HARRISBURG, Pa. - The intensifying warfare in the former Soviet republic of Georgia has put a new focus on the increasingly hard line that Senator John McCain has taken against Russia in recent years, with stances that have often gone well beyond those of the Bush administration and its focus on engagement.

Mr. McCain has called for expelling what he has called a "revanchist Russia" from meetings of the Group of 8, the organization of leading industrialized nations. He urged President Bush - in vain - to boycott the group's meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006. And he has often mocked the president's assertion that he got a sense of the soul of Vladimir V. Putin, who was then Russia's president and is now its prime minister, by looking into his eyes. "I looked into his eyes," Mr. McCain said, "and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B."

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

Barack Obama's single greatest advantage in this election is the state of the economy. It's the top issue on voters' minds. President Bush looks likely to leave office with gas prices three times what they were when he was elected, and the stock market is groaning under the weight of the housing crisis, stagnating wages and increasing job losses. Yet throughout the summer, the Illinois Senator seems to have hit a ceiling in surveys, unable to crack 50% approval, usually hovering in the mid-40s, in public-opinion polls. Why isn't this advantage reflecting in polls? The answer lies in two kinds of economic voters Obama has yet to fully persuade: one group from the right and the other from the left, both of whom share a similar concern.

The first type is reflected in Ed Hecimovich, 41, who had just sat down for a greasy- spoon lunch with his wife and three young children when the Secret Service swarmed Schoop's Diner in Portage, Ind., and Obama swept in for a cheeseburger. Hecimovich, a pipe fitter who twice voted for President Bush, asked the candidate about the economy, his top concern. Obama's answers impressed the independent, but he's still undecided. "I like that Obama stands for change," Hecimovich says. "But he doesn't have the experience."

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.

By Jay Newton-Small, Time, August 11, 2008

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.

"During our 26-year history, the series has experienced controversy, demonstrations, cancellations, reschedules, deaths of speakers, and weather delays," the college said in a statement. "The Salem State Series has become a microcosm of contemporary life. We feel that there is a compelling story to be told by the Edwardses who have experienced both triumphs and many tragedies together."




By Foon Rhee, The Boston Globe, August 11, 2008

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.

Reuters, August 12th, 2008

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.

When Hillary dropped out on June 7th -- a two+ month eternity ago -- the conventional veepdom wisdom was that a) he didn't need her; and b) she wouldn't take it. Like most conventional wisdom, it was, and is, wrong on both counts.





By Adam Hanft, The Huffington Post, August 11, 2008

THE MOST remarkable fact of the 2008 presidential election is that it remains a close race. Democrats have not known such favorable political terrain since 1932, yet what should be a blowout is looking like a blanket finish.

The fundamental reason is white men. Like Al Gore in the summer of 2000, Barack Obama is roughly splitting white women. But only 34 to 37 percent of white men support Obama, according to the Gallup Poll's latest weekly index of 6,000 voters.

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.

By David Paul Kuhn, The Boston Globe, August 13, 2008

Foreign Policy Experience Is Emphasized

Aides to Republican Sen. John McCain were scrambling last Thursday morning even as his plane was descending into Des Moines. Russia had escalated its aggression in the bordering Republic of Georgia, they told reporters, and McCain wanted to seize the moment.

On the ground in Iowa, advance men raced to erect a podium on the tarmac, just feet from McCain's plane. The Republican nominee strode to the microphone for the first of several blistering statements condemning Russia's moves, delivering his comments well before President Bush spoke publicly about the incident.

"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.

Since then, McCain's rhetoric has become increasingly sharp. On Tuesday, he called Russia an unrepentant combatant against a "brave little nation" and compared Russian "killing" in the "tiny little democracy" to Soviet aggression during the Cold War era.

"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

By Joel Connelly, Seattle P.I., August 13, 2008

DENVER, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- Continuing tensions between supporters of Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are showing up within the Colorado Democratic Party delegation, observers say.

Sacha Millstone of Boulder, Colo., a supporter of one-time candidate Clinton, D-N.Y., was asked by the state party leadership to give up her seat at the Democratic National Convention in Denver but refused, The Denver Post reported Tuesday.

"Isn't there a right to free speech? Isn't this right in line with our time-honored tradition with the Dems?" Millstone told the newspaper. "These intimidation tactics have a chilling effect on people feeling comfortable speaking up."

Colorado Democratic delegates loyal to Clinton say all they want is to put her name on the convention ballot, vote for her and then move on to support likely nominee, Obama, D-Ill., before his Aug. 28 acceptance speech. Obama's supporters, however, are pressuring them to unite behind him from the start, the Post said.

"It's inevitable within a party of this size that there will be different views about the merits of the candidates that the parties put forward," Daniel Kagan, a delegate representing Denver, told the Post.

United Press International, August 12, 2008

If John McCain's campaign operatives were looking for strategic advice for the fall campaign against Barack Obama, they could click on the Atlantic Monthly's Web site. There they would find a raft of memos from Mark J. Penn, Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief strategist, outlining possible ways to try to defeat the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The memos, dug up by the enterprising Joshua Green and accompanying an article chronicling the demise of Clinton's campaign, are drawing attention in large measure for what they reveal about her operation's dysfunction. They are equally revealing for what they say about the direction Penn wanted to take Clinton's message and the risks inherent for McCain if he and his campaign were to pursue the same path.

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."

At the end of the day on March 30, he wrote an even more pointed memo. He argued that Obama needed to be "vetted" on the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his former pastor; on his ties to the corrupt Tony Rezko; and on his record in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate.

"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?

Clinton's risk, often cited by Penn's opponents inside the campaign, was that attacking Obama directly would only heighten negative impressions of her. She carried plenty of baggage as a polarizing politician; taking on Obama would have added to that baggage. Others in Clinton's high command preferred to portray her as more human. They did not think she needed to look more like a warrior.

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.' "

McCain's campaign appears to have less hesitation than Clinton's did in going after Obama. For the past few weeks, it has run a series of negative ads -- some humorous, some not so -- that portray Obama as a famous but empty suit who is wrong on many of the issues Americans care most about.

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.

By Dan Balz, The Washington Post, August 13, 2008

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.

By James Rosen , FOX News, August 13, 2008

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. John McCain's recent campaign commercial linking Sen. Barack Obama to vapid celebrities was unanimously criticized in Democratic quarters, but one of the party's leading strategists said it did the job.

In an op-ed in Politico on Tuesday, Mark Penn, former top strategist to Sen. Hillary Clinton, said negative ads are often effective in forming public opinion of a candidate. He pointed to the McCain campaign's recent ad featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as an example of an effective television spot.

"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.

"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," Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo to campaign colleagues.

"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!"

By Ed Hornick and Alexander Mooney, CNN, August 12, 2008

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

* Adviser wanted to go after Obama as un-American

* Margaret Thatcher touted as possible role model

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.

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, August 13 2008

This is a torturous month of what-ifs for Hillary Clinton and her still substantial number of followers.

First, they have to wonder if the Democrat-friendly media that helped her for so long may have doomed her by refusing to follow a John Edwards adultery story that could have given her the Iowa win that Barack Obama used as his nomination springboard.

Instead, Hillary and her followers will have to make do with a Tuesday night convention speech the week after next. But she could have accepted the nomination that Thursday night if only she had followed the instincts of discarded communications director Mark Penn, cast aside for a lobbying controversy no one cared about.

What she and her handlers should have cared about was the wisdom of his advice, laid bare in an upcoming issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

It details numerous e-mails that reveal the depth of the internal squabbling that stalled the Clinton campaign. But a larger question looms: What if she had followed Mr. Penn's inclination to focus strongly on voter unease with Barack Obama's far-flung upbringing and resulting lack of mainstream American values?

"His roots to basic American culture and values are at best limited," Mr. Penn wrote in March 2007. "I cannot imagine America electing a president at a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and values."

(And they say Democrats and Republicans can't agree on anything.)

He continues: "Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programs, the speeches and the values ... he doesn't."

Predictably, those now tasked with paving the way for an Obama ascendancy are awash in contrived indignation. "It's an appeal to prejudice. I think it's ugly," frowns Democratic consultant Bob Shrum. "If Hillary Clinton had done that, she would permanently besmirch her reputation, her legacy and her place in American politics."

Or she might have been delivering a Thursday night convention speech.

In state after state, primary voters who like their presidents to cleave to their country's roots and culture gave Mrs. Clinton victories that almost allowed her to rally.

Had she been more aggressive in this regard, I believe she would have won. Now, her torment will be complete, as John McCain uses exactly that strategy to reveal Mr. Obama as insufficiently woven into the tapestry of the nation he seeks to lead.

And it will work.

Along the way, there will be more of the same prattling that such criticism is unfair, even racist. But after candidates tell you their views on health care or oil prices – every word changeable with the wind – you arrive at the vital questions: What kind of person is this candidate? Does he cherish the things I cherish? In which ways is he like me? Or not?

One of the ways Mr. Obama differs from most Americans is his breezy indifference for the nation, which may extend, at times, to active distaste. The flag pin as Kryptonite, failing to place his hand over his heart for the national anthem in Iowa – these are symbolic, but symbolism means something.

They reveal a man who gladly tolerated two decades of America-bashing in his church and even worse among his friends and associates. It is, in fact, more relevant than any position paper you might find at his Web site.

Even when he attempts to praise America, it is in terms of his magical ability to lift it from a mediocrity imposed by less lofty predecessors.

John McCain will use such observations to beat Barack Obama in November. If Hillary Clinton had summoned the nerve to do the same, she would be addressing the convention crowd 15 days from now instead of 13.

By Mark Davis, The Dallas Morning News, August 13, 2008

In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of "Unfit for Command," the book attacking Senator John Kerry's record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry's war credentials as he sought the presidency.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "extensive connections to Islam" - Mr. Obama is Christian - and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

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."

In exploring Mr. Obama's denials that he had been present for the more incendiary sermons of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Corsi cites a report on the conservative Web site NewsMax.com that Mr. Obama had attended a sermon on July 22, 2007, in which Mr. Wright blamed "the 'white arrogance' of America's Caucasian majority for the world's suffering, especially the oppression of blacks."

Mr. Obama, however, was giving a speech in Florida that afternoon, and his campaign reported he had not attended Mr. Wright's church that day.

William Kristol, a columnist for The New York Times, had cited the same report in a column, and issued a correction. "There is a dispute about the date, and Kristol chose to side with Obama," Mr. Corsi said. "We can nitpick the date to death," he added, saying his "fundamental point" was Mr. Obama's close association with someone ascribing to "black liberation theology."

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.

The Associated Press, August 13, 2008

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.

By Michael Cooper, The New York Times, August 12, 2008

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.

By Michael Falcone, The New York Times, August 12, 2008

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.

- Nearly half - 49 percent - said they'd like to vacation with the Obamas; 26 percent said they'd like to with the McCains. "Nearly 20 percent would prefer to vacation without the candidates," the poll found.

So what's Obama to do? If he's over-exposed, perhaps he could knock off campaigning for a while, give rides or spend some pool time with recovering Clinton voters.

Margaritas, anyone?




By David Yepsen, Des Moines Register, August 10, 2008

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.

By Derrick Z. Jackson, The Boston Globe, August 12, 2008

In A Changing Corner of Pennsylvania, A Glimpse Of Democrat's Age Problem

When Gene Rutherford, 65, tries to make sense of the meteoric rise of Barack Obama, and the rampant enthusiasm for him among younger Americans, he thinks of the local mall, where as director of operations he often deals with teenagers.

"Kids today have been given everything they want, and don't have to work for it. They have no respect for authority," said Rutherford, standing at the bar at the Elks lodge here. "They'll make remarks right to the face of the [mall] cops. I get to the point where I want to do something," he said, cocking a fist as if to threaten a punch. "But the police say we can't, that we just have to stand there." It makes him worry for the country. "I see it going the Roman way."

If the senator from Illinois is going to achieve his goal of bridging the nation's divides, he is going to have to overcome a generation gap with older voters unlike any such split a Democratic presidential nominee has faced in years.

Even as younger voters are showing signs of breaking with years of lackluster turnout to support him, Obama is facing singular resistance from voters over 65. That age group turns out at the highest rate on Election Day and is disproportionately represented in the swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania; Bill Clinton and Al Gore both relied on it in winning the Democrats' only popular-vote majorities of the past two decades.

With polls showing Obama dominating among those under 40 and running even among middle-aged voters, Republican John McCain's lead among those 65 and older is the main reason he remains close overall. His margin is largest among older white voters without a college education, accounting for much of Obama's problem with the white working class.

Obama has tried to compensate by proposing a tax cut for seniors, which was criticized by economists. But as Rutherford's comments suggest and surveys show, Obama's challenge goes deeper than a new proposal or two -- an approach that worked for Clinton against George H.W. Bush and Robert J. Dole.

Surveys and interviews suggest that older voters think McCain, who will turn 72 this month, comes far closer than Obama, 47, to sharing their values and outlook on the world and on the changes in the nation over the past half-century.

"The older people just don't see Obama in these glowing terms," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "For older voters, a lot of the reservations really have to do with this experience factor, while younger voters see in Obama something much closer to themselves."

The generational split is on display in Lancaster, a city of 55,000 in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, a once solidly Republican area that is growing more mixed with an influx of Hispanic immigrants and urban professionals.

Trying to sustain itself amid the city's changes is the local branch of the Elks Club, the 140-year-old fraternal organization, which like similar groups is losing members. Rutherford, who served two terms as his branch's "exalted leader," sees a link between falling membership -- from 1,200 a decade ago to 680 today -- and Obama's popularity among local youths.

"Kids want to think for themselves -- they don't care what Mom and Dad say," said Rutherford, a burly man with a Manhattan in his hand. "This was a Republican stronghold, but it's changing very quickly because it's 'Mom and Dad, you're Republican, so I ain't ever going to be one of them.'"

Rutherford's pessimism does not extend to his own four children, three of whom followed him and his father and grandfather in becoming Elks. He presumes that they lean Republican, as he does, though he votes Democratic now and then and wishes former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, a Republican who supports abortion rights, were the GOP nominee.

He worries about McCain's ability as a candidate but has deep respect for what he endured in Vietnam. Rutherford received draft deferments while enrolled as an electrician's apprentice, and that has bothered him ever since. "It was not the greatest decision in my life," he said. "An awful lot of my friends didn't come back or didn't come back in the best mental condition. . . . I felt that I'd let them down."

While he has spent his whole life in Lancaster, he says he is more worldly than many of his contemporaries there. He and his girlfriend are thinking about investing in real estate in Baltimore, and he prided himself on putting the lodge's newsletter online, despite complaints from older members. Nonetheless, he has trouble fathoming as president someone who, as he sees it, is not qualified. "It's kind of a tried-and-true American versus an unknown," he said.

The presidential race has featured generational contrasts before, most recently when Clinton, a baby boomer, took on World War II veterans in Bush and Dole. But Clinton fared well with older voters because of the strong support for programs such as Social Security among the seniors who predominated in the 1990s, many of whom grew up during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In 2000, Gore narrowly won voters over 65 after echoing Clinton's arguments about Social Security. In 2004, John F. Kerry lost voters over 65 by five percentage points to President Bush, and he lacked the huge edge that Obama holds in polls with younger voters to make up the difference.

Edward F. Coyle, executive director of the left-leaning Alliance of Retired Americans, said Obama holds the traditional Democratic edge on issues such as pensions, but is lagging with seniors because his campaign became so identified with younger voters during the primaries, as older ones gravitated toward Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"There was never a lot of discussion about the issues we work on, and he wasn't working with older communities to get out their vote," Coyle said. "He's pretty much unknown on these issues as a result, and has a lot of work to do."

Demographers have for decades noted a conservative bent in McCain's age cohort, roughly those born between 1930 and 1945, who came of age in the relatively serene Eisenhower years. Even as their views have changed over time, members of this generation have remained notably more conservative than those who followed.

A Pew survey last year found that the proportion of those born before 1946 who approve of interracial dating had increased from 36 percent to 65 percent since 1987, but that that rate remained well below that for the generations that followed. Across a range of other social issues, such as women's rights and gay rights, the views of all post-1946 generations clustered together, while pre-baby boomers stood apart as more conservative.

And this year, older voters find themselves presented with a choice that illuminates societal shifts.

McCain hails from an America that exalted service to country, and he is the scion of a military family who endured five years in enemy captivity and who preaches a mantra of personal honor and of the nation over the individual -- "Country First," as his campaign slogan declares. His wife is conspicuously reserved at his side; he does not communicate by e-mail and only recently learned to use the Internet; even his roguish sense of humor carries echoes of the more chauvinistic 1950s of his youth.

Obama's embodiment of a newer America begins but hardly ends with the fact that he would be the first black president. In a country where people liked to know where you were from, Obama lacks a ready answer -- he is part Hawaii, part Kansas, part Chicago. In a recent speech in Berlin, he declred himself a "citizen of the world."

He came of age after the draft and was shaped by the modern meritocracies of premier universities. While McCain has served 26 years in Congress and has run for president before, Obama contends with the perception that he has shot to the top without putting in his time. He and his wife exemplify the contemporary marriage of professional equals. His campaign thrives on the Internet and is very much about his appeal as an individual, with iconic posters and YouTube compilations. If he shares anything with the America of yore, it is that he likes to smoke cigarettes.

Faced with this divide, older voters have made their preference for McCain clear -- even though they are more likely than younger ones to express concern about his age, possibly because they are aware of the challenges they face as they grow older. In April, a Pew survey found that more than 70 percent of voters under 50 and 67 percent between 50 and 64 found Obama inspiring, but that only 53 percent over age 65 did.

McCain has exploited this gap with his ads, which frame Obama as a mere pop idol in a way meant to incite resentment against celebrity youth culture. But McCain will need those attacks to resonate not just among older voters but also among the middle-aged, given how much he lags among the youngest voters, the "millennial generation" that is taking shape as even more Democratic-leaning than young voters before them. And notably, Obama is holding his own among baby boomers, despite casting himself as the one who can move politics beyond their culture clashes.

Here again, there are clues among the Lancaster Elks, who occupy a handsome 19th-century brick edifice downtown, with stained glass, elegant wall carvings and stuffed elk busts decorating the bar where hot dinners are served three times a week. The current branch leader is Tim Patches, 52, a baby boomer who leans Republican but is still undecided about this election and generally possesses a worldview far different from Rutherford's.

Patches, a real estate broker, takes a kindly view of today's young people, saying he has been encouraged by his success in getting some new members in their 20s and 30s after a long dry spell. At first, he worried they were joining for the perks: four duckpin bowling lanes with automated pin-spotters, cheap beer. But they have gotten involved in the club's service efforts, which, along with his son's decision to join the Marines last year, has made him think "this younger generation is very volunteer-oriented, very patriotic."

He is sanguine about the new immigrants in town. "I like change. I know a lot of people fear it, but how do you move on in an organization or business without it?" he said. He is only slightly more grudging about gay rights. "When it comes to constitutional law, it doesn't matter how I morally think," he said. "If we're all protected, whether I like it or not is irrelevant."

Patches traces his looser view to his upbringing in the 1960s and '70s, when he watched on TV as the country lurched through the Vietnam War and the urban riots, an era that he said knocked loose assumptions and scrambled partisan definitions.

"Then you had the computer, all the tech advances," he said. "When I grew up, you were a Republican or Democrat and neither shall be the other. Now . . . not everything needs to be liberal or conservative. You've got an opportunity to actually sit back and think."

Not that he tolerates everything. Flag burning, for instance, still upsets him. But he thought it was silly when Obama came under fire for not wearing a flag pin on his lapel. "I mean, come on. If you're going to nitpick everyone who wants to be president, you're going to run out of everyone, and then you'll have to come to me," he said.

"And that would be a problem. Because I'd want duckpin bowling at the White House."





By Alec MacGillis, The Washington Post, August 12, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Hillary Clinton would be the Democrats' White House nominee today if former presidential hopeful John Edwards had come clean earlier about an extra-marital affair, a top aide to Clinton believes.

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," Howard Wolfson, who was the combative communications director for Clinton's doomed campaign, told ABCNews.com.

In an interview released Monday, Wolfson also said that Clinton's campaign knew about the affair but kept quiet.

"Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it," he said.

Former senator Edwards, whose wife Elizabeth is stricken with terminal breast cancer, confessed Friday to having had an affair in 2006 with filmmaker Rielle Hunter.

But Edwards, who was the Democrats' vice presidential nominee in 2004 and bowed out of this year's White House race in late January, denied fathering the six-month-old baby of Hunter.

Wolfson insisted that Edwards voters in Iowa, whose presidential caucuses kicked off the 2008 race in early January, would have been behind Clinton rather than Barack Obama.

"Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," he said, citing internal polling by the Clinton campaign.

"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."

Obama, who is set to be crowned the Democratic nominee in just over a fortnight, won the Iowa caucuses with 37.58 percent of the vote. Edwards came second on 29.75 percent, a hair's breadth ahead of Clinton with 29.47 percent.

It was a shock result that derailed what was once seen as an "inevitable" march to the nomination by the former first lady, and put Obama firmly in the driving seat over the marathon primary process that followed.

Just two months before the caucuses, Edwards had angrily denied a National Enquirer report about an affair with Hunter, and the issue was ignored by the mainstream press until he belatedly came clean on Friday.

While the Obama campaign did not comment on Wolfson's claim, it can point to subsequent primary results to undermine the assertion that supporters of Edwards were a natural fit with Clinton's.

Both Edwards and Obama ran outsiders' campaigns that vowed to take on Washington politics, and after Edwards bowed out, the Illinois senator swept 11 nominating contests in a row in February.

But Wolfson's intervention does come at a sensitive time just ahead of the Democratic convention, with Clinton supporters demanding a potentially divisive roll-call vote to formally acclaim her battle for the nomination.

Meanwhile as Democrats denied that the revelations about Edwards would hurt their electoral chances in November, Hunter was reported to have ruled out a DNA test to establish the paternity of her baby.

Edwards offered to take the test in an emotional ABC television interview on Friday, when he also denied extending financial payments to Hunter to buy her silence.

AFP, August 11, 2008

Obama, his campaign trying to transcend it -- but can't

I can't be the only person who sees the snake in the room. The one that slithers away whenever the political pundits start explaining what the latest presidential poll means.

From the moment Barack Obama went from a wannabe presidential contender to a front-runner, the race factor curled up and waited to strike anyone who got too close.

Former President Bill Clinton got bit. So did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Still, whenever commentators talk about the close contest between Obama and John McCain, they ignore the snake.

Yet anyone who thought Obama would whip past McCain like an Olympic speed skater was being naive about the state of race relations in this country.

I wouldn't label as racist every white Democrat who switched to McCain after Hillary Clinton was dispatched, but acting as though racial prejudice no longer exists in this country is also wrong.

Obama tries to avoid talking about race, as do his surrogates, staffers and supporters.

But when a cable network interviewed Virginia voters during the Democratic primary, a white woman didn't stutter when she said she couldn't vote for a "Negra."

Does this woman represent a large percentage of the white voting population? Probably not. But there are still enough people like her out here, and they are giving the Obama campaign the flux.

He could put his birth certificate and his baptismal papers on his Web site, and some will still argue that he is a Muslim.

He could distance himself from every black leader who has ever said anything that might have offended white people, and he will still be perceived by some as running to represent Black America.

And he can swill beer, hit the lanes and ride in a pickup truck, and a percentage of blue-collar workers won't be able to bring themselves to vote for a black man who has surpassed them by every measure.

Indeed, it says a lot that McCain, who dumped his first wife to marry a wealthy heiress, is perceived to possess more of the values that resonate with voters than Obama does, according to some polls.

Using code words and nasty attack ads, the McCain camp might as well have called Obama an "uppity black." Yet, they are the ones complaining that Obama has dragged race into the campaign.

The truth is, despite avoiding the topic as much as possible, Obama hasn't transcended race.

Although he has tailored his message to appeal to white voters, McCain has a 17-point lead with white men and is leading by 10 points with whites overall, according to the Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Those who argue that Obama's 55 percent lead among blacks and Hispanics and other minorities is proof that blacks are voting for him because he is black are ignoring the fact that blacks always vote heavily Democratic.

If Colin Powell was trying to become the first African-American president, he'd have to switch parties to pull similar numbers among black voters.

Women, minorities and young voters accounted for Obama's 6-point lead over McCain, according to the national poll.

Still, given the mess George Bush is leaving behind, conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that Obama won't have much trouble beating his opponent.

But in this election, race trumps the economy, an unpopular war and a dull candidate.

A poll taken in Florida found Obama and McCain in a statistical tie, with Obama at 46 percent of the vote and McCain at 44 percent, with a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.

How Floridians summed up the potential first ladies was especially telling.

Voters there said Cindy McCain -- a former drug addict and thief -- better fits their idea of a first lady than Michelle Obama, someone who has not had a hint of scandal attached to her name.

How does that make any sense?

Like her husband, Michelle Obama has spent a great deal of time trying to convince white independent voters that she is not "unpatriotic" and "angry."

But I would not be surprised if a photo spread in an upcoming Harper's Bazaar of Tyra Banks pretending to be Michelle Obama in the White House doesn't result in a fresh round of complaints.

I disagree with those who say Obama ought to "suck up" the racial fear-mongering because it's a battle he can't win.

Maybe not.

But you wouldn't want to be in a room with a snake and deny that it is what it is.

By Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times, August 7, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Diehard Hillary Clinton backers stepped up a campaign Wednesday to get their heroine onto the nominating ballot alongside White House hopeful Barack Obama at this month's Democratic convention.

But the Clinton and Obama campaigns issued a joint statement late Wednesday insisting they were working together to unify the party.

"We are working together to make sure the fall campaign and the convention are a success," the statement said.

"At the Democratic Convention, we will ensure that the voices of everyone who participated in this historic process are respected and our party will be fully unified heading into the November election," it said.

The group Colorado Women Count/Women Vote said it would hold a pro-Clinton parade in Denver on August 26, the second day of the convention when the New York senator is rumored to be given a prime-time speaking slot.

The date is also the 88th anniversary of female suffrage in the United States, and the group said it would press home its demand for Clinton supporters to have a chance to vote for her on the first ballot with Obama.

Even if she has no chance of winning, given Obama's overall lead in the delegate count, such a vote would mark a symbolic confirmation of the nearly 18 million primary votes won by Clinton during her battle for the nomination.

But other pro-Clinton groups such as PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) claim that she could still win the nomination if enough Obama delegates can be persuaded to switch sides at the Denver convention, and are lobbying to that end.

"That is not going to happen!" Clinton told a group of female supporters a week ago, while appearing to back the efforts to get her name on the first ballot as a cathartic exercise for the sake of Democratic unity.

"What we want to have happen is for Senator Obama to be nominated by a unified convention of Democrats," she said.

"The best way I think to do that is to have a strategy so that my delegates feel like they've had a role and that their legitimacy has been validated."

After a bitterly fought primary campaign with Obama, Clinton suspended her drive for the Democrats' presidential nomination in June and then gave her full backing to his election battle against Republican John McCain.

Following a pair of joint fundraisers in New York last month, she is due to hold a rally on Obama's behalf in Las Vegas on Friday and another in Florida on August 21, four days before the start of the Denver convention.

Obama, now safely secure in the party nomination, called Sunday for the renegade states of Michigan and Florida to be restored with full voting power after months of bitterness over their decision to hold early primaries.

That represented an olive branch to Democratic officials and voters in two states that will be vital players in November's presidential election.

Clinton won both unofficial contests, though neither candidate campaigned in Florida, and Obama was not on the ballot on Michigan.

But PUMA and other pro-Clinton groups such as the Just Say No Deal Coalition, vowing never to support Obama, are still threatening to raise a ruckus in Denver.

AFP, August 6, 2008

Hillary Clinton tells supporters she believes that Democratic Party unity would be stronger 'if people feel that their voices were heard and their views respected.'

The presidential candidate says he needs a break. A poll indicates half of voters welcome his time off.

ELKHART, Ind. -- Everyone seems ready for Barack Obama to take a vacation -- his family, foreign leaders, even a fair number of voters.

After marathon bouts of campaigning, Obama is about to relent. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is heading off for Hawaii on Friday for a break that will be his last before the November election.

"During the middle of a campaign you're always worried about taking some time off," Obama said, standing in the aisle of his campaign plane. "That's the nature of the job. I've been going pretty much straight for 18 months now. So we're going to take the time."

Obama has been keeping a relentless schedule. He took time off in the Virgin Islands in March, but leaped right into the general election campaign after defeating Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton in June.

Fortified by daily workouts at the gym, he looks fit. But his face seemed drawn as he addressed a town hall meeting here Wednesday, the toll of a week spent parrying Republican rival John McCain's charge that his antidote to the energy crisis is tire inflation.

Politicians who've crossed paths with Obama have urged him to relax. During his dash through the Middle East and Europe last month, he was admonished by British conservative leader David Cameron: "You should be on the beach."

Voters might not be sorry to see him disappear for a spell. A Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll released Wednesday showed that 48% believed they'd been hearing too much about Obama. Only 26% had the same feeling about McCain.

McCain is doing what he can to feed impressions that Obama is overexposed. In a recent TV ad, the McCain campaign called the Illinois senator the "biggest celebrity in the world," juxtaposing images of the candidate with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

On Wednesday, McCain put out another ad reinforcing the idea. Airing in 11 states, the ad asks: "Is the biggest celebrity in the world ready to help your family?"

A spokesman for McCain painted the Hawaii trip as an indulgence. "Americans are facing sky-high gas prices, and instead of Barack Obama taking the initiative to call his allies in Congress back from vacation to carve out real energy relief, he's joining them at the beach," Tucker Bounds said.

McCain has spent all week slamming fellow members of Congress for leaving on a five-week summer recess. Although records show McCain has not cast a vote on the Senate floor since April 8, he repeatedly demanded that his colleagues return to Washington to focus on the energy crisis. In a telephone town hall meeting with Pennsylvania voters Tuesday night, he described the congressional holiday as "shameful" and "reprehensible."

The Republican candidate may take some political heat when he takes a vacation of his own later this month at his compound in Hidden Valley, Ariz., near the resort town of Sedona. McCain, who has taken most weekends off since locking up his party's nomination in March, will probably take three or four days there and not a full week, according to Mark Salter, a top aide.

Salter said the McCains had hoped to go fishing and boating on nearby Lake Powell, one of their favorite holiday destinations, but decided the presence of Secret Service, reporters and police would disrupt other vacationers. So the couple will spend their time at their rustic home, which is nestled in low desert hills near the state's famed red rock canyons. McCain likes fishing for catfish and grilling on his backyard barbecue.

Obama's trip will be a homecoming. He was born in Hawaii and spent a good part of his boyhood there. His 85-year-old grandmother, who helped raise him, still lives on Oahu, as does his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng.

Part of Obama's vacation will be a family reunion. He said he tries to see his grandmother every year, but put off a trip in 2007 while he battled his Democratic rivals. "So it's been about 19 months since I saw her," Obama said. "She's at an age where it's really important for me to see her."

Then there's the rest of his family: two daughters and wife Michelle, who has voiced worries about her husband's safety on the campaign trail. "Those little girls need a little love," Obama said. "And so does Michelle, I think. So we're going to take the time."




By Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2008

On a clear-skied Sunday in New York City's Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, a dozen Asian American teenagers scarf down hot dogs, fly kites and do their bit for the U.S. presidential race. Over the din of a crowd cheering rowers at the annual Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival, the students, part of city council member John Liu's Youth Action Team, call out to passersby in Mandarin, Cantonese and English, "Have you registered to vote?"

For Asian Americans across the nation, it's an important question. Their numbers might be small compared to other ethnic groups-only five percent of the total population-but they've been growing nine to 10 times faster than the general population, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census. That could swing the ballot in key states, according to "Awakening the Sleeping Giants?", a recent report by researchers at UCLA.

The broader significance of Asian American voters was evident in 1996, when U.S. Senate candidate Jim Webb garnered 76 percent of Virginia's Asian American and Pacific Islander votes, thus securing a narrow victory (less than 0.5 percent) over Republican incumbent George Allen, tipping control of the Senate to Democrats.

Asian Americans also played a significant role in helping Hillary Clinton win the California Democratic primary earlier this year. Comprising an estimated 12 percent of the states electorate, an overwhelming majority of Asian American-some 71 percent, according to a CNN exit poll voted for Clinton. Other politically powerful states with large Asian American populations include New York and Texas, and, in a tight race, Asian American voters could swing Florida, says the UCLA report.

Although both Webb and Clinton are Democrats, Asian Americans don't possess deep party loyalties because as immigrants they don't inherit familial ties to one political persuasion, says Paul Ong, a co-author of the UCLA report and a professor at the university. Beyond being "Asian," voting preferences also depend upon a citizen's age and country of origin. Vietnamese Americans who escaped from the communists, for example, have served as a reliable Republican bloc, but their children tend to vote along more fluid lines.

Nationwide, aside from Obama's childhood turf of Hawaii, Asian Americans nearly unequivocally supported Clinton's bid; her loss of the nomination left Asian American voters divided over which candidate to support in November.

Clinton resonated with Asian American voters in part because she worked within cultural norms, giving "face," or respect, to their communities and working through what Chinese refer to as "guanxi," or connections. "We felt loyal to Hillary and guilty when she lost," says John Liu, New York's first Asian American city councilor.

Chris Wang, director of the Queens Nan-shan Senior Center, which operates under the auspices of the Chinese-American Planning Council, says the center's 4,000 naturalized citizen members don't vote based on a candidate's platform as much as on whether, "that candidate has spoken directly to them and recognized their validity as citizens."

And as with many Americans, citizenship does not automatically ensure active political engagement. Both naturalized and native-born Asian Americans have lower rates of voter registration than do non-Asians. Among citizens, language barriers and a lack of understanding about the parties prevent competent participation. " 'Democrat' sounds like 'democracy,' which is great - it's what people signed up for when they came here-but the word for 'Republican' in Chinese sounds a little too close to the word for 'Communist party,' " says Peter Koo, a naturalized American citizen running as a Republican candidate for New York State Senate in 2009.

There are efforts to eliminate these problems: Under the Voting Rights Act, non-English ballots may be provided to voters. In addition, Asian-language media have given extensive political coverage and Asian immigrant support centers throughout the country offer classes on voter registration. But there are more insidious psychological obstacles. Coming from nations where democratic engagement has been actively discouraged or eliminated, where politics have wrecked fortunes and ruined families, many Asian American voters remain reluctant to get involved.

Zhou Ling, a naturalized American citizen from Taiwan who wears an Obama pin with the Chinese characters for hope, says Asian American citizens must abandon fear and cultivate courage and civic duty. For her, both were inspired by the Obama campaign, where she now volunteers. The challenge in rallying Asian Americans for Obama has been that, among certain voter blocs, "there's uneasiness in the image of a black president, particularly among naturalized citizens who have grown up in monocultures," says Zhou.

The Obama campaign clearly recognizes the need to reach out to the Asian-American community. Last month, California Rep. Mike Honda addressed an Obama fundraiser sponsored by a coalition of Asian American political groups. Obama's part Indonesian half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, has also contributed as a spokesperson. Their efforts may bear fruit. According to "New Voters, Old Fears," by News 21, a Journalism Initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations, Asian Americans increasingly lean towards Democratic candidates.

McCain, for his part, has long courted Vietnamese Americans, despite once using a racial slur to describe his Northern Vietnamese captors. During the 2000 run for president, he promised Asian American journalists if he won he would name an Asian American to his cabinet. Van Thai Tran, Republican member of the California State Assembly, the first Vietnamese to serve there, has endorsed him; on a more personal note, McCain has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh. McCains Web site, however, lists no Asian American coalition.

Ong, the UCLA researcher, says another report due out in October will show "young Asian Americans have become dramatically more involved in the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama can take a lot of credit for that." But even the candidate who has made change a central part of his campaign cannot uproot ancient social values, such as deference to elders and respect for experience. One example: Mr. Wen, (he declined to provide his first name) an "80-something-year-old" naturalized citizen and resident of New York says he will vote for McCain. "I like a tough guy who can get the job done," says Wen in Mandarin. As a veteran who fought in the Korean War with Chinese troops in 1952, Wen relates to McCain's political experience in Vietnam and says, "America has scarier enemies now."

Perhaps so, but from the looks of the group gathered in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, America also has a muscular new political vigor.

By Megan Shank, Newsweek, August 07, 2008

Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck.

Impossible?

It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal.

Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and too liberal.

So, everyone is puzzled why the Democratic candidate isn't at least 10 points ahead. It seems the more Americans get used to Barack Obama, the less they want him as president -- and the more Democrats will soon regret not nominating Hillary Clinton.

First, Obama was billed as a post-racial healer. His half-African ancestry, exotic background and soothing rhetoric were supposed to have been novel and to have reassured the public he was no race-monger like Al Sharpton. On the other hand, his 20-year career in the cauldron of Chicago racial politics also guaranteed to his liberal base that he wasn't just a moderate Colin Powell, either.

Yet within weeks of the first primary, the outraged Clintons were accusing Obama of playing "the race card" -- and vice-versa. Blacks soon were voting heavily against Hillary Clinton. In turn, Hillary, the elite Ivy League progressive, turned into a blue-denim working gal -- and won nearly all the final big-state Democratic primaries on the strength of working-class whites.

Americans also learned to their regret how exactly a Hawaiian-born Barack Obama -- raised, in part, by his white grandparents and without African-American heritage -- had managed to win credibility in what would become his legislative district in Chicago. That discovery of racial chauvinism wasn't hard once his former associate, his pastor for over 20 years, the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, spewed his venom.

Obama himself didn't help things as he taught the nation that his dutiful grandmother was at times a small-minded bigot -- no different from a "typical white person." And in an impromptu riff, Obama ridiculed small-town working-class Pennsylvanians' supposed racial insularity.

The primary season ended with a narrow Obama victory -- and a wounded, but supposedly wiser, Democratic candidate.

Not quite. Without evidence, he unwisely has claimed his opponents ("they") will play the race card against poor him. In contrast, on the hot-button issue of racial reparations, he recently played to cheering minority audiences by cryptically suggesting that the government must "not just . . . offer words, but offer deeds." He later clarified that he didn't mean cash grants, but his initial words were awfully vague.

Second, many are beginning to notice how a Saint Obama talks down to them. We American yokels can't speak French or Spanish. We eat too much. Our cars are too big, our houses either overheated or overcooled. And we don't even put enough air in our car tires. In contrast, a lean, hip Obama promises to still the rising seas and cool down the planet, assuring adoring Germans that he is a citizen of the world.

Third, Obama knows that all doctrinaire liberals must tack rightward in the general election. But due to his inexperience, he's doing it in far clumsier fashion than any triangulating candidate in memory. Do we know -- does Obama even know? -- what he really feels about drilling off our coasts, tapping the strategic petroleum reserve, NAFTA, faith-based initiatives, campaign financing, the FISA surveillance laws, town-hall debates with McCain, Iran, the surge, timetables for Iraq pullouts, gun control or capital punishment?

Fourth, Obama is proving as inept an extemporaneous speaker as he is gifted with the Teleprompter. Like most rookie senators, in news conferences and interviews, he stumbles and then makes serial gaffes -- from the insignificant, like getting the number of states wrong, to the downright worrisome, such as calling for a shadow civilian aid bureaucracy to be funded like the Pentagon (which would mean $500 billion per annum).

If the polls are right, a public tired of Republicans is beginning to think an increasingly bothersome Obama would be no better -- and maybe a lot worse. It is one thing to suggest to voters that they should shed their prejudices, eat less and be more cosmopolitan. But it is quite another when the sermonizer himself too easily evokes race, weekly changes his mind and often sounds like he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

In a tough year like this, Democrats could probably have defeated Republican John McCain with a flawed, but seasoned candidate like Hillary Clinton. But long-suffering liberals convinced their party to go with a messiah rather than a dependable nominee -- and thereby they probably will get neither.

By Victor Davis Hanson, Town Hall, August 07, 2008

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is seeking a way for her delegates to be heard at the Democratic National Convention, telling supporters such a step will help unify a party that split between her and Sen. Barack Obama during their hard-fought nominating contest.

"I happen to believe that we will come out stronger if people feel that their voices were heard and their views respected. I think that is a very big part of how we actually come out unified," Clinton, D-N.Y., told supporters last week at a California fundraiser. A video clip of her remarks was posted on YouTube.

"Because I know from just what I'm hearing, that 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.' That is what most people believe is the best way to go," she said.

The former first lady did not rule out the possibility of having her name placed into nomination at the convention, being held Aug. 25-28 in Denver. But she also said no decisions had been made.

"We are trying work all this through with the (Democratic National Committee) and with the Obama campaign," said Clinton, who suspended her White House bid on June 7 and endorsed Obama, an Illinois senator.

Clinton campaign officials are negotiating with both parties to determine the full scope of her role at the convention. She is expected to deliver a prime-time address to delegates on Aug. 26, the second night of the gathering.

"We are working together to make sure the fall campaign and the convention are a success," said a joint statement released late Wednesday by the Clinton and Obama campaigns. "At the Democratic Convention, we will ensure that the voices of everyone who participated in this historic process are respected and our party will be fully unified heading into the November election."

Spokeswoman Kathleen Strand said Clinton believes "it's important that her supporters have a voice in some way," adding that no decisions have been made on how this would happen.

But advisers to the New York senator said she will almost certainly not ask to have her name placed in formal nomination at the convention, avoiding a divisive vote on the night Obama is expected to become the Democratic Party's first black presidential nominee.

Under DNC rules, Clinton must submit a signed, written request to have her name placed in nomination, accompanied by a petition signed by at least 300 delegates. Some Clinton delegates have circulated such petitions, but the effort is meaningless without Clinton's signed request.

Delegates are not formally pledged to any candidate so Clinton does not need to "release" them to Obama. The rules also say delegates may vote for the candidate of their choice whether or not the name of such candidate was placed in nomination.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean said in an interview last month that Clinton would have the right to put her name up for a binding vote at the convention.

"That's totally up to her," he said. "She is a duly registered candidate who got a lot of votes, and she is going to do what she wants to do."

Meanwhile, Democratic officials announced Wednesday that more than half of the 75,000 tickets for Obama's acceptance speech on Aug. 28, the convention's fourth and final night, will go to residents of Colorado, a battleground state critical to the party's hopes of winning the White House.

Obama will deliver his speech at Invesco Field at Mile High, home to football's Denver Broncos. Nearly two-thirds of the tickets will go to residents of the West and Southwest, including Colorado, where Democrats have made inroads in recent elections.

"You don't have to be a delegate or party insider to witness this historic moment firsthand," Democratic National Convention Committee CEO Leah Daughtry said, announcing the plans for credentials.

Ticket selection was designed "to showcase the gains the party has made in the West," she said.

Convention committee spokeswoman Natalie Wyeth declined to say how many tickets would be issued.

Last week, Obama campaign officials said they hope to turn the stadium crowd into a giant phone bank, with attendees using their cell phones to ask friends and others to register and vote.

The first three nights of the convention will be held at the 21,000-seat Pepsi Center.

By STEVEN K. PAULSON, Associated Press, August 06, 2008

ELKHART, Ind. - In a presidential campaign billed as "the maverick vs. the outsider," this was supposed to be a different sort of election.

So far, however, the nastiness is just as intense as in previous contests, with tire gauges, pop stars and some choice adjectives being tossed about in recent days.

At a stop here on Wednesday, Sen. Barack Obama showed no hesitancy in criticizing his opponent, John McCain.

"If Sen. McCain wants to talk about how Washington is broken, that's a debate I'm happy to have because Sen. McCain's energy plan reads like an early Christmas list for oil and gas lobbyists," he said.

Later, he added that there was a "debate between John McCain and John McCain" over whether it is good advice to, as Obama first suggested recently, maintain proper tire inflation to boost gas mileage.

In Ohio, McCain criticized Obama for not fully embracing nuclear power as part of a comprehensive energy plan, The Associated Press reported. "He's out of touch," McCain said.

The Republican also released a TV ad about Obama asking, "Is the biggest celebrity in the world ready to help your family?"

Appearing with Obama, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana - rumored to be under consideration as a running mate - criticized McCain's energy plan and his calls for more offshore drilling. "It sounded a lot like my dentist," he said of the Arizona Republican's plan to "drill, drill, drill."

By John McCormick, Chicago Tribune, August 7, 2008

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has fuelled speculation about potential running mates when he appeared with Indiana senator Evan Bayh on the campaign trail.

But the 47-year-old Illinois senator gave no indication he was nearing a decision as to who would be his vice president if elected in November's election. At the very latest, Mr Obama's running mate will be unveiled by the end of the Democratic Party's national convention in Denver, Colorado, at the end of the month.

Mr Bayh, who is widely considered to be on Mr Obama's shortlist, hailed the likely Democratic nominee as "a breath of fresh air" when he introduced him at a campaign event in Elkhart, Indiana.

Others thought to be on the list include Mr Obama's former rival Hillary Clinton, Delaware senator Joe Biden, Virginia governor Tim Kaine and Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius.

Mr Obama called Mr Bayh "one of the finest US senators that we have" today. The former governor of Indiana, which neighbours Mr Obama's home state of Illinois, has experience in government and represents a swing state, but his image as a political insider could be at odds with Mr Obama's message of change for America.

Delaware senator Mr Biden's 35 years in the US Senate and experience on its foreign relations committee could help Mr Obama overcome criticism of his own experience by former Vietnam prisoner-of-war John McCain, the Republican candidate.

Virginia governor Tim Kaine leads a state which the Obama campaign wants to target and would help the Democrat attract key constituencies, including the white working class, Hispanics, Catholics and southerners. But he has little experience, especially in foreign policy.

There has also been much talk among US pundits of a potential "dream ticket", with Mr Obama picking former first lady Mrs Clinton as his running mate. But a passionate, and often fierce, 16-month-long primary season between the two candidates led to frequent disputes between the two camps and many US pundits now feel an Obama-Clinton ticket is unlikely.

If Mr Obama wants a woman on the ticket, then Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, who gave the Democratic response to this year's State of the Union address, could be considered. But a Democratic ticket devoid of any white men would be a radical choice and could alienate many voters across the US.

On the Republican side, Mr McCain is thought to be seriously considering former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a former rival during the Republican primary season.

The Press Association, August 6, 2008

As speculation swirls about possible running mates, a new poll suggests that the choices made by John McCain and Barack Obama may matter more in this election than usual.

A CBS News survey released yesterday, showing Obama with a 45 percent to 39 percent national lead, reported that 30 percent of voters said the vice presidential pick will have "a great deal of influence" on their vote - double the percentage who said so in the 2000 election. Nearly half of the 13 percent of voters calling themselves undecided said that the choice of running mate will make a difference.

On the veep watch yesterday, Obama campaigned in Indiana with Senator Evan Bayh, who supported Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries but is believed to be under consideration by Obama.

Obama called Bayh "one of the finest US senators that we have." Bayh said Obama would bring "a breath of fresh air" to the nation's capital.

On the Republican side, Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota appeared to veer off message a little in an appearance in Arlington, Va., before GOPAC, a Republican political action committee that helps find party candidates.

"Say what you will about Barack Obama," Pawlenty said, "people gravitate when you have something positive to say. People want to follow hopeful, optimistic, civil, decent leaders. They don't want to follow some negative, scornful person."

He added that McCain has been positive as well, and later criticized Obama's experience and resume in comparison with McCain.

THE BOSTON GLOBE AND ASSOCIATED PRESS, August 7, 2008

Hoosier senator says there are no plans for private meeting during Obama's Indiana visit

Whether Sen. Barack Obama chooses Sen. Evan Bayh as his running mate remains to be seen, but Bayh insisted Tuesday that no such decision will be announced today, dumping a bucket of cold water on the frenzied speculation that had surrounded their joint appearance in Elkhart.

In a telephone interview, Bayh said Obama has not asked him to be his running mate.

"I'm absolutely confident there will be no announcement (today)," he said. "I guess the best way to put it is, if there's an announcement (today), I'd be as surprised as anybody else."

But, again, none of that means it couldn't still happen.

Bayh, a two-term senator from Indiana who also served two terms as governor, has been the focus of a media frenzy in recent days, including cable TV news shows and blogs, as speculation escalates that Obama is close to making his choice.

Bayh has been tapped by many as among a handful of names on the likely short list, along with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

The length of Obama's visit here this week -- 21 hours, with Obama arriving Tuesday evening and scheduled to leave about 3:30 p.m. today -- added to the speculation that he was in Indiana for more than his scheduled town hall meeting in Elkhart this morning.

Bayh will introduce Obama at the event but said he knew of no plans for a private meeting with him.

He said he believed the campaign was trying to add another stop in Indiana, accounting for the length of the visit.

One additional sign that the rumors were off-base is that Bayh's wife, Susan; twin sons, Nick and Beau; and father, former Sen. Birch Bayh, will not be joining him on this trip.

In addition, Obama is scheduled for a weeklong vacation in Hawaii next week -- something he'd be unlikely to do immediately after announcing his vice presidential choice.

Bayh has been touted by some as a good fit for Obama. As a strong backer of Clinton during the primary, he could help bridge the two factions of the party; and he has executive experience as governor and foreign policy experience as senator. Even Republicans acknowledge that Bayh would be unlikely to make verbal missteps that could embarrass Obama.

Democrats in Indiana also hope his name on the ballot would mean their party could carry this state for the first time since 1964 and help them win other state races as well.

By Mary Beth Schneider, The Indianapolis Star, August 6, 2008

By Don Frederick, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2008

Barack Obama stands accused of introducing race into this election.

Why, before Obama quipped that the McCain campaign had nothing to offer but fear of "the other" - and then implied that he was the other because he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills" - I bet no one had given race a thought. Certainly not Billy Shaheen, the former co-chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton's New Hampshire campaign, who suggested that Republicans would ask whether Obama had ever sold drugs.

Not Bill Clinton, who condescendingly likened Obama to Jesse Jackson and then described the reaction to that comment as a "mugging." Clinton is still reeling from the episode. During a recent interview with ABC News, Clinton insisted: "I am not a racist. I've never made a racist comment, and I didn't attack (Obama) personally."

Not Hillary Clinton, who - in a tacky remark condemned by one of her supporters, Rep. Charlie Rangel - questioned the strength of Obama's support among "hard-working ... white Americans."

Not the media, where pundits spent months examining the inane question of whether Obama was "black enough" only to turn around during the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fiasco and essentially ask if he wasn't too black. Analysts also insisted that Latinos wouldn't elect an African American president. Now, with Hillary Clinton out of the race, Obama leads McCain 2-1 among Latinos.

Not the New Yorker, which depicted Obama and his wife as flag-burning, fist-bumping, Osama bin Laden-worshiping black militants. While some of that is race-neutral in that the same could be said for a white militant, the fact that Obama is black only fuels the caricature because African Americans have long had to suffer fools who question their patriotism.

Not the voters, some of whom - according to polls - still have mixed feelings about making history and electing America's first black president. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll in June, 30 percent of white voters (and 34 percent of blacks) admitted to harboring some racial prejudice. In the poll, just over half of white voters called Obama a "risky" choice for president, but two-thirds considered McCain a "safe" one. Twenty percent of white voters thought that Obama would over-represent the interests of African Americans.

Really? Tell that to the African American hecklers who pestered Obama during a recent speech in St. Petersburg, Fla., holding up a banner that read: "What about the black community, Obama?" Some on the fringe complain that Obama hasn't addressed the concerns of a community that all but worships him so that he can appeal to the mainstream.

The point is that long before Obama noted that he doesn't resemble dead white males on dollar bills, race was already one of the currencies of this campaign. And, from the moment that Obama entered the contest and began playing to win, it was always going to be. Some are jumping on Obama for even alluding to race, when others have flirted with the topic for months.

Race doesn't have to become the dominant narrative of this election. But it is naive to think that it wasn't going to be woven in there somewhere. If anything, it seems that Obama has tried to avoid the subject out of fear that it'll weaken his support among white voters.

And so it looks childish for McCain campaign manager Rick Davis to rant and rave that Obama - in implying that Republicans would use race to scare up support for McCain - "played the race card, and ... played it from the bottom of the deck." Davis said this was "divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

Give me a break. Davis went over the top. Obama was just pre-emptively dealing with a touchy subject before his opponents could use it against him. In response, Davis did the same thing. What was it that McCain said in defense of that desperate celebrity ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton? "Campaigns are tough."

Yes, they are. But is it too much to ask that they also be useful? Are we done playing games? Can we start the real campaign now - the one where Obama and McCain explain how they would improve the economy, lower gas prices, save Social Security, pull out of Iraq, expand trade, provide illegal immigrants with earned legalization while securing the border, make the public schools accountable, etc?

You know, the campaign where we spend less time wringing our hands over where America has been and more time charting where we need to go.

By Ruben Navarrette Jr, San Diego-Union Tribune, August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON - Sixteen years ago, the Democratic Party refused to allow Robert P. Casey Sr., then the governor of Pennsylvania, to speak at its national convention because his anti-abortion views, stemming from his Roman Catholic faith, clashed with the party's platform and powerful constituencies. Many Catholics, once a reliable Democratic voting bloc, never forgot what they considered a slight.

This year, the party is considering giving a speaking slot at the convention to Mr. Casey's son, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who like his late father is a Roman Catholic who opposes abortion rights.

The likely shift reflects concern among Democrats that they need to do more to regain the allegiance of Roman Catholic voters, who broke decisively for President Bush in 2004 and could be crucial to the outcome in a number of battleground states this year. Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, lost the Catholic vote badly to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, like Mr. Obama, is a supporter of abortion rights, during the primaries in states like New Hampshire, Missouri and Ohio. In Pennsylvania, Catholic voters preferred Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Obama by a 40-point margin.

The Obama campaign is being close-mouthed about its convention plans and would not confirm whether Mr. Casey would be given a prime-time speaking slot. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said that the call was Mr. Obama's, but that a prominent speaking role for Mr. Casey would assist in the candidate's efforts to woo Roman Catholic voters.

Mr. Casey, who endorsed Mr. Obama early and campaigned extensively for him in Pennsylvania, said there was no formal offer yet from Mr. Obama or the party. But, he said, "I think we'll get something worked out."

Mr. Casey's appearance would be an important signal to Catholics, especially those who follow church teachings and oppose abortion. Mr. Obama could also use his choice of a vice-presidential running mate to reassure Roman Catholics. Among those that his campaign is vetting is Gov. Tim kaine of Virginia, a Roman Catholic whose faith has been part of his political identity. At least three other Catholics have also been mentioned as possible running mates: Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.

Although abortion is central to the political crosscurrents around Catholics - Ms. Sebelius has vetoed a number of bills that would restrict abortion rights in Kansas, prompting the archbishop of Kansas City to suggest that she stop receiving communion - part of Mr. Obama's strategy is to emphasize that there are other issues on which they can base their votes. It would be a way to address the perception that Mr. Obama has a "Catholic problem."

Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative Catholic legal scholar at Pepperdine School of Law, said that although the formal teachings of the American Catholic bishops put primacy on the sanctity of life, including fetuses and embryos, doctrine allows for voting on other grounds, including the Iraq war, which the Vatican has opposed from the start.

Mr. Kmiec, a Republican who served in the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan, said he was supporting Mr. Obama because his platform met the standard of justice and concern for the poor the church has always defended. This year, Mr. Kmiec was denied communion by a priest at a gathering of Catholic business people because of his support for Mr. Obama. Mr. Kmiec said, "The proper question for Catholics to ask is not 'Can I vote for him?' but 'Why shouldn't I vote for the candidate who feels more passionately and speaks more credibly about economic fairness for the average family, who will be a true steward of the environment, and who will treat the immigrant family with respect?' "

He urged Mr. Obama to invite Mr. Casey to speak as an answer to those who believe they cannot vote for someone who supported abortion rights.

Mr. Kmiec’s and Mr. Casey's views put them in conflict with millions of lay Catholics, for whom abortion is a nonnegotiable issue, and many Catholic clerics, including Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver, the site of the Democratic convention.

Archbishop Chaput, who has stopped short of telling his flock how to vote, has called abortion a "foundational issue." He has said that a vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights or stem-cell research, like Mr. Obama or Senator John Kerry in 2004, was a sin that must be confessed before receiving communion. Mr. Obama's Republican rival, Senator John McCain, an opponent of abortion rights, met last week in Denver with Archbishop Chaput.

The archbishop declined an interview request but his spokeswoman, Jeanette DeMelo, said that his views had not changed. In a column this year, Archbishop Chaput wrote that Catholics could support a politician who supported abortion only if they had a "compelling proportionate reason" to justify it. "What is a 'proportionate' reason when it comes to the abortion issue?" the archbishop wrote. "It's the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life - which we most certainly will. If we're confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed."

That is a tough standard for Mr. Obama, or any supporter of abortion rights, to meet. Republicans are gearing up campaigns to depict Mr. Obama as a radical on the question of abortion, because as a state senator in Illinois he opposed a ban on the killing of fetuses born alive.

Mr. Obama has said he had opposed the bill because it was poorly drafted and would have threatened the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right. He said he would have voted for a similar bill that passed the United States Senate because it did not have the same constitutional flaw as the Illinois bill. Mr. Obama has opposed the federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortions for similar legal and constitutional reasons.

That explanation did not wash with many abortion foes and most Republicans.

"When you look at his opposition to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which many Mass-attending Catholics view as bans on infanticide, Obama's more extreme than any other Democratic presidential candidate," said Leonard Leo, who directed Catholic outreach for Republicans in 2004, and is an informal adviser to the party and the McCain campaign.

Mr. Leo also said that the appearance of Mr. Casey on the dais at the Democratic convention would not be enough to address the concerns of faithful Catholics.

"He might get a slight bump from Casey among Catholics generally, but it doesn't get him all the way there because Casey-the-Younger isn't his father, and Mass-attending Catholics have figured that out," Mr. Leo said.

William A. Galston, a domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Catholics were the quintessential swing voters. Mr. Galston said they were roughly a quarter of the electorate but lived in disproportionate numbers in the swing states of the Midwest. Polls show them closely divided between the two candidates. Mr. Galston said Mr. Obama could improve his standing with Catholics by, like Mr. Clinton in 1992, conferring with a group of Catholic leaders and then giving a substantive speech at Notre Dame or another Catholic institution.

Mr. Obama should also speak out in favor of legislation now before Congress to provide financing for alternatives to abortion like free prenatal care and adoption assistance, Mr. Galston suggested. Mr. Obama should also invite Mr. Casey to speak at the convention, he said.

"I spend a lot of time with Catholic intellectuals, and no matter how liberal they are and inclined to support Democrats, they speak with vehemence about the exclusion of Casey's father from the 1992 convention," Mr. Galston said. "They don't accept any of the explanations. I think it would be a dramatic act of historical rectification that would resonate with Catholics."

By John M. Broder, The New York Times, August 6, 2008

Foreshadowing the nation's changing makeup, one in four American counties have passed or are approaching the tipping point where black, Hispanic and Asian children constitute a majority of the under-20 population, according to analyses of census figures released Thursday.

Racial and ethnic minorities now account for 43 percent of Americans under 20. Among people of all ages, minorities make up at least 40 percent of the population in more than one in six of the nation's 3,141 counties.

The latest population changes by race, ethnicity and age, as of July 1, 2007, were generally marginal compared with the year before. But they confirm the breadth of the nation's diversity, and suggest that minorities - now about a third of the population - might constitute a majority of all Americans even sooner than projected by census demographers, in 2050.

In 2000, black, Hispanic and Asian children under age 20 were at or near a majority in only about one-fifth of the counties and, over all, blacks, Hispanics and Asians accounted for 40 percent or more of the population in about one in seven counties.

Even with the growing diversity, all but one of the 82 counties where blacks make up a majority are in the South (except St. Louis), all but two of the 46 where Hispanics are in the majority are in the South or the West (except the Bronx and Seward, Kan., home to giant meatpacking plants), and four of the five counties with the largest proportion of Asians are in Hawaii (San Francisco rounds out the top five with 33 percent).

Except for two counties in New Mexico and South Dakota with large American Indian populations, the 10 counties with the highest proportion of minorities were along or near the Mexican border.

From 2006 to 2007, according to the bureau's revised estimates, the counties that became majority-minority included Rockdale, near Atlanta.

An analysis by Kelvin Pollard and Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau found 489 counties where a majority among people younger than 20 are racial and ethnic minorities and another 274 where they account for 40 percent to 50 percent of people in that age group.

The latest figures confirm the sweep of America's growing diversity, outside central cities and beyond black and white. In 109 of the 302 majority-minority counties, no single minority made up more than half the total population.

In the New York metropolitan area, the changes suggested that the city was experiencing a racial equilibrium while the suburbs were becoming more diverse.

The number of Asians rose in every county in the New York area. Only Manhattan lost Hispanics. Non-Hispanic whites declined in every county except those that make up Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and in New Jersey, Monmouth.

An analysis by William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, found that since 2000 the top 10 gainers of non-Hispanic whites were all counties in the South or West, except for Manhattan and Will County, near Chicago.

Since 2000, Mr. Frey said, only one in six counties recorded an increase in the number of non-Hispanic white children under 15.

While half the counties recorded losses of non-Hispanic whites, Dr. Frey found, almost five times as many counties are losing white children as gaining them. A growing number of minority families with children are clustering in suburban and Sun Belt counties.

At the other extreme, he said, "are counties in the nation's industrial heartland, inner suburbs and Great Plains that are losing their largely white child and young adult populations."

Meanwhile, nine times as many counties are gaining mature adults as losing them.

People 65 or older made up 25 percent or more of the population in 24 counties, led by La Paz, Ariz., home to the Colorado River Indian Reservation, where they make up 32 percent. Most of the counties with disproportionately high populations 65 and older are in Florida, Texas and Michigan. Children under 5 make up 10 percent of the population in 26 counties, led by Webb County, Tex., on the Mexican border, where they constitute nearly 13 percent.

By Sam Roberts, The New York Times, August 6, 2008

ELKHART, Ind. - When Senator Evan Bayh introduced his colleague Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, at a town-hall-style meeting here on Wednesday morning, there was more scrutiny of the interaction between the two men than would be usual at such an event. That was because Mr. Bayh's name is said to be on the short list of candidates Mr. Obama is considering as his running mate.

The reasons for Mr. Bayh's apparent presence in the inner circle of potential ticketmates are varied, and they say something about the nature of the 2008 race and the correlation of forces within the Democratic Party.

In contrast to Illinois, Mr. Obama's home state, neighboring Indiana has not supported a Democrat for president since 1964, when it was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory. But in this election, it is considered a battleground state. Many Republicans crossed over to vote Democratic in the May 2 primary, and there is some thought that putting Mr. Bayh on the ticket just might be enough to make this red state and its 11 electoral votes turn blue.

During the primary campaign, Mr. Bayh, 52, not only supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, he was also one of her national campaign co-chairmen and described her in an advertisement as having "a spine of steel." But his roots and popularity in Indiana run deep. His father, Birch Bayh, served three terms in the United States Senate (losing in 1980 to Dan Quayle, the last Indiana native to serve as vice president). And Evan Bayh served two terms as governor of Indiana before being elected to the Senate in 1998.

Still, there was not much to parse Wednesday at the event here, which focused, as have all of Mr. Obama's public appearances this week, on energy independence. Mr. Bayh introduced Mr. Obama as "my friend, our neighbor" and they embraced on the stage, Mr. Obama patting Mr. Bayh on the back and smiling warmly.

But a stop later in the day, at Schoop's Diner in Portage, exemplified the sometimes-feverish and ultimately undecipherable speculation that has been swirling around Mr. Bayh. He and Mr. Obama entered together, and, according to a pool report, after Mr. Obama ordered four cheeseburgers, a local reporter yelled out, "What does the V.P. want?"

Mr. Bayh smiled and said, "You're causing trouble." At that, another reporter asked about the speculation and Mr. Bayh said, "Nothing today." In fact, he added, the subject of the ticket did not come up on their bus ride to the diner. Instead, he said, they spoke about sports and family.

And Mr. Obama remained as mum on the subject during a conversation with reporters Monday night during a flight from Boston to Ohio, when he deflected a question about his leanings. Which is exactly why there was so much attention paid to body language and nuance when Mr. Bayh was in his company on Wednesday.

By Larry Rohter, The New York Times, August 6, 2008

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - The Jordanian business partner of a prominent Florida businessman, who has raised more than $500,000 for Senator John McCain, appears to be at the center of a cluster of questionable donations to his presidential campaign.

Campaign finance records show Mr. McCain collected a little more than $50,000 in March from members of a single extended family, the Abdullahs, in California and several of their friends.

Amid a sea of contributions to the McCain campaign, the Abdullahs stand out. The checks come not from the usual exclusive coastal addresses, but from relatively hardscrabble inland towns like Downey and Colton. The donations are also startling because of their size: several donors initially wrote checks of $9,200, exceeding the $2,300 limit for an individual gift.

Making matters murkier, some couples in the family who contributed more than $9,000 to Mr. McCain also gave the maximum in December to either Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton or Rudolph W. Giuliani, or both, totaling in the case of at least one family more than $18,000.

On Wednesday, an article in The Washington Post said the donations were collected by Harry Sargeant III, a Florida businessman who has also raised money for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani.

It appears, however, that Mr. Sargeant, the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party and the part-owner of a major oil trading firm, International Oil Trading Company, did not actually solicit the donations from the Abdullahs and their friends.

That task fell to a longtime business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a. Mr. Sargeant said in an interview that he has known Mr. Abu Naba'a for more than a decade and has worked with him on commercial ventures, including a contract with the Pentagon to supply fuel to the military in Iraq.

Through Mr. Abu Naba'a's connections, Mr. Sargeant has raised more than $100,000 in contributions from several dozen Arab Americans in California, including the Abdullahs, for four candidates: Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. McCain and Charlie Crist in his successful campaign for Florida governor in 2006. Mr. Crist is a close friend and college fraternity brother of Mr. Sargeant.

Several of the donors were emphatic in interviews that they had made the contributions on their own and had not been reimbursed. Indeed, while the donors do not fit the typical profile of people who often make large political donations, it appears many have made relatively successful livings, toiling away at small businesses they own: an auto repair shop, a discount stereo warehouse, a realty company.

Brian Rogers, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, said the campaign strictly followed campaign finance laws and as a general rule would look into a matter if flags were raised, but he declined to say whether it would look into the contributions tied to Mr. Sargeant.

Mr. Sargeant is a former Marine fighter pilot who has business interests around the world. He hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain at his lavish home in Delray Beach, Fla., this year. Mr. Sargeant estimated he had raised more than $200,000 for Mr. Giuliani and helped a business associate raise a similar amount for Mrs. Clinton.

But Mr. Sargeant's business dealings have caused controversy. Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, opened an investigation last month into whether his company has been overcharging the military for its contract in Iraq, although Mr. Sargeant said Mr. Waxman's office had an erroneous understanding of what the company was billing.

As for his political fund-raising, Mr. Sargeant said he often turned to his business associates and asked them to solicit their extended families, although Mr. Sargeant said he was unclear exactly how Mr. Abu Naba'a knew the Abdullahs in California.

Mr. Sargeant said Mr. Abu Naba'a, who has a home in Florida, was unavailable for an interview because he was abroad.

Faisal Abdullah, a Palestinian immigrant who works as a director of operations of a window treatment company, identified himself in an interview as the driver behind the McCain donations from his relatives and friends. He sent them to Mr. Abu Naba'a, whom Mr. Abdullah described as an acquaintance.

Mr. Abdullah is an unlikely McCain fund-raiser, admitting he had soured on the Republican Party as a result of President Bush.

Nevertheless, he said that he harbored vague designs on a political career and that a discussion with Mr. Abu Naba'a gave him the idea that fund-raising was a way to get started. He said he initially collected numerous $500 checks for Mr. Crist from relatives and friends, and late last year, set out to raise money for the presidential campaign.

Mr. Abdullah said he cajoled a few relatives into giving the maximum donations to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani, the early front-runners last year.

But when Mr. McCain claimed the mantle of presumed Republican nominee in March, Mr. Abdullah decided to support him.

"This is the horse I'm betting on for the future," Mr. Abdullah said.

He told his friends and relatives that the contributions were tax-deductible, something he later seemed surprised to learn from a reporter was not true. Many in his circle appear to have little affection for Mr. McCain but said they gave mostly as a favor to Mr. Abdullah.

Abdullah Makhlouf, the owner of a discount stereo store who is one of Mr. Abdullah's closest friends, and his wife contributed $9,200.

"He's like a worse copy than Bush," Mr. Makhlouf said of Mr. McCain.

When a reporter initially contacted Mr. Makhlouf, he denied giving to the McCain campaign.

After eventually admitting to the donation, Mr. Makhlouf added, "I'm still not going to vote for him."

By Michael Luo, The New York Times, August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON - Alice Rocchio is an office manager at the New York headquarters of the Hess Corp., drives a 1993 Chevy Cavalier and lives in an apartment in Queens, N.Y., with her husband, Pasquale, an Amtrak foreman.

Despite what appears to be a middle-class lifestyle, the couple has written $61,600 in checks to John McCain's presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, most of it within days of McCain's decision to endorse offshore oil drilling.

At a June fundraiser, the Rocchios joined top executives at Hess Corp. - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Hess, his wife, Susan, his mother, Norma Hess, and six other officials in giving a total of $313,500 to a joint McCain-RNC fundraising committee, Federal Election Commission records show.

The donations, first traced by Campaign Money Watch last week, were part of $1.2 million in oil industry contributions to McCain's Victory '08 Committee, 73 percent coming after McCain reversed his long-held opposition to offshore oil drilling. The non-partisan watchdog group said oil executives and their spouses from Colorado, Mississippi, Louisiana, California, Indiana, New Jersey and Florida also donated.

Hess, among the nation's five biggest oil companies, conducts deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico as well as off the coasts of Europe, Africa and Asia.

The Rocchios donated $4,600 to McCain's campaign in February and another $57,000 at the June fundraiser.

Alice Rocchio, reached at the office, confirmed that she registered her '93 Chevy in February, but said that she "absolutely'' used her own money to make the donations.

Moments later, she asked a reporter: "Are you done with your questions?''

A former FEC official said that it's possible that the Rocchios had the means to make those hefty contributions - their first reported donations to a federal campaign. But the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that their donations also could trigger a complaint or otherwise catch the eyes of the agency's enforcement staff, tasked to ensure that companies or wealthy individuals don't illegally circumvent contribution limits by using employees or other third parties as "conduits'' for cash.

The staff might wish to determine whether the couple is too "under-employed'' to be making donations that large, the official said.

An agency spokesman declined to comment on the matter.

The McCain campaign had no immediate comment.

Of the $57,000 the Rocchios donated in June, $4,600 went to McCain's general election "compliance committee,'' to pay for campaign lawyers and auditors, and $52,400 went to the RNC, which devotes nearly all of its money to supporting McCain's presidential bid.

By Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers, August 5, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. - Former Sen. John Edwards has a deadline to save his spot on the national stage.

With two weeks to go before their national convention, a number of Democrats are saying that Edwards needs to publicly address National Enquirer stories that have alleged he had an affair with a campaign worker and fathered her baby.

If Edwards fails to clear up the story in short order, he risks party officials deciding not to have him speak or, if they do, creating a distraction from a week focused on Barack Obama accepting the nomination.

"If there is not an explanation that’s satisfactory, acceptable and meets high moral standards, the answer is 'no,' he would not be a prime candidate to make a major address to the convention," said Don Fowler, a former Democratic National Committee chair.

Democrats gather in Denver on Aug. 25 and Edwards, as the 2004 vice presidential nominee and a presidential candidate who won delegates this year, ordinarily would be locked in as a speaker.

"He absolutely does have to (resolve it). If it's not true, he has to issue a stronger denial," said Gary Pearce, the Democratic strategist who ran Edwards’ 1998 Senate race. "It's a very damaging thing. ...

"The big media has tried to be responsible and handle this with kid gloves, but it's clearly getting ready to bust out. If it's not true, he's got to stand up and say, 'This is not true. That is not my child and I'm going to take legal action against the people who are spreading these lies.' It's not enough to say, 'That’s tabloid trash,' " Pearce said.

Edwards is widely regarded as a rousing speaker, particularly on poverty, and still has as many as 19 delegates pledged to him, making him a logical choice for a high-profile convention role under normal circumstances.

Convention organizers said Wednesday that the schedule of speakers has not yet been announced.

Edwards' political currency declines with each day the story goes unresolved, Fowler and other Democratic strategists said.

An appearance at the convention would only highlight the unresolved story, said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant and former aide to then-Vice President Al Gore. A convention speaking appearance could become the moment that drives news media coverage of the alleged affair to explode.

"You want to address these issues long before you get to that point," Lehane said. "Otherwise people who haven’t written about it before, now start writing about it." Edwards' decision not to take questions about the alleged affair has allowed doubts to linger and political bloggers to speculate. The National Enquirer has reported that he fathered a child with a former campaign worker and met with her in a Beverly Hills hotel last month. He made no response to the National Enquirer’s posting on Wednesday of what it said was a photo of Edwards and his illegitimate child. Two weeks ago, after the National Enquirer ran the story about the hotel liaison, he dismissed a reporter’s question in Houston and used the "tabloid trash" line.

He brushed off a McClatchy reporter in Washington last week: "Can't do it now, I'm sorry."

His designated staffer for press contacts has not responded to e-mail requests for an interview.

No one answered a reporter who rang a buzzer at the gate of Edwards' Orange County home on Wednesday.

Friends and former staffers refuse to comment now, though they helped Edwards last fall by dismissing an October story in the Enquirer of a sexual relationship between Edwards and a campaign videographer when it initially broke.

"Sorry cannot help you on this one," wrote Jennifer Palmieri, a former top Edwards aide, in an e-mail Wednesday.

The Enquirer's October story, citing unnamed sources, claimed that Edwards was having an affair with a woman who had filmed a series of videos during his presidential campaign. The tabloid later reported that she was pregnant.

Two weeks ago, the tabloid posted a story online chronicling how Edwards had visited the woman, Rielle Hunter, and their child on July 21 at a Beverly Hills hotel and that the paper’s reporters confronted him afterward.

Hunter posted an online statement at the time denying the October story. In December, a campaign worker for Edwards, Andrew Young, claimed paternity of the woman’s then-unborn child. Last week, though, the Charlotte Observer obtained a copy of the child's birth certificate, which did not list the father. Hunter's lawyer would say only that "a lot of women do that" and that it was a personal matter between Hunter and Young.

Presidential candidates who lose in the primaries traditionally are invited to address their party's convention. Politico reported last month that Edwards told others he was promised a prime time speaking slot when he endorsed Sen. Barack Obama.

By Mark Johnson, Charlotte Observer, August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON - Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader is quietly making headway in his third bid for president.

He clinched a major victory last Saturday by getting on the California ballot as the nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party. In 2004, Nader wasn't on California's ballot - a state receptive to his antiwar, anti-corporate message - and was on the ballot in only 34 states. He said Wednesday that he's confident of getting on the ballot in 45 states this year.

With the major-party candidates in a close race, Nader could have an impact, perhaps as dramatic as in 2000, when the then-Green Party nominee received more than 97,000 votes in Florida, which Democratic nominee Al Gore lost by 537 votes to George W. Bush. That gave Bush an Electoral College majority and the White House.

Nader is at 3 percent in one recent poll and 6 percent in another.

True to form, however, he's complaining about being excluded from the presidential debates, paid for, he noted, by a "corporate duopoly" of the Democratic and Republican parties.

"Why do we ration debates in this country?" he asked. "You can only reach 2 percent of the public without debates."

The Commission on Presidential Debates stipulates that participants must have 15 percent support in national polls to be eligible.

Nader accuses the news media of being in a "cultural rut" by ignoring him. He said he'd been on national television only 10 seconds this election cycle.

"Put me in all the debates and we'll have a three-way race," Nader said of likely Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican nominee John McCain.

An AP-Ipsos poll released Tuesday shows Obama with a 6-point lead over McCain and Nader at 3 percent among registered voters. Recent CNN/Opinion Research polls scored Nader's support at 6 percent.

His critics worry about a repeat of 2000.

Nader, who's called Bush a "raging pit bull," hates the spoiler label that's been hung on him since that election, saying it's "a contemptuous word of political bigotry."

As for Obama, Nader said he "lost all respect for him" when the Illinois senator spoke out against impeaching Bush. Nader supports impeachment because of how Bush handled the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

While Nader doesn't seem to face a concerted Democratic campaign to block him from state ballots, as he did in 2004, so far he's on only 12 state ballots, according to the newsletter Ballot Access News. Nader campaign spokesman Chris Driscoll said signatures had been submitted in 26 states and that the campaign was on track to win access in 45 states.

In 2004 Nader received 463,653 votes, 0.4 percent of the total. In 2000, he received 2,882,955, 2.74 percent of the popular vote.

Political analyst Larry Sabato takes a jaundiced view of Nader's latest run.

"People aren't stupid," said Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "They're not going to throw their vote away. It's August, not November. When it matters in November, people will abandon third-party candidates."

Texas billionaire Ross Perot won more than 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992, but Sabato said he was an exception.

American University history professor Allan J. Lichtman thinks Nader still has a "limited appeal" to those who "are sick and tired of politics as usual."

And, Claremont McKenna University professor Jack Pitney said, as unlikely as he thinks a 2000 repeat is, "you can't completely rule out a Nader effect."

By Maria Recio, McClatchy Newspaper, August 6, 2008

The conventional wisdom has it down pat: A bad economy works against the candidate from the party in power as voters take out their rage and fear on the president's party and back the challenger, just like they did in 1992. But this is not a normal economic slowdown (or recession) and Obama is not a normal challenger. I think the conventional wisdom may be dead wrong.

It is not so much that unemployment is so high (5.7%) or that the economy is in the tank (1% growth this quarter) as that everything seems to be falling apart. Banks are under assault, mortgages are in default, and quasi-government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac need bailouts, financial institutions go hat in had to foreign sovereign wealth funds peddling shares of their equity in return for desperately needed cash, the cost of filling a gas tank has tripled. It is not the present circumstances that have voters freaked, it is the threats that seem to loom on the horizon.

And Obama is no ordinary challenger. Not like Bill Clinton, for example. In 1992, from the first moment the campaign started, Clinton billed himself as the expert who could solve the economy's problems. His promise to "focus like a laser beam" on the recession won him big points throughout the campaign. His ten year record as a governor and his chairmanship of the National Governors' Association all bolstered his credentials. But we first met Barack Obama as an advocate of racial and partisan healing and then as an opponent of the war in Iraq. When he tried to morph into an economic expert in time for the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, voters didn't buy it and voted for Hillary.

So the question that hangs over the election is: Are we prepared to trust a new candidate with almost no experience and no claim to economic expertise in the middle of one of the most threatening economic situations we have ever faced?

Add to this backdrop, Obama's pledge to raise taxes and you have a combustible situation which could frighten American voters en masse. When, amid relative prosperity, Obama said he would restore fairness by raising taxes on the rich, it was well received, particularly in the Democratic primary. Raising the top bracket to 40% seemed a no-brainer. Applying the Social Security tax to more earned income, not just to the first $100,000, seemed like elemental fairness and a good way to save the pension system. Restoring the capital gains tax to 28% appeared to comport with the notion that those whose income comes from investment should pay a tax closer to that paid on earned income (despite the argument that it is after tax money that they invested in the first place).

But now, with massive capital outflows crippling the public and private sectors, doubling the tax on capital seems like a very, very bad idea. And a sharp increase in taxes on the entrepreneurial class seems like a risky proposition.

And, besides, when a candidate starts raising taxes, who knows where he will stop once his in office.

McCain can put economist after economist on the air to prophesy depression if Obama's plan for taxes is enacted. And the public will not be reassured by the Democrat's claims that his tax hikes are only on the rich.

It almost doesn't matter that McCain is not an economist and avows ignorance of what Thomas Carlyle called the "dismal science." We know McCain. We know he will surround himself with some pretty capable people and, above all, we know that he won't raise taxes.

Were these calmer times, with less of a threat from abroad and less economic danger, we might indulge our penchant for change and elect an ingénue in the hope that he will offer something different. We might be more easily captivated by his charisma. But, in these times, we may want to stay with the safer candidate.

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, Town Hall, August 06, 2008

Barack Obama may be the fresh face in this year's presidential election, but nearly half say they're already tired of hearing about him, a poll says.

With Election Day still three months away, 48 percent said they're hearing too much about the Democratic candidate, according to a poll released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Just 26 percent said the same about his Republican rival, John McCain.

Obama, the 47-year-old Illinois senator who would become the first black president, has dominated political news coverage much of the year. According to an ongoing Pew study, Obama has appeared in more news stories this year and more people say they have heard more about him than McCain, the longtime Arizona senator who also ran for president in 2000.

Two-thirds of Republicans and about half of independents said they've heard too much about Obama, as did a third of Democrats, a significant number.

At the same time, nearly four in 10 said they've been hearing too little about McCain _ about four times the number who said so about Obama. About half of Republicans, four in 10 independents and even a quarter of Democrats said they've not heard enough about the GOP candidate.

The poll was conducted from Aug. 1-4 and involved telephone interviews with 1,004 adults. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Town Hall, August 06, 2008.

Come November, more Americans might cast their ballots on paper than in any other election in U.S. history.

That wasn't supposed to happen. If everything had gone according to the government's $3 billion plan to upgrade voting technology after the hanging-chad fiasco in Florida in 2000, that sentence would read "electronic machines" instead of paper.

Instead, thousands of touchscreen devices are collecting dust in warehouses from California to Florida, where officials worried about hackers and fed up with technical glitches have replaced the equipment with scanners that will read paper ballots.

An Associated Press Election Research survey has found that 57 percent of the nation's registered voters live in counties that will be relying on paper ballots this fall.

The number of registered voters in jurisdictions that will rely mainly on electronic voting machines has fallen from a high of 44 percent during the 2006 midterm elections to 36 percent. (Much of the rest of the electorate consists of voters in New York state, who will be using old-fashioned pull-lever machines.)

In fact, because of growth in the electorate over the past decade, expansion of absentee voting rules, and expectations of high turnout for the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain, some experts are predicting a record number of Americans will cast ballots on paper this year.

"More people will be using computer-read paper ballots than at any other time in the nation's history," said Kimball Brace, head of Election Data Services, a consulting firm. "As you get more registered voters and more people in the pool, it exacerbates this bigger issues of paper."

In 2000, about 97 million registered voters lived in counties that relied on some form of paper ballot, Brace said. That figure is expected to top 100 million this fall, according to the AP data.

The return to paper creates extra stress on an already-strapped election system. Cash-poor counties will have to spend tens of millions of dollars printing ballots. Voters, many of them first-timers, may wind up confused by the ballot formats and frustrated by long lines of people waiting to use the scanners. And counting all the paper could hold up the results of the election.

"After 2000, there was a widespread revulsion about paper - everyone had the mental image of the guy cross-eyed looking at the punch-card ballot," said Doug Chapin, director of the watchdog organization Electionline. "But there's no silver bullet. You're trading one set of problems for another."

All states but Idaho have junked the punch-card ballots that caused so much trouble in Florida. But many plan to use paper ballots that require voters to fill in ovals with a pen. The ballots are then read by digital scanners.

Unlike touchscreens, paper can't malfunction or be hacked into. But it has to be printed, shipped and securely stored before and after Election Day. Counties already paying to warehouse electronic machines will have to buy reams of card stock, print extras in multiple languages, pay for delivery and eventually destroy the unused ballots.

In counties that are on their third system in three presidential contests, officials are retraining workers in how to use the equipment and demonstrate it to voters. Broward County, Fla., which was caught in the punch-card maelstrom in 2000, has produced guides showing voters how to feed their paper ballots into the scanners.

Other counties making the switch, including some of California's largest, are planning to collect ballots at polling places and pay workers overtime to feed them into industrial-size scanners at central offices.

None of that is likely to prevent voters from making other sorts of mistakes, such as filling in the wrong oval or using the wrong color pen.

"A lot of officials are in damage-control mode because they're going to try to limit the problems of switching to paper," said Mike Alvarez, an expert in voting technology at Caltech in Pasadena. "You will have ballots not showing up, being printed wrong, the litany of mistakes voters make with these ballots, and then there's incredible pressure in a crowded polling place for people who are trying to make their decision."

As Brace put it: "Paper is traditionally the device that the public is really good at screwing up."

In 2000, about 61 percent of registered voters lived in counties that relied on some form of paper ballot, whether punch-cards or fill-in-the-oval forms, according to Election Data Systems. Only 13 percent of voters lived in counties that used touchscreens or other e-voting devices; the rest used pull-lever machines.

With fewer than 100 days until Nov. 4, the first concern for many election officials is making sure they will be able to get all their ballots printed between the time the national, state and local slates have been selected and Election Day.

California, the nation's biggest electoral prize, with more than 16 million people registered to vote, abruptly outlawed most electronic machines last summer, creating a potential crunch in the highly specialized ballot-printing industry. San Diego contracted with a Washington state company after local businesses said they couldn't produce the 3.5 million extra ballots in the two-month window.

Many paper ballots may wind up in the shredder.

Last week, Ohio's secretary of state ordered all 53 counties using electronic machines to print paper ballots to accommodate voters in November who opt out of e-voting. A similar order during the primary resulted in the pulping of more than a million unused ballots after only 14,484 voters asked for them.




By ALLISON HOFFMAN, August 06, 2008

THE RACE: The presidential race nationally

THE NUMBERS (CBS News)

Barack Obama, 45 percent

John McCain, 39 percent

___

OF INTEREST:

Obama's lead in the CBS News poll has not changed since June. Combining undecided voters with those who favor one candidate but say they may switch, about four in 10 have not made a final decision. Among the likeliest to be undecided are supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton, 24 percent, and women, 17 percent. McCain now is viewed as more believable than Obama: 49 percent say he says what he believes, compared to 42 percent for Obama. In May, just over half said each was believable. Fifty-three percent of voters say they are paying a lot of attention to the campaign - a level not surpassed during the 2004 campaign until October of that year. Three-quarters want the next president to pay more attention to domestic rather than foreign policy issues.

___

The CBS News poll was conducted from July 31-Aug. 5 and included interviews with 906 registered voters. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Associated Press, August 06, 2008

To understand why Barack Obama and John McCain are emphasizing solutions to the country's energy woes and have scrambled to change their positions, look no further than the voters' distress over $4-a-gallon gasoline and its wide ripple effect.

The presidential candidates' sparring over energy peaked this week as each sought to capitalize on a topic that touches every voter and provides a way to discuss the declining economy at home, national security threats abroad and the changing climate worldwide.

"Sen. McCain's energy plan reads like an early Christmas list for oil and gas lobbyists," Obama charged Wednesday, a day after accusing the GOP of misstating his proposals. He is using the issue to paint the four-term Arizona senator as a Washington insider beholden to special interests while trying to strike a balance on the environment vs. exploration debate that divides Democrats.

Conversely, McCain is leading a Republican Party largely unified in support of oil and gas drilling off U.S. coastlines and is trying to use energy to cut the Democrat's edge in the polls on economic issues. He dubbed Obama "Dr. No" because of his opposition to expanded nuclear power and unlimited offshore drilling. Said McCain on Wednesday: "We need an 'all of the above' plan."

This year energy policies resonate with voters of all political stripes, as high gasoline prices inflate the cost of food, transportation and other necessities. The country's dependence on foreign oil raises national security concerns as U.S. troops fights wars in the oil-rich Middle East. And, the public's concern over global climate change has grown in recent years along with calls for alternative energy sources to curb planet-warming greenhouse gases.

"Almost everyone wants this problem solved," said Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. "The candidates are responding to the fact that the public is hurting and crying for relief."

Interviews and surveys bear that out.

"We can help our family less and less" because high gas costs are "pretty bad" and crunching the family's budget, said Renee Wren, a 50-year-old Riverview, Fla., homemaker with three grown children who are semi-dependent and two grandchildren.

In St. Louis, Carla Fehribach, a 65-year-old airline customer service agent, is shopping and going out less because gas prices have strained her budget. She said: "I don't do things I would normally do right now."

Like many others, Fehribach and Wren say energy proposals will help them determine their vote. Both are leaning toward Obama now.

An ongoing AP-Yahoo News poll that began in November shows that gas prices have risen steadily to near the top of voters' concerns; the issue now is second only to the economy. A whopping 87 percent surveyed now say gas prices are at least a very important issue to them personally, while roughly the same amount as before the primaries - 62 percent - say the environment is at least a very important issue.

Also, a Pew Research Center poll in June found growing support for more energy exploration. Roughly the same percentage of people said drilling and other exploration should be the top priority as said energy conservation should get the most attention. A few months earlier, far more people favored conservation than exploration.

Said Kohut: "Politically, I think it's the only domestic, economically leaning issue where the Republicans have a slight opportunity - even advantage - because of the trend in support for even greater exploration."

More than half of those in a USA Today/Gallup Poll in late July said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who favored easing restrictions on offshore drilling, while one third said they'd be likelier to oppose that candidate. Even more - nearly seven in 10 - said they'd be likelier to support a candidate who favored tax breaks for energy conservation, raising mileage requirements for vehicles, and increasing federal research on alternative energy.

GOP efforts may be swaying some undecided voters.

"I would have to lean more toward McCain with this offshore drilling," said Gene Zupkofska, 71, a retiree in Rockland, Mass. In Amarillo, Texas, Terry Hearn, too, cited McCain's drilling position on that as a primary reason he's seriously considering the Republican over the Democrat. Said Hearn, age 51: "They need to do something" to try to lower gas prices.

McCain reversed his opposition to more offshore drilling in June and endorsed lifting a federal moratorium to allow individual states to decide whether to drill in waters off their coasts. Thereafter, President Bush backed the move and Republicans in Congress beat the drilling drum.

Obama was pulled in two directions as liberal Democrats continued to oppose drilling because of environmental concerns while other Democrats revised their longtime positions to respond to voters' distress.

Over the last week, Obama dropped his longtime opposition to offshore drilling and to using the nation's oil stockpile: He said he'd be willing to support limited offshore drilling if that's what it takes to enact a comprehensive energy policy and proposed releasing 70 million barrels from the nation's 707-million-barrel strategic oil reserve to help lower pump prices.

By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press, August 07, 2008

The diverse culture of the nation's 50th state - and the island nature of Hawaii itself - shaped Barack Obama's view of the world and the politics he would practice.

Those who knew him as a child say that view and those politics click with the themes of his Democratic presidential campaign. For Obama, though, Hawaii is even more personal, the place where he picked up basketball and formed his racial identity.

"If you grow up here, where we have no majority and there's a complete ethnic mix, people have learned how to get along with others who look different and are from different places," said longtime family friend Georgia McCauley.

"In Hawaii, because we have a confined space in terms of being an island state, we perhaps have to learn how to cooperate and compromise more," McCauley said. "We learn how to listen to each other and work on things in a positive manner."

This weekend, Obama planned to return to the island where he spent his childhood as a pudgy kid called Barry who lived in a modest apartment with his grandparents. He planned to visit his maternal grandmother and sister for a few days of vacation before the Democratic National Convention in Denver at month's end.

Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 to a white mother and a black father who had met in Russian class at the University of Hawaii. He was an island boy most of his first 18 years. His mother's charitable work, his multiethnic friends and the economic gap between his family and his classmates at the island's most prestigious private school - he attended on scholarship - helped forge Obama before he left for college on the mainland.

His father, also named Barack Obama, was a scholarship student from Kenya. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was an 18-year-old from Kansas who went on to become an anthropologist and helped set up loans for poor people to start businesses in Indonesia.

Their marriage didn't last long. When Barry was 6, he moved to Indonesia, the homeland of his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, another university student his mother met in Hawaii. Obama was 9 when his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born. She now teaches history in a private girls high school in Honolulu.

Obama's mother sent him back to the islands after four years in Indonesia to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. His grandfather was a furniture salesman and his grandmother was Bank of Hawaii's first female bank vice president.

Obama entered the fifth grade at the elite Punahou School, where he was a minority among minorities, an out-of-place boy in a school of the privileged. He enjoyed the lifestyle of an island teen, playing basketball, body surfing and spear-fishing, and he worked at a burger outlet and served on the school literary magazine's editorial board.

Obama has recounted numerous instances when he felt like an outsider, as when a seventh grader called him a "coon" and the parents of a white girl objected to her going to the prom with him. The islands' roughly 49,000 blacks account for less than 4 percent of the population.

"Hawaii's spirit of tolerance might not have been perfect or complete. But it was - and is - real," Obama wrote in a 1999 essay for the Punahou alumni magazine. "The opportunity that Hawaii offered - to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect - became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."

He left the islands for Occidental College in Los Angeles, then graduated from Columbia University before taking a church-based community organizing job in Chicago and moving on to Harvard Law School. He returned to Illinois as a civil rights lawyer. When he won the U.S. Senate race in 2004, Hawaii Democrats adopted Obama as the state's "third senator." He continued to make regular visits to be with family and friends, the last in December 2006, as Democrats were urging him to seek the presidency.

"He himself is a child of diversity, and Hawaii gave him that opportunity," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, who was friends with Obama's family and remembers him as a boy. "He believes diversity defines you, rather than divides you. That's the central message of change he's bringing. It's nothing to be afraid of."

By MARK NIESSE, Town Hall, August 07, 2008

Republican presidential candidate John McCain is taking up the issue of possible job losses due to the closure of a DHL shipping site in Ohio, the result of a corporate merger aided by his campaign manager during his work as a lobbyist.

In 2003, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis lobbied Congress to accept a proposal by German-owned DHL to buy Airborne Express, which kept its domestic hub in Wilmington in southwest Ohio.

In announcing a restructuring plan in May, DHL said it planned to hire United Parcel Service to move some of its air packages, sending them through an airport in Louisville, Ky., and putting the Wilmington Air Park out of business. Some 8,000 jobs could be at stake, Wilmington officials estimate.

Davis took a leave of absence from his lobbying practice to work for McCain, a self-styled reformer who asked his campaign staff to disclose all previous lobbying ties and make certain they were no longer registered as lobbyists or foreign agents.

McCain on Thursday was to discuss DHL's plans with local officials and others affected by the potential job losses. The economy and job losses are important issues in Ohio, a critical swing state that gave President Bush the electoral votes needed for re-election in 2004.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers said Wednesday that Davis had not worked with DHL since 2005, long before DHL announced plans to move its work out of Wilmington. The companies merged in 2003.

"At the time of the merger, no one anticipated an impact on jobs in Wilmington," Rogers said.

McCain, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, had a role in the deal too. He urged then-Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens to abandon proposed legislation that would have prohibited foreign-owned carriers from flying U.S. military equipment or troops, which Airborne Express said was aimed at torpedoing its merger with DHL.

Rogers said McCain opposed the bill because it could have hurt the military's airlift capabilities in a time of war.

The DHL-Airborne deal ultimately went through, despite opposition from competitors UPS and FedEx, which argued that it would violate a ban on foreign control of domestic airlines. DHL is the U.S.-based shipping unit of German postal service Deutsche Post AG.

On Wednesday, Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and supporter of presidential hopeful Barack Obama, called on McCain and Davis to use their past ties to DHL to urge the company not to move jobs out of Wilmington.

"John McCain through this whole thing has said zero about his connection to DHL," Brown said. "We need their help. I'm accusing them of indifference."

A task force of local and federal elected officials as well as business and labor leaders has been working to save the jobs.

"This is worthy of every presidential candidate's attention," Wilmington Mayor David Raizk said. "Whether it's a vote-changing issue or not, I think it might be a little too early to tell. It's a matter of making sure our situation here stays on the front burner."

During a campaign visit last month, Obama discussed the situation with Raizk and other officials and pledged help if elected.

In a statement Wednesday, Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich called the situation "one of the worst job catastrophes that any community in this nation is facing" and said the involvement of both McCain and Obama indicated it merited global attention.

"We are going to need some involvement by the German government," Voinovich said.

DHL declined to comment.

Ohio is a general election battleground state, and rural southwest Ohio, where Wilmington is located, is a Republican stronghold. In 2004, Clinton County - which includes Wilmington - voted for Bush over Democrat John Kerry by more than 2-to-1, even though Bush narrowly won the state.

By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press, August 07, 2008

WASHINGTON - Pundits see Hillary Clinton fading as a possible running mate for Democrat Barack Obama. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday referred to her as "the big name" who "would make a great vice president."

In an interview with Reuters on a range of political and legislative topics (as well as her new book "Know Your Power, A Message to America's Daughters"), Pelosi said there was a deep bench Obama could choose from in rounding out the Democratic ticket.

Pelosi was asked whether the Obama campaign had signaled Clinton was out of the running because the New York senator and ex-presidential candidate has been slotted to speak on the Tuesday of the Aug 25-28 Democratic convention. The vice presidential nominee traditionally addresses the convention on Wednesday while Obama will speak on the final evening - Thursday.

"I think convention schedules can be changed," said Pelosi, who will chair the Colorado convention.

Pelosi was quick to add that she does not have "the faintest idea" who Obama will pick. "I think the only person who knows maybe is Barack Obama himself and Michelle Obama."

By Richard Cowan, Reuters, August 5th, 2008

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton paved the way for the first woman president, a milestone that could be reached within the next eight years, according to a nationwide poll of women released yesterday.

But it won't be Hillary.

Only three in 10 of the women surveyed said that Clinton would be the first woman to occupy the White House as chief executive, the poll for Lifetime Networks found.

And despite complaints by her backers of sexism during the hard-fought primaries this year, the majority of women blame Clinton and her campaign strategists for her loss to presumptive nominee Barack Obama, the poll found.

A Clinton campaign aide disputed the poll's findings.

Yet Clinton could play a crucial role in shoring up support for Obama as she prepares to make her first solo campaign trips for him this month in an election that could be decided by the women's vote.

Democrat Obama leads Republican John McCain 49 percent to 38 percent, but 10 percent remain undecided, according to the survey of 700 women nationally in the last week of July. The poll has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.4 percentage points.

Obama still must win over nearly one in five of the women who backed Clinton in the primaries, said Celinda Lake, who conducted the poll with Kellyanne Conway.

Three quarters of the Clinton voters say they will support Obama, but 18 percent of them - who are more independent, blue collar and older - say they'll vote for McCain.

"That may change when they see Hillary campaign for Obama," Lake said.

Clinton will host rallies and voter registration drives in Las Vegas on Friday and in South Florida on Aug. 21, the Obama campaign said yesterday.

Clinton campaign adviser Ann Lewis disputed the poll's ability to make sweeping conclusions about Clinton's presidential possibilities, since it is not clear how many of those surveyed are Democrats.

After all, Lewis said, more than half of the women voted for Clinton for president when they had a chance to do so in the Democratic primaries.

As to the reasons for Clinton's loss, Lewis said the polling question apparently does not ask whether sexist attitudes during the primaries, particularly in the media, played a role in Clinton's defeat.

The poll indicates bitterness lingers among her followers. But among women overall the poll found:

Two-thirds blamed Clinton's loss on "the kind of campaign she ran" or "who she is and what she stands for." Only a fifth said she lost "because she's a woman."

The majority of women say if Obama or McCain pick a female running mate it won't make a difference in their vote.

Obama is viewed favorably by 53 percent of women, and McCain by 37 percent.

44 percent say a woman will be president in eight years.

By TOM BRUNE, Newsday, August 6, 2008

Touted by some as candidate material herself, the dynamic former Hewlett-Packard CEO has sparkled, and stumbled, in her new role.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A self-described "change warrior," Carly Fiorina has been a law school dropout, a real estate broker, an English teacher, a telecommunications executive and the first woman to be hired, then fired, as chief executive of a Fortune 20 company.

The former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO is again forging new territory for herself, this time in the highest ranks of American politics. She has quickly emerged as a high-level advisor to Sen. John McCain's campaign in the Arizona Republican's bid for the White House.

Her poise and freshness have been offset at times by her inexperience and her contentious tenure at HP, during which she cut more than 20,000 jobs and the venerable technology company's stock fell by nearly half. Democrats say that Fiorina is a ripe target, viewed as an elitist who threw the company into turmoil before walking away with $21 million in severance and other payments.

On the campaign trail, a comment she made about insurers and Viagra created an embarrassing moment for McCain. In the following weeks, she showed her face less frequently in public but appeared on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

Her rise in politics has marked quite a comeback. In 2005, Fiorina was dismissed by HP. Three years later, she is discussed as a potential vice president.

"To be suddenly cast in the World Series is unusual," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic political consultant. "She's had a few moments where she has said something that has gotten her in trouble. But no one goes from having never playing baseball to getting hits."

Political consultants say Fiorina serves several roles in shaping the candidate's image. She "softens" McCain by trumpeting his more moderate positions. Her business resume bolsters his economic credentials. And she is a counterpoint to McCain's image as a man's man, championing the Republican senator as a friend to women.

"I happen to be pro-life," Fiorina said late last month during a meeting of Georgia Women for McCain in Atlanta. "There are many women in this country who are not, and yet many of them will support John McCain."

Fiorina has never run for public office, although politics has long been mentioned as her next act. Ever since she took the helm of Palo Alto-based HP in 1999, at the age of 44, friends and California Republicans have nudged her to run for state office. She resisted those invitations while at HP because she felt her work wasn't finished, she wrote in her 2006 memoir, "Tough Choices."

"She electrifies a room when she comes in, and she has an ability to inspire," said Boris Feldman, a Silicon Valley lawyer and friend of Fiorina.

Fiorina, who declined to be interviewed for this article, met McCain in 2000 when she went to Washington to argue against Internet taxation.

She was reintroduced to him last year, and in March was named chairwoman of the Republican National Committee's Victory '08 panel to raise money and rally voters. In May, as the Democratic primary season was winding down and women who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York appeared up for grabs, Fiorina began to appear more frequently on political talk shows and introduced McCain at events.

Her work for the campaign isn't without risks.

During a July breakfast with reporters in Washington, Fiorina said it was incongruous that many health plans covered Viagra but not birth-control medication for women. Yet McCain had twice voted against legislation to mandate that health insurance companies cover birth control.

When asked about Fiorina's comment, McCain appeared stumped. Planned Parenthood turned video of his hemming and hawing into a TV spot.

"She has shown herself a sort of rookie," said Donnie Fowler, a Silicon Valley-based Democratic political strategist.

Scott Reed, a Republican strategist who ran Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, gives Fiorina high marks for her political presence but said she "tripped over the Viagra issue."

"She has to remember she is speaking for the candidate, not herself," he said.

In her memoir, Fiorina described a life of taking on challenges and going the least comfortable route. She dropped out of UCLA School of Law in 1976, disappointing her father, a law professor who later became a federal judge.

Fiorina met fierce resistance from both employees and directors, who criticized her as an overly slick marketer who didn't understand technology or the company well. She appeared in TV commercials, and her portrait appeared in the company's lobby next to ones of the founders, sparking howls of derision among the rank and file.

The resistance turned into a war when in 2001 Fiorina engineered a $18.9-billion merger with Compaq Computer Corp. She fought a seven-month proxy battle against the founders' children, who wanted to stop the merger.

Fiorina won. But she struggled with the merged company's financial performance during an economic downturn. She drew the ire of workers across the country by cutting the workforce and defending the practice of outsourcing jobs overseas. "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," she said.

That applied to her own.

HP's stock fell 49% while she led the company, a much steeper decline than the 27% drop of the Nasdaq over the same period. In early 2005, HP's board wanted her to hand off some oversight of the company's daily operations. When Fiorina resisted, the board fired her.

Since Fiorina's departure, HP's sales, profit and stock price have taken off. Although many credit new Chief Executive Mark Hurd, Fiorina said she set the proper course.

"The company was transformed under my leadership," Fiorina said in a 2006 interview on "60 Minutes."

Chuck House, a former HP employee who is co-writing a corporate history, thinks Fiorina helped modernize the company and was unfairly blamed for its problems.

"It's curious to me why she got bashed so badly," said House, executive director of the Media X program at Stanford University, which brings together research and industry. "She has a lot of naysayers, who tend to be people who love the old HP way."

Fiorina's emergence on the political stage has revived debate over her HP legacy and created a backlash against the candidate by some high-tech workers. But Fiorina's controversial tenure may make her more ready for politics than many other CEOs, who are often insulated from daily criticism, said Steve Forbes, the media magnate and two-time presidential candidate.

"She knows the treachery of internal politics from an entrenched circle," he said.

In the three years since she left HP, Fiorina has written her memoir, worked on her charitable foundation and spent time with family (she and husband Frank Fiorina have two adult daughters from his previous marriage).

She has been "redefining and relaunching herself" for years, said George Anders, author of "Perfect Enough: Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard," a book about the HP proxy fight. "Starting over with new allies is part of the adventure."

Whether or not McCain becomes president, Fiorina may emerge a winner.

As she said in July: "One of the great things about my life right now is I have lots of options and lots of opportunities. And I have learned that if you're open to options and opportunities, the future tends to take care of itself. So I'm not really worried about what's next."




By Michelle Quinn, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2008

McCain's aides were decidedly cagey about whether Cheney would have a convention role. Top strategist Mark Salter told reporters aboard McCain's plane that he had no comment. Advisor Charlie Black said speaking invitations hadn't been issued. And spokesman Brian Rogers declined to say whether the American Spectator report was true or false.

"We have not announced the program," Rogers said.

President Bush will speak the first night of the convention, but Rogers said the only other speaker he could confirm was John McCain.




By Maeve Reston and Janet Hook, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2008

So the pundits' verdict is in: Obama is too confident. It all would be funny if many people didn't seem to be inhaling this multimedia stink bomb as if it were fragrant truth.

America, meet Barack The Arrogant.

Did you hear, this guy's already talking about redecorating the Lincoln Bedroom? Or that a few weeks back, he stood behind a podium bearing a faux presidential seal? The young upstart from Illinois has even got his minions planning a White House transition!

But it's a long ways from, in the words of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, acting like "the presumptuous nominee" whose "biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris."

Milbank, who is often wickedly revealing, last week seemed mostly wicked as he turned benign campaign tableau -- an Obama motorcade, a talk with the Treasury secretary, a "pep rally" with congressional Democrats -- into evidence that Obama thinks he's already the winner.

Milbank at least leavened his thesis with humor, unlike others piling on the campaign to turn Barack into Slick Barry.

Fox News host Sean Hannity told viewers last week how "presumptuous" Obama had become. Proof: The candidate told congressional Democrats that the world had been waiting for his hopeful message and that to some he had become a symbol of a "return to our best traditions."

That may not be humble pie, but doesn't even come close to breaking the narcissism barrier. Don't our politicians routinely boast about how essential they are to the republic?

Then came the stunning revelation that Obama had begun planning for a transition to the White House.

Fox News hostess E.D. Hill -- who dubbed Obama's playful knuckle bump with his wife a "terrorist fist jab" -- reminded viewers recently that the Democrat was "not commander in chief just yet, which is why some find his decision to start planning his transition into the White House a bit presumptuous."

Hill wondered whether Obama was "jumping the gun or just covering all the bases?"

Never mind that McCain advisors have acknowledged that they too were planning for a White House transition or the fact that history has rewarded those who looked ahead. Early transition planner Ronald Reagan hit the ground running in 1980. Bill Clinton initially struggled after dawdling on White House preparations in 1992.

Yeah, but what about that talk of remodeling the Lincoln Bedroom? Surely that proves Obama thinks he's destined for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

That whopper grew out of an entirely benign moment last month in Fargo, N.D. A woman asked if Obama would consider remodeling the room with African kente cloth.

"No," Obama said with a laugh. He mused that when he had toured the White House in 2005, he thought a copy of the Gettysburg Address would look more appropriate in the historic chamber than the flat-screen TV on the wall.

What about that seal, complete with American eagle, that the Obama faithful trotted out a few weeks back? No question it was a cheesy would-be stature-builder -- but it was far short of counting electoral votes before they're cast.

The candidate's crowning demonstrations of hubris, according to those building a case, came during his extended trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Europe. Recall the pundits demanding the freshman Illinois senator prove he could be presidential in the foreign arena?

So he appeared at ease with world leaders, talked animatedly with beaming American troops and drew huge civilian crowds. Then the pundits -- who had been taking a round of bashing for supposedly going easy on Obama -- told Obama he needed to beware of appearing too presidential.

Opponents would like to put the Democrat in another can't-win box over his "failure" to visit wounded troops at a military hospital in Germany. Obama canceled a visit to the Landstuhl hospital and was accused of being self-centered.

What if he had appeared at the hospital? David Kiley reported in BusinessWeek magazine how a Republican operative described plans to attack Obama for -- that's right -- using wounded troops as campaign props, if he had gone through with the visit.

These red herrings, a veritable school of 'em, are amusing for those who put them in perspective. But how many take the time to do that?

In 1992, George H.W. Bush reportedly was surprised to find a price scanner in a grocery store, which "proved" he was out of touch with the common man. In 2004, John F. Kerry windsurfed and knew how to speak French. He was pegged as an elitist snob.

McCain launched a television ad last week lumping Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton: just a trio of celebrities handed fame they haven't really earned.

"There's an interesting line building on Obama that somehow success and intelligence are a handicap," said Mark Sawyer, a UCLA political scientist. "If he wasn't extraordinary, he wouldn't be there. But then he is extraordinary and it becomes, 'He is just too good, too well spoken, too accomplished.' "

So here are a few lessons for would-be commanders in chief:

Inspire attention, but not too much. Act presidential, but not like you already have the job. Be confident, but in an obsequious kind of way.

It's really not that complicated.




By JAMES RAINEY, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2008

The conventional wisdom is that $4 gasoline raises the odds that Sen. Barack Obama will become the nation's next president.

This may well turn out to be the case, since history suggests an ailing economy, in this case hurt by high energy prices, works to the advantage of the political party that does not hold the White House.

Yet, the American people are undergoing a change of opinion when it comes to all things energy that might actually provide a useful campaign opportunity for Sen. John McCain.

Simply put, this transformation offers the Republican presidential nominee a potential vehicle to turn around his largest problem - voters don't think he can resurrect the nation's slumping economy.

It provides him the chance to redefine the economic debate to emphasize reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil and rescuing the American economy from the straitjacket of rising energy prices. Doing so would take the focus off rising joblessness, the real-estate crisis and health care - issues that work to the Democrat's advantage - and shift it to energy, where the Republican might hold the edge in public opinion.

Energy Policy Beats War Stance

Moreover, a new series of Quinnipiac University polls in the last two weeks has found that voters in six of the seven largest swing states in the Electoral College say a candidate's energy policy has become more important to their choice for president than his views on the Iraq War. In the seventh, Florida, the war has a 1% margin.

The big plus for Sen. McCain comes from the fact that $4 gasoline has forced voters to re-evaluate their view that more drilling for oil and natural gas in previously protected areas offshore or in Alaska is not worth potential environmental risks.

They've shed that notion along with their previous reluctance to support expansion of nuclear power - long unpopular due to safety concerns - to produce electricity.

Clearly Sen. McCain is aware of this transformation. He is trying to make the most of it, seeking to link the energy issue and the need to increase production of existing fossil fuels to the economy, which voters say is their top concern when it comes to picking a president.

And, at the very end of last week, Sen. Obama showed he understood the changing political climate. He indicated he would accept more drilling off a portion of the nation's coastline if there was a bipartisan energy compromise reached in Congress - as likely as a snowfall in this summer's highly charged political climate.

Not only do voters agree with Sen. McCain about the need for drilling but also the issue offers an opportunity to make him the candidate of change while branding Sen. Obama as the captive of the status quo by catering to environmentalists over the national interest.

The Candidate for Drilling - and Change

If Sen. McCain can successfully make that case to the American people it might undercut the central theme of Sen. Obama's campaign: that he is the candidate of the future who will make real change in Americans' lives.

The Quinnipiac University polls in the seven key battleground states, whose electoral votes will decide the November election, finds either majority or large plurality support for opening up previously protected areas offshore and in Alaska for drilling.

The data come from Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin (the last four were surveyed in conjunction with The Wall Street Journal and washingtonpost.com).

To be clear, the surveys found that Americans would still prefer that future energy needs be met by development of alternative energy sources such as solar, wind or biomass. They want the government to mandate better car mileage and also say they favor more conservation over more exploration.

However, what has changed is that high energy prices have apparently driven home the argument that the pro-drilling and nuclear power folks have been making for years: That renewable, alternative energy sources are decades from being able to significantly cut America's need for fossil fuels. And the only way to bring down the high prices and avoid sending billions of dollars daily overseas is to increase domestic production of oil and natural gas.

Interestingly, the public's support for drilling appears to override its distaste for President George W. Bush. While only roughly a quarter of Americans approve of the president's job performance, strong majorities agree with him that Congress needs to follow his decision to allow drilling in previously closed offshore oil fields.

Sen. McCain recently changed his position to favor opening up those offshore areas for drilling because of the energy crisis. He suggests that Sen. Obama's refusal to go along with more drilling by itself shows that the Democratic candidate doesn't understand the seriousness of the problem.

Whether Sen. McCain can use the energy issue to raise questions about Sen. Obama's judgment or not, a shift in the campaign's spotlight from the Iraq War and the real estate/mortgage crisis surely can't hurt the Republican's chances.

By Peter Brown, The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2008

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is just the kind of political spouse Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain are trying not to be.

In America, we like our steak medium rare, our beer ice-cold and, as a rule, we expect our first ladies to act out the part of the supportive political spouse, the archetypal housewife in the ultimate white house. Look pretty, but don't speak out of turn, a la Laura Bush. Glam it up, but always in a demure, ladylike way, like Jackie O. And if you have to speak your mind, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, then be prepared to pay the price. When Clinton, one of the most polarizing figures in modern American politics, said dismissively in 1992 that "I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession," she endured a storm of conservative criticism.

In her outspokenness, Clinton is much like Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, ex-supermodel, C-list pop star, occasional centerfold and the new first lady of France. The difference is that in France, the public couldn't care less about the public gaffes of its political wives; they're more interested in preserving the 35-hour workweek. The difference between Bruni-Sarkozy and her possible future American counterparts, Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama, couldn't be starker. As America's November election nears and the candidates and their families go under the magnifying glass, Americans seem to want their political spouses to present a pristine appearance, even if they aren't Snow White.

On her new album, "Comme Si de Rien N'etait" (As if Nothing Had Happened), Bruni is in no danger of being compared to the virginal cartoon character. She sings, presumably in reference to her husband, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, lyrics that would make Tammy Wynette blush if she were alive: "You need to understand, you are my lord, you are my love, you are my orgy." Her music has also referred to heroin and polyandry - one can be reasonably sure that the only kind of cookies she might bake would have psychotropic qualities. The Italian-born Bruni-Sarkozy, with her penchant for unforgettable metaphor, has been embraced by the notoriously nationalistic French, but in America, she never would have had a chance. Never mind her enthusiasm for group sex; she's just too darn beautiful.

Meenal Mistry, a New York-based fashion journalist, observes that "physical beauty provokes all kinds of strange and strong reactions in people, suspicion [among] them. Both Michelle and Cindy are attractive women, but they're not supermodels and they are quite conservative in their hair, makeup and dress. I think if the country was faced with a beauty like Carla, it would become an issue. The opposing party would use it as a weapon, the candidate's morals would be called into question, and no matter what the wife had accomplished, she would be viewed as a trophy wife - and the candidate seen as the sort of man who wants and needs a trophy wife." When you survey the landscape of political wives of presidential candidates over the past 20 years, Mistry's reading of the situation seems right on. The women are always well-manicured and put together, they ooze inoffensive, upper-middle class taste, but they never exude unbridled sexual magnetism. If one's ambition extends to the Oval Office, an end goal for which some candidates spend their entire life plotting, then that's too big of a risk to take in your love life.

Cindy McCain, a former beauty queen with a preserved-in-aspic appeal, past addiction to painkillers and inherited fortune, has more in common with Bruni-Sarkozy than one might expect. When she revealed her addiction 14 years ago, she could have proved to be a political liability for her husband's presidential aspirations. Cindy McCain, however, unlike Bruni-Sarkozy, has attempted to maintain a low public profile, while standing steadfastly at her husband's side. She toes the party line in press interviews; dresses in prim, tailored suits; and never has a hair out of place. She is also 54, past the point when the American public might perceive her as a sexual being (fairly or unfairly).

Michelle Obama, 44, is still in an age bracket that could conceivably wield some sex appeal within pop culture's unforgiving, ageist parameters, but she has effectively branded herself as both a devoted mother and an accomplished career woman, shifting attention from her physical self to her achievements and attachments. She has also nurtured a dress sense that subtly incorporates sophisticated high-fashion elements, such as bold costume jewelry from Tom Binns. Fern Mallis, the senior vice president of IMG Fashion, hopes to welcome both candidates' wives during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York this September, where she sees them as a natural fit in the front row. "They both look very chic and wear clothes appropriate to their lifestyles and the rigor of the campaign trail. Michelle is wearing slightly more contemporary clothes ... and Cindy is [more] conservative ... and looks very comfortable in her wardrobe."

The McCain and Obama wives are discreetly stylish, appealingly pretty and, not by accident, conspicuously nonthreatening. Michelle might love a nice set of pearls as much as the next woman, but the wholesome image they represent is probably part of the reason she's been seen sporting them all over the country. Consultants, campaign advisers, focus groups hover in the background - it's not just the husbands who have hand-tailored images. Sartorial strategy factors into the bigger political picture, and you can be sure there is someone considering the broader implications of hemlines, color palettes and cleavage.

Clinton's success in the primaries sparked some celebratory rhetoric about barriers being broken and glass ceilings shattered, and without a doubt, her candidacy has raised the bar of possibility for American women. But missing from this conversation is an acknowledgement of the way that America's complicated relationship to its own sexuality influences the standards by which women in public life are judged. We sneer at the French and their "liberated" ways, but they make allowances for the humanity of their political figures instead of holding them up to a desexualized standard of perfection that often yields disappointment, or, alternately, deception. In her latest publicity bombshell, Bruni-Sarkozy poses with a catlike smile on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair, and inside, she stands defiant in a blood-red gown that billows in the wind, on the roof of the Elysee Palace, in Paris. In the accompanying interview, it is clear she is not going to apologize for being herself. Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York and author of "Eccentric Glamour," sums up the difference between the two countries' conceptions of political figures: "America still has that Puritan thing going on: self-denial is a prerequisite for public service." Just try telling that to Carla.

By Sameer Reddy, Newsweek, August 4, 2008

How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters.

But who's really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

In fact, Obama's actual energy plan is much more than a tire gauge. But that's not what's so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis - the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less.

The RNC is trying to make the tire gauge a symbol of unseriousness, as if only the fatuous believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil without doing the bidding of Big Oil. But the tire gauge is really a symbol of a very serious piece of good news: we can use significantly less energy without significantly changing our lifestyle. The energy guru Amory Lovins has shown that investment in "nega-watts" - reduced electricity use through efficiency improvements - is much more cost-effective than investment in new megawatts, and the same is clearly true of nega-barrels. It might not fit the worldviews of right-wingers who deny the existence of global warming and insist that reducing emissions would destroy our economy, or of left-wing Earth-firsters who insist that maintaining our creature comforts would destroy the world, but there's a lot of simple things we can do on the demand side before we start rushing to ratchet up supply.

We can use those twisty carbon fluorescent lightbulbs. We can unplug our televisions, computers and phone chargers when we're not using them. We can seal our windows, install more insulation and adjust our thermostats so that we waste less heat and air-conditioning. We can use more-efficient appliances, build more-efficient homes and drive more-efficient cars, preferably with government assistance. And, yes, we can inflate our tires and tune our engines, as Republican governors Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Charlie Crist of Florida have urged, apparently without consulting the RNC. While we're at it, we can cut down on idling, which can improve fuel economy another 5%, and cut down on speeding and unnecessary acceleration, which can increase mileage as much as 20%.

And that's just the low-hanging fruit. There are other ways to reduce demand for oil - more public transportation, more carpooling, more telecommuting, more recycling, less exurban sprawl, fewer unnecessary car trips, buying less stuff and eating less meat - that would require at least some lifestyle changes. But things like tire gauges can reduce gas bills and carbon emissions now, with little pain and at little cost and without the ecological problems and oil-addiction problems associated with offshore drilling. These are the proverbial win-win-win solutions, reducing the pain of $100 trips to the gas station by reducing trips to the gas station. And Americans are already starting to adopt them, ditching SUVs, buying hybrids, reducing overall gas consumption. It's hard to see why anyone who isn't affiliated with the oil industry would object to them.

Of course, in recent years, the Republican Party has been affiliated with the oil industry. It was the oilman Dick Cheney who dismissed conservation as a mere sign of "personal virtue," not a basis for energy policy. It was the oilman George W. Bush who resisted efforts to regulate carbon emissions. And most congressional Republicans have been even more reliable water carriers for the industry's interests.

John McCain has been a notable exception. He is not an oilman; he has pushed to regulate carbon emissions; and he opposed Bush's pork-stuffed energy bill, which Obama supported. He also opposed efforts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and until recently opposed new offshore drilling. But now that gas prices have spiked, McCain is running for President on a drill-first platform, and polls suggest that most Americans agree with him. It's sad to see his campaign adopting the politics of the tire gauge, promoting the fallacy that Americans are powerless to address their own energy problems. Because the truth is: Yes, we can. We already are.

By Michael Grunwald, Time, August 04, 2008

Why isn't Barack Obama doing better? Why, after all that has happened, does he have only a slim two- or three-point lead over John McCain, according to an average of the recent polls? Why is he basically tied with his opponent when his party is so far ahead?

His age probably has something to do with it. So does his race. But the polls and focus groups suggest that people aren't dismissive of Obama or hostile to him. Instead, they're wary and uncertain.

And the root of it is probably this: Obama has been a sojourner. He opened his book "Dreams From My Father" with a quotation from Chronicles: "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers."

There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.

Last week Jodi Kantor of The Times described Obama's 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. "The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count," Kantor wrote.

He was a popular and charismatic professor, but he rarely took part in faculty conversations or discussions about the future of the institution. He had a supple grasp of legal ideas, but he never committed those ideas to paper by publishing a piece of scholarship.

He was in the law school, but not of it.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey. His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. He absorbed things from those diverse places but was not fully of them.

His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective. He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it. He had some accomplishments, but as Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote, he was famously bored by the institution and used it as a stepping stone to higher things.

He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it, not sharing the liberation theology that energized Jeremiah Wright Jr. He is in the United States Senate, but not of it. He has not had the time nor the inclination to throw himself into Senate mores, or really get to know more than a handful of his colleagues. His Democratic supporters there speak of him fondly, but vaguely.

And so it goes. He is a liberal, but not fully liberal. He has sometimes opposed the Chicago political establishment, but is also part of it. He spoke at a rally against the Iraq war, while distancing himself from many antiwar activists.

This ability to stand apart accounts for his fantastic powers of observation, and his skills as a writer and thinker. It means that people on almost all sides of any issue can see parts of themselves reflected in Obama's eyes. But it does make him hard to place.

When we're judging candidates (or friends), we don't just judge the individuals but the milieus that produced them. We judge them by the connections that exist beyond choice and the ground where they will go home to be laid to rest. Andrew Jackson was a backwoodsman. John Kennedy had his clan. Ronald Reagan was forever associated with the small-town virtues of Dixon and Jimmy Carter with Plains.

It is hard to plant Obama. Both he and his opponent have written coming-of-age tales about their fathers, but they are different in important ways. McCain's "Faith of My Fathers" is a story of a prodigal son. It is about an immature boy who suffers and discovers his place in the long line of warriors that produced him. Obama's "Dreams From My Father" is a journey forward, about a man who took the disparate parts of his past and constructed an identity of his own.

If you grew up in the 1950s, you were inclined to regard your identity as something you were born with. If you grew up in the 1970s, you were more likely to regard your identity as something you created.

If Obama is fully a member of any club - and perhaps he isn-t - it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama's age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It's not clear what the rest of America makes of them.

So, cautiously, the country watches. This should be a Democratic wipeout. But voters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot place.

A group of high-profile liberal activists, including authors Howard Zinn and Gore Vidal, filmmaker Robert Greenwald and Eli Pariser, one of the leaders of MoveOn.org, have written an open letter to Barack Obama, criticizing what they call "troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign" and urging him to "stand firm on the principles you have so compellingly articulated."

"We recognize that compromise is necessary in any democracy. We understand that the pressures brought to bear on those seeking the highest office are intense," the group of more than two dozen intellectuals and activists wrote in a letter posted on the website of The Nation magazine on July 30. "But retreating from the stands that have been the signature of your campaign will weaken the movement whose vigorous backing you need in order to win and then deliver the change you have promised."

The group specifically criticized Obama for his vote for a bill that granted telecommunication companies immunity from prosecution for a controversial Bush administration domestic wiretapping program. They called on Obama to remain committed to goals he has set, such as universal health care and removing troops from Iraq on a timetable.

Such a small core of activists don't post much of a political problem for Obama, who is popular among voters who identify themselves as liberal.

But this group previewed some issues where they would challenge Obama if he wins in November.

"In other areas--such as the use of residual forces and mercenary troops in Iraq, the escalation of the US military presence in Afghanistan, the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the death penalty--your stated positions have consistently varied from the positions held by many of us, the 'friends on the left' you addressed in recent remarks," they wrote. "If you win in November, we will work to support your stands when we agree with you and to challenge them when we don't. We look forward to an ongoing and constructive dialogue with you when you are elected President."

The letter adapted Obama's own slogan "Change We Can Believe In," with special emphasis on the word "we." It was also signed by author Walter Mosley and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation.

By Perry Bacon, The Washington Post, August 5, 2008

In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama often highlights the campaign contributions of $200 or less that have amounted to fully half of the $340 million he has collected so far.

But records show that one-third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more: a total of $112 million, more than Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama's Republican rival, or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his opponent in the Democratic primaries, raised in contributions of that size.

Behind those larger donations is a phalanx of more than 500 Obama "bundlers," fund-raisers who have each collected contributions totaling $50,000 or more. Many of the bundlers come from industries with critical interests in Washington. Nearly three dozen of the bundlers have raised more than $500,000 each, including more than a half-dozen who have passed the $1 million mark and one or two who have exceeded $2 million, according to interviews with fund-raisers.

While his campaign has cited its volume of small donations as a rationale for his decision to opt out of public financing for the general election, Mr. Obama has worked to build a network of big-dollar supporters from the time he began contemplating a run for the United States Senate. He tapped into well-connected people in Chicago prior to the 2004 Senate race, and once elected, set out across the country starting to cultivate some of his party's most influential money collectors.

He courted them with the savvy of a veteran politician, through phone calls, meals and one-on-one meetings; he wrote thank-you cards and remembered birthdays; he sent them autographed copies of his book and doted on their children.

The fruits of his efforts have put Mr. Obama's major donors on a pace that almost rivals the $147 million raised by President Bush's network of Pioneers and Rangers in contributions of $1,000 or larger during the 2004 primary season.

Given his decision not to accept public financing, Mr. Obama is counting on his bundlers to help him raise $300 million for his general-election campaign and another $180 million for the Democratic National Committee.

An analysis of campaign finance records shows that about two-thirds of his bundlers are concentrated in four major industries: law, securities and investments, real estate and entertainment. Lawyers make up the largest group, numbering roughly 130, with many of them working for firms that also have lobbying arms. At least 100 Obama bundlers are top executives or brokers from investment businesses: nearly two dozen work for financial titans like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs or Citigroup. About 40 others come from the real estate industry.

The biggest fund-raisers include people like Julius Genachowski, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission and a technology executive who is new to political fund-raising; Robert Wolf, president and chief operating officer of UBS Investment Bank; James A. Torrey, a New York hedge-fund investor; and Charles H. Rivkin, chief executive of an animation studio in Los Angeles.

"It's fairly clear that this is being packaged as an extraordinary new kind of fund-raising, and the Internet is a new and powerful part of it," said Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute. "But it's also clear that many of the old donors are still there and important."

The care and feeding that top Obama fund-raisers have received underscores their significance to his campaign. Members of his National Finance Committee who fulfill their commitment to raise at least $250,000 are being rewarded with trips to the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Finance committee members participate in conference calls with top campaign officials every other week. The fund-raisers meet quarterly, often with Mr. Obama dropping in. He lingered after the most recent meeting in June in Chicago, telling his staff he wanted to thank every person in the room. Some fund-raisers who knocked on doors for Mr. Obama in places like Indiana, Iowa and Pennsylvania got to spend time with Mr. Obama backstage before and after speeches on primary nights.

His fund-raisers invariably say their support for him is not rooted in any kind of promise of access, but rather their belief in him.

"This is about Barack Obama and changing the direction of our country," said Jonathan B. Perdue, a business consultant in Mill Valley, Calif., who has raised more than $250,000 for Mr. Obama's campaign.

Mr. Obama has pledged not to accept donations from lobbyists or political action committees registered with the federal government. But some top donors clearly have policy and political agendas. Hedge-fund executives, for example, have bundled large sums for Mr. Obama at a time when their industry has been looking to increase its clout in Washington.

Kenneth C. Griffin, chief executive officer of Citadel Investment Group in Chicago, has collected more than $50,000 for Mr. Obama. But Mr. Griffin, whose $1.5 billion in income in 2007 made him one of the country's highest-paid hedge-fund executives, has given generously over the years to Republicans as well, and he recently helped to hold a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain. Citadel has spent more than $1.1 million, dating back to 2007, in lobbying against higher tax rates for hedge-fund gains. (Mr. Obama has supported the higher tax rates.)

Similarly, Paul Tudor Jones, a billionaire hedge-fund manager from Connecticut, has raised more than $100,000 for Mr. Obama. But he also gave to Mr. McCain, to Rudolph W. Giuliani and to Mitt Romney. Mr. Jones, who has given more than $900,000 over the last decade to federal candidates and political organizations, helped form a trade association that has fought hedge-fund regulation.

Many fund-raisers sit on the campaign's array of policy working groups, getting a chance to weigh in on policy positions and speeches. Mr. Genachowski, a Harvard Law School classmate of Mr. Obama, leads the technology working group. Fund-raisers from private equity and hedge funds sit on Mr. Obama's economic policy group.

Despite Mr. Obama's image as a newcomer, many of his bundlers are Democratic Party stalwarts, including people who were some of the top fund-raisers for Senator John Kerry in 2004. At least 58 of them appear to have personally made more than $100,000 in contributions to federal candidates and committees over the last decade. Updated bundler lists released recently by the McCain and Obama campaigns show that they have similar numbers of high-dollar fund-raisers.

The Obama fund-raising operation is meticulously organized. Bundlers are assigned tracking numbers, and the finance staff sends them quarterly reminders of how they are doing in meeting their goals.

"There's no price for admission," said Alan D. Solomont, a top Democratic fund-raiser in Boston who made his fortune in the nursing home industry and has given more than $1.5 million to Democratic candidates and causes. "We value every donation and every donor equally. But we are a performance-based organization. We want everybody to feel like they're included, but at the same time we're not here to have tea together."

Mr. Obama began courting many of his fund-raisers soon after he burst upon the national scene with his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Mr. Solomont, a major fund-raiser both for Mr. Kerry and for Bill Clinton during their presidential runs, received a call on his cellphone in February 2005, a year after Mr. Obama's election to the Senate, from a member of his staff who asked if he would like to get together with Mr. Obama.

They met for Chinese food in Washington the following week, and Mr. Obama scored points with Mr. Solomont when he pointed out that they had both been community organizers earlier in their careers.

"I've been involved in politics a long time," Mr. Solomont said. "Nobody's bothered to know that about me."

Early that same year, Mr. Obama attended a dinner in the Bay Area for about 20 major Kerry supporters. The dinner was organized by Mark Gorenberg, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who was Mr. Kerry's single biggest fund-raiser, after Mr. Obama's staff members contacted him. Several of those on hand, including Mr. Gorenberg and John Roos, head of a Silicon Valley law firm, became among the earliest and biggest check collectors for Mr. Obama's presidential bid.

In 2006, Mr. Obama became a vice chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, giving him the opportunity to campaign across the country and to cultivate other potential benefactors.

When his book "The Audacity of Hope" came out later that year, his staff members organized book parties at the homes of major Democratic donors.

In December, Mr. Obama visited the New York office of the billionaire investor George Soros to court a roomful of high-powered Democratic fund-raisers, hoping to lure some of them away from Mrs. Clinton. Not everyone was swayed, but Mr. Obama won over Orin Kramer, a hedge-fund executive from New Jersey, and Mr. Wolf, the UBS executive, both of whom are now among Mr. Obama's biggest fund-raisers.

Mr. Obama signed on as his finance director Julianna Smoot, who had led fund-raising for Senate Democrats and, before that, for Senator Tom Daschle when he was majority leader.

With guidance from Ms. Smoot, a key part of the campaign's fast start was its success in scooping up top former Kerry fund-raisers, including Lou Susman, a Chicago investment banker who was Mr. Kerry's national finance chairman, and Kirk Wagar, a lawyer in Miami who became Mr. Obama's finance chairman in Florida.

Even so, the initial meeting of Mr. Obama's national finance committee, held in Chicago the day after he officially announced his candidacy, was a relatively small affair, numbering about 75 people.

Penny Pritzker, the billionaire heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune whom Mr. Obama asked to become his finance chairwoman, challenged the group to double in size.

The number of bundlers ballooned quickly. The Obama campaign made important inroads among affluent people under age 45, including Silicon Valley engineers and hedge-fund analysts, many of whom had not been on the political radar screen.

Donations in June, the latest month for which Mr. Obama has disclosed his donors to the Federal Election Commission, illustrate the double-barreled nature of the campaign's fund-raising. Mr. Obama brought in nearly $31 million in contributions of less than $200, his best month for small donations. But he also collected more than $12 million in contributions of $1,000 or more, the most since the first half of 2007.

The share from large contributions appears poised to increase, as Mr. Obama has stepped up his fund-raising schedule.

"In 2007, the campaign relied on the tried and true methods like fund-raisers, for both large- and small-dollar donors, with the candidate or his surrogates, and the Internet largely financed it in 2008," said Kirk Dornbush, the president of a biotech firm and a top fund-raiser in Atlanta. "When you combine the traditional fund-raising methods with the continued online contributions, you have a very, very powerful fund-raising engine."

Forty-seven years after he last looked out from behind the bars of a South Carolina jail cell, locked away for leading a march against segregation in Columbia, James Clyburn occupies a coveted suite of offices on the second and third floors of the United States Capitol, alongside the speaker and the House majority leader. Above his couch hangs a black-and-white photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in Charleston, with the boyish Clyburn and a group of other men standing behind him onstage. When I visited Clyburn recently, he told me that the photo was taken in 1967, nine months before King's assassination, when rumors of violence were swirling, and somewhere on the side of the room a photographer's floodlight had just come crashing down unexpectedly. At the moment the photo was taken, everyone pictured has reflexively jerked their heads in the direction of the sound, with the notable exception of King himself, who remains in profile, staring straight ahead at his audience. Clyburn prizes that photo. It tells the story, he says, of a man who knew his fate but who, quite literally, refused to flinch.

On the day in early July when Clyburn and I talked, Barack Obama, who is the same age as one of Clyburn's three daughters, had recently clinched his party's nomination for president. Clyburn, who as majority whip is the highest-ranking black elected official in Washington, told me that on the night of the final primaries he left the National Democratic Club down the street about 15 minutes before Obama was scheduled to speak and returned home to watch by himself. He feared he might lose hold of his emotions.

"Here we are, all of a sudden, in the 60th year after Strom Thurmond bolting the Democratic Party over a simple thing, something almost unheard of - because he did not want the armed forces to be integrated," Clyburn said slowly. "Here we are 45 years after the 'I have a dream' speech. Forty years after the assassinations of Kennedy and King. And this party that I have been a part of for so long, this party that has been accused of taking black people for granted, is about to deliver the nomination for the nation's highest office to an African-American. How do you describe that? All those days in jail cells, wondering if anything you were doing was even going to have an impact." He shook his head silently.

This time, however, a lot of the old activists stood in the path of an African-American's advancement rather than blazing it. While Democratic black voters embraced Obama by ratios of 8 or 9 to 1 in a lot of districts, the 42 House members in the Congressional Black Caucus, for a time, split more or less down the middle between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the country's leading black ministers and mayors trended toward the Clinton camp. Clyburn himself declined until the very end to endorse a candidate in this year's primaries, saying that his leadership role required him to remain neutral, but he made no effort to disguise his relief at having been able to invoke that excuse. "Being African-American, sure, my heart was with him," Clyburn told me. "But I've got a head too. And in the beginning my head was with Clinton. The conventional wisdom was that this thing was going to be over in February."

He then recalled a moment, just after the Georgia primary in early February, when he ran into John Lewis, the legendary civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, on the House floor. Lewis was in anguish over the primaries. He had endorsed his friend Hillary Clinton, but his constituents had gone heavily for Obama, and he was beginning to waver. As Clyburn remembered it, Lewis told his old friend sadly that after all these years, they were finally going to see history yield to the forces they had unleashed. "And I'm on the wrong side," Lewis said. (Later, after weeks of public vacillating, he would switch his allegiance.)

It is hard for any outsider to fully understand the thinking that led many older black leaders to spurn the candidacy of a man who is now routinely pictured, along with '60s-era revolutionaries like Angela Davis and Malcolm X, on the T-shirts sold at the street-corner kiosks of black America. ("You'd be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn't down with it," the comedian Chris Rock joked to a Harlem audience while introducing Obama last November. "You'd say: 'Aww, I can't call him now! I had that white lady! What was I thinking?' ") Conversations like those I had with Clyburn and Lewis, however, begin to illuminate just how emotionally complicated such internal deliberations were.

On a surface level, those who backed Clinton did so largely out of a combination of familiarity and fatalism. If you were a longtime black leader or activist at the end of 2007, you probably believed, based on your own life experience, that no black man was going to win the nomination, let alone the presidency. ("If anybody tells you they expected this result, they're not being honest with you," Clyburn cautioned.) You knew the Clintons personally, or at least you knew their allies in the community. Who was this Obama, really, aside from the resonant voice and the neon smile? As Charles Rangel, Harlem's powerful representative and a strong Clinton ally, told me recently, "Of course I would support someone I knew and had liked and had worked with, versus someone I'd never heard of."

But maybe it wasn't only what you didn't know about Obama. What did he know about you? Obama was barely 2 years old when King gave his famous speech, 3 when Lewis was beaten about the head in Selma. He didn't grow up in the segregated South as Bill Clinton had. Sharing those experiences wasn't a prerequisite for gaining the acceptance of black leaders, necessarily, but that didn't mean Obama, with his nice talk of transcending race and baby-boomer partisanship, could fully appreciate the sacrifices they made, either. "Every kid is always talking about what his parents have been through," Rangel says, "and no kid has any clue what he's talking about."

For black Americans born in the 20th century, the chasms of experience that separate one generation from the next - those who came of age before the movement, those who lived it, those who came along after - have always been hard to traverse. Elijah Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he had been crying tears of joy. "Oh, you know, I'm happy," his father replied. "But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I'm about to die." In any community shadowed by oppression, pride and bitterness can be hard to untangle.

The generational transition that is reordering black politics didn't start this year. It has been happening, gradually and quietly, for at least a decade, as younger African-Americans, Barack Obama among them, have challenged their elders in traditionally black districts. What this year's Democratic nomination fight did was to accelerate that transition and thrust it into the open as never before, exposing and intensifying friction that was already there. For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama's candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle - to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream.

"I'm the new black politics," says Cornell Belcher, a 38-year-old pollster who is working for Obama. "The people I work with are the new black politics. We don't carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but that's just the way it is.

"I don't want in any way to seem critical of the generation of leadership who fought so I could be sitting here," Belcher told me when we met for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown one morning. He wears his hair in irreverent spikes and often favors tennis shoes with suit jackets. "Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He's the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that.

"But it's like watching something that you've been working on all your life sort of come together right before your eyes, and you can't see it," Belcher said. "It's like you've been building the Great Wall of China, and you finally put that last stone in. And you can't see it. You just can't see the enormity of it."

The latest evidence of tension between Obama and some older black leaders burst onto cable television last month, after an open microphone on Fox News picked up the Rev. Jesse Jackson crudely making the point that he wouldn't mind personally castrating his party's nominee. The reverend was angry because Obama, in a Father's Day speech on Chicago's South Side, chastised black fathers for shirking their responsibilities. To Jackson, this must have sounded a lot like a presidential candidate polishing his bona fides with white Americans at the expense of black ones - something he himself steadfastly refused to do even during his second presidential run in 1988, when he captured more votes than anyone thought possible.

Most of the coverage of this minor flap dwelled on the possible animus between Jackson and Obama, despite the fact that Obama himself, who is not easily distracted, seemed genuinely unperturbed by it. But more interesting, perhaps, was the public reaction of Jesse Jackson Jr., the reverend's 43-year-old son, who is a congressman from Illinois and the national co-chairman of Obama's campaign. The younger Jackson released a blistering statement in which he said he was "deeply outraged and disappointed" by the man he referred to, a little icily, as "Reverend Jackson." Invoking his father's most famous words, Jesse Jr. concluded, "He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself."

This exchange between the two Jacksons hinted at a basic generational divide on the question of what black leadership actually means. Black leaders who rose to political power in the years after the civil rights marches came almost entirely from the pulpit and the movement, and they have always defined leadership, in broad terms, as speaking for black Americans. They saw their job, principally, as confronting an inherently racist white establishment, which in terms of sheer career advancement was their only real option anyway. For almost every one of the talented black politicians who came of age in the postwar years, like James Clyburn and Charles Rangel, the pinnacle of power, if you did everything right, lay in one of two offices: City Hall or the House of Representatives. That was as far as you could travel in politics with a mostly black constituency. Until the 1990s, even black politicians with wide support among white voters failed in their attempts to win statewide, with only one exception (Edward Brooke, who was elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 1966). On a national level, only Jesse Jackson was able to garner a respectable number of white votes, muscling open the door through which Obama, 20 years later, would breezily pass.

This newly emerging class of black politicians, however, men (and a few women) closer in age to Obama and Jesse Jr., seek a broader political brief. Comfortable inside the establishment, bred at universities rather than seminaries, they are just as likely to see themselves as ambassadors to the black community as they are to see themselves as spokesmen for it, which often means extolling middle-class values in urban neighborhoods, as Obama did on Father's Day. Their ambitions range well beyond safely black seats.

Artur Davis, an Alabama representative and one of the most talked-about young talents on Capitol Hill, recently told me a story about his first campaign for Congress, in 2000, when he challenged the longtime black incumbent Earl Hilliard. Davis was only 32 at the time, a federal prosecutor who graduated from Harvard Law School, and he saw Hilliard as the classic example of a passing political model - a guy who saw himself principally as a spokesman for the community rather than as an actual legislator.

After a debate in which Davis pounded the incumbent for being out of touch with the district, Hilliard took him aside. "Young man, you have a good political future," Davis recalled Hilliard telling him. "But you've got to learn one basic lesson. You're trying to start at the top, and you can't start at the top in politics."

"With all due respect, Congressman," Davis replied, "I don't think a group with 435 members can be the top of anything."

Davis lost that race, but he won in a rematch two years later. Now he's weighing a run for governor.

One telling difference between black representatives of Davis's generation and the more senior set in Washington is how they initially viewed the role of race in this year's primaries. Older members of the Congressional Black Caucus assumed, well into the primary season, that a black candidate wouldn't be able to win in predominantly white states. This, after all, had been their lifelong experience in politics. Not only did Davis, who grew up in post-segregation Montgomery and supported Obama, reject this view, but he also wouldn't concede when we talked that Obama's race was, on balance, a detriment.

"Race was a factor in the contest between Obama and Clinton," he told me. "There's no question race will be a factor with Obama and McCain. But I'm not sure it plays out as neatly as people think. There's no question that some young cohort of white voters were drawn to Obama because they like the idea of a break with the past. A young, white politician from Illinois might not have gotten that support. So race probably cost Obama some votes. And it probably won him some votes. That's the complex reality we're living in."

When I met last month with Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark who at 39 is already something of a national sensation, he told me that he had just finished reading, belatedly, Obama's memoir "Dreams From My Father." He said passages about Obama's youth in Hawaii had reminded him of his own experience with subtle racism in the affluent, mostly white suburb of Harrington Park, N.J. "You know, what it's like growing up every single day and having people ask to touch your hair because they've never seen hair like that," Booker said. "To have the entire class laugh and giggle when somebody pronounces 'Niger' as 'nigger.' The constant bombardment of that kind of thing really affects your spirit, and it's every single day. Like when people want to come back from a vacation and compare their tan to yours and joke about being black."

No doubt these were searing experiences for Booker, and I had to wince as he ticked them off, recognizing too much of myself and my white classmates from the 1980s in the imagery. But as Booker himself noted, they are a world away from the reality that was pounded into civil rights activists like his parents, to whom racism meant dogs and hoses and segregated schools and luncheonettes. You can imagine what James Clyburn - still haunted by the vivid memory of the moment he found out that his erudite father had never been allowed to graduate from high school - would make of the lifelong trauma caused by suburban kids asking to feel your hair.

A Rhodes scholar who graduated from Stanford and Yale Law, Booker won his office in 2006 after first running unsuccessfully in 2002 against the incumbent, Sharpe James, who governed Newark for an astounding 20 years (and was sentenced last month to prison time on federal corruption charges). James was the very model of the Black Power mayor, a defiant spokesman for his community and a deft conjurer of America's racial demons. James derided Booker as a suburban outsider and questioned his blackness. ("You have to learn how to be African-American," James said in a speech directed at Booker, "and we don't have time to train you.") Booker famously took up residence in a city housing project, but his relationship to Newark's black community was, and still is, more tenuous and complicated than his predecessor's.

When I asked Booker if he considered himself a leader of the black community, he seemed to freeze for a moment. "I'm Popeye," he replied finally. "I am what I am." He paused again, then tried to explain.

"I don't want to be pigeonholed," he said. "I don't want people to expect me to speak about those issues." By this, presumably, he meant issues that revolve around race: profiling by police, incarceration rates, flagging urban economies. "I want people to ask me about nonproliferation. I want them to run to me to speak about the situation in the Middle East." Since the mayor of Newark is rarely called upon to discuss such topics, I got the feeling that Booker does not see himself staying in his current job for anything close to 20 years. "I don't want to be the person that's turned to when CNN talks about black leaders," he said.

Even so, Booker told me that his goal wasn't really to "transcend race." Rather, he says that for his generation of black politicians it's all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black - to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience, he told me, that should be instantly recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate. And that means, at least theoretically, that a black politician shouldn't have to obscure his racial identity.

"So Obama's the first one out there on the ice," Booker told me. "This campaign is giving other African-Americans like myself the courage to be themselves."

Given this generational perspective, it is easy to understand why Obama's candidacy was greeted coolly by much of Washington's black elite. Obama joined the Congressional Black Caucus when he arrived in 2005, but he attended meetings only sporadically, and it must have been obvious that he never felt he belonged. In part, this was probably because he was the group's only senator and thus had little daily interaction with his colleagues in the House. But to hear those close to Obama tell it, it was also because, like Booker and other younger black politicians, he simply wasn't comfortable categorizing his politics by race. One main function of the black caucus is to raise money through events, because many of the members represent poorer districts. Obama, already a best-selling author by the time he was sworn in, should have been a huge fund-raising draw, but he never showed much interest in headlining caucus events, and he was rarely asked.

Jesse Jackson Jr. warned his colleagues in the black caucus of the risks of shunning Obama's candidacy, reminding them of the political aftermath of Jesse Jackson Sr.'s campaigns in the 1980s. Back then, too, most black Congressional Democrats sided with the white presidential candidates, and Jackson carried many of their districts in 1984 and virtually all of them in 1988, driving up voter registration in the process. A result, over the next few election cycles, was a flurry of primary challenges, the retirement or defeat of several incumbents and the arrival in Washington of a new class of black congressmen, including James Clyburn. Jackson's message was clear: even if Obama lost, there could be a cost for opposing him.

Still, most in the caucus didn't take Obama all that seriously as a potential nominee, and neither did the Clinton campaign. They calculated that he would need a huge share of black votes to wrest the nomination from Hillary, and her advisers, white and black, considered that a near impossibility. "There was an arrogance and a complete dismissiveness in our campaign against Obama, that he was a lightweight, that he couldn't get black support," one senior Clinton aide told me recently. "A lot of the black leaders didn't know him, didn't think he was black enough, didn't think he was of the civil rights movement." This point about whether Obama was "black enough," a senseless distinction to most white voters, came up often in my discussions. It referred to the perception among some black leaders that not only had Obama not shared their generational experience, but also that he hadn't shared the African-American experience, period. Obama's father was a Kenyan academic; his family came to America on scholarship, not in chains.

Internally, Clinton's strategists set a goal of receiving half the black vote in the Southern primaries, though they calculated that they needed as little as 30 percent in order to beat back Obama. It seemed like a sure bet. Last fall, as the primaries neared, their own polls had them winning more than 60 percent of black voters.

Within hours of Obama's victory in Iowa, however, Clinton's black support began to crumble. Black voters, young and old, simply hadn't believed that a black man could win in white states; when he did, a wave of pride swept through African-American neighborhoods in the South. Nor did those voters apparently have the deep affection for Hillary Clinton that many of their ministers and local pols did. Carol Willis, a Clinton aide from the Arkansas days who was leading the campaign's outreach to black voters, told me, "I always heard people saying: 'I know Bill Clinton. I don't know Hillary Clinton. So I'll give Barack Obama a closer hearing.' " Internal polling in both campaigns after Iowa showed Obama suddenly garnering closer to 75 or 80 percent of the black vote in primary states.

From then on, the Democratic nomination fight sometimes took on the feel of one of those contentious diversity workshops, with every word parsed for its racial undertone and every emotion rising to the surface. What did Bill Clinton mean by "naive" and "fairy tale"? Was it an accident that Hillary Clinton used the word "spadework" to deride her opponent's record? Clyburn and Bill Clinton had long and tense phone conversations because of several comments the former president had made. The one that bothered Clyburn the most, he told me, came when he read in a South Carolina newspaper that Clinton had referred to Obama as a "kid." "I grew up in the South, where men like Barack Obama, who right now is older than Bill Clinton was when he ran for president, were called 'boy,' " Clyburn told me. "And that's what a kid is - a boy." The most damaging moment for Bill Clinton, though, came just after the South Carolina primary, when he waved away the victory by comparing it with Jesse Jackson's wins there in 1984 and 1988. "There was something about the condescension on his face when he said it and the dismissiveness in his voice," Artur Davis recalled. "It was a verbal pat on the head."

In March, shaken by the persistent controversy over comments pulled from the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an icon in Chicago's black community and Obama's former pastor, Obama gave his now famous speech on race. It was aimed, for the most part, at reassuring white voters over the Wright controversy, but it also marked the first time that he publicly addressed the generational divide his own campaign had exposed among black Americans. "For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation," Obama said, "the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and bitterness of those years. . . . At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines or to make up for a politician's own failings." Some older black politicians may have recognized themselves in Obama's subtle criticism, but those I spoke to said they took pride in seeing a black candidate articulate their experience to white America.

A lot of black incumbents who supported Clinton now find themselves trying to explain how they ended up so disconnected from their constituents, and many are preparing for their strongest primary challenges in years. (In a primary last month, John Lewis, who had run unopposed since 1992, had to beat not one but two primary opponents, including a 31-year-old minister named Markel Hutchins who designed his campaign to look just like Obama's, right down to renting the same office space and using a red, white and blue logo in the shape of an "O.") So far, incumbents facing insurrection over their endorsements of Clinton have easily dispatched their challengers, leading to a collective exhalation inside the black caucus in Washington. But then, as Jesse Jackson Jr. tried to remind his colleagues, the history of black politics is that such challengers are often heard from again.

On the first Tuesday in July, I traveled to Philadelphia, the site of Obama's landmark speech on race, to see the city's mayor, Michael Nutter. Known as a reformer during a 14-year stint on the City Council, Nutter played a central and intriguing role in this year's presidential contest, emerging as the black face of Hillary Clinton's campaign in Pennsylvania at a time when she desperately needed - and got - a solid victory in the state. Nutter certainly wasn't the only visible black politician to campaign for Clinton deep into the primary season, but he was, in some ways, the least likely. Nutter is only four years older than Obama, Ivy League-educated, bookish and doggedly unemotional. He is, in short, the very prototype of the new generation of black political stars. But unlike Cory Booker or Artur Davis or Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, Nutter sided with Clinton, and he enthusiastically campaigned for her.

I was curious to know whether Nutter, who was elected to a four-year term just last fall, was bracing for the consequences of that decision. About 9 of every 10 black voters in Philadelphia pulled the lever for Obama, according to exit polls, and I heard at least one black Obama backer in Washington vow to make Nutter pay for his apostasy. On the day that I visited him at City Hall, his aides had been reviewing the video of a sermon from last fall in which a prominent black minister in the city suggested that Nutter might have a "white agenda."

It was late in the day when Nutter and I sat down at a long conference table in his office, accompanied by the sounds of subway trains rumbling underneath and R & B music piped in from mounted speakers. He told me that he had made his decision methodically and had felt no pressure at all from his constituents.

Nutter said he sat down with both Clinton and Obama after his election as mayor and quizzed them about urban issues like housing, education and transportation. Race, he said, hadn't entered into this thinking. He understood, he said, why the prospect of a black president after hundreds of years of discrimination was "powerful stuff" for a lot of his constituents, but he had a greater responsibility, and that was to run the nation's sixth-largest city. "In the context of what I do for a living, I've not figured out a black or white way to fill a pothole," he said, in a way that made me think he had said this many times before. Nutter was a delegate for Bill Clinton way back in 1992, and he said that the former first lady had shown a "depth of understanding" of what cities like Philadelphia were facing. It probably didn't hurt that Obama endorsed one of Nutter's opponents in last year's mayoral primary, either.

Nutter said he wasn't bothered by comments that the Clintons or their surrogates made during the campaign that had so incensed other black officials. "I think there was a lot of sensitivity, some warranted and some unwarranted," he said. "It's based on your life experience, and it's generational. You know, if you have a sore on your arm, you don't necessarily have to touch the sore to feel the pain. You can touch another part of your arm. You've still got a certain sensitivity to it. So if race is the sensitive thing, then anything that even gets close to it - sounds like it, looks like it, feels like it - is it."

I asked Nutter if, during his private conversations with Obama early in the campaign, the subject of race and the historic nature of his candidacy came up. He stared at me for a moment. "Um, I knew he was black," he said finally. "I'd really kind of picked up on that."

Later, when I mentioned that it could be hard for a white journalist to understand all of the nuances of race, he looked over at his press secretary, who is black, and interrupted me. "He's not black?" Nutter deadpanned, motioning back at me. "You guys told me it was a skin condition. I thought I was talking to a brother." Nutter is known to have a dry sense of humor, but I also had the sense that he was tweaking me in these moments, watching with some amusement as I tried to navigate subjects that white and black Americans rarely discuss together. He seemed to think I was oddly preoccupied with race.

In fact, Nutter seemed puzzled by the very notion that he should be expected to support a candidate just because they both had dark skin. "Look, I never asked anybody to be for me because I was black," he said. "I asked people to be for me because I thought I was the best candidate when I ran for City Council and when I ran for mayor. I'm proud of the votes I received. I'm proud I received the votes of the majority of the African-American community and the majority of the vote from the white community. But I never asked anybody to give me anything because I was black. I asked people to give me a chance because I thought I was the best."

For most black Americans, Obama's candidacy represented a kind of racial milestone, the natural next phase of a 50-year movement. But for Michael Nutter, the reverse was also true: not supporting Obama's candidacy marked a kind of progress, too. The movement, after all, was about the freedom to choose your own candidate, white or black. In a sense, you could argue that it was Nutter - and not those black politicians who embraced Obama because they so closely identified with his racial experience - who represented the truest embodiment of Obama-ism. Here, perhaps, was a genuine postracial politician, even if that meant being, as John Lewis put it, on the wrong side of history.

I asked Nutter if he found it insulting to have me come barging into his office, demanding to know why he didn't pick the black guy.

"It's not insulting," he answered. "It's presumptuous. It demonstrates a continuation of this notion that the African-American community, unlike any other, is completely monolithic, that everyone in the African-American community does the same thing in lockstep, in contrast to any other group. I mean, I don't remember seeing John Kerry on TV and anybody saying to him, 'I can't believe you're not for Hillary Clinton.' Why?"

It's inspiring to hear Michael Nutter say that governing a city isn't about race, that there's no black or white way to fill a pothole. And yet, it's also true that in any given American city there are likely to be more potholes in black neighborhoods than in white ones - along with more violence, more unemployment and more illiteracy. Having grown up in West Philadelphia, Nutter knows well that while the decisions he makes as a mayor have no racial antecedents, rarely do they affect the races equally. "The challenge there is never forgetting where you came from," he told me. "So, yes, I am mayor of all Philadelphia, but I am quite well aware of, and raise on a regular basis, the fact that the majority of people who are killed in Philadelphia are African-American, that the overwhelming majority of people who have health-care challenges are African-American, that education has tremendous disparity gaps. Unemployment, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, housing - all affect the African-American community at a disproportionate level as opposed to everyone else."

In this way, post-Black Power politicians like Nutter and Booker embody the principal duality of modern black America. On one hand, they are the most visible examples of the highly educated, entrepreneurial and growing black middle class that cultural markers like "The Cosby Show" first introduced to white Americans in the 1980s. According to an analysis by Pew's Economic Mobility Project, almost 37 percent of black families fell into one of the three top income quintiles in 2005, compared with 23 percent in 1973. At the same time, though, these black leaders are constantly confronted in their own cities and districts by blighted neighborhoods that are predominately black, places where poverty collects like standing water, breeding a host of social contagions.

That both of these trend lines can exist at once poses some difficult questions for black leaders and institutions. Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, the evils and objectives were relatively clear: there were discriminatory laws in place that denied black Americans their rights as citizens, and the goal was to get those laws repealed and to pass more progressive federal legislation at the same time. You marched and you rallied and - if you had the bravery of a James Clyburn or a John Lewis - you endured blows to the head and to the spirit, and eventually the barriers started to fall. Things become more complicated, and more confounding, however, when those legal barriers no longer exist and when millions of black Americans are catapulting themselves to success. Now the inequities in the society are subtler - inferior schools, an absence of employers, a dearth of affordable housing - and the remedies more elusive.

This confusion over the direction of the movement has all but immobilized the nation's premier civil rights group, the N.A.A.C.P. Synonymous with the long journey toward racial equality since its founding by W. E. B. Du Bois and others in 1909, the organization has, in recent years, lost much of its cachet with younger black Americans. In 2005, the N.A.A.C.P.'s unwieldy 64-member board hired Bruce Gordon, a former Verizon executive, to retool the organization. Gordon's premise was that civil rights was no longer simply about protesting discrimination - that African-Americans were now stymied not only by institutional barriers but also by conditions in their communities. He proposed that a new N.A.A.C.P step into this breach, organizing services that might include SAT prep classes or training for new parents. He also created a new class of online members who didn't have to pay any dues, adding more than 100,000 members to a group whose paying membership had declined, in Gordon's estimate, to under 300,000.

Gordon's agenda was always controversial among the N.A.A.C.P.'s board members ("Most of them are older than me," the 62-year-old Gordon told me), and after a little more than 19 months in the job, Gordon resigned. In May, after a highly contentious process that divided the board once again, the N.A.A.C.P. hired the youngest president in its history, 35-year-old Benjamin Todd Jealous, the chosen candidate of Julian Bond, the civil rights leader and the N.A.A.C.P.'s board chairman.

You might expect Jealous, a native of mostly white Monterey County, Calif., and a Rhodes scholar, to have shared the racial experience of other emerging black leaders. But generational lines are rarely that neatly drawn, and when we met for breakfast on Independence Day, I was surprised to find that Jealous spoke about race not like Booker or Nutter but much like his heroes of an earlier era. The N.A.A.C.P.'s main job, he told me, was to be the place where African-Americans could turn when institutional racism assaulted their communities. He mentioned the racially charged arrests of six black teenagers in Jena, La., in 2006, as well as the suspicious death, just a few days earlier, of an accused cop killer in his suburban Maryland jail cell.

"It's still a human rights struggle," Jealous told me. "This isn't a struggle that began in the 1930s or 1960s. It's a struggle that began in 1620. It's a struggle against slavery and its children."

Jealous's main difficulty in rejuvenating the N.A.A.C.P., though, may have less to do with the racist power structure than with a new class of black competitors online. And in this way, what's happening among the black grass roots mirrors what's been happening in the Democratic Party over the last several years, as loyalty to institutions and leaders has given way to a noisy conversation about how to better hold them accountable. A new generation of black activists is now focused on reforming institutions, namely the Congressional Black Caucus and the N.A.A.C.P., that they say have become too mired in the past and too removed from their constituents. And as in the rest of the political world, this rebellion is happening on the Internet, driven by ordinary Americans with laptops and a surprising amount of free time.

"The African-American voting population is very much online," Cheryl Contee, who in 2006 helped found the blog Jack and Jill Politics, told me. Contee, who is an owner of a digital consulting business, blogs under the pseudonym Jill Tubman, and hers is one of a number of sites that have emerged in just the last year as part of what's often called the "Afrosphere." "One of the things I talk to clients about is that the digital divide has changed," Contee said. "It's no longer along racial lines like it was in 1996 and 2000. Now it's more economic and educational." In other words, after lagging for a time, college-educated African-Americans are now organizing online in the same way as their mostly white counterparts at Daily Kos and MoveOn.org started doing several years ago.

One of most vibrant voices in this debate belongs to Color of Change, a Web site designed to replicate the MoveOn model among black Web surfers. Two Bay Area activists, Van Jones and James Rucker, founded Color of Change in 2005, a week after the images of devastated black neighborhoods began streaming back from New Orleans. The group now boasts about 425,000 members, about half of whom are white. The bulk of the membership is between the ages of 35 and 55 and probably falls into the categories of middle class or affluent - in other words, the very people who were once the N.A.A.C.P.'s base of support. Those members pay no dues but contributed about $250,000 during a three-month period in 2007 to pay the legal fees of the defendants in Jena.

As in the liberal online community at large, there is not a lot of ideological coherence among the emerging "black roots." There is no clear action plan for how to bridge the divide between middle-class black families and the millions left behind, aside from the same basic antiwar, anticorporate ethos that permeates the rest of the digital left. But there is a strong sense that the leaders of the civil rights generation need some kind of retirement plan, and soon. "Victims don't make things happen," says Rucker, who previously worked for MoveOn. "Things are changing from where they were 30 years ago. The fights are changing. And you have an infrastructure that's not producing results. Look at the incarceration rates, the difference between whites and blacks. What are the old organizations accomplishing?"

Most of all, the black roots make it clear to elected officials and civil rights advocates that being black doesn't, by itself, make you a leader. Online activists have attacked the Congressional Black Caucus for, among other things, standing by William Jefferson, the black representative accused of stuffing a freezer with cash bribes. They have harshly criticized several caucus members, some for having endorsed Clinton and others, like Artur Davis, for not being sufficiently liberal. Some bloggers went after the Rev. Al Sharpton and the N.A.A.C.P. for reflexively coming to the defense of four black teenagers in West Palm Beach who were charged with taking part in an unusually horrific rape of a mother and her 12-year-old son. (Sharpton and the local N.A.A.C.P. claimed that the boys were being treated differently from accused white rapists in a separate case, who were freed on bail.) Color of Change claims to have raised more than $10,000 and some 50 volunteers for Donna Edwards's successful Web-supported primary campaign against Representative Albert Wynn, a black incumbent who voted for the Iraq war.

"There are some members who need to go or to update and be accountable," Rucker told me. "It's not about getting rid of the N.A.A.C.P. or our members of Congress. It's just wanting to be proud of our leaders."

For some black operatives in the Clinton orbit - people who have functioned, going back to Jesse Jackson's campaigns in the 1980s, as Democratic Washington's liaisons to black America - the fallout from an Obama victory would likely be profound. "Some of them will have to walk the plank," an Obama adviser told me bluntly. In their place, an Obama administration would empower a cadre of younger black advisers who would instantly become people to see in Washington's transactional culture. Chief among them is Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago real estate developer who is one of Barack and Michelle Obama's closest friends. "She's poised to be one of the most influential people in politics, and particularly among African-Americans in politics," Belcher told me. "She may be the next Vernon Jordan." In fact, the last time I saw Clyburn, he told me he had just spent two and a half hours at breakfast with Jarrett.

Then there are operatives like Belcher himself; Michael Strautmanis, Obama's former chief counsel and de facto younger brother, who first met Michelle Obama when he was working as a paralegal at her law firm; Matthew Nugen, a political aide who is Obama's point man for the Democratic convention; and Paul Brathwaite, a 37-year-old lobbyist who used to be the executive director of the black caucus and who might act as a bridge between black congressmen and an Obama White House.

Should they win in November, Obama and these new advisers will confront an unfamiliar conundrum in American politics, which is how to be president of the United States and, by default, the most powerful voice in black America at the same time. Several black operatives and politicians with whom I spoke worried, eloquently, that an Obama presidency might actually leave black Americans less well represented in Washington rather than more so - that, in fact, the end of black politics, if that is what we are witnessing, might also mean the precipitous decline of black influence.

The argument here is that a President Obama, closely watched for signs of parochialism or racial resentment, would have less maneuvering room to champion spending on the urban poor, say, or to challenge racial injustice. What's more, his very presence in the Rose Garden might undermine the already tenuous case for affirmative action in hiring and school admissions. Obama himself has offered only tepid support for a policy that surely helped enable him to reach this moment. In "The Audacity of Hope," he wrote: "Even as we continue to defend affirmative action as a useful, if limited, tool to expand opportunity to underrepresented minorities, we should consider spending a lot more of our political capital convincing America to make investments needed to ensure that all children perform at grade level and graduate from high school - a goal that, if met, would do more than affirmative action to help those black and Latino children who need it the most."

Then there are the issues that Ben Jealous and others might raise: black men incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white men, black joblessness more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans. Just talking about such disparities as systemic problems could be harder for an African-American president - for any African-American, really - than it was before. "If Obama is president, it will no longer be tenable to go to the white community and say you've been victimized," Artur Davis told me. "And I understand the poverty and the condition of black America and the 39 percent unemployment rate in some communities. I understand that. But if you go out to the country and say you've been victimized by the white community, while Barack Obama and Michelle and their kids are living in the White House, you will be shut off from having any influence."

As a candidate, Obama has outlined an agenda for "civil rights and criminal justice," aimed primarily at urban African-Americans. His platform includes refocusing the Justice Department on hate crimes, banning racial profiling by federal law-enforcement agencies and reforming mandatory minimum sentences (which disproportionately affect black men, especially those convicted on crack-cocaine charges). Obama's black advisers caution, however, that no one should expect him to behave like a civil rights leader, marching alongside Al Sharpton to protest the next Jena or putting black causes ahead of anyone else's. "It's a very interesting question, but as a black person, you should feel confident that he will focus on your injustices and know that all the other injustices in other communities affect you too," Valerie Jarrett told me. "There have been wounds in all the communities, not just in the black community. There are plenty of wounds to go around."

If there is any American who can offer a glimpse of what it would be like for Obama as president, it's probably Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. While most of the younger black politicians know one another only from the occasional encounter or phone call, Patrick and Obama shared a cup of coffee, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, in the mid-1990s and developed a close friendship. (The senator even borrowed some of Patrick's oratory during the primaries, which led the Clinton camp to charge plagiarism.) Patrick was Coca-Cola's general counsel and the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration before he became, in 2006, only the second black man to be elected governor in American history, following L. Douglas Wilder in Virginia in 1989.

When we talked recently, Patrick explained for me some of the inherent pressures that come with being a black executive in a state with a history of friction among the races. "You're constantly tested by a whole host of factors to see whether you're speaking for the entire Commonwealth or just for one community," Patrick told me. "I don't fit in any box, and I think that's what the electorate has had to learn about me."

Black ministers were slow to embrace Patrick after he supported gay marriage as a candidate and refused to back down. After a black child was shot and killed in Boston last year, Patrick told me, he sent a note to the family and prepared to attend the funeral service, but relatives held a news conference at which they criticized him for not coming by to pay his respects. (Patrick later grew close to the family.) I remarked that it was usually the city's mayor who was expected to comfort victims of urban crime.

"Yes, but it's not good enough for me to have the reaction that you just did, to say I'm the governor, not the mayor," Patrick told me. "They expect more." In other words, he was expected not only to be a governor but also to fill the traditional role of the black politician - that of spokesman, minister and conduit to the white establishment.

Patrick and I spoke just a week after Jesse Jackson was caught wishing Obama bodily harm. "You wouldn't believe how many times in the last few days people have stuck microphones in my face to ask my opinion about Jesse Jackson's comments," he said, sounding a little exasperated. He had declined to offer one. "I don't have to be the black oracle," Patrick told me. "All I have to be is as good a human being and as good a governor as I can be, and the rest will take care of itself." If Obama's day comes, he might want to think about borrowing those words too.

By Matt Bai, The New York Times, August 6, 2008

By Andrew Malcolm, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2008

Tracking the vice presidential sweepstakes is always an exercise in chasing ghosts, but perhaps never more so than in this year's campaign. Those who know what's going on generally don't talk and those who don't know often do, leaving hungry journalists to speculate with partial or perhaps even incorrect information about the state of play.

After all, this was to be the week that somebody picked a vice president -- or was that last week? That is what some of the tea leaves or misdirected signals seemed to suggest not that many days ago. But was it John McCain or Barack Obama who was going to make the early pick?

When Obama was overseas, the thinking was that McCain might have to move quickly on the vice presidency to grab the attention back from his rival. Instead the McCain camp decided to go on offense against Obama with a series of negative ads that changed the conversation about the campaign. There was also speculation while Obama was overseas that he might name his running mate when he returned. That, of course, didn't happen.

Lately there has been talk inside the McCain camp that Obama might pick his running mate soon to deflect attention away from all the attacks flying in his direction. Their thinking was that he needed to grab back some of the momentum for his campaign. That overlooked the reality that the presumptive Democratic nominee is getting ready to fly off to Hawaii for a vacation with his family (and trailing reporters). Leaving behind a newly-minted vice presidential running mate makes little sense.

Meanwhile it's not at all clear that anyone's timetable has truly changed, in part because the process of vetting and interviewing prospective candidates and then debating with advisers who the actual choice should be takes a considerable amount of time -- certainly more than the hurry-up world of 24/7 media and blogs assumes.

Obama now seems likely to make his selection when he returns from vacation, which would put it in the week before his convention. That is later by several weeks than John Kerry made his pick of John Edwards four years ago, but roughly the same timing as in 1992 when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore a week before his convention.

If that seems the most logical timing for Obama, then McCain's choices are clear: preempt Obama and move while Obama is away or wait until Obama has made his selection and counter with full knowledge of what his opponent has done.

Moving sooner of course risks getting caught up in the Olympics, which some strategists believe will overshadow everything else that may be happening in the world. That is a dubious assumption. While the summer games will draw enormous attention, it's hard to believe that the selection of a vice presidential running mate by either candidate will not punch through into public consciousness. Will CNN and MSNBC and Fox and the networks not carrying the games (CBS and ABC) -- let alone the worlds of print and internet journalism--not jump on the vice presidential story?

One of the savviest Republicans in the country was speculating about vice presidential matters a few weeks ago. He was asked whom McCain should pick. "I have a recommendation but it's not of a person and I shared this with them back in March," he said. "Wait till the Democrat convention is over and see who they pick...You'll have more information."

Speculation about who is in the running may be generally accurate, in part because it is in the interest of the campaigns to have most of those on their shortlists the topic of conversation. That is part of the vetting process. That still leaves open the possibility for surprise, although a total shock is not necessarily in the best interest of the candidate unless the pick is a big and instantly accepted person -- someone like Al Gore for Obama.

This week two new names popped up into public view: Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.). How serious they may be under consideration is not really known. McCain likes Cantor. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks highly of Edwards. But reaching for a House member is a stretch for either candidate, particularly for Obama.

The focus remains on a handful of prospective picks. For McCain they include former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, former Ohio congressman Rob Portman, South Dakota Sen. John Thune and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. For Obama they include Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and perhaps a few others. Hillary Clinton has always been a long shot, but Obama may be hard pressed to think of someone better qualified.

Some of these prospective candidates are going through a public tryout. Kaine did a series of interviews and appearances after my colleagues Michael Shear and Shailagh Murray reported last week that he had turned over financial and other records to the campaign. Pawlenty will be in Washington on Wednesday to talk about the future of the Republican Party, which he says should be more about Sam's Club and less about the country club.

If Obama is truly worried about his foreign policy credentials, he would pick Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But those who know Obama best believe he is less likely to try to deal with a perceived weakness through a vice presidential selection. Rather, they say, he is more inclined to attack weaknesses head on. That was the purpose of his foreign trip, after all.

McCain may be more likely to look to someone younger to offset concerns about his age, and his assumed list of possible choices includes several who would meet that test. Picking someone to shore up his perceived weakness on economic issues -- there has been talk of various people from the business world -- would risk having to select someone who has little political experience. That would violate the first rule of this process: first, do no harm.

This summer parlor game will soon come to an end, after two final media frenzies as the selections near. Meanwhile, the speculation is entertaining for sure and sometimes accurate. But the process is anything but transparent and that too is worth keeping in mind.

By Dan Balz, The Washington Post, August 5, 2008

AUSTIN - Almost 20 percent of women who voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton said they were now John McCain supporters, but Barack Obama was still leading in a poll of female voters.

The Lifetime Network national poll showed that women were coalescing around their candidates but that neither had sealed the deal by breaking the 50 percent mark: Mr. Obama led Mr. McCain 49-38 percent.

"Women will elect the next president," said pollster Celinda Lake, referring to the largest voting bloc in presidential elections. In most primary states, women were 55 percent or more of the electorate.

Ms. Lake said that the election could hinge on whether Mr. Obama can consolidate female supporters. She said President Bush used his much stronger support among men to overcome John Kerry's narrow lead among women.

Most women said having a female on the ticket doesn't matter, even though almost half of those who supported Mrs. Clinton said they would be more likely to vote for Mr. Obama if he picked a female running mate.

Ms. Lake said that the 18 percent of women who voted for Mrs. Clinton and now favored Mr. McCain will probably decline as Mrs. Clinton actively campaigns for Mr. Obama.

Among married and older women - the two most reliable voting groups - Mr. Obama has some reason to hope. Married women, who most often tend to be Republican, favored Mr. Obama 44-41 percent. Even though Mr. Obama trailed Mr. McCain among women 65 and older 46-37 percent, he led every other age group.

The poll findings mirrored those also released Tuesday by AP-Ipsos, in which Mr. Obama was leading by 13 points among women.

The Lifetime poll of 500 women nationwide who voted in primaries was conducted July 25-29 and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

By CHRISTY HOPPE, The Dallas Morning News, August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON - Although Barack Obama had trouble winning women's votes in his primary battles against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee has taken a commanding lead over Republican John McCain among women in the general election campaign for the White House, a national poll released Tuesday showed.

The poll, commissioned by Lifetime Network as part of its "Every Woman Counts" campaign to engage women in the presidential campaign, showed that 49 percent of women prefer Obama as president and 38 percent favor McCain, with 10 percent undecided.

Obama and McCain have both targeted women voters in the wake of Hillary Clinton's historic but unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. And while Obama came up short against Clinton among women voters in the primaries, 76 percent of those who voted for Clinton supported him in the Lifetime Network poll. Even so, 18 percent of Clinton's primary supporters said they support McCain.

Despite Obama's 11 percentage point lead among women, he still falls short of a majority and, as a result, "the race for women is not decided yet," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who conducted the survey along with Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster. The two discussed their findings with reporters at a news conference.

"Women like Obama primarily for his personal attributes," said Lake.

"There's no question that Senator Obama wins the likability contest," Conway added, noting, for example, that 51 percent of women would rather carpool with Obama, 20 percentage points higher than those who would prefer McCain. Similarly, 49 percent would prefer to vacation with the Obamas, 26 percent with the McCains.

But Conway also suggested that the 18 percent of former Clinton supporters who now support McCain are doing so for some of the same reasons that they supported Clinton in the Democratic primaries - mostly, experience in foreign policy matters as well as domestic issues.

The issues of top concern to women are the economy (41 percent), the war in Iraq (24 percent), health care and prescription drugs (23 percent) and education (17 percent). Forty-seven percent said they want to hear the candidates talk more about the economy in the coming months.

Sixty-nine percent of those polled agreed that Clinton's campaign for president this year will help future female presidential candidates, and the same percent believe she will run for president again in the future. But 57 percent said Clinton herself would never become president. Still, 44 percent said that because of Clinton's groundbreaking campaign - she won 23 primaries or caucuses - a woman would become president within the next eight years.

"Mrs. Clinton is credited with really paving the way for an eventual female president of the United States," said Conway.

But most of the women polled said that choosing a female running mate would make no difference in their votes this fall. Five-five percent said it doesn't matter if Obama chooses a woman as his vice presidential nominee, and 62 percent said the same for McCain.

Asked what the undoing of Clinton's campaign was, only 21 percent said she lost "because she is a woman," while 31 percent blamed the loss on "who she is and what she stands for" and 34 percent said she fell short against Obama because of "the kind of campaign she ran."

The poll results were based on interviews with 500 women across the country on July 25-29. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Lifetime's nonpartisan "Every Woman Counts" campaign began in 1992 in an attempt to get candidates to focus on issues of importance to women, to motivate women to register and vote and to encourage women to run for public office. The campaign includes an 11-city bus tour this summer, including stops at the party conventions in Denver and St. Paul, and an online program in which women are encouraged to upload "If I were president" videos explaining what they would do in the Oval Office.

By Scott Shepard, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 5, 2008

Right-wing commentators are feigning outrage over Ludacris's sexist rap lyrics in order to tarnish Barack Obama's campaign

Just when you thought the smearing of Barack Obama couldn't get any more ridiculous (I'm refusing to make "ludicrous" puns in this article), the presidential candidate's campaign sends out an official statement about a hip-hop song. Yep, instead of further outlining his economic plans in a time of downturn, or discussing the minutiae of foreign policy issues, the Obama campaign team was drafting an official message last week condemning the single Politics As Usual (Obama Is Here), in which rapper Ludacris shares with us, among other insights: "Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant."

Not that I blame the Obama camp for feeling they had to issue a statement of condemnation. It should go without saying that calling Clinton a "bitch" is both sexist and stupid. And had Obama's campaign not distanced itself from it quickly, the media furore would no doubt have escalated, as it did when Obama was slow to draw a firm line between his own views and those of the Rev Jeremiah Wright. But the fact that Obama's campaign team instinctively knew it would have to address the issue (or, rather, the distinct non-issue) of what Ludacris happens to think, shows how much Obama has been cornered by right-wing attempts to sabotage his campaign.

Much has been made by both Ludacris and conservative commentators of the fact that Obama previously praised the rapper as a great businessman, and said that Ludacris was on his iPod. In contrast, the statement sent by Bill Burton, Obama's spokesperson, was clear that "while Ludacris is a talented individual, he should be ashamed of his lyrics". So, does this mean that, like many of us, Obama enjoys listening to hip-hop without agreeing with every line in every song? No, apparently, it means he is in league with "radicals". Sean Hannity of Fox News argued last week that Politics As Usual is nothing less than proof of Obama's "radical associations", because he is endorsed by a "controversial rapper" like Ludacris.

How the conservative commentator managed to bake such a perfect pineapple upside-down cake of logical fallacies - Ludacris is a radical, now, as opposed to a bit of a muppet? And Obama is linked to said radical because he has Ludacris on his iPod? - really deserves a separate article on each little morsel of circular thinking and ad hominem attacks. Hannity even advanced the argument that, by previously saying he listens to Ludacris, but now distancing himself from the song, Obama is showing signs that he flip-flops on issues. (Honestly).

But what really needs unpacking is the sudden objection to calling Clinton a "bitch" by the very figures who so recently, and so flagrantly, used and manipulated sexist attitudes to damage her presidential bid. Now, with Clinton out of the game, a rapper who endorses Obama using the same sexist language is met with outrage and disdain by Hannity. It's a selective and manipulative faux-sensitivity to misogyny that trumps even Laura Bush's expedient 2001 realisation that maybe the Taliban weren't very nice chaps when it came to the treatment of women.

Because, as sexist as it is to call Clinton a "bitch", this isn't really about misogyny so much as it's about race. Or rather, how pundits like Hannity feign outrage at misogynistic remarks when it helps them portray another group as dangerous. In generating a link between Obama's views and the use of the word "bitch", conservatives are implicitly drawing upon the racist fear of the threat of black men to white women. 'They call women bitches', 'They show women no respect' is the sentiment behind the conservative analysis of Politics As Usual, completely ignoring the fact that the most sexist diatribes against Clinton didn't come from hip-hop stars but from white Republicans and media figures.

It's very telling that, second in line to the faux-horror at Ludacris' use of the b-word, is conservative outrage at the line in Politics As Usual that predicts Obama will "paint the White House black". As Hannity played that part of the song on his show, you could almost hear the triumphal "I told you so". Bay Buchanan, a former Romney adviser, told Hannity that the Ludacris track was proof that Obama "appreciates and enjoys a culture that is very much opposed to that which middle America appreciates", a moment of comprehensive amnesia that allowed her to forget not only the popularity of hip-hop among white surburbanites, but also the fact the Obama campaign had already condemned the rap.

By inflating the most tenuous of links between Obama's views and Ludacris's opinions (opinions expressed, I have to say again, in a hip-hop single. In a song), conservative commentators are gambling on the fact that white America is still too racist to vote for Obama, so long as they can out Obama as the secret extremist he surely must be - either through his "terrorist fist bumps" or with supposed evidence of his secret desire to "paint the White House black".

The Catch-22 Obama is caught in by these smears has been analysed in much greater depth elsewhere. But, in rough shorthand: knowing that acknowledging his experience as a black man in America will be spun by conservatives to show Obama is somehow playing the race card, Obama is forced to consciously de-emphasise his race, which leads in turn to Jesse Jackson (who gets a frankly confusing namecheck in Politics As Usual) and others criticising Obama for betraying or talking down to black people. For all his faults, it remains impressive that Obama has managed to navigate such an impossible bind without more bumps.

And, post-Wright, the double standard (that the onus is on Obama, but not John McCain, to prove he does not support the views of all those who support him) is so ingrained that the Obama camp now pre-empts it. The statement condemning Politics As Usual was issued before the media storm had time to really kick off. But why should Obama have to officially distance himself from individuals like Ludacris who both endorse him and happen to hold a party-mix bag of prejudices, dumb ideas and skewed world views? Does McCain get called upon by the mainstream media to distance himself from the neo-Nazis and other self-confessed racists lurking in the seedy corners of the internet, who are trying right now to drum up support for his campaign?

If people cannot grasp the difference between Obama-supporters' views, and Obama's own views, then I for one am worried. Did I miss the memo announcing that Ludacris was Obama's new spokesperson? Do people think Obama will, literally, "paint the White House black" if elected, unless he swiftly issues a statement denying these proposed renovation plans to the West Wing?

Ludacris calling Clinton a "bitch" is clearly misogynistic and offensive. I'm not going down the dodgy, patronising route that says sexism is any less offensive when it comes from the hip-hop community. But what Ludacris said isn't any more sexist than the jokes, innuendos and outright statements that regularly came out of the mouths of white commentators in a shameless attempt to smear Clinton's presidential campaign earlier this year.

What's really offensive, to people who care about women's rights, is how right-wing commentators have suddenly turned to the guise of feminist arguments to tarnish Obama's campaign because an individual who likes him also likes the word "bitch". And what's really offensive, to people who care about democracy, is how the Obama camp has been bullied into the position of having to issue a statement about a song.

By Heather McRobie, The Guardian, August 05 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to campaign for Barack Obama in Nevada and Florida this month, events expected to be her first solo campaign appearances for Obama since she lost the Democratic nomination contest.

The Obama campaign said Tuesday that Clinton will host rallies and voter registration events this Friday in Las Vegas and again in south Florida on Aug. 21.

In June, Clinton and Obama appeared together in Unity, N.H., in a symbolic event to push for party unity after their long and often bitter primary battle. Both also have been helping each other raise money, in Clinton's case to retire her own hefty campaign debt.

The announcement came a day after former President Clinton defended his role in the hard-fought Democratic primary. He said that while he may have some regrets, he was not a racist and had never attacked Obama personally.

"There are things that I wish I'd urged her to do. Things I wish I'd said. Things I wish I hadn't said," the former president told ABC News.

Democrats hope the Clintons and Obama can persuade supporters on both sides to put aside any bad feelings and come together to defeat Republican Sen. John McCain this fall.

Sen. Clinton is scheduled to deliver a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver later this month, but her husband's role there is still unclear.

Sen. Clinton conceded to Obama in early June after the primaries ended and he'd locked up sufficient convention delegates to win nomination.

Since then, she has been slowly re-injecting herself into the New York political scene from which she's been largely absent for more than a year. On Monday night, she was the guest of honor at a party thrown by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

At the party, Clinton thanked constituents for putting their demands on hold for 18 months while she campaigned for president.

"Now the hold is off, and I am open for business, 100 percent of the time and really looking forward to working with you on behalf of this city and state that we love," Clinton said.

By Sara Kugler, Associated Press, August 5, 2008

Amid speculation about possible vice presidential nominees, an interesting question remains unasked: Why not just let the conventions decide? This hasn't happened since the Democratic convention of 1956, but it may be the time to try that approach again.

First, consider the matter from the Democrats' standpoint. Picking a vice president in order to "balance" the ticket is always problematic, but especially so in Barack Obama's case. Because Obama achieved the presidential nomination with no defined constituency, there is no obvious imbalance to rectify. Should he seek a centrist to counterbalance his own liberal persona? Should he choose a military man, like Sen. Jack Reed, to offset the perception that he is too idealistic? These murky questions can be addressed more convincingly by convention delegates than by the candidate's inner circle.

Of course, there is also pressure to select the runner-up. Obama may not relish sharing the campaign trail with Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he does relish winning, and so might accept Clinton in the same spirit that John F. Kennedy accepted Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960. If that choice were made on the convention floor, at least it would appear less cynical.

John McCain confronts similar problems in selecting a running mate. McCain was an unusual choice for Republicans, who seldom pick a "maverick." Now, the smart money advises selecting a running mate whose conservative credentials are impeccable. Good luck with that! The party of Ronald Reagan may believe there is a definable core to its conservative philosophy, but in 2008, the stubborn facts tell another story.

Conservatives have been scouring the list of Southern governors for a candidate, and one name that pops up is Florida's Charlie Crist. But Crist's conservatism hasn't stopped him from seeking a vastly expanded federal role in insuring against Florida's hurricane losses. Mitt Romney is another vice presidential possibility whose conservative credentials are debatable. On the key cultural issue of abortion, he remains especially suspect, and on health insurance, Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, backed one of the country's most liberal programs. In short, if McCain conflates the selection of a running mate with the task of defining conservatism, circa 2008, he sets himself quite a mission. It's surely better to let the convention handle that thankless job.

Beyond the special problems that McCain and Obama face in choosing running mates this year, history shows that presidential nominees almost always make a hash of the job - even when their tickets win. Both Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush were urged to dump their vice presidents (Richard Nixon and Dan Quayle) the second time around. Bush's refusal may have cost him a second term. Although Eisenhower did win re-election, history proved the dump-Nixon camp right. In 1944, Democratic Party elders practically forced Franklin D. Roosevelt to dump the sitting vice president, Henry Wallace, in favor of Harry Truman. Good thing they did.

The list goes on. In 1980, Walter Mondale certainly didn't help Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. Mondale subsequently lost his own presidential race in a landslide. George McGovern's disastrous choice of Tom Eagleton killed what little chance his campaign ever had. Nixon's choice of Spiro Agnew was uniquely misbegotten: Many Nixon subordinates were convicted of crimes that involved the president, but Agnew bears the distinction of pleading no contest to a crime that had nothing to do with Nixon.

Ronald Reagan's choice of Bush Sr. set up Bush's election in 1988, at which point Bush began urging a "kinder, gentler America." Bush never was comfortable with Reaganism, and proved it. Did Al Gore help Bill Clinton, or the Democratic Party? Did Bob Dole's choice of Jack Kemp make much sense? Mondale wanted to be a trailblazer when he chose Geraldine Ferraro. Right, that's the same Ferraro who so embarrassed the Hillary Clinton campaign this year.

The vice presidency is the second highest office in the land. In a democracy, why not make nominations for that office with a semblance of democratic procedure? It may be idealistic to suppose that either candidate will alter tradition for that reason, but perhaps one will do so in his own self interest - or at least to add some drama to a dull convention.

By Steve Stein, San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 2008

Hillary Clinton supporters will march through Denver during the Democratic National Convention to show appreciation for the New York senator's historic primary run and urge the party to place her name in nomination.

The city issued a permit Tuesday to Colorado Women Count/Women Vote for a parade on Aug. 26 - the 88th anniversary of women's suffrage and the date Clinton is rumored to be speaking at the DNC.

The group also will team with 18 Million Voices, a national organization of Clinton supporters, for a rally in a yet-to-be-determined Denver park.

"We just want to celebrate Hillary's accomplishments and what she's done for the country as a whole and women in particular," said Katherine Vincent, 55, of Louisville, who is organizing the parade and rally.

Vincent is among those passionate followers who believe Clinton's delegates have a right to vote for her at the convention.

"That's why they were selected," she said. "We think it would actually bring the party together."

Nationwide, Clinton's staunchest supporters refer to themselves as "PUMAs," short for "Party Unity My A--."

They are raising money to pay for buses to Denver, and setting up a headquarters at The Broker restaurant downtown, where people can "check-in" when they arrive in town.

But the efforts to put Clinton's name to a vote may be meaningless. Clinton, who conceded to Sen. Barack Obama in June, must submit a request in writing to be nominated at the convention. According to published reports, Clinton has decided against doing so and has been urging her delegates to vote for Obama.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign said Clinton will campaign for the Illinois senator this month in Nevada and Florida.

Jenny Backus, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, said Clinton is working closely with the Obama camp, and will continue to be "a tremendous asset."

"Senator Clinton is going to play a critical role in the convention," Backus said.

Clinton is scheduled to speak at an Emily's List gala at the Sheraton Denver Hotel at 2 p.m. on Aug. 26. She will join Michelle Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the event, a celebration of women's suffrage.

Vincent said she is hopeful Clinton's schedule that day also will include a stop by the rally, which she says will not include any messages that are anti-Obama or pro-John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

"We're keeping it positive," she said. "It's a way of saying 'Thank you Hillary, we appreciate what you've done.' "

By Sara Burnett, Rocky Mountain News, August 6, 2008

(NEW YORK) After grinding through 18 months on the presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton was ready to let off some steam at a party in New York City tonight. Mayor Michael Bloomberg threw the "welcome back" celebration for the woman who is now readjusting to life as the junior senator from New York.

Chevy Chase may have been the professional comedian in attendance, but it was one of Sen. Clinton's jokes about Mayor Bloomberg 0 which had a particularly long setup - that had the crowd laughing the hardest.

"I was very touched by Mike's concern for me over these last months, every since the campaign ended, and you know I was really moved that he wanted to talk about the campaign," Clinton deadpanned. "What happened, how it happened, how you did it, what was the reaction that you got, what was effective and what wasn't effective, you know, what worked in advertising and in direct mail, and I mean he was so interested in me that I was just transformed."

The crowd roared with laughter as it became clear she was taking a goodhearted jab at the mayor's rumored presidential ambitions.

Almost all of New York's most prominent politicians were among the 300 or so people in attendance, including two former mayors (Ed Koch and David Dinkins), New York Senator Chuck Schumer, Governor David Patterson, Republican Representative, and even former Rudy Giuliani supporter Peter King. Legendary journalist Barbara Walters was also in attendance.

Clinton had the crowd in stitches when she related a story which demonstrated that Gov. Paterson, who is legally blind, is not afraid to laugh at himself.

"I just was in the middle of a conversation between David and Chuck," Clinton said. "And the governor said, 'We had dinner the other night.' And Chuck said, 'Yeah, I paid for it. You know, I left the check on the table for a long time.' And David said, 'I didn't see it.'"

Though she did dole out a long laundry list of thank you's to everyone who supported her presidential campaign, Clinton was brief in her reflections on her losing bid saying only, "I was disappointed by the outcome, but I am so privileged to have been able to do this, and it is a great country and what we need to do is start acting like Americans that can solve problems and do our best to make sure this country stays great and that's what I'm going to do in the Senate."

Clinton made sure to note that she was actively campaigning for Barack Obama and urged the attendees to join her "to make sure we can carry on this campaign and the causes and issues that are near and dear to us."




By Scott Conroy, CBS News, August 4, 2008

A Democrat in a conservative state, he has been Indiana's governor, U.S. senator and often mentioned as a vice-presidential pick.

After two terms as governor of Indiana (1989-96), Evan Bayh was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998, winning the seat once held by his father.

Birch Evans Bayh III was born the day after Christmas 1955 in Shirkieville, Ind., where his father, Birch Bayh II, was a member of the Indiana legislature.

Seven years later, Birch Bayh became a U.S. Senator and moved his family to Washington D.C. where Evan grew up. He was a serious student who seemed destined for a life in politics.

Bayh's mother, Marvella, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1971 and died April 24, 1979. He later said her death instilled in him a determination to make the most of his life.

Bayh was elected Indiana secretary of state in 1986 following a heated debate over whether he met the state's five-year residency requirement to be on the ballot. After just two years in that office he ran for, and was elected, governor. He was the first Democrat in 20 years to hold that office and -- at 33 -- the youngest governor in the U.S.

He was re-elected governor in 1992 with the highest percentage of the vote in a statewide election in modern Indiana history. By the end of his second term Bayh had an approval rating of nearly 80 percent.

Although consistently popular, Bayh was sometimes criticized for being overly cautious and not using his political capital to reach for higher goals. Bayh supporters say his administration met challenges such as the rising costs of Medicaid, the need for more prisons and getting Indiana through a recession without a tax hike, all while balancing the budget.

Bayh's second term expired at the end of 1996 and he became, briefly, a private citizen again. He bought a house in the Meridian-Kessler neighborhood not far from the governor's mansion and accepted a lecturing position at the Indiana University School of Business in Bloomington.

In 1995, he and his wife, Susan, became the parents of twin boys Nicholas Harrison and Birch Evans IV (Beau).

In 1998, Bayh was elected to the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by his father. Bayh defeated Paul Helmke with 64% of the vote, the largest victory margin ever by Democrat in a U.S. Senate race in Indiana. In 2004, he was re-elected, soundly defeating Republican challenger Marvin Scott.

When Bayh arrived in Washington in January 1999 one of his first tasks as a senator was to pass judgment on fellow Democrat Bill Clinton, who had been impeached by the House.

More conservative than his liberal father, the second Sen. Bayh established himself as a centrist who seeks common ground with Republicans. In the Senate, Bayh organized a group called the New Democrat Coalition, and in 2001 he became chairman of the influential Democratic Leadership Council.

In the presidential election of 2000 and 2004, Bayh was on the list of possible running mate for presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry and it was widely speculated that Bayh would one day make a run for president on his own.

A member of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, Bayh was co-sponsor of the resolution which authorized President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq in 2003.

On Dec. 3, 2006, Bayh announced on This Week With George Stephanopoulos that he would create a presidential exploratory committee as the next logical step in seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. But less than two weeks later, on Dec. 15, Bayh said he had decided not to seek the nomination after all.

After deciding not to run himself, Bayh was an early supporter of Hillary Clinton and campaigned with her. His help likely made the difference in her slim victory in the state, but even with that win she was unable to keep up with Barack Obama's delegate lead.

Although Bayh had been a Clinton supporter, his name again surfaced as a short-list contender to be Obama's running mate.

The Indianapolis Star, August 6, 2008

Committee Seats, Red-State Support Complement Obama

Officially, Barack Obama will deliver an energy-policy speech Wednesday to citizens in Elkhart, Ind. But the focus of the political chattering class will be on the man sitting shotgun at the event: Evan Bayh, the Indiana senator thought to be on the likely Democratic presidential nominee's short list of vice-presidential candidates.

The scion of a prominent Hoosier political family and a former two-term Democratic governor of a deep-red state, Sen. Bayh is viewed by many as an ideal complement to the Illinois senator, who has a charismatic stage presence but a short political résumé for a presidential candidate.

Understated in demeanor and rarely demonstrating a passion for showboat political issues, Sen. Bayh may lack flash. But he sits on the powerful Senate armed-services and intelligence committees, enjoys an easy rapport with Midwestern crossover conservatives and displays a fund-raising knack extending beyond his home constituency.

OpenSecrets.org, which tracks federal political donations, says Sen. Bayh has raised $10.9 million between 2003 and 2008, with 77% of his cash coming from out of state.

Sen. Bayh is also a known commodity. He was under consideration for the No. 2 job -- and presumably vetted for the position -- by the previous two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry. It was with Mr. Gore, one former Bayh aide said, that Sen. Bayh had his best shot of making the ticket.

The connection to Mr. Gore -- and by extension, to the Clintons -- provides another potential benefit of an Obama-Bayh matchup. Sen. Bayh has ties to former President Bill Clinton from when the two were governors. He sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee with Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose bruising primary battle with Sen. Obama continues to evoke hard feelings among her supporters and threatens party unity.

"Sitting next to someone on a Senate committee has sparked more than a few deep friendships," said Anita Dunn, a political adviser for Sen. Obama who served as an adviser to Sen. Bayh during his Senate campaigns.

An early Obama adherent, Ms. Dunn said she wasn't surprised when Sen. Bayh allied himself with Sen. Clinton, whom he described as having "a spine of steel." During the Indiana primary, he offered his own staff to help put her over the top in her race against Sen. Obama, who had a huge ground staff and an advantage in Indiana districts around Chicago, where he is well-known. "There's a Democratic political machine in Indiana -- it's called Evan Bayh," Ms. Dunn said.

The Indiana Democratic Party was in shambles when Sen. Bayh sought and won his first statewide office, secretary of state, in 1987. His father, Birch Bayh, a liberal Democrat and former U.S. senator, had been out of office since losing a re-election bid in 1980. Backers see kismet in the fact that Birch Bayh's campaign slogan when he ran for president in 1976 was "Change We Can Believe In." That is also Sen. Obama's slogan.

Birch Bayh was a darling of liberals, having been the chief architect of the Equal Rights Amendment, which failed to muster enough support to get ratified, and the 26th Amendment, which extended voting rights to 18-year-olds. He also championed Title IX, landmark legislation that included forcing equal opportunity in school athletics for females.

Evan Bayh, by contrast, voted in favor of a failed amendment that would have banned flag-burning and legislation that would have kicked Russia out of the Group of Eight leading economic nations. What upset many liberals the most was his vote to authorize the Iraq invasion and his subsequent co-chairmanship, with likely Republican presidential nominee John McCain, of the Iraq Liberation Committee, a neoconservative group that pushed hard for war.

Sen. Bayh now says he regrets his early support of the Iraq war and has no recollection of the committee. "I don't remember any meetings, any conversations, any anything," Sen. Bayh said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "Obviously my name was linked to it, but other than that there's nothing that can be said."

Supporters note that his overall record hews closely to the Democratic line and sometimes goes beyond it, such as when he voted against the confirmation of conservative Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Sen. Bayh made perhaps his biggest political impression as governor. He developed a reputation as a fiscal conservative, ushering through the biggest tax cut in recent state history and passing what he considers the signal legislation of his career: a bill that extends free tuition to grade-school students who pledge to stay out of trouble. The initiative passed over the objections of a Republican-dominated statehouse.

"He was a governor who tried to not ruffle feathers," said Murray Clark, chairman of Indiana's Republican Party. "It's helped him; he's made very few enemies."

What few political enemies Sen. Bayh does have cast him in terms that hark back to the latest Democratic vice president, Mr. Gore, often branded an automaton by detractors. Sen. Bayh's critics include Paul Helmke, a former mayor of Fort Wayne who ran unsuccessfully against him for a Senate seat in 1998.

"As a debater, I felt like I was in the 'Twilight Zone' show. You want to reach over and slit the arm to see if there's flesh and blood or just wires," said Mr. Helmke, who is now the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "One of my big accomplishments was at one point [in the debate], he started to sweat."

Ms. Dunn, the current Obama adviser, dismisses such criticism. "Is it boring to win five times as a Democrat in a state that's overwhelmingly Republican?" Ms. Dunn asked. "Obviously, the people of Indiana think there's something exciting about him."

A person on Sen. Obama's staff has said no vice-presidential announcement will come Wednesday in Indiana. Sen. Obama has told reporters not to put too much stock in rumors about candidates.

By CHRISTOPHER COOPER and DOUGLAS BELKIN, The Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2008

Obama has all the momentum that a fawning press and left leaning acolytes can provide.

This presidential election should be a slam dunk for the Democrat presidential candidate regardless of the candidate. The blame for mistakes in Iraq, the slumping economy, immigration chaos, and the rise of gasoline prices have been heaped on President Bush. Fair or not, these issues are always blamed on the sitting administration.

The Democrats have tried to paint John McCain as a continuation of administration policies. White House insiders probably laugh at the suggestion that McCain has been a reliable ally of the administration. But I digress. Despite all the factors in favor of any Democrat candidate, I predict that Barack Obama will lose the presidential election. There are many reasons why I think Obama will lose but here are a few that I believe will tilt the election.

Obama has all the momentum that a fawning press and left leaning acolytes can provide. The public has suffered through the swooning groupies and pundits claiming to have chills running up their leg when Obama spoke. Now we are within the last 100 days and the voters will start to pay attention to the seriousness of the election. There won't be any more swooning or claims of chills running up legs, and without that hype, the Obama campaign will be forced to depend on substance - which he has not shown.

The Democrats had a dozen or more candidates that began the nomination process. Without a doubt, the person with the least qualifications was Barack Obama. Pick any of the potential Democrat candidates and every one of them had more qualifications than Obama. Obama accomplished nothing in his short time in the Illinois Senate and nothing in the U.S. Senate in the 140 days before he started his presidential election bid. Hillary pointed to Obama's lack of experience several times but the message never resonated. Obama's claim to fame was his time as a 'community organizer'. According to The Nation magazine, "Obama worked in the organizing tradition of (noted leftist) Saul Alinsky...". If working as a 'community organizer' was a resume enhancer for president, Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been elected president. But Obama was the better orator and mesmerized the Democrat primary voters. He made vacuous promises of change to the fawning masses, and he sounded good doing it. But without a teleprompter and a prepared speech he is less than impressive.

Obama has promised change. But his supporters never realized that he meant change in policy positions. His flip flops make a fish out of water look like a statue. Like John Kerry, Obama was against something before he was for it. For example: campaign financing, drilling offshore, troop withdrawal from Iraq, NAFTA, wiretaps, banning handguns, social security reform and campaign debates.

As the election draws near I believe that there will be 'Candidate Remorse' within the Democrat electorate. The electorate will recognize that Obama is a little more than a glib empty suit and that even Hillary would have been a better candidate to represent the Democrats. Hillary defeated Obama in the states that will be needed to become president. Obama won lesser states and amassed a delegate lead through the tainted caucus process. Now, Democratic Party insiders recognize the flaws in the caucus process. But the damage is done and Obama will be their candidate. 'Candidate Remorse' could materialize in low turnout for Obama or vote for a third party candidate.

You can't blame someone for the actions of people they know or associate with, but you can question someone's judgment for associating with them. Throughout his life Obama has sought out and associated with dubious characters. Like known terrorists, Weather Underground members (Ayres and Dohrn), crazy racist preachers (Wright and Pfleger), convicted criminals (Rezko), and known Socialists (Davis). Just imagine the field day the media would have if John McCain was buddies with the Unibomber, Timothy McVeigh, and Angela Davis. The media has given Obama a free ride for his associations, but I doubt if the people will.

In the long run the election is Obama's to lose and I think he will lose.

By Jack Ward, Canada Free Press, August 5, 2008

WASHINGTON - Federal and local authorities are girding for huge protests, mammoth traffic tie-ups and civil disturbances at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this month, fearing that the convention will become a magnet for militant protest groups.

Officials say that what makes Denver different than past conventions is the historic nature of Senator Barack Obama's nomination, a megawattage event whose global spotlight could draw tens of thousands of demonstrators, including self-described anarchists who the police fear will infiltrate peaceful protest groups to disrupt the weeklong event.

The Secret Service is wary of discussing threats against the people they protect, but with Mr. Obama poised to become the first black presidential nominee, there are special worries. While law enforcement officials say there are no specific, credible threats against Mr. Obama, they expressed concern about low-level chatter on Web sites frequented by white separatists who spew hate about Mr. Obama's race and what they perceive as his liberal agenda.

One recent scheduling change caused a major shift in security plans. When Mr. Obama announced last month that he would accept his party's nomination not at the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver, where the convention is being held, but at Invesco Field, home of the Denver Broncos, the Secret Service scrambled to work out plans with local authorities to secure the open-air stadium, which seats more than 75,000 people. Invesco is also adjacent to Interstate 25, a major corridor through the Northern Rockies that will most likely be closed for at least part of Mr. Obama's acceptance speech.

"The magnitude of the event has expanded," said John W. Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver and a Democrat. "It's bigger and more profound than we expected."

Officials acknowledge that their projections for the number of protesters are based more on a worst-case chain of events than specific information about who will show up, but they say they cannot take any chances.

As a result, the Secret Service, the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and scores of police departments are moving thousands of agents, analysts, officers and employees to Denver for the Aug. 25-28 convention. They will operate through a complex hierarchy of command centers, steering committees and protocols to respond to disruptions.

National political conventions are a chance for federal agencies to test their latest and most sophisticated technology, and this year is no different. There was a brief flare-up recently between the F.B.I. and the Secret Service, when each wanted to patrol the skies over the convention with their surveillance aircraft, packed with infrared cameras and other electronics. The issue was resolved in favor of the Secret Service, according to people briefed on the matter.

Both Denver and St. Paul, where the Republican National Convention will be held Sept. 1-4, are enlisting thousands of additional officers to help with security. Even so, their numbers will be only about a third of the 10,000 police officers that New York City fielded for the 2004 Republican convention, just three years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Denver Police Department will nearly double in size, according to federal officials involved in the planning. The city is bringing in nearly 1,500 police officers from communities throughout Colorado and beyond, even inviting an eight-person mounted unit from Cheyenne, Wyo. State lawmakers changed Colorado law to allow the out-of-state police officers to serve as peace officers in Denver.

The expressions of concern about security at the convention could have more immediate political and legal implications, too. A federal judge, Marcia S. Krieger of United States District Court in Denver, is expected to issue a decision this week in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking to ease security provisions at the convention. The A.C.L.U. has suggested that the Secret Service and the Denver police have exaggerated risks as part of a crackdown on dissent.

The case centers on whether the security zone around the Pepsi Center is so large, and the designated parade route through the city for marches and rallies so far away, as to unnecessarily stifle free speech. New worries about protests and anarchy could bolster the government's case that the plans are justified.

Last month, under pressure from the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, the city released a list of expenses related to the convention showing that the police were preparing for large demonstrations and mass arrests and that the department had spent $2.1 million on protection equipment for its officers, $1.4 million for barricades and $850,000 for supplies related to the arrest and processing of suspects.

In disclosing the cost breakdown, city officials denied rumors that had circulated for weeks that they had contemplated buying exotic nonlethal weapons that fired an immobilizing goo, or that used radiation or sonic waves to incapacitate people or vehicles.

Similar preparations are under way for the Republican convention in Minnesota, but without the harsh glare that, at the moment, seems to be focused on Denver. St. Paul's 600-member police force will grow nearly sixfold with about 3,000 additional officers arriving from around Minnesota, as well as from Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and the Dakotas, said Tom Walsh, a spokesman for the St. Paul Police Department.

"St. Paul isn't New York," he said. "We just don't have the staffing."

Kenneth L. Wainstein, the White House adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, recently visited Denver and St. Paul, a trip that reflected the administration's interest in the conventions. "In the post-9/11 world, you have to prepare and plan for all contingencies," Mr. Wainstein said. "That means preparing for everything from a minor disruption and an unruly individual to a broader terrorist event. We need to plan for everything no matter what the threat level is on any particular day."

Intelligence analysts, however, have not reported a heightened threat from Islamic extremists or domestic threats from antigovernment groups or environmental militants like the kind that operate in many Western states, according to federal officials. "We just aren't seeing a credible threat," said James H. Davis, the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Denver office.

Each convention has been designated a National Special Security Event, which makes the Secret Service the lead federal agency responsible for protecting dignitaries and providing overall security. Other agencies will be on standby.

The National Guard in Minnesota and Colorado will each have hundreds of troops on call to their governors to help civilian medical personnel or bomb squads, for instance, if needed. National Guard specialists trained to deal with biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological weapons will also be available.

"There won't be a visible military presence," said Maj. Gen. Guy C. Swan III, director of operations for the military's Northern Command, which is in charge of the military's response to threats on American soil.

Each city has been awarded $50 million in federal funds for convention costs, a substantial part of which is being spent on security-related equipment and training. And each city has been enlisting the help of neighboring communities to provide more officers to help police the conventions.

The security and safety of convention delegates and visitors has become an increasingly significant issue in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul, where local officials were hoping to avoid complaints, heard in 2004 after the Democratic convention in Boston and the Republican convention in New York, that restrictive security arrangements had nearly locked down the convention sites.

From the start, the Democrats' decision to hold their convention in Denver and the Republicans' choice of St. Paul stirred concerns about whether local police in each city had enough officers to deal with a wide range of threats, including terrorist attacks or a lone gunman.

The most pressing fears, particularly in Denver, are that as many as 30,000 demonstrators may sweep into the city to disrupt the convention. Much of the city's planning, in conjunction with federal authorities, has been based on the possibility of such protests, according to federal officials.

Still, these officials acknowledge that they have little concrete intelligence indicating that such large or unruly demonstrations are being planned. But, officials said they had based their assessments on groups like Recreate 68, Tent State and other activist coalitions. Organizers insist the groups are nonviolent, but to the authorities their names alone raise the specter of violent confrontations like those at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

In Denver, federal officials have expressed concern that demonstrators could try to shut down regular business at several major offices, including the Federal Reserve Bank, the United States Mint, and the federal courthouse.

"Because of the Internet, the ability of protesters to mobilize and share information has metastasized," said Troy A. Eid, the United States attorney for Colorado. "That would be fine if it were peaceful, as we expect. But we have to plan accordingly."

In recent days, domestic security officials issued a heightened awareness bulletin urging greater attention because of a number of factors, including the election and the conventions. But law enforcement authorities say they are trying to strike a balance between planning for every conceivable threat, including terrorist attacks and large public demonstrations, and not strangling a city's commercial life in the process.

"We're not looking to shut down an entire city," said Malcolm Wiley, a Secret Service agent involved in security planning for the convention in Denver.

Well before Senators Barack Obama and John McCain rose to the top of their parties, a partisan shift was under way at the local and state level. For more than three years starting in 2005, there has been a reduction in the number of voters who register with the Republican Party and a rise among voters who affiliate with Democrats and, almost as often, with no party at all.

While the implications of the changing landscape for Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are far from clear, voting experts say the registration numbers may signal the beginning of a move away from Republicans that could affect local, state and national politics over several election cycles. Already, there has been a sharp reversal for Republicans in many statehouses and governors' mansions.

In several states, including the traditional battlegrounds of Nevada and Iowa, Democrats have surprised their own party officials with significant gains in registration. In both of those states, there are now more registered Democrats than Republicans, a flip from 2004. No states have switched to the Republicans over the same period, according to data from 26 of the 29 states in which voters register by party. (Three of the states did not have complete data.)

In six states, including Iowa, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the Democratic piece of the registration pie grew more than three percentage points, while the Republican share declined. In only three states - Kentucky, Louisiana and Oklahoma - did Republican registration rise while Democratic registration fell, but the Republican increase was less than a percentage point in Kentucky and Oklahoma. Louisiana was the only state to register a gain of more than one percentage point for Republicans as Democratic numbers declined.

Over the same period, the share of the electorate that registers as independent has grown at a faster rate than Republicans or Democrats in 12 states. The rise has been so significant that in states like Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina, nonpartisan voters essentially constitute a third party.

Swings in party registration are not uncommon from one year to the next, or even over two years. Registration, moreover, often has no impact on how people actually vote, and people sometimes switch registration to vote in a primary, then flip again come Election Day.

But for a shift away from one party to sustain itself - the current registration trend is now in its fourth year - is remarkable, researchers who study voting patterns say. And though comparable data are not available for the 21 states where voters do not register by party, there is evidence that an increasing number of voters in those states are also moving away from the Republican Party based on the results of recent state and Congressional elections, the researchers said.

"This is very suggestive that there is a fundamental change going on in the electorate," said Michael P. McDonald, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an associate professor of political science at George Mason University who has studied voting patterns.

Mr. McDonald added that, more typically, voting and registration patterns tended to even out or revert to the opposing party between elections.

Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and one of the designers of the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, said: "Obviously, these are not good numbers for the party to be looking at. Democrats have always had extremely broad multifaceted registration programs."

But in terms of the presidential election, Mr. Armey said the tea leaves were harder to read.

"I think the key in this one is, where do all these new independent voters break?" he said. "I think right now, you've got a guy in western Pennsylvania saying, 'I am really disgusted right now and I'm not going to register as a Republican anymore, but I really don't want this guy Obama elected.' "

Those in charge of state Democratic parties cite a national displeasure with the Bush administration as an impetus for the changing numbers, which run counter to a goal of Karl Rove, President Bush's former top adviser, to create a permanent realignment in favor of Republicans.

"I think nationally and here, people are kind of tired of the way this administration has been conducting the policies of this country," said Pat Waak, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party.

Yet while an unpopular war, a faltering economy and a president held in low esteem have combined to hurt the Republican Party, Democrats are also benefiting from demographic changes, including the rise in the number of younger voters and the urbanization of suburbs, which has resulted in a different political flavor there, voting and campaign experts said. The party has also been helped by a willingness to run more pragmatic candidates, who have helped make the party more appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.

Among the 26 states with registration data, the percentage of those who have signed on with Democrats has risen in 15 states since 2004, and the percentage for Republicans has risen in six, according to state data. The number of registered Democrats fell in 11 states, compared with 20 states where Republican registration numbers fell.

In the 26 states and the District of Columbia where registration data were available, the total number of registered Democrats increased by 214,656, while the number of Republicans fell by 1,407,971.

The unsettled political ground has manifested itself in state and local elections. Twenty-three state legislatures are controlled by Democrats and 14 by Republicans, with 12 states with divided chambers (Nebraska has a nonpartisan legislature). After the 2000 election, 16 state legislatures were dominated by Democrats, and 17 by Republicans, with 16 divided.

It is a similar story in governors' mansions. After the 2004 election, there were 28 Republican governors and 22 Democrats; those numbers are now reversed. After the 2000 election, there were only 19 Democratic governors.

Elected Democrats have made significant inroads even in places where Republicans have enjoyed a generation of dominance. In Colorado, for example, Democrats control the governorship and both houses of the Legislature for the first time in over four decades. Last year, Virginia Democrats gained a 21-to-19 majority over Republicans in the State Senate, the first time the party has controlled that body in a decade.

In New Hampshire, Democrats are in control of both the legislative and executive branches for the first time since 1874. In Iowa, Democrats have taken over the statehouse and the governor's office simultaneously for the first time in a generation.

The changes in state government could have broad implications for Congressional redistricting and on policies like immigration, health care reform and environmental regulation, which are increasingly decided at the state level.

In many states, Democrats have benefited from a rise in younger potential voters, after declines or small increases in the number of those voters in the 1980s and '90s. The population of 18- to 24-year-olds rose from about 27 million in 2000 to nearly 30 million in 2006, according to Census figures.

Mr. Obama's candidacy has drawn many young people to register to vote, and some of the recent gains by Democrats have no doubt been influenced by excitement over his campaign. But even before Mr. Obama's ascendancy among Democrats, younger voters were moving toward the Democratic Party, demographers said.

Dowell Myers, a professor of policy, planning and development at the University of Southern California, also noted that a younger, native-born generation of Latinos who have a tendency to support Democrats is coming of age.

Further, young Americans have migrated in recent years to high-growth states that have traditionally been dominated by Republicans, like Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, which may have had an impact on the changing registration numbers in those places.

The changing face of many American suburbs has also had in impact both in voter registration and voting patterns. In many major metropolitan areas, suburbs that were once largely white and Republican have become more mixed, as people living in cities have been priced out into surrounding areas, and exurban regions have absorbed those residents who once favored the close-in suburbs of cities.

"What we speculate is that density attracts Democrats," said Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech who has researched voting patterns. "It is not that people move to those areas and change positions. It tends now to be a self-selection of singles, childless couples," who tend to vote Democrat more than their married with children counterparts.

In the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas, Democrats carried nearly 60 percent of the Congressional vote in 2006 in inner suburbs, up from about 53 percent in 2002, according to Mr. Lang’s research.

This trend is particularly evident in places like St. Louis, southern Pennsylvania and Fairfax County, Va., which President Bush won in 2000 but lost in 2004.

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who won her seat in 2006, picked up the large majority of voters in the St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areas, and Senator Jim Webb, also a Democrat, won his seat in a similar manner in Virginia, which has not voted for a Democrat for president since 1964.

Democrats have also succeeded, at least in part, by running centrist candidates where they are most needed. Bill Ritter, the Democratic governor of Colorado and former district attorney of Denver, opposes abortion rights. Among the men who flipped three of Indiana's eight Congressional seats in the midterm election in 2006, two also oppose both abortion rights and gun control.

What the demographers, political scientists and party officials wonder now is whether the shift of the last few years will be sustained.

"Major political realignment is not just controlling the branches of government," said Mr. McDonald of the Brookings Institution. "It is when you decisively do it. We haven't seen that in modern generations."

History shows that a lot can happen between now and November to reshape the election.

As I read the umpteenth piece wondering why Barack Obama's lead in the polls isn't bigger, I remembered how Robert Redford recently said that you "could kiss the Democratic Party goodbye" if Obama loses the election.

This may be overstating the case - the Democratic Party would not cease to exist if presumptive Republican nominee John McCain emerges triumphant on Election Day.

But a presidential loss in an election year when so many indicators are going its way (an incumbent Republican president with approval numbers in the 20s, an electorate focusing on the economy, and on and on) would likely lead to a prolonged wander in the wilderness, akin to what the British Labour Party experienced in the pre-Tony Blair years. The post-election recriminations within the Democratic Party, taken alone, would see to that.

That scenario and eight years of the Bush administration have a lot of Democrats viewing this year's contest as the most important presidential election in years - a veritable "must-win."

To achieve this must-win, Democratic primary voters and superdelegates opted not for one of the "safe" choices among the large and varied field of primary contenders, but for a history-making candidate. (The same would be true if the party had ultimately settled on Hillary Clinton.)

For the Democrats, there is a lot riding on bringing history to fruition. Maybe anxiety provoked by this fact is at the root of some of the columns wondering why Obama's polling lead over McCain is "only" a few points, three months before Election Day.

A few words about these polls. First and foremost, no matter whom one wants to see in the White House, paying close attention to summer polls is pure folly. Some say to this line of reasoning, "Sure, but look at Michael Dukakis, for example: He was up 17 points over George H.W. Bush in 1988."

If you must search for historical antecedents, you could also look at 1980, when unpopular incumbent Jimmy Carter ran a close race against Ronald Reagan until very late in the campaign, when voters evidently decided they were comfortable with the former actor and onetime governor of California. Reagan went on to win by nine points in an electoral landslide.

But as they say in the disclaimers that run at the end of ads for investment services, past performance does not necessarily serve as a predictor of future results. And it's worth remembering that polls haven't exactly been the most reliable indicators so far in this election season.

Perhaps this is advantage McCain, as Obama polled better than he performed in the run-up to the New Hampshire and California primaries - and perhaps this is advantage Obama, as one theory has it that pollsters, who only use land lines to place their polling calls, are missing a lot of Obama's younger, cell-phone-only supporters.

Obama, a relative unknown on the national stage until only recently, is running against a well-known senator and war hero who - whether you agree or not - has an image as a straight-talking maverick. McCain's campaign hasn't been strong out of the gate, but he remains a formidable candidate and well-matched opponent to Obama.

Given the two previous presidential elections, no one should be surprised that this race is close now, no matter what the indicators. And those who know their history also know that, in this historic campaign, any number of things could happen between now and Nov. 4.

By Dan Rather, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 5, 2008

Why isn't Barack Obama leading in the polls by a landslide? Primarily because "there is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart," writes The New York Times' David Brooks. "He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded." In many ways standing apart has allowed for his "fantastic powers of observation and his skills as a writer and thinker. It means that people on almost all sides of any issue can see parts of themselves reflected in Obama's eyes. But it does make him hard to place," Brooks notes.

"If Obama is fully a member of any club - and perhaps he isn't - it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama's age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It's not clear what the rest of America makes of them." That's not to say there won't still be a Democratic landslide, "but voters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot place."

Last week's racial politics may have been "disappointing" but "like it or not, Obama's race is an issue, just as John F. Kennedy's religion was an issue in 1960 - and racism runs deeper in our history than anti-Catholicism," writes The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr.. "There is no doubt that two keys to this election are: How many white and Latino votes will Obama lose because of his race that a white Democrat would have won? And how much will African American turnout grow, given the opportunity to elect our nation's first black president?"

This year Republicans have a host of things to choose from when it comes to attacking Obama - and as unpleasant as they are he'll have to face them. "The great opportunity this year for less scrupulous Republican strategists is that Obama is both black and a Columbia-and-Harvard-educated former professor who lived in the intellectually rarified precincts of Hyde Park in Chicago, Manhattan's Upper West Side and Cambridge, Mass. They can go after him subtly on race and overtly on elitism," Dionne writes. "Is this unfair? Yes, it is. But if our nation is to cast off the shackles of race this year, Obama will have to grapple more than he'd like with the burdens that our history and the past travails of liberalism have forced him to bear."

Both Obama and John McCain seem to be dragging their feet on announcing their veep choices - a decision that might not be such a good one, writes Salon.com's Walter Shapiro. "At first glance, it seems appealing for Obama to delay naming his veep until the Democratic delegates start arriving in Denver over the weekend of August 22 to 24. McCain advisers are even reportedly speculating that the GOP nominee could wait until the Tuesday morning of the convention (September 2) to make his announcement as a way of erasing memories of George W. Bush's scheduled Monday night speech. But such efforts at syncopated scheduling run the risk of replicating the dread Dan Quayle experience when a vice-presidential selection spontaneously combusted in the middle of a convention."

So what does Quayle have to do with anything? "What gives the Quayle quake contemporary relevance is that neither Obama nor McCain will be presiding over rubber-stamp conventions. One of the reasons the Obama campaign moved his Thursday night acceptance speech to Invesco Field is that an outdoor football stadium will mask the reality that about 48 percent of the convention delegates favored Hillary Clinton and may not be appropriately enthusiastic on camera. McCain will have to grapple with a party with the fringe on top, ranging from the unreconciled Ron Paul supporters to the onward Christian soldiers of the religious right on the alert for heresy." If Obama were to choose a woman who is not Clinton and McCain were to make a "bold" veep choice, they'd need some time to defend it. "By waiting until the eve of their conventions, both Obama and McCain will face nearly irresistible pressures to pick nominees who are safe, secure and a trifle soporific. There is nothing like the onset of a convention to create a groundswell for a conventional vice president."

By Sara Murray, The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2008

Take a deep breath, Denverites. Here they come.

Thirty-five thousand or more Democratic delegates, journalists, protesters, celebrities, vendors, contributors, and a once-in-a-century political circus will soon descend on our city for the Democratic National Convention.

The good news is, cash registers will ring and credit-card scanners will scan. The bad news is, LoDo, Cherry Creek and the greater downtown area will be transformed - though only for about 96 hours.

Only a relative few of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, have had the opportunity to participate directly in that great American institution, the political convention. Most others are not quite sure what to expect. By and large, these quadrennial get-togethers are treated as commercial events and media sensations. And they are both. But they are also much more. They are democracy in action.

Behind the balloons and banners, the confetti and motorcades, serious events are occurring. We are selecting the president of our country for the next four, and perhaps eight, years. That person will in turn select a cabinet and sub-cabinet that will govern us and make monumental decisions affecting the lives of everyone of us every day. Our economic well-being, the quality of our very air and water, the lives of our sons and daughters, our relationships with the peoples of the world, our taxes, war and peace, and countless other profound directions will be determined by the outcome of these conventions and the election to follow.

Most of us, even in Denver, will watch what happens at this convention through the eye of a television camera and be told by reporters and analysts what is going on. Let's hope they resist the temptation to look for the sensational sideshows and funny hats and instead penetrate the panoply to tell us what is really going on, what policies are at stake, what it means for our country.

For example, delegates will adopt a party platform. These documents contain everything but the kitchen sink and are meant to have a little something for every partner in the party coalition. For a big-tent party like the Democrats, that means a pretty lengthy, catch-all document. But occasionally there is a nugget that will translate into a real policy departure for a party once in power. So platforms shouldn't be automatically dismissed as window dressing.

Even the choice of speakers can be important. No better evidence exists than the fact that in 2008, the Democrats will nominate a senator who startled their convention only four years ago.

There will be a great temptation for the large majority of Republicans and independents to tune the whole week out. I hope not. The stakes are too high. A giant return toward civility would occur if, as in my younger years, members of each party watched the convention of the opposition party for its historic significance and for what it means for the direction of our nation.

There will be sideshows. There is a very slight chance that a delegate or two may have one too many drinks. Most likely Denver policemen will scuffle with demonstrators. If the media choose to make events like this the headline, it will be too bad.

Whether we like it or not, Denver and Colorado will, for that 96-hour period, be in the spotlight of both the nation and the world. There will be hundreds of visiting political figures and journalists from all over the world here. What they see and experience, how we behave and how we treat them and ourselves will be reported in every major capital of the planet. No one needs to lecture citizens of the West on manners or civility. Long after the great tent is folded, long after a new president is elected, stories will be told of the decency and good humor, the friendliness and hospitality, of this great city and state.

Despite the clamor and chaos, the disruptions and the distractions, the circus and the shouting, tens of thousands of visitors will still be talking about the great time they had at the Democratic convention in Denver. What a great town that is, they will say. What great people I met. There's something about the West that is different and better, they will remember. And that is why this convention is so important for us.

By Gary Hart, The Denver Post, August 5, 2008

Workers scramble to prepare for candidate's pick

The whiteboard inside Patti Solis Doyle's office lists four key dates and corresponding notations for this summer and fall: Aug. 4, V.P. staff arrives; ?, Announcement; Aug. 25, Convention begins; Oct. 2, V.P. debate in St. Louis.

That question mark for when Sen. Barack Obama will name his running mate is just one of the many unknowns inside the office of the Chicago native who will be the top staff member for the person ultimately picked.

Amid seemingly endless speculation about who Obama will select, a group of new employees arrived Monday at his Chicago headquarters to help prepare the campaign apparatus needed to support the vice presidential candidate. More than a dozen employees are now in place as part of a staff ultimately expected to total 30 to 40.

With a second campaign plane at the ready, they are a staff in waiting, just like the rest of the nation's political junkies who are eager to see what signals the Illinois Democrat and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) send with their selections.

While the "veepstakes" political parlor game is in high season, only a very small group of people in each campaign actually know anything for certain about finalists or timing.

With the Olympics starting Friday- and Obama expected to go on vacation in Hawaii next week - conventional thinking is that the announcements will either come this week or much later in August.

Late pick ahead?

If not made this week or next, the picks will be among the latest in recent history. In 1988, George H.W. Bush named Dan Quayle as his running mate on Aug. 16, the latest selection in the past five presidential elections.

Reporters were in a frenzy over the weekend when it was announced that Obama would make a campaign stop Wednesday in Elkhart, Ind. Speculation immediately turned to a possible announcement of Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, believed to be on Obama's short list.

The new staff members join Solis Doyle, a former top aide to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) who has been here about three weeks. The sister of Ald. Danny Solis (25th), she plans to take her new crew out for pizza and beer Tuesday night for introductions.

Does that mean the announcement will not happen Wednesday? Solis Doyle had no comment but said it is the sort of question she routinely gets. "I definitely get pestered a lot and I can honestly say I have no idea," she said.

Solis Doyle said she does spend a fair bit of time reading biographical material for those rumored to be on Obama's list because she needs to be an expert on many. "I read the papers," she said.

The staff is preparing a briefing book for the new candidate with everything he or she might need to know about the campaign and candidate positions. "We're trying to get the pieces together so we can go as soon as we are told," Solis Doyle said.

The running mate will get to pick a few of his or her own staff members for such positions as the person who traditionally serves as a sort of traveling concierge.

The new employees, meanwhile, are seated next to those who work for Michelle Obama and near the campaign's main scheduling, communications and rapid-response teams.

A packed headquarters

All are gathered on the 11th floor of a Michigan Avenue office building, where hundreds of workers are now packed shoulder to shoulder. The heat from their bodies and laptops warms the space, as a large digital clock counts down the days, hours, minutes, seconds and tenths of seconds until the Nov. 4 election.

The new workers include veterans from other parts of Obama's operation, as well as some from the previous presidential and vice presidential efforts of Clinton, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

Newly named as Solis Doyle's deputy chief of staff is Kathleen McGlynn, a former chief of staff for the Edwards presidential bid who worked as scheduling director for Elizabeth Edwards in 2004. The top communications jobs are going to Ricki Seidman, a veteran of the Clinton White House, and David Wade, Kerry's 2004 press secretary.

Oddly enough, several staffers said there is no office betting pool on when or whom Obama will pick.

McGlynn said the initial days for the running mate are stressful, including often dealing with the Secret Service for the first time and determining the role of any children. "This is a big adjustment, and we want to help him or her get through the first couple days," she said.

By John McCormick, Chicago Tribune, August 4, 2008

She urges support for Obama at Phila. lunch.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton thanked top Pennsylvania backers for their help in her failed Democratic presidential campaign - and urged them to work just as hard now for presumptive nominee Barack Obama - during a private luncheon yesterday in Center City.

Participants described the meeting at the Wolf Block law firm with about 50 fund-raisers and political leaders as a sometimes-emotional celebration of Clinton's victory in the state's April 22 primary.

"It was remarkable," said Alan Kessler, a partner at the law firm and a Democratic fund-raiser. "We see candidates coming through all the time raising money, but it's a rare thing to experience them coming back just to say 'thank you.' "

The event was not a fund-raiser. Attendees said that Clinton did not bring up her $25 million campaign debt, though some in the audience asked her about it, and that she urged them to open their checkbooks and hearts to Obama.

Before the gathering, Clinton met with Mayor Nutter and his wife, Lisa, for 90 minutes at the Park Hyatt Philadelphia at the Bellevue.

"It really was a get-together, in a sense, of some friends," Nutter said. "It was mostly a policy discussion about education and children ... and she was very thankful for all my help."

The visit was a "personal honor," he said.

Clinton has embarked on a series of visits to thank her biggest supporters around the country and to try to integrate her fund-raising network with Obama's. She plans to campaign for him in swing states before the Democratic convention later this month.

Clinton also told people during her Philadelphia visit that she is scheduled to speak to the convention on Tuesday night, Aug. 26. She said she had no more insight than that available in the media about where Obama's super-secret vice-presidential selection process might lead.

"She warned that it's going to be a much closer election than people realize, and that she was putting her loss behind her and moving forward," said fund-raiser Mark Aronchick, who attended the luncheon. Aronchick said "she was very positive," and that she said Obama would be a "great president."

Even former President Bill Clinton, whose temper flared at several inopportune times during the primary struggle, is getting into the healing act.

There are some things "I wish I hadn't said," Clinton told ABC News in an interview from Africa broadcast yesterday, but he denied referring to Obama's race. He said that the media applied "a different standard" to his wife in campaign coverage but that dwelling on such things "interferes with the issue, which is who should be elected in November."

By Thomas Fitzgerald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 5, 2008

Many of the foremost activists in the women's movement ardently believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton should be Barack Obama's running mate - and primary wounds that are just beginning to heal may be torn back open should the Democratic nominee select someone else, as it seems very likely he will.

Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter who in 1984 became the first woman on a major party presidential ticket, said Obama should be "gracious" enough to offer Clinton the vice presidency, considering how narrow the race was.

Marcia Pappas, who heads the New York state chapter of the National Organization for Women, believes that Clinton supporters "would be outraged to know she was not given that right of first refusal."

"She is the only woman in history who has ever garnered this much support," Pappas continued. "She is the only woman in history who was able to raise the kind of money one would need to run a presidential campaign."

Pamela Sumners, who directs the Missouri chapter of the abortion-rights group NARAL, added that Clinton "is now seen as the reigning dean of the women's movement. It's sort of Moses gets all the way to the mountain and doesn't get to the promised land - and I think there would be people really angry about that."

About one in five voters who supported Clinton in the Democratic primaries tell pollsters that they are not voting for Obama, according to a mid-July Quinnipiac University national poll of likely voters - a number that's only slightly lower than when Clinton dropped out and the conventional wisdom had it that support would coalesce around the presumptive nominee after a brief cooling-off period.

The split isn't limited to women. "No matter who he picks," said former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, "the question is going to be raised: Are you telling me that this person would be a better qualified vice president than Hillary Clinton?"

While there had been speculation that Obama might seek to mend fences by tapping another woman for the role, this seems increasingly unlikely - and it's not clear that even if it did happen that it would help with Clinton loyalists, especially since the most-often named women all endorsed Obama in the primaries, earning the resentment of many leaders of women's organizations.

"If he picked Claire McCaskill or [Janet] Napolitano [or Kathleen] Sebelius, I think it would annoy women," Ferraro said.

Ferraro added that "those are women who we spent our lifetime helping run for office" and that "a lot of us are not happy with these women for not supporting Hillary because they came to us for help based in large part on their gender."

"I would be very concerned about his judgment if he offered the position to another woman before offering it to Hillary Clinton," Pappas said, "or any person."

"The women who have been elected to office in this time in history are the beneficiaries of the women's movement," Pappas continued. "And it's disheartening to see those same women turn their backs on another woman who is better qualified, and one can only wonder what they are getting out of their decision to turn their back."

Any selection other than Clinton will reinforce some women's sense that the most qualified candidate, a woman, has been passed over for the position.

Clinton has in this sense become a metaphor for the women's movement itself.

"There are a lot of women apoplectic at the discussion of Bob Barr and Chuck Hagel," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization