more formidable in New Hampshire. Then there's the matter of whether McCain's new campaign chief is cut out to run a guerrilla operation. In 2000, Weaver often railed about the bureaucratization and sclerosis endemic to McCain headquarters. He dubbed the place "the Pentagon"-and Davis was its SecDef. "Rick is good at many things," says a Republican strategist who knows him well, "but insurgencies are not among them."

Even on the most optimistic reading, what this scenario envisions, in essence, is McCain as the Republican John Edwards: a candidate placing all of his chips on a single state (in McCain's case, New Hampshire; in Edwards's, Iowa) and hoping that a victory there will create sufficient momentum to carry him through the others. If you're in the mood to be Panglossian, you might observe that although being the Republican Edwards plainly is not ideal, it's conceivably better than being the new Bob Dole-the role that McCain seemed destined to play had he maintained his front-running status.

For more than a few Republicans, no doubt, the fall of McCain is a cause for rejoicing. But I wonder if they'll feel that way when all is said and done. McCain's flaws are real enough, but no one can dispute that he's a serious man, with serious ideas, who would have seriously changed the GOP, a party in a serious state of crisis. Nothing similar can remotely be said of what remains of the Republican top tier. McCain's marginalization leaves them all floating, weightless, barely tethered to reality, short of ideas and gravitas, let alone convictions. I suspect that they will miss him more and sooner than they now know.

WASHINGTON - New York tops the nation in coughing up campaign cash to candidates in the 2008 White House race, and hometown hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has collected the most in the Empire State.

New Yorkers have cut checks totaling nearly $37 million in the frenzied dash for the White House, pushing the total take of presidential wannabes to an eye-popping $265 million in the first six months of the year. The gold rush also hit California, where candidates collected $35.2 million, second only to New York. Floridians came in a distant third, chipping in $13 million, according to an analysis by washingtonpost.com.

Federal campaign records show Clinton has collected a staggering $14 million from New Yorkers, accounting for 25 percent of the $53 million she's raised during her six-month Democratic campaign.

Former New York mayor and GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani pocketed a pretty penny on his home turf, too, pulling in $7 million. Clinton's rising rival Barack Obama helped himself to a healthy slice of the Big Apple, raising $6 million to grow his pack-leading war chest to $58 million. And he thumped Clinton in his home state of Illinois, where he took home $7 million. That's more than $5 million more than the former first lady squeezed out from her childhood home state.

The federal records show Obama with $34 million remaining in the bank and Clinton $33 million. Their campaign armies appear evenly matched, too. Obama paid $3.2 million in salaries over the past three months, while Clinton dished out $2.5 million, though she owes money to high-priced consultants such as pollster Mark Penn.

Meanwhile yesterday, Clinton won the endorsement of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a cause celebre of some Democrats who believe the Bush administration maliciously revealed his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.

By Ian Bishop, New York Post, July 17, 2007

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton aimed her fire today at President Bush, saying that from the first day of his administration he began rolling back various programs and funding avenues that had supported abortion rights. She cited limits he imposed on foreign assistance to certain international groups, which became known as the "global gag rule;" programs promoting abstinence-only education in schools; and the appointment of Supreme Court justices who, she said, have chipped away at Roe v. Wade.

On her first day in office, Mrs. Clinton pledged that she would change all that.

"For six-and-a-half years, the president has played politics with women's health," she said. "When I'm president, I will devote my very first day in office to reversing these ideological, anti-science, anti-prevention policies that this administration has put into place."

Mrs. Clinton noted that as First Lady she helped start the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. She reminded the audience that as a senator, she sponsored the Prevention First Act, which is aimed at expanding family planning services and sexual education programs in schools and requiring insurance companies to cover birth control. Today, she introduced a bill that would broaden access to emergency contraception among women in the military.

The Planned Parenthood Political Action Fund, the political arm of the abortion rights group, has not endorsed a candidate for president yet.

WASHINGTON -- And the leading Republican presidential candidate is ... none of the above.

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals. Such dissatisfaction underscores the volatility of the 2008 GOP nomination fight.

In sharp contrast, the Democratic race remains static, with Hillary Rodham Clinton holding a sizable lead over Barack Obama. The New York senator, who is white, also outpaces her Illinois counterpart, who is black, among black and Hispanic Democrats, according to a combined sample of two months of polls.

A half year before voting begins, the survey shows the White House race is far more wide open on the Republican side than on the Democratic. The uneven enthusiasm about the fields also is reflected in fundraising in which Democrats outraised Republicans $80 million to $50 million from April through June, continuing a trend from the year's first three months.

"Democrats are reasonably comfortable with the range of choices. The Democratic attitude is that three or four of these guys would be fine," David Redlawsk, a University of Iowa political scientist. "The Republicans don't have that; particularly among the conservatives there's a real split. They just don't see candidates who reflect their interests and who they also view as viable."

More Republicans have become apathetic about their options over the past month.

A hefty 23 percent can't or won't say which candidate they would back, a jump from the 14 percent who took a pass in June. Giuliani's popularity continued to decline steadily as he faced a spate of headline headaches, came under increased scrutiny and saw the potential entry of Thompson in the mix; his support is at 21 percent compared with 27 percent in June and 35 percent in March. The former New York mayor is running virtually even with Thompson, who has become a threat without even officially entering the race. The actor and former Tennessee senator has stayed steady at 19 percent. McCain, the Arizona senator who is revamping his nearly broke campaign, clocked in a bit lower at 15 percent, while Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, remained at 11 percent.

None of the top candidates has a clear lead among Christian evangelicals, a critical part of the GOP base that has had considerable sway in past Republican primaries. Giuliani, a thrice-married backer of abortion rights and gay rights, had 20 percent support _ roughly even with Thompson and McCain who have one divorce each in their pasts. Romney, a Mormon who has been married for three decades, was in the single digits.

Among the legions of undecided Republicans is Barbara Skogman, 72, a retired legal assistant from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She isn't at all excited about any of the prospects. "I'm looking for a strong honest person. Do you know of any?" she joked. She had an easy time detailing why she was queasy about each of the most serious contenders. "Isn't that sad?" Then she reached a conclusion: "I just don't know."

Otherwise, Clinton kept her strong advantage over Obama; her backers accounted for 36 percent of Democrats to his 20 percent, while support for Edwards remained essentially unchanged at 11 percent.

While neither Obama nor Edwards has threatened Clinton in national polls, both are giving her a chase in other areas. Obama leads her in fundraising for the primary and Edwards is running stronger in Iowa.

Nationally, the combined sample found Clinton has the edge among black Democrats, with 46 percent of their support to Obama's 33 percent. Her advantage is even wider among Hispanics; she has the support of 45 percent of them to Obama's 17 percent. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, whose mother was Mexican, had the backing of just 5 percent of Hispanics and virtually no support among blacks.

Put aside the flap over Sen. Hillary Clinton's open-mic chat last week with John Edwards about limiting the debate field. The private exchange caught on tape after a recent debate showed the New York Democrat seeming to agree with Edwards, who proposed smaller and "more serious" debates. But Clinton would have to be a political dummy to really back such a plan - and she is no dummy.

No, there is zero chance that Clinton was being genuine with Edwards. And instead of trying to craft a backroom deal with the front-runner, Edwards should concentrate on ratcheting up his own performance to actually win a debate or two. Only then might Clinton seriously entertain a different format.

New Yorkers Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton led their presidential rivals in the Florida money chase over the past three months, reflecting their popularity in the state and their national fundraising success.

Giuliani, a Republican, collected more than $1.7 million, while Clinton, a Democrat, received more than $1.5 million. Both have comfortable leads over their opponents in the latest Florida polls.

Among the Republican contenders, Giuliani was followed by Mitt Romney with $982,116 and John McCain with $473,871. Fred Thompson, who came in second behind Giuliani in one Florida survey, does not have to report his fundraising because he is not officially in the race. Among the Democrats, Clinton was followed by top national fundraiser Barack Obama with $936,541, John Edwards with $511,347, Bill Richardson with $216,936 and Chris Dodd with $101,800. The drop-off is steep for the rest of the candidates. Sunday was the deadline for presidential candidates to report their contributions and expenses to the Florida Elections Commission.

Under a new state law, Florida will be the first big state to hold its presidential primary on Jan. 29. Giuliani and Romney were the big spenders here, suggesting that the state is a linchpin of their national strategy to win their party's nomination.

Other candidates are more focused on the earlier primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

By Rob Barry and Beth Reinhard, Miami Herald, July 16, 2007

Candidates for the White House are not only raising far more than ever before, many are also spending that money as fast as they get it, leaving some close to being forced from the race almost six months before the first votes are cast. Campaign finance reports released in recent days show that the spending spree is a reality for both front-runners and long shots. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) burned through more than $20 million in the past three months, 50 percent more than he raised during that span. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blew through the $11 million he raised during the past quarter and has barely enough money to keep going, even with his dramatically scaled-down operation. The frenzy of spending has put the squeeze on several candidates in both parties who are struggling to keep pace during the long march to the first primaries in January, even as the gap between the haves and have-nots expands.

Of the candidates mounting a serious push for the 2008 nomination, records released yesterday show that among Republicans, Thompson, Huckabee and Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.) all have less than $1 million. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) also has less than $1 million. None of those candidates has signaled anything but an intent to forge ahead. But Joseph Trippi, who is running the campaign of former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), recalled the tough calculations he had to make when advising Howard Dean during his 2004 bid. "You can move a message with very little money," Trippi said. "Where you find trouble is if you hit a stage where you say, 'I'm not even sure if I can manage to run the basics: paying for airfare, bus fare, lodging, keeping the lights on.' "

Many of those who are struggling have depended on money from their home states. Thompson raised 62 percent of his funds from donors in Wisconsin, where he served four terms as governor. Huckabee took half his money from his home state of Arkansas. Democrat Bill Richardson got 37 percent of his $7 million in donations from New Mexico, where he is governor. Trippi said the challenge for these candidates, in particular, is figuring out whether they can extend their reach beyond states where they have enjoyed political success. "That's a huge step," he said. Biden has $2.7 million on hand and said he considers his haul "a solid showing," given the size of his home state, Delaware. One exception among long-shot candidates is Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), who has parlayed high-profile moments in the Republican debate and a frugal campaign into a balance of $2.4 million.

One major change to the political landscape is a revamped and more front-loaded campaign calendar. Competitors for their parties' nomination will for the first time spend January waging primary and caucus battles in more than just Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Now Nevada and Wyoming are in the mix, Florida looms on Jan. 29, and the ultimate primary event comes on Feb. 5, when more than a dozen states, including California, New York and New Jersey, will hold primaries.

Lesser-known candidates have also had to compete with the likes of Clinton and Giuliani, candidates with near-universal name recognition.

Crawford, the Vilsack adviser who helped the former governor crunch numbers as he struggled to keep pace, has a different take. "I don't see how you can make it to Iowa with less than $30 million," he said. "I think that's a floor, an absolute floor."

July 16, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Hollywood heavyweight in the battle against fellow Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama for the cash of Tinseltown titans.

The former first lady and current presidential front-runner lassoed more superstars in the past three months, new federal campaign records show, while Obama has largely become a favorite of Hollywood's African-American set.

Clinton pilfered from Obama such A-listers as Tom Hanks, comedian Ben Stiller and "Spider-Man" star Tobey Maguire, who all gave to Obama at the start of the year but switched to Hillary in the past three months.

Clinton also collected cash from actress Jodie Foster and actor-director Danny DeVito.

Obama countered with actor-rapper Will Smith, funnyman Chris Rock, fired "Grey's Anatomy" leading man Isaiah Washington and former "Designing Women" diva Jean Smart.

Superstar and philanthropic foodie Paul Newman gave to both candidates.

By Ian Bishop, New York Post, July 16, 2007

WASHINGTON -- It didn't matter whether they raised more money or not, most presidential candidates certainly boosted their spending in the second quarter of the year. More on staff. More on travel. More on consultants.

Democrats outraised Republicans about $80 million to $50 million from April through June. But Republicans kept pace with Democrats on spending - nearly $50 million spent on both sides.

The Democrats' money advantage was helped in large part by the extraordinary fundraising of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. He raised $32 million for the primary; she raised $21.5 million.

But even as they raised more money, the better financed Democrats were chary about spending it all. Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, spent half of what he raised in the second quarter. Clinton spent 60 cents for every primary dollar raised. John Edwards raised $9 million and spent $6.4 million.

That was not the Republican model. John McCain raised $11.3 million and spent $13 million. Mitt Romney had to lend his campaign $6 million to stay even with his spending for the quarter. The pattern was similar among GOP candidates with lesser finances. Only Rudy Giuliani, the Republican with the most cash on hand, kept his spending below his fundraising.

Obama, however, retained an advantage over Clinton in the number of donors who could still give to his campaign. About $3 our of every $7 raised by Obama's campaign for the primary came from donors who have given the maximum $2,300 donation permitted by law. For Clinton, about three-fifths of her primary donations come from maxed-out donors.

Overall, attorneys topped the list of donor occupations for most Democrats, with homemakers not far behind. For Republicans, homemakers led the list, with attorneys not far behind. Homemakers are a common occupation in political fundraising because donors usually team up with their spouses to maximize contributions.

Trial lawyers -- who handle civil cases such as medical malpractice, personal injury and product liability -- are at the top of the enemies list of Republicans, the Bush White House and various precincts in corporate America, who have been pressing state and national lawmakers for years to approve proposals to place curbs on lawsuits and caps on awards. The rebranding -- including another switch, from the phrase "trial attorneys" to "justice lawyers" -- came in an effort to draw attention from the individual attorney to the "mission."

"At a nuts-and-bolts campaign deliverable level," said AAJ consultant Chris Lehane, "the justice lawyers are one of the major political players within the Democratic Party at a contribution level, at a message level, as important opinion makers and as organizers.''

Obama has already delivered tough-love messages to the trial lawyers as a state senator and in his first weeks in the U.S. Senate. On Feb. 10, 2005, Obama and Dodd were two of 18 Democrats who joined with Republicans in voting for a bill, opposed by the trial bar, making it harder for lawsuits to be certified as class actions. Edwards, a former trial lawyer, has relied heavily on the trial lawyer network to bankroll his second White House bid, though many are also donating and raising money for front-runners Clinton and Obama, despite his 2005 vote.

With so much Democratic money in one hotel, all of the Democrats are hosting receptions for donors in connection with the convention. Clinton will appear at a "Lawyers for Hillary" event today at the hotel, with the "ask" between $250 and $2,300. In the 2006 congressional cycle, trial lawyers scored wins in 14 of 18 races involving trial lawyers. One noteworthy victory was in Iowa, where now-Rep. Bruce Braley was attacked as a "trial lawyer" -- but the strategy backfired.

"The justice lawyers are especially motivated in 2008," said Lehane. "For seven years, they have been the focal point of George W. Bush, who in a raw, crass, partisan, Nixonian political move has targeted justice lawyers at the behest of his biggest donors and in order to stuff the Republican Party's financial coffers."

In the Democratic primary, 33 percent choose Clinton, the New York senator, while 25 percent pick Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and 15 percent go with former vice presidential nominee John Edwards. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson snags 7 percent in the poll.

Overall, the poll found an atmosphere ripe for Democratic victory. Support for the Iraq war is at an all-time low, as is approval for President Bush - and a majority of those polled, 52 percent, said they would support impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney. In head-to-head matches, the top three Democrats beat the top three Republicans in every case but one (Giuliani versus Edwards).

On the Republican side, several candidates get 1 percent each: Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson.

"Remember: In early January of 2004, Howard Dean was leading," he said.

By Lauren R. Dorgan, Concord Monitor, July 15, 2007

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton could defeat a prospective Republican rival in next year's United States presidential election, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 47 per cent of respondents would support the New York senator, while 38 per cent would vote for Arizona senator John McCain.

Support for Rodham Clinton in this match-up increased by one point since late June, while backing for McCain fell by four points. In a separate contest, Rodham Clinton keeps a one-point edge against former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

If she's elected president, Sen. Hillary Clinton has promised her first priority will be ending the war in Iraq. But the Democratic candidate would face another pressing decision.

What should Bill do?

The Clintons campaigned across New Hampshire yesterday, and voters in Keene said they liked seeing Hillary and Bill together. The key to using Bill Clinton effectively, they said, is for his wife to draw on his experience and popularity while maintaining her own authority - a doable balancing act, most agreed.

Bill Clinton "has been around the block a few times," said Stephen Seraichick, of Westmoreland. "He's so knowledgeable. He's the perfect guy to have as a husband."

"I'm not sure how that's going to work out," Stephen Seraichick responded. "I know he's adaptable. I think it'd be better if he's not in an official position. She has to look like she's making the calls herself, and she's leading the country."

Hillary Clinton answered the Bill question at last month's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, and she answered it again yesterday, referring to her husband as "my No. 1 ambassador." That's a good role for Bill Clinton, many voters said.

"Basically, what he's been doing with Poppa Bush," said Allison Nason of Swanzey. "Keep him busy, keep him out of trouble." After the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, Bill Clinton worked alongside former president George H. W. Bush to fundraise for disaster relief - an effort Nason thinks should continue. Clinton also heads a foundation that fights AIDS and works to improve health care in developing countries.

Projects like that, Mike Kaul said, have already carved out a role for Clinton if his wife wins the presidency. "I don't think that he's going to be sitting around the White House, twiddling his thumbs," said Kaul, who's from Keene. While he said Bill Clinton would be the most important presidential spouse to date "except for Eleanor Roosevelt," Kaul warned against assigning him too much responsibility, pointing out what happened when Bill Clinton charged his wife with handling health care reform.

Yesterday morning, Hillary Clinton played up her husband's presence, and the crowd reacted favorably. "Clinton Country" signs dotted the stands, and one man held up a handwritten version: "Happy times are here again! Enough of the Bushes - bring back Bubba!" Bill Clinton spoke for about 10 minutes before handing the microphone to his wife, "the next president." Along with the exchange came a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

"It's nice to have a family on stage," said 20-year-old Heather Day, who works with an Upward Bound program.

That emphasis on family, said Meagan Malone, was useful in reassuring voters that the Clintons, once plagued by scandals and infidelity, have a stable marriage - "fidelity and all that." "It's a frighteningly effective political tool; it really is," said Malone, who is also 20 and with the Upward Bound program.

Day said Bill Clinton would make a "great resource." Malone saw him with a less weighty responsibility.

"Redecorate the White House," she said.

Cathy Morris and Debbie Link, both of Keene, also thought Bill could serve Hillary most effectively by being subservient. "Put him to work. Like a personal assistant," Morris said. "That's exactly it. A personal assistant. He seems to do well with that," Link said. "It'll be interesting, won't it?"

And while a few people noted the possibility for the charismatic former president to upstage his wife, they didn't think that would happen. "They're too smart," Kaul said. "He's a big asset to her. He could be a detriment, but they're too smart."

By Maddie Hanna, Concord Monitor, July 14, 2007

KEENE, New Hampshire, July 13-When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton popped into view for the audience gathered here on the football field at the local high school, a hearty cheer went up from the several hundred people who had been waiting for almost two hours in the sun.

The Clintons campaigned together in New Hampshire this morning for the first time this election season as Mrs. Clinton, of New York, continues her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Blue and red signs dotted the crowd: Women for Hillary; Clinton Country; Hillary for President. But it was clear who many had come to see.

Then, he indulged in a stroll into what is, at this point, the political days of yore, recalling the bitter cold when he first came to this town early in the primary season. He described a community forum that his campaign had expected might draw 250 people for a "good meeting."
In the end, more than 400 people crowded inside, he said, and the fire marshalls made his campaign move to a larger room. It was the first time, he said, he thought, "I might actually win this thing."

"I first realized it in Keene, New Hampshire," he said. "Thank you very much."

"So what does it feel like?" she said. "It feels great."

One supporter of Mrs. Clinton, Kathy Manns, 55, seemed to speak for many in the crowd when she said, "I do believe with Hillary, you get two for one."

By Michael Luo, The New York Times, July 13, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 13 - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today became the latest presidential candidate to announce her support for ending a tax break that has enabled some wealthy financiers to shave enormous amounts of money from their income tax bills.

The Wall Street investment firms that would be affected by changing the tax rates on carried interest have already mounted stiff opposition in Congress, where they have numerous allies in both parties. The investment industry argues that the portion of profits they receive from investments should get preferential treatment because of the risk involved. Critics say those profits should be considered bonuses because firms have little, if any, of their own money at stake.

Venture capital firms, real estate partnerships and many oil and gas companies also have a stake in proposals to change the tax code, since they use similar accounting methods to justify paying the lower tax rate. The debate has attracted more attention of late with the enormous money earned by the top tier of Wall Street tycoons. If it continues to percolate in Congress and if it enlivens the race for the White House, it could inspire arguments about the intricacies of the tax code and the sometimes competing national values that have made it so complicated over the years.

But she went on, "We can close this loophole that unfairly benefits some of the best-paid people in America, while continuing to encourage investment in innovative, young companies."

By David Stout, The New York Times, July 13, 2007

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds New York Senator Hillary Clinton (D) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) virtually even in their race for the White House. This month, Clinton nominally leads the mayor 44% to 43%. Last month, it was Giuliani by a single point. As recently as March, Giuliani could claim a double-digit lead over Clinton but he lost that lead in April and the match-up has been a toss-up ever since.

Despite an unexpected and strong challenge from Illinois Senator Barack Obama, Clinton remains the Democratic frontrunner and has even increased her lead in national polling over the past several weeks. Clinton trails Obama in the fundraising category, but both leading Democrats are far ahead of everybody else when it comes to financial support.

Giuliani has spent most of 2008 atop the polls for the Republican Presidential nomination. In recent weeks, he has fallen slightly behind former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson. Thompson, who has yet to formally announce he is running, is seen as the most politically conservative of all Republican hopefuls. Giuliani, while well-liked among GOP voters, is viewed as less ideologically conservative than most Republican primary voters.

DETROIT -- Talk to the rapper Master P and you'd think there weren't eight Democrats running for president, but just two: Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.

In the competition for black primary voters among Democratic presidential contenders, Miller's sentiments reflect what the polls and interviews with African-Americans suggest: that Obama and Clinton are locked in a fierce battle for black support, which could prove more pivotal than ever given next year's front-loaded primary calendar. Black voters say they like Clinton for her work on issues important to minorities, such as universal healthcare, and out of a sense of loyalty to President Clinton. But they say they are also moved by Obama's uplifting message, his life experience, and the prospect of seeing the first African-American president in the White House.

Polls underline the divided loyalties. In a Gallup survey last month, 43 percent of black Democrats said they preferred Clinton, while 42 percent said they liked Obama. The next-highest vote-getter was John Edwards, former North Carolina senator, at 6 percent.

"It's pretty clear that the black vote is being split up, or at least what's been decided, between Obama and Clinton," said David Bositis, a specialist on politics and African-American voters at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

The competition between Obama and Clinton for black votes comes in a year in which several high-profile events have drawn attention to racial politics and their potential impact on the Democratic primary race. In March, Obama and Clinton traveled to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the 1965 voting rights protest in which marchers were attacked by police, a watershed event of the Civil Rights Movement. Both used their appearances to pay homage to civil rights pioneers, though Obama was forced to acknowledge afterward that he overreached when he said that his parents had gotten together because of the march, when in fact he was already born .

"Hillary is sort of a political institution and Barack is a new face on the scene," said Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, who was in Detroit for the convention. "They're both very dynamic, they're both very energetic, and from my standpoint either one of them would make a great president."

The emergence of Obama as the primary challenger to Clinton has changed the dynamic of the campaign in many ways. In terms of the nomination itself, the question may become more clearly framed as whether or not Democrats want to nominate Clinton or someone else… and that someone else will have a name.

Also, Obama represents a challenge to Clinton from the left. A year ago, it was expected that the major challenge might come from the right in the form of candidates like Mark Warner or Evan Bayh. That creates additional challenges for Clinton in the primary competition. If she goes on to win the nomination, it will also have had the impact of pulling her further away from the political center heading into the general election campaign.

As Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards ramps up his anti-poverty initiative this weekend, he will be confronting a deep popularity deficit among his party's poorest voters.

In the most recent Washington Post-ABC poll, the former senator from North Carolina was trounced by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents with household incomes below $20,000. Clinton had the support of 55 percent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) drew 20 percent and Edwards 10 percent.

Edwards also encounters trouble among those independents who said that they and their families are falling behind financially. In this group, 9 percent said they would definitely support him as the nominee. Obama and Clinton had nearly twice that level of certain support.

"The right strategy before the surge and post-escalation is the same: Start bringing home America's troops now," Clinton said in Iowa. "We have heard for years now that as the Iraqis stand up, our troops will stand down. Every year, we hear about how next year they may start coming home. Now we are hearing a new version of that yet again from the president as he has more troops in Iraq than ever and the Iraqi government is more fractured and ineffective than ever."

With the absence of U.S. troops, the senator hopes to stabilize the country by focusing on aid efforts that put money in the hands of the Iraqi people.

In addition, Clinton plans to bring together U.S. allies, global powers and Iraq's neighbors to stabilize the country.

By Klaus Marre, The Hill, July 10, 2007

DES MOINES - Speaking to a crowd of more than 300 this morning, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called for a quick end to the war in Iraq, saying that "it is time to begin ending this war - not next year, not next month - but today."

To a cheering audience of supporters, Senator Clinton termed President Bush's statements that American troops will begin to stand down as the Iraqi soldiers take over "a very familiar song from the President" and said that the "right" strategy is to "start bringing home America's troops now."

Senator Clinton drew the loudest applause in saying that she and Senator Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat and longtime opponent of the war, would introduce an amendment to repeal authorization for the war. It would require Mr. Bush to seek new Congressional authority to extend the conflict beyond Oct. 11, 2007, five years after original permission was given.

"We want to de-authorize the war and end the president's authority to fight it," Senator Clinton said to a standing ovation at a campaign event at the Temple for Performing Arts here. The Senate has returned from its July 4th recess this week, and has already begun debating the defense authorization bill for this week and next.

"This would be my first and most important mission as president," she added. "It's time we honored those who have served by bringing them home."

She criticized the Bush administration for a "catalogue of miscalculations, misjudgments and mistakes" in Iraq and added that "there is no military solution to the crisis in Iraq."

"It is long past the time for the President to end combat," she said, but added that "if the past is any guide, the president will maintain his failed strategy no matter what." Senator Clinton also criticized Mr. Bush for not pursuing diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran, saying that "diplomacy is the best tool" for bringing stability to the region.

By Leslie Wayne, The New York Times, July 10, 2007

DEMOCRATS, of course, are thirsting for change. Oh, but what flavor shall it be?

Linda Levey, a lawyer here, sees little reason to take a chance, particularly given today's precarious times. "I've tried to keep an open mind, but I think I'm going to support Hillary," Ms. Levey said. "We know what we'll get." Jan Heckroth, a hospital chaplain, is ready to take a leap of faith. "I want something very new," Ms. Heckroth said. "As much as I liked the Clintons, think what a President Obama could do?"

When Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois waved goodbye at the end of their tours across Iowa last week, voters were left with a handful of choices that will help bring clarity to the 2008 presidential race.

With President Bush's approval ratings below freezing and the war going badly, are Americans most seeking experience and its corollary, competence? Or are they so fed up with the current state of affairs that what they value most is change, a fresh start, a new way of doing business? Taken literally, it is a false choice. But these are the themes that define presidential candidates, reflecting the best judgments of legions of highly paid strategists and consultants about what the nation is looking for.

It is most apparent in the matchup between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, two contenders for the Democratic nomination. He presents himself as a candidate of the future, a healer for a nation only beginning to be aware of its wounds. She is emphasizing her experience, in the Senate and in the White House, and what she casts as the proven results of the policies she and her husband championed in the 1990s. Each is grappling with the flip side of the coin as well. In Mr. Obama's case, a fresh face and change could be read to mean inexperienced, an ominous designation, particularly now, when a steady hand seems a prerequisite for the job. A Clinton presidency offers a familiar brand, but do voters want to buy it again?

"If you did flashcards for people in Iowa and showed the faces of what springs to mind, they'd see Senator Clinton's face and say she's been there, she knows what goes on, she's experienced and stable," said Gary Hart, who cast himself as the agent of change in his 1984 presidential campaign. "They would see Senator Obama's flashcard and say, 'Wow! That's interesting. I wonder how he'd do this? I wonder how he'd do that?' "

"Her baggage, if you will, is experience and her strength is experience," Mr. Hart added. "He would be more likely to try new things."

As the candidates circled each other in Iowa over the last week, testing out those themes on voters, Mrs. Clinton's traveling companion, former President Bill Clinton, served as a walking billboard for what her presidency might look like. To critics who suggested the Clintons were old news, he retorted: "Yesterday's news was pretty good." Mr. Obama sought to avoid talking about the Clintons, at least by name. "My campaign is not premised on running against the past," he said, "my campaign is based on what we can accomplish in the future."

The dynamic unfolding between these and other candidates mimics the age-old formula that incumbents and outsiders have used to frame elections: change versus more of the same.

This time around, even Republicans are reluctant to advocate more of the same, so they continue to develop strategies to deal with the political climate created by Mr. Bush and search for ways to distance themselves from an unpopular White House without abandoning conservative principles or alienating the Republican Party's base.

Michael Dukakis, whose 1988 Democratic presidential campaign was rooted in the argument that he was the candidate of competence, not ideology, said Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton would have to prove that they could offer both: experience and change. "It's a mistake to run just as either," he said. "You have to convince people that you can fundamentally change the kind of politics that have gotten us into trouble. You also have to convince them that you have what it takes to be an effective president. The two go hand in hand."

Indeed, Mr. Obama is working to demonstrate that experience is more than logging years in Washington (his first TV ads do not mention that he serves in the Senate, but rather emphasize his earlier biography). And Mrs. Clinton is trying to show that she could comfortably return to the White House, but it would not merely be a reprise.

"On the Obama side, he's got to persuade people that the experiences he has will enable him to do the job," said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who ran for president in 1992. "With Senator Clinton, they will say she has the experience, but can she build a consensus?"

And then there's Hillary, the other frontrunner. True, Barack Obama, the other rock star who entered the race after initial expectations had been set, has outdone her in dollars and donors, but the reality is that the two of them are operating in a zone beyond everyone else, Democrat or Republican. Barack may have more, but Hillary has plenty. And notwithstanding his financial success, he's yet to catch her in any polls, national or state.

She is still the top choice in every national survey; where she lags, as in Iowa, it is not to Obama, but to John Edwards, who has practically lived there in recent years and almost won last time. She has dominated the debates, demonstrated mastery on the issues, deftly deployed her husband, shown a sense of humor and warmth that some doubted she had (as in the Sopranos video), and withstood the slingshots of former friends (for instance David Geffen) and foes.

No one has questioned her ability or her toughness, her stamina or her style. I've hardly read a word about her hair or her clothes. For all the talk about Obama, and he certainly deserves it given his impressive opening and even more impressive financial success, most observers are still waiting for the second date.

But if Hillary hasn't fallen apart the way her Republican counterpart, Mr. McCain, has, she continues to be dogged by the one question that we've been hearing, literally, for years: Can she win?

The chink in her armor relates not to Democratic primary voters, at least not in the first instance, not to the insiders who have been paying attention to date, but to those who haven't. According to one recent national poll, 52 percent of American voters say they wouldn't vote for Hillary; if that number holds, she couldn't win in a two-person race; and so-- the argument goes-- will Democratic primary voters, desperate as they are to win this time, be willing to nominate someone whose longer term prospects are so doubtful?

There are a number of answers to that argument.

First of all, there are some people who don't like anyone. If even 3 percent of that 52 percent would also not vote for the eventual Republican candidate - and both Romney and Giuliani had high negatives, albeit not quite as high as Hillary - then it becomes, as it is for many voters in November, not a question of who you like, but who you dislike least. It doesn't matter if you're voting for your favorite or for the lesser of two evils: It still counts for one vote.

Second, 52 percent can cost you the presidency in a two-person race, but there is every reason to believe that, this year, there may well be three candidates, in which case a strong base of support could count for more than a high negative. Recent polls also show would-be candidate Mike Bloomberg, the recently Republican mayor of New York, drawing more support from the former Republican mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani than he does from Hillary; in a contest between two white male Republican New York City mayors and a female Senator, my money's on the girl.

Third, strategic voting - that is, voting for the candidate who can win, rather than the one you like - holds a mixed record among primary voters. Many voters still vote for their favorite, regardless of what the pundits tell them about electability. And when they don't, the results don't always work out the way they're supposed to. Certainly, a big part of John Kerry's support in 2004 came from those who calculated that as a Vietnam Vet, he was the strongest candidate to nominate in wartime. Don't ask them today what they think of that calculation.

Fourth, and most important, the election is not tomorrow. It is well over a year away. If you look at Hillary's track record in New York, what is crystal clear is her ability to change voters' minds, including traditionally moderate and even Republican voters in the reddest part of the state.

When Hillary announced her candidacy for the Senate nearly 10 years ago, she was coming out of a terrible period in the White House. Her husband had been fighting impeachment, and even women who should have been, and are today, her strongest base of support, were visibly angry with her for standing by her man instead of leaving him in the dust. Her negatives in New York topped 60 percent on a good day.

And what happened? Over the course of a long campaign, people got to know her. The real person who they saw in that much-covered campaign turned out to be a lot more attractive than the caricature they'd been carrying in their heads. When the votes were finally counted, she won in a walk. After six years in office, Republicans were hard pressed to find anyone even to run against her, and the much-vaunted anti-Hillary machine never gained any traction at all.

Whatever their faults, and there are many, presidential campaigns, by the time they end, tend to be stunningly transparent. You get to know who the candidate is, for better or for worse. Media advisers can do only so much. Spinners can twist things only so many times. There are moments, often painful ones, believe me, where the candidate is on his own, calling the shots, and his, or her, colors show.

The real Hillary Clinton is much loved by her friends, much respected by her fiercely loyal staff, a woman who is far warmer, funnier, and more human than the caricature that still dominates her public image. And it will be the real Hillary Clinton who voters see by the time November 2008 rolls around, as it was in New York in the last two elections. By then, the question may well be not whether she can win, but as it was in New York, whether anyone can beat her.

By Susan Estrich, Fox News, July 8, 2007

Candidates are scrambling for strategies to deal with a rush of Early contests.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, is expected to campaign heavily in New York State and neighboring New Jersey. He also is expected to make a major effort in California, where his centrist stands on social issues might give him an edge.

Fred Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, who is likely to enter the race, has a different approach. He is expected to compete heavily in his home region—southern and border states such as Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas, where Giuliani and others are considered weak.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton's aides say she will wage a national campaign, with special focus on California, her birth state of Illinois, and New York. Barack Obama has similar national plans but also hopes to compete with Clinton for African-American votes in the South.

Another wild card is where this leaves the earlier states of Iowa, which holds first-in-the-nation caucuses January 14; New Hampshire, which holds the first primary January 22, and South Carolina, which holds a Democratic primary January 29 and a Republican primary February 2. These states traditionally filter out weaker candidates and sometimes propel dark horses into contention.

KEEP AN EYE ON...

Florida, which has moved its primary to January 29, leaping ahead of the gaggle of other states that have scheduled a quasi-national primary on February 5. Watch for an army of candidates, advisers, and reporters to sweep through the Sunshine State right after the New Hampshire primary January 22.

State by state, region by region, there's a new political world out there. The old formulas for winning the White House seem increasingly out of date, and the candidates are scrambling to figure out how to deal with a new, evolving electoral map.

Today, the political landscape seems to be shifting again, in myriad ways. The Republicans, looking to capitalize on a perceived tilt to the right, chose Minneapolis-St. Paul as the site of their national convention next year in the once reliably Democratic state of Minnesota. Similarly, the Democrats picked Denver, in the heart of the increasingly pragmatic and less conservative Rocky Mountain West.

The rapidly growing Rocky Mountain region, in fact, figures prominently in the Democrats' master plan. Demographic shifts, including an influx of pragmatic-minded voters from other states and more-liberal Latino voters, have resulted in big changes in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Each has grown increasingly Democratic at the state and congressional levels and could easily go Democratic in the presidential race. Those four states have a combined total of 29 electoral votes. If they all went Democratic, the party's nominee would no longer need Florida's 27 electoral votes to win the White House. This calculation is being pushed by Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean as he tries to position his party for 2008.

Democratic strategists also hope for a surge of support from Latino voters nationwide. Party leaders say Hispanics will turn increasingly against the GOP because of the recent Senate fight over immigration, in which conservatives favored a crackdown on illegal workers.

The Republicans have more conventional plans. Their strategy focuses on holding the South and border states and conservative rural states in the central part of the country and building an electoral majority outward from there. They consider the upper Midwest fertile territory, notably formerly Democratic states such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

And GOP strategists say California, a Democratic bastion for a generation, could be in play. That's largely because GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has shuffled the deck with his new, moderately conservative but highly pragmatic approach to governing. That style gave Schwarzenegger a big re-election victory last year.

One equation has remained the same. Both parties believe that the midwestern states of Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois, and the traditional swing state of Pennsylvania, are within their grasp, so they will remain battlegrounds.

KEEP AN EYE ON...

California, which has been a Democratic mainstay for nearly a generation. But Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's success has GOP strategists hopeful that it may be in play in 2008.

New York. If New Yorkers Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton are the nominees, expect a battle royal.

Aspen - Sen. Hillary Clinton drew powerful, deep-pocketed crowds at a pair of fundraisers here Saturday, speaking at length on issues from health care to the environment to removing American troops from Iraq. Clinton, wearing a coral blazer and black slacks, arrived for a cocktail reception at Belly Up without her husband, who was in town for the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced her colleague to the crowd of more than 100, which included former Disney chief Michael Eisner and movie producer Steve Tisch, who is also a co-owner of the New York Giants.

In remarks to the group, Clinton said she would tax oil companies that didn't invest significantly in alternative energy. The tax would fund a $50 billion account that Clinton said would fund alternative energy, according to Daniel Becnel, an attendee. Clinton spokesman Blake Zeff said it is the campaign's policy to close fundraisers to the media unless the events take place on public property or attract more than 1,000 people.

Later, Clinton was the featured guest at a $2,300-a-plate dinner where the guest list included former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his wife, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell. It was unclear whether Bill Clinton joined his wife for the dinner event at Matsuhisa.

"She is so incredible on the hoof, which is not unlike her husband and so different than the current people we have who need 43 secretaries to do anything," said Marian Peters, who splits time between her Snowmass Village residence and her home in Orlando. "She can quote statistics chapter and verse."

Becnel, an attorney from New Orleans who has owned a home in Aspen for 35 years, said he supports Clinton for her experience and for the opportunity to have the former first lady "repair relations with foreign countries."

Think about where things were six months ago: the Barack Obama buzz was just starting but no one was quite sure what to make of it; there was speculation that Hillary Clinton was not ready to launch her campaign in February and was hoping for a spring start; Rudy Giuliani was still considered a "maybe"; Fred Thompson was making fundraising calls for John McCain; Mitt Romney and John Edwards were the two candidates making the most trips to the early states; and we had yet to hold one presidential debate.

Six debates, one drop out (remember Tom Vilsack?), $100 million in spending ($32 million from Romney alone), and $250 million in total fundraising later ($100 million just between Obama and Clinton), and the conventional wisdom of the race has radically shifted.

Let's start with the most chaotic portion of the campaign: the fight for the Republican nomination.

The rise of Romney
Perhaps the only un-surprising outcome to date has been the rise of Mitt Romney. For those of us who have tracked his trajectory over the last few years, one could sense he was built for the long haul. He is a classic presidential candidate: he's been thinking about it for years, he has the ambition, he has the Ozzie and Harriet family photo and he has the TV-ready looks. He is running a great conventional campaign and I use the term "conventional" as a compliment. Romney's now the agreed upon "leader" in Iowa and New Hampshire and, frankly, in campaign organization, thanks to the current downfall of McCain. Romney controls his own destiny, which is a position every candidate wants to be in for as long as he can.

Of the next three markers in the GOP race, it's hard to decide which of the three is more of a surprise: the resiliency of Giuliani, the downfall of McCain or the meteoric rise of Fred Thompson.

In hindsight, I'd say the Giuliani result is the most surprising. I think many of us have underestimated his strength with some rank-n-file conservatives, thanks mostly to the view some of them have that the Iraq war is a battle in the ultimate war against Islamic fundamentalism. There are certain parts of the GOP that strongly believe this is a fight for religious freedom (see President Bush's Fourth of July speech in West Virginia). For these folks, Giuliani is their general. These folks are willing to put aside some of their moral value issues with Giuliani if it means keeping up this global war.

Should the GOP race come down to Giuliani and Romney, the showdown between the two for South Carolina's conservative electorate is going to be fascinating. Neither fit the state very well, thanks to Giuliani's social positions and Romney's Mormonism.

The downfall of McCain
Next on the list of GOP surprises in this topsy-turvy six months is the downfall of McCain. It's not that any of us are surprised that McCain is having problems connecting with rank-n-file Republicans, it's that it happened so fast. The immigration issue did far more political damage to McCain than anyone on his team imagined. Is it fatal? I don't know. I know this: he's no longer in charge of his own destiny and he needs his three chief rivals (Rudy, Romney and Thompson) all to implode between now and the end of the year. Is that out of the question? Of course not; the media always love a good comeback story and McCain certainly has shown to be at his best when his political fortunes are at their worst.

Finally, there's the rise of Fred Thompson, which for some may seem like the most surprising part of the last six months but for me is the least surprising. It's not that I somehow expected Thompson to be the surprise dark horse, it's that I expected someone to fit the bill. Six months ago, there was something about Romney, Rudy and McCain that screamed the party wants one more choice. And six months ago, my list of dark horse first tier Republican candidates might have included Thompson, but also would have included folks like Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (if he could only get an organization together) or even former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Clearly, there was a hunger for another first tier option. Thompson is now that option. What's fascinating about the current Thompson boomlet is how many very smart folks in the chattering class secretly believe he'll fall on his face. Some don't believe he'll have the stomach for the negative side of the campaign, some aren't sure he wants the job bad enough to do the little things, and some just don't believe any politician is capable of filling the ridiculously high expectations some on the right have for ol' Fred right now. I'll admit to wondering about whether Thompson can pull this off for all of those reasons. The good news for Thompson is that he's in an enviable position; he has a constituency that wants to believe and so he controls his image for the time being. The bad news: the window is closing faster than perhaps his staff believes.

Already down to two for the Dems?
The Democratic race is a bit more stable right now but how we got there from January to today has been surprising.

No one is shocked that Hillary Clinton is still the leading candidate but the most underappreciated story of the Democratic race is the rise of Obama. It's not just the money, it's also the fact that he's such a solid No. 2 already. I think many of us expected Obama to be a player in this thing but I don't think many of us thought we'd already been in a "Will it be Clinton or Obama?" conversation this early in the process.

It's a fascinating contest of realism vs. idealism; most of the time realism defeats idealism in politics except when it doesn't. Republicans picked idealism in '64 and '80 and one candidate led the party to its greatest defeat and the other led it to one of its greatest victories. That's the thing with idealism: it's a high risk/high reward proposition. Obama's job for the next six months is to keep his flock of idealists excited while also reassuring the realists in the Democratic electorate that he's ready for the job.

Clinton has just the opposite challenge. She's already the candidate of realism; what she needs is to create that sense of excitement around her without having to lean on Bill Clinton.

As for the rest of the Democratic field, perhaps no one had a worse six months than Edwards. He started out as the candidate no one should overlook. Now one wonders if he can hang in there. The haircut issue is silly but revealing. He's lost control of his image and has to hurry up and get it back. The window is closing very fast for him. It's never easy when a candidate becomes his caricature. It happened to Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 and 2006 (the joke) and that fact could give some folks pause about Edwards. Do the Democrats want to nominate someone whom the Republicans and late-night comics might so easily mock? Should this alone be a reason to disqualify someone? No, but it's a bigger factor than many like to admit.

What a six months. If the next six months are anything like the first, then it's going to be a wild ride. The electorates on both sides are very uneasy about things and the uneasiness has translated into a very turbulent and unpredictable campaign that's still having a hard time coming into focus. I just feel lucky to be along for the ride.

By Chuck Todd, NBC News, July 7, 2007

July 7, 2007 -- Capitalizing on her experience, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has opened up a 23-point lead over Barack Obama, a new poll released yesterday shows.

The Newsweek poll shows Clinton leading Obama 56-33 percent in a two-way matchup of the Democratic presidential candidates. That's almost double a previous survey in early May that showed Clinton with a 51-39 percent edge over Obama.

The latest numbers also indicate that the question of which candidate is experienced enough to take the Oval Office is playing into the equation. Asked "do you think he or she has enough experience in politics and government to be a good president," some 70 percent of voters said Clinton does, compared to 25 percent who gave her experience level a thumbs down. Five percent said they didn't know.

But asked the same question about Obama, 40 percent said he had enough experience, while 34 percent thought he didn't. Another 26 percent of voters weren't sure. The notion of experience has been a hallmark of the Clinton campaign, and it's been an issue on the stump for Obama in recent weeks.

In other findings, 86 percent of voters said if a woman were their party's nominee they would cast a ballot for her, but only 58 percent said they think the nation is ready for a woman president.

When the same question was asked about the first black presidential nominee, a whopping 92 percent said they'd vote for their party's choice, but 59 percent said the country isn't prepared for a black president.

Clinton's approval rating is at 57 percent in the poll, with Obama right behind her at 54 percent, according to the survey. The poll also showed President Bush's job-approval rating at a dismal 26 percent.

The poll of 1,002 people nationwide was taken this past Monday and Tuesday. The margin of error for the entire survey is 4 percentage points, while the margin for the Democratic candidates was 6 points.

By Maggie Haberman, New York Post, July 7, 2007

The audience that gathered Friday at a downtown convention hall, drawn by the Democratic Party heavyweight headlining the day's agenda at the Essence Music Festival, burst into a standing ovation before U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton uttered a single word.

But more than her promises to restore the Gulf Coast and end the Iraq war if voters elect her to the White House in 2008, it was Clinton's references to the failures of the Bush administration to enact a swift and lasting response to Hurricane Katrina that raised the mostly African-American crowd to its feet again and again.

"Too many people have become invisible to the president of the United States," Clinton said during a half-hour appearance at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. "He doesn't even see them. Thousands of people still living in trailers here in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast -- they're invisible."

Clinton, a New York Democrat, used her audience with several hundred black voters to reiterate criticisms of Bush that she voiced in New Orleans in May, when she toured ravaged neighborhoods and laid out an expansive agenda for rebuilding hurricane-ravaged states.

"You can't get the people back unless you have the services, but you can't get their services back unless you have the people to use the services," she said, laying out a complex local problem that rarely gets referenced outside the region.

Six months into the 110th Congress and approximately six months before the first primary vote is cast, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is the favorite presidential candidate among members of Congress.

Of the 196 lawmakers who have already decided who they think should be the next president, Clinton has garnered 51 endorsements, the most of any candidate.

Additionally, 22 of New York's 23 Democratic congressmen have endorsed Clinton. Rep. Yvette Clarke, who has not yet declared her allegiance to any candidate, is the only New York Democrat who has not endorsed her. Clinton, the current Democratic front-runner for the nomination, has also gained the support of influential members. She boasts the endorsements of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.).

On the Republican side, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney lead with 27 endorsements each. Nine senators have backed McCain, the most of any presidential candidate. Most notably, McCain has picked up the endorsements of Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member John Warner (R-Va.). Warner's endorsement surprised many observers because Warner and McCain have been on opposite sides of the debate surrounding the current strategy of the war in Iraq - Warner has advocated a diversion from the president's strategy while McCain has staunchly supported it.

Romney, whose fundraising prowess has helped him gain momentum in New Hampshire and Iowa, is backed by five Republican senators - Wayne Allard (Colo.), Bob Bennett (Utah), Larry Craig (Idaho), Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) - and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

Clinton's top competition for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), is backed by 22 lawmakers. Like Clinton, Obama has received much of his support from his home state. His only supporter in the Senate is his Illinois colleague Dick Durbin (D). Eight of 10 Democratic Illinois congressmen have also endorsed Obama. Reps. Daniel Lipinski and Rahm Emanuel are the only two Democratic Illinois lawmakers who have not endorsed Obama.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has picked up 17 endorsements from lawmakers. Only one senator, David Vitter (La.), is backing Giuliani, and three of New York's six Republican congressmen support Giuliani's campaign.

Even though he has yet to enter the race officially, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson (R) has garnered support from 14 lawmakers. Both Tennessee senators, Lamar Alexander (R) and Bob Corker (R), are backing Thompson. Thompson also stole two endorsements from Romney when Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) swung their support from the former governor to the former senator. House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (Fla.) has also backed Thompson.

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) also has collected 14 congressional endorsements. The 2004 vice presidential nominee has yet to receive the support of any senators but is backed by every North Carolina Democratic congressman.

By Jeremy Jacobs, The Hill, July 6, 2007

Americans appear prepared to elect either a black or a female president. But experience trumps both factors-and in a two-way race, Hillary Clinton leads Barak Obama by nearly 20 points.

Hillary Clinton promised cheering steelworkers Friday that she would offer a labor-friendly White House and would promote manufacturing if elected president.

"We are going to revitalize our manufacturing base," the Democratic senator from New York told union leaders at a conference on manufacturing sponsored by the United Steelworkers of America. The union's membership has fallen with declining manufacturing.

"I don't think we can be a great nation without a manufacturing base," she said. "If we don't keep making things, we're not going to sustain our economic standard of living or our quality of life."

Clinton drew cheers with commitments to legislation making it easier for union membership drives and a promise to make union-friendly appointments.

The nation has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs in three decades. The manufacturing share of the nation's work force has dipped from 20 percent in 1979 to 11 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The Steelworkers union membership peaked at 1.4 million during the post-World War II steel industry expansion and dipped to 600,000 about 10 years ago. Mergers with other unions, including the Rubber Workers, have pushed membership to about 850,000.

By Thomas J. Sheeran, Associated Press, July 6, 2007

Fundraising figures released this week by the 2008 US presidential hopefuls have shown Republican candidates lagging far behind their Democratic counterparts, exposing the sharply contrasting moods within the two parties as they gear up for next year's elections.

The $68.5m raised by the three leading Democratic contenders in the second quarter was greater by a third than the $42m brought in by the top three Republicans, marking a reversal of the advantage traditionally enjoyed by Republican candidates.

The gap reflects the much greater enthusiasm within the Democratic party for its field, led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, compared with widespread dissatisfaction among Republicans about their choices for the party nomination.

More broadly, the figures underscore the resurgence under way in the Democratic party, as grassroots anger about the war in Iraq and the deepening unpopularity of President George W. Bush fuels demand for change.

Republicans, in contrast, have suffered a slump in morale and an outbreak of bitter infighting since the party's crushing defeat in last November's mid-term congressional elections.

Republican weakness was exposed most brutally by Arizona senator John McCain, who laid off about a third of his campaign staff this week after a second consecutive quarter of disappointing fundraising. Mr McCain was once favourite for the party's nomination but now faces a struggle to save his campaign from collapse. He raised $11m over the past three months and saw his cash reserves dwindle to about $2m. "We are encountering the kinds of challenges that other Republicans are facing," said Terry Nelson, Mr McCain's campaign manager. "We face a difficult fundraising environment right now and certainly difficult in comparison to what our Democratic counterparts are able to raise."

Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, also suffered a slowdown in fundraising to $14m in the second quarter. He bolstered his war chest with an additional $6.5m from his personal fortune.

By Andrew Ward, Financial Times, July 4, 2007

Ted and Sherie Larimer smiled and waved American flags as they left downtown Davenport after Hillary Clinton's campaign speech Tuesday.

"I like what she said and just think, if elected, we'd get two for the price of one," Ted Larimer said. He and his wife shook hands with both Clintons and got their autographs, too. The Larimers, of Geneseo, Ill., joined the crowds at 2nd and Main streets to listen as top Iowa Democrats - U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley and former Gov. Tom Vilsack - joined former President Bill Clinton in pitching for U.S. Sen. Clinton's candidacy.

The Clintons worked hard to connect with the Quad-City area audience, fondly recalling their 1992 post-convention bus tour that stopped late one summer's night in Bettendorf, and his tour of flood-ravaged Davenport on the Fourth of July in 1993.

By Deirdre Cox Baker, Quad-City Times, July 4, 2007

Romney announced yesterday that he has lent his campaign $6.5 million from his personal fortune to supplement the $14 million he raised from April through June. Giuliani's campaign said it raised about $15 million during the quarter. Last week, McCain announced a dramatic staff shake-up after raising only $11 million, leaving him with just $2 million in the bank.

The fundraising results continued a striking reversal of fortunes for Democratic presidential hopefuls, who have often labored with less money than their Republican counterparts.

"Clearly, that's a reflection on the war and a reflection of the past," said Alex Castellanos, Romney's media consultant. "There's a lot of pent-up disappointment in the Republican Party on issues like spending. It's not just the administration, being unable to keep its promises . . . since we're the guys in charge, we pay a price for that."

"Those folks are just raising up a storm of money," said Gary Nordlinger, a Democratic consultant. "What you are showing is that there is a heck of a lot more grass-roots enthusiasm among the Democratic base than there is among the Republican base."

"She is by a long stretch the best qualified nonincumbent I have ever had a chance to vote for president," he said, noting 2008 would be his 40th year as a voter.

After her husband's effusive introduction, Hillary Clinton cracked a joke. "If I was as smart as Bill seems to suggest I am, I would say nothing," she said.

The couple entered the crowd through a corridor of straw bales and stood together during an introduction and endorsement of Hillary Clinton by Ruth Harkin, wife of Democratic Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin. Bill Clinton occasionally put his hands on his wife's shoulders as they listened, then sat on a stool as his wife spoke.

During her speech, Hillary Clinton condemned President George W. Bush's decision to spare former White House aide Lewis Libby from prison and said it was evidence the Bush administration had "elevated cronyism over the rule of law."

Both Clintons noted Bill never competed in the Iowa caucuses during his two campaigns for the presidency. Sen. Tom Harkin was a candidate in the first race in 1992 and other Democrats left the state to him. In 1996, Clinton was unopposed for the nomination.

Hillary Clinton said she was excited to be the first member of her family to take part in Iowa's kickoff caucuses. "I'm thrilled to finally find something in politics that I'm doing that my husband didn't do," she said.

Former president Bill Clinton joined the New York senator for three days of campaigning across the state, to be followed by events this month in New Hampshire. Monday's rally drew several thousand sign-waving people to the Iowa State Fairgrounds. With five more rallies today and Wednesday, they were sure to enliven the Democratic race as it enters the final six months before Iowans start the voting in their caucuses.

Bill Clinton's role here is to tout his wife's credentials but not to overshadow her, and he did just that Monday. He spoke for less than 10 minutes, calling her "by a long stretch the best-qualified non-incumbent I have ever had a chance to vote for in my entire life."

He added, "I'd be here tonight, if she asked me, if we weren't married."

Noting her husband's oratorical skills, Hillary Clinton took the microphone and said, "If I was as smart as Bill seems to think I am, I would say nothing." Then she spent 30 minutes disparaging the Bush administration and outlining her goals on health care, energy, education and foreign policy.

"I will work my heart out for you," she said. Then, pointing at the ex-president seated beside her, she added, "I will have some good help along the way." Many in the crowd, sitting on bales of straw and sporting buttons that read "Miss Bill? Vote Hill," were drawn by the ex-president's star power. "It's too bad he couldn't run for a third term," said Phyllis Thomas, 69, a retired state employee.

A poll of 400 likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers released Monday by American Research Group showed Clinton leading John Edwards, the party's '04 nominee for vice president, 32% to 29%, but the result is within the +/-4% margin of error. In May, the same poll measured support for Clinton at 31%, with Edwards behind her with 25%.

Enter Bill Clinton, a prodigious fundraiser who quickly sold out 3,500 tickets to the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner last October. "People look forward to seeing him. He is a great orator," said Scott Brennan, the state's Democratic chairman.

The former president already talks about his wife's career and qualifications on a video on her campaign's website, www.hillaryclinton.com. On the campaign trail, "He's going to be talking about her, and she's going to be talking about the country," said Phil Singer, the campaign's press secretary.

The Iowa Democratic caucuses next year could go down to the wire, as they did in 2004. For Clinton, "That's not necessarily a bad thing at this stage," Selzer said. "What you want to do is catch fire at the end."

By Richard Wolf, USA Today, July 3, 2007

WASHINGTON - For months, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been running her presidential campaign as a front-runner, establishing an image of steady inevitability. Barack Obama unsteadied her. By raising a dazzling $32.5 million and outpacing Clinton by $10 million in primary election money, Obama succeeded in making his chief rival look mortal.

Clinton still leads in national polls and is strong in early primary states like New Hampshire and Florida. Obama now leads in fundraising and number of donors - an impressive 258,000 during the first six months of the year.

Neither ensures success in the voting booth.

But both Democrats now occupy a rarified place in the presidential field. Their campaigns can compete with overwhelming force against bantam candidates, such as John Edwards or Bill Richardson, who must run more targeted, all-eggs-in-one-basket campaigns. Obama and Clinton now stand where George W. Bush stood in 2000. Bush was a well-financed candidate able to sustain a blow from Sen. John McCain in New Hampshire and outspend McCain to victory in subsequent primaries.

Edwards, Richardson and others with fewer resources can find solace in John Kerry, whose campaign was all but dead in 2003 before he borrowed $6 million against his Boston house and put all his effort into winning Iowa. The momentum out of Iowa helped Kerry overcome a 21 percentage point deficit in New Hampshire where his win translated into national momentum. "Some of these candidates are in positions where Iowa is must win - Edwards is in that situation," said Mark Mellman, who was Kerry's pollster in 2004. "Hillary and to some extent Obama can say they can afford to lose along the way and still have popularity and resources to live to fight another day."

Ultimately, the attention to fundraising shifts to spending. And that calculation is complicated by the accelerated pace of the nominating contests this presidential cycle. As the nominating calendar stands now, between Jan. 14 and Feb. 2, Democrats will compete in the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire, Florida and South Carolina primaries. Then the candidates will confront a Feb. 5 election tsunami where potentially more than 20 states, including New York and California, will hold caucuses or primaries.

Clinton's camp has been more circumspect, publicly focusing on the January contests. But she also has been spending money in California to build a presence in that state and her aides have been touting national polls that show her as the Democrat most able to defeat the leading Republican presidential candidates.

Obama's appeal is similar to Howard Dean's 2003-2004 presidential bid, when Dean tapped into a motivated, broad based army of supporters. They elevated Dean from obscure former Vermont governor to a national contender. But, in a cautionary tale for Obama, that grass-roots support never materialized as votes.

How the candidates are beginning to spend their money will become more evident when they file detailed finance reports in mid-July. Clinton has yet to air any television ads and Obama only went on the air with ads last week in Iowa. Edwards, Richardson and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., have been more aggressive with advertising, buying air time in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Edwards raised at least $9 million in the second quarter, Richardson raised $7 million and Dodd raised $3.25 million. On Monday, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden's campaign announced he raised $2.4 million during the last three months.

Obama and Clinton are on a pace to raise $90 million to $100 million each by the end of the year, a formidable sum that would allow them to eclipse the spending by Edwards, Richardson and others in states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Florida, which is scheduled to hold its primary Jan. 29, is an expensive media market. But Obama and Clinton will also have to decide whethe