WASHINGTON (AFP) - Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have put on a convincing show of personal amity, but political calculations are not far behind as the Democrats join forces in the battle for the White House.

If former president Bill Clinton still nurses grievances from this year's bruising primary epic, and a dwindling band of his wife's supporters are threatening to vote for Republican John McCain, Hillary Clinton at least has moved on.

"I don't see any divergence of interests. She needs to do everything she can to get Senator Obama elected president, and be seen doing everything she can," said William Galston, a former adviser to Bill Clinton.

"I think it's in Senator Obama's interest to have Senator Clinton campaign regularly and enthusiastically for him. It's also in her interest to do that," he said, explaining that Clinton's own future in the party is at stake.

The two senators staged their first joint campaign rally in the aptly named New Hampshire town of Unity last week. Both spoke passionately of their desire for unity to end Republican rule for the sake of a nation ardent for change.

But as Obama prepares for more campaigning in Independence, Missouri on Monday, they still face tricky questions over what role Clinton may take in the Obama campaign and at the Democrats' August convention in Denver -- and eventually, what job she might solicit in an Obama administration.

Bill Clinton is said still to be smarting over being portrayed as a closet racist by some Obama supporters during the primary campaign, and is taking his wife's agonizing loss personally.

But one of Hillary Clinton's most avid supporters, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, said the former president was certain to join his wife's efforts to elect Obama.

"President Clinton's going to do every single thing that Barack Obama asks him to do," said Rendell, who campaigned tirelessly for the New York governor during her failed bid for the Democratic nomination.

"He's disappointed, just like I am, but he knows the stakes are so high for this country. He's going to get out there in typical Bill Clinton fashion and make a great case for Senator Obama as our next president."

The former president, still a star draw for many in the party, has given only tepid backing to Obama. But both he and his wife Friday each donated the maximum legal limit of 2,300 dollars to the Obama campaign, aides said.

That financial gesture of reconciliation came after Obama gave the same amount to help retire the former first lady's campaign debts of 22.5 million dollars.

His donation came at an elite gathering late Thursday of top Clinton fundraisers, where the two senators rolled out their unity show before heading to the New Hampshire town where they split the primary vote exactly in January.

Most of those in attendance appeared eager to take the fight to the Republicans on Obama's behalf, although one guest told ABC the event at Washington's historic Mayflower Hotel felt like a "dentist's appointment."

Obama has been reaching out by hiring Clinton campaign staffers, most of whom will be out of a job this month.

Opinion polls meanwhile suggest that disaffected Clinton voters are returning to the Democratic fold. The proportion that was threatening to vote for McCain rather than Obama was as high as one-third a month ago.

But now only 11 percent of Clinton supporters still plan to defect to McCain, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released Tuesday.

Recent polls also suggest little appetite for Clinton to run as Obama's vice presidential nominee, despite persistent demands for that "dream ticket" from some of her supporters.

Clear majorities of independent voters in four battleground states where Obama is now beating McCain -- Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin -- are against the idea, according to the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

AFP, June 29, 2008

CHICAGO - By rights, a group that helped elect Bill Clinton president and counts Sen. Hillary Rodham CLinton as one of its leaders should be hostile territory for Barack Obama. But members of the Democratic Leadership Council seem ready to embrace Obama rather than risk squandering an opportunity for victory this fall.

"Ultimately, what I care about is putting a strong Democrat in the White House," said Phil Bartlett, a state senator from Maine who backed Clinton in the primary.

But many DLC members, meeting in Chicago on Sunday, argued victory will require following their centrist organization's philosophy.

They urged Obama to emphasize practical solutions to the problems directly affecting voters - gas prices, inflation, failing schools, job security. He can't let Republicans define him as a tax-and-spend liberal, they said, and he can't let the left push him toward a campaign based on retribution against the Bush administration.

"We need somebody who can pull us together," said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Md., a DLC vice chairman. "Voters want us to be united and they want us to govern from the middle."

The Democratic Leadership Council was formed in the wake of Walter Mondale's huge loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984. The goal was to change the party's image and focus by stressing such issues as welfare reform, charter schools and business opportunity.

The group helped Bill Clinton win in 1992, although critics say it ignores Democratic principles and the poor and vulnerable who need the party's help. The group's president is a former Clinton aide, and Hillary Clinton heads its "American Dream Initiative."

Some former Clinton backers admit to a little hesitation about Obama.

Peggy West, a member of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, says she's still "taking inventory" after Clinton's loss to the Illinois senator in the Democratic presidential primary.

"I'm not, at this point, enthusiastic about Obama, but I am going to be out there doing doors and giving what little money I can," West said. "I'm definitely in his camp."

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who endorsed Obama after ending his own run for the Democratic nomination, urged DLC members to put aside any hurt feelings from the long primary race.

"There is still probably a need to heal a little bit," he said in a speech to the group. "It may take a little time - hopefully not too much longer. Everybody needs to find ways to recognize that we have an incredible opportunity to regain the White House."

The DLC meeting took place just across a small courtyard from the building that houses Obama's headquarters. While the campaign didn't make any overt effort to woo the group, senior Obama aides did meet with members during the conference, "many of whom are elected officials who have been involved with the campaign for a long time," said spokeswoman Amy Brundage.

Obama won the nomination without help from top DLC leaders, but that isn't stopping them from taking a little credit.

Al From, who founded the group, argued Obama's theme of putting solutions ahead of bipartisan bickering matches what the DLC has championed from the beginning. And in the early stages of the general election, Obama shows signs of continuing that theme, he said.

Obama didn't condemn a Supreme Court decision restricting gun control laws, From pointed out, and he endorsed a congressional compromise on legal protections for telecommunications companies that aided Bush administration wiretapping - two positions that disappoint some liberals.

"He's shown me that he knows how to be practical," From said.

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin argued that on almost any issue, Obama can get voters to listen if he emphasizes results over ideology. He said Obama should make the case that Republicans have failed to get results on health care, government spending, the war on terror and more.

Voters know Obama is smart and inspirational, Manchin said - now they need to know that he has specific plans to make their lives better.

By CHRISTOPHER WILLS, Associated Press, June 29, 2008

WASHINGTON - The ping-pong table was supposed to be a gag. It was in Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate suite when she returned to the office Tuesday after a two-week rest following the suspension of her presidential campaign.

The table, where staffers were locked in a mock contest to celebrate her arrival, was dismantled soon after the New York Democrat moved through the door. The capital's supine politial media fawned over the stunt.

But it struck some New Yorkers as an out-of-body signal from their junior senator who had missed 97 out of 155 votes cast in the Senate this year in a historic, roller-coaster quest for the presidential nomination.

Clinton's heavily-packaged rites, which continued for three days, perplexed some who wonder if she were really resigned to the strong probability that she is not going to become president next Jan. 20, and may never be president.

It was reported her staffers recruited a small crowd, which Clinton worked like a campaign rope-line outside the Capitol. When she entered the Senate chamber she used the great ceremonial door that not even the vice president employs when he visits.

In the hallways, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N. Y., arranged a public greeting for her.

She had hugs for supporters like Sens. Debbie Stabenow, DMich., and Barbara Mikulski, DMd., but a cold shoulder for Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who did not back her.

It went on. She made major speeches to two advocacy groups.

Then the Clintons staged a high-profile downtown party to raise $100,000 to defray her campaign expenses. The presumptive nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and his wife, gave Clinton checks for $4,600, said nice words and left.

To core supporters, the fuss looked appropriate for the first - but not the last - woman as a serious contender seeking the presidential nomination.

The rituals, though, did not necessarily enhance her ability to answer New York's great needs in the Senate, where most Democrats supported Obama, and where she ranks Number 68.

Among Democrats, she stands fifth on the Environment and Public Works Committee, eighth on Health, Education and Labor, and ninth on Armed Services.

Some wonder if Clinton and New York would have been better off had she quietly ambled into the Senate chamber two weeks ago and then privately dined with members who did not support her, and just got to work.

The awkward truth is that Schumer for the last few years has largely done the chores of both senators, as far as upstate is concerned.

It was Schumer, not Clinton, who rushed into the breach when the Bush administration proposed draconiam ID rules for crossing the Canadian Border. It was Schumer who interceded with the National Football League to bolster the Buffalo Bills' finances. Schumer and nobody else has been hectoring the airlines to keep regular, inexpensive service in upstate. Same with Medicaid funding.

Schumer has confronted power to help New York. The state needs two senators to help pull it out of the hole it is in. It needs two senators with influence.

Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign is either over, or it is not over. New York papers are reporting that Obama is becoming very nettled at continuing pressure from Clinton supporters to put her on the ticket and give her a starring role at the Denver convention, which should showcase Obama.

For the sake of whatever clout she can wield for New York at an Obama White House, Clinton should end, not suspend, the campaign, stop the ceremonies, cast off the Bill Clinton third-termers, release her delegates now and tell her friends to stop needling Obama.

By Douglas Turner, The Buffalo News, June 30, 2008

There's no exact science on running mates, and history isn't always the best teacher.

The sight of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton together in Unity, N.H., is sure to refuel the endless guessing game over who will occupy the second spots on the major-party tickets.

There's no way to anticipate the thought processes of Democrat Obama and Republican John McCain, no formula for weighing the factors involved.

And this year, as ever, lessons learned seem to have been forgotten.

Consider that much of the speculation has centered on individuals presumed to be able to deliver their states in November - even though few running mates have delivered states before, and current polls suggest it's not likely to happen in 2008, either.

Obama and McCain could announce their picks at any time between now and the late-summer conventions. History suggests later rather than sooner; nominees tend to want to weigh their options as long as possible.

In the end, of course, few Americans will vote on the basis of the vice president. But the selection of No. 2 says a lot about the thinking of No. 1. "Vice presidential candidates are in the spotlight the week they're chosen and the week of their debate," said Michael Nelson, a political scientist at Rhodes College in Tennessee who has studied the subject. "That's a pretty good chunk of the campaign."

In addition, recent years have demonstrated how much it matters who sits in the vice president's office, beyond the right of succession.

One indicator of how the process may play out this time is how it has played out in the past. What follows are historical trends. And trends, even more than rules, are made to be broken.

Governors need not apply.

The last to make the cut was Republican Spiro Agnew, who ran with Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Agnew wound up resigning and going to prison. Since then, the major parties have looked in other directions.

One reason is that a lot of presidential nominees (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) had been governors. So they tended to want Washington figures running with them.

"Outsiders pick insiders," said Joel Goldstein, an expert on the vice presidency at St. Louis University. "Insiders usually pick insiders, too."

This time, though, with two senators running for president, governors may actually have a chance.

Also-rans from the nomination fight don't win the prize.

From time to time, a presidential nominee has selected the runner-up. Democrat John F. Kennedy went with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960, Republican Reagan with George H.W. Bush in 1980, Democrat John Kerry with John Edwards in 2004.

But no candidate has passed over the runner-up to select a straggler. This does not augur well for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, all of whom finished far behind Hillary Clinton.

Running mates aren't picked for their ability to carry their home state. Or shouldn't be.

To be sure, Johnson helped carry Texas for Kennedy in 1960, although the Texan was chosen for his appeal to the entire South. Since then, perhaps the only running mate who helped win a state that a ticket otherwise might have lost was Al Gore (Tennessee) with Bill Clinton in 1992.

According to a 1989 study, a running mate from a state improves the ticket's performance there by an average of 0.3 percentage points.

This month, pollsters from Quinnipiac University asked Floridians about having Republican Gov. Charlie Crist or Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson as vice presidential candidates; Pennsylvanians about former Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican, and Gov. Rendell; Ohioans about former Rep. Rob Portman, a Republican, and Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.

Ridge polled the best: He had no impact. All the others made voters less likely to support Obama or McCain.

That hasn't stopped the talk about politicians with presumed local appeal, including Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and two Virginia Democrats, Sen. Jim Webb and Gov. Tim Kaine.

With his choice, the presidential nominee will make a statement of some sort.

By picking Dick Cheney in 2000, George W. Bush said he was confident enough of himself - and aware of his own inexperience - to go with a strong Washington insider.

Obama, who has little foreign-policy experience, might be inclined to pick someone with strong credentials in that realm. Rendell has recommended Hillary Clinton, Biden or Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana.

McCain might be drawn to someone with a business background, such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Or he might pick a woman, particularly if Obama doesn't. At 71, McCain knows that his choice will draw close scrutiny, particularly if he opts for a much younger person with limited experience. Said Goldstein: "In picking a running mate, good government is good politics. If the person doesn't pass the test of being presidential, it hurts your credibility. It's a drop-dead requirement."

The announcements probably won't happen soon.

They used to come at the conventions. More recently, they have usually been announced the week before, giving delegates time to deal with any anger or disappointment before arriving on site.

The exception was Kerry. He announced Edwards, a move he knew would be popular, 20 days before the 2004 Democratic convention.

With the Democrats meeting first this year, as the out-party always does, McCain has the opportunity to wait out Obama, then factor Obama's move into his own calculus.

In terms of the outcome in November, the choice probably won't be decisive.

With the possible exception of 1960, it's fair to say that there hasn't been an election where a vice presidential candidate was the difference between victory and defeat.

But analysts say three running mates damaged their tickets - Agnew, Dan Quayle and Democratic Rep. Geraldine Ferraro. The GOP won despite Agnew in 1968 and Quayle 20 years later; the Democrats would have lost in 1984 no matter whom Walter Mondale chose as his No. 2.

In the end, few politicians refuse to be No. 2.

In 1972, presidential nominee George McGovern, a prohibitive underdog, was turned down by several prominent Democrats before settling on Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who then had to leave the ticket after revelations that he'd been treated for depression.

That's the exception, especially now that the vice presidency has become an office with real clout. "Unlike most other people, I'm being straight with you," Biden said on NBC's Meet the Press this month, after saying he did not want the job. "If asked, I will do it."

By Larry Eichel, The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 30, 2008

It is more than a little ironic that it has taken the first African-American to win a major party presidential nomination to make clear to everyone what has been the case for more than 40 years in presidential elections: Democrats have a problem with white voters.

Suddenly, the topic du jour on television and radio talk shows, at water coolers and the most exclusive cocktail parties is how well Sen. Barack Obama can do among whites, especially the demographic group pundits call the "white working class."

The truth is these voters have been around for decades. They're "The Silent Majority," "Jill and Joe Six-Pack" and "Reagan Democrats," and whatever the name, they have given Democratic presidential candidates the back of their hands since 1964. That was the year Lyndon Johnson won in one of the biggest landslides in American history, and any demographic group he did not carry probably held its meetings in a telephone booth.

Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton, the last Democrats to occupy the Oval Office since then, won a majority of white voters. Mr. Clinton came relatively close in 1996 and might have done so in 1992 had Ross Perot not been in the race. But focusing on those near misses overlooks the larger point: Sen. Obama, the son of a white mother and black father, could lose this election badly and still outdo the very pale - Sen. George McGovern in 1972, former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988 and possibly Sen. John Kerry in 2004 - among white voters.

The Big Disqualifier?

For those voters, especially ones without college degrees, the fact that Sen. Obama is black may not be as much a disqualifier as his background as a Democrat from the Frost Belt with no national security or executive experience and a voting record judged by the nonpartisan National Journal as the Senate's most liberal during 2007.

Yet, the focus on Sen. Obama's relative weakness among the white working class has become the hot topic among many who say racial bias explains it. Of course it would be naive to believe that race is not a factor in America today. But that doesn't necessarily mean Mr. Obama's relative weakness among white voters is solely, or even mainly, due to the fact that he is black and that three quarters of voters this year will be white.

In 1991, when I wrote a book about how the Democrats were failing to deal with their white voter problem, I ran into a number of editors who wanted to know why anyone would care - and not too subtly wondered whether looking at the reasons for their disaffection might be too politically touchy.

Then Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, however, recognized the problem. Not only did he write a back cover blurb for the book, but also his campaign showed that he understood the discontent.

Although Mr. Clinton won enough votes to take the presidency, after his reign, Democrats continued to see the formula for victory as before; increasing minority turnout - especially African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Hispanics - while winning those white voters most likely to see things their way - single women, union members and those with low incomes who viewed government as their salvation.

Ignoring Views and Values

Such a focus ignores the views and values of the larger group of white voters.

The truth is that, more than we like to admit, polls consistently show a correlation between race and ideology in American society. White voters, as a group, are more likely to favor a limited role for government here at home and a more aggressive posture overseas. In general, polls show Democrats - and a disproportionate share of black voters - favor a smaller, less adventurous military and a larger role for government on the domestic front.

This disconnect goes a long way toward explaining the GOP White House dominance since 1980.

The question this year is whether an unpopular war, an even less popular Republican president and a slumping economy can change those dynamics in favor of Sen. Obama - or perhaps whether just the American electorate has become less white enough so that it does not matter.

But making a big deal about Sen. Obama's weakness among white voters, among those with or without a college education, and assuming it has to do just with his race ignores history. It does a disservice to both Sen. Obama and those who oppose him.

By Peter A. Brown, The Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2008

The frequently sharp exchanges between Barack Obama and John McCain over whether to negotiate with Iran is but the opening volley in what will be a months-long debate about American foreign policy. Though a raft of issues divides the two camps, there is a deeper ideological division that has nothing do with diplomacy or military force.

When it comes to U.S. security, McCain is a universalist and Obama is a particularist.

The concepts of universalism and particularism were sketched out in the early days of the Cold War by George Kennan, an official in President Truman's State Department and the architect of America's containment strategy. According to the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, Kennan saw the universalistic approach as one which assumed "that if all countries could be induced to subscribe to certain standards or rules of behavior" than the rivalries and human emotions that begat conflict would fade away.

To a universalist, America is only secure when, to borrow the phrase, "freedom is on the march." The key to American security is the active spread of American values and institutions around the globe. While many neoconservatives subscribe to such a view, it long predates their ascendancy in political and policy-making circles. At the time Kennan wrote, universalists were apt to put their faith in international institutions (which reflected, however opaquely, Western parliamentary procedures) rather than global military dominance.

Particularists, on the other hand, do not believe the world's political diversity represents a threat to the U.S. However deplorable, particularists believe that tyranny, autocracy, corruption and misrule will remain a fixture in international relations so long as human beings remain fallible. Those with a particularist mindset tend to govern as "realists" - more inclined toward international cooperation, even if it entails dealing with tyrants. As Gaddis wrote in Strategies of Containment, particularists could tolerate "varying degrees of enmity in the world so long as it was neither consolidated nor coordinated."

With the important caveat that campaign oratory is an imperfect guide to future performance, it's increasingly clear that McCain hews closer to the universalist camp, while Obama is more of a particularist.

Take McCain first. He has stated, repeatedly, that America's security rests in the propagation of its values. "It is the democracies of the world that will provide the pillars upon which we can and must build an enduring peace," he said in a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. In the pages of Foreign Affairs, he noted that "the protection and promotion of the democratic ideal, at home and abroad, will be the surest source of security and peace for the century that lies before us."

Many politicians, Obama included, have spoken of the universal appeal of American values. But McCain's argument is different. He's not merely stating that they are appealing, but that they universally applicable and that it is in our interest to apply them.

In a long article on McCain's foreign policy views for the New York Times Magazine reporter Matt Bai noted that "McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain's view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet."

McCain frequently peppers his foreign policy speeches with quotes from the Founding Fathers on the potential for the American revolution to transcend its borders, implying, if not a mandate, than at least a precedent for such a capacious view.

In his World Affairs Council speech, McCain said the U.S. had "numerous overlapping interests" with China, but cautioned that "until China moves toward political liberalization, our relationship will be based on periodically shared interests rather than the bedrock of shared values."

In other words merely cooperating is insufficient. Only until China changes its political system to mirror ours will we enjoy good relations. In his own Foreign Affairs essay, Obama wrote that America's "essential challenge" when it comes to China is to "build a relationship that broadens cooperation while strengthening our ability to compete." Unlike McCain, he does not stake the future of U.S.-China relations on the latter's political liberalization.

The contrast with Russia is equally apparent. McCain has been a harsh critic of Russia, not because it has threatened the U.S., but because it has walked away from its democratic reforms and taken to periodically bullying its neighbors. McCain has suggested booting Russia from the G8 group of industrial democracies and refers to them as a "revanchist" power - an incendiary term implying a Russian desire to reoccupy Eastern Europe.

Obama, however, is more circumspect. "Although we must not shy away from pushing for more democracy and accountability in Russia, we must work with the country in areas of common interest," he said to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Rather than threaten Russia, Obama proceeded to lay out a case for cooperation on non-proliferation issues.

But it is McCain's hallmark proposal - that the U.S. create a "league of democracies" - that best illustrates his universalist thinking. Such a league, McCain argued, "can harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values..." Implicit in this argument is that ideological affinity begets shared interests. Where the dictator-friendly U.N. is uncooperative, McCain believes that a grouping of democracies would be more effective. Such a league, he said, would pressure regimes "with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval" and could "impose sanctions on Iran and thwart its nuclear ambitions."

Obama's particularist predilections are harder to discern, but still evident. He speaks frequently of the appeal of American values and the imperative to promote democracy. Yet Obama will more often link American security with the relative income levels and personal dignity of those beyond our borders, and not to the political system under which they live. He has put a higher price on stability and cooperation with great powers than on ideological conversion.

Beneath Obama's stated preference for diplomacy when dealing with North Korea or Iran lies a clear subtext: barring acts of overt aggression, America can co-exist in a world with these loathsome, nuclear-armed regimes. His objection to the Iraq war carried a similar implication. Containing Iraq was preferable to conquering it.

Although these are theoretical maxims, the real world consequences are clear enough. Because universalism rejects the legitimacy of non-democratic systems and has global ambitions, it is inherently destabilizing. Non-democratic states have little incentive to cooperate with the U.S. if they believe we are intent on subverting their governments. Similarly, because universalism does not recognize the legitimacy of autocratic governments, it too easily dismisses their security interests as the product of political false consciousness.

Particularlism too is not without its dangers. Because it values stability, it can remain dangerously passive toward emerging threats. Since it accepts the presence of non-democratic governments, it will miss, or deliberately overlook, opportunities to promote a more liberal world order. It can be captive to the status quo.

Despite its present distribution along partisan lines, universalism and particularism are not partisan categories. While each campaign has a clear preference, they're not dogmatic. McCain, for instance, has suggested that he is a "realistic idealist" and counts as advisors men like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, who are staunch particularists. Obama's camp can lapse into universalism when they suggest that America has a national security mandate to promote dignity among the world's benighted.

But if they occasionally veer from the path, the road each man wishes to take America down is clear. The only question that remains is: where do we want to go?

By Gregory Scoblete, Real Clear Politics, June 30, 2008

WASHINGTON - As they look to the fall election, Democrats face a strategic decision that has bedeviled their party for 40 years: How hard should they fight in the South?

And how does having Senator Barack Obama at the top of the ticket affect that calculation?

Officials in Mr. Obama's campaign say they are bullish on the South, and they have signaled their aggressiveness with early campaign appearances in North Carolina and Virginia, major voter registration drives in the region, and television advertising in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama, said he saw "tremendous potential" in several Southern states.

"If you go in and look at the number of unregistered voters in demographic groups that are important to Barack's candidacy - younger voters, African-American voters - the potential is just incredible," Mr. Hildebrand said.

And yet since the South began to shift away from the Democrats in the 1960s, it has become one of the biggest and reddest of the Republican strongholds. In the last two presidential elections, the Democrats failed to carry any of the Southern states. Although recent Democratic nominees have typically gotten about 9 out of 10 of the votes of Southern blacks, they still need a substantial chunk of the white vote to prevail. Political scientists put that figure at close to 40 percent, though it depends on the state, and the Democrats have rarely gotten it.

Even after selecting a Southerner, John Edwards of North Carolina, as his running mate in 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts drew 29 percent of the white vote in the region (17 percent in the Deep South). In 2000, Al Gore got 31 percent, even losing his home state, Tennessee.

The only times since 1972 that the Democrats have carried more than a third of the Southern white vote, according to exit polls, were when Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, both Southerners, were atop the ticket. In 1996, for example, Mr. Clinton got the votes of 36 percent of Southern whites and 87 percent of Southern blacks, and carried 5 of the 13 Southern states.

Mr. Obama's Southern strategy relies on significantly increasing black registration and turnout, as he did in the primary season. Mr. Hildebrand said that by some estimates there are 600,000 unregistered black voters in Georgia alone. The higher the black share of the vote, the lower the requirement for garnering white votes. But the Obama camp argues that it can increase its share of the white vote as well by focusing on younger, more progressive whites.

Democratic candidates have typically written off many Southern states early in the process. But when Democrats give up the South, they need to win 70 percent of the rest of the electoral votes, said Merle Black, an expert on Southern politics at Emory University. And they often subject candidates running for lower offices in the region to fierce political headwinds: it is hard for a statewide candidate to prevail when his party's presidential nominee loses by double digits.

"We've not only lost in Mississippi, we've lost by 20 points in Mississippi," said Ray Mabus, the former governor of Mississippi and a senior adviser to Mr. Obama.

Mr. Mabus added: "It's not only Democrats who've been writing off Mississippi. It's Republicans, too, because they felt safe."

The Obama campaign's interest in the South, Mr. Mabus said, is already heightening the competition there. He noted that Senator John McCain had been to Mississippi since clinching the Republican nomination. "I don't think he would have come if he thought it was a mortal lock," Mr. Mabus said.

Southern Democrats have often felt left out of their party's presidential calculations. From Reconstruction to the 1960s, the South was essentially a one-party region: Democratic. But voters' allegiance was rocked in the 1960s by the Democrats' leadership in passing civil rights legislation, and whites began to move to what Republicans asserted was their more natural ideological home.

This was exacerbated, many Southern Democrats believe, by the national party's habit of nominating Northern liberals who campaigned little in the region. But the Democrats who ran those campaigns said they had to devote their resources to the states where polls showed they had the best chance of prevailing.

"We started out with a pretty broad playing field, with the intention of putting more states in play than had been put into play before," said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who worked for Mr. Kerry in 2004, noting that the Kerry campaign competed early on in Virginia.

"At a certain point, we needed to make a decision on whether to continue to compete in states that weren't likely to pay off and drain money from states that could," Mr. Mellman said.

But this time, the resources argument would be less compelling because Mr. Obama is expected to have a sizable financial edge over his rival, given his decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits that accompany it. And, some Democrats who work in the South argue, writing off a region is simply the wrong thing to do.

"How do you tell 102 million people who live in the South that they don't matter?" said Steve Jarding, a Democratic consultant who has worked on several Southern campaigns. This year, he added, the region should be open to a Democratic argument on economics.

But some contend that the building blocks of a Democratic electoral majority lie elsewhere, notably the Southwest. That argument was laid out in 2006 in "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South," by Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

"The notion that the Democrats have to win in the South is just a fiction," Dr. Schaller said.

Some Democrats say the Obama registration drive could have unintended consequences, spurring a higher turnout among whites planning to vote Republican. But Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, said he considered that unlikely.

"Older whites who are most likely to have traditional racial attitudes are probably already registered and may have records of consistent participation," Dr. Bullock said.

As Mr. Mabus put it, "I'm sure some won't vote for him because he's African-American, but I'm pretty sure those people wouldn't vote for any Democrat."

Mr. Obama's race aside, his ideology is a significant hurdle in the South, if history is any guide. Mr. Clinton broke the Republicans' hold in 1992 in part by running as a decidedly centrist Democrat - pro-death penalty, pro-welfare reform, for the "forgotten middle class." He was also helped by Ross Perot's third-party candidacy, which drained votes from the Republicans.

In the Republican camp, strategists say that for all the difficulties the party is facing, the South remains deeply conservative.

"It would take an awful big shift in the electorate this year," said Mike DuHaime, a senior adviser to the McCain campaign. "It's not like we're talking about states that were won by one or two points last time. These Southern states, with the exception of Virginia and Florida, were double-digit wins."

Mr. DuHaime acknowledged that Virginia, whose northern suburbs have become more Democratic in recent years, would be competitive this year. But he maintained that Mr. McCain, more than many Republicans, should have substantial appeal to moderate and independent voters.

Gordon Giffin, a Democratic activist in the South and an ambassador to Canada in the Clinton administration, said the economy and the Iraq war had created "more available white voters in the South this time than we've had in recent memory." Southern Democrats always argue for more attention from the national party, and Mr. Giffin acknowledged, "Sometimes we know we're full of hot air."

He added, "This time it's different."

By Robin Toner, The New York Times, June 30, 2008

In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize. With the general election four months away, Obama's rhetoric on the topic now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far.

Obama's plan, which was formally laid out last September, called for the remaining combat brigades to be pulled out at a brisk pace of about one per month, along with a strategic shift of resources and attention away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan. At that rate, all combat troops would be withdrawn in sixteen months. In hindsight, it was a mistake - an understandable one, given the nature of the media and of Presidential politics today - for Obama to offer such a specific timetable. In matters of foreign policy, flexibility is a President's primary defense against surprise. At the start of 2007, no one in Baghdad would have predicted that blood-soaked neighborhoods would begin returning to life within a year. The improved conditions can be attributed, in increasing order of importance, to President Bush's surge, the change in military strategy under General David Petraeus, the turning of Sunni tribes against Al Qaeda, the Sadr militia's unilateral ceasefire, and the great historical luck that brought them all together at the same moment. With the level of violence down, the Iraqi government and Army have begun to show signs of functioning in less sectarian ways. These developments may be temporary or cyclical; predicting the future in Iraq has been a losing game. Indeed, it was President Bush's folly to ignore for years the shifting realities on the ground.

Obama, whatever the idealistic yearnings of his admirers, has turned out to be a cold-eyed, shrewd politician. The same pragmatism that prompted him last month to forgo public financing of his campaign will surely lead him, if he becomes President, to recalibrate his stance on Iraq. He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reenergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia's recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: "We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

Obama's advisers have been more forthcoming. Samantha Power, before she resigned from the campaign for making an indiscreet remark about Hillary Clinton, told the BBC, "He will, of course, not rely upon some plan that he's crafted as a Presidential candidate or a U.S. senator. He will rely upon a plan - an operational plan - that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground." Last month, the Center for a New American Security, which has become something like Obama's foreign-policy think tank, released a report that argued against a timetable for withdrawal, regardless of the state of the war, and in favor of "conditional engagement," declaring, "Under this strategy, the United States would not withdraw its forces based on a firm unilateral schedule. Rather, the time horizon for redeployment would be negotiated with the Iraqi government and nested within a more assertive approach to regional diplomacy. The United States would make it clear that Iraq and America share a common interest in achieving sustainable stability in Iraq, and that the United States is willing to help support the Iraqi government and build its security and governance capacity over the long term, but only so long as Iraqis continue to make meaningful political progress." It's impossible to know if this persuasive document mirrors Obama's current thinking, but here's a clue: it was co-written by one of his Iraq advisers, Colin Kahl.

A "conditional engagement" policy is a much better fit for the present situation in Iraq. It would keep the heat on Iraqi politicians, whose willingness to reach compromise on issues like oil revenues, provincial elections, de-Baathification, and power sharing still lags well behind the government's recent military successes. It would allow for a phased withdrawal of most troops, depending on political progress and on the performance of the Iraqi Army. This, in turn, would ease the pressure on the American military and answer the rightful disenchantment in American public opinion. There will be no such thing as victory in Iraq, but the next President, if he remains nimble, may be able to keep the damage under control.

The politics of the issue is tricky, because acknowledging changed ideas in response to changed facts is considered a failing by the political class. Accordingly, Obama, on the night that he proclaimed himself the nominee, in St. Paul, made a familiar declaration: "Start leaving we must. It's time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future." His supporters claim that the polls are with Obama, that war fatigue will make Iraq a political winner for him in November. Yet, as exhausted as the public is with the war, a candidate who seems heedless of progress in Iraq will be vulnerable to the charge of defeatism, which John McCain's campaign will connect to its broader theme of Obama's inexperience in and weakness on national security. The relative success of the surge is one of the few issues going McCain's way; we'll be hearing about it more and more between now and November, and it might sway some centrist voters who have doubts about Obama.

Obama has shown, with his speech on race, that he has a talent for candor. One can imagine him speaking more honestly on Iraq. If pressed on his timetable for withdrawal, he could say, "That was always a goal, not a blueprint. When circumstances change, I don't close my eyes - I adapt." He could detail in his speeches the functions that American troops and diplomats can continue to perform even as our primary combat role recedes: training and advising, counterterrorism, brokering deals among Iraqi factions, checking their expansionist impulses, opening talks with our enemies in the region. He could promise to negotiate all this with Iraqi leaders, emphasizing the difference between a relationship that respects the wishes of the public in both countries and one in which Iraqis are coerced into cooperation. If Obama truly wants to be seen as a figure of change, he needs to talk less about the past and more about the future: not the war that should never have been fought but the war that he, alone of the two candidates, can find an honorable way to end.

By George Packer, The New Yorker, July 7, 2008

Though as The Times's Robin Toner writes today, the southern United States has "become one of the biggest and reddest of the Republican strongholds," Senator Barack Obama's campaign is hoping to change that this November. The campaign is putting resources into several southern states, running ads and signing up voters:

Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama, said he saw "tremendous potential" in several Southern states.

"If you go in and look at the number of unregistered voters in demographic groups that are important to Barack's candidacy - younger voters, African-American voters - the potential is just incredible," Mr. Hildebrand said.

Registering black voters will be important to any kind of "Southern Strategy" for the Democrats and the Wall Street Journal's Christopher Cooper and Susan Davis looks at the Obama campaign's efforts to sign them up.

Both Mr. Obama and his Republican challenger Senator John McCain sought to appeal to Hispanic voters over the weekend. But Time Magazine's Michael Scherer reports that many in the Hispanic community detect a "mixed message" when it comes to Mr. McCain's stance on immigration issues:

For months, that confusion has been somewhat intentional on the part of the McCain campaign. It was the issue of immigration, after all, that almost sunk McCain's candidacy back in the summer of 2007, when the Senate debated and defeated a comprehensive immigration bill that was dubbed the McCain-Kennedy bill and derided as an "amnesty bill" by opponents. After the defeat, McCain's public rhetoric on the issue changed significantly, even as his actual position only altered slightly. "I got the message," he told Republican crowds hundreds of times in the early voting states. "We will secure the borders first."

But in public comments, McCain often delivered a somewhat mixed message of his own. He continued to favor all the parts of his comprehensive plan - border security, increased employer sanctions for illegal hiring and a path to citizenship for the undocumented - but he mostly refrained from using the word "comprehensive." Instead, he spoke of a two-stage solution. First, he would secure the borders, a process that would be certified by border state governors. Then he would push for a process to allow the 12 million undocumented immigrants to become full citizens.

The fine line Mr. McCain is walking on the immigration issue may be an indication of the importance he places on keeping both Hispanics, a fast-growing demographic, and his party's base happy.

Over the weekend Mr. McCain also looked to court evangelical Christian voters with a visit to the North Carolina home of the Rev. Franklin Graham and his father, Billy. The Times's Robert D. McFadden writes: "Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, had requested the meeting with the Grahams. He called his hosts "great leaders" and said they had had "an excellent conversation." In response to a reporter's question, he said, as if slightly surprised: "Oh, I didn't ask for their vote."

Both candidates appear to be trying to burnish their foreign policy credentials. Mr. Obama has announced plans to take an overseas trip to Iraq and Afghantian and Europe this summer. Senator McCain heads to Latin America later this week. The Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler previews: "In Colombia on Tuesday and Wednesday, in the coastal city of Cartagena, he plans to highlight a pending free-trade agreement that he supports and rival Sen. Barack Obama opposes. Thursday in Mexico, the Republican candidate will talk about the war on drugs. The Arizona senator will meet with both nations' presidents."

And The Washington Post's Michael D. Shear takes a closer look at what could become a familiar refrain from Republicans on the campaign trail. He reports that they are trying to cast Mr. Obama "as an opportunistic and self-obsessed politician who will do and say anything to get elected."

Veepstakes: The Los Angeles Times's Doyle McManus examines the long, long lists of potential running mates for both candidates, but notes: "The real question is who's on the "short lists." And that remains, for the moment, Washington's deepest mystery." Mr. McManus runs through some of the boldfaced names of vice presidential contenders.

Spouse Watch: USA Today's Jill Lawrence interviews Michelle Obama who is "filling in her schedule with events that underscore her roles as girlfriend and working mom." Ms. Lawrence observes: "The result, by accident or design, is that Obama's softer side is on display when she needs it to be: after a winter of edgy remarks that made her a lightning rod and gave ammunition to Republican John McCain and his allies."

By Michael Falcone, The New York Times, June 30, 2008

It's feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It's also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country's direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton?

Current polls - not horse-race polls, which are notoriously uninformative until later in the campaign, but polls gauging the public mood - are strikingly similar to those in both 1980 and 1992, years in which an overwhelming majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the country's direction.

So the odds are that this will be a "change" election - which means that it's very much Mr. Obama's election to lose. But if he wins, how much change will he actually deliver?

Reagan, for better or worse - I'd say for worse, but that's another discussion - brought a lot of change. He ran as an unabashed conservative, with a clear ideological agenda. And he had enormous success in getting that agenda implemented. He had his failures, most notably on Social Security, which he tried to dismantle but ended up strengthening. But America at the end of the Reagan years was not the same country it was when he took office.

Bill Clinton also ran as a candidate of change, but it was much less clear what kind of change he was offering. He portrayed himself as someone who transcended the traditional liberal-conservative divide, proposing "a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement." The economic plan he announced during the campaign was something of a hodgepodge: higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes for the middle class, public investment in things like high-speed rail, health care reform without specifics.

We all know what happened next. The Clinton administration achieved a number of significant successes, from the revitalization of veterans' health care and federal emergency management to the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and health insurance for children. But the big picture is summed up by the title of a new book by the historian Sean Wilentz: "The Age of Reagan: A history, 1974-2008."

So whom does Mr. Obama resemble more? At this point, he's definitely looking Clintonesque.

Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama portrays himself as transcending traditional divides. Near the end of last week's "unity" event with Hillary Clinton, he declared that "the choice in this election is not between left or right, it's not between liberal or conservative, it's between the past and the future." Oh-kay.

Mr. Obama's economic plan also looks remarkably like the Clinton 1992 plan: a mixture of higher taxes on the rich, tax breaks for the middle class and public investment (this time with a focus on alternative energy).

Sometimes the Clinton-Obama echoes are almost scary. During his speech accepting the nomination, Mr. Clinton led the audience in a chant of "We can do it!" Remind you of anything?

Just to be clear, we could - and still might - do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Mr. Obama's most fervent supporters expect much more.

Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals'. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade.

They may have had it backward.

Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination. Most notably, he has outraged many progressives by supporting a wiretapping bill that, among other things, grants immunity to telecom companies for any illegal acts they may have undertaken at the Bush administration's behest.

The candidate's defenders argue that he's just being pragmatic - that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same "triangulation and poll-driven politics" he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands.

In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn't too clear about what that change would involve.

Of course, there's always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all.

One thing is clear: for Democrats, winning this election should be the easy part. Everything is going their way: sky-high gas prices, a weak economy and a deeply unpopular president. The real question is whether they will take advantage of this once-in-a-generation chance to change the country's direction. And that's mainly up to Mr. Obama.

Who fills in the Democratic ticket?

Was there enough unity in Unity, N.H., where once- bitter rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama were to kiss and make up on Friday, to form a presidential ticket? Clinton may be the first choice of the 18 million Democrats who voted for her this spring, but Obama has lots of options to help win over Hillary voters.

If he wants gender balance, he can pick Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who was in Denver last week. She's generating veepstakes buzz for kicking coal-fired power plants out of her state in favor of clean energy.

If he wants to woo those working-class voters he might tab John Edwards, who is decidedly non-working- class, but his populism has an appeal. And if he's looking in a different direction, perhaps to win the West, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would be a nice pickup.

But if he really wants to shake up Washington and traditional party politics, he could name Republican Senator and Bush critic Chuck Hagel of Nebraska to his ticket.

Now it's your turn to tell us whom you would like to see on that Pepsi Center platform with Obama.

By Dan Haley, The Denver Post, June 29, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Courting the increasingly influential Latino vote, the rival presidential candidates each pledged Saturday to make overhauling the nation's immigration policies a top priority.

In separate appearances before the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain looked for every possible way to connect with their audience and emphasize distinctions between themselves.

Before the candidates spoke, Adolfo Carrion Jr., the association president and Bronx Borough president, laid down the stakes: "I believe that we will determine the outcome of the 2008 presidential election."

Perhaps with that in mind, Obama delivered a few lines in Spanish -- "Sí, se puede," or "Yes, we can," he said -- and recalled marching in the streets of Chicago in support of immigration reform. He offered his historic campaign to become the first African American president as a signpost for others.

"I'm hoping that somewhere out there in the audience sits the person who will be the first Latino nominee in their party," he said.

McCain noted that he represents Arizona, "where Spanish was spoken before English," and remembered a fellow Vietnam prisoner of war, Everett Alvarez, "a brave American of Mexican descent."

McCain said that he pushed for overhauling immigration laws when "it wasn't very popular with some in my party."

Both political camps are working hard for the Latino vote. A projected 9.3 million Latinos will go to the polls this year, up from 7.6 million in 2004 and 2.5 million in 1980, according to the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC. In California, more than 2.6 million Latinos will cast votes this year, up from about 2.1 million in 2004, the institute projects.

Latinos loom as a potential swing vote, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, because they constitute an important share of the electorate in four of six states that President Bush carried by margins of 5 percentage points or fewer in 2004 -- New Mexico, Florida, Nevada and Colorado.

Latinos voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton over Obama by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in the Democratic primaries nationwide -- and by 67% to 32% in the California primary, according to an analysis of exit polls by the Pew Hispanic Center. A Gallup Poll last month showed Obama leading McCain among Latino voters, 62% to 29%.

"This election could well come down to how many Latinos turn out to vote," Obama said Saturday.

On the central question of providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, he accused McCain of shifting positions to suit his audience.

"When he was running for his party's nomination, he walked away from that commitment," Obama said. "He said that he wouldn't even support his own legislation if it came up for a vote."

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers issued a statement later in the day calling it "audacious" for Obama to question McCain's commitment to immigration reform and criticizing Obama's record on the issue.

McCain, who faces a tough balancing act in attempting to win Latino support without losing conservative votes, said that overhauling immigration policies will be "my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow." But he said that tightening security at the borders was crucial to winning support for an overhaul.

"Many Americans, with good cause, did not believe us when we said we would secure our borders, and so we failed in our efforts," he said. "We must prove to them that we can and will secure our borders first, while respecting the dignity and rights of citizens and legal residents of the United States."

He pledged to address the issue "in a humane and compassionate fashion."

"I understand these are God's children," he said.

Obama, also calling for securing the borders, called for bringing "12 million people who are here illegally out of the shadows" and putting them on a pathway to citizenship after paying a fine, learning English and going to the "back of the line."

While calling for tightening security on the borders, he said that if elected he would review the security plans.

"If we think that a wall is the sole solution to the problem, then we're not thinking it through," he said.

McCain was interrupted four times by antiwar protesters. One demonstrator shouted, "We want a peace candidate!" and was ejected from the room. "The one thing Americans want us to stop doing is yelling at each other," McCain said, to applause.

McCain, who met Saturday in Washington with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, defended his support for the war in Iraq. Obama earlier in the day visited wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, calling later for a "responsible, honorable end" to the war.

McCain took Congress to task for taking a July 4 recess without completing action on a housing rescue plan, calling it "incredible that Congress should go on vacation while Americans are trying to stay in their homes."




By Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2008

Verbal slips by the presidential candidates and their aides can tell us a lot.

John McCain's senior advisor, Charlie Black, is in trouble. Not because he's a former lobbyist whose professional history undermines the reformist credentials of his candidate. And not because he said something untrue in earshot of a reporter. His mistake was much larger: He accidentally said something true.

Speaking to Fortune magazine, Black was asked about the potential effect of a terrorist attack on McCain's White House chances. "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," Black said. Outrageous! Within hours, Barack Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, had released a statement saying "the fact that John McCain's top advisor says that a terrorist attack on American soil would be a 'big advantage' for their political campaign is a complete disgrace, and is exactly the kind of politics that needs to change."

At a fundraiser the next day, Black apologized. "I deeply regret the comments," he said. "They were inappropriate. I recognize that John McCain has devoted his entire adult life to protecting his country and placing its security before every other consideration."

What he doesn't say, you may notice, is that his comments were wrong. And that's because he doesn't believe they were wrong. Black got caught in what Washingtonians know as a "Kinsleyan gaffe," named after the journalist Michael Kinsley, who once said that "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth." The McCain campaign's position on this subject has long been known: If the race turns on the issue of terrorism, McCain might win. But if the dominant issue is the economy, he definitely loses. It's just that his aides aren't supposed to say that.

That's why, in the very same article in which Black uttered these unspeakable remarks, McCain replied to a question about "the gravest long-term threat facing our economy" by saying, "the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences."

The interviewer, rather than asking if McCain had failed to hear the word "economy" in the question, marveled at McCain's facility for "deftly turning the economy into a national security issue." In other words, when Black said a terrorist attack would be good for the McCain campaign, he was roundly criticized. When McCain used a question about the economy to remind voters of the possibility of a terrorist attack, no one said a word, except his interviewer, who called him politically "deft."

This sort of thing happens all the time. When Hillary Clinton was trumpeting her strength with Appalachian voters in Kentucky and West Virginia -- the vast majority of whom were white -- it was an acceptable argument about electoral appeal. When she got specific and said that she had a broader base on which to build a winning coalition because "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" were moving away from Obama and "supporting me," she was roundly criticized.

What was so bad about what she said? Though infelicitously phrased (the remark seemed to link being hard-working with being white), it was a common argument for her candidacy, and a fair one: She had support among voting demographics that an observer might imagine would add up to an easy majority. But it was unacceptable because it implied that white voters would not support the black candidate. Accurate or not, this made it seem like her campaign was taking advantage of racism, and that couldn't be done explicitly, even if it could be implied every time her advisors ticked down the states that Obama seemed to struggle in.

Similarly, Obama was voicing a possibly controversial, but hardly way-out-of-the-mainstream, argument when he said "people don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody is going to help them ... they don't believe they can count on Washington. You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. ... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Again, the phrasing could've been better. Some interpreted it as a generalized swipe at the authenticity of rural spirituality and gun culture. But many others were offended by its intended meaning: that religious and cultural issues had less place in the political sphere than economic and foreign policy issues.

Obama spent a few days apologizing, but the whole of his campaign -- that he will fix Washington so that it's actually responsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens, and in doing so will vastly increase civic engagement and help end the divisiveness of our politics -- is based on the underlying analysis.

It's an odd quirk of our democracy that some of the most powerful forces in campaigns cannot be mentioned, at least not directly. Like the denizens of Plato's cave, we're stuck watching shadows of the actual election. McCain may not hope for a terrorist attack, but he certainly hopes for an electorate terrified of one, and much of his strategy relies on reminding them of the danger. Obama cannot directly say that McCain is too old -- that might offend somebody -- but when he lauds McCain's "half-century of service" or asserts that this election is a choice between "the past and the future," the message is clear.

In many cases, this is as it should be. It's probably better that fear, age, race and all the rest remain sub-themes that emerge only when cynics forget to bite their tongue rather than explicit points of contention. Civility has its uses.

But the occasional Kinsleyan gaffe has its uses too. It clarifies campaign strategy and allows for the occasional peek behind the curtain. The McCain campaign does not wish a terrorist attack on the country, but its officials do hope Americans don't dismiss one as an impossibility, and they do hope that Americans will think seriously about whether a one-term senator has the experience to respond to such an event.

The Obama campaign does not wish to make McCain's age an issue explicitly, but its officials wouldn't mind if the electorate viscerally understood that he's a 71-year-old who laughingly confesses that he's "illiterate" with computers. Because if the campaigns were being honest, they'd confess that they're well aware of what we might as well call the Nixonian truth: Sometimes it's the quiet, ugly stuff that helps you win.




By Ezra Klein, Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2008

YORK, Pa. - Barack Obama is on his way to a blowout victory this fall, if you believe recent polls that show him leading John McCain by 15 percentage points.

Big summertime leads in presidential contests have a way of fading, though. Comparisons are already being drawn to 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, who looked like a mortal lock after he bounced, in late July, to a 17-point advantage over George H. W. Bush.

Obama could fall back, too, unless he makes a convincing case to millions of undecided voters who still regard him as a stranger, despite the fact that his name and face are recognized around the world.

His campaign manager says as much, describing this summer as a rerun of 2007, when Obama was introducing himself to activists for the first time.

"In many ways, it feels like, let's say, last July or August in Iowa for us," says David Plouffe. "You look at these voters who are going to decide the election in these battleground states, and they know very little about him."

Obama has been aptly described as elusive. And while a candidate may want to fuzz his image - to gain the widest possible appeal and keep from alienating potential supporters - it is the news media's responsibility to sharpen the picture.

There are more than four months left to finish that job. But voters are complaining that they aren't getting the information they need and that too much time is being spent on trivia.

That criticism is hard to dispute. Many news organizations picked up the revelation, from a Rolling Stone interview, that Obama has about 30 Bob Dylan songs on his iPod, including the entire "Blood on the Tracks" album. His wife's clothing and hairstyle have been dissected at length.

Far less attention has been paid to the lack of new thinking behind his candidacy, which closely tracks liberal Democratic orthodoxy.

Gary Hart, the "new ideas" presidential candidate of the 1980s, recently wrote that Obama, as president, "would have a rare opportunity to define a new Democratic Party." He can either focus on winning the election "to the exclusion of all else" or "use his campaign as a platform for designing a new political cycle and achieve a mandate for starting it."

His advisers say Obama plans to deliver a series of policy speeches over the next few months. But whether he articulates a broad new agenda may depend on how confident he is that he will win.

Plouffe, a cool-headed operator who helped engineer Obama's nomination victory, says he doesn't put much stock in national polls, since a presidential election is a state-by-state battle. Laying out the public version of his campaign's strategy for a room full of reporters, he zeroed in on the most important target for both Obama and McCain.

"The people in the middle - in some cases we're only talking about 6 to 10 percent of the people in a state - they will decide the election," Plouffe says. "Some of these voters just haven't been consuming the political news. ... So we think we have some very, very important foundational work to do" in spreading Obama's message.

He plans to redeploy a large volunteer force, built during the primaries, on a door-to-door persuasion effort organized down to the precinct level.

That personal voter contact, he adds, is "even more important for a candidate like Barack Obama, who people don't have a decades-long relationship with. They're still thirsting for information. They may need reassurance."

In Pennsylvania, one of the most important battleground states, Obama's team might want to knock on the door of Janell Mader, 32, who left her teaching job to raise her young daughter in York. Like millions of Republicans, she has come unmoored from her party and is up for grabs this year.

"For most of my life, my decisions have been made based on morals and family values and that whole belief system that I've had instilled in me since birth," she says. "And now, all of a sudden, our country is turned upside down by all these economic issues that I haven't encountered in my lifetime."

She's considering Obama but wants more information about what he'll do to improve the living standard of families earning less than $100,000 a year.

"I just know 'vote for change.' I don't know what change," she says. "I know there has been a lot of media coverage, but I'm still waiting for the meat of it."

Mader was among a group of 12 voters, none of whom voted for either Obama or McCain in the primary, who met in York last week for a two-hour discussion sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. Their comments ran the gamut, including doubts about Obama's patriotism and whether his election would lead other nations to test the inexperienced president's mettle.

Kimberly Aldinger, 45, of Seven Valleys, a dialysis technician who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary, is open to Obama but "until I see what he wants to change and how he's going to change it, I am totally undecided."

Sheryl Randol, 51, a single mother of three who works for a pharmaceutical company, wants to see the Iraq war ended but feels that she doesn't know enough about either candidate.

Obama "has to show me that he's got the intelligence and the people around him to make a difference globally," she says. "I want to see concrete plans, not just spin."

Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who moderated the discussion, says Obama needs to put "meat on the bones" for undecided voters like these - not only about who he is but "what he will do and what he stands for." Voters, he adds, have "figured out that they want change. Do they want the Obama change or do they want the McCain change?"

"We look at polls and we look at numbers and we think we've seen the end of this election," he says. But when voters talk, "you really get a sense of just how far from the finish line we are."




By Paul West, The Baltimore Sun, June 29, 2008

As the nation's first major party African American nominee for president, Democrat Barack Obama would be testing the audacity of hope in his effort to wrest large blocks of the old Confederacy from Republicans.

The plan is simple: Take record African American turnout in states with large black populations, peel off young, college-educated whites, divide the opposition with a third-party candidate where you can, and reach a "win number" to take Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia.

If things go really well, aim to add Mississippi, South Carolina and Louisiana, at a minimum forcing Republican Sen. John McCain to spend money and time where he has none to spare.

"In Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, Sen. Obama is on track to get a higher vote share than any Democrat in 40 years," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said.

"African Americans helped Democrats win two special elections in the Deep South," he added, citing recent Democratic victories in congressional districts in Louisiana and Mississippi long held by Republicans. If those states look "doable" in October, Plouffe said, campaign resources will pour in.

At a campaign event last winter in New Hampshire, Obama boasted he could redraw the South's political map and rock the foundation of every modern Republican presidency since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

"I'll give you one specific example," Obama said. "Mississippi is 40 percent African American, but it votes 25 percent African American. If we just got the African Americans in Mississippi to vote their percentage, Mississippi is suddenly a Democratic state. And Georgia may be a Democratic state. Even South Carolina starts being in play. And I guarantee you African American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30 percent around the country, minimum."

Presumptive Republican nominee McCain's spokesman, Jeff Sadosky, scoffed: "We are very, very excited when Barack Obama spends money in states we are very, very confident we will carry in November."

Experts are less dismissive, although the strategy is a longshot in many Southern states.

"I think we're going to see the largest African American turnout in the history of the country this fall," said Merle Black, a leading scholar of Southern politics at Emory University and author with his twin brother, Earl, of "Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics." African Americans typically vote 90 percent Democratic, and Obama could push that to 95 percent, Black said.

Obama has other advantages. McCain is not as popular as President Bush was in the South. He lost most of the Southern primaries to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and is not well liked among evangelicals, the base of the Southern GOP. A recent poll in Georgia showed McCain 16 percentage points behind where Bush was in 2004. Former Georgia Republican turned Libertarian Bob Barr could siphon about 5 percent of the GOP vote.

"The dissatisfaction of the Republicans, the excitement about the Obama campaign, and a third-party candidate have kind of come together to create a situation here where it might be possible for Obama to carry Georgia with less than 50 percent of the vote," Black said.

One recent poll in Georgia showed McCain leading by just one percentage point. Virginia is a dead heat. In North Carolina, McCain is up an average of just four points.

The modern South has seen a big influx of outsiders, making cities such as Atlanta decidedly more liberal than they were. In North Carolina, Obama benefits from a large college population in the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle region. Virginia is growing Democratic in its northern suburbs.

Plouffe predicted that if Obama holds the states Democrat John Kerry won in 2004 plus Iowa, adding either Virginia or North Carolina would put him at "game, set, match."

He outlined a strategy like the one Obama used to win the primaries that he described as "adjusting the electorate": heavily boost registration and turnout of African Americans and young professionals to squeeze "a couple of points here, a couple of points there" to come up with a majority.

"We know who these unregistered voters are," Plouffe said. "We're going to go find them. We have the organizational capacity to do this."

But Obama's strategy faces serious hurdles, and they go well beyond race.

Kerry, who is white, got just 29 percent of the white vote across the South in 2004. Kerry also drew 90 percent of the black vote, leaving little margin for improvement there.

"Southern whites will not vote for a candidate of any race as liberal as Obama," said Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. "They will vote in roughly the same proportion as they voted for John Kerry, which is not very many."

In 2004, Kerry failed to win a single Southern state.

The modern South has seen a realignment of white voters, led by college-educated whites who are "overwhelmingly Protestant, they are culturally conservative, and in terms of economics, they are upwardly mobile," Black said. "They have been the backbone of the Republican Party in the South."

Yet while these voters are affluent and urbanized, "This is not like the middle class of San Francisco," he said. "This is a middle class that's much more culturally conservative, and much more individualistic, in terms of their economic interests. They hate paying taxes. They think they're overtaxed."

Obama's appeal falls further in less-urbanized states. Unlike Georgia and Virginia, neither South Carolina nor Mississippi has ever elected an African American to statewide office. In two other states of the old Confederacy, Arkansas and Tennessee, Obama faces his "Appalachian problem" with blue-collar white voters who spurned him in the primaries against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Obama may face his biggest hurdles in states with the largest black populations, said David Bositis, an expert on black voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, because that is where racial polarization is most pronounced.

Mississippi's 37 percent black population is the largest in the country. Louisiana and South Carolina are over 30 percent.

"It would have to be a major national landslide for Obama to win Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina," said Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

"You have this tremendous racial polarization, and whites still outnumber blacks in Mississippi," Black said. "Bush in 2004 got 85 percent of the white vote in Mississippi. Is Obama going to run much more than 15 percent of the white vote in Mississippi? I don't think he can break 20 percent."

Bositis calculated that Obama would have to capture 23 percent of the white vote in Mississippi - a 50 percent increase from Kerry's showing - and generate exceptional black turnout.

Longtime Mississippi civil rights activist Lawrence Guyot thinks he can.

"I've watched the transformation of Mississippi," Guyot said. "Imagine, if you will, reading the headlines in your paper the day after the election: Obama carries Mississippi."

White evangelicals "are open to a larger discussion on the role of religion as it relates to the poor," Guyot said. "I think they're looking for someplace else to go and that someplace in this race is Obama."

And Republicans appear to be in surprising trouble, losing not just a recent race for a Mississippi congressional district, but facing a surprisingly close Senate contest in November to replace retired Republican Trent Lott. A Rasmussen poll last week showed McCain up just six percentage points in Mississippi.

A good indicator of whether the Obama campaign strategy is succeeding will be in North Carolina, Black said, if the Democratic candidate for governor, Beverly Purdue, appears with Obama on the stump. "The last time he was in North Carolina," Black said, "she didn't show up."

The Latino vote: Obama accuses McCain of retreating from overhaul of immigration laws; McCain insists it's his top priority. A15

By Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 2008

Three weeks after conceding defeat Hillary Clinton finally took the stage yesterday alongside Barack Obama, laughing about the bitter rivalry that for so long split the Democratic party in half.

They had engaged, she said, in a "spirited dialogue - that's the nicest way I could think of putting it" because "we both care so much" about the causes they have in common. "We are one party, we are one America and we are not going to rest until we take back our country."

Every detail of their rally - what Mr Obama called "our little get-together" - had been painstakingly planned to radiate harmony, even down to the bright blue tie he wore to match Mrs Clinton's trouser suit.

They travelled together - sitting in the front seats of a plane once chartered by her but now being used by him - to the tiny town of Unity, New Hampshire, a venue chosen to symbolise their reconciliation.

John McCain and Barack Obama challenged each other for the support of Hispanic voters Saturday, as they made back-to-back speeches to the same group of influential Latino officials in Washington, D.C.

The Latino constituency could be pivotal in the fall. To court it, both candidates pledged to pursue comprehensive immigration reform, and challenged each other's commitment to it.

McCain spoke first and said immigration reform "will be my top priority yesterday, today and tomorrow." He highlighted the unsuccessful immigration legislation he helped author in the Senate.

"I know this country ... would be the poorer were we deprived of the patriotism, industry and decency of those millions of Americans whose families came here from our hemisphere - Mexico, Central and South America. I will honor their contributions to America for as long as I live," McCain told the group, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

McCain pointed to his efforts to reform immigration laws. He acknowledged the economic importance of immigrant laborers while saying those who are here illegally should be dealt with.

McCain, who was interrupted four times by anti-war protesters, also made a patriotic appeal to the Latino group. He recalled how he refused early release when he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam because he would not leave behind those who had been imprisoned longer. One of those fellow prisoners was a Mexican-American.

"To leave him behind would have shamed us," McCain said.

Obama later noted that McCain's focus on immigration reform was not quite as sharp during the GOP primary.

During a January debate in California, McCain repeatedly refused to say whether he'd vote for his own proposal if it came to the Senate floor - some critics have said his reform measures amounted to amnesty since they would provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

"It will not be voted on," McCain reasoned, arguing that Americans made clear they want the border secured first.

"(McCain) deserved great credit as a champion of comprehensive reform. I admired him for it," Obama told the same group of Latino officials Saturday. "But what he didn't mention is when he was running for his party's nomination, he walked away from that commitment. ... If we are going to solve the challenges we face, we can't vacillate."

Obama said the country still needs such reform to secure the borders but also punish employers who exploit immigrant labor and provide a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented residents already here.

"That has to be one of our priorities as well," Obama said to loud applause. "And I will say it now and I will say it after I'm president."

Responding to Obama's criticism, McCain said Obama "worked to kill" last year's Senate legislation by voting for amendments to it that Democratic sponsors opposed.

Obama was making the first of three scheduled speeches to Hispanic organizations in less than a month. He plans to speak to two other major groups in July. He also conducted interviews with Spanish-language news outlets Saturday.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told FOX News on Saturday that Latino voters are engaged with Obama's candidacy, not McCain's.

"Senator McCain tailors his message to whatever group he's speaking to," he said.

"If you look at the recent polling, Barack Obama has a huge lead among Latino voters, because voters understand that what Barack Obama's agenda is - that is a quality of education, that is health care ... comprehensive and real immigration reform."

A recent AP-Yahoo News poll showed that Obama leads McCain among Hispanics, 47 percent to 22 percent with 26 percent undecided.

Still, Obama doesn't have a lock on this volatile group. During the Democratic primary, Hispanics preferred rival Hillary Clinton to Obama by nearly 2-to-1.

McCain, for his part, senses opportunity and is hoping to build on Republicans' recent inroads in this Democratic-trending group.

President Bush captured about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, the most ever for a GOP presidential candidate. His Democratic rival John Kerry won 53 percent, down from the 62 percent former Vice President Al Gore got in 2000.

Clinton, who appeared with Obama at their first joint campaign rally Friday in New Hampshire, warmed up the crowd at NALEO on Thursday in an effort to convince her former backers to line up behind the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"Every issue you care about personally ... is really at risk," Clinton told the Latino group Thursday. "We cannot afford four more years of the same. ... And therefore we have to be determined to chart a new course and we cannot do that without electing Barack Obama our next president."

UNITY - The "Unite For Change" rally more than doubled the population of Unity yesterday as 40 school buses shuttled more than 4,000 people to the field behind Unity Elementary School.

"This is a real shot in the arm for Unity," said longtime resident Ken Hall, who is known as the unofficial mayor of Unity. "For something this big to happen here, we never would have believed it."

Hall introduced Sen. Barack Obama and former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to an enthusiastic crowd of supporters at the rally.

"I also have a little confession to make," Hall said. "I'm a lifelong Republican.''

The audience quieted down until Hall added, "I voted for Senator McCain in the this year's primary, but I may be part of this change!"

And with that, the audience erupted.

Campaign staffers for both Obama and Clinton said planning and logistics for yesterday's rally went smoothly, despite the venue's obstacles, which included country roads and no on-site parking. Aside from long bus rides to and from the rally -- either from Twin State Speedway in Claremont or Mount Sunapee Resort in Newbury -- metal detectors, bag searches and police dogs awaited the throng that turned out. But few seemed to care.

"I'm feeling the love," said Lisa Campbell, a massage therapist from Claremont and a former Clinton supporter. "We're unified, no doubt about it."

Campbell said the transition from supporting Clinton to supporting Obama was tough for the first few days, but when it came to deciding between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, the choice was easy.

"I have the utmost respect for McCain as a hero and all that stuff, but I don't want him as my President," she said. "He's afraid to buck the party line. Obama's not afraid."

Unity, population about 1,700, was selected as the site of the rally because of its symbolic name and because Obama and Clinton each received 107 votes there in the primary election.

"Now, we look at them as 214 votes for change," Obama said during his speech.

The rally felt a bit like a country fair, but with a more serious tone. Voters purchased hamburgers and hotdogs from the local Kiwanis Club and mingled with friends and neighbors, and many bought Obama T-shirts after the event as they waited for shuttle buses to bring them back to their cars.

Alan Willard of Newport, an Obama supporter since the primary campaigns began, said he thought the rally achieved its goal of asserting unity among Democrats.

"People forget that if you can bring hope to anything, it's of enormous value," he said, "and that's what this campaign has done."

Willard said he gained more respect and admiration for Clinton because of her speech.

"I thought today was the first time the country was able to see the transcendent goodness of Hillary Clinton," he said.

Dozens of law enforcement officers and emergency personnel maintained crowd control and responded to at least six medical emergencies, said Mike Batista, a Sullivan County sheriff's deputy. Most of the medical calls were related to the heat, he said.

There were no criminal disturbances.

The public safety agencies staffing the event included the New Hampshire State Police, the New Hampshire National Guard, the Sullivan, Cheshire and Grafton county sheriff's departments, the Lempster Fire Department, two local ambulance services and several federal agencies.

By KRISTEN SENZ, Union Leader, June 28, 2008