His hard line has been derided as provocative, and possibly dangerous, by some so-called realist foreign policy experts, who warn that isolating Russia would do little to encourage it to change. But others, including neoconservatives who deem promoting democracy a paramount goal, see Mr. McCain's position as principled, and prescient. Now, with Russia moving forcefully into Georgia as Mr. McCain seeks the presidency, his views are being scrutinized as never before through the prism of Russia's invasion.

For Mr. McCain, the conflict came after months of warnings about the situation in Georgia. Mr. McCain befriended Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, over the course of several trips there, and even nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 (in a letter that was co-signed by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York).

Mr. McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, lobbied on behalf of the Georgian government until March, and Mr. McCain has long embraced Georgia's efforts to move toward joining NATO, which has been seen as part of a broader strategy to contain Russia by admitting its old satellites and former Soviet republics into the alliance.

"NATO's decision to withhold a membership action plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia," Mr. McCain told reporters on Monday in Erie, Pa., "and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision."

While Mr. McCain has long called for excluding Russia from the Group of 8, and isolating it on the world stage, his probable Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama, has made clear he favors more engagement with Russia (even as he speaks of reviewing relationships with Russia, including its interest in joining the World Trade Organization).

The question of how to handle a Russia that is rich with oil revenues and increasingly independent has divided the foreign policy establishment.

Charles King, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and the author of "The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus," said that rhetoric like Mr. McCain's might have spurred Georgia to act unwisely. "It hurts because it has encouraged Georgia to try to push maximalist positions - 'We've got to get this territory back at all costs, and if we get it back, the United States will support us,' " Dr. King said.

Mr. McCain acknowledged in a recent interview that his stance on Russia had divided some of his foreign policy advisers.

"If Henry Kissinger thinks that I'm wrong, he'll pick up the phone - and he has, several times," he said of the former secretary of state, "and say 'You're wrong on this; you shouldn't be so hard on the Russians, O.K.?' "

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a top McCain foreign policy adviser, said that people who found Mr. McCain's rhetoric on Russia inflammatory were living in denial.

"The reason he's right is that Russia has now entered into an entirely different realm of international behavior which we haven't seen in decades," Dr. Kagan said. "Russia is clearly trying to establish an old hegemony over its near neighbors."

In recent days, the Obama campaign has highlighted Mr. Scheunemann's lobbying ties to Georgia. Mr. Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, has represented Georgia since at least March 2004, lobbying specifically on the issue of NATO membership. Mr. Scheunemann talked with members of Mr. McCain's staff in December 2005 about a Senate resolution Mr. McCain submitted expressing support for the government of Georgia, and he later called them to express thanks after it passed, according to Justice Department records.

McCain campaign officials condemned the Obama campaign for casting "aspersions" on Mr. Scheunemann, and noted that Mr. McCain had long advocated similar positions. (Other advisers to Mr. McCain have ties to leaders in the region backed by the Kremlin: Paul J. Manafort, a business partner of Mr. McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, advised Viktor Yanukovich, the former Ukrainian prime minister, whose party was opposed by the Bush administration and Mr. McCain because of its ties to Mr. Putin.)

On Monday, though, Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama found themselves on the same page in dealing with the current crisis, perhaps reflecting the delicacy of the situation. Both said Russia had escalated the dispute beyond its catalyst, the conflict over South Ossetia; both said the United Nations Security Council should call for an end to the violence; both called for putting Georgia on a path toward membership in NATO; and both spoke of deploying an international peacekeeping force in the disputed areas that set off the fighting.

By Michael Cooper, The New York Times, August 11, 2008

Obama met the second type of economic voter the next morning in St. Paul, Minn., when he stopped by the Copper Dome Restaurant for some pancakes. There he met Fred Romo, 71, a retired Ford factory worker. Romo's a lifelong Democrat, but he remains undecided, even after meeting Obama. "I'm kind of leaning towards Obama, but he's a rookie, you know, and I'm kind of worried about that," says Romo, who wants a candidate who'll bring down the cost of living for retirees.

It was Hillary Clinton who planted the first doubts about Obama on the economy. The key theme: experience. "Hillary said she's the candidate for people who need a President," says Thomas Riehle, a partner at RT Strategies, a bipartisan polling firm in Washington. "In other words, people who don't need a President can afford to vote for Obama because he's exciting, represents change, etc." Which is why, Riehle says, Obama did so badly in some blue collar areas - places along the Ohio River, for example, where Clinton beat him by two- and three-to-one margins.

Taking a few pages from the Clintons' playbook, Obama is beginning to eschew his signature monster rallies in favor of smaller events: roundtable discussions, town-hall meetings and surprise trips to diners. In his earlier speeches, his stories were mostly inspirational. But Obama has begun to also mention some of the painful stories he hears from voters - just as Clinton did. In making his case for an energy rebate, last week Obama pointed to "the mother that had to cut back on groceries because of rising gas prices, the guy I met who couldn't fill up his gas tank to go on a job search." He is also growing more detailed in his policy proposals. The word legislation, hardly found in his early speeches, is now mentioned regularly.

Clinton's strategy worked against Obama in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The voters in those states are Romo's brethren and the Democratic base that Obama needs to hold. Obama should learn Clinton's lesson, says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "Obama could use a little more empathy and a little less lecture," Sabato says. "Feel your pain, anyone?" The constituency is willing to be persuaded. Says Romo: "I'm hoping Obama would be a better steward of the economy, but I'm undecided." He adds, "I don't like McCain. McCain is Bush, and we've already had this one, you know what I mean?" In the end, says Riehle, Obama retains a big advantage with true-blue Democrats over McCain, who is seen as anti-union, pro–free trade and supportive of Bush's fiscal policies.

In addition, political analysts say Obama needs to focus more on expanding his political map and luring fiscal-conservative voters away from McCain - voters like Hecimovich. McCain's "base are independent-leaning voters concerned by overspending in Washington," Riehle says. "Obama can battle McCain in appealing to those kind of voters very well." But so far Obama has seemed unwilling to do what both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton did against their respective rivals: paint his opponent as, having spent the past 30 years in Washington, being out of touch with ordinary voters.

Instead, Obama accuses McCain of running for a third Bush term, a message that is resonating with some fiscal conservatives like Hecimovich. "McCain, he'd be a good military leader, but I don't know as far as running the economy," Hecimovich says as he balances his little boy Sam on the lunch table. "It's hard to say at this point who'd handle the economy better." Then his wife Debbie leans over, steadying Sam, and almost under her breath adds, "We need change, so whoever's going to make the biggest change."

While Romo and the Hecimoviches make up their minds, Obama and McCain remain close in polls. When I ask Obama on the flight from Minnesota to Chicago if he's worried about his economic message, he reminds me that it's still early. "My sense is that during the summer months, people are not going to be paying as much attention as they're going to be paying in September and October." Obama says he plans to highlight the differences between his and McCain's tax and health-care plans in the fall. "When the American people start focusing on those contrasts, they will see two fundamentally different visions of where we can take America." In the words of an old Clinton campaign, he plans to remind McCain: It's the economy, stupid.

While most Democrats and pundits try to divine what John Edwards's confession of adultery will mean going forward for the party, some Hillary Clinton partisans are looking back.

They wonder what might have been had the confirmation of the affair had come before the first Democratic presidential contest, likely knocking Edwards out of the race. The former North Carolina senator vehemently denied tabloid reports late last year of an affair with a woman who had been hired by his political action committee to make videos. The mainstream media did not delve into the case, and it wasn't an issue while Edwards was in the race.

I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," former Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com today, voicing the argument that Clinton's inevitability would have been strengthened by a win in Iowa -- not punctured by Barack Obama's surprise victory.

"Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. "They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama."

Instead, Obama won the caucuses with 38 percent of the vote, Edwards finished second with 30 percent, and Clinton ended up third with 29 percent. Obama emerged as the front-runner, Clinton had to pull off a come-from-behind win in the New Hampshire primary to stay in the nomination fight, and the Democratic contest became a bitter, drawn-out battle that lasted until June 3.

Entrance polls done for the TV networks, however, suggest that many Edwards voters would have gone for Obama instead, so Clinton still probably would have lost. And longtime Clinton strategist James Carville chalked up Wolfson's assertions to wishful thinking.

"My instinct tells me she probably would have done better if Senator Edwards wouldn't have been on the ballot," Carville said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "But that wasn't the circumstances at the time. I think Howard is fine in engaging in this kind of speculation, but it doesn't really mean very much."

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Salem State College announced today that, at least for now, the Sept. 23 appearance is still on for Edwards and his wife Elizabeth to discuss presidential politics and healthcare.

YORK, Pa. - John McCain, teased as "that wrinkly, white-haired guy" by Paris Hilton, said on Tuesday he knew he wasn't connecting with young voters but urged them to give him a hearing.

"I need to do a better job ... with young voters in America and I want to reach out to them," he told a former Sen. Hillary Clinton supporter now pondering whether to support him or his Democratic presidential opponent Barack Obama.

The questioner said during the town hall meeting in York, Pennsylvania he wasn't sure what McCain stood for on issues like education that mattered to young voters.

"I would like to say 'tell all your friends, come to the next townhall meeting.' I'd like to meet and discuss with them ... especially those who are undecided in this election," McCain replied.

Bryce Wagoner, a 19-year still trying to make up his mind about who to vote for, said the Republican senator from Arizona had not managed to ease his concern that social security would not be worth anything when he eventually retired.

"Everyone says that we need to fix it but nobody has a plan ... he didn't have any real solutions," Wagoner said.

McCain later swung by Manheim Central High School to watch football practice and continue courting the youth vote.

After suggesting that they run over the press corps clustered in the center of the field, McCain told the squad - 15 times league champions since 1989 - that "you win as a team or you lose as a team," before reminding them to study.

The likelihood of the 24-hour tchochke mill churning out buttons, placards and key chains screaming Obama/Clinton '08 is about zero.

That's a huge loss and a big mistake. Normally, as we know, the choice of the vice-presidential candidate is far from an election-maker. But this is no ordinary year, as we also know.

The reasons for Senator Obama to choose Senator Clinton as his running mate are manifold, inter-connected, and urgent.

1. Practicality. She would make a meaningful, if not profound difference on the ticket. Her appeal to women and blue-collar voters is indisputably stronger than Obama's. Yes, he can get stronger, although it will be difficult in the face of McCain/Schmidt's relentless efforts to frame him as running for president of the United States of Arugala.

But he will never have her drawing power with the Krispy Kreme krowd, never be able to energize her base, which is so critical in Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. And the value of the power and influence of the Clinton network as the race tightens is inestimable.

2. Fairness. Normally by the time a putative nominee has been determined, and the runner-up runs out of gas, the gap between them has become substantial, crippling the argument that any one candidate has a "claim" on the vice-presidential slot.

This year, however, on the strength of 18 million passionate voters, Hillary made it a horse race almost till the end. Say what you will about her mistakes, she threw herself into retail politics with a vengeance, and through that has earned a place on the ticket more than any vice-president in recent memory earned theirs.

To ignore the passion, grittiness and success of her efforts, and anoint a secondary figure like Evan Bayh, is a definitive act that would be hard to interpret as anything but a slap in the face. After all, when both fairness and logic point to Hillary, a rejection of her - from someone whose brand, in large part, stands for a clear-eyed, unemotional, pettiness-free analysis of the facts at hand - is unambiguous.

3. Obama's Personal Narrative. The "Not Ready to Lead" storyline that McCain has introduced essentially says that Obama is talented but immature. Given that the vast majority of reasons for spurning Senator Clinton are personal - the negative nature of the primary, the awkwardness of having Bill big-footing all over the White House, the country and the world - moving beyond her is essentially a validation of McCain's framing of Obama as not possessing the true qualities of leadership.

If she's not selected, the implicit message to voters will be that ego kept her off the ticket, reinforcing the dangerous cultural sub-texting going on right now that defines Obama as arrogantly self-confident.

4. The credibility of her voice. Who would be stronger making the argument that Obama is prepared to lead at 3AM...Hillary Clinton, or Evan Bayh? Who would you want as the archetypal pit-bull VP candidate, taking the low road while Obama remains Obama? Who is remotely as strong as her to stand beside him at the convention, and through the remainder of the campaign, as both a validation of his leadership abilities, a comforting bastion of continuity, and as someone who could lead the country at a moment's notice herself?

5. The stakes. If you believe this is a pivotal election, that it's absolutely critical that we reverse the failed geopolitical, social and economic policies of the last eight years, isn't it a moral and ethical responsibility to construct the strongest national argument for that? Hillary Clinton needs to be part of that argument.

In fairness to Obama, he inherited the problem. Not since 1976, when Democrats last achieved a majority, has a Democrat won more than 38 of every 100 white, male voters. That Obama is nearly at par with Democrats' poor performance is hardly good.

Obama remains narrowly ahead because of black, Hispanic, and youth support. Those strengths may prove brittle. Large black populations are mostly in states Obama will surely win, across the Northeast, and states he will surely lose, the Deep South. Hispanics are a nonfactor in Heartland swing states like Ohio. Young voters are notoriously unreliable.

On Election Day, high youth and black turnout will matter in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nevada. But as Hillary Clinton demonstrated, Obama's strengths may not matter enough.

Obama's one clear gain with white men, over Gore and John Kerry, is with those under age 30. But those gains are undercut by a poor showing with older white men, according to Pew Research Center summer polling. The same effect, though more mild, is also true for white women.

Pundits will be tempted to blame racism. Yet Colin Powell would have won white men and likely defeated Bill Clinton in 1996. Liberals have long placed white guys atop their ticket. Look where that got them. Democrats have won three of the past 10 presidential elections.

Many Democrats explain their failures in a respect that reaffirms their self image; the good fight for black equality caused a racially motivated "Southern flip." In the Deep South, that was true. But nationally, political white flight occurred in the South and the North. It also reached its crescendo with Ronald Reagan's election - not during the peak of civil rights debates.

This impulse to cite the color of the issue as the issue was recently applied to Obama's Appalachia difficulty. Race did matter, and will matter. But if Obama were white, would we have expected him to win rural voters? Like Gary Hart or Paul Tsongas, Obama was not Appalachia's kind of Democrat.

That weakness is neither inalterable nor politically fatal. His unique personal attributes may, amid the near implosion of the Republican Party, galvanize enough minorities and young voters to squeeze out a win. But a majority coalition, that does not make.

In search of that coalition liberal analysts tend to subscribe to the "Emerging Democratic Majority," a plan to wait out demographic shifts - more Hispanics, more young voters, more educated whites. In short: "Why should I change, let America." That strategy failed George McGovern. Give it a couple more decades. The portion of white, male voters remains about five times the size of all Hispanic voters. And a college education has not led more white men to vote Democratic.

Latinos are increasingly vital to Democratic ambitions in Florida and key western states. Yet electoral math ultimately concerns the sum. Minority groups can more easily tip vital states for Obama if aided by gains with far larger blocs of the electorate, none more than white men.

In the end new majorities do not merely "emerge," even for Richard Nixon. It takes proactive efforts. For Democrats, the potential reward is massive.

White men make up the largest portion of independents. More than one in three voters who will choose the next president remains white and male. And McCain's support is soft with these men, compared to George W. Bush's bids.

Yet for too long, some progressives have viewed seeking these men as antithetical to liberalism. Rebutting that intellectual vice would truly change Democratic politics. It would also expand the electoral map. Therefore, whether he knows it or not, Obama has tied the audacity of his promise to the white men his party has lost.

"Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory," he said, interrupted by the sound of jets taking off.

"We've seen this movie before in Prague and Budapest," McCain said on Fox News. "And I'm not saying we are reigniting the Cold War, but, this is an act of aggression in which we didn't think we'd see in the 21st century. " For McCain's team, it has become the latest incarnation of what Sen. Hillary Clinton once called the "3 a.m. moment," an opportunity to showcase for voters his longstanding skepticism about Russian leader Vladimir Putin while emphasizing Sen. Barack Obama's lack of experience dealing with foreign affairs.

"You got a guy who is ready to be president on Day 1 who understands the world for what it is," said McCain ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, echoing another Clinton line. "The thing about Sen. Obama, he's playing catch-up here. His initial statements, quite frankly, didn't appreciate how bold a move this was from Russia."

McCain's public statements have highlighted his differences with the Bush Administration, which Graham said "has miscalculated the Russian threat" to its former republics, and are also designed to show off his predictions about Russian aggression.

"Sen. McCain has talked for years about the dangers of Russian policies in the way they conduct themselves and undermine the sovereignty of their neighbors," said Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, who noted that McCain has known Georgian President Saakashvili since 1997, when Saakashvili was a graduate student.

"There is a depth of knowledge, a breadth of knowledge and an extent of historical experience" that is greater than that of his rival, Scheunemann said.

Obama adviser Susan Rice, appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball" Tuesday night, accused McCain of responding irresponsibly. "Barack Obama, the administration and the NATO allies took a measured, reasoned approach," she said. "We were dealing with the facts as we knew them. John McCain shot from the hip, very aggressive, belligerent statement. He may or may not have complicated the situation."

Obama has confronted the crisis in Georgia in more modulated tones, initially sounding closer to Bush than McCain, but later condemning the Russian aggression in strong terms, saying there was "no possible justification" for it. Unlike McCain, he has also taken note of Georgia's military actions in the breakaway region known as South Ossetia. He supports Georgia's candidacy for NATO and has called for a review of Russia's application to join the World Trade Organization, but has not followed McCain in threatening to expel Russia from the G-8.

"Russian peacekeeping troops should be replaced by a genuine international peacekeeping force, Georgia should refrain from using force in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and a political settlement must be reached that addresses the status of these disputed regions," Obama said during a break from his vacation in Hawaii on Monday.

Obama's advisers argue that he, too, has been prescient about the region's potential for conflict. In April, the Democratic nominee condemned Russian provocations in the contested Georgian provinces, and in July he urged Georgia not to be tempted into military action and called for an international peacekeeping force in the region. Since becoming a candidate, he has warned that the U.S. preoccupation with Iraq has distracted policymakers.

They said Obama's response in the last several days has been suited to the events on the ground. Obama's first statement calling for a ceasefire by both Russia and Georgia came when Georgian troops were still attacking targets in South Ossetia. As Georgia pulled back and Russia invaded Georgia proper, Obama's condemnation grew stronger and focused on Russia, his advisers note.

"He was not calling for equivalence [between Russia and Georgia], he was calling for a ceasefire to stop the violence . . . After Russia invaded, it was a totally different order of magnitude," said Stanford University professor Michael McFaul, the campaign's chief adviser on Russia.

Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the U.N. in the Clinton administration and an Obama supporter, objected to the suggestion that Obama had been late in coming to a tough condemnation of Russia. Obama and McCain are now more or less on the same page in decrying the aggression, he said.

"It is based on an exaggerated and deliberately misleading perception of Senator Obama's initial statement, which was issued early, while the crisis was unfolding," he said. "This is an attempt by people supporting Senator McCain to politicize a great international tragedy and it's not worthy of the dimensions of the problem, especially when both candidates have roughly the same position."

Obama's more nuanced tone may reflect the debate going on among his advisers, who say they must bear in mind the messy geopolitical reality that America relies on Russia on a host of issues, from Iran to nuclear proliferation to energy and climate change.

"Part of the reason we don't have leverage is that we don't have a U.S.-Russian relationship. It has been adrift," McFaul said. Referring to McCain, he added, "It's easy to say something belligerent about Russia. I'm no friend of Vladimir Putin, and cheap shots about tough talk are all well and fine. But what are you doing to actually make the situation better?"

Several Russia experts not affiliated with either campaign said they recognized that tough talk had become a political necessity on the campaign trail, but worry that U.S. credibility could suffer because the country does not have the leverage to follow through.

"This type of bluster is fairly counterproductive because it is a bluff, there's nothing we can do about this," said Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution. But he noted that "it has become a race to be see who can be the tougher. I can't see anybody suddenly stepping back and becoming a voice of moderation and calling for calm."

By Michael Shear and Alec MacGillis, The Washington Post, August 13, 2008

Penn was always the biggest hawk in Clinton's campaign, always the one who advocated going negative against Obama. The day after the senator from New York won primaries in Ohio and Texas, Penn called for drawing a sharp contrast with Obama along the following lines:

"He is just words and she is a lifetime of action. . . . She is the one who is ready to fill the big shoes of this job and he is an inspiring speaker who isn't, and whose background you are beginning to wonder about. She has brought real results and even his words today are in doubt, invented for a campaign. Ultimately he cannot win against John McCain."

Clinton's campaign, he argued, "must now in earnest show that their image of Obama Camelot is simply nothing but campaign pitter-patter."

"Does anyone believe it is possible to win the nomination without, over these two months, raising all these issues against him?" Penn wrote. "A 'nice' campaign that wins the states alone that can be won -- will that be enough or do serious issues have to raised about him?"

None of these were new positions for Penn. A year earlier, on March 19, 2007, he portrayed Obama as lacking roots in basic American values and as being a phony -- although he was more tentative on how the campaign ought to approach those topics.

Penn was particularly struck by what he called "a very strong weakness" in Obama -- "His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."

But then he worried about how the Clinton campaign could draw a contrast on this without sounding negative. "We are never going to say anything about his background -- we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most Americans -- the invisible Americans."

Penn's solution? "Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't," he wrote. "Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy fund. Let's use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds."

Clinton's campaign never did quite become the flag-waving, patriotic operation that Penn envisioned in March 2007, nor did she ever go as overtly negative as he was preaching in March and April 2008. Would she be the nominee if she had? And can McCain win the presidency if he -- carefully -- pursues a similar path?

Earlier this year, the McCain campaign, presumably unknowingly, adopted some of Penn's provocative 2007 playbook with an ad that talked about the presumptive GOP nominee as "the American president Americans have been waiting for."

That was even less subtle in invoking a cultural-values argument against Obama than Penn's suggestion to Clinton that she always tell audiences she was "born in the middle of America" and to talk about "the deeply American values you grew up with."

Interestingly, the most provocative of Penn's memos posted by the Atlantic -- the one that talks about Obama's lack of roots in American values -- went nowhere. "I don't remember there being a real discussion about this," Howard Wolfson, who was the campaign's communications director and who often differed with Penn on strategy, said yesterday. "It was universally rejected, and in fairness to Mark, I don't think Mark pushed it. . . . It's one of those things people heard and said, 'That's not a good idea.' "

The ads, at a minimum, may be getting under Obama's skin. It's possible they are doing real damage. Penn seems to believe that, based on what he wrote for the Politico. "Fair or not, as advertising it did its job," he said.

Just how far McCain's campaign will pursue this strategy isn't clear. There are risks for him, just as there were for Clinton. Obama has proven over this long campaign to be a difficult target to hit -- at least on anything more than an occasional basis. So the mileage may be limited long term.

More fundamentally, McCain risks damaging his reputation as a politician who has eschewed the politics of negativity. But what was considered out of bounds in a Democratic primary campaign may be less so in a general-election race, in which other voters come into play. McCain will have to make some difficult judgments about this in the final 82 days.

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clybrun said Tuesday that he takes issue with comments by Bill Clinton in which the former president seemed to suggest Clyburn undercut Clinton's reputation with black voters.

The No. 3 Democrat in the House, Clyburn said his heart has been with Barack Obama, but his head had been supportive of Hillary Clinton despite suggestions otherwise.

Clinton told ABC News last week that Clyburn "used to be" an old friend of his, but he "was not Hillary's supporter. Never. Not ever. Not for a day."

When told that Clyburn had said Clinton damaged his own credibility with the black community, Clinton responded, "That may be by the time he got through working on it, that was probably true."

Cilnton "is not correct in his conclusions," Clyburn told FOX News.

As for whether Clinton thinks Clyburn undermined him with black voters, the congressman said, "That's easily to be understood from his comments, and I just beg to differ with that. Because the fact of the matter is all the stuff that I saw reported were reports on things the president said from his own mouth."

Clyburn specifically pointed to Clinton's comparison of Obama's primary win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's 20 years earlier. Jackson won the black vote and not much else on the way to losing the Democratic nomination to former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

"Most people thought that the most telling thing back in January was the equation that the president made of Jesse Jackson having won South Carolina caucuses 20 years earlier, and compared that with Obama winning the South Carolina primary. There's a big difference in a caucus and a primary," Clyburn said. "And so a lot of that, irrespective of what the president may have meant by the statement, a lot of people interpreted that as having a racial connotation, and Jim Clyburn didn't speak on that issue at all."

As for whether Clinton did hurt himself among black voters, Clyburn said, "I don't know that I've done any surveys to determine whether or not the president, former president has ever damaged himself or not."

What does his gut tell him? "My gut tells me that some things I ought to keep to myself," he said.

"Fair or not, as advertising it did its job: It used humor, stuck viewers with memorable images and created a debate, just as Lyndon Johnson's 1964 'Daisy' ad, Walter Mondale's 'Red Phone' spot 20 years later and Hillary Rodham Clinton's '3 a.m.' commercial in 2008 did," Penn wrote.

Penn, who was behind Clinton's headline-grabbing "3 a.m." ad that questioned Obama's readiness to lead during a national security crisis, also said the Illinois senator should have responded more effectively to the Hilton/Spears ad.

"The Paris Hilton ad also bore a Republican political trademark -- attacking a candidate's strengths rather than the candidate's weaknesses," Penn wrote. The spot attempted to portray Obama's leadership for change as something fluffy and useless. Obama did not immediately hit back on the air."

Penn, who was ousted from his formal role with the Clinton campaign last spring, faced fresh criticism earlier this week after newly released campaign memos revealed that he advocated painting Obama as foreign.

"All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050," the memo added.

The e-mails shed light on a bigger problem plaguing Democratic Party stalwarts: how best to bring Clinton supporters into the Obama column.

Obama has said, however, that he doesn't anticipate "any problems."

But Obama's assessment runs counter to grumbling from some of Clinton's supporters, some peculiar praise from the former president and Sen. Clinton's seeming embrace of a plan to put her name into nomination.

In the modern era of presidential primaries, no losing candidate has so visibly endorsed an opponent so many months before the convention and still put his or her name up for nomination.

"I happen to believe that we will come out stronger if people feel that their voices were heard and their views were respected," the senator from New York has said of some of her supporters, who are demanding a role in the party's convention.

A video posted on YouTube showed Clinton talking to supporters who wanted to have her name put to a vote at the convention.

"I know from just what I'm hearing, there's incredible pent-up desire, and I think that people want to feel like, 'OK, it's a catharsis, we're here, we did it, and then everybody get behind Sen. Obama,' " she told the crowd.

Obama said last week that the brouhaha over whether Clinton's delegates would be able to vote for her at the Democratic convention was a media creation. "There hasn't been controversy other than what you guys are projecting right now," he told reporters Thursday.

Obama described conversations between the two campaigns over convention planning as "seamless."

"It has not been a problem," he added.

On Friday, Clinton seemed to agree. At an Obama rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, she said, "We had a hard-fought campaign, and it was exciting. It was a bit like the proverbial roller coaster, but we are now unified and ready to go forward together.

"And it is imperative that each and every one of us think about how we're going to help in this election," she said.

"We are one party, we share one vision, and we believe as Democrats, as independents and repentant Republicans, in the progress we can make together!"

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Fierce infighting undermined the US presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton as she rejected calls to paint rival Barack Obama as un-American, according to campaign documents published in a magazine expose Tuesday.

An inside glance at the rough-and-tumble fight for the Democratic nomination showed that Clinton's advisers and the New York senator first did not believe Obama was a serious contender and then failed to forge a strategy to fight him.

But the Atlantic monthly magazine feature by Joshua Green also characterized Clinton as not making the command decisions needed to resolve poisonous bickering between her top strategists.

"Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence, on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to 'do the job from Day One,'" Green wrote.

"In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles' heel."

Citing a trove of campaign internal documents and emails provided by staff of the now-failed campaign, Green showed that well before Obama gained an edge in the Democratic primaries, campaign chief strategist Mark Penn dismissed Obama's chances to become the US president while focusing on former vice president Al Gore -- who ultimately did not enter the race.

"The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun," he wrote in a campaign memo.

Still, Penn urged Clinton to portray Obama, who lived as a youth in Indonesia and Hawaii, as having "roots to basic American values and culture (that) are at best limited."

Senator Clinton "wisely chose not to go this route," Green wrote -- though much later the same strategy has since been picked up by Republicans seeking to blunt the African-American senator's White House quest.

But then Clinton's advisers fought for months without resolution on how to staunch Obama's march to victory in the primaries.

Green cited a document which showed that Clinton's team, despite having from the beginning a clear strategy, consumed by "anger and toxic obsessions".

While Clinton was a "shrewd strategist," she never weighed in to decide venomous battles between advisers.

On January 3, just after Obama scored a stunning upset victory in the bellwether Iowa primary, Green wrote, Clinton "seized control of her campaign."

But when her attempts in a conference call with staff to restart the effort were met by stunned silence, she became incensed.

"This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself," she said before hanging up, Green wrote.

The continued infighting, and disagreement over whether to launch negative attacks on Obama, led to rival strategists leaking embarrassing internal documents to the media.

Following a March 6 Washington Post article on the internal rancor over Penn's strategies, Robert Barnett, a respected Washington insider, blasted off a memo to the campaign.

"This circular firing squad that is occurring is unattractive, unprofessional, unconscionable, and unacceptable ...It must stop."

But neither that nor the sacking of campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle could save the campaign, as Obama continued to rack up the delegates that finally led to Clinton's conceding the race in June.

AFP, August 12, 2008

A stash of internal memos and emails from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign yesterday exposed a toxic mix of indecision and infighting that destroyed her chances of winning the White House.

The 26 documents, posted online and to be published in Atlantic magazine, suggest Clinton failed to face up to tough decisions and act - while campaigning on the slogan of "Ready to lead on day one". They also suggest the Clinton campaign struggled to come up with a coherent strategy against Barack Obama, even when she was undisputed frontrunner.

Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, repeatedly pushed for Clinton to attack Obama. "His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited," Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo. "Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programmes, the speeches and the values. He doesn't." In the same memo, Penn writes: "The right knows Obama is unelectable, except perhaps against Attila the Hun."

Penn pushed for Clinton to emphasise her toughness. In a December 2006 memo laying out his launch strategy, he advised her to use Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, as a role model. "Regardless of the sex of the candidates, most Americans in essence see the president as the 'father' of the country. They do not want someone who would be the first mama, especially in this kind of world. But there is a yearning for a kind of tough single parent."

But Clinton alternated indecision with flashes of temper. In December 2007, an enraged former first lady demanded her campaign go on the attack, after learning she was trailing Obama in Iowa. Within four minutes, according to the email trail published in the Atlantic, her press operation decided to attack Obama for overweening ambition on the basis of a comment he made as a five-year-old. The attack backfired on Clinton.

But by late February, after Clinton had had 12 consecutive primary defeats, she was again torn over attacking Obama, withholding her approval on the "3am" ads touting her fitness to deal with a national security crisis in the White House. According to Atlantic, it was Bill Clinton who finally issued the order to run the attack ads.

That mindset of paralysis alternated with too-hasty decisions extended to fundraising and delegate strategy. Warnings from Harold Ickes, a senior adviser, to keep $25m in reserve for the February contests went ignored, leaving the campaign without the money it needed to compete against Obama.

Suggestions from a staffer, Philippe Reines, that the campaign raise the issue of the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries, which could provide enough delegates to win the nomination, went ignored for three months.

The sheer quantity of email and memos produced by the campaign suggests a bureaucracy mired in its own infighting. By March, Clinton's friends were appalled. "This circular firing squad that is occurring is unattractive, unprofessional, unconscionable, and unacceptable," the Clintons' lawyer, Robert Barnett, wrote.

But the campaign clung on. The final memo from Penn in June lays out an argument to superdelegates, or senior and elected Democratic officials, for giving support to Clinton over Obama.

Some of Clinton's supporters have adopted the same die-hard approach, launching a signature petition this week to put her name on the ballot at the party's convention in Denver.

Meanwhile, Obama's campaign yesterday highlighted his ability to win over moderate Republicans and independents by producing endorsements from former Rhode Island senator Lincoln Chafee, and Iowa congressman Jim Leach.

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is "Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday - at No. 1.

The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday.

The publisher is Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster whose chief editor is Mary Matalin, the former Republican operative turned publisher-pundit. And it is a significant, early success for Ms. Matalin's three-year-old imprint, which is also planning to publish the memoirs of Karl Rove, President Bush's longtime political guru. Threshold says it has undertaken an extensive printing effort for anticipated demand, with 475,000 copies of "The Obama Nation" produced so far.

"The goal is to defeat Obama," Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview. "I don't want Obama to be in office."

He said he was planning to aid several conservative groups that intend to run advertisements against Mr. Obama this fall, though he would not name them.

Mr. Corsi, who has over the years also written critically about Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama's probable Republican opponent, said he supported the Constitution Party presidential nominee, Chuck Baldwin, and had not been in touch with McCain aides. He called his reporting on Mr. Obama, which he stands by, "investigative," not prosecutorial.

Ms. Matalin said in an interview that the book "was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book," calling it, rather, "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." She said she was unaware of efforts to link it to any anti-Obama advertising.

In its timing, authorship and style of reporting, the book is strikingly reminiscent of the one Mr. Corsi wrote with John O'Neill about Mr. Kerry, "Unfit for Command," which included various accusations that were ultimately undermined by news reports pointing out the contradictions. (Some critics of Mr. Kerry quoted in the book had earlier praised his bravery in incidents they were now asserting he had fabricated; one had earned a medal for bravery in a gun battle he accused Mr. Kerry of concocting.)

But books like "Unfit for Command," which remained for some 12 weeks on the Times best-seller list, and, now, "The Obama Nation," have become an effective and favored delivery system for political attacks. There have been anti-Clinton (both Bill and Hillary) and anti-Bush books too numerous to name. The sensational findings in these books, true or dubious, can quickly come to dominate the larger political discussion in the news media, especially on cable television and the less readily detectible confines of talk radio and partisan Web sites.

Fact-checking the books can require extensive labor and time from independent journalists, whose work often trails behind the media echo chamber.

Web sites on the left have begun poring over Mr. Corsi's latest book. Media Matters, which is run by David Brock, a former right-wing journalist who wrote a classic of the attack genre, "The Real Anita Hill," has been particularly aggressive in fact-checking the book, and its press releases on inaccuracies in the book have gotten some attention on cable television.

Several of the book's accusations, in fact, are unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate.

For instance, Mr. Corsi writes that Mr. Obama had "yet to answer" whether he "stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended to his law school days or beyond." "How about in the U.S. Senate?" Mr. Corsi asks.

But Mr. Obama, who admitted to occasional marijuana and cocaine use in his high school and early college years, wrote in his memoir that he had "stopped getting high" when he moved to New York in the early 1980s. And in 2003 The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., quoted him responding to a question of his drug use by saying, "I haven't done anything since I was 20 years old."

In an interview, Mr. Corsi said "self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable."

Mr. Corsi described most of the critiques of his book as "nitpicking," like a contradiction of his claim that Mr. Obama had failed to dedicate his book "Dreams of My Father" to his family; Mr. Obama dedicated the book to several family members, in the introduction.

Mr. Corsi called the Media Matters critique inconsequential because it was advancing a liberal, political agenda.

Media Matters was created in part to answer a conservative "echo chamber" - one that liberal activists say they have still yet to match - that gives books like Mr. Corsi's extra bounce.

"There's just no doubt that in terms of longer-term infrastructure, there's more out there on the right than there is on the left," said Cliff Schecter, author of a liberal attack book on Mr. McCain, "The Real McCain," which, with 35,000 copies in print, did not make the Times bestseller list.

Mr. Obama's campaign has yet to weigh in heavily on Mr. Corsi's accusations. It appears to face the classic decision between the risk of publicizing the book's claims by addressing them and the risk of letting them sink into the public debate with no response.

"This book is nothing but a series of lies that were long ago discredited, written by an individual who was discredited after he wrote a similar book to help George Bush and Dick Cheney get re-elected four years ago," said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. "The reality is that there are many lie-filled books like this in the works cobbled together from the Internet to make money off of a presidential campaign." He added, "We will respond to these smears forcefully."

Several Democrats associated with Mr. Kerry's campaign in 2004 said in interviews Tuesday that they were comfortable so far with Mr. Obama's more muted response to the book, which has not showed up yet in television advertisements.

Even Mr. Corsi said this book did not have what "Unfit for Command" had: a built-in interest group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to run advertisements against its target.

While he said he thought it was a certainty that he would be "assisting in the creation of ads in the fall," he did not say what he believed their content would be.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Hillary Rodham Clinton's top campaign strategist advised her to cast presidential rival Barack Obama as having questionable "roots to basic American values and culture" and use the theme to counter the image that his background is diverse and multicultural.

"I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values," Mark Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo to Clinton.

Clinton did not take Penn's advice, revealed by a report in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine.

The article says Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination went from front-runner status to failure for a number of reasons, from badly managed money to blistering warfare between advisers. Clinton, the candidate who said she was ready to lead on Day One of her administration, did little to quell the infighting.

Clinton grew angry during a conference call with her senior aides about how to recover from her loss in the Iowa caucuses. She found herself doing most of the post-mortem, to near-silence on the other end of the line.

"This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself," Clinton snapped, and hung up, the magazine reported.

Mostly, the disputes were over whether to go negative against Obama, a half-black, Harvard-trained lawyer with a gift for soaring rhetoric and big themes.

Penn advised going negative.

Obama's background - he grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii - was a "lack of American roots," Penn wrote. Also a weakness, he added, was the divisive rhetoric of Obama's controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who cursed America during a sermon.

"Won't a single tape of Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game-ender?" Penn wrote in a March 30 memo.

Penn's memos also contained prescient advice. The memo from March 2007 talked about the importance of a key voting bloc he called "the invisible Americans" - women and lower- and middle-class voters.

Those groups helped Clinton beat Obama in key states before she quit the race in June.

YORK, Pa. - One of the McCain campaign's new themes, that Senator John McCain has always put his country first, has been seen by some analysts as a subtle suggestion that his opponent, Senator Barack Obama, has not.

But as he introduced Mr. McCain at a campaign event here on Tuesday, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut made the attack a lot more explicit, calling the election a choice "between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not."

Mr. Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000, made the remark as he used his introduction of Mr. McCain to deliver a harsh assessment of Mr. Obama without mentioning his name.

"In my opinion, the choice could not be more clear: between one candidate, John McCain, who's had experience, been tested in war and tried in peace, another candidate who has not," Mr. Lieberman said. "Between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not. Between one candidate who's a talker, and the other candidate who's the leader America needs as our next president."

Mr. McCain, for his part, told the town-hall-style meeting here that he had spoken by phone Tuesday morning with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili - he referred to him familiarly as "Misha" - and told him that "today we are all Georgians."

"My friends, today the killing goes on," Mr. McCain said. "And the aggression goes on. Yet I know, from speaking this morning to the president of Georgia, Misha Saakashvili, whom I have known for many years, that he knows that the thoughts and prayers and support of the American people are with that brave little nation a they struggle today for their freedom and independence. And he wanted me to say thank you to you, to give you his heartfelt thanks for the support of the American people for this tiny little Democracy far away from the United States of America. And I told him that I know I speak for every American when I say to him: today we are all Georgians."

Some Georgians have felt abandoned by the West, which has encouraged it to act more independently of Russia, since Russia invaded it. Mr. McCain - who noted that he visited the disputed territory of South Ossetia two years ago - again spoke of his strong support for Georgia. His rundown of the situation there cataloged Russia's aggression but did not mention that Georgia had sent its military into South Ossetia last week.

His campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, may no longer host the national press corps anymore, as the campaign has cut down access to the candidate. But it can still make quite an entrance: the bus drove right into the hangar-like hall, where a large crowd awaited Mr. McCain. To the theme from Rocky, natch.

"It's great to be here with Rocky McCain," Mr. Lieberman said, before going into his criticisms of Mr. Obama.

HONOLULU - In at least one way Senator Barack Obama's fund-raiser Tuesday night in Hawaii will be just like all the others: supporters had to fork over a big check - tickets cost $2,300 - to rub shoulders with the candidate.

And that's where the similarities end.

In almost every other way - from the dress code to the entertainment - the sold-out event at the luxury Kahala Hotel and Resort - will be a distinctly Hawaiian affair.

Guests will be treated to performances by an award-wining local hula ensemble as well as Kuhi Suganuma, who was crowned Miss Aloha Hula 2008. The musical entertainment includes Willie K, a guitarist who the Honolulu Weekly once described as "a Hawaiian Jimi Hendrix" and Raiatea Helm, a Grammy-nominated Hawaiian female vocalist.

The invitation lists Hawaii's Senators Daniel Inouye, Daniel Akaka as well as Representatives Neil Abercrombie and Mazie Hirono as honorary co-chairs of the event.

On the menu: Hawaiian pupus.

And leave your haute couture at home. The dress code tonight is "Aloha attire," according to the invitation. (In case you're wondering, that means flower-patterned Hawaiian shirts and muumuus are acceptable, even encouraged.)

More than 500 guests are expected at the fund-raiser, and those who contributed at least $10,000 to the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee were invited to a V.I.P reception to have their picture taken with Mr. Obama.

The campaign is hoping to collect $1.5. million on Tuesday night. That is more than three-times their original goal and, as the Honolulu Advertiser pointed out today, would exceed the total amount Mr. Obama has raised from residents of Hawaii since he began his presidential campaign.

The private fund-raiser will be only the second - and perhaps last - event on Mr. Obama's official itinerary during his week-long vacation here.

The Illinois senator, who was born in Hawaii, has been keeping a low-key schedule on the island. On Monday, he visited his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, at her Honolulu apartment for the third time on his trip. Later he watched "The Dark Knight," at a nearby movie theater and ate dinner with his wife, Michelle, his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and a group of friends at an upscale Honolulu restaurant.

A new poll of likely women voters shows Democrat Barack Obama still has work to do to attract the ballots of some who backed Hillary Clinton in her primary fight with him.

Obama leads Republican John McCain, 49 percent to 38 percent among all women voters, according to the poll, but 18 percent of the women who voted for Clinton in the nomination fight say they plan to vote for McCain in November.

The survey, conducted for the Lifetime television networks by two respected pollsters, Democrat Celinda Lake and Republican Kellyanne Conway, was released last week.

The findings are important because women are likely to comprise a majority of the American electorate in what is shaping up to be another close presidential election. Some national tracking polls show the race in a statistical tie. McCain has gained in recent days.

"While the majority of women who voted for Hillary in the primary are flocking to Obama - 76 percent - nearly one out of five - 18 percent - say they will vote for McCain for president," according to the poll's findings.

Obama needs to try to stop that erosion if he hopes to win. In any primary contest, the losers' supporters are sometimes slow to join up with the winner, but these numbers suggest Obama still needs to pay special attention to Clinton and her voters.

(That could be difficult. A Pew Research poll last week showed 48 percent of voters say they've been hearing too much about Obama. Pew called this "Obama fatigue." Only 26 percent said they'd heard too much about McCain, and 38 percent said they'd heard too little. Only 10 percent said they'd heard too little from Obama.)

The Lifetime poll offered a mixed bag for Clinton.

"Despite all the talk about sexism in the presidential campaign, the majority of women voters laid the blame for Hillary's loss squarely on her and her strategists' shoulders, they largely reject gender as a cause of her demise," the poll found.

There were 34 percent who "believe she lost because of the kind of campaign she ran, 31 percent who said it was who she is and what she stands for and 21 percent who said it was because she is a woman.

"Despite losing the Democratic nomination, women (69 percent) credit Hillary for paving the way for tomorrow's female presidential candidates." The next female presidential candidate won't have to put up with all the novelty and tabloid scrutiny of being first.

There were 44 percent of the respondents who said they expect to see a woman president in the next eight years.

The poll has some whimsical findings:

- A majority - 51 percent - said if they were trying to carpool to save gas, they'd rather do it with Obama; only 31 percent preferred McCain.

AS BARACK Obama vacations in Hawaii, his staff is on heightened image alert in these two weeks before his official nomination for president. The problem is not Republican John McCain. It is the Democratic dysfunction erupting and festering all around him.

With the revelation last week by John Edwards that he had an affair in 2006, Obama is now deprived of a significant weapon in the values arsenal at the party convention in Denver. The former North Carolina senator, 2004 vice presidential candidate, and a third-place burr in the campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton made some interesting noise in the campaign by recasting himself as the voice for the poor, the working class, and against Washington lobbyists.

He was one of the Democrats who denounced President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky for its "remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen." With Edwards's outrageous display of disrespect - as his wife was in remission from cancer - the party is one scandal closer to forgetting why it took back the leadership of the House and Senate in 2006. The Democrats won in part because voters were tired of Republican moral immolation.

Reports say the Edwards family will not be at the convention. It will be interesting to see how the Democrats now handle the morals issue in Denver, let alone the notion as to whether the poor will have any voice at all.

Then there is the never-quite-buried hatchet between the Obama and Clinton staffs. The Atlantic Monthly magazine, according to Politico.com, will report this week that Clinton's former top campaign strategist, Mark Penn, wanted to run a more aggressive campaign against Obama than what unfolded during the primaries. Penn wanted to strike at the very heart of imagined voter uncertainties as to how "American" Obama is.

In two excerpts printed yesterday by The New York Times, Penn wrote memos saying:

"All those articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural, and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050."

"I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."

In another excerpt posted by Politico, Penn advised, "Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches, and the values. He doesn't."

As it was, the Clinton campaign periodically embarrassed itself as volunteers and high-level surrogates created firestorms by passing along right-wing rumors that Obama is Muslim, said his youthful cocaine use made him unelectable, or diminished him as an affirmative action baby. It is small wonder that with friends such as these in his own party, Obama, a Christian, continues to battle the notion that he is Muslim. Newsweek polls in April and May and Pew Research Center polls in March and July are all frozen at between 10 and 13 percent of Americans who think Obama is Muslim.

Given the tightness of the last two presidential elections, the Pew poll holds particular dangers for Obama. There is no difference in the percentage of Democrats or Republicans who think Obama is a Muslim. And of the Democrats who think Obama is Muslim, 19 percent said they preferred McCain over Obama. "Democrats who share the misconception are significantly less likely to support Obama," Pew said about the poll.

Obama of course had no control of the private life of John Edwards or the inner workings of the Clinton campaign. But if he is to be president, he has to overcome the corrosion of such episodes as these. Voters in major polls say they want change on domestic issues such as the economy. But they also still trust McCain more for dealing with Iraq and terrorism. The fact that one in 10 Americans still think he is Muslim is a sign that Obama has to go to Denver on a heightened mission to define the Democrats and himself.