"I got lost in a blizzard of words there," Charles Gibson of ABC News said to Gov. Sarah Palin, with a trace of irritation in his voice. "Is that a yes?"

Ms. Palin didn't look rattled or lose her cool in her first interview with Mr. Gibson, the network anchor, on Thursday night, but she skittered through with general answers, sticking to talking points that flowed out quickly and spiritedly, a little too much by rote to satisfy her interviewer that she was giving his questions serious consideration. When Ms. Palin seemed not to know exactly what the Bush doctrine is, Mr. Gibson made a point of explaining it - pre-emptive self-defense - and demanded that she tell him whether she agreed with it.

ABC News delivered the first glimpse of Ms. Palin without a script or a cheering audience, and it was a strained and illuminating conversation. Ms. Palin, who kept inserting Mr. Gibson's nickname, Charlie, into her answers, as if to convey an old hand's conviviality, tried to project self-confidence, poise and even expertise: She let Mr. Gibson know that she had personally reassured the Georgian president and correctly pronounced his last name, Saakashvili. At times, her eyes looked uncertain and her voice hesitated, and she looked like a student trying to bend prepared answers to fit unexpected questions.

Mr. Gibson, who sat back in his chair, impatiently wriggling his foot, had the skeptical, annoyed tone of a university president who agrees to interview the daughter of a trustee but doesn't believe she merits admission.

When he asked her, slowly and solemnly to "look the country in the eye" and say whether she truly felt qualified to be vice president and possibly commander in chief, Mr. Gibson seemed to expect Ms. Palin to express at least a moment of humility and self-doubt. Ms. Palin said she had no doubts when asked to be Senator John McCain's running mate. ("I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink. You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink.") Mr. Gibson suggested that her brash, unwavering confidence sounded like "hubris."

That first portion of ABC's three-part interview, broadcast on "World News," was meaty, touching on Iraq, Israel and Russia and her Christian faith, but it is unlikely to end the debate about her qualifications or the Republican complaints about news media bias and sexism. Mostly, it supplied all sides with fresh material.

It was the first real test of Ms. Palin's ability to handle questions about foreign and domestic policy, but almost as much of a challenge for Mr. Gibson. The McCain campaign chose him for the interview partly because he is seen as courteous, mild-mannered and unlikely to play "gotcha" with such an important "get."

His was a tricky course to navigate. If Mr. Gibson were too soft, Democrats would accuse him of being afraid of the Republican news-media-bashing machine, which has been scouring the press and Senator Barack Obama's speeches for any hint of sexism or elitism. If his questions were too tough, he would be very likely to stir up charges of sexism or elitism. While his questions were trenchant, they were fair game; he was careful in the first day of interviews not to ask anything too frivolous (there were no questions about lipstick, pigs or juggling family and career). But his attitude was at times supercilious: He asked if a nuclear Iran posed an "existential threat" to Israel, as if it were the land of Sartre, not Sabras.

It was an unnerving first interview for Ms. Palin, but it was also a cautionary dress-rehearsal for Mr. Obama's running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., in his debate with Ms. Palin next month: On television, tone matters as much as content.

By Alessandra Stanley, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

After days of sharp attacks against each other, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama suspended all political combat on Thursday, including television commercials, and instead made joint visits to ground zero and a forum on public service in New York to mark the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

At one point, Mr. McCain, who spoke first at the nighttime forum at Columbia University, defended his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, for recently making fun of Mr. Obama's work years ago as a community organizer. He said that Ms. Palin made her comment in reaction to Democratic attacks on her relative inexperience as a first-term governor and a former mayor of a small Alaskan town, Wasilla.

"Of course I respect community organizers, of course I respect people who serve their community, and Senator Obama's record there is outstanding," said Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, before adding, "I think a small-town mayor has very great responsibilities."

Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in his appearance that while he deeply respected mayors, "I was surprised by several remarks around community organizing, and belittling it."

"It taught me," he said, "that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, when they're given a chance and brought together. I want every young person to recognize that they will not fulfill their potential until they hitch their wagon to something bigger."

Both candidates did agree on a politically divisive issue: They urged universities like Columbia to reverse Vietnam-era bans on Reserved Officers Training Corps activities. Some schools continue the bans in reaction to the military's policy on gays and lesbians - a policy that Mr. Obama has pledged to lift and that Mr. McCain has said he would continue.

"Shouldn't the students here be exposed to the attractiveness of serving in the military, particularly as officers?" said Mr. McCain, of Arizona, who attended the United States Naval Academy. "I would hope that these universities would re-examine that policy."

Asked if Columbia, his alma mater, should reinstate ROTC, Mr. Obama said: "I think we've made a mistake on that. I recognize that there are students here who have differences in terms of military policy, but the notion that young people here at Columbia aren't offered a choice or an option in participating in military service is a mistake."

Outside of the forum, on the steps of Low Memorial Library, students cheered loudly when Mr. McCain talked about Columbia's unwillingness to let ROTC on campus and then booed when he mentioned the option of serving as a military officer. When Mr. Obama proposed allowing ROTC back on campus, meanwhile, the students remained largely silent.

While Mr. Obama made no campaign appearances on Thursday, he did not entirely halt campaign-related activities: He shared a 90-minute lunch in Harlem with former President Bill Clinton, intended, in part, to soothe any ill will left from the bitter Democratic primary campaign between Mr. Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Advisers to the two men said afterward that the meeting was cordial and that Mr. Clinton urged Mr. Obama, of Illinois, to keep his political message focused on economic issues.

The meeting took place in Mr. Clinton's 14th-floor office on 125th Street, and they took a few questions from reporters. Mr. Clinton said he had agreed to do "a substantial number of things" on behalf of Mr. Obama this fall, and would hit the campaign trail as soon as his Global Initiative conference concluded on Sept. 26.

"We're putting him to work," Mr. Obama joked.

Asked for his opinion about the state of the presidential race, Mr. Clinton replied, "I predict that Senator Obama will win and win handily."

"There you go," Mr. Obama said. "You can take it from the president of the United States. He knows a little something about politics."

Yet the main event of the day was a moment when no words were exchanged: It was the image, rather, of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain walking shoulder-to-shoulder down a long ramp at ground zero.

The two appeared somber throughout their 15 minutes together, chatting briefly on the ramp. At the bottom, they greeted a small receiving line of uniformed officers and relatives of victims. Each man also took a rose and placed the flower on a reflecting pool. They stood silent for a few moments, each clasping his own fingers.

At the end of their 15-minute public detente, Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama shook hands, and Mr. McCain could be heard saying, "All right, sir, see you soon."

The idea for the rivals to appear together at ground zero originated last week during a telephone conversation between the men. When Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain to congratulate him on accepting the presidential nomination, aides to both men said, Mr. Obama proposed the idea and Mr. McCain accepted.

The breather from minute-by-minute politicking comes after several days of intensifying tension and attacks between the McCain and Obama camps, in large part over Ms. Palin's leadership style and record. She is under scrutiny for her inconsistent positions on Congressional earmarks and her motives in dismissing the Alaska public safety commissioner, among other things.

By Patrick Healy, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

Senator Joseph Biden Jr., the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, is an experienced, serious and smart man. But he does say some curious things. A day on the campaign trail without some cringe-inducing gaffe is a rare blessing. He has not been too blessed lately.

Just this week, he mused that Senator Barack Obama might have been better off with Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate.

"Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America," Biden said Wednesday in Nashua, New Hampshire. "Quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me."

Earlier in the week, in Columbia, Missouri, Biden urged a paraplegic state official to stand up to be recognized.

"Chuck, stand up, let the people see you," Biden shouted to State Senator Chuck Graham, before realizing, to his horror, that Graham uses a wheelchair. "Oh, God love ya," Biden said. "What am I talking about?"

But it was the Clinton remarks that touched a potentially sensitive spot for the Obama-Biden ticket. With Sarah Palin's addition to the Republican ticket potentially energizing some women voters, Biden's remarks raised anew a legitimate question of whether Obama would have been better off picking the former first lady as his running mate. One could imagine Senator John McCain's campaign even using Biden's remarks in their own ads to exploit female misgivings about the Democratic ticket.

Obama knew what he was getting when he picked Biden as his running mate: A veteran of six terms in the Senate, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, an Irish Catholic with working-class roots, a guy who had twice been tested in the arena of presidential politics.

And a human verbal wrecking crew. This is the fellow who nearly derailed his nascent presidential campaign last year by calling Obama bright and clean and articulate and who noted that you needed a slight Indian accent to walk into a Dunkin' Donuts or 7-11 in Delaware.

The guy who, reading his vice-presidential acceptance speech from a TelePrompter, bungled McCain's name, calling him "George" ("Freudian slip, folks, Freudian slip," he explained).

The guy who, on the day Obama announced him as his running mate, referred to his party's presidential nominee as "Barack America" and noted that his own wife, Jill, a college professor, was "drop-dead gorgeous" but who, problematically, possessed a doctorate.

The guy who has said he is running for president (not vice president) and who confused army brigades with battalions. Who referred to his Republican vice-presidential opponent as the lieutenant governor of Alaska.

Aides to Obama said that Biden's propensity to misspeak could pose problems, particularly in the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 2. They are watching his performance on the trail warily, but so far have not tried to rein him in.

But they have assigned a couple of veteran minders to travel with him - David Wilhelm, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, and David Wade, former spokesman for Senator John Kerry. Wade said that Biden's occasional stumbles prove to voters that he is human and that they help them relate to the candidate.

"It would be a huge mistake to try to strip away the authenticity that's been his greatest strength for 35 years," Wade said. "For anybody who's gone to Joe Biden events and watched how voters connect with him, there's a pretty big gap between the expectations of the elite media who seem to crave scripted, blow-dried drones out of central casting instead of regular folks who want to see some honesty and candor. They appreciate it that he takes the voters seriously and doesn't take himself too seriously."

Wade added: "I've never heard a voter say they wanted someone who was more scripted, more slick and who talks to me in sound bites. If they wanted stuffed shirts, we'd be preparing for an October debate with Mitt Romney."

Those who have known Biden for a long time say they see him as a man with an equally big heart and mouth.

"He has overwhelming support here, he's well liked," said James Baker, mayor of Wilmington, Delaware, Biden's home. "We forgive him every once in a while when he says something dumb - 'Oh, that's just Joe."'

Biden recognizes that his tongue sometimes ventures ahead of his brain and often catches himself with a smile.

In Fort Myers, Florida, last week, he referred to the "Biden administration," before quickly correcting himself to say the "Obama-Biden administration."

"Believe me, that wasn't a Freudian slip," he said, laughing and crossing himself. "Oh lordy day, I tell ya."

By John M. Broder, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year -- lacking ideas, programs or values -- John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood. Their supposed persecutors are Democrats and the news media, and the aim of this whole charade is to keep Americans from talking about ideas, programs and values.

Every day, the McCain campaign brays anew with over-the-top indignation at "the outrageous attacks" on Palin's family. The McCain people don't cite specifics, because there are no specifics to cite. What newsworthy Democrat has ventured any personal criticism of Palin or any member of her family? What serious news outlet has done any such thing?

I hear McCain's amen chorus screaming, "Lipstick on a pig! Lipstick on a pig!" But they're well aware that Barack Obama was unambiguously talking about McCain's economic ideas, not his running mate. It seems incomprehensible that the McCain campaign would make so much noise about an allegation that clearly doesn't hold a drop of water -- until you realize that the noise is the whole point.

As long as people are talking about barnyard beauty tips, they're not talking about substance. Any day spent arguing about meaningless ephemera is a small but significant victory for a campaign that has nothing to say.

It's not in McCain's interest to talk about the 46 million Americans who don't have medical insurance; Obama has a plan to get most of them covered, while McCain promises a modest tax credit and his best wishes for good health. It's not in McCain's interest to talk about the economy; Obama wants to renew our sense of shared enterprise and responsibility, while McCain is happy to stick with the Republican philosophy of "I've got mine, suckers." It's not in McCain's interest to talk seriously about the occupation of Iraq; Obama was prescient in calling for a withdrawal date, while McCain outdoes even George W. Bush in insisting that our troops stay where they are no longer even wanted.

The most important fact about the political landscape this year is that 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. It doesn't take a genius to realize that McCain's only chance of winning is to obscure the fact that on the issues voters most care about, he essentially proposes to stay the course.

So McCain stopped talking about experience and started echoing Obama's mantra of change, change, change. No one is supposed to remember that when he was courting his party's conservative base he bragged that in his Senate votes he supported Bush 90 percent of the time. Only the party faithful are supposed to be mindful of the fact that McCain is, like Bush, an actual Republican.

Running for and against one's party at the same time is not an easy trick to pull off, however. The contradiction is too big to hide -- it's like a huge, lipstick-smeared Yorkshire boar wallowing in the middle of the room. At some point, people are going to notice it unless you draw their attention elsewhere.

That's the function of the McCain campaign's daily screams of feigned outrage. Creating the false impression that Democrats and journalists are unfairly attacking Palin serves another purpose as well: It helps create the impression that legitimate and necessary questions about her record -- such as her one-time support for the Bridge to Nowhere or her history of seeking the congressional earmarks she now claims to reject -- are somehow out of bounds.

To mix things up, sometimes the campaign pretends that McCain is the one being persecuted -- for his age, usually. It's all just noise, intended to drown out meaningful debate.

If you scream bloody murder every day, however, people eventually stop taking you seriously. News stories about the lipstick remark stated forthrightly that the McCain people were misrepresenting what Obama had said. At some point, these tactical lamentations become not worth reporting at all.

And there will be at least four key moments when the McCain-Palin campaign will be unable to avoid the issues. Obama and McCain will hold three debates; Palin and Joe Biden will hold one. The television audience for these encounters is expected to be enormous, perhaps the biggest ever.

Americans will be presented with a straightforward question. Do they want a Republican in the White House for four more years, continuing to take the country in the same direction? Or not?

By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post, September 12, 2008

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, "Thanks, but no thanks" when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they're all claims recently made by the McCain campaign - and they're all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 - my first year at The Times - trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign's claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can't think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign's lies in 2000 were artful - you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn't say "no thanks" - she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would "not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative."

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn't righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin's alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama's alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for "age and developmentally appropriate education"; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there's the claim that Mr. Obama's use of the ordinary metaphor "putting lipstick on a pig" was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they're probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being "balanced" at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he’s wrong, it reports that "some Democrats say" that he's wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They're probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being "McCain campaign lies," it becomes "Obama on defensive in face of attacks."

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign's lies? I mean, politics ain't beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues - on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there's another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I'm not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team's ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I'm talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I'd argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

John McCain, stakes his life and his nation's fate, on honor, whatever the cost. Barack Obama is a human seismometer, sensing the needs of his interlocutors--enemies and friends--before he acts.

If you want to understand how a President McCain or a President Obama might approach the world from the summit of the Oval Office, two words, above all others, must be pondered.

Those words go not to the amount of experience each has accumulated in life--the usual point of comparison between the two men, who are separated by a generation gap of 25 years--but to McCain's and Obama's dueling qualities of heart and mind and maybe even soul. The words are "honor" and "empathy."

Consider a pair of images. The first, from early June, is a John McCain campaign speech at the Pontchartrain Center in suburban New Orleans. Yes, this is the nationally televised speech with the infamous lime-green backdrop, which even McCain admirers thought looked awful, but that's not the point. In the audience, supporters are hoisting placards with "Honor" stenciled in navy blue on a white background. "Honor" is not your typical campaign slogan, but it has a special resonance for McCain and his followers. For the McCain group, the signs are a kind of return salute as well as an affirmation of McCain's vision of Superpower America's role in the world. McCain is a military man and a senator for whom honor is not only a cardinal personal value but also one that powerfully informs his foreign-policy agenda. With respect to Iraq, his signature issue, his refrain is, "Our American troops will come home with victory and honor."

The second image dates backs a couple of years. Picture Barack Obama, with less gray in his hair than he has now, delivering the commencement address to the class of 2006 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb. He is holding forth on his pet theme of empathy. "There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit--the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us," Obama tells the students. He offers as examples "the child who's hungry" and "the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room" and notes, "As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier."

Although Obama's examples are drawn from an American gallery, it is clear that he sees empathy in a global context as well. In his 2006 best-seller, The Audacity of Hope, the chapter on "The World Beyond Our Borders" begins with nine pages on Indonesia, where he spent part of his childhood, as a "useful metaphor" for the world outside of America as well as "a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years." And his main point is that America, notwithstanding its frequent interventions in the affairs of Indonesia, including some by covert CIA operatives, has consistently failed to see Indonesia clearly. America has failed an empathy test. And this is not surprising, because, as Obama acidly says in a single sentence that commandeers its own paragraph: "Most Americans can't locate Indonesia on a map."

Honor for McCain and empathy for Obama--each is a touchstone. As such, each orients a vision of the world--and in that sense is a link to potential action. Every president, when confronted by advisers who counsel whether to do this, that, or the other thing with respect to some complicated event in a far-off land, filters their advice through a screen made up of familiar habits of thought and feeling. "Character is destiny," McCain asserted in his 2005 book of that title. And because neither man is especially wedded to an ideological point of view as a guide to decision-making, personal character may matter more than ever in a McCain or Obama presidency.

But exactly how might the honor principle--or the empathy principle--play out? The answer is not as predictable as it may seem--for honor in politics is not only about the stiffened spine, and empathy is not only about the misty eye. And although honor and empathy, standing alone, represent virtues, neither is a solution for governing, for dealing with foreign friends or enemies, for resolving sticky matters like the Iraq occupation or Iran's nuclear ambitions. Indeed, honor for McCain and empathy for Obama have the potential to be blinders--to keep them from adjusting their sights to uncomfortable realities. It is one of life's ironies to be tripped up by one's most deeply felt values.

For McCain or Obama to succeed as president, he would have to discover the practical limitations of the value he holds so dear; he would have to attach himself to a more transcendent conception of American policy. And that will be a difficult and probably painful challenge--there is a lot at stake, for America and the world, in how well it is met.

Honor as a Blinder

The McCains were "bred to fight as Highland Scots of the Clan McDonald," John McCain proudly declares in Faith of My Fathers, a "family memoir" written with his longtime aide Mark Salter. "No one in my family is certain if we are descended from an unbroken line of military officers. But you can trace that heritage through many generations of our family, finding our ancestors in every American war, in the War for Independence, on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War." One of his ancestors, McCain relates, was killed and scalped by Indians in the Battle of Black Creek in the 1760s. "Like his descendants," the dead man's brother "was not one to suffer such an insult quietly," and he tracked the killers, sending some to the grave, "and recovered his brother's scalp."

In the news media's usual telling of the John McCain story, his attachment to the honor code is attributed to his upbringing in a military tradition, with his father and paternal grandfather serving as four-star admirals in the Navy and John himself a graduate, if a somewhat rebellious one, of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. But there is a wider frame of reference for understanding McCain's attachment to honor principles. McCain's ancestors settled in the antebellum South on a plantation known as Teoc, in Carroll County, Miss., on which his grandfather was born. "I have been told that the McCains of Teoc were clannish, devoted to one another and to their traditions," McCain notes in Faith of My Fathers--and that was surely the case, for that was a typical characteristic, along with a penchant for fighting, of Southern families sharing the heritage of the McCain brood.

As the scholars Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen remind us in their perceptive 1996 book, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, honor principles penetrated especially deeply in the South because the South was largely settled by "herdsmen from the fringes of Britain" while the North was largely settled by sedentary farmers from places such as England, Holland, and Germany. That might not sound like an important distinction, but as Nisbett and Cohen note, "Herdsmen the world over tend to be capable of great aggressiveness and violence because of their vulnerability to losing their primary resources, their animals." In this fuller sense of the concept, they observe, honor is not only about "probity of character" but also about defense of turf, about being "on guard against affronts that could be construed by others as disrespect."

In the military, the honor code serves an elevated and even essential purpose--the code is about putting country and comrades ahead of self. McCain lived by that code in his hard times as a prisoner of war at the Hanoi Hilton, to which he was sent after his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by the North Vietnamese in 1967. Withstanding torture, he exemplified honorable behavior by refusing an offer of early release from his captors after his father became commander of U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater. His acceptance, after all, might have damaged the morale of his fellow prisoners.

Country and comrades were served in that instance, but how well do honor principles work in other avenues of life, like in the realm of geopolitics?

Peace With Honor

McCain has operated in the political world for more than 25 years since being elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986. But his conception of honor is still tinged with the sentiment of the warrior. His favorite play, he has said, is Henry V, "a soldier's play"; and in the introduction to Character Is Destiny, he quotes from the famous St. Crispin's Day speech, in which King Henry urges his outnumbered band to battle against the French, for honor, glory and fraternity, "for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother."

And yet Shakespeare is not offering an unambiguous celebration of the honor principle--he views honor as a rounded concept. In the St. Crispin's speech, above the lines quoted by McCain, Henry defiantly asserts: "But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive."

A sin to covet honor? Shakespeare is on terrain staked out by philosophers all the way back to Plato. Ancient Athens was the ultimate culture of honor, which at the time meant something akin to public reputation. The man of honor was a figure of worship. But for an irreverent skeptic like Plato, the good life was decidedly not about honor. One reason he banished poets from his ideal Republic was because he viewed them as likely to promote vainglorious conduct. "And what will anyone be profited if under the influence of honor," Plato has Socrates ask, "he neglect justice and virtue?"

These are not idle speculations. In insisting on an honorable victory in Iraq, McCain in a speech in mid-May outlined the prospect of "most" U.S. troops coming home by January 2013--the end of his first term--with Iraq left as a "functioning democracy," with "militias disbanded," with Al Qaeda in Iraq "defeated," and with Iraq's government "capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders."

Left unsaid was precisely the question that vexes philosophers--at what price honor? McCain did not offer a strategy for achieving these goals; he did not say what cost in blood or treasure he would pay to achieve them. He offered an honorable victory as a hope, not as a potentially hazardous journey.

Absent a specific plan for honorable victory, the McCain line, fairly or not, invites cynicism. President Nixon repeatedly said that "peace with honor" was his objective for America's exit from Vietnam--and he invoked that phrase on January 23, 1973, in his nationally televised speech to announce the signing of the Paris peace accords with Hanoi's leaders. Indeed, he congratulated the American people for their insistence on a deal that achieved peace with honor.

And yet despite America's promises to continue standing up for its ally, the South Vietnamese government, that government collapsed as America beat a retreat, punctuated by that chaotic day on April 30, 1975, when a helicopter picked up the last American personnel from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Hundreds of Vietnamese friends, who had been assured they would not be left behind, stood on the roof waiting for helicopters that never returned. The embassy was looted. "It was not a proud day to be an American," the late Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., a writer and analyst who served in Vietnam, observed.

The historian Larry Berman persuasively argues in his 2001 book, No Peace, No Honor, which he based on declassified records, that Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the president's top negotiator, "expected" the Paris accords to be "immediately violated" by the North Vietnamese--an outrageous breach that would give Nixon credible license to pursue an aggressive airpower campaign "to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency." That strategy failed as the Watergate scandal consumed Nixon's presidency, forcing him to resign his office with more than two years left in his second term. An emboldened post-Watergate Congress cut off funds for the war.

Finger on the Trigger

McCain's silence on an Iraq strategy likewise raises the question of whether he intends to escalate the war in Iraq--and possibly take the fight to neighboring Iran (which the U.S. military has repeatedly accused of meddling in Iraq by aiding anti-U.S. insurgents)--in order to achieve an honorable victory. The disintegration of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, courtesy of the U.S.-led invasion, has enabled Iran's ruling Shiite mullahs to forge tight bonds with Iraq's post-Saddam Shiite-led government--and the mullahs, at times, seem almost to be spoiling for a fight.

To appease an aggressor goes against the honor principle--and can invite further aggression. It is possible, though, that Iran means to send a deterrent signal by showing that it is prepared to defend itself against an attack by Israel or the U.S. When a nation suffers a loss of prestige, as America already has in Iraq and the wider Middle East theater, the historian Berman said in an interview, "it should lead decision makers to reflect on the limits of intervention rather than looking for the next target to prove that we're the world's sole remaining superpower."

Another possible trip wire for a President McCain is Russia. With his passionate statement "We are all Georgians" after Russia's August rumble through that South Caucasus country, McCain seemed to be investing his personal prestige in the effort to draw a red line against Russian aggression in its old imperial backyard. What will he do if the Kremlin, heedless of the warning, tries to take a bite out of nearby Ukraine?

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, is among those with misgivings about how a President McCain, wedded to a code of honor, might handle duties as commander-in-chief. Wilkerson is as familiar with the honor code as McCain is--and also knows something about statecraft. He served in the Army for 31 years before leaving active duty in 1997. He fought in Vietnam in the late 1960s, and from 1989 to '93, he was an aide to Colin Powell when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From 2002 to 2005, he served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Powell, and afterward became a public critic of how the George W. Bush administration has fought the war in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism.

"I am still a Republican," Wilkerson said in an interview--but a Republican not planning to vote for McCain. "John McCain with his finger on the nuclear trigger frightens the hell out of me," he said. "In the national arena, you do things in accord with the realities of power, not according to some code. I am not going to vote for him for that very reason.... There is a much bigger concept than honor, and that is morality."

Empathy as a Blinder

That is a harsh criticism of McCain--but Wilkerson's anxieties about how a President McCain might proceed with the honor principle is matched by worries shared by others about how a President Obama might use his attachment to empathy.

Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of acclaimed best-sellers such as The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. George W. Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal. In one of his slimmer books, A Bound Man, Steele offers a penetrating essay on the character of Barack Obama, a figure to whom he relates because, as he writes at the outset, "I, too, was born to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was old enough to notice the world's fascination--if not obsession--with it."

And yet it is precisely Steele's insight into Obama's character that makes Steele so concerned about an Obama presidency. Steele's thesis is that Obama is "born to bargain." "Bargaining is his natural metier," Steele writes of Obama, "because he seems to understand it as a kind of charm" that will relieve those who are white of whatever anxiety they might feel on encountering a black person. Or as Steele told me in a telephone interview, Obama has an instinctive knack for standing in the shoes of the other: "He wants primarily to make the other side comfortable; he wants to show empathy." Following Obama's pronouncements is "like watching a tennis match. Something wonderful to say to conservatives, something wonderful to say to liberals."

And this mind-set, Steele continued, is worrisome because it is inherently soft--insufficiently regardful of the problem of "human evil" in the world--and because it is incomplete. When I read for Steele Obama's Northwestern commencement riff on the "empathy deficit," Steele commented: "This is so typical of Obama--to name some irrefutably good thing, like empathy, as a way of avoiding saying who the hell he is and where he wants to take America's role in the world."

Let's put that criticism to the side for a moment. Is "empathy" really the defining word for Obama's character? It does seem to be the word that comes quickly to the lips of those who love him and know him best, like his wife, Michelle, who described her husband as "sweet, empathetic" in an appearance on the ABC morning talk show The View. But the most persuasive source for this proposition is Obama, as he types himself in Dreams From My Father, an autobiographical tale of his efforts to find his identity. Obama presents himself as a kind of human seismometer, exquisitely sensitive to the vibrations of the social landscape.

Bound for Columbia University, he spent his first night in Manhattan "curled up in an alleyway," and as he got accustomed to New York City, he felt that "beneath the hum, the motion, I was seeing the steady fracturing of the world taking place ... it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America's race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia's bathrooms as well."

By the same token, it is the want of empathy, Obama believes, that can account for evil deeds. His explanation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America is decidedly more sociological than theological. In a column written for a Chicago community newspaper shortly after the attacks, he said, "The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers; an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others." He said that "most often," such a "failure" of empathy "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

Standing in Their Shoes

The gift of empathy--and it is a gift--certainly can be useful for a political leader, in global affairs as well as domestic ones. "You cannot influence a person that you do not make an effort to understand," Robert McNamara said in an April 2005 speech at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island. "Today we don't do this. It's a lack of the willingness to move toward empathy."

McNamara served as Defense secretary in the mid-1960s for a president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who seemed at times to have a stunning inability to understand the North Vietnamese enemy that the Pentagon was trying without success to bomb into submission. An intensely personal, hands-on politician, LBJ was painfully aware of his own deficit of empathy in this instance--he simply could not, he admitted, put himself in the shoes of Ho Chi Minh and see the world as Ho did. His frustration mounted at the end of 1965, as the White House debated the merits of a bombing pause as a possible path to a diplomatic solution to the conflict. "I don't know him," LBJ confided to an aide, Jack Valenti. "I don't know his ancestry or his customs or his beliefs. It is tough, very tough."

Empathy is a natural springboard for a diplomatic strategy of engagement, which Obama has said would be a hallmark of his presidency. As the Democratic presidential primary debates got under way last summer, Obama distanced himself from Hillary Rodham Clinton in his professed willingness to meet one-on-one, without precondition, during the first year of his presidency, the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea. "And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them," he said at the CNN/YouTube debate in South Carolina, "is ridiculous."

Obama gets support on this perspective from the likes of Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a biting critic of Bush administration foreign policies in Iraq and elsewhere, who is leaving the Senate. "This world is now so much beyond where we were 25 years ago, that no longer is it adequate for America to adjust and calibrate and frame and build and implement policy based on our optic alone," Hagel said at a June 18 forum on "smart power" organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "We've got to reverse those optics and get a sense of how the Pakistanis see us, too, or how the Muslim world sees us, or any other country. That doesn't take anything away from our sovereignty, our manhood. That's just smart," he said. Hagel, a Vietnam combat veteran, has not endorsed McCain, and he is a plausible Cabinet official in an Obama administration.

And yet Steele's criticism of Obama resonates not because engagement or "reversing the optics" is a bad approach but because Obama, the self-declared candidate of change, has so far failed to show how this tack would fit into a broader foreign-policy strategy and vision. In his chapter in The Audacity of Hope, "The World Beyond Our Borders," Obama boldly declares, "We need a revised foreign policy framework that matches the boldness and scope of [President] Truman's post-World War II policies," and then he goes on to say, "I don't presume to have this grand strategy in my hip pocket." He leaves the reader with "starting points for a new consensus" on a new strategy--which is little more than a series of conventional observations along the lines of "Any return to isolationism--or a foreign-policy approach that denies the occasional need to deploy U.S. troops--will not work." He praises certain aspects of President Carter's stewardship--and certain aspects of President Reagan's. It is a mishmash.

Nor has Obama fleshed out this vision in his foreign-policy speeches on the campaign trail. His usual narrative device is to work off the theme of hope in a fashion that binds his tales of working as an organizer in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago with stories of his overseas travel. "My experience has brought me to the hopeless places" of the world, he noted in an address at DePaul University in Chicago last October. "As a senator, I've been to refugee camps in Chad, where proud and dignified people can't hope for anything beyond the next handout."

Aaron David Miller is a retired professional diplomat who, over the past two decades, has advised secretaries of State for Republican and Democratic administrations on how to deal with the Middle East. The lessons of his experience at the negotiating table are ably laid out in the 2008 book The Much Too Promised Land. "Barack Obama may have all the empathy in the world," Miller said in an interview. "He may improve America's image in the world--Lord knows it needs improving--but he may not get anything done. There is no correlation necessarily between empathy and advancing America's national interest."

Honor and Justice

The McCain campaign, eager to promote the honor theme, is offering a pack of 50 lapel stickers with the word "Honor" printed on them for a $10 campaign contribution. The Obama campaign, facing questions about whether their man has the fiber to take on America's enemies, is not peddling anything on the "empathy deficit" theme. Its mantra, as ever, is "Change." You fill in the blank.

But let's not forget that we are in the high tide of the campaign silly season. Come January, it is quite possible that honor would lead a President McCain--or empathy, a President Obama--in directions at odds with the one-dimensional images these values generate in the media and the realm of political spin.

While the typecast image of honor tends to evoke an uncompromising approach to politics, surely honor also can be married to the principle of justice. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, it became a matter of national honor for America to try to rescue the Vietnamese who had helped protect U.S. troops and other Americans in the country--and who were likely to be murdered or "re-educated" by the triumphant North Vietnamese. President Ford, Nixon's successor, personally decreed an effort resulting in the resettlement within America of 131,000 Vietnamese by the year's end.

So far, candidate McCain has steered clear of the complexity of the refugee crisis that the Iraq war has caused. Perhaps McCain figures that talking about the Iraq refugee problem during the campaign could draw unwelcome attention to the shortcomings of the war. Whatever his calculation, the next president will find this matter on his desk. An estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees are stranded outside their country, mostly in Syria and Jordan. This is not only a humanitarian issue but also a national security issue, given the potential for refugee communities to serve as recruiting grounds for anti-American militant groups.

And it is a matter, too, of America standing by its friends. Among the Iraqi refugees are those who put their lives on the line for U.S. forces in Iraq--working in combat zones as interpreters, for example. Having been branded as collaborators by anti-U.S. groups in Iraq, they face the prospect of retaliation should they return. Washington's pledge to resettle 12,000 Iraqis in fiscal 2008 is a paltry one. The bureaucracy is unlikely to move faster without Gerald Ford-like presidential pressure. "It is clearly a matter of national honor," Ken Bacon, the president of Refugees International, a Washington-based group, and a former Pentagon spokesman, said in an interview.

Although McCain has not announced a policy on refugees, sentiment exists within his camp for a President McCain acting boldly to make en tering the United States easier for stranded Iraqis who helped Americans. "We should open our doors to those people," McCain foreign-policy adviser Richard Burt told me. Burt served in the Reagan administration's State Department, first as director of political-military affairs, then as assistant secretary of State for European and Canadian affairs, and then as U.S. ambassador to Germany.

No Dumb Wars

America's national honor, too, has been called into question by the torture of U.S.-held prisoners at Abu Ghraib and by the treatment of the detainees held in seemingly permanent limbo at Guantanamo. On this set of issues, going to the core of America's identity as a nation of laws and fairness, surely no political figure in America has more credible standing than McCain to craft policies that pass constitutional muster, keep faith with universal standards of human rights, and protect America's security. As a senator, he has been a selective critic of certain Bush policies. As president, he would have a unique opportunity, with the bully pulpit before him and the whole world watching, to review all established policies and insist on appropriate reforms that future presidents would dare to change only at their political peril.

McCain adviser Burt said that McCain, in principle, is very well positioned to act on those issues but that the practicalities are daunting in their complexity. No obvious solution exists for what to do with the Guantanamo detainees should that facility be closed, Burt said.

As for an Obama presidency, although the typecast image of empathy tends to evoke a forgiving approach to politics, surely empathy can also be a matter of backbone. Who is more deserving of empathy than victims of genocide? If the history of the 20th century and of the first decade of the early 21st century is any guide, then the next president is likely to be confronted with the question of how to deal with genocide in some remote part of the world that, as Obama might say, few Americans could locate on a map.

Even though presidential candidate Obama rallied the antiwar Democratic Left to his side with his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq and his call for bringing U.S. troops home, a commander-in-chief Obama may find himself tempted to use America's globally unrivaled military arsenal to stop crimes against humanity. The truly empathetic leader, after all, is as apt to be a liberal war hawk as a pacifist; the hope that a terrorized villager in Darfur seeks comes not in the form of food packages but from the barrel of a friendly gun. "I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars," Obama declared in his now-famous speech, at an anti-war rally in Chicago in the fall of 2002, opposing the approaching Iraq war.

Empathy and Genocide

Obama has not set forth the particular conditions under which, as president, he might use military force to prevent genocide. But two of his closest foreign-policy advisers, Susan Rice and Anthony Lake, are somewhat hawkish on this matter. In "We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?" an op-ed that The Washington Post ran in the fall of 2006, they called for U.S. military intervention, with or without U.N. support, to stop genocide in Darfur, just as America acted in Kosovo in the 1990s without a U.N. resolution. (Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., also co-wrote the piece.)

Rice, a possible choice for national security adviser in an Obama White House, has written passionately and in considerable conceptual depth about the "responsibility to protect" victims of crimes such as genocide. "There is danger in the impulse to submerge liberal ideals beneath the familiar veneer of strategic realism," she wrote, with co-author Andrew J. Loomis of Georgetown University, in an essay in the 2007 book Beyond Preemption, published by the Brookings Institution. Noting that "the U.N. still lacks any effective rapid deployment capability," that piece called for strengthening U.N. capabilities to conduct "humanitarian" interventions.

Rice served on President Clinton's National Security Council from 1993 to 1995--during the time of genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, in 1994--as director for international organizations and peacekeeping. (Clinton later called his failure to intervene in Rwanda his biggest regret as president.) From 1995 to 1997, she served as the NSC's senior hand on African issues, and from 1997 to 2001, at Foggy Bottom as assistant secretary of State for African affairs.

Africa may be the testing ground on which the bones of an Obama "empathy policy" acquire sinew. Africa often suffers from geopolitical neglect--and no continent has suffered more from genocide, civil war, and failed states over the past 15 years. It seems unlikely that Obama will ignore Africa, the birthplace of his father and a land that has evoked some of his most deeply felt writing. And as a practical matter, some of his most enthusiastic political supporters are African-Americans, including first-generation African immigrants who are helping to register voters and raise money for the Obama campaign.

Like every other chief executive, a President McCain or a President Obama would be challenged to reconcile a signature value with the dictate of pragmatism. How might a President McCain deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who gratuitously insulted George W. Bush by likening him to the devil? The McCain camp's current answer comes out of the honor code: "Senator McCain thinks that Chavez is a charlatan and a thug. The senator doesn't trust Chavez, and does not think it worth getting into a back-and-forth with him," a McCain adviser told The New Yorker. From a top Obama supporter came an equally predictable answer: "We need to establish some lines of communication with him," New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson told the magazine.

Neither answer addressed the difficult question of how to construct a policy to address Chavez's ambition of becoming leader of a regional bloc perched on America's doorstep. Messy realities are the rule in foreign policy. While McCain and Obama offer contrasting profiles of character, the same world awaits whoever is elected president--a world as likely to frustrate American initiative as to reward it.

By Paul Starobin, National Journal Magazine, Sept. 13, 2008

WHO WOULD have dreamed that a hockey mom could produce such a bounce? I didn't even think the puck was supposed to get off the ice.

But now that so many women have skated over to her side, allow me another metaphor. Sarah Palin is the Zamboni of this campaign.

This hockey mom rolled onto the ice, did a couple of turns around the rink, and managed to clear off all the nasty old Republican detritus. She gave the Grand Old (Boy) Party a new image, or at least a new surface.

Let us remember that Republicans had long targeted working mothers as the centerpiece of the culture wars. They ran an entire convention on Marilyn Quayle's line that "Most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women."

Now their heroine is the in-your-face governor who once said: "To any critics who say a woman can't think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I'd just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave."

Hey, wasn't that our line? Weren't the Neanderthals who wanted women to stay in their traditional roles these same conservatives? Suddenly, we are watching the parade of the flip-floppers, patriarchs with pedicures.

Who can forget James Dobson, who blamed the decline and fall of morality on "working mothers and permissiveness," and told us that real women "are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership." He now says "I believe Sarah Palin is God's answer."

Who can forget Phyllis Schlafly who said the "flight from home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman." She now says that "I think a hardworking, well-organized CEO type can handle it very well."

Who can forget all this? I'll tell you who can forget: Everyone! Sarah the Zamboni has cleared the ice of this pesky historical memory.

Mind you, sexism is still alive and well, although it is enchanting to watch the same folks who criticized Hillary supporters for whining take off after the media for vetting. Back when a Hillary hater asked McCain "How do we stop the bitch?" John responded "Excellent question!" Now his campaign says it's "offensive and disgraceful" of Obama to use the word "lipstick." How do you spell chutzpah?

Nevertheless the good news for this cockeyed optimist is that Palin has made it politically incorrect to criticize working mothers. They are the demilitarized zone of the cultural battleground.

There is, however, another divide between left and right that has reappeared with the governor's star turn. It's the difference between those who think a woman can have it all as long as she can do it all . . . by herself, and those who think that it is neither wimpish nor whiny to push for some help.

The Emergence of Sarah Palin is actually the Return of Supermom. Mother of five, moose killer, and marathoner, she was back at work three days after her son's birth, juggling a Blackberry and a breast pump while making Helen Reddy look like a slacker. Call her a role model or a parody, but the fresh face of 2008 looks like the exhausted face of the 1980s.

The conservative virtue of Palin's life is that she doesn't need anything from anyone outside the family. She isn't lobbying for, say, maternity leave, equal pay, or universal pre-K. Let alone universal health insurance. Or college tuition breaks, especially for that soon-to-be-teen-mom and her soon-to-be husband. Compare this with the Wal-Mart mom juggling day-care fees and gas bills, fantasizing about a job with benefits and the flexibility to be home when the kids are sick.

Somehow the original women's movement slogan, the personal is political, has been turned on its head. It's more fun to talk about the candidate's family and eyeglasses than Iraq and the recession. If Bush was the guy you wanted to have a beer with, Palin is the gal you want to go to aerobics with. The political is way too personal.

So let us applaud the way Palin has pushed the working mother out of the firing line of the culture wars. But what about those family issues flattened by Sarah Zamboni?

By Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe, September 12, 2008

As the campaign enters its final stretch, a look at where the two presidential candidates are spending their time and money suggests a playing field with sharp similarities to that of the last two national elections.

According to media buy information obtained by The Fix, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain are currently on the air in 14 of the same states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Obama has the airwaves to himself in three states: Indiana, Montana and North Dakota. Of the 18 states his campaign initially advertised in at the start of the general election campaign, Obama remains on television in all but two: Georgia, whose rock-ribbed Republicanism always made it a long shot and Alaska where the selection of immensely popular Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate has solidified the Last Frontier for the GOP.

Obama's willingness to fund ads and run full campaigns in a slightly broader palette of states gives him a few more paths to the nomination although, as we've noted, the fall election seems likely to come down to a handful of states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida -- that decided the 2000 and 2004 races as well.

Here's our take on the ten states most likely to switch their 2004 presidential preference. As always, the number one ranked state is the most likely to switch sides in the fall election. Agree with our picks? Disagree? The comments section welcomes all views.

To the Line!

10. Virginia (Bush, 54 percent): Democrats' irrational exuberance about their prospects in the Commonwealth have worn off of late. Obama passed on putting Gov. Tim Kaine on the ticket, and the state's largely conservative nature (with the obvious exception of northern Virginia) appears to be reasserting itself. The state is still a major target -- both Obama and McCain campaigned there earlier this week -- but the most recent independent survey suggests McCain holds an edge. (Previous ranking: 8)

9. Florida (Bush, 52 percent): Polling continues to suggest that McCain is maintaining a solid lead despite being massively outspent on television by Obama. McCain is now up on television in the state, which suggests some level of concern among his team. Still, the Sunshine state is McCain's to lose. (Previous ranking: 10)

8. Ohio (Bush, 51 percent): Yes, we know the polling out of the Buckeye State shows Obama as the slight favorite. And, it's clear that Democrats are in a very different -- and better -- place in the state than they were in 2004, thanks is no small part to the election of Gov. Ted Strickland (D) in 2006. And yet, most strategists on both sides are skeptical about Obama's ability to carry the state -- pointing to his struggles with rural white voters during the Democratic primaries and the appeal of Palin to that same crucial voting bloc. (Previous ranking: 7)

7. Pennsylvania (Kerry, 51 percent): No state provokes as much disagreement between Democratic and Republican strategists as this one. Democrats point to the massive gains they have made in voter registration (375,000 more Democrats on the rolls than after the 2006 election) as evidence that the math is determinative in their favor. Republicans note that polling continues to show the contest close, and that the Democratic nominee hasn't taken more than 51 percent of the vote in the Keystone State in the last four national elections. (Previous ranking: 8)

6. New Hampshire (Kerry, 51 percent): Obama, McCain and vice presidential nominee Joe Biden either have or will make campaign stops in the Granite State this week and weekend, a sign of the state's importance to both campaigns' electoral vote calculus. McCain's success in the state during the 2000 and 2008 primary seasons keep the state at number six on the Line for now but recent polling suggests the Obama campaign's optimism about their chances here is well founded. (Previous ranking: 4)

5. Michigan (Kerry, 51 percent): The Fix generally avoids bold predictions but here's one we can't resist: Michigan in 2008 will be the Ohio of 2004 or the Florida of 2000. That is, the Wolverine State will be the central battleground in the fight for the White House this fall. Why? First and foremost because the economy is, far and away, the biggest issue in this election and nowhere are those hard times felt more than in Michigan. Second, both Obama and McCain believe they have a reasonable path to 50 percent plus one in the state on Nov. 4. It is going to be an absolute war for the next 54 days. (Previous ranking: 5)

4. Colorado (Bush, 52 percent): Democratic and Republican operatives seem to agree that the Rocky Mountain State is a golden (pun intended) opportunity for Obama. Democrats have scored across-the-board gains (two House seats, a Senate seat and the governor's mansion) over the last few elections and staging the Democratic National Convention in Denver is sure to further fire up the party's base for the fall. (Previous ranking: 7)

3. Nevada (Bush, 50 percent): The high profile Democratic caucus in the state earlier this year did wonders for party registration numbers; as of August, there were nearly 458,000 registered Democrats in Nevada as compared to 397,000 registered Republicans. Still, Nevada's voters tend to be more conservative on social issues like guns and abortion and the Western appeal of the McCain/Palin ticket should not be overlooked. (Previous ranking: 2)

2. New Mexico (Bush, 50 percent): The coming fall election looks like a slam dunk for Democrats in the Land of Enchantment. Senate Republicans have given up on the open seat race to replace Pete Domenici, and House Democrats are optimistic about their chances in taking over two open seats. With a Democratic wave seemingly building, Obama's campaign feels very good about his chances here. (Previous ranking: 3)

1. Iowa (Bush, 50 percent): McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said recently that he felt better about their chances in Iowa. Hard to see why. Obama retains a quasi native son appeal in the Hawkeye State and the most recent poll we've seen gave him a 15 point edge. (Previous ranking: 1)

By Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post, September 12, 2008

GOP Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin tonight appeared to back Barack Obama's assertion that the United States could attack targets in Pakistan without the country's permission -- a position that her running mate Sen. John McCain has called "naïve."

Pressed three times by Charles Gibson of ABC News on whether the United States had the right to make cross-border attacks into Pakistan, "with or without the approval of the Pakistani government," Palin twice avoided the question before answering: "I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table."

In August 2007, the now-Democratic nominee stirred controversy when he said that if he were elected president, he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government. "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said.

Obama was referring to long-time U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf, who recently resigned.

The New York Times in Thursday's editions reported that President Bush secretly approved orders in July that would for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government. The newspaper said the classified order was directed against al Qaeda and Taliban forces.

But McCain, on several occasions, has attacked that idea as wrong-headed, most recently on July 28 on CNN's "Larry King Live."

King asked: "If you were president and knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan, you know where, would you have U.S. forces go in after him?"

McCain replied: "Larry, I'm not going to go there and here's why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation. I think the Pakistanis would want bin Laden out of their hair and out of their country and it's causing great difficulties in Pakistan itself."

By Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, September 11, 2008

NEW YORK -- With the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks over, the campaigns of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama went back to war this morning with new attack ads that use the same harsh tactics the candidates lamented in a forum on civic service here last night.

McCain last night conceded the campaign had become a little rough, blaming the tone on Obama's decision not to hold a series of joint town hall meetings. This morning, he released an ad, "Disrespectful" that kept up his campaign's "celebrity" line of attack on Obama even as it continued to cast his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as a victim, saying "they" dismissed her as "good looking," said she was just doing "what she was told" and called her a liar.

"He was the world's biggest celebrity, but his star is fading," the ad intones.

The independent watch dog group FactCheck.org has already weighed in, saying the ad -- on the air in Denver -- continues a McCain campaign pattern of distortion, taking quotes of context and twisting meaning. For instance, Obama's running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden, joked that one of the differences between himself and Palin is that she is "good looking," but contemporaneous news reports did not say that was belittling.

"The new McCain-Palin ad ... begins like an earlier ad we criticized, with its reference to Barack Obama's celebrity, but then goes down new paths of deception," Factcheck.org said.

Obama released two ads, one positive, the other on the attack, trying to focus the campaign on McCain, not Palin, and hammering home the theme of change. The attack is direct, accusing McCain of being out of touch with the country after 26 years in Washington: "He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send e-mail. Still doesn't understand the economy, and favors $200 billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class."

"After one president who was out of touch," it concludes, "we just can't afford more of the same."

The ad uses jaunty, dated music, pictures of a middle-aged McCain wearing giant early-'80s glasses and images of a huge, boxy old cellular phone and a Rubik's Cube to drive home the theme that the Republican is out of touch after having been in Washington for decades.

The other spot features Obama simply looking into the camera and talking about his vision of change, with any reference to McCain coming by inference, not name. "To me, change is a government that doesn't let banks and oil companies rip off the American people. Change is when we finally fix health care instead of just talking about it. ... Change is a president who brings people together," Obama concludes.

By Jonathan Weisman, The Washington Post, September 12, 2008

With Democratic jitters mounting over the Obama campaign, the presidential candidate's campaign manager, David Plouffe, released a memo trying to calm frayed nerves.

"In recent weeks, John McCain has shown that he is willing to go into the gutter to win this election. His campaign has become nothing but a series of smears, lies, and cynical attempts to distract from the issues that matter to the American people," he wrote.

But, he assured supporters, "We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain's attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people. We will not allow John McCain and his band of Karl Rove disciples to make this big election about small things."

Plouffe said that with the selection of Palin, McCain had abandoned his core message of experience and moved to Barack Obama's ground of change. With just two months to go, McCain will have to remake himself as the agent of change.

"That is a debate we welcome," he concluded.

The full memo follows:

TO: Interested Parties
FR: David Plouffe, Campaign Manager
RE: Heading into the Final Stretch
DA: September 12, 2008

Summary

With both conventions and the vice-presidential selections behind us, the campaign is now heading into the final stretch. The race has settled into a tight race nationally with Obama well-positioned in the key battleground states, a historic enthusiasm gap, and a debate being waged on Obama's home turf -- change.

In recent weeks, John McCain has shown that he is willing to go into the gutter to win this election. His campaign has become nothing but a series of smears, lies, and cynical attempts to distract from the issues that matter to the American people. But as Barack Obama said earlier this week "enough is enough." This election is too important and the challenges too big to spend the next 54 days talking about trivial non-issues.

Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign, and today we are releasing two new ads that go directly at the fundamental issue in this race: John McCain is out of touch with the American people and unable to address the challenges facing the country in the 21 st century and bring about real change, and that Barack Obama is the candidate who will bring about change that works for the middle class.

We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain's attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people. We will not allow John McCain and his band of Karl Rove disciples to make this big election about small things.

Senator Biden will be integral to that effort, both in pushing back on the lies that we'll continue to see from our opponents, and in keeping the debate focused on delivering for everyday Americans. After all, that's what Joe Biden has done throughout his career: passing the Crime Bill to put more cops on our streets, passing to the landmark Violence Against Women Act, and serving as a steadfast voice every day for those more concerned about the price of gas and saving for retirement than the latest political charade in Washington.

A Change Election with Two Converts

For the entire general election campaign, the McCain campaign has insisted that years in Washington should be the yardstick by which Americans measure their next President. But in recent days, and with his selection of a running mate with no Washington experience, Senator McCain has abandoned his core argument. Now he and his strategists have belatedly come to the realization that, after eight disastrous years, the American people are demanding change.

So the candidate who just months ago was openly boasting that he has been a faithful supporter of George W. Bush's policies, and would continue them as President, now is improbably scrambling to offer himself as the candidate who will deliver the change America needs - even as President Bush holds a fundraiser for him today in Oklahoma.

This is a debate we welcome. It is the debate America needs.

For two decades, Barack Obama has challenged political insiders and outworn thinking to bring about real, meaningful change that helps people, not special interests. From welfare reform, to tax relief for working families, to health care for children of working families who lacked coverage, Obama has been at the forefront of fights that have made a difference in the lives of everyday Americans.

In Washington, Obama has been a consistent opponent of the Bush policies that have hobbled our economy and weakened the middle class, and his proposals for the future would steer us away from that disastrous course.

He's challenged leaders of both parties by passing landmark reforms that took dead aim at the campaign contributions and favors through which corporate lobbyists have rigged the system. He worked across the aisle to pass laws reining in no-bid contracts and opening the budget process to the American people.

And Obama has lived by those principles in this campaign, refusing the contributions of Washington lobbyists and political action committees and imposing those same rules on the Democratic National Committee. Lobbyists don't run his campaign. And when he's President, they won't run his White House.

But what about John McCain?

Can we really expect change from a Senator who supported the Bush policies 90 percent of the time? Who has said the Bush policies have brought about "great progress economically" and who just three weeks ago proclaimed the economy fundamentally strong?

The fact is that while he mouths the word "change," Senator McCain's record and proposals scream "more of the same." His plans for the economy, energy, health care, education and Iraq barely stray from the Bush policies that are in place today.

And can we really expect change from a candidate whose campaign is being run by some of the most powerful corporate lobbyists in Washington?

While Senator McCain loudly declares that he will tell the special interests in Washington that their day is "over," they are working overtime to elect him.

Seven of the top officials in his campaign are lobbyists. Between them, they have lobbied for Big Oil, the drug and insurance industries, foreign governments--even Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His campaign manager routinely lobbied for corporations who had business before the Senate Commerce Committee that McCain chaired.

Corporate Lobbyists and PACs have contributed millions of dollars to his campaign and the Republican National Committee on his behalf.

Does anyone believe they are spending their time, money and energy to put themselves out of business?

That is not change. It's more of the same.

A debate about delivering change is a debate we're happy to have. Because no matter how many times McCain and Governor Palin use the word "change" or try to reinvent their own records, one thing stays the same: the fact that when it comes to the economy, education, Iraq, or the special interests' stranglehold on Washington, they both are stubborn defenders of the past eight years and they both promise more of the same.

One final note:

Senator McCain has called the news media "his base" because of the friendly treatment he has received. And he undoubtedly is counting on his "base" to overlook the gulf between his newly minted "change" message, and the realities of his record and campaign.

His lobbyist-manager said Sunday that Governor Palin would only submit to questions about her record, statements and views when they determine that the news media will treat her with due "deference" -- a startling and arrogant new standard for public officials in our democracy.

But we trust that the obvious conflicts between their rhetoric and records, their promises and their plans will not go unreported in the last 53 days of this campaign.

By Jonathan Weisman, The Washington Post, September 12, 2008

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 -- Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

"America can never go back to that false sense of security that came before September 11, 2001," she said at the deployment ceremony, which drew hundreds of military families who walked from their homes on the sprawling post to the airstrip where the service was held.

Palin's return to Alaska coincided with her first extensive interview since she became the Republican vice presidential nominee. In the interview, with ABC News correspondent Charles Gibson, she was confronted with questions about the U.S. relationship with Russia and her fitness for office, and she appeared to struggle when asked to define the "Bush doctrine" on foreign policy. Palin drew repeated follow-up questions from Gibson about whether she believed in the right to "anticipatory self-defense" and crossing other nations' borders to take action against threats.

"I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hellbent on destroying America and our allies," she said after several questions on the topic. "We have got to have all options out there on the table."

That response put her in line with a view expressed by Sen. Barack Obama, now the Democratic presidential nominee, in August 2007, when he stirred controversy by saying that if he were elected president, he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government. "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharaff won't act, we will," Obama said. At the time, McCain called Obama's comments "naive."

Palin continued to take a hard line on national security issues when asked whether war with Russia could be necessary if Georgia were to join NATO and Russia crossed its borders again. Palin replied, "Perhaps so."

"I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help," she said.

In the interview, Palin said "I'm ready" when asked whether she had sufficient experience to serve as vice president. She added that she did not hesitate when McCain offered her the No. 2 spot on the ticket.

"I answered yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink," she told Gibson.

The event Thursday, held on a barren Army post on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, provided a powerful visual backdrop for Palin's first solo appearance after weeks of traveling alongside McCain and reading from a carefully prepared script.

McCain aides were adamant that the ceremony had not been coordinated with the campaign, and officers at the installation said the Alaska governor had agreed to attend months before she was chosen for the GOP ticket. Palin's son Track, 19, will deploy to Iraq with his unit later this month. McCain's son Jimmy is with his Marine Corps unit in Iraq, but the senator from Arizona has taken pains to keep him out of the campaign spotlight.

As she has been since McCain plucked her from relative obscurity two weeks ago, Palin continues to be surrounded by senior McCain advisers even here; the senator's top strategist, Steve Schmidt, and several others accompanied her to Alaska. The group is guiding Palin through a crash course on policy issues and is revising the campaign's original plan to send her on fundraising missions separately from McCain.

Instead, seeking to seize on the outpouring of enthusiasm for Palin, McCain advisers are "seriously considering" having McCain and Palin campaign together on the road. It would be an unusual arrangement -- running mates traditionally split up to cover as much ground as possible -- but aides believe it would help brand McCain and Palin as a single unit. It would also prevent Palin from having to contend with her own dedicated press contingent as she works to become more comfortable with an array of national and international issues. The campaign is also cognizant of the fact that McCain has consistently drawn bigger crowds since adding Palin to the ticket.

"It is under serious consideration that they will spend more time together than not, and more time together than is traditional," said a senior McCain adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "They are a great duo together, from the perspective of delivering a message." The adviser added: "Sometimes these vice presidential selections, the pairings work in a magical way; they click."

Other campaign formalities have also been taken care of in recent days. Aides confirmed that Palin and her husband, Todd, have been assigned Secret Service names: hers is Denali, after the Alaska national park and wildlife preserve that includes Mount McKinley; his is Driller, a nod to his work as an oilman on the state's North Slope.

On the Army post outside Fairbanks early Thursday afternoon, thousands of soldiers stood in formation as a low sun beamed on the chilly tarmac. One officer who said he had come to know Track Palin said that the ceremony would have taken place in the same way had the governor not been tapped to run for higher office, and that her son was determined to remain as anonymous as possible.

Pvt. 1st Class Palin is being sent to Iraq with the Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division. Palin, 19, will be deployed to northern Iraq and will be primarily tasked with protecting and helping transport the deputy commander of his unit, Lt. Col. Michael W. Smith. His position is one of dismounted infantryman.

"He wants to pave his own route in life. He wants to do his own thing," Maj. Chris Hyde said. "He doesn't want to just be known as Governor Palin's son."

Hyde said Col. Burt Thompson had arranged the deployment ceremony to coincide with the Sept. 11 anniversary as a symbol of the importance of the military. "That was intentional," Hyde said, describing the effort as a "theatrical" one but adding quickly that it had nothing to do with the Palins. "I talked to Track Palin last week, and he's still just an all-American kid," Hyde said.

The governor did not address her son by name in her remarks but spoke broadly on behalf of the troops' families. "Don't mind us -- your parents, your friends, your family -- if we allow for a few tears or if we hold you just a little closer once more before you're gone," she said. "We're going to miss you. We can't help it, we're going to miss you."

She continued: "You may not need our protection anymore. In fact, you're the ones who will now be protecting us, protecting America."

By Anne E. Kornblut, The Washington Post, September 12, 2008

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate has stirred the hypocrite within us. Women judging women.

We watch the polls while examining her stockings. We listen to her speech while calculating how many bobby pins hold up her hairdo. We parse her record while commenting on the shade of her lipstick. We measure our child-rearing skills against hers. She's a hockey mom. We are soccer (or swimming or softball) moms. We can give a pretty good PTA pep talk, and nobody asked us to be vice president.

But wait. In her circumstances -- five children, one a baby with Down syndrome, one a pregnant, unmarried teenager -- would we want to be vice president? We gather at the playground or in office cubicles and question her choices, knowing that to do so is sexist, the very thing so many women have fought against. "We never have these conversations about men," said Kavita N. Ramdas, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, which promotes women's rights worldwide.

Still, women are debating, partly because Palin herself injected motherhood into the campaign.

For Sherma Farray, a Frederick mother of three young children, the internal argument went like this: "How is she going to run for vice president with five kids? . . . Then I said to myself, 'She is doing it already in Alaska, she can do it in the White House.' Then I saw the picture of that baby, and I thought, 'She is going to need a lot of help.' The vice president goes all over. Makes big decisions. Then she will have a grandbaby on the way. That's a big responsibility."

Finally, Farray concluded, "I just cannot see myself sitting around the meeting table when my family is going to need attention."

Maureen Carrington, a 40-year-old mother of three who runs a business from her Silver Spring home, came down on the other side of the question. "This lady seems to be a powerhouse. I don't think there's anything she can't do" -- including raising children and holding the nation's second-highest office.

Like many women, Carrington admires and identifies with Palin. "I'm not a member of the NRA," she said, "but I've had to do a lot by myself. I learned to be independent. I get up at 5 a.m. every day. I work my tail off like a lot of women. I see that in her. I think she works her tail off."

Heather Maurano, 35, is excited by Palin. "I'm a mom of three small daughters," said Maurano, who lives in Silver Spring. "I think it is great to have a role model for them. At this point, I'm staying home with them. I respect the fact she is doing it all, and it's great."

So it appears that we have a superwoman running for vice president, soaring above other mothers who are trying to balance work and family. Pro or con, the discussion about Palin's choices is a process of comparison for women, because that's what so many of us do: measure ourselves against other women, contrast our lives to theirs, compare our careers with her meteoric rise. Would we choose as she did? Could we do what she's doing? How does she do it?

But there is another component to the conversation. Palin has burst onto the political scene from a state far away, geographically and culturally. Suddenly she has become the symbol of Everywoman, the working mother who broke the glass ceiling that so many women have tossed stones at. Standing on their shoulders, she has emerged on the other side.

Now many women are trying to square Palin's sudden status as the most famous female politician since Hillary Clinton with her political views about women. On some level, we despise ourselves for judging the first GOP vice presidential nominee among us. On another, we feel entitled to scrutinize her choices because she would like to dictate many of ours.

"It's ironic that the party that tends to be less supportive of women has managed to get a woman in as their vice presidential candidate," said Linda M. Hahn, 49, a Potomac mother of four ranging in age from 8 to 25. "But her private views and her voting views hurt women. It's like she doesn't make sense to me."

But why should she have to? "We would never dream that a male candidate would have to reflect the fears and worries of all men," Ramdas says. "So now it's Sarah Palin. Before that, it was Hillary Clinton. What will she do for women? How will she represent women?" She says the term "women's issues" is misleading: "It is as if we don't care about war and peace. Or we don't care about education. Or we don't care about the environment."

Still, women's rights are at the core of the election for some women. Nancy Bagwell, 65, a retired nurse who lives in Arlington, sees Palin's candidacy unraveling everything her generation fought for. "She wants to impose her views about reproductive rights on everybody. She has this idea that . . . God says even with incest or a genetic defect, you have to have this child. I certainly wouldn't want to have that imposed on women. It doesn't affect me. I'm way over reproductive age. This is not my question. This is a question of women who are poor . . . and under the thumb of male dominance. All of a sudden, they get pregnant and have to have this child. It's about poor people. . . . Those are the women I'm speaking for."

While many women celebrate Palin's decision to have a baby with Down syndrome, and her daughter's decision to keep her baby and marry her boyfriend, as living proof of her anti-abortion position, others see a moral gap between her commitment to "family values" and the projected picture of her family.

"She does have a child who is about to have a child," said Tonda Bean, a Silver Spring mother of two, who stays home with her daughters, 11 and 15. "There is attention that could have been paid. . . . The research I've read says you can circumvent some problems if you are with them enough. You can keep them out of certain activity."

In view of Bristol Palin's pregnancy at 17, Bean is concerned by Sarah Palin's stance favoring abstinence-only sex education. "What is missing," Bean said, "is to tell them about contraceptives. I wonder whether she will reform her position on that."

So while we probe Palin's conservatism, we also question how she could expose her daughter to national scrutiny, and wonder whether somebody else's pregnant daughter would be similarly embraced by a religious right that has not hesitated to criticize other famous unwed mothers, real (teenage pop star Jamie Lynn Spears) or imagined (TV sitcom character Murphy Brown).

"If it was the other way around, and it was Barack Obama's daughter," Farray said, "you would not hear the end of it."

Three women sat in an Indian restaurant in Gaithersburg last week, talking business, talking about Palin.

"The fact she has a pregnant teenage daughter when preaching abstinence, why is that okay?" asked Laura Levengard, a personal trainer who has two children.

"Some would say putting herself in the public eye was not fair to her daughter," Linda Hahn said. "That subjects her daughter to public shame."

"Why does a 17-year-old have to be married?" Levengard wondered.

The conversation turned inward and became an examination of their own lives.

"I've always done what I wanted to do: stayed home and watched the kids Monday through Friday and run my business on the weekend," Levengard said, recalling her former occupation. "I think you can do it all."

Then she told a story about mentioning to her brother that she had an out-of-town business opportunity. Her brother's response caught her off guard: "But who will watch the kids?"

"The same question wouldn't be asked of your husband," said Hahn, who has a business training company. "Who's going to watch the kids?"

"The personal choice we make -- our choices are because our lives are what they are," said Sylvia Henderson, another business owner. "That's life. We choose to be married or single. We choose to have kids or not. They are personal choices I've had to make whether someone likes them or not. My personal choices are made to feel comfortable with me. In my skin. I resent the fact we have to explain our choices."

But we want Palin to explain hers.

On Urbanmamas.com, a Web site for mothers, one posting absolved us of our curiosity: "It's ok to judge the mothering decisions of a vice presidential candidate," this mother wrote, "as it opens a window to her decision-making process (and after all, we're supposed to judge her as she's a politician and we get to vote)."

Then she raised The Question: "Would you run for a major office while your children were young?"

Palin has reignited the never-resolved mommy wars -- not the old ones between mothers who stay home and those who work, but the ones inside every mother who has a choice. Should a woman nourish her personal ambitions to succeed at her career while trying to raise a family? Was it selfish or superhuman of Palin to go back to work almost immediately after her son's birth? Was it fair to her constituents, the residents of Alaska? After all, most mothers remember barely functioning from lack of sleep when they had new babies. Is it anybody's business?

"The recent debate about Sarah Palin's choice to go back to work three days after her fifth baby was born (and what that means for the 'little' people's parental leave rights) . . . have got me thinking about selfishness," a mother said on Urbanmamas.com. "When do we cross the line between caring for ourselves (whether that be reading a good book or furthering our career) and giving our children appropriate attention? Must good parenting be about entirely sublimating our own interests to focus every moment on our progeny? I think most of our behavior rides the line, not entirely healthy for our kids, but not entirely servicing our sanity either."

Jill Miller Zimon, 46, mother of three and a contributing editor at BlogHer.com, wants to know how Palin rides that line.

"There is no evidence in how she does the juggling," Zimon said. " . . . There's no way to know how she does it all. We don't know how she juggles. I want to know, because I juggle. . . . I would love to see inside Sarah Palin's house because I know what my house looks like at 6:15 in the morning when I'm trying to get my kids off to school."

We think about this as we fly from our downtown office to pick up the kid from day care, fry up some chicken, fold a load of laundry, clear the dining room table, wash the dishes, scrub the frying pan, get the kid to bed, finish our office work by midnight and drag the body to bed. And get up to do it all again another day. Can women do it all?

Levengard has decided: "We can do it all."

Hahn disagreed. While other mothers hurried off to get their children from school, she and Levengard remained at the table, picking over the question of Palin and the election and the choices women make.

"You literally can't do everything," Hahn said. "We can say we can do it all. We've had to say that to break in and have careers. But in reality at a certain point, no matter how smart or intelligent you are, you max out. There are only so many hours in a day."

Levengard pressed her point: "Did you ever not feed your kids dinner [or] bail on the fundraiser?"

"No," Hahn said, "but sometimes they had crummy dinners."

By DeNeen L. Brown, The Washington Post, September 12, 2008

NEW YORK - Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said Friday she thinks Barack Obama regrets not making Hillary Rodham Clinton his running mate.

Palin praised Clinton's "determination, and grit and even grace" during the Democratic primaries, sounding an altogether different note than when she suggested earlier this year that the New York senator was whining about negative press coverage and campaigning in a way that was not advancing the cause of women in politics.

"I think he's regretting not picking her now," Palin told ABC News.

Her comment brought a sharp rejoinder from Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, on behalf of the Obama campaign: "Sarah Palin should spare us the phony sentiment and respect. Governor Palin accused Senator Clinton of whining."

Palin, in the second part of her first major interview since she joined the GOP ticket, also defended the nearly $200 million in federal pet projects she sought as Alaska governor this year even as John McCain told a television audience she had never requested them.

Palin was confronted in the interview with two claims that have been a staple of her reputation since joining McCain: that she was opposed to federal earmarks, even though her request for such special spending projects for 2009 was the highest per capita figure in the nation; and that she opposed the $398 million Bridge to Nowhere linking Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport.

Palin actually turned against the bridge project only after it became a national symbol of wasteful spending and Congress had pulled money for it.

Palin told ABC's Charles Gibson that since she took office, the state had "drastically" reduced its efforts to secure earmarks and would continue to do so while she was governor.

"What I've been telling Alaskans for these years that I've been in office, is, no more," Palin said.

When Gibson noted she had requested money to study the mating habits of crabs and harbor-seal genetic research - the kind of small-bore projects that draw McCain's ire - Palin said the specific requests had come through universities and other public entities and weren't worked out by lobbyists behind closed doors.

On the Bridge to Nowhere, Palin said she had supported a link from the mainland to the airport but not necessarily the costly bridge project.

"We killed the Bridge to Nowhere," Palin said flatly, despite evidence she had supported the project in its early stages.

On social issues, Palin reiterated her opposition to abortion rights - parting with McCain, who supports legal abortion in cases of rape or incest. Palin would not allow those exceptions. She also said she opposes embryonic stem cell research, which McCain supports.

Palin refused to say whether she believed homosexuality was an orientation or a choice. "I'm not one to judge," Palin said.

Palin's comments came after McCain sat for a feisty grilling on ABC's "The View," where he claimed erroneously that his running mate hadn't sought money for federal pet projects.

"Not as governor she didn't," McCain said, ignoring the record.

Palin's entry in the race has drawn support from many white women, and the McCain campaign hopes in particular that she can pull Clinton's supporters away from Obama. It was in that spirit that she heaped praise on Obama's defeated rival in the face of her earlier criticisms.

"What determination, and grit, and even grace through some tough shots that were fired her way - she handled those well," Palin said.

In March, Palin was asked about coverage of Clinton at a Newsweek forum, and said: "Fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it, really. I mean, you gotta plow through that. You have to know what you're getting into ... when I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or you know maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, 'That doesn't do us any good - women in politics."

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, the man Obama picked for his ticket, defended Clinton this week when a voter told him it was best that he was chosen over the New York senator. Biden said Clinton "might've been a better pick than me."

In Alaska, meanwhile, the investigator looking into whether Palin abused her power as governor in trying to fire her former brother-in-law asked state lawmakers for the power to subpoena Palin's husband, Todd, a dozen others and the phone records of a top aide. The state House and Senate judiciary committees were expected to grant the request.

Palin told ABC she welcomed the investigation. "There's nothing to hide in this," she said.

Palin was in Alaska on Friday and scheduled to attend a campaign rally in Nevada on Saturday while McCain took the day off, a reflection of her growing status as the GOP ticket's celebrity draw.

On "The View," McCain said that Palin had "ignited a spark" among voters but acknowledged they parted ways on certain issues. The Arizona has said human behavior is largely responsible for climate change and opposes drilling for oil in a federally protected refuge, for example.

McCain appeared to back off a bit from his claim that Palin was the best vice presidential pick in U.S. history when he joked, "We politicians are never given to exaggeration or hyperbole."

The GOP hopeful also stood by two debunked campaign commercials - one which said Obama favored comprehensive sex education for kindergarten students and another that suggested Obama had called Palin a pig. Both are factually inaccurate.

Obama, as an Illinois state senator, voted for legislation that would teach age-appropriate sex education to kindergartners, including information on rejecting advances by sexual predators. And while Obama told a campaign rally this week that McCain's policies were like "putting lipstick on a pig," he never used the phrase in connection with Palin.

"Those ads aren't true. They're lies," said "View" co-host Joy Behar.

"They're not lies," McCain said, insisting that Obama "chooses his words very carefully" and should never had made the lipstick remark.

By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press, September 12, 2008

WASHINGTON - An overwhelming advantage in experience and lopsided support from working-class and suburban whites have lifted Republican John McCain to a slender lead over Barack Obama less than two months from Election Day, a poll on the presidential race said Friday.

The Arizona senator has a 13-percentage-point lead over his Democratic rival both with men and senior citizens, and a 23-point advantage among rural residents, according to the Associated Press-GfK Poll of likely voters. He's also doing better than Obama at consolidating support from party loyalists: 94 percent of Republicans back McCain, while 83 percent of Democrats prefer the Illinois senator.

Obama has good news, too. He's preferred two-to-one by those who say the nation's economy is in poor shape - a strong position on an issue many surveys say is the public's top worry. He also has an 18-point advantage among voters who look more to a candidate's values and views than experience, and his weak showing with whites is generally no worse than Democrat John Kerry did in his losing but close 2004 race against President Bush.

The poll is in line with others showing that in the days since both parties picked vice presidential candidates and held their conventions, Republicans have gained momentum and erased a modest lead Obama held most of the summer. McCain leads Obama among likely voters, 48 percent to 44 percent, according to the AP-GfK Poll.

"My heart sort of runs with McCain and my mind probably tends to run toward Obama," said David Scorup, 58, a county government official in Othello, Wash. "I think I resonate more with McCain."

The poll suggests that perceived inexperience is more of a problem at the top of the Democratic ticket than in the No. 2 spot for Republicans.

Eighty percent say McCain, with nearly three decades in Congress, has the right experience to be president. Just 46 percent say Obama, now in his fourth year in the Senate, is experienced enough.

Fully 47 percent say Obama lacks the proper experience - an even worse reading than the 36 percent who had the same criticism about McCain running mate Sarah Palin, serving her second year as Alaska governor after being a small-town mayor.

"This is his fourth year in the Senate, and two of those four years he spent campaigning for president," said Arthur Koch, 63, an undecided voter from Wallington, N.J. "I'm not too comfortable with that."

Underscoring how tight the race remains, several swing groups that traditionally help decide presidential races remain split between the two tickets. These include independents, married women and Catholics.

Seven in 10 said Palin made the right decision in becoming McCain's running mate, despite the demands of a family whose five children include a pregnant, unmarried teenage daughter and an infant with Down syndrome. Men were slightly likelier than women to back her choice, and even Obama supporters were split closely over whether she did the proper thing.

"She scares the bedoodles out of me," said Lisa Rolfe, 46, an Obama backer and pharmaceutical worker in Pembroke Pines, Fla. But as for Palin's choice, she said, "I know it's going to be very difficult, but I'm sure she weighed her decision. That's a very personal value."

McCain leads Obama by 55 percent to 37 percent among whites. That includes margins of 24 points with suburban whites and 26 points with whites who haven't finished college, plus similar advantages with white men and married whites.

The poll finds that despite Democratic attempts to tie McCain to the profoundly unpopular Bush, half say they believe the Arizonan would chart a different course - including a slight majority of independents, a pivotal bloc of voters. In addition, although slightly more call themselves Democrats than Republicans, conservatives have a huge 40 percent to 20 percent edge over liberals.

Ken Campbell, 49, a Republican and county sheriff in Lebanon, Ind., said of Obama: "Our lifestyles and beliefs are so radically different that there is no similarity whatsoever."

Obama leads 61 percent to 35 percent among voters under age 30. He has about a 5-to-1 edge with minorities and narrow advantages with college graduates and women, though he trails among white women 53 percent to 40 percent.

Asked if they prefer a presidential candidate with solid experience or one whose values and views they support, two-thirds picked the latter. While those preferring experience overwhelmingly back McCain, people opting for a contender's values say they'll back Obama over McCain, 56 percent to 38 percent.

"Obama seems to be more oriented toward getting people together," said Ron Long, 60, of Pella, Iowa, an Obama supporter.

Though Obama led among those who said values were more important than experience, respondents gave a 9-point edge to McCain as the candidate whose values and principles are similar to theirs. He had an 8-point edge over whom people agreed with on issues.

In another sign of recent GOP gains, people said they preferred a Democratic to a Republican-run Congress, 46 percent to 41 percent. Several surveys earlier this year gave Democrats a wider edge.

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Sept. 5-10 and involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,217 adults, including 812 considered likely voters. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.8 percentage points for the entire sample and 3.4 points for likely voters.

By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press, September 12, 2008

For the last two weeks, Democrats and even some Republicans have asked: Does Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska have enough experience to hold the second-highest office in the nation, or the presidency if the need arises?

"I'm ready," Ms. Palin answered without any hesitation in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, saying she had felt no doubt about accepting Senator John McCain's offer to run as his vice-presidential nominee.

"I answered him yes, because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink," Ms. Palin told her interviewer, Charles Gibson. "You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war."

It was perhaps the most confident answer she supplied in a sometimes tense and generally probing interview with Mr. Gibson. It was her first session with a major news organization since she joined Mr. McCain's Republican ticket two weeks ago and was immediately transformed from an obscure, first-term governor to a national political star.

At times visibly nervous, at others appearing to hew so closely to prepared answers that she used the exact same phrases repeatedly, Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of "anticipatory self-defense."

At a separate event on Thursday, a deployment ceremony for her son Track and thousands of other soldiers heading to Iraq from Fort Wainwright, Alaska, Ms. Palin told them they would be fighting "the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The comments sounded reminiscent of the disputed connections the Bush administration once made, but no longer does, between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. But a senior McCain campaign aide said Ms. Palin did not believe Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks.

The interview took place on the seventh anniversary of the attacks. There were no obvious gaffes during the grilling by Mr. Gibson, who was facing pressure of his own to move Ms. Palin beyond her stump speech to reveal more about her readiness for high office and knowledge of world and domestic affairs.

Ms. Palin used the interview to reinforce the muscular foreign policy of Mr. McCain, saying she would not second-guess any military action Israel deems necessary to protect itself, warning Russia away from aggression against its neighbors and generally supporting President Bush's approach to combating terrorism. But she also put some distance between the administration and the McCain team. "There have been blunders along the way," she said.

Ms. Palin came into the interview with heavy preparation from Mr. McCain's top political and policy advisers, many of whom accompanied her home to Alaska, where Mr. Gibson will be holding a series of question-and-answer sessions with her through Friday afternoon.

The McCain campaign has kept Ms. Palin away from reporters and off the interview circuit traditionally traveled by vice-presidential nominees, but was under pressure to place her before a nationally recognized journalist. There were conflicting signals from the campaign about whether it would consider Mr. Gibson's interview session the first of many or one of the few.

In choosing Mr. Gibson as Ms. Palin's interlocutor, the campaign was going with a journalist known for having a mild manner but the gravitas to be taken seriously.

But the interview was hardly gentle, as Mr. Gibson pressed Ms. Palin for direct answers to some of the complicated foreign policy and national security issues facing the next administration.

Ms. Palin said the United States could not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons. As Americans, she said, "we do not have to stand for that." She advocated a new round of sanctions.

But Mr. Gibson noted that threats of new sanctions had failed to stem Iran's nuclear program so far and asked Ms. Palin whether she would back Israel if it were to seek to eliminate Iran's facilities militarily.

"We are friends with Israel," Ms. Palin said, "and I don't think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security." Pressed, she twice more said she would not "second-guess" Israel.

Ms. Palin was clearly caught off guard when Mr. Gibson asked, "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?" Seeking direction, and perhaps time to formulate an answer, Ms. Palin leaned back, smiled stiffly and said, "In what respect, Charlie?"

Initially unwilling to define the doctrine, Mr. Gibson said, "What do you interpret it to be?"

Ms. Palin asked, "His world view?"

Mr. Gibson said, "No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war."

Ms. Palin responded: "I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation."

Mr. Gibson, finally defining the doctrine as "the right of anticipatory self-defense," still struggled for a direct answer, asking twice more if she agreed with it before Ms. Palin answered: "Charlie, if there is a legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country."

Ms. Palin seemed to relax with Mr. Gibson later when she discussed a more familiar topic in a second interview, shown on "Nightline": her support for oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in her home state. Mr. McCain has opposed it.

But Ms. Palin seemed to move closer to her running mate's position that global warming is caused by people, saying, "Man's activities certainly can be contributing." (She told Mr. Gibson she had never ruled that possibility out, but the conservative journal Newsmax recently quoted her as saying, "I'm not one, though, who would attribute it to being man-made.)

Mr. Gibson expressed exasperation with Ms. Palin toward the end of the first interview segment, shown on "World News" complaining that she had buried him in "a blizzard of words" as he sought a direct response to his question of whether the United States had the right to attack terrorists in remote areas of Pakistan without the Pakistani government's approval.

This year, Mr. McCain criticized his opponent, Senator Barack Obama, for saying he would consider such strikes, calling it naive and asking, "Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?"

Ms. Palin answered Mr. Gibson by saying, "We're going to work with these countries."

Becoming impatient during a prolonged exchange, Mr. Gibson finally asked, "Is that a yes?" to which Ms. Palin responded, "I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies."

Ms. Palin was particularly forceful in discussing Russia, saying its incursion into Georgia earlier this summer was "unprovoked," a description that some foreign policy analysts have argued with. But, pronouncing the name of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, with perfect pitch, she avoided a question that has bedeviled experts on Eastern European affairs: what the United States can or should do to "restore Georgian sovereignty" over its separatist regions.

"We've got to keep an eye on Russia," she said, then repeated the phrase.

She expressed full support for the induction of Georgia and Ukraine into the NATO alliance, which has prompted strong Russian protest. The position is shared by Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama and Mr. Obama's running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Ms. Palin acknowledged that such membership could require the United States to join militarily in defense of Georgia if Russia was to move against it again.

Ms. Palin said that before a trip to the Middle East and Germany in 2007, her only foreign travel had been to Mexico and Canada, And, she acknowledged, she had not met any foreign leaders, though she said - in an apparent veiled reference to Mr. Biden - "We've got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual and somebody's big fat resume that maybe shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment, where, yes, they've had opportunities to meet heads of state."

By Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

Senator Barack Obama will intensify his assault against Senator John McCain, with new television advertisements and more forceful attacks by the candidate and surrogates beginning Friday morning, as he confronts an invigorated Republican presidential ticket and increasing nervousness in the Democratic ranks.

Mr. McCain's choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate and the resulting jolt of energy among Republican voters appear to have caught Mr. Obama and his advisers by surprise and added to concern among some Democrats that the Obama campaign was not pushing back hard enough against Republican attacks in a critical phase of the race.

Some Democrats said Mr. Obama needed to move to seize control of the campaign and to block Mr. McCain from snatching away from him the message that he was the best hope to bring change to Washington.

After back-to-back attack ads by Mr. McCain, including one that misleadingly accused Mr. Obama of endorsing sex education for kindergarten students, the Obama campaign is planning to sharpen attacks on Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin in an effort to counter Mr. McCain's attempt to present himself as the candidate of change with his choice of Ms. Palin.

Mr. Obama's campaign released two new advertisements this morning that underscored the tougher road it is taking, criticizing Mr. McCain for, among other things, favoring tax cuts for corporations and acknowledging that he doesn't know how to use a computer or send e-mail. "Things have changed in the last 26 years, but John McCain hasn't," an announcer says in one advertisement. "After one president who was out of touch, we just can't afford more of the same."

The new tone is to be presented in a speech by Mr. Obama in New Hampshire and in television interviews with local stations in five swing states, backed up by new advertisements and appearances across the country by supporters.

In addition, advertising themes will be pay equity for women, an issue that has particular resonance as the campaigns battle for female voters, and a more pointed linking of Mr. McCain to President Bush and Republicans in Washington.

But Mr. Obama's aides said they were confident with the course of the campaign. They said that, other than making some shifts around the edges, particularly in response to Mr. McCain's effort to seize the change issue from Mr. Obama, they were not planning any major deviation from a strategy that called for a steady escalation of attacks on Mr. McCain as the race heads toward the debates.

That response is characteristic for a campaign that has presented itself as disciplined and unflappable and is reminiscent of the way Mr. Obama's campaign reacted a year ago when it came under fire from allies who said it was not being tough enough in going after Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"We're sensitive to the fluid dynamics of the campaign, but we have a game plan and a strategy," said Mr. Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe. "We're familiar with this. And I'm sure between now and Nov. 4 there will be another period of hand-wringing and bed-wetting. It comes with the territory."

Still, Democrats outside the campaign suggested Mr. Obama should be urgently working to regain control of the message.

"The Obama message has been disrupted in the last week," said Representative Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama. "It's a time for Democrats to focus on what the fundamentals are in this election."

Phil Singer, who was a press secretary for Mrs. Clinton in her primary campaign against Mr. Obama, said, "The Obama people need to reboot and figure out ways to make the McCain-Bush argument newsworthy again."

The uneasiness among Democrats is the result of a confluence of factors in the week since Mr. McCain accepted his party's nomination in St. Paul. The selection of Ms. Palin became the defining event of Mr. McCain's convention, revving up the conservative base and drawing the spotlight away from Mr. Obama.

Mr. McCain's increasingly aggressive campaign has sought to put Mr. Obama on the defensive in each news cycle, using any development at hand, like Mr. Obama's colloquial comment this week about putting "lipstick on a pig," to keep attention away from Democratic messages about the economy and the similarities between Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush.

And a series of quick polls taken after the Republican convention have suggested that Mr. Obama has lost support among white women and independent voters. Polls taken so close to major political events are notoriously unreliable, but Democrats remember what happened in 2004, when Republicans used the period right after Senator John Kerry's nomination to undercut him with a series of attacks.

By every indication, Mr. Obama's aides underestimated the impact that Mr. McCain's choice of Ms. Palin would have on the race. Mr. Obama and his campaign have seemed flummoxed in trying to figure out how to deal with her. His aides said they were looking to the news media to debunk the image of her as a blue-collar reformer, even as they argued that her power to help Mr. McCain was overstated.

"Everyone was astonished that she drew 9,000 people to Lancaster the other night," said Mr. Obama's senior strategist, David Axelrod. "But we drew 10,000 people there last week."

"They got a transient boost from the sort of imagery surrounding her selection," Mr. Axelrod said. "But I think things will settle in. She will be a candidate and not just a symbol."

Beyond that, Mr. Obama's aides said they had been taken aback by the newfound aggressiveness of the McCain campaign under Steve Schmidt, who has played an increasingly powerful role since last summer. Even as the aides have denounced the tactics as unsavory, they acknowledge that Mr. McCain is running a more effective campaign than he was a month ago.

"They had big problems in their campaign, and they made adjustments," Mr. Axelrod said.

To a large extent, the perception that Mr. Obama is struggling is based on national polls taken in the days after the convention. But Mr. Obama's campaign views such measures as irrelevant and focuses on what is going on in the 18 or so swing states.

Mr. Plouffe argued that the attention being paid by national news media outlets to events like Mr. Obama's lipstick comment was not mirrored in local news coverage. What is more, the Obama campaign has filled the airwaves in some states with advertisements that link Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush.

And for all the concern voiced by Democrats to Mr. Obama's aides that the candidate has not hit Mr. McCain hard enough, he has increasingly assailed Mr. McCain in recent days, mocking his attempt to present himself as an agent of change and denouncing his campaign style as a break from the promise he had made to practice a new kind of politics. Yet, at least on television, Mr. Obama's critique did not break through the lipstick debate.

Inside the campaign headquarters in Chicago, aides said, there have been no emergency conference calls or special strategy sessions to deal with the new dynamic in the race.

Still, interviews with advisers and supporters suggested a concern not seen in the Obama campaign since its most competitive days in the long primary fight with Mrs. Clinton.

"You can't be so stubborn that you don't react or adjust to events," Mr. Plouffe said. "We have been given up for dead any number of times in this process, so it does stiffen your spine a little bit."

One adjustment for the Obama campaign comes as Mr. McCain is seeking to claim the Democrats' theme of change by pointing to Ms. Palin. For months, advisers to Mr. Obama had assumed that Mr. McCain would play up his experience; Mr. Plouffe said he welcomed what he argued would be a campaign fought out on the issue of change.

"This is a very major development," Mr. Plouffe said. "John McCain jettisoned his message and his strategy. It is now about change. We're going to lean into that very, very hard."

In the midst of all this, Mr. Obama had a private lunch on Thursday with someone he battled with for much of the year but who knows how to put the Republicans on the defensive: former President Bill Clinton. Discussion topics, aides said, included how Mr. Obama might handle Ms. Palin in the days ahead.

By Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

CHICAGO - No one is more familiar with the buzz surrounding Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin than Joe Biden.

He is forced to address the Palin phenomenon at nearly every campaign event. In Green Bay, Wis., this week, a woman urged him: "Don't be afraid to debate her." In Chicago, four of the six questions asked at a pair of fundraisers referenced Palin, as big-money donors fretted about how Democrats should defend against her appeal to female voters and her allegedly extreme views.

If he is frustrated by the attention lavished on Palin, he doesn't show it. More often than not he addresses the lingering questions of how he will handle the much-anticipated Oct. 2 vice presidential debate and the balancing act of running against a woman head-on in his stump speech.

"I don't know where these guys have been," he said of the pundits asking those questions in kicking off his remarks in Columbia, Mo., on Tuesday. Plenty of accomplished women hold high political office, and he debates them every day in the Senate, he says.

"Are there pitfalls? Yeah, there are pitfalls if two people of different genders or races, different ethnicities, debate one another," Biden explained in Green Bay. "Either person may say something that comes off the wrong way."

In his stump speeches, the notoriously garrulous Biden is uncharacteristically careful in how he treats the subject, telling his crowds that he just doesn't know that much about her.

Occasionally, he slips up, such as when he noted his "obvious differences" with Palin.

"She's good looking," he said at a forum on the economy in Ohio.

But for the most part, Biden has shown restraint.

"I don't know much about Gov. Palin, but I'm sure she's a great person," he said in Green Bay, in the midst of a riff on McCain's praise for President Bush's economic record.

The veteran Delaware senator said he believes that once Palin's positions are fully vetted, voters will make their own conclusions that she's not what they want.

He urges patience when it comes to Palin - and he himself is patient with all the focus on his opponent. Palin is a "phenomenon right now," he said at one Chicago fundraising event. But he suggested that could fade as Palin opens up to the press.

"We have time, we have time," he reassured nervous donors. "The press is not going to let her get away with not a) explaining what she believes in and b) not answering for her statements."

Biden has made it clear - both directly and in the way he handles Palin in his stump speeches - that he believes Democrats can't attack Palin as anything other than a politician.

He's judicious when talking about her positions, often qualifying his comments by noting that he's only repeating what the press has reported, and that he isn't prepared to make his own judgments. In Green Bay, for instance, he said Palin's views on global warming - she reportedly has doubts about its existence - "if they are as presented, are pretty far out there."

And in Chicago, he warned Democrats against questioning her religious beliefs because "there's an awful lot of people in America ... who have views, particularly as related to religion, that are fundamentally different than ours and they hold those views tightly."

He has stressed the need to avoid giving Republicans an excuse to say attacks on Palin's extreme views, if she indeed has them, are coming from the Obama campaign.

"I think we're overreacting," he told Chicago donors. "This will calm down, folks. This will get down to some sense of reality. And if she has those views, the public will makes those judgments... but it's not something they're going to hear me pushing."

That's not to say Biden is totally rolling over when it comes to Palin.

He enjoys damning her with faint praise, saying she gave "one heck of a political speech" during the convention, but he didn't hear one word about what she'd do on the health care crisis, the ailing economy or the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

While he says he doesn't care whether she was for or against the infamous "bridge to nowhere," he tweaks her and McCain on the issue by calling the ticket's health care plan "a bridge to nowhere."

Biden's equanimity in the face of the Palin juggernaut sometimes conceals the fact that he's gearing up for a fight. A campaign aide said he is determined not to repeat the mistake of the past two presidential cycles when Democrats underestimated Dick Cheney in the debates.

The campaign views Palin as a tough debater who has trounced two political heavyweights in Alaskan politics.

Biden has tapped Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Harvard Law graduate and mother of three, to play Palin as he prepares for the all-important Oct. 2 vice presidential debate. Biden has also reached out to Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California for help as he prepares, an aide said.

Biden picked Granholm for her debate skills, her experience as a prosecutor and the longtime relationship the two share, the aide said.

By Victoria McGrane, Politico, September 12, 2008

WASHINGTON - Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden's son Hunter has stopped working as a federal lobbyist, work that had made him a Republican target in the presidential contest.

"I no longer expect to act as a federal lobbyist," Hunter Biden said in a letter to the Clerk of the House and the Senate Office of Public Records. The letter is dated Aug. 25 and was made public Friday.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who chose Biden as his running mate last month, has been a vocal critic of rival John McCain's ties to lobbyists. In a television ad Friday, Obama repeated criticisms of McCain for having current and former prominent lobbyists on his campaign staff.

Obama has refused to accept contributions from federal lobbyists, though some have advised his campaign.

Hunter Biden and his lobbying firm, Oldaker, Biden & Belair, have represented colleges and hospitals, mainly in an effort to secure money for them in appropriation bills. In June, however, Biden also signed on as a lobbyist for a law firm that represents a billionaire couple who run an Internet gambling business. The lobbying documents on file with the Senate Public Records Office show that Biden intended to lobby on the "legality of internet gaming" and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which Congress passed in 2006.

The law firm, Sharp & Barnes, represents Russell DeLeon and his wife Ruth Parasol, according to lobbying records. The couple was listed as having a net worth of $1.8 billion in 2006 and made the Forbes top billionaire's list. They dropped out of the list the following year. Forbes reported that a congressional crackdown on online gaming caused their company stock to fall 75 percent.

Biden's letter ending his lobbying work was first reported Friday by The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire.

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press, September 12, 2008

WASHINGTON - The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He said Friday that Palin never asked for money for lawmakers' pet projects as Alaska governor, even though she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain's skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama's campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

McCain's persistence in pushing dubious claims is all the more notable because many political insiders consider him one of the greatest living victims of underhanded campaigning. Locked in a tight race with George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, McCain was rocked in South Carolina by a whisper campaign claiming he had fathered an illegitimate black child and was mentally unstable.

Shaken by the experience, McCain denounced less-than-truthful campaigning. Vowing to live up to his "straight talk" motto, he apologized for his reluctance to criticize the flying of the Confederate flag at South Carolina's state Capitol in a bid for votes. When the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked the military record of Democrat and fellow Navy officer John Kerry in 2004, McCain called the ads "dishonest and dishonorable."

Now, top aides to McCain include Steve Schmidt, who has close ties to Karl Rove, Bush's premier political adviser in 2000.

Politicians usually modify or drop claims when a string of newspaper and TV news accounts concludes they are untrue or greatly exaggerated. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, conceded she had not come under sniper fire in Bosnia after a batch of debunking articles subjected her to scorn during her primary contest against Obama.

But McCain and his running mate Palin, the Alaska governor, were defiant this week in the face of similar reports. Day after day she said she had told Congress "no thanks" to the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, a rural Alaska project that was abandoned when critics challenged its costs and usefulness. For nearly a week, major news outlets had documented that Palin supported the bridge when running for governor in 2006, noting that she turned against it only after it became an object of ridicule in Alaska and a symbol of Congress's out-of-control earmarking.

The McCain-Palin campaign made at least three other aggressive claims this week that omitted key details or made dubious assumptions to criticize Obama. It equated lawmakers' requests for money for special projects with corruption, even though Palin has sought millions of dollars in such "earmarks" this year.

It produced an Internet ad implying that Obama had called Palin a pig when he used a familiar phrase, which McCain also has used, about putting "lipstick on a pig" to try to make a bad situation look better. McCain supporters said Obama was slyly alluding to Palin's description of herself as a pit bull in lipstick, but there was nothing in his remarks to support the claim. Obama accused the GOP campaign of "lies and phony outrage."

The lipstick wars were fully engaged when the McCain campaign produced another ad saying Obama favored "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners. The charge triggered the sort of headlines becoming increasingly common in major newspapers and wire services monitoring the factual content of political ads and speeches.

"Ad on Sex Education Distorts Obama Policy," was the headline on a New York Times article Thursday. "McCain's 'Education' Spot is Dishonest, Deceptive," The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" article said.

Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. "But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault," said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don't back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact."

With Palin giving McCain's campaign a boost in the polls, Obama supporters are nervously watching to see what impact the latest claims will have. Surveys already show that most people believe Obama would raise their taxes - a regular McCain claim - even though independent groups such as the Tax Policy Center concluded that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under his proposals.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds defended the campaign's statements. "We include factual backup in every one of our TV spots," he said Thursday.

Obama, of course, has made exaggerated or questionable assertions as well. Earlier this year, for instance, he repeated a claim that more black men are in prison than in college, after news accounts refuted it. He also used a McCain remark about having troops in Iraq for "100 years" to exaggerate McCain's proposals for being fully engaged militarily in that country.

In general, however, Obama has been quicker to react to news accounts challenging his accuracy. Faced with skeptical reports this year, for instance, he stopped saying he "worked his way" through college, and instead credited hard work and scholarships.

Dan Schnur, a former McCain aide who now teaches politics at the University of Southern California, said McCain and Obama learned they must stretch the truth "when staying on the high road didn't work out to their benefit."

McCain, he said, "tried it his way. He had a poverty tour and nobody covered it. He had a national service tour, and everybody made fun of it. He proposed these joint town halls" with Obama, "and nothing come of it. Through the spring and early summer, that approach didn't work. You can't blame him for taking a step back and reassessing."

By Charles Babington, The Associated Press, September 12, 2008

There they were in Harlem on Thursday, the 42nd president and the Democrat who hopes to be the 44th, for a two-hour lunch hour chat at Bill Clinton's office.

It is not at all clear that Barack Obama particularly wants Clinton's advice about how to win the presidency - after all, he kept the former president at a cool distance, with just occasional phone calls, for months - but many Democrats believe it is increasingly clear that he could use it.

The fact that Obama is even with or behind John McCain despite so many favorable trends for Democrats shows that there is still plenty he could learn from the master - the political Houdini who is the only Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two terms.

We do know that Clinton was happy to share his thoughts. He recently offered 10 minutes of "here's what Obama needs to do" wisdom while standing in the popcorn line with someone he just met at a New York movie theater, according to one Democrat privy to the conversation.

The Clinton-Obama meeting was closed. We don't know for sure what they said.

But it is not hard to make an educated guess. Here, based on 16 years experience watching Bill Clinton campaign - and interviews with a half-dozen veterans of his political teams - is a reasonably safe bet about his campaign advice to Barack Obama:

1. Don't make this about you.

Clinton is always skeptical of politicians who try to win races on the basis of their life story or supposed personal virtues. Those can be nice side dishes ("The Man from Hope") but they can't be the main entree. Voters just don't care that much about you. They care about themselves and what you will do for them. Clinton believes, plausibly, that this is why he emerged from sex scandals and all manner of other controversies with his job approval ratings intact.

"What Bill Clinton always told me is, 'If we make this about their lives instead of mine, we'll be better off,' " recalled Paul Begala, who served as strategist in the 1992 election and the second-term White House. "It's always about the voters, never about the candidates."

What's more, the politics of biography can turn in an instant, as happened to John F. Kerry in 2004 when what was supposed to be an asset - Kerry's Vietnam service - was turned into a distraction and even liability by the Swift Boat Veterans.

Clinton thinks Obama has erred by putting too much focus on himself and on his supposedly transformational brand of politics - it's too airy, and it puts him at risk of being branded a hypocrite when, as inevitably happens, he needs to play rough.

2. Define yourself through policies - yours and theirs.

Clinton would often dismiss proposed speech drafts handed him by his staff writers with a mocking phrase, "Words, words, words!"

He has never thought much of Obama's rhetoric-driven campaign.

While Obama has plenty of policy proposals, there are not many that he has managed to make recognizable signatures, the way Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it" in 1992.

Most people know Obama claims to represent "Change you can believe in." But Clinton believes people won't believe him - or any politician - unless change is defined with specificity. That means describing, in language that sounds plausible rather than partisan, what you believe in versus what the other guy believes in.

3. Have more fun.

Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton are both obsessed with how - as they see it - Republicans have perfected the art of the bogus attack, the distracting wedge issue, "the politics of personal destruction."

From the Clinton vantage point, both Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 lost when they allowed Republicans to get under their skins and hijack their public images.

Obama has hinted that he believes that, too, and has signaled that he will fight back hard.

But that is not as easy as it might sound. A candidate needs to do more than just complain about the unfairness of it all, as when Obama this week shouted "enough!" and denounced "lies, outrage and swift-boat politics."

The trick is counter-punching without looking rattled, and without letting your opponents set the agenda of the conversation. Though he did not always follow his own advice, Clinton believes humor is one tool that can help a politician connect with audiences and convey toughness rather than whininess.

Mark Penn, the Clintons' longtime pollster and strategist, said Obama may have listened too closely to people urging him to "fight back, fight back."

"He's got to learn how to completely eviscerate the guy with a smile," he said.

4. Make the election about something big.

It's a mistake, Clinton believes, for a presidential nominee of one party to be arguing about the vice presidential nominee of the other party, as Obama has been over Sarah Palin in recent days.
The best way for Obama to convince people he's ready to be president is by talking about ideas that sound presidential.

During both his presidential runs, Clinton gave major speeches at Georgetown University that were not partisan or even in the strict sense political - they were wide-ranging discourses about where the United States stood at that moment in history.

Clinton believes Obama is on losing terrain if he allows the election to be about pigs and lipstick. Obama needs to soar above that by talking about large themes like energy and global warming, and how to harness the opportunities of a global economy.

5. Spend more time speaking to your opponents.

Most Democrats, Clinton believes, spend too much time enjoying the cheers of the home crowd - and not enough trying to persuade people who do not already agree with them.

One of his favorite rhetorical tactics is to describe an opponent's ideas in ways that sound perfectly fair and reasonable - as a prelude to why the opponent is dead wrong.

Successful politicians, he believes, look for opportunities to speak to skeptical audiences. Clinton went to New Hampshire to talk to gun owners - even though many hunters there were furious over passage of a crime bill that hunters feared would take away their guns. "All our guys in Washington thought I was crazier than the March Hare," Clinton once told me and Mark Halperin. "And they said, 'Well, you don't want to talk about this.' I said, 'Oh, yes, I do.' "

Obama's convention speech in Denver was a spirited performance that thrilled Democrats, but did not have enough passages aimed at people who don't already support him. What's more, Obama has not taken enough positions that make clear he is not a standard-issue Democrat.

6. Don't take Hillary voters for granted.

Obama's strategists believed that they did not have to worry that much about Hillary Clinton's female backers, because they figured that most of them were liberal, abortion-rights supporters who will vote for the Democrat even if the nominee was not their first choice.

That was probably true for about two-thirds of those voters, according to one Clinton strategist's appraisal of polling data. But another one-third of Clinton's women supporters were more conservative-tilting, working-class women, who were drawn to Clinton because they admired her pluck - and these voters are now a key target group for McCain-Palin.

7. Stop smoking whatever it is you are smoking.

In his cool treatment of both Clintons over the summer, and in the way he allowed expectations among Democrats and the news media to build, Obama has acted as if he were on a glide path to a relatively easy victory.

Clinton knows this attitude is delusional. Someone who grew up in Arkansas as the state - and much of the South - was growing more conservative can never forget how hard it is for Democrats to win in what for the past two generations has been a center-right country.

Democrats have only won more than 50 percent in a presidential election there twice since 1944. Republicans have done it seven times.

One important thing to remember: Obama has never faced a serious race against a Republican. His important victories in Illinois and this year have all been against other Democrats in nomination battles.

Some Clinton allies say this may tend to warp his perspective about how politics works and what kind of issues and stories matter in a presidential context. Bottom line: it does not matter who is getting better coverage in the New York Times.

"This is a new experience for Obama - facing a Republican who will do and say things far different from the Democrats he has faced. Republicans don't care what Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd or establishment media has to say about them," said Penn.

8. And while you are at it, give me an apology.

The meeting in Harlem was friendly, and Obama could hardly have hoped for a more lavish endorsement than he got from Clinton at the Democratic convention in Denver.

But he errs if he thinks the former president does not still have resentments toward Obama, and that those resentments might not surface at unwelcome times, in the view of many former aides.

Simply put, Clinton will never be fully at peace with Obama until the Democratic nominee makes clear - in emphatic words, in public - that Clinton is not in any way racist, and that he did not try to "play the race card" during the Democratic nomination contest, as some commentators have suggested.

There's no question that Clinton was impolitic in comparing Obama's victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's victory 20 years earlier. But Clinton is understandably outraged that people would argue this remark negated a career-long commitment to racial equality - and that Obama stood by mute while such charges were made.

Clinton swallowed his medicine with his speech for Obama in Denver. Obama has still not fully swallowed his by making a public defense of Clinton on race.

John F. Harris, the editor-in-chief of Politico, has written two books about Bill Clinton and his politics, "The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House," and "The Way to Win; Taking the White House in 2008."

By John F. Harris, Politico, September 12, 2008

Democrats, hit reset. Accept the fact that the race has changed utterly, that you're up against a ticket that has captured the public imagination. Now you must go out and recapture it.

Out of the shirtsleeves, into the suit. Stop prowling the stage with what looks like Phil Donahue's old mic. No more scattered, listless riffs; back to the podium and the prepared - and focused - speech. Campaign as a duo, Obama-Biden, together again. Obama alone looks like he's part of nothing.

You must aim your fire at the top of the ticket, John McCain, and not at this beautiful girl, Sarah Palin, about whom you can do nothing.

You can never kill her now. Forget it. She can hurt herself, but in terms of Democratic attacks she is bulletproof. You made her that - she wasn't that way when she walked in.

Hope that Mr. McCain stops campaigning with her and spins her off into her own orbit, to small towns and medium-sized cities. It will cut his recent power in half. Some press will follow her, but mostly on gaffe patrol. They will want to keep their main lens on Obama and McCain.

This is going to be the only way to contain her power: Ignore it.

* * *

This race is not over. Everyone I know thinks it is, but I don't buy it. Mr. Obama just suffered a catastrophe, his first. Mr. McCain just enjoyed a triumph, maybe not his last. GOP strategists are experiencing premature triumphalism; they're puffing up like blowfish, emitting great bubbles of self-regard. Democrats, be encouraged by this! They make mistakes when they're winning. They always start to think they're the reason.

Democratic strategists have their heads in their hands, knowing they took a bad hit but not understanding exactly how, or why. Republicans, be inspired by this! They can't come up with the right cure if they can't diagnose the illness.

Here's why it's not over: We are a more or less 50/50 nation experiencing 80% wrong-track numbers, alarming economic challenges and two continuing wars. New voters are about to flood to the polls. There are more than 50 days to go. The media environment is volatile. The Obama campaign has some experience in turning inevitable candidacies into evitable ones. Sen. Obama himself is talented, resourceful and compelling.

More important, obviously, the race shouldn't be over. The nation deserves - and requires - a real debate, a real and spirited presenting of fact and argument. It won't get that if the election is over. The candidates must argue this thing out or it means nothing. And the day after the election, for the winner in this tempestuous nation, it better mean something, or he won't be able to govern.

* * *

After the past 10 days, it is not remarkable that Mr. McCain has caught up with Mr. Obama. It is amazing that Mr. Obama is still roughly even with Mr. McCain.

There is no denying that Mr. Obama is in a bad place, that he must now be considered the underdog, that he's wearing Loser-Glo. The slide started with the Rick Warren interviews in August, just as America was starting to pay attention. Verdict? McCain: normal. Obama: odd.

Then Mrs. Palin, and the catastrophe of the Democratic and media response to her. Books will be written about this, but because it's so recent, and so known, we're almost not absorbing how huge it was, and is. Here was the central liberal mistake: They used the atom bomb just a few days in. They used it so brutally, and yet so ineptly, in a way so oblivious to the true contours of the field, that the radiation blew back over their own lines. They used it without preliminary diplomatic talks, multilateral meetings or Security Council debate. They just went boom. And it boomeranged.

The atom bomb was personal and sexual perfidy, backwoods knuckle-draggin' ma and pa saying, Tell the neighbors the baby's ours. Then the ritual abuse of the 17-year-old girl. Then the rest of it - bad mother, religious weirdo. (On this latter it must be noted that Mrs. Palin never told a church that the Iraq war was God's will; she asked them to pray that it was God's will. It wasn't the sound of Republican hubris, it was the sound of Christian humility: We can't know the mind of God, we can only pray we are in accord with it.)

All of this was unacceptable to normal Americans. They experienced it as the town gossip spreading rumor and slander before the new neighbor even got to put down her bags. It offended the American sense of fairness. And - it still lives! - gallantry.

Most crucially, the snobbery of it, the meanness of it, reminded the entire country, for the first time in a decade, what it is they don't like about the left. Really, America had forgotten. Mr. Obama's friends reminded them. Unforgettably.

And it wasn't just excitable bloggers or 24-hour cable news shows desperate to fill the maw. The chairwoman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said this week that Mrs. Palin's "primary qualification [for vice president] seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion."

The Democrats were up against Xena the Warrior Princess and came across, in response, as pale-lipped Puritans who actually, at the end of the day, don't really like women all that much. Mrs. Palin radiates the sense that she'd never give up her femininity in her quest for power because her femininity is part of her power. (On the Democratic side, she can be compared in this to Nancy Pelosi.)

A certain normal-versus-sissy template was captured in a deadly email that is making the rounds. It offers two pictures. One is of a young Mrs. Palin in a short skirt, smiling at the camera as she leans against a big ol' motorcycle. The other is of a thin and careful Obama on a bicycle, in a plastic safety helmet, looking like a tony suburban professional trying to lower his carbon footprint. The headline on the email: "This settles it."

* * *

All of this is being exploited - so far relatively deftly, soon to be heavy-handedly - by the Republican Party, which is sending out emails saying that if you'll click on this little link you'll be able to contribute money to help stop the smears and lies aimed at Mrs. Palin.

Right now only Mrs. Palin can hurt Mrs. Palin. Messrs. Obama and Biden can't do it and shouldn't try. And the media can't, because more than half the country won't listen to them on this subject now, and for a while. The media could get videotape of Mrs. Palin saying, "We should invade Mars and it will be easy because Mars is hidden inside my hair!" and people would say, "Stop sliming Sarah!"

The mainstream media may themselves come down on Mr. Obama. They like him, but if he doesn't come back and make this a race, he'll embarrass them. They just might be on the edge of getting angry, having been left exposed. Forget what Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin can do to Mr. Obama: If he embarrasses the media, they'll kill him.

By Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2008

The working mothers' case against Sarah Palin.

The day of the Sarah Palin announcement, I called the small cadre of senior female writers and editors who work at The New Republic to see if any of them wanted to write a piece about their reaction. Not surprisingly, the women of TNR had a lot to say. But it was also the eve of a holiday weekend, and, with seven small children and one full-time staffer among the four of us, we had to scramble to find the time.

Sarah Palins we are not. Central to the narrative that the McCain campaign is selling about Palin is that, in addition to being the reformist governor of Alaska, she's a supermom, too. During his announcement, McCain referred to Palin as a "devoted wife and mother of five," while Palin, who began her speech by introducing her children, referred to herself variously as "just your average hockey mom in Alaska," "the team mom," and "the mother of one of those troops" (her son Track heads to Iraq this month). And she does all that mothering in addition to running a state.

Stories of Palin's working-mom feats abound: She gave birth to her daughter and was back at work the very next day! She flew to a Texas meeting of governors while eight months pregnant with her son, laboring on the plane home! She brought her newborn with her to the office, reportedly nursing through a meeting! How can you feminists not love her? the GOP seems to say. OK, so there's that little thing about Roe v. Wade, but, surely, Palin proves women can have it all. And she makes it seem so achievable. You just do it. As Palin recently explained to People magazine, "What I've had to do, though, is in the middle of the night, put down the BlackBerries and pick up the breast pump. Do a couple of things different and still get it all done."

It's a distinctly Republican vision of feminism: If you can't do it all, you're just not working hard enough. And, if you want more societal or governmental support, Palin's ideology has a word for that: whining. That's how she described Hillary Clinton's reaction to sexism on the campaign trail (that is, before Clinton became her personal hero), advising her in a Newsweek interview to "work harder."

But the reason most of us are not Sarah Palins has nothing to do with lack of effort or of desire. We also want it all. It's just that we have less to work with. Palin not only has the type of office (namely, her own) where you can bring your daughter to work more than one day a year; she has a large and supportive family network (her husband is currently devoting himself full-time to the kids) and plenty of financial resources. The deepest insult is that Palin's brand of up-by-your-bootstraps feminism allows the McCain campaign to appear to support working moms--plus hockey moms, team moms, soldiers' moms--while rejecting the policies that would actually make their lives better.

There are several attacks that have been leveled at Palin for running as a working mom that are flat-out unfair. Chief among them is that Palin's career prevents her from being a good mother. Shortly after her selection, John Roberts at CNN questioned whether Palin should be out on the campaign trail with a special-needs four-month-old. This line of attack only became more frenzied with the news that Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. This is the sort of judgmental mommy-war nonsense that would never be directed at a male politician: No one seriously thought Al Gore should have stayed home and stopped saving Planet Earth when his son was nabbed breaking the speed limit last year in a drug-laced Prius.

Equally unfair are criticisms of Palin for politicizing her role as working mom. While it's true that Hillary Clinton did not make being a mother a big part of her campaign, Joe Biden highlighted his working-dad role in Denver with son Beau speaking movingly of Biden as an "incredible father" who would "travel to and from Washington four hours a day" on the train "to be there to put us to bed, to be there when we woke from a bad dream, to make us breakfast." Sure, Palin's talk of being a hockey mom of five is politically expedient. But so is Biden's tale of being an "Amtrak dad."

The one legitimate criticism that hasn't really been out there yet--but that should be--is that, in turning herself into Everywoman, Palin is significantly misrepresenting most every woman. The underlying point of the Biden story is that he made sacrifices--bowing out of the public ceremony for his oath of office when his kids were in the hospital, forgoing evening events in Washington--to be a parent first. In contrast, Palin's parenting story is not about sacrifice or even the struggle for balance but about blithely doing it all. This vision of parenting is not only unrealistic--it devalues the job. Whether you work or stay at home, parenting is an exhausting around-the-clock juggling act; the list of people I have to thank for giving me the emotional energy and time just to write this article reads like an Oscar acceptance speech. Once the difficulty and sacrifice of the job have been elided, the basis for policy solutions is seriously undermined.

And these solutions are sorely needed. Over 70 percent of mothers with children under the age of 18 work. Yet women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men (on average, the families of working women lose nearly $10, 000 a year because of the earnings gap). Affordable child care is largely unavailable: In 2004, a single parent with average earnings spent about 37 percent of the family's after-tax income on center-based child care. This is an incredible financial burden, particularly for the 30 percent of working families headed by single mothers. And, with rising gas and food prices, the strain has only gotten worse.

Palin, by contrast, has a six-figure salary and an incredible support system--a husband with flexible jobs rather than a competing career, a close-knit community, and a host of nearby grandparents, aunts, and uncles to lend a hand on the domestic front. Palin freely admits to these advantages but offers no solutions for the majority of women who don't have them.

Palin is staunchly pro-life, but, beyond this very public position, she has a slender record on issues that affect working moms. She is a member of Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion group that also advocates for equal pay for women, for part-time and telecommuting situations for working moms, and against domestic violence. (The group supported Biden's Violence Against Women Act.) Presumably Palin shares these views. But, despite all her emphasis on being a working mom and breaking the glass ceiling, in her debut and acceptance speeches Palin never once mentioned her support for any of these issues or the legislation designed to address them. And she said nary a word about affordable child care. Her record on this issue is even more discouraging: Though it's true she did declare May 9 Child-Care Provider Appreciation Day, she also line-item vetoed the funding for a vocational residential facility that included a child care center for students, as well as the funds for breast-feeding pumps, among other supplies, for a Women, Infants, and Children program for poor women.

This is, of course, precisely the Republican Party line. The 2008 Republican Party platform advocates more part-time and flexible jobs for working parents but contains not a single mention of affordable child care or equal pay. And McCain's record on issues that affect working moms is on the same sorry page as his party's--he skipped a vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (which helps ensure women get equal pay); he opposed expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which covers uninsured children, to include their parents; and he has consistently opposed not only abortion rights but family-planning legislation, even for low-income women.

By running as a spunky can-do Republican-style feminist mom who meets challenges head-on instead of whining about them, Palin may appeal to some working mothers, as the GOP intends. But it's more likely that a different demographic will find this winsome: anti-feminist men. Tarring anyone who struggles as a whiner is a common GOP tactic--from African Americans (Rush Limbaugh on Michelle Obama's undergraduate thesis on race: "It's a full whine") to the poor (Michael Savage on welfare recipients: "these couch-warming leeches ... have the nerve to whine") to, well, just about everyone (Phil Gramm: "We have sort of become a nation of whiners").

There is, however, an upside to Palin's presence, an important reminder to working moms: Feminism is not just about having the opportunity to do it all. It's also about having the support to do as much as you can. This is why, in the end, feminism needs to be tied to not just an identity, but to an ideology that encourages that support. Sarah Palin's free-market feminism fails that mission on almost every count, diminishing the trade-offs and sacrifices that haunt working moms--even a couple of the TNR variety juggling over a holiday weekend to put their frustrations into words.

By Katherine Marsh, The New Republic, September 24, 2008

WASHINGTON - John McCain has taken a modest lead over Barack Obama entering the final seven weeks of their presidential contest, buoyed by decisive advantages among suburban and working-class whites and a huge edge in how people rate each candidate's experience, a poll showed Friday.

The Republican McCain has had some success parrying his Democratic opponent's efforts to tie him to the deeply unpopular President Bush, according to the AP-GfK Poll of likely voters. Half say they believe the Arizona senator would chart a different path from Bush, including a slight majority of independents, a pivotal group of voters.

The survey has plenty of positive signs for Obama as well. The Illinois senator is generally doing about as well with whites as Democrat John Kerry did in his losing but close 2004 race against Bush. Obama has an 18-percentage-point lead over McCain among voters who look more to a contender's values and views than experience, and a modest advantage in the number of supporters who say they will definitely vote for their candidate.

Even so, the survey - conducted after both parties staged their conventions and picked their vice presidential candidates - conforms with others that have shown the Republicans grabbing the momentum after a summer in which Obama had steadily maintained a slim lead.

"My heart sort of runs with McCain and my mind probably tends to run toward Obama," said David Scorup, 58, a county government official in Othello, Wash. "I think I resonate more with McCain."

Underscoring how tight the race remains, several swing groups who traditionally help decide presidential races remain about evenly divided between the two tickets. These include independents, married women and Catholics.

Seven in 10 said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made the right decision in becoming McCain's running mate, despite the demands of a family whose five children include a pregnant, unmarried teenage daughter and an infant with Down syndrome. Men were slightly likelier than women to back her choice, and even Obama supporters were split evenly over whether she did the right thing.

"She was able to cope when she was governor of Alaska, so she must have great coping strategies," said Nancy Skinner, 58, a retiree and McCain supporter from Scottsbluff, Neb. She said Palin's decision to give birth to their youngest child, knowing he had Down syndrome, "shows she has compassion and is not afraid to face heartache and hard decisions."

McCain leads Obama by 18 points among whites, but his advantage peaks with certain types of voters. He is ahead by 24 points among suburban whites and 26 points with whites who haven't finished college, and has similar advantages with white men and whites who are married.

He also leads by a comfortable 23 points among rural voters and by 13 points with voters age 65 and over.

Obama leads 61 percent to 35 percent among voters under age 30. He has about a 5-to-1 edge with minorities and a narrow 5-point lead with women, though he trails among white women 53 percent to 40 percent.

By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press, September 12, 2008

Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign launched a broadside against Sen. Barack Obama yesterday, accusing him of a sexist smear, comparing his campaign to a pack of wolves on the prowl against the GOP vice presidential pick, charging that the Democratic nominee favored sex education for kindergartners, and resurrecting the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

"Enough," Obama declared yesterday while campaigning in Norfolk, Va. "I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift boat politics. Enough is enough."

The McCain campaign, meanwhile, sought to portray itself as the victim of unfair smears and sexist attacks against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin even as it pursued its own assaults on Obama. The rhetoric was echoed yesterday on conservative talk radio, the Internet and in the House, where Republican women decried Obama's alleged sexism.

"The Obama campaign has decided that the way to get at Sarah Palin is through personal attacks and sexist insults," Rep. Candice S. Miller (Mich.) said on the House floor.

On a campaign conference call last night, Rep. marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) lumped together Obama's reference to a female reporter as "sweetie" last May, his decision not to choose Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) or Kansas Gov. Katheleen Sebelius as his running mate, and his use of the saying "lipstick on a pig" in comments Tuesday to denounce what they call a pattern of sexism.

The attacks over the first three days of this week have come at a sometimes dizzying pace. Within 24 hours, the McCain campaign released a television advertisement saying Obama favored "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners, produced an Internet ad charging that the Democrat had referred to Palin as a pig, then concluded with another ad saying, "Obama's politics of hope? Empty words."

All three of the spots drew outraged responses and charges of dirty politics from Obama and his supporters. "We've got an energy crisis," the candidate said at a campaign event where he had planned to focus entirely on education policy. "We have an education system that is not working for too many of our children and making us less competitive. We have an economy that is creating hardship for families all across America. We've got two wars going on, veterans coming home not being cared for -- and this is what they want to talk about."

McCain allies think they have succeeded in knocking Obama on his heels since he accepted his party's nomination in Denver two weeks ago.

"They really are in a meltdown," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), a McCain adviser.

Obama aides say the assaults will not work, arguing that all of the accusations against him are a reach, if not fabrications. The sexism allegation stemmed from a comment Obama made in Virginia during a talk in which he did not mention Palin.

"Let's just list this for a second," he said Tuesday. "John McCain says he's about change, too. And so I guess his whole angle is, 'Watch out, George Bush. Except for economic policy, health-care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics, we're going to really shake things up in Washington. That's not change. That's just calling some -- the same thing something different. But you know, you can't, you can put, uh, lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig."

The McCain campaign seized on the remark, saying that Obama was alluding to Palin's characterization of herself as a pit bull in lipstick. The Internet ad skips over the introductory words from Obama, juxtaposing Palin's line from her nomination acceptance speech last Wednesday -- "They say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick" -- with Obama's lipstick-on-a-pig phrase, a phrase that McCain also has used, to describe Clinton's health-care plan.

"Ready to lead? No," the ad concludes. "Ready to smear? Yes."

The sex education ad referred to legislation Obama voted for -- but did not sponsor -- in the Illinois Senate that allowed school boards to develop "age-appropriate" sex education courses at all levels. Kindergarten teachers were given the approval to teach about appropriate and inappropriate touching to combat molestation.

The McCain advertisement calls it "Obama's one accomplishment" in education: "legislation to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners."

"Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama, wrong on education, wrong for your family," the ad concludes.

Paired with that was another attack. The "wolves" ad alludes to a "mini-army" of lawyers dispatched to "dig dirt" on Palin in Alaska.

"As Obama drops in the polls, he'll try to destroy her," the ad states.

The ad pins the swirl of Internet rumors about McCain's running mate to the Obama campaign. The reference to a mini-army was drawn from a Wall Street Journal column by conservative John Fund. A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee said yesterday that neither it nor the Obama campaign had any researchers or lawyers in Alaska.

It was a McCain surrogate, former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.), who brought back the words of Wright, Obama's former longtime pastor, whose incendiary sermons nearly derailed the Democrat's primary candidacy.

"Frankly, I think Reverend Wright was correct when he says he's just doing what politicians do," Thompson said of Obama as he introduced McCain to a Northern Virginia audience. "That's not the kind of change this country needs."

During a Boston fundraiser, Obama's running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), denounced the negativity, noting that McCain himself faced smears in his 2000 race for the presidency.

"What really disappoints me is the very tactics used against him, they're trying to use against Barack Obama now," he said. "It's literally saddening. I didn't expect it, I didn't expect it. But I guess I should learn to expect everything."

America's feminists may have lost a battle or two. But they are winning the war

THIS was supposed to be the year in which America's feminists celebrated the shattering of the highest glass ceiling. They had the ideal candidate in Hillary Rodham Clinton, a woman who had been tempered in the fires of Washington. And they had every reason to think that she would whip both the young Barack Obama and the elderly John McCain.

But it was Mrs Clinton who got the whipping. She not only lost an unlosable primary race. She was dissed and denounced in the process. Chris Matthews of MSNBC said that she owed her Senate seat to her husband's infidelity. One lobbyist created an anti-Hillary pressure group called Citizens United Not Timid. A couple of young men ordered her to "iron my shirt". Mr McCain, whom she regards as a good friend, looked on benignly when a Republican asked him "How do we beat the bitch?"

Mr McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate has turned the defeat into Armageddon. Mrs Palin is everything that liberal feminists loathe: a gun-toting evangelical, a polar bear-hating former beauty queen, a mother of five who opposes abortion rights and celebrates the fact that her pregnant teenage daughter has "chosen life". During her campaign for Alaska's lieutenant-governorship in 2002 she called herself as "pro-life as any candidate can be".

Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms magazine, says that "Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton". Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organisation of Women, dismisses her as a "woman who opposes women's rights". Debbie Dingell, a leading Michigan Democrat, said that women felt insulted by the choice. Joe Biden says that, if Mrs Palin becomes the first female vice-president, it will be a "backward step for women". "Eighteen million cracks", says the New Republic, (referring to Mrs Clinton's 18m votes and the glass ceiling) "and one crackpot."

Mrs Palin's arrival on the national stage is inspiring some startling political somersaults. Some feminists claim to be outraged that Mr McCain has promoted somebody just because she is a woman. Sally Quinn, a writer for the Washington Post, has even argued that, given the size of her family, she cannot possibly be both a national candidate and a good mother. At the same time, conservative traditionalists are suddenly realising that they have always been supporters of mould-breaking working mothers, whatever impression they may have given to the contrary. The whole business is also inspiring plenty of speculation about the end of feminism. One group of Hillary supporters said that their heroine's defeat was like being told to "sit down, shut up and move to the back of the bus."

But is feminism really faring so badly? American women are certainly under-represented in public life. They make up less than 20% of governors and members of Congress. The number of women on the Supreme Court has recently fallen by half, from two to one, thanks to Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement. But what Ms Steinem regards as the most "restricting force" in America is nevertheless getting ever less restrictive. Some of the most culturally conservative states in the country, such as Kansas and Michigan, have female governors. In 1998 women won the top five elected offices in Arizona. Mrs O'Connor was arguably the most powerful voice on the Supreme Court for decades.

Women are also winning the most important of all gender wars - the war for educational qualifications. They earn 57% of bachelor's degrees, 59% of master's degrees and half of doctorates. And they are doing better all the time. In terms of higher education, women drew equal with men in 1980. By the early 1990s six women graduated from college for every five men. Projections show that by 2017 three women will graduate for every two men. The meritocracy is inexorably turning into a matriarchy, and visibly so on many campuses: the heads of Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Brown and the National Defence University are all women.

Boys, meanwhile, are more likely to drop out of high school than girls. They are also more likely to be consigned to special education classes or prescribed mood-managing drugs. Men are more likely to commit crimes, end up in prison, kill themselves or be murdered. Even their sperm count is headed south. The long-term result seems unavoidable: men are becoming ever more marginalised, while women are taking over the commanding heights of wealth and power.

The new Madonna

It is even plausible to argue that there is feminist-friendly news buried in the recent headlines. One reason why younger women did not coalesce behind Mrs Clinton in the same way as their mothers must surely be that they have simply become accustomed to living in a world of opportunities. On Super Tuesday, for example, Mr Obama did very well with women under 30, while Mrs Clinton won easily among women over 60. Convinced that they will see a woman in the White House during their lifetimes, they did not feel the same "fierce urgency of now" (to borrow a phrase from Mr Obama) as 70-somethings like Ms Steinem.

In her idiosyncratic way, Mrs Palin also represents the fulfilment of the feminist dream. She demonstrates that gender is no longer a barrier to success in one of the most conservative corners of the land, the Alaska Republican Party. She also proves that you can be a career woman without needing to subscribe to any fixed feminist ideology. Camille Paglia hails her as the biggest step forward for feminism since Madonna. One can argue, as we have, that it was astoundingly reckless of Mr McCain to have picked her on the basis of having once met her for 15 minutes. But if feminism means, at its core, that women should be able to compete equally in the workplace while deciding for themselves how they organise their family life, then Mrs Palin deserves to be treated as a pioneer, not dismissed as a crackpot.

The Economist, September 11, 2008

The governor's return marks her first solo campaign foray since joining the GOP ticket.

FAIRBANKS, ALASKA -- Gov. Sarah Palin returned triumphant to her home state Wednesday for the first time since she was named to the Republican ticket with John McCain, and received thunderous cheers as she promised 3,000 supporters: "I will do my best to do Alaska proud."

Palin reprised many passages from her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech at the party's convention in St. Paul, Minn. But she steered away from explicit attacks on the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, instead gushing about her home state and its sudden role in the limelight.

Her return to Alaska is part of a carefully orchestrated introduction to the media. While here, she is scheduled to talk with ABC News anchor Charles Gibson today and Friday.

Wednesday evening, the governor spent much of her 20-minute speech lauding McCain, his prisoner-of-war past and his Senate record as a contrarian who has both bucked his party and sought its backing.

"John McCain," Palin said, "is a maverick of the Senate riding to the White House."

Palin cited her own role in taking on "the old oil monopoly," which resulted in the state reaping a share of millions in oil pipeline profits that are being returned to Alaska residents as rebates. And she prompted a round of cheers by telling the crowd that the state's vast oil and gas reserves are a prime example of the need to seek more energy sources.

"Everywhere we go, they're chanting, 'Drill, baby, drill," she said.

And in a passage aimed at her welcoming crowd and the hundreds of Christian conservatives who had turned out for her arrival, Palin praised "this great land of Alaska that God has so richly blessed."

Palin arrived on a McCain-Palin campaign jet from Washington, D.C., with a stop in Montana to refuel. As confetti flew and a college band played, she walked out of the plane with her husband, Todd, whom she called "the first dude," and three of their children, Piper, Willow and infant son Trig.

The crowd of Republican stalwarts, curiosity-seekers and tourists chanted, "Sarah! Sarah!" and pressed toward a makeshift stage inside the cavernous hangar, which was festooned with two massive U.S. flags. Several Fairbanks residents covered an old truck bed with homemade banners bearing slogans including "Palin Power" and "Sarah is one of us!"

"This is our girl!" enthused Dory Powell, 67, a retired college purchasing agent. "She's brought the Republican Party to life." She called Palin's addition to the ticket a "win-win situation for Alaska. If she wins, we get her in the White House, and if she loses, well, we get her back home here with us."

Scores of tourists on their way through Alaska's interior showed up to cheer along with the locals. Marlene Perna and her husband, Joe, were among several couples from suburban Phoenix who interrupted their sightseeing to take in Palin's homecoming.

"Sarah brings honesty and know-how to straighten out Washington," Perna said. "And she's not afraid of anyone. I want a pit bull on the ticket."

Some excited mothers brought young daughters who wore T-shirts proclaiming: "When I grow up, I want to be just like Sarah Palin."

Ronetta O'Connor, a Fairbanks homemaker, had her two daughters, MacKenzie, 8, and Keira, 2, in tow. "We wanted my girls to see a little bit of history," O'Connor said.

The O'Connors learned about the event from an automated call from the local Republican Party. "I was so excited," said MacKenzie, who fielded the call before her mother, a loyal GOP voter, heard the message. "I want her to win very much!"

Matt Carter, a 46-year-old mechanic who works two-week shifts on the oil pipeline in Prudhoe Bay, took advantage of his down time to drive from his home in North Pole, a town outside Fairbanks. "I watched her at the Republican convention on TV and I had the biggest swell of pride since I heard [Ronald] Reagan speak," said Carter, a registered independent.

Carter said he liked Palin's passages Wednesday night that echoed her acceptance speech. But he said he still wanted to hear "more meat and potatoes about what she's going to do about energy. I'm tired of seeing us pouring money into Saudi Arabia and Iran, and want to hear what her proposals are."

John Strong, 58, an Alaska Airlines worker, said he was already convinced by Palin's energy stance -- impressed by her ability to wring more pipeline revenue for Alaska from the major oil companies: "Lookit, if she can twist Big Oil's tail, she can do anything."




By Stephen Braun, Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2008

NEW YORK -- Barack Obama revealed Wednesday that former President Clinton will campaign for him in the weeks leading up to election day.

Relations between the pair became testy during the primaries, when Obama was challenging Clinton's spouse, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, for the presidential nomination. Obama and the former president didn't speak for nearly a month after the campaign ended.

But they have made peace and the former president has offered to do whatever he can to help.

"There's nobody smarter in politics," Obama said on CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman," scheduled to air Wednesday night. "And he is going to be campaigning for us over the next eight weeks, which I'm thrilled by."

Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna said the former president would campaign for Obama at a yet-to-be announced site in Florida on Sept. 29, with more events to follow.




The Associated Press, September 11, 2008

CBS forces YouTube to pull a McCain Web ad targeting Obama for his 'lipstick on a pig' remark. The spot featured CBS anchor Katie Couric.


Barack Obama wasn't the only one ticked off by the way the McCain campaign jumped all over his use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig." CBS on Wednesday forced YouTube to yank a John McCain Web ad titled "Lipstick" because the commercial used unauthorized footage of CBS anchor Katie Couric.

The ad showed a clip of Obama's comments during a campaign event Tuesday in Virginia in which he said, "You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig." McCain's campaign accused him of making a sexist dig at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a charge Obama heatedly disputed, saying he was referring to McCain's policies.

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler says McCain chose a running mate 'whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion.'

Move over lipsticked pigs. Make way for another installment of the recurring campaign soap opera, "Surrogates Say the Darndest Things."

On Wednesday, South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler told a reporter for the website Politico that Sen. John McCain chose a running mate "whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion."

Rhetorical attacks by the presidential candidates mask a consensus. But analysts say both are lacking in details on the subject.

WASHINGTON -- On the campaign trail, the two presidential teams have been savaging each other over what they contend are stark differences between how Barack Obama and John McCain would lead the United States in its multibillion-dollar war on terrorism.

Obama declared in his convention speech: "McCain likes to say that he'll follow Bin Laden to the gates of Hell -- but he won't even go to the cave where he lives."

At the GOP convention, Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, fired back: "Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America -- he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?"

But beneath the harsh rhetoric, the two candidates -- who meet today in New York City to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks -- seem to be moving toward consensus on their broad-brush strategies, an unexpected development in what was the most contentious issue in the presidential race four years ago.

"The process of political campaigning has exaggerated the differences of the two candidates on trivial issues," said Brian Michael Jenkins of the Rand Corp., who is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on terrorism. He has studied the issue in the last seven presidential races. "But when it comes to where the campaigns have outlined their platforms on Iraq, Afghanistan and national security, there isn't a great deal of difference."

Both McCain and Obama have pledged to retool much of the Bush administration's self-declared war on terrorism, saying it has been heavy-handed, too militaristic and unpopular at home and abroad.

On Iraq, one of their most fundamental initial disagreements, the two candidates' proposals have converged. Both now say they would withdraw troops within the next several years. Obama would draw down the troops by mid-2010 and McCain by 2013, but each with significant caveats that could prolong the U.S. military deployment.

Both say more troops are needed to quell a rapidly intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan and support a larger military force overall. They say a fresh approach is needed to capture Osama bin Laden and deal with the growing terrorist activity in Pakistan.

They pledge to stop the torture of terrorism suspects. They vow to engage in more public diplomacy and "soft power" tactics that emphasize winning the hearts and minds of those leaning toward extremism and anti-American beliefs. And they want to sharply curb nuclear proliferation.

Both want to close the controversial U.S. military detention facility for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and try such defendants elsewhere.

And both have come to support legislation that ensures at least some court oversight of the electronic eavesdropping in terrorism investigations to protect the privacy of American citizens.

And neither has said much about reforming the intelligence community or the Department of Homeland Security.

One advisor to Obama, a counter-terrorism expert, attributes to presidential campaign politics the disconnect between the perception of the candidates and their policies.

Both candidates, he said, are happy to talk tough on terrorism and to criticize their opponent. But they are reluctant to talk specifics because it is there -- in the nuts and bolts of how to fight Al Qaeda and the spreading ideology of anti-Western Muslim extremism -- where the controversies lie and the risk of alienating voters is potentially great.

"There is not a big incentive to articulate the details. These are complex questions that don't lend themselves to short answers during presidential debates," said the advisor, speaking on condition of anonymity because his role in the campaign is not public.

But Randy Scheunemann, McCain's senior national security advisor, said that the two candidates are "profoundly different on a range of issues."

Scheunemann said Obama "refused to see the obvious that Iraq was the central front in the war on terrorism," whereas the Obama campaign said McCain erred in emphasizing Iraq over the terrorism problem in Afghanistan.

Officials with both campaigns acknowledge that the two candidates' positions have grown closer on at least some security issues in recent months, in part because of the improving security situations in Iraq and deteriorating stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"The reason people think there is a coming together is because McCain has been forced to move on issues like Iraq and Afghanistan in Obama's direction, because the world has moved in that direction," said an Obama national security advisor, Richard Clarke, a former Clinton and Bush administration counter-terrorism official.

And both camps say that despite any similarities on paper, there are fundamental differences in the candidates' approach to counter-terrorism, which stem from how they see themselves and the world at large.

Team McCain portrays the Arizona senator as a fighter who is not afraid to stand up to bullies and state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran, and who knows firsthand the tragic consequences of war. The Obama campaign paints McCain, however, as a warmonger whose overly militaristic approach to counter-terrorism will backfire and create many more enemies than America already has.

Obama sees himself as a tough but more sophisticated peacemaker who will opt for a more cautious, diplomatic and inclusive approach to the counter-terrorism effort. The McCain camp says the Illinois senator is naive, lacks the experience and toughness to stand up to terrorism and its sponsors, and that his proposal to fight Al Qaeda through expanded law enforcement is outmoded and ineffective.

"It is certainly a matter of personality of character and world view" that separates the two, Clarke says.

Both camps said that they would offer more details of their national security plans in the coming weeks. But several counter-terrorism experts say they have grown increasingly frustrated by the tough rhetoric but lack of substantive details.

They acknowledge that the issue is not at the top of the agenda as it was in 2004, because of the economic downturn and the distance from the Sept. 11 attacks.

But they argue that the counter-terrorism effort will test the leadership abilities of the next president perhaps more than any other issue, and that potential missteps in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and numerous other hot spots could be catastrophic.

"I haven't seen or heard much nuance or cognizance of the complexity of the issues from either candidate," said Frank Cilluffo, a former Bush administration counter-terrorism official who directs George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute in Washington.

"How do we realistically address Pakistan and the safe-haven issue? How would you recalibrate our counter-terrorism strategies and policies? To achieve what specific aims? What are the criteria for success?" Cilluffo asks. "How will you communicate your priorities to the world to drive constructive change? How would you differentiate your policies from the current administration?"




By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2008

News outlets and independent truth squads seem to agree that the McCain camp's distortions on Barack Obama have gone too far.

The Sept. 11 memorial bells chimed with beautiful clarity Thursday, from Shanksville, Pa., to ground zero and beyond, a reminder of tragedy and our nation's real enemies.

What a welcome respite, that serene sound, after days of presidential politics that roared and sputtered with a cacophony of distortion, innuendo and outright lies.

I'm not saying that Obama hasn't told a few whoppers -- like suggesting McCain's proposed corporate tax breaks are tailored specifically for oil companies or that his opponent seriously believes anyone making under $5 million is middle-class.

But it's McCain and his foot soldiers who have really fouled the election airwaves in recent days, provoking the first flickerings of a backlash from the media.

Give credit to PolitiFact.com -- an online endeavor operated by Florida's St. Petersburg Times along with Congressional Quarterly -- for unequivocally knocking down one of the McCainites' biggest fabrications in recent days. You know, the one where Obama supposedly called Republican V.P. nominee Sarah Palin a pig.

For the half-dozen of you who haven't heard about this kerfuffle: It began this week when Obama belittled McCain's suggestion that McCain would bring change to Washington.

"That's not change," Obama told a responsive audience. "That's just calling something -- the same thing -- something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig."

McCain operatives puffed themselves up with outrage about Obama's "sexism." Then they released a Web advertisement, disingenuously flashing text on the screen -- "Barack Obama on: Sarah Palin" -- while cutting to Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark.

As noted on PolitiFact, the ad gives no context for Obama's remark -- context that made it clear the Democrat was belittling McCain's claim that he is an agent of change.

PolitiFact rated the McCain ad "Pants on Fire" (as in "liar, liar") on its Truth-O-Meter. "If anyone's doing any smearing," the site concluded, "it's the McCain campaign and its outrageous attempt to distort the facts."

Outrageous, but just a warmup for the smarmy untruth the McCain camp uncorked next --that Obama voted in his home state of Illinois to foist detailed sex education on kindergartners.

Often in the past, journalists who were confronted with such a lie opted for on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand reporting. That allows one politician to launch a fabrication, while another tries, often in vain, to swat it down.

McClatchy Co. newspapers (publisher of the Sacramento Bee and other papers) and reporter Margaret Talev admirably cast aside the wishy-washy approach. Looking at Obama and the Illinois sex-ed legislation, Talev concluded that McCain's charge was "deliberately misleading."

"As a state senator in Illinois, Obama did vote for, but was not a sponsor of, legislation dealing with sex ed for grades K-12," the reporter explained. "But the legislation allowed local school boards to teach 'age-appropriate' sex education, not comprehensive lessons to kindergartners."

That probably would have meant, at most, classes to help the youngest children fend off sexual predators.

Talev flagged the McCain ad for "unsportsmanlike conduct."

The truth-tellers in this campaign have not throttled McCain alone. PolitiFact, for example, has slapped Obama more than once, including for his flase claim that McCain promised to continue the war in Iraq for 100 years. (McCain said the United States might need to keep military bases there for that long.)

It was the McCain team, however, that plumbed new depths this week by distorting a fact-checking outfit that had come to its aid.

It happened when FactCheck (a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center) shot down rumors flying around the Internet about Alaska Gov. Palin.

FastCheck rejected claims that Palin cut special education in Alaska, endorsed Pat Buchanan for president and joined the secessionist-leaning Alaskan Independence Party. (Her husband, Todd, was an AIP member.)

The McCainites tried to attribute anonymous Internet falsehoods to one individual: Surprise! Barack Obama.

Superimposing FactCheck's "completely false, or misleading" finding over a photo of Obama, the Republicans suggested the Democrat had trumped up the charges.

FactCheck, however, found "no evidence" tying Obama to the anonymous Internet attacks. The muckrakers announced Wednesday that McCain & Co. had been "less than honest."

Obama blew off the lies with a shrug and a smile when he visited David Letterman this week. But I suspect that many Americans' reaction comes closer to sadness. Or anger.




By James Rainey, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

At Columbia University, McCain praises his rival's work as a community organizer. Obama returns the compliment.

Pressed by moderator Judy Woodruff of PBS about whether he condoned Palin's tone, McCain insisted he respected the work of community organizers and went so far as to say he would consider asking Obama to oversee national service efforts in a McCain administration.

"Sen. Obama's record there is outstanding," McCain said of his rival's work as a community organizer.

Acknowledging that the tone of the presidential campaign had been "rough," he praised Obama for inspiring "millions of Americans who otherwise wouldn't be involved in the political process."

Obama returned the compliment in the next hour, lauding McCain's service as a Navy pilot. He said he had been surprised by the criticism of his work on the South Side of Chicago.

"I think about the choice I made as a 23-, 24-year-old to spend three years working with churches to help people help themselves," Obama said. "No insult to the president of this fine institution, but it's the best education I ever had."

The moderators asked Obama, in turn, if Democrats had belittled Palin's experience as a former small-town mayor. Palin is now the governor of Alaska.

After McCain picked Palin, Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, said, "Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency."

Obama spoke up for mayors everywhere, saying their job is among the toughest in the country.

"While we yak in the Senate, they actually have to fill potholes and trim trees and make sure the garbage is taken away," he said.

The congenial tone of the forum, at which the two candidates shook hands and hugged briefly on stage at the university's Lerner Hall, provided a fleeting pause in the rancorous debate on the campaign trail.

Both held to their pledge, which they made in a joint statement last week, to avoid politics and display unity in honor of the lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. Before participating in the interviews, part of a weeklong "Service Nation Summit" on community and national service, McCain and Obama shared a moment of prayer and reflection during a visit to ground zero.

They were accompanied by McCain's wife, Cindy, and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. They greeted one another with a handshake and barely spoke as they walked down the long ramp lined with flags from across the world to the reflecting pool at ground zero.

Neither candidate campaigned Thursday. Obama had lunch with former President Clinton at his office in Harlem. McCain attended a memorial in Shanksville, Pa., for those aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a field after passengers are believed to have overpowered the hijackers.

For all the venom passing between the campaigns, each man seemed willing to name the other to a Cabinet post. Whether the loser would accept was not so clear.

Asked if, as president, he would put McCain in charge of a Cabinet position devoted to national service, Obama, enjoying the question, said, "If this is the deal he wants to make right now, I am committed to appointing him to my Cabinet."

Would he accept the same job under President McCain?

"We've got a little work to do before we get to that point," Obama said.




By Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

Any lingering resentments from the often-heated Democratic primary season seem to have been set aside, with the former president set to stump for the Illinois senator in Florida later this month.

NEW YORK -- A Democratic Party riven by the long primary season took another step toward unity Thursday, as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton sat down in Harlem for a takeout lunch and an extended conversation aimed at forging a new alliance.

Obama's lunch date with the former president marked the first time the two men have sat down for a one-on-one discussion since the presidential campaign began.

During the primaries, plenty of venom spewed from the two camps, but those on both sides say all is forgiven, if not entirely forgotten. Clinton is set to campaign for Obama in Florida on Sept. 29. He will also raise money for the Democratic nominee and make other campaign stops through election day.

In a brief exchange with reporters in Clinton's office on West 125th Street, the former president said: "I've agreed to do a substantial number of things -- whatever I'm asked to do."

Asked his opinion of the race, Clinton said: "I predict that Sen. Obama will win and win handily."

Obama jumped in: "There you go. You can take it from the president of the United States. He knows a little something about politics."

Before they began their lunch of grilled chicken and vegetables, Clinton was overheard telling Obama about the framed photographs displayed on his coffee table. The moment seemed far from the rancor of the primary season.

Early in the year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton's nomination chances dimmed, her husband's frustration mounted, and at one point he accused the Obama forces of doing a "hit job" on him.

Obama aides bristled over Bill Clinton's campaign tactics. As South Carolina voters turned against his wife, Clinton seemed to marginalize Obama's candidacy when he noted that Jesse Jackson had also won the state 20 years before.

Both sides have taken steps to salve lingering wounds.

With Hillary Clinton defeated, Obama has made adjustments, carving out time in his basic speech to showcase her husband's record. Speaking at a high school in Lebanon, Va., on Tuesday, Obama made a point of telling the crowd: "When Bill Clinton was president, the average family income went up $7,500."

Deploying Bill Clinton on the trail can be double-edged. In 2000 the Al Gore campaign was reluctant to send him out, fearing he might alienate undecided voters. At the time, the Monica Lewinsky scandal was fresh enough that the Gore team worried Clinton might scare off as many voters as he attracted.

Bob Shrum, a top advisor to Gore's 2000 campaign, said in an interview: "Look, in 2000 he had a generally unfavorable rating with swing voters and undecided voters in the battleground states."

Conditions are different now, Shrum said. "This is not 2000. . . . Circumstances have changed, and perceptions have changed," he said. "I don't see what the downside is."

Yet when it's Clinton, there are always risks. He is a less disciplined campaigner these days, lashing out at reporters when he dislikes a question and rarely passing up a chance to talk about his post-presidential work and past accomplishments.

Still, Obama supporters say they are eager to have him in the fold.

Dick Harpootlian is a former South Carolina Democratic chairman and Obama backer who clashed with the former president during the primaries, calling the Clinton team's tactics "reprehensible." Now Harpootlian is over it. "In the heat of battle, all of us become advocates and emotionally charged," he said. "But I welcome him to the campaign trail. I welcome him to South Carolina. And I think he can be very effective in many of those states he carried in 1992."

Hillary Clinton campaigned in Florida for Obama earlier this week. Once Bill Clinton hits the Sunshine State, both halves of the Clinton marriage will have stumped for Obama in the crucial battleground state with 27 electoral votes.

An aggregate of public polls in Florida shows Republican nominee John McCain with a 3-percentage-point edge.




By Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

Her interview with anchor Charles Gibson isn't without stumbles as she discusses foreign policy.

Sarah Palin took a hard line on Russia and Iran on Thursday as she fielded questions on foreign affairs for the first time since Republican presidential candidate John McCain named her his running mate two weeks ago.

The Alaska governor also reversed her stand on the cause of climate change, telling ABC News that she believes "man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming." Less than a year ago, she said the opposite.

By turns tense and combative, Palin, 44, used two interviews with ABC anchor Charles Gibson to display her grasp of issues central to the vice presidency.

She acknowledged that, other than a trip last year to see troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Germany, her only visits abroad were to Mexico and Canada. And she said that she had never met a head of state but that she did speak last week with President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia.

The interviews, conducted in and around Fairbanks, Alaska, did not go without a hitch. Palin called the Russian incursion into Georgia last month "unprovoked," a view at odds with that of U.S. officials who have reviewed events leading up to the military action.

She also appeared stumped when Gibson asked whether she agreed with the Bush Doctrine, which holds that the United States can wage preemptive war against hostile nations.

And Palin, whose critics see her as unqualified for the vice presidency, said she was "thankful that, under Reagan, we won the Cold War." The Soviet Union collapsed three years after Ronald Reagan left the White House.

The interviews were Palin's first since she spoke with People magazine on the day McCain put her on the Republican ticket. Top McCain advisors -- including chief strategist Steve Schmidt -- traveled with Palin to Alaska on Wednesday to brief her for the two Gibson interviews on Thursday and one today.

Palin has proved a powerful asset for McCain, giving him a sudden boost in the polls, and advisors were determined to avert any misstep that could change those dynamics.

Palin's shift on global warming aligns her more closely with McCain, who has long believed that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change. In December, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner quoted her as saying, "I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity."

Palin, in speaking to ABC, chose her words carefully, saying that "some of man's activities" could be "potentially causing some of the changes in the climate right now."

As governor, Palin has named an advisory panel to help Alaska adapt to the consequences of climate change, such as melting ice sheets that have changed fish and wildlife migration patterns. But her views on the cause probably have significant bearing on whether, like her running mate, she favors steps to curb carbon emissions that cause global warming. "John McCain and I are going to be working on what we do about it," she said.

On foreign policy, Palin largely echoed McCain. She said she favored bringing Ukraine and Georgia into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for instance -- though Russia would consider such a move a threat to its security. So under the NATO alliance, Gibson asked, would the United States have to go to war in response to a Russian invasion of Georgia?

"Perhaps so," she responded. "I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help."

Gibson alluded to McCain's recent statement that Alaska's proximity to Russia lent Palin some expertise on that nation, asking Palin to explain.

"They're our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska -- from an island in Alaska," she said.

As for Iran, Palin said nuclear weapons under the control of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be "extremely dangerous to everyone on this globe." She called for a hands-off approach to Israel if it decided to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

"We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself," she said.

Palin's interviews took place on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes. McCain and Democratic rival Barack Obama observed the occasion with a rare break in their daily exchange of campaign attacks.

As part of her first Alaska homecoming since McCain introduced her as his running mate, Palin went to an Army base outside Fairbanks on Thursday to attend an Iraq deployment ceremony for a brigade of soldiers, including her 19-year-old son, Track.

In the sit-down with Gibson, she faced questions about statements on the Iraq war that she made at an Assembly of God church that she sometimes attends in her hometown, Wasilla, of which she is a former mayor.

A video shows Palin asking a group to pray that the nation's leaders were sending troops to Iraq "on a task that is from God."

Gibson, however, mischaracterized her as simply asserting that the nation's leaders were sending troops to Iraq on a task from God.

"Are we fighting a holy war?" he asked.

After Palin disputed his characterization, she paraphrased Abraham Lincoln, saying she meant, "Let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side."

Gibson went on to take a second part of her comments out of context. Palin had asked the group to pray "that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan."

But Gibson dropped her reference to praying -- and instead quoted Palin as saying the war was God's plan. He asked if she believed the country was sending her son on a task from God.

"I don't know if the task is from God, Charlie," she responded, adding that she was proud of Track for "serving something greater than himself."

Palin's most visible stumble came when Gibson asked whether she agreed with the Bush Doctrine.

"In what respect, Charlie?" she asked the anchor, who sat directly across from her in a matching upright armchair.

Gibson then asked what she interpreted the Bush Doctrine to be.

"His worldview," she answered.

Once Gibson explained that the doctrine meant preemptive wars, Palin used the opportunity to take veiled shots at President Bush, whose unpopularity has weighed on McCain's candidacy.

"I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hellbent on destroying our nation," she said. "There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made."

With new leadership "comes opportunity to do things better," she said.

On the question of whether she was ready to step in as president if needed, Palin said she was. She also said she had not hesitated to accept McCain's offer to join the ticket.

"I answered him yes, because I have the confidence in that readiness, and knowing that you can't blink," she said. "You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't blink then, even when asked to run as his running mate."




By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

Sen. Hillary Clinton must be as bemused as her many supporters are (that's a polite word) by the excitement Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to a dull Republican ticket. It might even help the GOP win! Horrors! Why didn't Sen. Barack Obama think of this? Why didn't he summon the courage to add Clinton to his own Democratic ticket?

No real understandable reasons, or excuses, have been forthcoming. Except, of course, he was running so strongly against the old guy in white hair that he thought he didn't need any help.

"Not a good fit" was about the closest an Obama mouthpiece came to an explanation. Meaning, one assumes, that he couldn't bear a competing shining star. McCain, of course, has no such worries. He is who he is, and Palin cannot challenge that. But she is proving so popular, if the raft of recent polls are sustained, that she is becoming a big political figure in her own right. At the moment, she is still a political stunt, but a successful one. In their first ad featuring Palin, the GOP shows the pair together and an announcer proclaims, "They'll make history," a not-so-subtle message that she could be the first female vice president.

She is the anti-Clinton, opposed to every domestic and social policy for which Clinton has worked for decades, yet she is pulling away hordes of white female voters who refused to settle for Obama after he dumped Hillary.

Gender may have an initial appeal only, but it could last if Palin proves to be clever and softens her hard-line anti-abortion, anti-stem cell research, anti-gay rights, anti-everything modern positions of the past. She's running for the second spot, not the top one. We'll see. The oddest thing about Palin's candidacy is that motherhood has suddenly moved into a top priority for political leadership. This is brand new, and a reflection of the fact her religious-right supporters want to promote her "family values," which differ from the standards of the past.

Sexual abstinence before marriage, for instance, has been dropped from the list of moral imperatives for the feminine ideal, given unmarried teen Bristol's inconvenient pregnancy.

But the notion that motherhood figures as a qualification to be commander in chief is too much too swallow. There are mothers who simply give birth and there are mothers who really make a difference over the decades in their children's lives, and that of the country. In either case, a mother - or father - must have talents and strengths beyond his or her own family. It was pleasant to see Palin and her family on display. Seven-year-old Piper is especially cute. But what did it mean to us? The voters need specific things, such as health care, regulatory and energy reform and a revitalization of privacy rights, particularly those of women.

Many or most of us have cute children, or grandchildren, at home or nearby. I could parade my own. That makes us empathize with Palin but doesn't make us qualified to run the country. Nor should it make us vote for her, on those grounds alone. The polls are unambiguous about the boost Palin gave to the GOP ticket, particularly among white women who never cottoned to Obama's cool, male attitude of superiority.

The USA TODAY/Gallup Poll showed that among registered voters McCain leads Obama by 4 points, 50 percent to 46 percent. Before the GOP convention, riding on his own convention bounce, Obama led by 7 points.

Significantly, according to the poll, more voters call themselves Republicans than before - 47 percent say they are Republicans or lean that way, 48 percent say they are Democrats or lean that way. Republicans have not been within a single point of Democrats in party identification since February 2005, after Bush's second inauguration. None of this may last. But it's not small potatoes either. Republicans are suddenly energized and hopeful, even though a dismal Bush administration and sagging economy have left them few reasons to feel that way. And Obama, who opted not to take pubic financing as McCain did, is struggling to raise the cash he needs through massive, and increasingly distracting fund-raising efforts. A Washington Post-ABC News poll reports similar reactions. Among all voters who supported Clinton, nearly a quarter say they plan to support McCain in November, although Obama has won over 78 per cent of women who were previously for Hillary.

It comes down to the self-declared independents, who now for the first time break narrowly for McCain. The score is 50 percent for McCain to 43 for Obama, not such a big margin but a revolution in the speed-dial political campaigns of today.

Wow! Clearly, Obama has been making major mistakes, the first of which was to reject Hillary. The over-the-top "I'm the Messiah" stuff and the grandiose backdrops haven't sold well either, except with impressionable liberal college kids.

The basic Obama pitch that he could bring the country together simply by the strength of his oratory is in tatters.The McCain campaign has been doing much better, with less to work with. In fact, it has been a miracle of repositioning and risk-taking and smiles, smiles, smiles. And, it is fair to add, a lot of exaggerations, misleading comments and outright fibs.

Clever quips have helped, too. In spite of everything, McCain's hard not to like. It is really the McCain personality, above all, that could rescue a campaign that shouldn't win in a political climate so dire. With the help of an unusual, unexpected and untested woman at his side, of course.

By MARIANNE MEANS, Houston Chronicle, Sept. 11, 2008

In new ads out Friday morning, the Obama campaign makes fun of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) because he "can't send an e-mail." And Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) insists in a personal appeal to voters: "This year, change has to be more than a slogan."

It's part of a new aggressiveness by the former frontrunner, who's suddenly scrambling to contain an insurgent McCain-Palin ticket.

The ads are designed, a campaign official said, to "underscore that John McCain can't bring about change when he is completely out of touch with the lives of regular Americans."

The campaign's new mantra: "Out of touch, out of touch, out of touch."

Although McCain has made startling gains among women in some polls, Obama aides contend that the wide swath of national polling shows that this race is essentially where it was pre-conventions: tied.

Eager to regain momentum, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe cast the recalibrated campaign as a relaunch for the final 53 days: "Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign."

Obama has been all about change, and polls show this is a change election. But starting at last week's Republican National Convention, McCain tried to eat Obama's delicious lunch by claiming to be the real candidate of change - someone who would do it, not just preen about it.

In a memo to reporters and supporters, Plouffe is vowing to seize back that mantle of change after what he called a series of Republican "smears, lies, and cynical attempts to distract from the issues that matter to the American people."

"We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain's attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people," Plouffe wrote. "We will not allow John McCain and his band of Karl Rove disciples to make this big election about small things."

Obama also released two new 30-second ads - "Still" and "Real Change" - that, as the campaign put it, explain "What Change Is and What It Isn't."

Obama say into the camera: "We've heard a lot of talk about change this year. The question is, change to what? To me, change is a government that doesn't let banks and oil companies rip off the American people. Change is when we finally fix health care instead of just talking about it. Change is giving tax breaks to middle class families instead of companies that send jobs overseas. Change is a president who brings people together. I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message because this year, change has to be more than a slogan."

In the second ad, an announcer says: "Things have changed in the last 26 years. But McCain hasn't. He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an email. Still doesn't understand the economy. And favors two hundred billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class. After one President who was out of touch, we just can't afford more of the same."

In a July interview with The New York Times, McCain said aides "show me Drudge," but said he didn't e-mail: "I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself."

Some Democratic strategists were surprised that Obama was on camera responding to the McCain campaigns attack over the "lipstick" remark, and Plouffe's memo suggested that Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) will be playing the traditional running mate's role of doing the attacking.

"Senator Biden will be integral to that effort, both in pushing back on the lies that we'll continue to see from our opponents, and in keeping the debate focused on delivering for everyday Americans," Plouffe wrote.

Here's the text of the memo:

TO: Interested Parties
FR: David Plouffe, Campaign Manager
RE: Heading into the Final Stretch
DA: September 12, 2008
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Summary

With both conventions and the vice-presidential selections behind us, the campaign is now heading into the final stretch. The race has settled into a tight race nationally with Obama well-positioned in the key battleground states, a historic enthusiasm gap, and a debate being waged on Obama's home turf - change.

In recent weeks, John McCain has shown that he is willing to go into the gutter to win this election. His campaign has become nothing but a series of smears, lies, and cynical attempts to distract from the issues that matter to the American people. But as Barack Obama said earlier this week "enough is enough." This election is too important and the challenges too big to spend the next 54 days talking about trivial non-issues.

Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign, and today we are releasing two new ads that go directly at the fundamental issue in this race: John McCain is out of touch with the American people and unable to address the challenges facing the country in the 21st century and bring about real change, and that Barack Obama is the candidate who will bring about change that works for the middle class.

We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain's attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people. We will not allow John McCain and his band of Karl Rove disciples to make this big election about small things.

Senator Biden will be integral to that effort, both in pushing back on the lies that we'll continue to see from our opponents, and in keeping the debate focused on delivering for everyday Americans. After all, that's what Joe Biden has done throughout his career: passing the Crime Bill to put more cops on our streets, passing to the landmark Violence Against Women Act, and serving as a steadfast voice every day for those more concerned about the price of gas and saving for retirement than the latest political charade in Washington.

A Change Election with Two Converts

For the entire general election campaign, the McCain campaign has insisted that years in Washington should be the yardstick by which Americans measure their next President. But in recent days, and with his selection of a running mate with no Washington experience, Senator McCain has abandoned his core argument. Now he and his strategists have belatedly come to the realization that, after eight disastrous years, the American people are demanding change.

So the candidate who just months ago was openly boasting that he has been a faithful supporter of George W. Bush's policies, and would continue them as President, now is improbably scrambling to offer himself as the candidate who will deliver the change America needs - even as President Bush holds a fundraiser for him today in Oklahoma.

This is a debate we welcome. It is the debate America needs.

For two decades, Barack Obama has challenged political insiders and outworn thinking to bring about real, meaningful change that helps people, not special interests. From welfare reform, to tax relief for working families, to health care for children of working families who lacked coverage, Obama has been at the forefront of fights that have made a difference in the lives of everyday Americans.

In Washington, Obama has been a consistent opponent of the Bush policies that have hobbled our economy and weakened the middle class, and his proposals for the future would steer us away from that disastrous course.

He's challenged leaders of both parties by passing landmark reforms that took dead aim at the campaign contributions and favors through which corporate lobbyists have rigged the system. He worked across the aisle to pass laws reining in no-bid contracts and opening the budget process to the American people.

And Obama has lived by those principles in this campaign, refusing the contributions of Washington lobbyists and political action committees and imposing those same rules on the Democratic National Committee. Lobbyists don't run his campaign. And when he's President, they won't run his White House.

But what about John McCain?

Can we really expect change from a Senator who supported the Bush policies 90 percent of the time? Who has said the Bush policies have brought about "great progress economically" and who just three weeks ago proclaimed the economy fundamentally strong?

The fact is that while he mouths the word "change," Senator McCain's record and proposals scream "more of the same." His plans for the economy, energy, health care, education and Iraq barely stray from the Bush policies that are in place today.

And can we really expect change from a candidate whose campaign is being run by some of the most powerful corporate lobbyists in Washington?

While Senator McCain loudly declares that he will tell the special interests in Washington that their day is "over," they are working overtime to elect him.

Seven of the top officials in his campaign are lobbyists. Between them, they have lobbied for Big Oil, the drug and insurance industries, foreign governments - even Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His campaign manager routinely lobbied for corporations who had business before the Senate Commerce Committee that McCain chaired.

Corporate Lobbyists and PACs have contributed millions of dollars to his campaign and the Republican National Committee on his behalf.

Does anyone believe they are spending their time, money and energy to put themselves out of business?

That is not change. It's more of the same.

A debate about delivering change is a debate we're happy to have. Because no matter how many times McCain and Governor Palin use the word "change" or try to reinvent their own records, one thing stays the same: the fact that when it comes to the economy, education, Iraq, or the special interests' stranglehold on Washington, they both are stubborn defenders of the past eight years and they both promise more of the same.

One final note:

Senator McCain has called the news media "his base" because of the friendly treatment he has received. And he undoubtedly is counting on his "base" to overlook the gulf between his newly minted "change" message, and the realities of his record and campaign.

His lobbyist-manager said Sunday that Governor Palin would only submit to questions about her record, statements and views when they determine that the news media will treat her with due "deference"-a startling and arrogant new standard for public officials in our democracy.

But we trust that the obvious conflicts between their rhetoric and records, their promises and their plans will not go unreported in the last 53 days of this campaign

By Mike Allen, Politico, September 11, 2008

Racism, sexism, ageism . . . evidently, we're all victims now.

At least that's what partisans would have us believe.

The political reality, of course, is quite different. "Exoticism" in the political realm is no longer an impediment, it's a significant asset. And Republicans, whether they admit it or not, were yearning for the excitement Barack Obama generated - that is, before Sarah Palin came along.

Palin's frontier mystique has captivated conservatives. Both the lipstick and the pitbull. It's also discombobulated many Democrats, now fumbling to find a strategy to deal with a conservative woman.

We've witnessed accusations of racism and sexism during the Democratic primary fight. On these topics, conservatives, for the most part, have tiptoed in trepidation, lest someone somewhere spy any misconduct.

Which makes the recent brouhaha over sexism much sillier.

When Obama riffed off of Palin's quote regarding lipstick, pigs and such, the McCain campaign instantaneously reacted with ham-fisted glee. Republicans do not excel at identity politics. They shouldn't try. Palin may be able to pull off election miracles, but playing the role of wounded prey is a nuclear-powered stretch.

Democrats, conversely, are prepared for the battle. Just witness how every word uttered by their rivals undergoes intense forensic scrutiny for any subliminal bigotry.

The accidental governor of New York, David Paterson, recently stated, "I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama 'black' in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention — a 'community organizer.' They kept saying it, they kept laughing."

Well, I did notice. I also noticed Democrats in Denver hailing Obama's community organizing days as an idealistic and weighty accomplishment. Community organizing, you know, is about as impressive to your Heartlander as the mayoralty of Wasilla, Alaska, is to the urbanite.

But, there is a more serious, preemptive claim of racism: The economy, after all, is in terrible shape, and no one likes the Republican president. There is no other way, it is asserted, that a candidate as talented as Obama could possibly lose this election. It must be prejudice.

To deny there are racists among us would be silly. But is it possible, with all the problems we face — or, rather the always-exaggerated problems we face during election time — that other factors play an overriding role?

Democrats told us everything was in shambles four years ago and yet states predictably lined up red and blue — a formula that will, for the most part, likely be repeated this year.

Did Americans have an intolerance for haughty junior senators from New England?

"You may or may not agree with Obama's policy prescriptions," Jacob Weisberg, also making the preemptive case of racism in Slate, wrote, "but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change."

Well, yes. It is about policy. Voters may struggle with their mortgage and curse those high gas prices, yet most of them won't surrender core values and policy beliefs due to the vagaries of the economy.

If roughly half of the nation's voters reject the serious, but collectivist, solutions Obama offers them, it doesn't mean they're racists, it means they're Republicans.

Now, should Obama lose in November, it will be partly of his own doing and partly because the majority of voters are permanent members of their respective parties.

However you slice it, portraying a hyper-accomplished 47-year-old man running for the highest office in the world as a victim is about as preposterous as depicting Sarah Palin as a damsel in distress.

By David Harsanyi, The Denver Post, September 11, 2008

NEW YORK - John McCain is mocked as an out-of-touch, out-of-date computer illiterate in a television commercial out Friday from Barack Obama as the Democrat begins his sharpest barrage yet on McCain's long Washington career.

The new fighting spirit comes as McCain has been gaining in the polls and some Democrats have been expressing concern the Obama campaign has not been aggressive enough. Obama's campaign says the escalation will involve advertising and pushes made by the candidate, running mate Joe Biden and other surrogates across the country.

"Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says in a campaign strategy memo. "We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain's attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people."

The newest ad showcasing their hard line includes unflattering footage of McCain at a hearing in the early '80s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit, interspersed with shots of a disco ball, a clunky phone, an outdated computer and a Rubik's Cube.

"1982, John McCain goes to Washington," an announcer says over chirpy elevator music. "Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn't.

"He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an e-mail, still doesn't understand the economy, and favors two hundred billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class," it says. It shows video of McCain getting out of a golf cart with former President George H.W. Bush and closes with a photo of him standing with the current President Bush at the White House. "After one president who was out of touch, we just can't afford more of the same."

Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said the campaign was not making an issue of the 72-year-old McCain's age, but the time he's spent in Washington.

"Our economy wouldn't survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats," Pfeiffer said. "It's extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn't know how to send an e-mail."

McCain has said he relies on his wife and staff to work the computer for him and that he doesn't use e-mail.

The ad is being coupled with another positive spot that highlights Obama's change message, arguing he will provide better health care and tax breaks and bring people together.

A spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Alex Conant, accused Obama of "trying to destroy" McCain and running mate Sarah Palin with personal attacks.

"This is more evidence that Obama's politics of hope is just empty words," Conant said in a statement.

Obama has already been showing a newly aggressive tone on the campaign trail in the past week, fighting back against the notion that McCain and Palin will bring change to Washington. Some Democrats have privately groused that Obama is attacking Palin and arguing that job should fall to Biden.

Plouffe made it clear in his memo that the vice presidential nominee will be at the center of the debate going forward. "Senator Biden will be integral to that effort, both in pushing back on the lies that we'll continue to see from our opponents, and in keeping the debate focused on delivering for everyday Americans," Plouffe wrote. He argued that the campaign welcomes a debate over who is best equipped to change the country.

The campaign dispatched Sen. Dick Durbin and Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, both Illinois Democrats, to lay out the new aggressive tone in a conference call with reporters Friday. They criticized McCain for saying the night before, "It's easy for me to go to Washington and, frankly, be somewhat divorced from the day-to-day challenges people have."

The comment came in a forum marking the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and was supposed to be a break from divisive campaigning, but that didn't stop Obama's campaign from using it against McCain a day later.

McCain made the comment as he defended the significance of Palin's experience as a small-town mayor. Obama agreed later in the forum that mayors have the toughest job in the country and also belittled the work of the Senate.

"We yak in the Senate," Obama said. "They actually have to fill potholes and trim trees and make sure the garbage is taken away."

Obama's campaign says the escalation is not in response to the changing dynamics of the race, but part of a planned strategy timed to the final weeks of the campaign after mourning the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. They insist that although McCain may have gotten a bump in national polls since his pick of Palin, Obama still is best positioned in battleground states for an Electoral College win.

Still, Obama has been playing defense as McCain has tried to grab the change mantel, created new enthusiasm with his pick of Palin and accused Obama of maligning her when he said putting lipstick on a pig is still a pig. In fact, Obama had not been talking about Palin when he made the statement, but heated accusations between the two campaigns over the flap dominated national coverage of his trip to the battleground state of Virginia this week.

The campaign was heartened that Virginia media focused instead on Obama's planned message of reforming schools and drawing contrasts with McCain over education policy. Aides say Obama will continue to highlight differences on issues - like tax policy during a visit to New Hampshire Friday - with the constant theme that Obama will bring change while McCain is no different than Bush.

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press, September 12, 2008

Joe Biden said Wednesday that Hillary Clinton "might have been a better pick than me" to be Barack Obama's running mate.

The Delaware senator was responding to an audience member at a town hall meeting in Nashua, N.H., who criticized Clinton and said it's a good thing Obama chose Biden over her.

"Make no mistake about this, Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Lets get that straight," Biden said in Clinton's defense.

"She's easily qualified to be vice president ... and quite frankly, might have been a better pick than me. But she's first rate. I mean that sincerely. She is first rate. So let's get that straight," he said.

The comment comes after Clinton tried to assuage tensions last month at the Democratic National Convention between the Obama campaign and her supporters - disenchanted over her primary loss and her absence on the Democratic ticket.

John McCain spokesman Ben Porritt within minutes sent around an e-mail saying the choice of Biden was Obama's "most important decision of this election." The e-mail then skewers Biden for suggesting "that he wasn't the right man for the job and that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice."

It was the latest shot in a spate of political crossfire between the two presidential campaigns. Biden earlier in the day compared McCain's attacks on Obama to the attacks McCain faced during the 2000 White House race - when Biden rose to McCain's defense.

Addressing an audience of about 300 political donors in Boston, the Delaware senator said he would respond forcefully to anyone attacking Obama in the manner of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that questioned Democrat John Kerry's military record during the 2004 campaign.

"Swiftboating is not going to work this time. And the reason it's not is, No. 1, I'm going to smack 'em right square in the chops," Biden said.

Biden did not get into specifics, but a spokesman said he was referring to a new McCain ad suggesting the Illinois senator supported sex education for kindergartners, as well as a recent ad from a McCain fundraiser that linked Obama to 1960s radical William Ayers.

By Aaron Bruns, FOXNews, September 10, 2008

NASHUA, N.H.--Joe Biden has had his hands full with Gov. Sarah Palin the past few days. But at a town hall this afternoon here in Nashua, the Democratic vice presidential nominee set his sights on another high-powered female politician: Hillary Clinton.

During the Q&A session after Biden's stump speech, a local voter brought up the former Democratic presidential candidate for the first time this week. "I am very pleased that Obama chose you over Hillary," he told Biden, as the crowd erupted with applause (a surprise, given that the Granite State was the site of Clinton's first primary win). As Biden struggled to shush the masses, the questioner rattled off a litany of unrelated points, veering from Freddie Mac to the "disgraceful ... Mexican wall." Eventually, Biden cut him off and came to Clinton's rescue.

The only question is whether he did too much rescuing.

"Make no mistake about this," said Biden. "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified as I am ... She's qualified to be president of the United States of America and easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America. And quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me."

Whoa. Did we just hear Joe Biden express ... humility?

We have no idea if the Delaware senator was sincerely saying that Clinton would've been better equipped to battle the Barracuda, or if he simply went a little overboard in rising to her defense. But if it was the former, Biden's not alone. Over the past few days, a number of prominent scholars, Republicans and even Democrats have taken to wondering what might have been. "If Hillary was on the ticket, he'd be in a much better position to win women voters," Republican Rep. Candice S. Miller told the Politico this morning. Julia Piscitelli of the American University's Women and Politics Institute agreed. "I don't think Palin would be seeing these kind of gains if Hillary was on the ticket," she said. "When Obama picked Biden, it gave Republicans an opening, and they are taking full advantage of it." Meanwhile, a former Clinton adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, went so far as to say that the "Obama people have got to be kicking themselves."

True? Who knows. Still, it's easy to imagine that if the order of the conventions had been reversed and McCain had shocked the world by picking Palin first, Obama would've at least considered shoring up female swing voters and bringing disaffected Hillaryites back into the fold by selecting Clinton as his running mate. As it happened, it was McCain who had the benefit of reacting to Obama's pick--a seemingly inconsequential quirk of scheduling that appears to have worked in the GOP's favor.

Just ask Joe Biden.

By Sarah Kliff and Andrew Romano, Newsweek, September 10, 2008

Would Hillary Clinton have been a better vice-presidential choice than Joe Biden? Maybe, according to a modest Biden.

"She's easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America, and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me, but she is first-rate," Biden said during a campaign stop in Nashua, New Hampshire.

The battle for the white, working-class women who largely supported Clinton in the long Democratic primary has heated up, with polls showing some of these women now support the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket.

The shift has led some pundits to speculate whether Clinton would have been a wiser pick for Obama, though Biden is also popular among older voters and working-class whites who supported Clinton.

She may not be on the ticket, but the Obama campaign has put Clinton to good use as of late. The former first lady campaigned in Florida on Monday and has a series of events planned next week in Ohio, where she defeated Obama in the Democratic primary.

Biden, known for his blunt manner on the campaign trail, praised Obama's former rival. "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am," he said. "Let's get that straight. She's a truly close personal friend."

By Amy Chozick, The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2008

Did Obama pick the wrong person to be his running mate?

IT'S WIDELY ACCEPTED now that Barack Obama would be better off if he'd picked Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential running mate instead of Joe Biden. Obama had his reasons, particularly his discomfort with her as his actual vice president if he's elected. Still, Obama sacrificed a stronger ticket by rejecting Clinton.

Absent Hillary, the contest between Obama-Biden and the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin is throwing the Democrats into disarray. The consequences of Obama's veep decision appear mostly to favor McCain. And if Obama had picked Hillary? Here are a few of the differences.

No Palin. Okay, McCain might have picked her anyway. He was looking for a running mate who would help him shake up the campaign. And Palin has delivered spectacularly on that. But choosing her would have seemed far less of a game-changer had Obama picked Clinton. Palin would have been merely the second female running mate in 2008. And her appeal to those who had voted for Clinton in the primaries would have been reduced if not nullified altogether.

As a result, the prospects of the other potential game-changers McCain was considering--Democratic senator Joe Lieberman and pro-choice ex-Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge--would surely have risen. And while it's unknowable whether McCain would have picked Palin if Obama had gone with Clinton, selecting Palin would have been a lot less likely.

No Biden. He's not an albatross, but he certainly hasn't given Obama a boost. He has brought no balance to the ticket, not in regard to class, gender, ideology or anything except longevity in Washington. Worse, unlike Palin, he's generated no enthusiasm or excitement. Biden has little appeal to the working class voters, especially women, who swarmed to Clinton in the primaries. He lacks the populist streak that Clinton had fashioned for herself. Biden is simply a weaker running mate.

Party unity. Democrats have come together fairly well behind the Obama-Biden ticket--but not as well as they would have if Obama had chosen Clinton. We still hear from disgruntled Hillary backers. Reporters have discovered they're easy to find at McCain-Palin rallies. Polls can't tell us how many will ultimately vote for McCain and Palin. But a chunk of them will--perhaps a few million--which means that Democrats aren't as unified as they might have been.

Ohio and Pennsylvania. Republicans figured these states, notably Pennsylvania, were all but goners if Clinton won the Democratic nomination. Even as veep, she'd have had a favorable impact. When she was passed over by Obama, Republicans jumped for joy. Ohio, which a Republican presidential candidate has to win, now leans McCain. Pennsylvania, which is crucial to a Democratic candidate's chances, has become a ripe target of opportunity for McCain.

Arkansas. As a Southern state, Arkansas is inclined to vote Republican in presidential races unless there's a compelling reason not to. One of those reasons: a Clinton on the Democratic ticket. Without Clinton, Arkansas moves into the leaning (strongly) McCain camp.

Vice presidential debate. This is a no-brainer. Who would be the easier opponent for Palin to face in the nationally televised debate on October 2? Clinton or Biden? The tough woman or Senator Windbag? Biden will have to be on his best behavior and treat Palin gingerly. Clinton wouldn't have had to.

Republican women. Mark Penn, chief strategist in the Clinton campaign, once insisted that 25 percent of Republican women were ready to vote for her for president. Many crossed party lines and voted for her in the primaries. Many of those women might have voted for an Obama-Clinton ticket. But how many Republican women are going to reject Palin and vote for an Obama-Biden ticket? Mighty few.

Because of all the problems associated with the Clintons--husband Bill, her relatively high unfavorability in polls, Clinton fatigue--Hillary Clinton appeared to be the wrong running mate for Obama. I thought so. I was mistaken. As Clinton won primaries in big states and developed a populist appeal to downscale white voters, her political value soared. As it turns out, Obama needed her. McCain is lucky Obama missed his chance.

By Fred Barnes, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, September 10, 2008

The most striking development in the new Washington Post/ABC News national poll, which showed Barack Obama and John McCain in a statistical dead heat in this fall presidential contest, was the major movement among white women to the Arizona Republican.

As the Post's Dan Balz and Jon Cohen write: "Much of the shift toward McCain stems from gains among white women, voters his team hoped to sway with the pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. White women shifted from an eight-point pre-convention edge for Obama to a 12-point McCain advantage now."

A 20-point swing in the space of less than a month -- the last Post poll was concluded on Aug. 22 -- is a major development in the race and one that must be attributed -- at least in large part -- to McCain's decision to pick Palin as his running mate.

(It's worth noting that in 2004 President George W. Bush carried white women 55 percent to 44 percent over Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry; in 2000 Bush won white women far more narrowly -- 49 percent to 48 percent -- over then Vice President Al Gore.)

The erosion in Obama's support among white women is sure to spark a debate about how he can get those voters back, a debate that will certainly begin (and may well end) with a discussion of the role Hillary Rodham Clinton will and should play in her one-time rival's campaign.

Clinton, who has pledged to do whatever it takes to elect Obama, was on the campaign trail in Florida yesterday. While she offered praise for Palin's selection, ("It's a historic achievement and it is certainly worthy of congratulations to the Republicans."), Clinton emphasized clearly where her loyalties in the race remain. "To slightly amend my comments from Denver: No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin," she said.

Howard Wolfson, a former senior adviser to Clinton's presidential campaign and now the author of "The Flack" blog at the New Republic, penned an item over the weekend that argued that his former boss won't -- and shouldn't go negative on Palin.

"It's not in Hillary Clinton's interest, and its certainly not in the interest of Barack Obama and the Democratic party," Wolfson wrote. He added that Clinton is better as a positive surrogate for Obama than a negative hit woman on Palin and noted: "Every day we are focused on Palin is a day we are not amplifying the Obama campaign's message that Senator McCain simply represents four more years of President Bush."

For today's Wag the Blog question, we want to hear from you about what role Clinton should play for Obama over the final eight weeks of the presidential race. And, as importantly, why and to what end? The best comments will be featured in their own post later this week.

Go to it!

By Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post, September 10, 2008

The McCain camp wants to accuse Barack Obama of traveling "the low road'' of politics with a sexist slur in his comment about putting lipstick on a pig - Obama's term for the McCain-Palin claim to a "change'' agenda. The Obama camp is crying, "gender card,'' back at McCain.

Just as the McCain campaign wanted to accuse Obama of playing "the race card... and playing it from the bottom of the deck'' when Obama warned voters that Republican rivals are out to scare people about this Democratic nominee for president who doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills. Obama accused the McCain camp of playing the "cynical'' card.

Of course, it was John McCain who called Hillary Clinton's health care plan in the primary campaign "lipstick'' on the "pig'' of the health care reform that she had promoted as First Lady back in the early 1990s. Might McCain also be playing the "Navy card'' with that cap he continues wearing to campaign rallies - protection from the sun, for sure, but also an unsubtle reminder in the center of the television camera's eye that one candidate for president served the nation and another didn't?

"Boar Wars,'' declares the morning headline of the New York Post. And the Republican Party has turned a quick "Web-ad'' quoting CBS News anchor Katie Couric on "the role of sexism in American life,'' portraying Obama delivering his lipstick line and asking the questions: "Ready to Lead? No. Ready to smear? Yes.''

Never mind who injected "read my lipstick'' into this year's election campaign: That would be Sarah Palin, the GOP's suddenly popular nominee for vice president who charmed the Republican National Convention with the explanation that the only difference between a pit-bull and a hockey mom is "lipstick.''

Everyone is playing with half a deck if they think the American voters are looking for a whining war of alleged offenses against the race of the Democratic nominee for president, the gender of the Republican nominee for vice president or the patriotism of either parties' candidates. The only card that plays out in a debate of one-liners like this is the Joker.

The McCain campaign also has mobilized Jane Swift, former governor of Massachusetts, for a Palin Truth Squad to fend off any attacks such as Obama's. There is something eerily uncomfortable about the revival of the words Swift and Truth in this campaign.

The latest row started, of course, when Obama voiced his dismay about the newly minted Republican ticket of McCain and Palin attempting to appropriate his camapign's longstanding call for "change.''

"How do they have the nerve to say it?" Obama asked his audience in suburban Detroit. "When you've been supporting this current president, your party has been in power, and you're not offering anything new, how is it that you're serious about change? You're not. It's empty words. You're just saying it because you realize, 'Obama has been talking about change. That seems to be working. Maybe we should try to say it too.'"

And then, in Lebanon, Virginia, a venue where candidates are prone to trot out some of the euphemisms of campaigns past, he said: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," and as laughter erupted: "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, but it's still going to stink after eight years."

"I guess the formation of the Palin Truth Squad couldn't have happened too soon," Swift said in a conference call with reporters last night, the first volley of a new McCain rapid response team.

"You would think having gone through a hard fought primary with Sen. Clinton, the Obama team would have figured out how to respectfully engage in a debate," said Swift, describing Obama's tactics as something fit only for "the low road.''

Camp Obama responded with a reminder that McCain himself had used the same words in reference to Clinton. And an Obama spokeswoman - underscore the word, woman - accused the McCain campaign of playing "the gender card.''

Campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, in October, McCain had criticized the Democratic contenders for president for proposing costly universal health care plans. He had not examined Clinton's health-care plan, he said, but it was "eerily reminiscent" of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the early 1990s.

"I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig,'' McCain said of Clinton's proposal.

"Enough is enough,'' Obama senior adviser Anita Dunn said in a statement e-mailed to reporters in response to Swift.

"The McCain campaign's attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy - the same analogy that Senator McCain himself used about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan just last year," she continued. "This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run."

"Gender sensitivity'' is a worthy pursuit in a campaign that features the first woman on a Republican Party presidential ticket, just as racial sensitivity is well advised in a campaign that features the first African-American candidate for president. And we should all be ready to stand up in objection to sexism and racial smears, just as we should all stand up to challenges of patriotism.

Obama calls it a question of "cynicism.'' McCain couldn't agree more - and the cynicism is Obama's, in his eyes.

They had gotten into this thicket this summer when Obama told audiences that opponents are trying to scare voters about him - Obama suggesting that they say, "You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. He doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bill.''

McCain manager Rick Davis accused him of "playing the race card... and playing it from the bottom of the deck..''

Obama called the charge "ridiculous.'' In an interview aired by National Public Radio's All Things Considered, he said, "This notion that somehow I was playing the race card is ridiculous.

"What I said in front of a 98-percent conservative, rural, white audience in Missouri is nothing that I haven't said before, which is, I don't come out of central casting when it comes to what presidential candidates typically look like. And it doesn't just have to do with race. It has to do with my name. It has to do with my biography and my background. It has to do with our message of change."

"I'm young, I'm new to the national scene,'' Obama said. "My name is Barack Obama. I was born in Hawaii. I spent time in Indonesia. I do not have the typical biography of a presidential candidate. What that means is, I am unfamiliar, and people are still trying to get a fix on who I am... So... what has been an approach of the McCain campaign is to say, 'He's risky,' to try to divert focus from the fact that they don't have any ideas for dealing with the economy, or dealing with education....

"Let me be clear, in no way do I think John McCain's campaign was being racist,'' Obama said. "I think they're cynical.''

The McCain campaign quickly accepted the "apology'' on racism, and skipped past the cynical line - just as Jane Swift now is calling on Obama to apologize for his lipstick remark.

The fact that one of the candidates is a woman, and another is black, creates a certain liability in words that never sounded too loaded when applied to white, male candidates. But it does not call for any arbitrary suspension of political tactics that have played out for years. This is the big top. The game is played rough.

If anything, perhaps the old-school politics of homespun metaphors could use a little updating. Perhaps the lines that play well in Lebanon, Virginia, and Des Moines, Iowa - home of the legendary state fair butter cow - don't play so well on the evening news or the 24-hour cable news loop. And maybe they shouldn't.

Maybe the old" lipstick on a pig" line is not really all that offensive when Obama utters it about the change mantra coming from McCain and Palin, or when McCain utters it about Hillary Clinton's health plan. But maybe, in the modern realm of televised campaigns, it has simply become a "dog that don't hunt.''

By Mark Silva, Chicago Tribune, September 10, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama's reference to "lipstick on a pig" has Republicans demanding an apology and Democrats accusing Sen. John McCain of a "pathetic attempt" to play the gender card.

McCain's campaign said Obama's remarks were offensive and a slap at Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin -- despite the fact that the Arizona senator himself used the phrase last year to describe a policy proposal of Hillary Clinton's.

Obama shot back Wednesday and accused the McCain campaign of engaging in "lies" and "swift boat politics."

"I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and swift boat politics," he said in Norfolk, Virginia. "Enough is enough."

The phrase "swift boat" comes from the 2004 presidential election, when the group "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" launched an attack ad campaign against Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Obama made his controversial "lipstick" remarks at a Virginia campaign stop late Tuesday afternoon.

"John McCain says he's about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is, 'Watch out George Bush -- except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics -- we're really going to shake things up in Washington,'" he said.

"That's not change. That's just calling something the same thing something different. You know you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. You know you can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it's still going to stink after eight years. We've had enough of the same old thing."

The crowd erupted in applause when Obama delivered the line.

The Illinois senator then praised both McCain's "compelling story" and Palin's "interesting story," and said his "hat goes off" to anyone who's looking after five kids -- "I've got two and they tire Michelle and me out. ...

"That's why John McCain's campaign manager [Rick Davis] said this campaign isn't going to be about issues, this campaign is going to be about personalities."

Within minutes, the McCain campaign announced a conference call focused on the remark, which they said was a deliberate reference to Palin's line: "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

Palin used the line in the opening remarks of her convention speech, and she frequently uses it on the campaign trail.

In Iowa last October, McCain drew comparisons between Hillary Clinton's current health care plan and the one she championed in 1993: "I think they put some lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig." He used roughly the same line in May, after effectively claiming the Republican nomination.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers told CNN the campaign saw a "big difference" between the two references: "McCain was referring to a policy proposal. Obama was referring to [Alaska] Gov. Sarah Palin. It's obviously disrespectful and offensive. ...

"Who has been talking about lipstick lately? It was obvious. The crowd went crazy because of it."

It wasn't the first time Obama used the line. In a phone interview with The Washington Post last September, he used it in reference to the situation in Iraq.

"I think that both Gen. [David] Petraeus and Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker are capable people who have been given an impossible assignment," Obama told the Post. "George Bush has given a mission to Gen. Petraeus, and he has done his best to try to figure out how to put lipstick on a pig."

Other politicians have also used the phrase in recent years, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Rep. John Mica of Florida and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, among others.

Torie Clarke, a former McCain adviser, even wrote a book called, "Lipstick on a Pig: Winning In the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game."

Still, the McCain campaign says Obama's use was intentional, and they want an apology.

"Barack Obama's comments today are offensive and disgraceful. He owes Gov. Palin an apology," said Maria Comella, a McCain-Palin spokeswoman.

Obama's campaign said "enough is enough" and accused McCain of running a "dishonorable campaign."

"The McCain campaign's attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy -- the same analogy that Sen. McCain himself used about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan just last year," said Obama campaign senior adviser Anita Dunn. "This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run."

McCain ally Mike Huckabee took Obama's side on the issue, saying he didn't think it was a swipe at Palin.

"It's an old expression, and I'm going to have to cut Obama some slack on that one. I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin; he didn't reference her. If you take the two sound bites together, it may sound like it," he said on Fox's "Hannity and Colmes."

"But I've been a guy at the podium many times, and you say something that's maybe a part of an old joke and then somebody ties it in. So, I'm going to have to cut him slack."

But McCain's campaign is not about to let the issue go. They released a Web ad Wednesday that plays Obama's lipstick comments, then asks, "Ready to lead? No. Ready to smear? Yes."




By Rebecca Sinderbrand, Sasha Johnson and Chris Welch, CNN, September 10, 2008

SEVEN SPRINGS, Pa. - What a difference a running mate makes.

Wednesday morning, 11 a.m.: Senator John McCain appeared in Northern Virginia with Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, who had a crowd estimated by local fire marshals at 15,000 - one of the largest of Mr. McCain's 2008 presidential campaign - chanting "Sarah, Sarah, Sarah!"

"I am so grateful for this turnout!" shouted Mr. McCain.

Wednesday afternoon, 3 p.m.: Mr. McCain, at his first sans-Palin campaign appearance since the Republican National Convention, spoke to seven women at a small diner in Philadelphia, then made a brief statement there about women in small business. He was repeatedly interrupted by supporters of his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, who were in the same indoor marketplace. At one point he paused to allow his own supporters to chant "John McCain" to drown them out.

But Mr. Obama's supporters were louder.

"Pennsylvania is a battleground state, as we can tell," Mr. McCain wryly observed.

The two starkly different appearances point to the difficulty Ms. Palin has created for Mr. McCain: how to capitalize on the celebrity of his new running mate without letting her overshadow him.

For now, Mr. McCain seems a happy captive in a hijacked campaign. Before Ms. Palin joined the ticket, he typically attracted crowds in the low hundreds for what his own aides admit were at times soporific events.

With Ms. Palin back in Alaska for a few days - she headed home on her own plane after her appearance with Mr. McCain in Fairfax, Va. - the McCain campaign will now be left to sort out the shifting politics of the pick. At the least, Ms. Palin has stopped Mr. McCain from criticizing Mr. Obama as this year's political celebrity and has led him to focus more on character issues and women.

Tellingly, the campaign has announced no large rallies with Mr. McCain alone, and a senior McCain aide said Wednesday that the campaign was considering keeping Ms. Palin and Mr. McCain together for appearances more often than is usual for running mates - perhaps more so than any ticket in recent times.

On Thursday, Mr. McCain will appear with Mr. Obama in New York at ground zero and at a forum at Columbia University on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. On Friday he will tape appearances on "The View" on ABC and on Rachael Ray's cooking show. He is to have no public appearances on Saturday.

On Wednesday in Fairfax, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin stuck to their stump speeches and then worked the crowd, Mr. McCain in a dark suit and tie, Ms. Palin in a black suit with ruby red heels at least three inches high. New words were mostly provided by former Senator Fred D. Thompson, one of Mr. McCain's rivals for the Republican nomination, who introduced Ms. Palin.

"Sarah Palin is the most remarkable success story in the history of American politics," Mr. Thompson declared.

He then criticized the news media, a theme and tactic of the McCain campaign in recent weeks, for heading to Alaska to "turn over every rock" to look into Ms. Palin's past. "They are now parachuting in dozens of lawyers and investors and scandal mongers and representatives of cable news," Mr. Thompson said, as the crowd booed the media. Mr. Thompson added, "I hope they brought their own brie and Chablis with them."

David Ray Hudson, the senior enlisted leader of the National Guard bureau at the Pentagon and a member of the Alaska National Guard, happened to be in the crowd, listening closely.

"We've got brie and Chablis in Alaska," he said.

In Virginia, Ms. Palin continued to press her case that she had been opposed to the so-called bridge to nowhere between the Alaskan city of Ketchikan and the sparsely populated island of Gravina despite widespread reporting that she had initially embraced the project.

"I told Congress, Thanks but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere," Ms. Palin said.

By Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, September 10, 2008

Two weeks ago, People magazine was granted an exclusive interview with Senator John McCain's new running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, who spoke about motherhood and career, life in Alaska and the historic nature of her candidacy.

She has not given an interview since, eschewing the traditional television news circuit traveled by a vice-presidential nominee.

Ms. Palin will break that news media blackout on Thursday, when she will begin two days of interviews by the ABC News anchor Charles Gibson.

The sessions could be the first test of Ms. Palin's ability to parry substantive questions on foreign and domestic policy, and as she flew back to Alaska on Wednesday, she brought with her a squad of Mr. McCain's top policy advisers to help her prepare. In a broader sense, the interviews will also provide fresh material for what is now an intense war between the campaigns to define Ms. Palin in the public mind, a battle that both campaigns consider potentially critical to the election outcome.

"The fight is over how she is going to be defined in the eyes of the American public," said Terry
Nelson, Mr. McCain's former campaign manager. "She's been introduced, but all the information about her has not been introduced, and once that information comes to light people are going to draw conclusions about her, and the campaigns are fighting to shape the conclusions."

With new reports coming out daily about Ms. Palin's record in Alaska, and a more aggressive offensive from Senator Barack Obama's campaign, Mr. McCain's team has issued a partywide, all-hands-on-deck.

It has hired several veterans from President Bush's campaigns, making them part of a team dedicated to defending Ms. Palin from unsubstantiated Internet rumors, Democratic attacks and potentially damaging news reports about her record produced by the investigative journalists now in Alaska.

"She's a dynamic agent for change, the Democrats recognize this, and there is this race now to paint a picture of her which is not true," said Brian Jones, who resigned as Mr. McCain's communications director in 2007 but returned this week to help in the effort to bolster Ms. Palin.

Mr. McCain's campaign released an advertisement on Wednesday accusing Mr. Obama of trying "to destroy" Ms. Palin, and featuring images of scavenging wolves and an assertion that Democratic operatives are researching Ms. Palin in Alaska. (The advertisement cited a report by FactCheck.org that was critical of "completely false" attacks on Ms. Palin, but failed to note that the report was referring to Internet rumors not linked to Mr. Obama's campaign.)

The McCain campaign is regularly battling reports from news organizations that have the potential to undermine the image that it has presented of Ms. Palin as a reformer.

On Wednesday, a new report on Politico.com detailed Ms. Palin's requests for federal appropriations as governor, including money for studies on the mating habits of crabs and the DNA of harbor seals, the very sorts of pet spending projects Mr. McCain has lampooned.

Mr. McCain's campaign has dispatched another team to Alaska to respond more rapidly to such reports. It is headed by Taylor Griffin, who had worked for President Bush's 2004 campaign. Another former Bush campaign aide, Tracey Schmitt, is now Ms. Palin's traveling press secretary.

Tucker Eskew, a veteran of Mr. Bush's primary season campaign against Mr. McCain, has been advising Ms. Palin this week, as she has hopped between S.U.V.s and planes, all the while reading briefing materials or receiving tutorials from policy advisers who have dipped on and off the campaign trail to visit with her.

On Wednesday night, three of them were on the plane to Alaska with Ms. Palin: Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Mr. McCain's economic adviser; Steve Biegun, a former staff member of Mr. Bush's National Security Council who has taken leave from his Ford Motors job to advise Ms. Palin; and Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.

Also accompanying Ms. Palin to Alaska as she prepared for her interview was Nicolle Wallace, a communications director for Mr. Bush's 2004 campaign and, later, his White House. Ms. Wallace's husband, Mark Wallace, Mr. Bush's deputy campaign manager in 2004, is helping prepare Ms. Palin for the debates.

For now, the preparation for the debate and the sessions with Mr. Gibson are one and the same. Aides have developed a set of presumed questions and answers that they are walking Ms. Palin through.

Aides traveling with Ms. Palin have reported back to associates that she is a fast study - asking few questions of her policy briefers but quickly repeating back their main points - who already has considerable ease and experience before cameras.

A former aide in Alaska who had helped prepare Ms. Palin for her campaign debates there said she had a talent for distilling information into digestible sound bites. The aide said she generally prefers light preparatory materials to heavy briefing books, and prefers walking through potential questions and answers with aides to holding mock sessions.

By Jim Rutenberg and Monica Davey, The New York Times, September 10, 2008

Speaking at a black-tie event sponsored by a major Hispanic outreach organization, Senator Barack Obama pledged that he would not take "a single Hispanic vote for granted" between now and November and reminded members of the key demographic group of their growing electoral influence.

"If you have any doubt about whether you can make a difference, just remember how back in 2004, 40,000 registered Latino voters in New Mexico didn't turn out on election day," Mr. Obama said. "Senator Kerry lost that state by fewer than 6,000 votes."

He added that in New Mexico today an estimated 170,000 Hispanics are not registered to vote - an untapped bloc that his campaign is presumably trying to add to the voter rolls before Election Day.

Mr. Obama appeared before an audience of several hundred at the annual dinner of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute in Washington on Wednesday night and focused a portion of his 18-minute speech on issues of particular importance to the Hispanic community. He was courting the group during a week when his campaign has encountered fresh challenges from Republicans, including those posed by the addition of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to the G.O.P. ticket.

And Senator Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, did not miss an opportunity to skewer his rival, Senator John McCain, for reversing course on a comprehensive immigration reform proposal he once strongly supported. Mr. Obama noted that immigration reform was not a part of the Republican platform at the party's convention last week, but was a priority for Democrats.

"You've got to ask yourself," Mr. Obama said, "if Senator McCain won't stand up to opponents of reform at his own convention, how can you trust him to stand up for change in Washington?"

One of the biggest applause lines of the evening was Mr. Obama's reference to "12 million people living in the shadows" - undocumented immigrants - "taking immigration enforcement into their own hands."

Mr. Obama continued: "They're counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves, and rise above the fear and demagoguery, and finally enact comprehensive immigration reform."

By Michael Falcone, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - The last time people in this state saw her in person, Sarah Palin was just their governor.

What a difference two weeks can deliver.

As an airplane carrying Governor Palin, now Senator John McCain's running mate, touched down in her home state on Wednesday night, it was greeted by hundreds of residents waving signs and chanting her name as confetti spilled over them inside a nearby hangar.

"This is beautiful," Ms. Palin told the crowd, after she and her husband, Todd, who have been campaigning for days, reunited with her infant son, Trig, and two of her daughters on a tarmac. She told members of her staff whom she spotted in the crowd that she could not wait to give them a hug. "Thank you for holding down the fort," she said, "and thank you for carrying the water."

Ms. Palin gave her own constituents a slight variation on the speech she has offered along the campaign trail in the lower 48; some of her stories of Alaska are already known to people here, and she seemed to offer a nod to that. She noted a state-owned luxury jet that she had sold on eBay when she took over as governor, an often repeated story - then glanced self consciously outside.

"I say that hopefully not sounding hypocritical as you watched me walk off that," she said, pointing a finger at her new campaign plane, now painted with the words "McCain Palin" in blue and parked right outside.

The locals here, crammed into the hangar, some in fold-up chairs, did not seem to mind the new plane in the least.

"She's a beautiful, good, decent woman with a wonderful family - just look at them," said Inge Griffin, 76, who said she had lived in Alaska for 55 years and considers herself an unshakable advocate of the governor. Mrs. Griffin said she was less certain of how the rest of the nation has, so far, treated Governor Palin.

Then Mrs. Griffin wrinkled her nose in the direction of the cameras and the reporters who had followed Ms. Palin here. "There's always something, you know?" she said. "But she'll be just fine. I don't worry about Sarah."

Ms. Palin told the crowd that she was spreading a message to the rest of the country, and that many were wondering, "What did we do up here in Alaska that has really allowed for a shaking up here?"

She spoke of energy policy, called for more drilling for oil and more alternative sources.

"Energy independence for our nation is going to start right here in Alaska with that natural gas pipeline," she said, speaking of a pipeline she had pressed for. "And people all over the country, they're hearing about it and they're saying, 'Thank you, Alaska, for allowing safe responsible development of your resources to help to secure our state, provide jobs here, but also for the betterment of our entire nation.' They're saying, 'Thank you, Alaska.' "

She continued: "Today, we're spending nearly $700 billion on imported resources, we're spending that money to some regimes who do not like America and we should be developing here, allowing the resources development to be tapped responsibly, safely, ethically here, producing it right at home."

Then she remembered her audience.

This was not Virginia, from earlier Wednesday. Or Ohio or Pennsylvania.

"I feel like I'm preaching to the choir cause you guys already know this," she said.

"I promise that I will do my best to make Alaskans proud in the weeks to come," she said at one point. "And I would ask you to help me then, let us work together. Let us elect John McCain, a great man who will be a great president because he's a friend of Alaska."

On Thursday, Ms. Palin is expected to attend a deployment ceremony here for her eldest son, Track, who is being sent to Iraq. "It's going to be awesome to get to spend a couple of days here and just getting back in touch with all of you and the great land that we call Alaska that God has so richly blessed," she said.

Then, on Saturday, it is off again, with the election less than two months away.

By Monica Davey, The New York Times, September 11, 2008

WASHINGTON - When John McCain decided to cast Barack Obama as a feckless upstart, an empty suit, he reached for the dirtiest word he could use: "celebrity."

"He's the biggest celebrity in the world," a female narrator warns in breathless tones for a McCain ad, "but is he ready to lead?" Chants of "O-bama! O-bama!" form a mischievous backtrack to fleeting images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton - one a troubled singer and the other a socialite who is famous for, well, being famous.

What McCain and his image-makers don't bother to tell us is that all serious presidential candidates are celebrities. In fact, some of our greatest presidents have benefited politically from our celebrity culture - and many shape the ubiquity of it all. Presidents and presidential candidates are not merely well-known, which in itself is enough to make them celebrities; their families, their health histories, their habits and hobbies and once-closeted skeletons are as open to the public as the pages of People magazine.

Oh, and there's this other small point McCain left out: Last month, he created his own celebrity.

Ten days ago, few people in the lower 48 could have named Alaska's governor, much less tell you that Sarah Palin is a mother of five - a moose-hunting, corruption-busting "hockey mom" with a pregnant teenage daughter, a son headed to Iraq and a raft of Internet rumors about her personal and professional life. The image has overwhelmed the reality of her relatively thin resume - she's nearly three years younger than Obama and barely into her first term as governor.

We think we know Palin. After all, that's her face on the covers of People ("Sarah Palin's Family Drama") and Us Weekly ("Babies, Lies & Scandal"), where we read about her affinity for BlackBerrys and breast pumps. Though not all the news is good - for celebrities, it rarely is - the fact and fiction of Palin's freshly carved image help her, and perhaps McCain, connect with Americans.

Many voters see a bit of themselves in Palin even while she stands above the populace - the classic celebrity duality of fame and attainability that has always accounted for the allure of stars in American culture. Why else would celebrity magazines spend millions of dollars for photos of stars acting "just like us" - fetching coffee, toting groceries, playing with their kids in the park?

While the culture of celebrity dates to the early 19th century in politics, the Hollywood ethic is everywhere today. It extends to athletic fields, board rooms and even church pulpits, where evangelists like Rick Warren preach to 20,000 people every week and write mega-selling books.

"People want to find candidates appealing and find some qualities where they're like me or they're better than me," says Victoria Ott, a historian at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama who studies the pre-Civil War era.

She points to Andrew Jackson, the self-styled populist who called himself "Old Hickory" and touted his war record. His allies cast rival John Quincy Adams as an elitist with the slogan, "Vote for Andrew Jackson, who can fight. Not for John Quincy Adams, who can write."

Nearly 180 years later, the celebrity machine is churning out the same pablum, albeit electronically and instantaneously. Now it's Vietnam POW John McCain who can fight and best-selling author Barack Obama who can write.

Abraham Lincoln edited his speeches before sending them off to newspapers, and his image-makers marched into a convention hall with two fence rails placarded, "Abraham Lincoln, The Rail Candidate for President in 1860." A celebrity was born, later to be deified upon his assassination and now celebrated daily at the Disney-influenced Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Ill.

In the 19th century, three developments fueled the celebrification of politics: a new form of communications (the telegraph), the proliferation of a largely partisan and affordable medium (newspapers) and the democratization of the electoral process that gave more people the vote. The same dynamics are driving the culture of celebrity today, though with different platforms: the Internet, blogs and Obama's drive to swell voter registration rolls with young voters.

Teddy Roosevelt, the rugged outdoorsman. John F. Kennedy, the dashing war hero. Ronald Reagan, the morning-in-America optimist. No less than Kennedy's "Rat Pack," these presidents were celebrities.

"What we're looking for in any celebrity is the marvel of discovery," says Jim Broussard, a historian at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. "A movie star is a celebrity because we see them in movies and we think they're great. I want to be him or like him. Obama's celebrity comes from the fact that a lot of people are hungry for something and all of a sudden they find it and say, 'This is terrific.'"

What are people hungry for? Fame, power, money, attention, status - those you can experience vicariously through the pages of People. But if the civic side of the American culture is hungry for change, then Obama and Palin - though polar opposites in their politics - are the equivalent of the Hollywood starlet who's discovered at a diner: an overnight sensation.

"We're thirsty," Broussard says, "and along comes the water."

What Michael Jordan is to sports, Rick Warren is to religion, Steve Jobs is to business and Madonna is to music - that's what McCain, Palin, Obama and Democratic running mate Joe Biden are to politics. Created and marketed as brands, sometimes long after they're effective (Michael Jordan is retired) or dead (Elvis has left the building, but he still sells), political figures are worshipped and consumed, even when they don't deserve the adulation or when the celebrification overwhelms real issues like the war in Iraq and the economy.

McCain's chief adviser, Rick Davis, might have been right when he said this election is not about issues. It certainly won't be about issues alone. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates," he said.

In fact, Americans pick a president the way they select a car. Sure, some of us know our way around an engine and read the consumer reports but at the end of the day, you don't buy a car without a test drive - without knowing how it feels and knowing what how it makes you feel about yourself. It's the same with politicians. The campaign is a test drive, and we want a gut check.

Presidents and presidential candidates are celebrities, imperfect models of what we are and what we want to become. "A celebrity is known for being known," Broussard says, "and known for being a bit like us and a bit better than us." And only then, if they're both, will we actually buy the car.

By Ron Fournier, The Associated Press, September 11, 2008

In state after state, rally after rally, Sarah Palin is generating record levels of enthusiasm among the Republican base. Crowds chant her name, congressional candidates cite her in their ads and there are numerous reports of a surge in grass roots volunteers for the McCain campaign.

The acclaim for the vice-presidential nominee is all but deafening within the GOP, except in one small but influential corner: the party's foreign policy establishment. Among that mandarin class, the response to Palin's nomination has been underwhelming, marked by distinctly faint praise or flat out silence.

Consider Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who currently serves as the committee's top-ranking Republican.

The day Sen. Joe Biden was announced as Sen. Barack Obama's running mate, Lugar, while en route to Tbilisi, Georgia, quickly issued a statement praising the choice.

"I congratulate Senator Barack Obama on his selection of my friend, Senator Joe Biden, to be his vice-presidential running mate," he said. "I have enjoyed for many years the opportunity to work with Joe Biden to bring strong bipartisan support to United States foreign policy."

To date, Lugar has been silent regarding Palin.

In a CNN interview over the weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declined to defend Palin's foreign policy credentials when asked whether Palin has "enough experience to handle the kinds of things that you need to handle?"

Rice replied: "These are decisions that Senator McCain has made. I have great confidence in him. I'm not going to get involved in this political campaign. As secretary of state, I don't do that. But I thought her speech was wonderful."

While none have come out and publicly questioned the Alaska governor's level of experience in foreign affairs, few have been willing to make the case that Palin is well-versed in the field.

John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and conservative hawk on foreign affairs, segued from questions of Palin's inexperience to McCain's experience.

"You want your strength on national security at the top of the ticket," Bolton told Politico at the Republican convention in St. Paul. "I feel very comfortable with her as a vice presidential nominee, how it plays politically beyond that I don't know.

"As somebody who spent a good part of his professional career on foreign policy matters I was delighted by her nomination," he later said. "What you have to look for is extensive executive experience."

Last week, prior to Palin's acceptance speech, former Secretary of the Navy and former Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) chose to accentuate the positive.

He told the Richmond Times Dispatch that Palin is "intelligent, she has a lot of tenacity, she is a risk taker and she is plenty energetic," but he added "only time will tell" if Palin is the smart choice for McCain.

A McCain policy adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged hearing from several worried GOP veterans immediately after Palin's selection.

"To a lot of people it was a surprise choice so there was caution," the adviser said early last week. "There was a pause because they didn't know her. My own personal view is I'm feeling more and more enthusiastic and I think they will too."

Robert Kagan, a foreign policy advisor to McCain, derided criticisms of Palin as elitist.

"I don't take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world," he said. "I'm not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin's experience."

One top conservative foreign policy wonk who declined to be named said he believed some of the questions surrounding Palin's experience are sexist.

"I don't see why Tim Pawlenty has any greater knowledge of foreign policy and nobody would have raised a peep about him," he said

Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow who also advises the McCain campaign, said that upon hearing McCain had tapped Palin, "like most people, I don't think I had any impression at all.

Boot said he soon decided that "she was a great way for McCain to generate excitement and interest in his campaign, one day after the Democratic convention."

"I don't know what her foreign policy views are. I'm not sure how important that is," Boot continued. "No one thinks that a McCain administration would be guided by the foreign policy of a vice president. The office of the vice president is not set up to be a second national security advisor or secretary of state.

"The lesson of the last eight years is that we had a president who was not that well versed on foreign affairs coming into office and we had a vice president who was supposed to make up for that deficiency," Boot added. "It seems to me the Obama campaign is trying to establish the Bush model."

By David Paul Kuhn, Politico, September 11, 2008

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - Gov. Sarah Palin arrived home to a chanting, cheering crowd, a blur of smiling supporters eager to embrace her after a whirlwind of national scrutiny since she was named Republican presidential nominee John McCain's running mate.

"It's been an amazing couple of weeks," Palin told the crowd of more than 2,000 gathered inside an airport hanger. They chanted, "Sarah, Sarah," waved signs that said, "Palin Is great."

Palin offered the crowd much of the same campaign speech she's given since McCain named her to the GOP ticket on Aug. 29, including her reference to listing the state plane for sale on eBay after she became governor.

"I say that hopefully not sounding hypocritical as I walk off that," she said, pointing to the McCain campaign jet she now uses.

She received the loudest bursts of applause when promising to push for drilling in this oil-rich state.

"Our state, Alaska, will be a leader in our nation's energy policy and bring us one step closer to energy independence," she told the audience, at one point straying from her prepared speech to say, "I feel like I'm preaching to the choir because you guys already know this."

This was Palin's first stop on her first campaign trip without McCain, who escorted Palin and her husband, Todd, to a Washington airport Wednesday. Palin told the hometown crowd "I can't wait to introduce you to John McCain. He's a friend of Alaska."

Palin, joined on the stage with her husband and three of her five children, soaked up the crowd's cheers. She said she has proudly talked about her life and work in her state while campaigning with McCain.

"We've been talking all about Alaska, and people have been impressed," she said.

She thanked her staff in the governor's office for "holding down the fort" while she's been campaigning.

"I promise that I will do my best to make Alaska proud in the weeks to come," she told her supporters.

McCain aides said he and Palin likely will rejoin on the campaign trail next week, and are expected to spend much of the fall campaigning together, a move that not only capitalizes on the Republican enthusiasm for the vice presidential nominee but also limits her exposure to the news media.

Palin has not done interviews since the first and only one she gave to People magazine on the day McCain introduced her as his vice presidential choice.

Palin's plane made a brief refueling stop in Montana to finish the trip to Fairbanks. She is scheduled to make at least two public appearances in Alaska, including a homecoming rally set for Wednesday evening in Fairbanks.

She also is scheduled for an interview with ABC News, but no other media interviews are scheduled, campaign officials said. The campaign repeatedly has denied other interview requests.

This is Palin's first venture away from McCain and his advisers, although several of the campaign's staff accompanied her to Alaska. She did not interact with reporters during the flight.

By STEVE QUINN, Associated Press, September 11, 2008

WASHINGTON - Oh, the outrage.

John McCain's campaign people are said to be suffering hurt feelings over Barack Obama's comment that McCain's policies are like lipstick on a pig. (And they are asking you to give money to make it better.)

Don't cry for them. And don't believe Obama was upset on behalf of the middle class when McCain joked that a rich person is one who makes $5 million.

These are hardened pols. Their sensibilities are not so meltingly tender.

When a candidate or his war room issues a huffy demand for an apology from the other side, you know they are having a good day. This is the Outrage Machine in motion, keeping the conflict going, spitting out a campaign ad and leveraging the whole sorry mess into a fundraising opportunity.

Manufactured grievances are flying in this campaign. "The bad news is, some of this stuff resonates," says Eric Dezenhall, a damage-control specialist.

"The good news is, it's only a matter of minutes before we move on to the next outrage."

The outrage of the minute arose Tuesday when Obama used a couple of metaphors to describe how McCain in his view would carry on like President Bush. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said. "It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years."

McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, was nowhere in sight in the long preamble - Obama was talking about the Republican presidential nominee and Bush.

But because Palin is a woman and made a lipstick joke at the Republican convention, the McCain campaign decided to take the Democrat's lipstick remark as a sexist smear.

Emotionally wounded fishermen have yet to be heard from. Aggrieved pig farmers are mum.

The McCain campaign quickly created an Internet ad juxtaposing Palin's joke with Obama's crack, apparently working through the night if not through a veil of tears to show what a terrible thing Obama had said about their woman.

The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party seemed close to needing therapy.

"What an outrage!" screeched an online appeal for money from Saul Anuzis. "I need you to click here now to make a secure online donation to the Michigan Republican Party so we can fight back against Obama and the Democrats' false and sexist attacks on Governor Palin. ... Time is of the essence!"

Never mind that McCain had described Hillary Rodham Clinton's health plan as lipstick on a pig last year.

Obama appeared outraged at the McCain campaign's outrage.

"What their campaign has done this morning is the same game that has made people sick and tired of politics in this country," Obama said Wednesday. "They seize on an innocent remark, try to take it out of context, throw up an outrageous ad because they know that it's catnip for the news media."

Obama avoids that kind of slick politicking himself. Not.

He's getting more mileage than a hybrid car over McCain's answer to a question at Saddleback Church about what constitutes a rich person. "Some of the richest people I've ever known in my life are the most unhappy," McCain began. "I think that rich should be defined by a home, a good job, an education. ..."

So far so good, but then McCain quipped, "How about $5 million?" Laughter followed, then McCain said, "No, seriously. ..."

Too late. Obama has been pit-bulling and hockey-moming that remark ever since.

Obama's Outrage Machine also kicked into gear late Tuesday when McCain released an ad claiming the Democrat had voted for legislation to teach kindergartners comprehensive sex education.

Calling the ad "shameful and downright perverse," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton went on to say: "Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't define what honor was. Now we know why."

But McCain did not tell Time that he was unable to define honor. Plainly cranky in an interview, he refused to give his definition, saying, "I defined it in five books."

All campaigns, Dezenhall says, are populated by operatives "with an active investment in perpetuating a faux pas or a crisis." That's how offhand comments get twisted into frontal assaults. And it may not matter whether or not a campaign has the facts right when it makes an accusation.

What counts, he says, is whether the charge is plausible and plays to type - that McCain is a rich, out-of-touch Republican, for example, or that "Obama is not from America but from an offshore boutique that doesn't value Middle America."

Dezenhall got an early education in remarks-gone-wild as a young aide in Ronald Reagan's White House. There he helped to tamp down the fuss over the president's suggestion that trees cause pollution. Now he helps companies and other clients manage scandal in an age when Internet innuendo spreads at lightning speed.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and author of 15 books on politics, said the McCain campaign would have been on more solid ground if it had accused Obama of ageism instead of sexism.

Obama's description of McCain's policies as "old fish in a piece of paper called change" could have been yet another hint about McCain's age - 72. Democrats have already suggested he is "losing his bearings" and "can't even remember anymore" how many houses he has.

But Republicans don't want a big discussion about McCain's age. Outrage has its limits.

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press, September 11, 2008

Barack Obama and his Democratic allies are intensifying their attacks on Sarah Palin, as her sustained and surprising central role in this race is upending Obama's strategy and often overshadowing McCain.

Democratic Congressman Russ Carnahan on Tuesday - introducing Joe Biden at a campaign event - ripped into Palin's record and punctuated it with this snarky jab. "There's no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick," he said. Later in the day, Obama used a variation of the lipstick line, though he was clearly talking about the McCain-Palin reform rhetoric. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said. "It's still a pig."

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, as part of his endorsement of Obama, said Palin "scares the hell out of me." And Obama hit Palin in nearly a dozen different press releases - one day after drawing laughs at a campaign stop by calling her a "moose shooter."

It isn't just Democratic officials who are fixated on Palin. Media outlets on the left - from Talking Points Memo to Huffington Post - are loaded with hard-hitting stories about Palin. McCain often seems like he's playing second fiddle.

"On the stump, not a single word that comes out of her mouth - or not a single word that the McCain folks put in her mouth - is anything but a lie," wrote TPM's Josh Marshall. "I know that sounds like hyperbole. But just go down the list. None of them bear out."

The Obama campaign is calculating that it must reckon with Palin and the big public boost she has provided McCain in the past week. When Palin was first named, the Obama staff attacked, then he pulled back. Now, reflecting the threat posed by Palin, Obama is taking the unusual route of attacking the opposition's No. 2, a job that would more typically be left to Biden, who focused more on McCain and President Bush.

The new tone is not without risk for the Democratic ticket. It's hard to take down an opponent without appearing overly or overtly partisan. It's also unusual to appear so focused on your opponent's running mate - and not the nominee himself.

But it is very unusual, if not unprecedented, for a vice presidential pick to dominate a campaign in a sustained manner the way Palin has. And there is good reason to believe it won't end anytime soon.

Let's start with the media's obsession with her. She is a fascinating "first" for the media to dissect: a female Republican vice presidential nominee with celebrity appeal. She is only beginning a string of media interviews - and continues to draw crowds McCain never could. Expect a flood of coverage off her two day interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson this week.

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that between Sept. 1 and 7 Palin was a bigger presence in the news than McCain or Obama. She seems an even hotter topic online, with blogs, gossip sites and media sites exploding with Palin coverage - some of it pretty darn wacky.

No topic is sparking more traffic or reader comment than Palin stories on Politico's site this past week. As of Tuesday afternoon, 11 of the 12 most-read stories on Huffington Post were about Palin.

The campaigns are obsessed with her, too. McCain extended his national tour with Palin in large part because of the massive attention she draws. A slew of new polls show McCain in the lead for the first time - and perhaps even more importantly, a swing away from Obama among white women. It is doubtful McCain's convention speech is the reason he's erasing the gender gap, at least temporarily.

Obama wants to focus on the economy, and often does. But it is clear from his tone and a string of press releases Tuesday that the Democratic nominee feels he must reckon with the Palin surge.

Obama at a Tuesday news conference in Riverside, Ohio: "There's no doubt that, you know, the Republicans are excited, particularly the right wing of the Republican Party is excited by Sen. - or Gov. Palin's choice. I think that has less to do with gender than it has to do with her ideological predispositions which are closely aligned to theirs."

The candidate and his campaign have pounced on Palin's somewhat bogus claim that she opposed the famous "Bridge to Nowhere" spending project in an effort to discredit her. She initially voiced support for the project and later opposed it as governor as opposition to it grew.

Stephanie Cutter, Michelle Obama's chief of staff, told MSNBC on Tuesday: "The more we learn about her, the more these facts don't add up. We now learn that she's the queen of pork in Alaska."

The Obama campaign is carefully weighing its words - remembering well the backlash that followed his attacks on Hillary Clinton during the nomination fight. But it also knows it cannot sit back and allow Palin to define her political image.

"When you change directions it's usually because of the polls. Obama is probably getting pressure from supporters and campaign strategists that he can't let her popularity go answered," said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. "Since people don't know so much about her they're using the opportunity to brand her and nick people's impressions of her."

Presidential politics is littered with vice presidential selections, from Thomas Eagleton in 1972 to Dan Quayle in 1988, having a negative effect on a campaign. But Palin's capacity to dominate both the debate and political discourse of the campaign, while also helping to boost McCain's prospect in the past week, is unique. And to an extent, Palin will test an old political axiom: voters vote on the top of the ticket.




By Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen, Politico, September 9, 2008

The anniversary is an important campaign moment for John McCain, who has staked much of his candidacy on the strength of his foreign policy credentials and ability to win the war in Iraq, and for Obama, it's an opportunity to shore up his standing with voters on national security issues and dispel false rumors about his patriotism.

After the attacks, McCain quickly emerged as a leading voice for striking back at countries allegedly harboring terrorists - places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. McCain supporters often reference the Arizona senator's tough response to the attacks as testament of his national security expertise, an argument President Bush echoed at the Republican National Convention last week.

"We need a President who understands the lessons of September 11, 2001: that to protect America, we must stay on the offense, stop attacks before they happen, and not wait to be hit again," said Bush. "The man we need is John McCain."

McCain will start the day in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the site of the temporary memorial for Flight 93, one of the planes that crashed on September 11. He plans to attend the annual ceremony memorializing the 40 passengers and crew members who were killed on the hijacked flight.

McCain also will participate in the annual reading of passenger names, wreath laying, and will deliver a brief, 90-second address.

From there, McCain flies to New York where he'll join Obama for a joint, mid-afternoon visit to Ground Zero. The candidates will walk into the site with a small press corps and lay wreaths, but will not give no speeches, according to aides from both campaigns.

"Tomorrow is a day for unity not politics," said Jen Psaki, an Obama spokeswoman. "The senators are coming together on an important day."

Still, the entire day will not be without political intrigue.

Obama plans to have lunch with Bill Clinton at the former president's Harlem office. According to campaign aides, Clinton extended the invitation, which will undoubtedly have the media atwitter about the former president's future role in the election. Clinton plans to campaign for Obama in Florida at the end of the month.

McCain and Obama will end the day at Columbia University, attending a forum hosted by SeviceNation, a coalition of 110 groups focused on civil engagement.

PBS NewsHour Senior Correspondent Judy Woodruff and Richard Stengel, managing editor of TIME, will question the candidates in front of a live audience about their views on the meaning and importance of service.

Unlike at last month's Saddleback Church forum in California, there will be no "cone of silence." Although the candidates will appear separately, both will be able to hear each other's interviews.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden will do a morning appearance in Parma, Ohio, for an event honoring first-responders.

While the other three candidates hold the public events, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will spend much of the day attending to more personal business. The Alaska governor's son, Track, ships out to Iraq with his Army brigade on Thursday. Palin plans to attend his deployment ceremony in the early afternoon.

On Wednesday, the vice presidential nominee briefly referenced her son's plans on the stump when she spotted a supporter holding a sign reading "God Speed Track."

"Thank you for that sign out there because as the mother of one of those troops, (John McCain) is exactly the kind of man I want leading those troops," said Palin.

By Amie Parnes and Lisa Lerer, Politico, September 10, 2008

In the opening days of the general election campaign, an exaggerated optimism has swept through Republican ranks and an equally exaggerated gloom has infected the Democrats.

A reporter readjusting his sights after living for two weeks in the twin bubbles of convention cities Denver and St. Paul can only wonder what has triggered these surprising reactions.

These are not the judgments of the party pros we were dealing with the past two weeks. When Steve Schmidt, John McCain's top strategist, visited with Post editors and reporters on the final day of the GOP convention, he said he would wait at least a week before he drew any conclusions from the polls. Mid-September would be an even better time to assess the state of race, he said.

But within 48 hours of McCain and Sarah Palin leaving St. Paul, we were flooded with polls purporting to measure the appeal of the McCain-Palin ticket vs. the Democratic pair of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. A Post-ABC News survey taken the weekend after the GOP convention reported the race essentially tied, whether you are talking about all registered voters or those most likely to show up at the polls. Obama led the larger group, 47 percent to 46 percent, while McCain led the latter, 49 percent to 47 percent.

The logical inference from these findings is that the race is still to be won, with events in the next eight weeks, including the debates, likely to determine the outcome.

But instead of reserving judgment, many of the Republicans I talked to in Washington have started a premature celebration, while their Democratic counterparts have panicked and called for Obama to "start fighting."

The two reactions were based on suspiciously large shifts the Post poll and others reported among some voter groups -- especially white women -- and on some issues. McCain vaulted past Obama among those women and scored big gains on the economy and on the capacity to change Washington. I call those shifts "suspiciously large," not because I doubt the accuracy or the methodology on the surveys but because the years have taught me that such swerves in voter opinion are likely to be temporary.

What we know is that the American people take the choice of a new president very seriously -- especially when their nation is at war and the economy is behaving in a way that causes real concern.

Relatively few Americans have ever cast a ballot for either McCain or Obama. McCain, after two presidential campaigns and a long career in Congress, is comparatively familiar. But Obama came onto the public's radar screen only this year, and Biden and Palin are still strangers to most of their fellow citizens.

The curiosity about all four is intense, which means that the learning process may go relatively quickly. But because voters know that they have until Nov. 4 to figure out their choice, those who are less partisan and more independent will take their time.

They will search carefully for clues that can give them confidence that they are making the right choice. Those clues may come in displays of character, in policy promises or in endorsements by trusted sources. Informal conversations among friends and family will be as important as TV ads or the candidates' speeches.

Multiply these factors by the political geography of this 51-part election, with nearly a dozen plausible tossup states, and the uncertainty of the outcome is overwhelming. We may go well into October and not know who will be succeeding George W. Bush.

Some find this unsettling and unacceptable, and they give full license to their emotions of joy or despair. I find it wonderful, even inspiring. This has been -- and remains -- the election of a lifetime.

By David S. Broder, The Washington Post, September 11, 2008

NEW YORK (AFP) - Ceremonies began Thursday at New York's Ground Zero, also due to be visited by White House rivals Barack Obama and John McCain on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

A choir sang a US national anthem before participants, led by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, observed a first minute of silence.

Commemorating the almost 2,750 people who died when hijacked airliners struck and demolished New York's two World Trade Center towers on 11 September, 2001, Bloomberg said the day will "live for ever in our hearts and our history."

The anniversary, he said, was about "New Yorkers, Americans and global citizens remembering the innocent people from 95 nations and territories that lost their lives that day."

Survivors of the 9/11 attacks then read out the names of the dead, as a cello played mournfully in the background. Further minutes of silence were to be observed to mark the destruction of each of the Twin Towers.

McCain and Obama -- expected by staff to be arriving later in the day, after the official ceremonies -- have promised to bury the hatchet in honor of the anniversary.

Over the last week the White House contest has degenerated into name-calling, climaxing with the row over Obama's branding of the Republican campaign of McCain and running mate Sarah Palin as "lipstick on a pig."

But Obama set the tone for the Ground Zero event, saying Wednesday that 9/11 showed "that here in America, we all have a stake in each other; I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper; and we rise and fall as one nation."

AFP, September 11, 2008

CHAMPION, Pa. - On the seventh anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called on Americans to renew "that spirit of service and that sense of common purpose" that followed the terrorist assaults that killed nearly 3,000 people.

With 54 days left in the heated presidential campaign, Thursday was unusual - a sort of political cease-fire in honor of the day terrorists forced four airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, a field in Shanksville, Pa., and the Pentagon in Washington.

Obama and his rival for the presidency, Republican John McCain, were to appear together twice, although briefly each time and mostly without public words. They also agreed to suspend all TV ads critical of each other.

The 2001 attacks transformed the nation in many ways, and one is that every anniversary since has found those holding or seeking office struggling for ways to appropriately pay homage. But it remained to be seen whether the McCain and Obama camps would actually refrain from sharp-edged campaigning, something hard to halt in an age of the Internet and 24-hour television news.

Obama issued a morning statement on the anniversary.

"On 9/11, Americans across our great country came together to stand with the families of the victims, to donate blood, to give to charity, and to say a prayer for our country. Let us renew that spirit of service and that sense of common purpose," he said.

But he also included a subtle dig - though at President Bush, not McCain - by including a reference to the work Bush is leaving unfinished. "Let us remember that the terrorists responsible for 9/11 are still at large, and must be brought to justice," Obama said.

McCain was to speak briefly at a ceremony near the Shanksville crash site, alongside other dignitaries and relatives of the 40 passengers and crew who were killed there. Investigators believe passengers rushed the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93 to thwart terrorists' plans to use that plane as a weapon like the others.

In the afternoon, in New York, Obama and McCain were to visit ground zero together for a somber, silent wreath-laying in the pit that marks the largest loss of life in the attacks.

That appearance was to be followed by another in the evening at a Columbia University forum. McCain and Obama were discussing their views on public service with journalist moderators, sharing only a handshake in between their separate sessions.

Obama's only other planned outing Thursday was lunch in New York with former President Clinton.

Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, was going to an American Legion post in suburban Cleveland with an invitation-only gathering of area police, firefighters and other first responders. The Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was in her home state of Alaska, attending an Army ceremony to send her eldest son, Track, off to duty in Iraq and taking interviews with ABC News.

Obama and McCain last appeared together in August when they shook hands at minister Rick Warren's megachurch in Orange County, Calif., where they spoke separately about faith and values. In June they attended the funeral of NBC newsman Tim Russert, sitting next to each other at the family's request.

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press, September 11, 2008

KISSIMMEE, Fla. - Anyone wanting a Hillary vs. Sarah smackdown might be in for a letdown. First, Sarah Palin launched her Republican vice presidential campaign with praise for the strides Hillary Rodham Clinton made in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. On Monday, Clinton spoke in kind.

"It is a great accomplishment," Clinton said of Palin's selection as the GOP's first female running mate. Clinton told a rally of 500 that the election will be decided on issues, not the historical significance of the candidates, and Democrat Barack Obama and his running mate Joe Biden

bring more to the table than the Republican ticket.

"Women as well as men make their decisions after they weigh the evidence," Clinton said. "As Americans go into that voting booth, what they have to ask themselves is not so much who am I for, as who is for me? And I don't think it's an even close question that we have the ticket that is going to do the best job in restoring the American promise."

About the most she'd say about Palin is that she and Republican president candidate John McCain "are not the change that we need."

Former Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson is dismissing any notion the Obama campaign would dispatch Clinton to take on Palin, as much as he thinks some people would revel in seeing the two strong women butt heads.

"Don't hold your breath," he wrote in his New Republic blog. "Clinton-Palin might drive ratings and sell magazines, but it wouldn't be good for the Democratic Party, or the cause of women's rights. Some might enjoy the spectacle, but don't expect Hillary Clinton to play along."

Clinton said: "I didn't run because I was a woman but I was very conscious of the fact that my campaign meant a lot to so many, and I appreciate that. But this election is about the two parties, and the two presidential nominees, where they stand, what they would do, what our country needs right now."

And she said the Democratic ticket is the one that "will fight to revitalize the economy and create jobs and make college affordable and enable hardworking Americans to be able to afford both a gallon of gas and a gallon of milk."

It was Clinton's second campaign swing through Florida since she conceded the Democratic primary to Obama. She told supporters it will be a critical state in November, and one that has been harder hit than most by unemployment and home foreclosures.

She later addressed nearly 1,600 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which endorsed her last year. Clinton asked them to help Obama now.

So far polls have found few signs that women who backed Clinton in the primary would cross over to vote Republican in large numbers. Even so, Palin has been the talk of the presidential campaign for a week and the Obama campaign has seemed unsure what to do about her.

Now commenting from the sidelines, Wolfson said each day the Democrats focus on Palin is a day they are not driving home the message that McCain just represents four more years of President Bush.

He warned against giving in to "an obsession in our popular culture with the 'cat fight,' an offensive term that describes the spectacle of two well-known women fighting with one another."

At least one Clinton supporter tried instigating that fight during a Tampa rally later Monday, interrupting her speech with a shout of "Tell us about Palin!"

Clinton didn't take the bait.

"You know what? I don't think that's what this election is about. This election is about the differences between us and the Republican Party," she said to cheers from the crowd of more than 1,000. "Anybody who believes that the Republicans, whoever they are, can fix the mess they created probably believes that the iceberg could have saved the Titanic."

At a news conference afterward, she took a slight jab at Republicans for not putting a woman on the ticket sooner.

"The Democrats did it in 1984," she said, referring to Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's running mate. "It took a while, but the Republicans got around to doing it this year. And I think that's a great milestone for us as a nation, but that's not the determinant as to who should be our president."

By BRENDAN FARRINGTON, Associated Pres, September 8, 2008

New polling evidence indicating that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is bringing female voters to the GOP ticket could result in pressure on Hillary Rodham Clinton to be more aggressive in attacking Palin, particularly if Clinton wants to avoid blame from Democrats should Barack Obama lose in November.

Democratic strategists and Clinton loyalists said the senator and former presidential candidate will likely face increased pressure from the Obama campaign to go after Palin, especially after a new poll Tuesday showed a 20 percent swing in white female voters from Obama to Republican rival John McCain after the Arizona senator chose Palin as his running mate.

All Democrats interviewed for this story cautioned that they are skeptical of the new Washington Post poll, adding that they remain confident the race will settle back to Obama-versus-McCain after the novelty of the relatively unknown Palin fades.

One Clinton loyalist argued that Clinton does need to be more aggressive in targeting Palin, something she has thus far show reluctance to do, but should do so indirectly, "savaging" McCain instead of Palin and tarnishing the Alaska governor by association.

"I'd expect her to give amazing speeches that also savage John McCain, which make people think Sarah Palin is no Hillary Clinton and tarnish John McCain," the source said. "She does need to make clear that she thinks Palin is an extremist. That is where she needs to come out and say, look, voting for an extremist is not what I'm about. I think the Obama camp will ask her to do more."

And all the Democrats contacted for this story seemed to agree that after the newness of Palin wears off, the race will settle back to a contest between McCain and Obama. And they cautioned that it would be a mistake for Obama to go after Palin now, as that would only keep her in the spotlight.

Some even expressed a concern that Obama, who targeted Palin in his remarks Tuesday, is focused too much on McCain's running mate and not enough on the top of the ticket.

"Democrats need to continue to make this election about John McCain and his embrace of the George W. Bush agenda, and Barack Obama's very different vision of change," said Mark Kornblau, a Democratic strategist and former aide to ex-Sen. John Edwards's (D-N.C.) presidential bid. "Every minute spent focused on Sarah Palin or anything else is a waste."

Democrats on the Hill were also reluctant to push Clinton into the attack-dog role, though they were eager to criticize Palin in their own right.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a longtime and vocal Obama supporter, said she thinks Clinton has been doing yeoman's work in campaigning for Obama and shouldn't be second-guessed for how she does it.

"How people campaign and advocate for a candidate is intensely personal, and I think Hillary Clinton is campaigning for Barack Obama," McCaskill said. "And I think she's a hero for doing it. And I think she will communicate very clearly, particularly to her supporters, what's at stake. I would never ever, ever presume to tell Hillary Clinton how to be effective."

Mo Elleithee, a spokesman for Clinton, said in an e-mail Tuesday that the New York senator has not been under any pressure to attack Palin, but he declined to offer any further explanation as to why Clinton has thus far not been more critical of McCain's running mate.

And the Obama campaign said that Clinton has been helpful so far, and it is not concerned about women moving to McCain's column because of Palin.

"While John McCain was gambling that women voters would overlook the fact that McCain-Palin are offering four more years of ... Bush's failed policies, Sens. Obama, [Joe] Biden and high-profile leaders like Sen. Clinton have been out there discussing the issues that women and families are concerned about - from ensuring that women receive equal pay for equal work to struggling to balance the family budget in the face of skyrocketing energy and healthcare costs," Nick Shapiro, an Obama spokesman, said.

Already, though, some Democrats were questioning Clinton's relative silence on the Palin issue, and some were privately wondering if Clinton is really doing all she can to elect Obama or instead keeping an eye on 2012, particularly as McCain has taken the lead in most new polls.

"It is a shrewd and self-serving political move," one Democratic strategist said. "She knows that for her own benefit she needs to be bigger than the assigned attack dog going after the No. 2 person on the other side. Also, it gives her more credibility as she continues to frame herself as a glass-ceiling-cracker. Meanwhile, though, shouldn't she be willing to do whatever it takes to help Obama win? Or is she all about Hillary Rodham Clinton?"

Democratic strategists said there will be some Obama loyalists, still bitter from the long nomination battle, who will blame Clinton no matter what if Obama loses.

"You're going to have hardcore Obam-o-philes who refuse to acknowledge that maybe the fault lies with him and his campaign," one strategist said. "The fact is Sen. Clinton doesn't own those 18 million votes."

Clinton loyalists, however, scoffed at the idea that Clinton could be blamed if women move to McCain's column.

"Blaming Sen. Clinton is easy spin, but it doesn't reflect the reality of what's needed," Phil Singer, a former Clinton aide, said. "Simply deploying her to go out and attack Sarah Palin day in and day out won't be the silver bullet that wins the women's vote."

Singer added: "It's the ticket that needs to seal the deal. You can't rely on people outside the ticket to make the sell."




By Sam Youngman, The Hill, September 9, 2008

Republican Rep. Candice S. Miller says Barack Obama had only one shot at Palin-proofing the Democratic ticket - and he missed it when he passed over Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate.

"Every woman in America knows what Barack Obama did to Hillary Clinton: He looked at her and thought, 'There's no way I'm doing that,' " said Miller. "If Hillary was on the ticket, he'd be in a much better position to win women voters."

Sarah Palin's presence - coupled with Clinton's absence - may be altering one of the great verities of American politics: that women voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week showed white women swinging hard against the Democratic ticket. Obama left Denver with an 8-point lead among white women; by the time John McCain pulled out of St. Paul, Minn., with Palin at his side, he had taken a 12-point lead.

Former Clinton strategist and pollster Mark Penn on Tuesday said that it's too soon to know where women will wind up in November, and he declined to engage in any "woulda, coulda, shoulda" speculation about how things might be different if Clinton were on the Democratic ticket.

But another former Clinton adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the "Obama people have got to be kicking themselves" for not putting choosing Clinton as his No. 2.

Julia Piscitelli of the American University's Women and Politics Institute agreed.

"I don't think Palin would be seeing these kind of gains if Hillary was on the ticket," she said. "When Obama picked Biden, it gave Republicans an opening, and they are taking full advantage of it. ... The question is: How long will it last?"

The answer, some Democrats say, is not long.

"I don't think this is a real swing [in the polls] until it's been a week, said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), one of Obama's busiest female surrogates. "We'll need to see whether Sarah Palin is willing to answer questions. ... No one will be a stronger advocate for Barack Obama and Joe Biden than Hillary Clinton."

Sen. Blanche L. Lincoln (D-Ark.) also sounded the Palin-will-wilt-in-the-spotlight theme.

"Sarah Palin delivered a great speech, but we haven't heard anything else about what she's going to do," Lincoln said. "American women are smart, they're bright and this election isn't just about Sarah Palin. This is about what they want to do for the country."

The Obama campaign has denied that it has a serious problem with female voters.

On Monday, campaign manager David Plouffe told a Washington Post reporter, "Your poll is wrong," adding, "We certainly are not seeing any movement like that. Polls, time to time, particularly on the demographic stuff, can have some pretty wild swings."

That view won support from two unlikely sources Tuesday: Penn and a Republican senator who backs the McCain-Palin ticket.

Penn said that women are going to be "the absolute swing vote in this campaign, and it's not clear which direction they are going to go in.

"I don't think it's a Hillary backlash we're seeing," he added. "With Palin on the ticket, we're going to be seeing this thing swing back and forth."

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has had a strained relationship with her state's governor, downplayed Palin's power. "I find it difficult to believe that many of the Hillary supporters are going to come over just because of Sarah Palin," Murkowski said. "It should be about strength of positions" and policy.

But Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is locked in a tough race of her own, says several women - former Clinton supporters - have come up to her in Maine to say Palin gives them a reason to back McCain.

"I have never seen such excitement in the Republican Party as we're seeing in response to Sarah Palin," Collins said. "I've had a lot of Democrats and independent women in Maine who say they're happy to see a woman on the ticket. Many of them saw an Obama-Clinton ticket as unbeatable. ... That is significant and remarkable."

Quinnipiac University Polling Institute Assistant Director Peter A. Brown said the Obama campaign is fooling itself if it discounts the importance of the problem. "This isn't about Hillary; it's about Obama's problem with white women voters," he said. "Hillary won about 10 million votes from women voters in the Democratic primaries - there are 52 million women voting in the general election."

Clinton has said she'll hit the road for Obama, but her team says she refuses to be an anti-Palin "attack dog." Further complicating matters for Obama, Hillaryland fundraiser Susie Tompkins Buell is leading a group that will fight media sexism against the Alaska governor.

DAYTON, Ohio -- A campaign debate over education took a nasty turn Tuesday, as John McCain rebutted a policy address by Barack Obama with an ad claiming the Democratic presidential candidate had supported "'comprehensive sex education' for kindergartners."

The Obama campaign denounced the 30-second spot -- which recycles attacks made against Sen. Obama in his 2004 Senate campaign -- as "shameful and downright perverse." In the Illinois state senate, Sen. Obama had supported legislation that called for "age-appropriate" sex education. Sen. Obama had supported the bill as a measure that he said would protect young children from sexual predators.

"Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't define what honor was. Now we know why," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. The McCain ad ends with a narrator asking incredulously: "Learning about sex before learning to read?"

The battle followed a speech Sen. Obama delivered earlier in the day, attempting to put education front and center in the campaign. Following a drop in support for him in the polls among women, he called for big increases in federal school spending while vowing to "replace" bad teachers.

In his remarks, Sen. Obama played to a Democratic base that is angry over the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind testing regimen. He said he would "fix" the law so that "our kids...become more than just good test takers."

Sen. Obama also proposed Tuesday that ineffective teachers be replaced, although he didn't say how. That sort of tough talk about teachers, an important Democratic constituency, is "noteworthy," said Andrew Rotherham, co-director of Education Sector, a think tank, and an informal adviser to the Obama campaign.

But some education-policy experts said Sen. Obama had missed an opportunity to show his reformist credentials, failing to challenge liberal orthodoxy on an issue that even many Democrats think needs fresh approaches. Sen. Obama has "staked out traditional positions. He's said things the Democrats like to hear," said scholar Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, which terms itself nonpartisan.

Speaking in a suburban high school here, Sen. Obama derided his Republican opponent for his support of school vouchers, which would provide public funds to pay private-school tuition. Instead, the Illinois Democrat proposed $400 million in federal aid to public charter schools, to which Democrats have lately given only tepid support.

But Mr. Loveless said that isn't likely to spur much change, because it still leaves school districts with most of the bill for charter schools.

Sens. Obama and McCain have drawn clear distinctions over how they would tackle the myriad problems facing schools, with the Arizona senator proposing such free-market solutions as alternative teacher certification for those who enter the profession from other fields and the greater use of private tutoring companies to spur performance.

Sen. Obama's proposals would help schools change from within, with big infusions of money for teacher training and incentive pay for teachers who he said make "a real difference in children's lives."

But Sen. Obama proposed Tuesday that teachers help design incentive programs, and he neglected to spell out a key point: whether pay should be linked to student performance. The teachers unions have long opposed giving a bonus to a teacher whose students made substantial progress on reading or math, for example, and instead argue that all teachers should be paid more.

In earlier appearances before the unions, Sen. Obama has met with a frosty response when he proposed any links between pay and student outcomes.

Sen. Obama didn't say how he would change No Child Left Behind, including whether he would reduce testing or how he would make tests more useful to teachers -- important points among legislators who must reauthorize the law next year. The law passed with bipartisan support in 2001, but now is unpopular among many parents and teachers who say schools have narrowed the curriculum to make time for test preparation.

Many of Sen. Obama's other proposals Tuesday were for programs that have been in place for years. He called for an Innovative Schools Fund to spur the development of experimental schools and programs, although innovation funding has been around since the administration of President George H. W. Bush.

Sen. Obama proposed that schools challenge their students by giving them easier access to college-level courses and advanced-placement classes -- proposals that date to the Clinton administration.

By AMY CHOZICK and JUNE KRONHOLZ, The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2008

DAYTON, Ohio - Senators John McCain and Barack Obam are confronting a sharply abbreviated general election campaign season, the product of the late nominating conventions and a boom in early voting in tightly contested states. This shortened timetable is forcing both campaigns to recalibrate the pace of television advertisements, accelerate voter turnout operations and tailor the candidates' traveling schedules to accommodate states where voting is imminent.

While it is just eight weeks until Election Day, even that schedule overstates how much time the presidential nominees have to win over voters. More than 30 states allow some form of early voting, forcing the campaigns to deal with a rolling series of Election Days. Iowa, a crucial state, will begin voting on Sept. 23, less than three weeks after the end of the Republican convention marked the traditional start of the general election sprint.

"I think it's unprecedented, a whole new way of looking at elections," said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who is not involved with either campaign. "A combination of the late conventions and the way early voting is becoming even earlier around the country is going to have a big, big impact."

Aides to Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, are devising state-by-state advertising strategies so that their close-the-deal messages - typically kept in reserve until the last 10 days before Election Day - are released to coincide with when people are reaching their final decisions. The old advertising formula was to begin after Labor Day with soft biographical advertisements introducing the candidate, followed by commercials drawing sharp contrasts with the other side, and closing with the strongest argument. But that formula is obsolete, aides to both candidates said.

The traveling schedules of the candidates, spouses and running mates are being adjusted so they front-load the time spent in states where, practically speaking, there is not much time before people begin to vote. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were in Ohio on Tuesday, on-the-ground evidence of the fact that this state will for the first time permit early voting in presidential elections. Voting starts Sept. 30.

Turnout operations that once would not have kicked into high-gear until the weekend before Election Day are about to be revved up and will remain in operation to accommodate the elongated period of early voting, posing new expenses and complications. The campaigns are using computer models - studying past voting trends along with consumer and demographic data - to try to identify people most likely to be early voters, and press them to vote.

"We are now less than 30 days from people voting," said Steve Hildebrand, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. "Easily one-third of the people are going to vote before Election Day."

Given the truncated general election season, campaign aides said they were going to have make triage decisions sooner about what states the nominees are actually going to compete in. The ambitious battleground presented by Mr. Obama's aides, of at least 18 states, may soon get whittled down in deference to a calendar that does not leave that many days for campaigning. With deceptively little time left, it is now unlikely that Mr. McCain will go to, say, New Jersey, or that Mr. Obama will visit Georgia, early wish-list states for the two candidates.

And given the time constraints, complicated by the fact that the three presidential debates are going to eat up campaign time in the weeks ahead, there is less time for a candidate to recover from a mistake or catch up should either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain experience a major breakthrough at one of those debates.

"It fundamentally changes two things: timing and budgets," said Mike DuHaime, the political director for Mr. McCain. "You need to close the deal earlier for some voters, and Election Day can be spread out over weeks. That means your get-out-the-vote costs are more than ever."

David Plouffe, Mr. Obama's campaign manager, said: "This is an enormously compressed time frame - this thing is really getting down to the wire. You can't look at this like there's 57 days until Election Day. We start having Election Day right around the corner."

The shortened campaign season means that both campaigns have more money to spend on a per-week or per-day basis; thus, the $84 million that Mr. McCain is receiving in his federal campaign subsidy will go a lot farther in a 60-day campaign than it would have gone in, say, 2000 when the general election campaign lasted 81 days.

With the exception of one campaign, 2004, this 60-day general election campaign is the shortest since the new Republican Party held its convention in 1856. This year, unlike in 2004, the two parties held their conventions in consecutive weeks toward the end of the summer, making the general election that much more concentrated for both of them. Early voting is a relatively new phenomenon in American politics, and its influence varies widely by region. But significantly, Southwest states that have emerged as McCain-Obama battlegrounds this year - Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico - are hotbeds of early voting, as is Florida, where one million people have already requested a ballot. But early voting is far less prevalent in contested Eastern states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Paul Gronke, the director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Oregon, said he expected 33 percent of the votes in this presidential election to be cast early, a sharp increase from the 20 percent of the 2004 election. In the 2006 midterm elections, 25 percent of the votes were cast early.

"The numbers have accelerated as the campaigns have learned about this," Mr. Gronke said. But, he said, this remains to some extent new territory, and he can see circumstances where early voting may not reach the levels expected.

"If the race is very competitive," he said, "citizens may hold their ballots."

Early evidence of how campaigns are adjusting to this new calendar can be seen in spending patterns on television advertising. Evan Tracey, the president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, a company that monitors political advertising, said his group had charted a big surge in spending in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico in recent days. Those are all states viewed as big early-voting targets.

In addition, Mr. Tracey said, Mr. McCain went on the air on Sept. 1 in Florida, another state where early voting is viewed as crucial, after weeks in which he let Mr. Obama have the field to himself there.

By Adam Nagourney, The New York Times, September 9, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Unless you've been living in the Himalayas, you know that huge numbers of Americans -- 46 million last year -- lack health insurance. By impressive majorities, Americans regard this as a moral stain. At the Democratic National Convention, Sen. Ted Kennedy echoed the view of many that health care is a "right" that demands universal insurance. This completely understandable view is, I think, utterly wrong. Take note, Barack Obama and John McCain.

The central health care problem is not improving coverage. It's controlling costs. In 1960, health care accounted for $1 of every $20 spent in the U.S. economy; now that's $1 of every $6, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that it could be $1 of every $4 by 2025. Ponder that: a quarter of the U.S. economy devoted to health care. Would we be better off? Probably not. Countless studies have shown that many tests, surgeries and medical devices are either ineffective or unneeded.

Greater health-care spending forfeits any superior moral claim on our wealth by slowly crowding out other national needs. For government, higher health costs threaten other programs -- schools, roads, defense, scientific research -- and put upward pressure on taxes. For workers, increasingly expensive insurance depresses take-home pay, as employers funnel more compensation dollars into coverage. There's also a massive and undesirable income transfer from the young to the old, accomplished through taxes and the cross-subsidies of private insurance, because the old are the biggest users of medical care.

It is widely assumed that health care, like most aspects of American life, shamefully shortchanges the poor. This is less true than it seems. Economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution recently discovered this astonishing data: on average, annual health spending per person -- from all private and government sources -- is equal for the poorest and the richest Americans. In 2003, it was $4,477 for the poorest fifth and $4,451 for the richest.

Probably in no other area, notes Burtless, is spending so equal -- not in housing, clothes, transportation or anything. Why? One reason: government already insures more than a quarter of the population, including many poor. Medicare covers the elderly; Medicaid, many of the poor and their children; SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program), more children. Another reason stems from the skewing of health spending toward the very sick; 10 percent of patients account for two-thirds of spending. Regardless of income, people get thrust onto a conveyor belt of costly care: long hospital stays, many tests, therapies and surgeries.

That includes the uninsured. In 2008, their care will cost about $86 billion, estimates a study for the Kaiser Family Foundation. The uninsured pay about $30 billion themselves; the rest is uncompensated. Of course, no sane person wants to be without health insurance, and the uninsured receive less care and, by some studies, suffer abnormally high death rates. But other studies suggest only minor disadvantages for the uninsured. One study compared the insured and uninsured after the onset of a chronic illness -- say, heart disease or diabetes. Outcomes differed little. After about six months, 20.4 percent of the insured and 20.9 percent of the uninsured judged themselves "better"; 32.2 percent of the insured and 35.2 percent of the uninsured rated themselves "worse." The rest saw no change.

The trouble with casting medical-care as a "right" is that this ignores how open-ended the "right" should be and how fulfilling it might compromise other "rights" and needs. What makes people healthy or unhealthy are personal habits, good or bad (diet, exercise, alcohol and drug use); genetic makeup, lucky or unlucky, and age. Health care, no matter how lavishly provided, can only partially compensate for these individual differences.

There is a basic dilemma that most Americans refuse to acknowledge. What we all want for ourselves and our families -- access to unlimited care paid for by someone else -- may be ruinous for us as a society. The crying need now is not to insure all the uninsured. This would be expensive (an additional $123 billion a year, estimates the Kaiser study) and would provide modest health gains at best. Two- fifths of the uninsured are young (19 to 34) and relatively healthy.

The McCain and Obama health-care proposals, either impractical or undesirable, largely ignore the existing challenge of Medicare. By some studies, 30 percent of its spending may go to unneeded services. Medicare is so large that by altering how it operates, government can reshape the entire health-care system. This would require changes to encourage more electronic record-keeping, better case management, fewer dubious tests and procedures, and a fairer sharing of costs between the young and the old. The work would be unglamorous and probably unpopular. But if the next president can't do it, his presidency will fail in one fateful way.

By Robert Samuelson, The Washington Post, September 10, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Members of Congress returned to Capitol Hill this week for what will be their final three weeks of work before Election Day. And while both parties are accusing the other of blocking critical legislation, the session ahead is likely to create nothing more than further finger-pointing and accusations of who is to blame for a do-nothing Congress.

From energy legislation to a second economic stimulus package, both parties could score big political victories over the coming weeks. Instead, each party will use the other's inaction and reluctance to negotiate as excuses to hammer the other over the head.

Asked in separate interviews what they hoped would be accomplished in the coming weeks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) were equally pessimistic.

"I hope the Republicans finally decide they want to try to accomplish some things for the country rather than the status quo," Mr. Reid said, pointing to what he said is the record number of filibusters Republicans have threatened or executed this year. "They've broken all previous records [for filibusters in a session] by almost 100%."

"This has been a Congress almost entirely without accomplishment," Mr. McConnell said. "It currently suffers from a 14% approval rating, and I think it's earned it." Quizzed about what will happen over the next three weeks, McConnell was blunt: "I would conclude darn little."

The Democratic Congress, Mr. McConnell asserted, has been ineffective "simply because they have no interest in accomplishment. It's just been one box-checking partisan exercise after another." A frustrated Mr. Reid instead blames Republican obstructionism. "I don't know why they've done what they've done," he said.

Not that members of both parties won't try, and the issue atop many voters' minds is the same as that atop members' to-do lists. After avoiding several votes on allowing new energy exploration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will bring an energy plan to the floor and, Republicans hope, allow votes on new drilling opportunities on the Outer-Continental Shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

A bipartisan group originally comprised of ten senators, now greatly expanded, has their own compromise legislation that Mr. Reid and Barack Obama have said they will consider.

Energy and gas prices remain at the heart of Republican political efforts this year, after the party's political fortunes dwindled thanks in large part to President Bush's unpopularity and the residual impact of scandals and missed opportunities that caused the party to lose control in 2006.

Now, House Minority Leader John Boehner, backed by virtually the entire GOP conference, is continuing to push his own energy plan, which includes funding for the next generation of biofuels, a renewed focus on nuclear and clean coal technologies and on lifting a ban on oil shale development. "We think we need to do all of the above, from conservation to drilling," Mr. Boehner told Real Clear Politics. "That's where all of our energy should be focused."

Ms. Pelosi's energy compromise will allow some votes on both new oil exploration and on other options, according to spokesman Brendan Daly. "We're giving them a vote on drilling," he said. But "as part of a bigger bill, you've got to talk about renewables."

That hasn't always been Ms. Pelosi's stand, but after significant pressure from her own caucus, the Speaker is now willing to allow new votes. Democratic incumbents and candidates alike, led by endangered Pennsylvania Rep. Jason Altmire and Louisiana Rep. Don Cazayoux, have begun calling on Ms. Pelosi to allow the votes. Pressure has grown so much on Congress to get something done that even Democraric Rep. Mark Udall, a solid environmentalist, has played up his support for some drilling on the Outer-Continental Shelf in his race for Senate in Colorado.

Republicans are pessimistic that they will have the chance to vote on every option they want. "Whether it's a credible proposal that genuinely allows more American energy production, both onshore and offshore, remains to be seen," Mr. McConnell said.

The issue has cropped up not just on Capitol Hill but in campaigns across the country. North Carolina Republican Rep. Robin Hayes, facing a tough rematch of a fight he won by some 300 votes in 2006, just launched an ad in which his Democratic opponent is seen saying he would not drill off the coast of the Tar Heel State. John McCain has made drilling a centerpiece of his campaign, demanding the U.S. "drill here, and drill now." (McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, only increases the GOP's commitment to the energy issue; Alaskan politicians are virtually unanimously in favor of new oil exploration, especially in their back yards.)

But comprehensive energy legislation takes time, and though it will be debated in the House tomorrow, it will take time to make it through the Senate. And given the way Republicans have held up some pieces of legislation this year, anything less than a perfect bill could meet fierce resistance; at a press conference during the Democratic convention in Denver, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican, went so far as to tangentially suggest his party would hold up bills designed to fund the government, though other Republicans have not committed to that strategy.

Mr. Reid said shutting down the government, either literally or figuratively, has been a long-held Republican goal, and one that hasn't always worked to the GOP's advantage. "It appears to me that someone should just check back a few years. [Shutting down the government is] what Gingrich tried. It really helped him a lot," he said sarcastically.

Accusations that the GOP is standing in the way of progress have emerged as the Democratic response to Republicans' focus on what they see as drilling-centric energy legislation. "They've tried to do that in many ways anyway. They don't believe in government," Mr. Reid said. "They have done everything they can during the Republican years to do indirectly what they can't do directly, and that is destroy government."

Even if it does make it to the upper chamber in a manner acceptable to majority Democrats and enough Republicans willing to vote in favor of cutting off debate, the Senate is planning to adjourn in early October. The House is scheduled to finish September 26, though Mr. Daly said they may be in session longer. So far, Ms. Pelosi's spokesman said, there are no plans for a post-election lame duck session of Congress.

The compressed schedule and the level of partisan bickering has made leaders of both parties pessimistic about the chances of getting real legislation passed. "They have made the mess and the American people have seen it," Mr. Reid said. But, rejoined Mr. McConnell, "I'd be surprised if this Congress that's been doing nothing for a year and a half suddenly started doing important things."

By Reid Wilson, RealClearPolitics, September 10, 2008

If John McCain can win this election race with a 50-pound ball called "George W. Bush" wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called "The U.S. Economy" wrapped around the other, then he deserves to represent America in the next Olympics in any race he wants - swimming, cycling or track - I don't care how old he is. He would be the Michael Phelps of politics.

I confess, I watch politics from afar, but here's what I've been feeling for a while: Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama's coffee needs to be found and arrested by the Democrats because Obama has gone from cool to cold.

Somebody needs to tell Obama that if he wants the chance to calmly answer the phone at 3 a.m. in the White House, he is going to need to start slamming down some phones at 3 p.m. along the campaign trail. I like much of what he has to say, especially about energy, but I don't think people are feeling it in their guts, and I am a big believer that voters don't listen through their ears. They listen through their stomachs.

If you as a politician connect with voters on a gut level, they will follow you anywhere and not fret about the details. If you don't connect with them on a gut level, you can't show them enough details. Obama early on, and particularly with young people, connected on a gut level like no other politician since Ronald Reagan.

But in recent weeks, I feel as though he has lost that gut connection. I thought his convention speech contained no memorable lines or uplifting visions. It never got me out of my seat. Forget trashing McCain's ideas. If Obama wants to rally his base, he has to be more passionate about his own ideas. I have long felt that what propelled Obama early was the fact that many Americans understand in their guts that we need a change, but the change we need is to focus on nation-building at home. We're in decline. We need to get back to work on our country. And that is going to require strong, smart government.

Who is bailing out Fannie Mae? Who is going to build a new energy system? Health care? More tax cuts are not going to do it. But I am just not sure that Obama is making the sale that he has the plan and passion to unite and mobilize the country for this task.

In a way, I would love to hear Obama say, just for shock value: "I am so eager to do whatever it takes to fix these problems that I am ready to be a one-term president. Mine will not be a presidency that is confined to the first 100 days. But that is what we have fallen into, folks. The first 100 days have become the only 100 days. Once they are over, presidents are told that they have to trim their sails to get ready for the midterm elections, and once the midterms are over they are told that they have to trim their sails and get ready for the next presidential election. We can't solve our problems with a government of 100 days. I am going to work the hard problems the hard way for 1,461 days."

I don't know how long or high the "Sarah Palin bounce" will go, but I would take her very seriously as a politician. She may not know nuclear deterrence theory, but she can deliver a line. "I think there are a lot of women out there that look at her, holding her baby, talking about being a hockey mom, and say, 'She knows what I feel; she's going through what I am going through,' " remarked leadership expert John Maxwell.

As Neil Oxman, political consultant at The Campaign Group, put it to me: For half the country, "Sarah Palin is Roseanne from the 'Roseanne' show. 'Roseanne' was the No. 1 comedy five years in a row and seven out of nine in the top 10." She is connecting at a gut level. So does McCain - and, therefore, they don't need to give their constituents many details.

This race has a long way to go. It is still Obama's election to lose. But Obama got where he is today by defining himself as the agent of change and by defining change as the issue in this election. McCain, with Palin's help, has once again not only made Obama's experience an issue, but has now moved in on Obama's strength and tried to define the G.O.P. ticket as the party of "change."

How, you ask, can two people running with the exact same policies as the party that has been in power for eight years, claim to be the agents of "change?" That's politics. There's no shame. But what this has done is to make the word "change" as a campaign slogan meaningless. Obama will need to find another way to connect his ideas - clearly, crisply and passionately.

Because, while the pollsters tell us it is still really close, my own totally unscientific, seat of the pants poll tells me this: When you say Obama's name today and ask people for their first impression - a quick, flash, gut, first impression - no single word or phrase or policy comes to mind. His opponents will fill that vacuum if he doesn't. They already are.

By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, September 9, 2008

"But, you know, when you've been taking all these earmarks when it's convenient, and then suddenly you're the champion anti-earmark person, that's not change. Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can't just make stuff up." -- Barack Obama, Sept. 6, 2008

In politics, words are cheap. What really counts are actions. Democrats and Republicans have talked about fiscal responsibility for years. In reality, both parties have a shameful record of wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars on pork-barrel projects.

My Senate colleague Barack Obama is now attacking Gov. Sarah Palin over earmarks. Having worked with both John McCain and Mr. Obama on earmarks, and as a recovering earmarker myself, I can tell you that Mrs. Palin's leadership and record of reform stands well above that of Mr. Obama.

Let's compare.

Mrs. Palin used her veto pen to slash more local projects than any other governor in the state's history. She cut nearly 10% of Alaska's budget this year, saving state residents $268 million. This included vetoing a $30,000 van for Campfire USA and $200,000 for a tennis court irrigation system. She succinctly justified these cuts by saying they were "not a state responsibility."

Meanwhile in Washington, Mr. Obama voted for numerous wasteful earmarks last year, including: $12 million for bicycle paths, $450,000 for the International Peace Museum, $500,000 for a baseball stadium and $392,000 for a visitor's center in Louisiana.

Mrs. Palin cut Alaska's federal earmark requests in half last year, one of the strongest moves against earmarks by any governor. It took real leadership to buck Alaska's decades-long earmark addiction.

Mr. Obama delivered over $100 million in earmarks to Illinois last year and has requested nearly a billion dollars in pet projects since 2005. His running mate, Joe Biden, is still indulging in earmarks, securing over $90 million worth this year.

Mrs. Palin also killed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in her own state. Yes, she once supported the project: But after witnessing the problems created by earmarks for her state and for the nation's budget, she did what others like me have done: She changed her position and saved taxpayers millions. Even the Alaska Democratic Party credits her with killing the bridge.

When the Senate had its chance to stop the Bridge to Nowhere and transfer the money to Katrina rebuilding, Messrs. Obama and Biden voted for the $223 million earmark, siding with the old boys' club in the Senate. And to date, they still have not publicly renounced their support for the infamous earmark.

Mrs. Palin has proven courageous by taking on big spenders in her own party. In March of this year, the Anchorage Daily News reported that, "Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is aggravated about what he sees as Gov. Sarah Palin's antagonism toward the earmarks he uses to steer federal money to the state."

Mr. Obama had a chance to take on his party when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered a sham ethics bill, which was widely criticized by watchdog groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste for shielding earmarks from pubic scrutiny. But instead of standing with taxpayers, Mr. Obama voted for the bill. Today, he claims he helped write the bill that failed to clean up Washington.

Mr. Obama has shown little restraint on earmarks until this year, when he decided to co-sponsor an earmark moratorium authored by Mr. McCain and myself. Mr. Obama is vulnerable on this issue, and he knows it. That is why he is lashing out at Mrs. Palin and trying to hide his own record.

Mrs. Palin is one of the strongest antiearmark governors in America. If more governors around the country would do what she has done, we would be much closer to fixing our nation's fiscal problems than we are.

Mrs. Palin's record here is solid and inspiring. She will help Mr. McCain shut down the congressional favor factory, and she has a record to prove it. Actions mean something. You can't just make stuff up.

By JIM DEMINT, The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2008

An America that disdains Obama for his global support risks turning current anti-Bush feeling into something far worse

The feeling is familiar. I had it four years ago and four years before that: a sinking feeling in the stomach. It's a kind of physical pessimism which says: "It's happening again. The Democrats are about to lose an election they should win - and it could not matter more."

In my head, I'm not as anxious for Barack Obama's chances as I was for John Kerry's in 2004 or Al Gore's in 2000. He is a better candidate than both put together, and all the empirical evidence says this year favours Democrats more than any since 1976. But still, I can't shake off the gloom.

Look at yesterday's opinion polls, which have John McCain either in a dead heat with Obama or narrowly ahead. Given the well-documented tendency of African-American candidates to perform better in polls than in elections - thanks to people who say they will vote for a black man but don't - this suggests Obama is now trailing badly. More troubling was the ABC News-Washington Post survey which found McCain ahead among white women by 53% to 41%. Two weeks ago, Obama had a 15% lead among women. There is only one explanation for that turnaround, and it was not McCain's tranquilliser of a convention speech: Obama's lead has been crushed by the Palin bounce.

So you can understand my pessimism. But it's now combined with a rising frustration. I watch as the Democrats stumble, uncertain how to take on Sarah Palin. Fight too hard, and the Republican machine, echoed by the ditto-heads in the conservative commentariat on talk radio and cable TV, will brand Democrats sexist, elitist snobs, patronising a small-town woman. Do nothing, and Palin's rise will continue unchecked, her novelty making even Obama look stale, her star power energising and motivating the Republican base.

So somehow Palin slips out of reach, no revelation - no matter how jaw-dropping or career-ending were it applied to a normal candidate - doing sufficient damage to slow her apparent march to power, dragging the charisma-deprived McCain behind her.

We know one of Palin's first acts as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska was to ask the librarian the procedure for banning books. Oh, but that was a "rhetorical" question, says the McCain-Palin campaign. We know Palin is not telling the truth when she says she was against the notorious $400m "Bridge to Nowhere" project in Alaska - in fact, she campaigned for it - but she keeps repeating the claim anyway. She denounces the dipping of snouts in the Washington trough - but hired costly lobbyists to make sure Alaska got a bigger helping of federal dollars than any other state.

She claims to be a fiscal conservative, but left Wasilla saddled with debts it had never had before. She even seems to have claimed "per diem" allowances - taxpayers' money meant for out-of-town travel - when she was staying in her own house.

Yet somehow none of this is yet leaving a dent. The result is that a politician who conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan calls a "Christianist" - seeking to politicise Christianity the way Islamists politicise Islam - could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Remember, this is a woman who once addressed a church congregation, saying of her work as governor - transport, policing and education - "really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God".

If Sarah Palin defies the conventional wisdom that says elections are determined by the top of the ticket, and somehow wins this for McCain, what will be the reaction? Yes, blue-state America will go into mourning once again, feeling estranged in its own country. A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all. And, most depressing, many African-Americans will decide that if even Barack Obama - with all his conspicuous gifts - could not win, then no black man can ever be elected president.

But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For Obama has stirred an excitement around the globe unmatched by any American politician in living memory. Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. If November 4 were a global ballot, Obama would win it handsomely. If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama.

The crowd of 200,000 that rallied to hear him in Berlin in July did so not only because of his charisma, but also because they know he, like the majority of the world's population, opposed the Iraq war. McCain supported it, peddling the lie that Saddam was linked to 9/11. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride roughshod over the international system but will treat alliances and global institutions seriously: McCain wants to bypass the United Nations in favour of a US-friendly League of Democracies. McCain might talk a good game on climate change, but a repeated floor chant at the Republican convention was "Drill, baby, drill!", as if the solution to global warming were not a radical rethink of the US's entire energy system but more offshore oil rigs.

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race - that Obama was rejected because of his colour - the world's verdict will be harsh. In that circumstance, Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently, international opinion would conclude that "the United States had its day, but in the end couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race".

Even if it's not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one - while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars - on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline". Let's not forget, McCain's campaign manager boasts that this election is "not about the issues."

Of course I know that even to mention Obama's support around the world is to hurt him. Incredibly, that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the "candidate of Europe" and making him seem less of a patriotic American. But what does that say about today's America, that the world's esteem is now unwanted? If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us - and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.

By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, September 10 2008

In the past 30 years or so, since presidential conventions no longer actually have decided the nominees, their usual purpose has been to focus and project a positive image of the already chosen candidate (and, of course, disparage the opponent). But last week in St. Paul, Minn., the GOP convention was different. It not only enhanced but also -- at least for the moment -- reversed-fielded the image of the Republican ticket.

In the aftermath of that reversal, the entire presidential contest has been upended. It also hastened (or perhaps even made possible at all) the change of the human image of the GOP from Bush/Cheney to McCain/Palin.

Until last week, Sen. McCain was running as the boring candidate of experience and was unable to substantially replace Bush as the image of the party. With Bush having a 70 percent negative image, he not only was dragging down McCain but also constituted a drowning weight on the buoyancy of Republican candidates at the federal, state and local levels.

But with the addition of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to the ticket, suddenly and spontaneously, McCain the reformer, McCain the maverick stopped being a GOP talking point and became incarnate. It is not only that the Alaska governor is a genuine reformer but also that by every aspect of her being, she is fresh, different, recognizably normal, and thus, the un-Washingtonian. The power of her image has supercharged McCain's image.

We see the first effects of McCain/Palin replacing Bush/Cheney in Monday's USA Today/Gallup Poll, in which 48 percent say they're Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party; 47 percent say they're Republicans or lean to the GOP. That merely 1-point party gap -- the strongest position for Republicans since Bush's second inaugural, at the beginning of 2005 -- had been in double digits only a few weeks ago. Moreover, voters -- by only 48-45 percent -- support the Democratic candidate in their congressional districts, the Democratic Party's narrowest advantage this year. If these numbers hold -- and it is a big if -- Republicans may well lose far fewer seats in the House and Senate in November.

Moreover, in an act of political alchemy, McCain's selection of the nationally inexperienced Gov. Palin only underscored Sen. Obama's own national inexperience. Worse for Obama, Gov. Palin's presence has sucked the oxygen out of Sen. Biden's public statements -- forcing presidential candidate Obama into the unthinkable: He himself must go on the attack against McCain's vice presidential junior partner. Worst of all for Obama, his campaign of a fresh face with new ideas is falling victim to a newer face with newer ideas.

As I predicted in a Feb. 28, 2007, column:

"What does it mean to be a 'fresh face' in a 12-month primary campaign in an Interneted, 24-7 news cycle environment? This, of course, must be a question that Sen. Barack Obama and his people are puzzling over now. He will be as familiar as an old shoe to Democratic Party primary voters by next January (2008) and February (2008). He may still be appealing next year (2008), but he will no longer be fresh. ...

"... A new idea put forward a year before primary voting risks not only providing more than sufficient time for an opponent's research team to find and publicize the flaws in the idea ... but also runs the risk of becoming stale and, most dangerously, of letting events overtake the proposal.

"Thus is lost one of the great advantages of challengers -- that their ideas are fresh, appealing and plausible, but not public long enough to be measured by events and considered judgment -- which is the inevitable plight of incumbents and their party successors.

"One of the other imponderable challenges to both fresh faces and well-known veteran candidates is how to manage the life expectancy of clever phrases and slogans and even of endearing personality quirks and styles of speech or manner.

"These things tend to get old. ...

"I suspect that the insatiable public maw of freshness-hunger will prove a vast challenge to the wordsmith and media shops of all the campaigns. ...

"Perhaps this will be the election cycle of the late entries."

And that is exactly what Obama is being forced to deal with. First his startling and lofty rhetoric grew stale from overuse. And now his once engaging (for some) ideas are being overtaken by events. His call for quick retreat from Iraq, overtaken by the surge and the smell of victory, has forced him to reverse field and admit the surge has been an unexpected (by him) success. Then the declining economy forced him this week to back away from his soak-the-rich tax increases for fear of further damaging the economy.

Of course, the perils of Pauline still may threaten Gov. Palin, and two months is time enough for many more strange twists. But one week on from the Republican convention, it is fair to say that never in modern history has a presidential ticket benefited so much from its convention. And never have the hopes and energy of a moribund party risen so quickly or so high.

For the first time since being named the Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is going home. After she and Senator John McCain headline an event this morning in Fairfax, Va., she'll catch a flight to Alaska and attend a welcome rally in Fairbanks upon arrival.

But the trip will also be a test for Ms. Palin, who has encountered an onslaught of both praise and criticism during her short time on the national campaign trail. While there, she will sit-down for her first major news interview since joining the Republican ticket with ABC's Charlie Gibson.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are stepping up their attacks on Governor Palin, report the Politico's Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen. They write that it's not just "Democratic officials who are fixated on Palin":

Media outlets on the left - from Talking Points Memo to Huffington Post - are loaded with hard-hitting stories about Palin. McCain often seems like he's playing second fiddle.
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The Obama campaign is calculating that it must r