WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has canceled an appearance at a New York rally next week after organizers blindsided her by inviting Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, aides to the senator said Tuesday.

Several American Jewish groups plan a major rally outside the United Nations on Sept. 22 to protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Organizers said Tuesday that both Clinton, who nearly won the Democratic nomination for president, and Palin, Republican candidate John McCain's running mate, are expected to attend.

That would have set up a closely scrutinized and potentially explosive pairing in the midst of a presidential campaign, one in which the New York senator is campaigning for Democratic nominee Barack Obama while Palin actively courts disappointed Clinton supporters.

Clinton aides were furious. They first learned of the plan to have both Clinton and Palin appear when informed by reporters.

"Her attendance was news to us, and this was never billed to us as a partisan political event," said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines. "Sen. Clinton will therefore not be attending."

A McCain-Palin campaign official, speaking on condition of anonymity because Palin's schedule for Monday has not been announced, said only that Palin tentatively planned to attend the rally.

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, did not immediately return messages Tuesday seeking comment, nor did other organizers of the rally. Other event sponsors are the National Coalition to Stop Iran Now, United Jewish Communities and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

Both McCain and Obama have made strong appeals to Jewish voters, particularly in critical states like Florida. Obama has emphasized to Jewish audiences his commitment to Israel's security, and has worked to dispel doubts created by false rumors that he is Muslim.

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press, September 16, 2008

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. returned to his beloved Amtrak train Tuesday, just like old times. He was traveling light, except for the big entourage.

One of the staples of Mr. Biden's Regular Joe credentials over the decades has been his regular ridership on the train between Washington and his home in Wilmington, Del. But the ritual was sharply curtailed last month when Barack Obama picked him to be his running mate and his home suddenly became the campaign trail.

Now, when he does take his beloved Amtrak, the tradition of Mr. Biden as the quiet, everyday Commuter Joe has given way to a big entourage, press throng and overall commotion that follow in the wake of a major party running mate.

This change of life was on full display Tuesday, when Mr. Biden took an afternoon Acela from D.C. to Wilmington before heading out for a three-day road trip to Pennsylvania and Ohio. The candidate carried a tattered leather briefcase (brown), was greeted by two uniformed Amtrak officers and wore a big, camera-ready grin for a cluster of reporters and cameramen.

"Hi, how are ya," Mr. Biden said, greeting the press.

At 1:57 p.m., Mr. Biden took a seat on the first passenger car - not a quiet car - which included a large section that was closed off to other passengers by Secret Service agents. Mr. Biden spent the first part of his journey talking on a cell phone, and "in meetings," according to Biden spokesman David Wade.

When the press was allowed onto Mr. Biden's car, the candidate was already in full meeting-greeting mode. He gestured to a reporter to come forward. The reporter demurred initially, saying he did not want to be a nuisance.

"Hey, I'm the nuisance," Mr. Biden reassured, gesturing to the phalanx of camera people and Secret Service agents around him.

"I used to ride this thing every day and nobody paid any attention." said Mr. Biden, as he then worked his way up the aisle.

"Hey man," he said to one guy. "Hey, I saw Matt the other day," he said to another.

Across the aisle, a Newark-bound passenger, Chrissy Dumbert, took in the commotion and observed, "This is the craziest train ride I've ever been on."

Meantime, Mr. Biden was assuring another passenger, "If we get elected, it will be the most train-friendly administration ever."

He told another passenger, Jim Dunn: "I understand you're a suspect," to which the Metro Park, N.J.-bound Mr. Dunn said, "Yes, you've probably seen my picture on the wall of the post office."

Mr. Dunn, who spoke with an Irish accent, said he probably knew Mr. Biden's ancestors back in Ireland, and that he took Mr. Biden's odd greeting in good faith.

"Get the hell out of my way," Mr. Biden yelled to another reporter standing in the aisle. "I love you, but you're bothering all these people."

He turned to another passenger: "You're on television now. I'm sorry, but I can't control this."

Mr. Biden then entered the dining car and whispered something to the woman behind the counter, Joanne. He ordered a bottle of water and a "Cranberry cocktail."

A reporter expressed surprise that Biden would partake of a "cocktail" at this afternoon hour.

"I'm the only guy you know who doesn't drink," Biden said, adding that he has never taken a drink in his life.

"Too many alcoholics in my family," he explained.

He then pivoted and turned back toward his seat, meeting and greeting more passengers. A few people made cell phone calls from their seats to report their Biden sightings.

Mr. Biden stopped and chatted with Neil and Ellen Meltzer, who were both heading to New York for a party at the Rainbow Room. Ms. Meltzer invited him to the party and, Mr. Biden invited Ms. Meltzer out of the road with him. He also offered Ms. Meltzer his bottled water.

All offers were declined amicably.

Mr. Biden then greeted an older man, Fritz Schwartz, who had testified before the Senate Judiciary committee on Tuesday.

Mr. Biden, for some reason, called Mr. Schwartz "the professor," although Mr. Schwartz noted that he was not in fact a professor.

Mr. Biden said that he looked like a professor, because Mr. Schwartz had "an air of authority" about him. Mr. Schwartz later said that he heard Seantor Biden say "hair of authority." (In fact, the guy had great hair, if not necessarily professorial hair,)

The train arrived in Wilmington at 3:16 p.m. Amtrak Joe walked the platform, shaking hands with cops and Amtrak workers.

At one point, he reached into an open door for one last hand-shake with another Amtrak employee and the automatic doors nearly closed on his arms. "You're like family," Biden said, pulling his arm away.

Calamity was averted at the last minute when the doors re-opened. A K-9 dog following behind barked at the near-incident.

The candidate left the Wilmington station by motorcade at 3:24.

By Mark Leibovich, The New York Times, September 16, 2008

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Senator Barack Obama stood beneath the stars - surrounded by the ones from Hollywood - and tried to soothe the concerns of worrying Democrats here on Tuesday as he held the biggest fund-raising night of his campaign.

"A lot of people have gotten nervous and concerned. Why is this as close as it is? And what's going on?" Mr. Obama said, speaking to about 300 people over dinner at the Greystone Mansion. "We always knew this was going to be hard - this is a leap for the American people."

In back-to-back receptions, one that featured a brief performance by Barbra Streisand, Mr. Obama raised about $11 million for his campaign and the party's general election efforts. Democratic fund-raising officials confirmed the figure, which exceeded a previous one-night record for the campaign of $7 million last month.

Mr. Obama implored Democrats to "keep steady" in the face of intense criticism and fluctuating poll numbers in his contest with Senator John McCain. Before bidding farewell to his supporters, in what aides said would likely be his last visit here before the election, he declared: "Don't spend time reading blogs, don't watch cable news. Just remember what this campaign is about."

The fund-raising rush for Mr. Obama comes at the very time he was working to turn the campaign's focus to the economy. Even before he arrived at his first reception here on Tuesday night, Mr. McCain criticized his rival's fund-raising trip to California.

In a rally in Ohio, Mr. McCain mocked Mr. Obama's schedule, accusing him of flying "off to Hollywood for a fundraiser with Barbra Streisand and his celebrity friends."

"Let me tell you my friends," Mr. McCain said, "there's no place I'd rather be than here with the working men and women of Ohio."

The twin fund-raisers for Mr. Obama on Tuesday evening sparked a surprising frenzy in Hollywood, where events raising money for Democrats are as routine as the studio pitch meeting.

"Both are sold out, but I've been getting calls all day from people who want to go," said Mike Medavoy, a film producer who was an early supporter of Mr. Obama, and planned to attend both events.

The first, and more expensive of the fund-raisers, included about 300 guests who paid $28,500 each to dine on filet of beef and roasted potatoes at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Following that event, more than 900 people attended a brief show by Ms. Streisand the nearby Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Ms. Streisand ran through bits of a few songs, but did not sing entire numbers. Her performance was closed to reporters. Among the celebrities in his audiences were: Will Farrell, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jodi Foster, Chris Rock and Dennis Haysbert, who portrayed the first African-American U.S. president on the TV series "24."

After he took the stage, Mr. Obama thanked the entertainers and struck a somber tone.

"This should be a celebratory evening, we've got 48 days to go in a campaign, a campaign that started 19 months ago, at a time when a lot of folks thought we might not get here," Mr. Obama said. But, he added, "I'm not in a celebratory mood."

He ticked through the series of crises that have taken place in recent days, including the hurricane on the gulf coast, the deadly train crash in nearby Los Angeles and the turmoil in the nation's financial markets. He said the stakes of the election were high.

"This is not a game. This is not a reality show - no offense to any of you," Mr. Obama said to laughter from a crowd filled with Hollywood executives. "This is not a sit-com. This is for all the marbles. There is a high stake to this election."

He added, "If we can cut through the nonsense and the lipstick and the pigs and the silliness, then I'm absolutely convinced that we're going to win."

By Jeff Zeleny, The New York Times, September 17, 2008

WASHINGTON - The crisis on Wall Street will leave the next president facing tough choices about how best to regulate the financial system, and although neither Senator Barack Obama nor Senator John McCain has yet offered a detailed plan, their records and the principles they have set out so far suggest they could come at the issue in very different ways.

On the campaign trail on Monday, Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, struck a populist tone. Speaking in Florida, he said that the economy's underlying fundamentals remained strong but were being threatened "because of the greed by some based in Wall Street and we have got to fix it."

But his record on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party's embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline.

While Mr. McCain has cited the need for additional oversight when it comes to specific situations, like the mortgage problems behind the current shocks on Wall Street, he has consistently characterized himself as fundamentally a deregulator and he has no history prior to the presidential campaign of advocating steps to tighten standards on investment firms.

He has often taken his lead on financial issues from two outspoken advocates of free market approaches, former Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Individuals associated with Merrill Lynch, which sold itself to Bank of America in the market upheaval of the past weekend, have given his presidential campaign nearly $300,000, making them Mr. McCain's largest contributor, collectively.

Mr. Obama sought Monday to attribute the financial upheaval to lax regulation during the Bush years, and in turn to link Mr. McCain to that approach.

"I certainly don't fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to," Mr. Obama told several hundred people who gathered for an outdoor rally in Grand Junction, Colo.

Mr. Obama set out his general approach to financial regulation in March, calling for regulating investment banks, mortgage brokers and hedge funds much as commercial banks are. And he would streamline the overlapping regulatory agencies and create a commission to monitor threats to the financial system and report to the White House and Congress.

On Wall Street's Republican-friendly turf, Mr. Obama has outraised Mr. McCain. He has received $9.9 million from individuals associated with the securities and investment industry, $3 million more than Mr. McCain, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group. His advisers include Wall Street heavyweights, including Robert E. Rubin, the former treasury secretary who is now a senior adviser at Citigroup, another firm being buffeted by the financial crisis.

If many voters are fuzzy on the events that over the weekend forced Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch & Company to be swallowed by the Bank of America Corporation, the continuing chaos among the most venerable names in American finance - coming on top of the recent government seizure of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the demise of the Bear Stearns Companies - has stoked their anxiety for the economy, the foremost issue on voters' minds.

So it was that first Mr. Obama and then Mr. McCain rushed out their statements on Monday morning before most Americans had reached their workplaces.

To the extent that travails on Wall Street and Main Street have both corporations and homeowners looking to Washington for a hand, that helps Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats who see government as a force for good and business regulation as essential. Yet Mr. McCain has sold himself to many voters as an agent for change, despite his party's unpopularity after years of dominating in Washington, and despite his own antiregulation stances of past years.

Mr. McCain was quick on Monday to issue a statement calling for "major reform" to "replace the outdated and ineffective patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight in Washington and bring transparency and accountability to Wall Street." Later his campaign unveiled a television advertisement called "Crisis," that began: "Our economy in crisis. Only proven reformers John McCain and Sarah Palin can fix it. Tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings."

Mr. McCain's reaction suggests how the pendulum has swung to cast government regulation in a more favorable political light as the economy has suffered additional blows and how he is scrambling to adjust. While he has few footprints on economic issues in more than a quarter century in Congress, Mr. McCain has always been in his party's mainstream on the issue.

In early 1995, after Republicans had taken control of Congress, Mr. McCain promoted a moratorium on federal regulations of all kinds. He was quoted as saying that excessive regulations were "destroying the American family, the American dream" and voters "want these regulations stopped." The moratorium measure was unsuccessful.

"I'm always for less regulation," he told The Wall Street Journal last March, "but I am aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight" in situations like the subprime lending crisis, the problem that has cascaded through Wall Street this year. He concluded, "but I am fundamentally a deregulator."

Later that month, he gave a speech on the housing crisis in which he called for less regulation, saying, "Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital."

Yet Mr. McCain has at times in the presidential campaign exhibited a less ideological streak. As he did on Monday, he from time to time speaks in populist tones about big corporations and financial institutions and presents himself as a Theodore Rossevelt-style reformer. He supported the Bush administration's decision to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants, and he has backed as unavoidable the promise of taxpayer money to help contain the financial crisis.

Other than Mr. Gramm, who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee before his leaving Congress in 2002 worked to block efforts to tighten financial regulation, Mr. McCain's closest adviser on matters of Wall Street is John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who has raised about $500,000 for Mr. McCain. Unlike Mr. Gramm, Mr. Thain has a reputation as a pragmatic, nonideological, moderate Republican. That the men are Mr. McCain's touchstones is typical of his small and eclectic mix of advisers, making it hard to generalize about how Mr. McCain would act as president.

A prominent McCain supporter, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, signaled how Mr. McCain would try to make his antiregulation record fit the proregulation times that the next president will inherit. Mr. Pawlenty suggested in an interview on Fox News that, given the danger that "any future administration" would go too far, Mr. McCain would be the safer bet to protect against "excessive government intervention or excessive government regulation."

Mr. Obama also does not have much of a record on financial regulation. As a first-term senator, he has not been around for the major debates of recent years, and his eight years in the Illinois Senate afforded little opportunity to weigh in on the issues.

In March 2007, however, he warned of the coming housing crisis, and a year later in a speech in Manhattan he outlined six principles for overhauling financial regulation.

On Monday, he said the nation was facing "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression," and attributed it on the hands-off policies of the Republican White House that, he says, Mr. McCain would continue. Seeking to showcase Mr. Obama's concerns, his campaign said Mr. Obama led a conference call on the crisis early Monday that included Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve; Mr. Rubin; and his successor as treasury secretary, Lawrence H. Summers.

Later, citing Mr. McCain's remarks about the economy's strong fundamentals, he told a Colorado crowd that Mr. McCain "doesn't get what's happening between the mountain in Sedona where he lives and the corridors of power where he works."

One reason for both men's sketchy records on financial issues is that neither has been a member of the Senate Banking Committee, which has oversight of the industry and its regulators. Under both parties' leadership, the committee often has been a graveyard for proposals opposed by lobbyists for financial institutions, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which last week were forced into government conservatorships.

Industry lobbyists' success in killing such regulations meant senators outside the banking panel did not have to take a stand on them.

By JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times, September 15, 2008

Clearly worried about the impact Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has had on the presidential race, the Obama campaign stepped up its efforts to court women this week, recruiting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to join Sen. Joe Biden for a taped webcast answering questions from women, announcing a list of high profile women who are endorsing Sen. Barack Obama and releasing a tough anti-McCain ad targeting women.

On Monday, as part of his "Women's Week of Action," Obama held a conference call with female supporters to outline the issues he will bring to the forefront in the weeks ahead, such as health care, the Supreme Court and pay equity.

And today in Washington, a number of high profile unions and groups representing millions of women joined together to throw their support to Obama. Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women -- both of whose organizations supported Clinton in the primaries -- held a press conference here announcing the support of ten groups for Obama.

NOW's endorsement represented the first time in 24 years the group has endorsed a general election presidential candidate -- the last being Walter Mondale in 1984, who ran on the first ticket to feature a woman as a vice presidential running mate.

The largest organization for women's rights, NOW says it is stepping into the contest to educate women about Palin's positions and highlight Obama and Biden's long-time commitment to policies that support women personally and economically.

"For us its a red alert," said Gandy. "Palin is so out of touch with women. I don't think people fully understand her positions."

"They are stark differences between these two candidates," said Smeal. "John McCain has a 26 year record of voting against issues important to women."

Smeal cited McCain's opposition to a bill that would afford equal pay to women, his opposition to abortion funding and a vote he cast against breast cancer research.

The new Obama pay equity ad says that "women work to help support their families but are paid just 77 cents to a dollar a man makes. It's one more thing John McCain doesn't get about our economy. He opposed a law to guarantee women equal pay for equal work, calling it too great a burden on business.... A burden on business? How about the burden on our families."

McCain's campaign quickly countered saying McCain's pays women on his senate staff better that Obama does.

By Lois Romano, The Washington Post, September 16, 2008

WASHINGTON - John McCain's campaign says the Republican is picking up the support of a top Hillary Clinton fundraiser and member of the Democratic National Committee's Platform Committee.

Lynn Forester de Rothschild has said she thinks Democratic nominee Barack Obama is arrogant and has a problem connecting with average Americans.

Rothschild is a member of the DNC's Democrats Abroad chapter and splits her time living in London and New York. She was one of Clinton's top fundraisers, bringing in more than $100,000 for her presidential campaign. She built a multimillion-dollar telecommunications company before marrying international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.

Rothschild plans to announce her support for McCain on Wednesday in Washington.

The Associated Press, August 17, 2008

MADISON, Wis. - John McCain has worked himself back into a tight race with Barack Obama in Wisconsin, a state that Democrats had hoped would be a stronghold for the Illinois senator.

Obama still has clear advantages in the state, which hasn't voted Republican in a presidential race since Ronald Reagan in 1984. He's got a field organization that Democrats say is stronger than ever, regional appeal as a neighbor from next-door Illinois and an electorate receptive to his message of change.

But McCain has gained ground on Obama through a barrage of television ads, campaign events and the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. He's also sharply increasing the number of campaign aides and offices he's got in the state to counter Obama's organizational strength.

The changing dynamic has emerged as the Republican Party base, which had been lukewarm to McCain, has been energized by the addition of Palin to the ticket. Across the state, Republicans describe a wave of new volunteers and contributions after the Alaska governor joined.

"They're saying it grabbed their attention and changed their stance about standing on the sidelines and getting involved," said Tom Van Drasek, chairman of the Brown County Republican Party in Green Bay. "Now the energy level is way up."

Democrats concede that it now looks like a closer general election for Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes than they'd originally expected.

"It makes the chance of a bigger Obama victory much less," said Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster based in Madison. "I still think Obama's the favorite in this state, but I don't think anybody can be overconfident. It's still probably going to be fairly close."

Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry each narrowly carried Wisconsin over George W. Bush. Kerry's 11,000-vote victory in 2004 made Wisconsin the state with the narrowest margin of victory at less than 0.4 percent.

McCain has dubbed himself the underdog in the state. But even before he selected Palin, he had succeeded in cutting into an Obama lead that polls showed was as high as 13 points in June. McCain did so by visiting the state over the summer while Obama campaigned elsewhere and by outspending Obama on ads questioning his opponent's readiness for the presidency.

McCain's campaign and the Republican Party spent nearly $2 million on ads in Wisconsin between June 3 and July 26, nearly twice as much as the Obama campaign, according to the latest figures available from the Wisconsin Advertising Project.

Now McCain is working to catch up with what Democrats say is Obama's biggest strength in the state - organization - by increasing the number of campaign offices from 10 to 18 and paid staff members from 20 to about 30.

Obama's campaign has 43 offices. Dozens of paid staff members - the campaign won't say precisely how many - are working to identify supporters.

State Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus wouldn't say whether he thinks McCain still is an underdog.

"Certainly we have our work cut out for us. But at this point, all of the energy is in our direction," Priebus said. "I think it's neck and neck."

After a slow start, the Obama campaign has stepped up its activity in Wisconsin in recent days. Obama campaigned in Eau Claire and Milwaukee in the last two weeks, and running mate Joe Biden made his first visit to Wisconsin last week, courting Packers fans in Green Bay. McCain and Palin will pay their own visit to Green Bay on Thursday.

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Joe Wineke said the Obama campaign "has the most sophisticated and intense ground game in this state I've ever seen" in the last 30 years. The campaign has at least twice as many offices as Kerry had open in 2004, Wineke said, some in places where Democrats rarely have spent time.

In addition, some 155,000 Wisconsin residents have registered to vote for the first time since the beginning of the year, nearly a third of them in Democratic-leaning Milwaukee County.

The McCain campaign's decision to add offices and campaign workers points to a renewed belief that Wisconsin is winnable for McCain.

Republicans say much of the enthusiasm revolves around Palin, whose anti-abortion views have excited social conservatives who were lukewarm on McCain.

"It's always nice when you feel the energy kick in," said Republican Party executive director Mark Jefferson. "This has been a real shot in the arm to those people who did think maybe this wasn't their year."

By SCOTT BAUER and RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press, September 17, 2008

Howard Wolfson, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's top strategist during her presidential campaign and current Fox News contributor, predicted Tuesday evening that Barack Obama will win the election in November and that Democrats will take over both houses of Congress and the New York State Legislature.

"There's a much better than average chance it's going to happen," he said.

Wolfson offered his assessments in Adam's Mark Hotel as the keynote speaker at the 2008 annual meeting of the Business Council of New York State.

Wolfson acknowledged to the crowd of more than 300 business leaders that if he had been asked earlier this year where he would be in September, he would not have guessed Western New York. Western Pennsylvania and Western Ohio would have been more likely guesses, he said, referring to Clinton's failed bid for the Democratic nomination.

But he said he welcomed the chance to put on his new pundit hat to share his thoughts and knowledge about the upcoming election.

Wolfson pointed out that recent polls show 70 percent of the American public believes the country is going in the wrong direction - and he said that's good news for Obama.

He said he believes the race between Obama and John McCain is so close because they are both enormously popular figures.

Wolfson said big news events, like this week's stock market plunge, are to Obama's advantage because they remind the public about their dissatisfaction with the current administration.

But, Wolfson said, McCain's campaign has done well with "winning news cycles" with controversies like the "lipstick on a pig" comment.

Wolfson took questions from the audience. Among the questioners was former Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, who earlier in the evening had been awarded the Corning Award for Excellence. He asked Wolfson why he thought Obama didn't pick Clinton as his running mate.

"I've long been on the record that Hillary would be the best choice," Wolfson said.

But he added that he never believed Obama would pick her.

He acknowledged that he spoke many "unkind words" about Obama and that the candidates also had done so against each other and that ultimately there was too much "water under the bridge."

By Maki Becker, The Buffalo News, September 17, 2008

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Weighing in on Gov. Sarah Palin's impact on the presidential race, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday 7 a.m. EST on Good Morning America that she has full confidence in Sen. Joe Biden as Sen. Barack Obama's running mate, praising his knowledge of the economy and world affairs.

Asked to respond to Palin's assertion that she thinks Obama is "regretting not picking [Clinton] now" -- with many former Clinton supporters now saying they will support the McCain-Palin ticket -- Clinton demurred, saying she's excited to campaign for Obama and Biden.

"We have a great Democratic vice-presidential candidate," Clinton told ABC's Diane Sawyer, aboard the "Good Morning America" "Whistle-Stop Express." "Joe Biden is a friend of mine. He's been a strong leader both on issues here at home when it comes to the economy and stresses on middle class working families, and he understands the strategic challenges that we face around the world. So I'm very happy going out campaigning as hard as I can for both Barack and Joe."




By RICK KLEIN, ABC News, September 15, 2008

U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today endorsed Vermont Speaker Gaye Symington, D-Jericho, for Vermont governor.

"Gaye Symington is the only candidate in the race who has laid out comprehensive plans to grow Vermont's economy by developing renewable energy sources, creating good green jobs, and building a skilled workforce through quality, affordable education," Clinton said in a news release.

"President Obama and Democrats in Congress will need strong leaders from across the country as we fight to bring about the positive change hardworking American families need," Clinton added. "Gaye has a proven track record of working on the issues that I have long championed - universal healthcare, equal rights for women and minorities, providing quality education for all of our children, and strengthening our middle class."

Symington has served in the Vermont House of Representatives for 12 years.

"I am honored to have Senator Clinton's support," said Symington. "Senator Clinton is a role model for public servants across the country."

Symington's competitor, Independent gubernatorial candidate Anthony Pollina today received an endorsement from the Vermont-National Education Association - the state's largest union.




The Burlington Free Press, September 15, 2008

The Road to the White House

AKRON, Ohio -- The T-shirts told stories of an unfulfilled infatuation.

"Hillary Is My Home Girl," read one, the now-faded lettering framing a caricature of the New York senator.

"One of 18 Million," read another -- a reference to the number of votes Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton received in her epic, failed Democratic nomination battle against Sen. Barack Obama.

"I'm Hot for Hillary!" (on a man)

By the time the afternoon was over, dark sweat stains were spreading on some of those T-shirts, as roughly 1,500 partisans crowded into a sweltering school gymnasium to a salute to a candidate who dominated this region in the Ohio primary.

They listened and cheered as she urged them to transfer their ardor to the candidate she battled through the longest, most expensive primary fight in history.

"I want to thank all of you who supported me and worked so hard," she said. Drawing a wave of cheers, she added, "And I'm asking you now to work as hard for Barack and Joe as you worked for me."

A half-dozen random interviews in the crowd didn't turn up anyone who hadn't voted for the New York senator in the spring. The good news for an Obama campaign was that those same voters were uniform in saying they had now come around to Mr. Obama.

The good news for his Republican opponent was that several said they had Democratic friends who have yet to transfer their allegiance to the candidate Mrs. Clinton was touting yesterday.

"There are some, there are some, no question," said Susan Peresta of Akron of the Democratic holdouts. "I've been talking and talking to them."

Jill Geier, a student, was another Obama convert, but of her circle of friends, she said, "there's some resistance ... I couldn't even get anyone to come with me."

George Bush won Ohio in 2004 in a race so close that Sen. John F. Kerry delayed his concession until the next day just to be sure of the result. A shift of a handful of votes per precinct would have given the state and the national electoral vote lead to the Democrats.

Most post-convention polls have shown Sen. John McCain with a narrow advantage here. One of the few recent polls that found Mr. Obama in front, a Quinnipiac University survey, also showed that 28 percent of Mrs. Clinton's primary voters were now supporting the Republican.

Several polls have suggested that white working-class women now represent a now larger challenge to the Obama campaign with the addition of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to the GOP ticket.

"McCain now leads Obama in this group by 16 points, 53 percent to 37 percent, up from July, when white women backed McCain by only 5 points -- 44 percent to 39 percent," a new Newsweek poll says. "Twenty-four percent of these women say they are more inclined to vote for McCain now that he has a female running mate." And the Republican ticket is clearly aiming to win over Clinton supporters.

Over the years, Mrs. Clinton has borne an ample share of conservative criticism. With her husband, she's been accused of complicity in political wrongdoing and actual crimes up to and including drug-running and murder.

But suddenly, she's the Republicans' new best friend. Even before Mr. Obama locked up the nomination, Mr. McCain took a markedly more respectful tone toward her than toward Mr. Obama. Since Mr. McCain's choice of Ms. Palin as his running mate, Mrs. Clinton has been elevated further in Republican rhetoric.

In a bid to exploit lingering memories of primary combat, Republicans, including Ms. Palin, are publicly reverent on the subject of the cracks her supporters placed in the glass ceiling of politics. In parody, the two women's pioneering roles were linked the previous night as "Saturday Night Live" opened with a sketch featuring actors playing them.

Tina Fey, playing Ms. Palin, echoed the newfound complaints linking them as victims of sexism. (The actual Ms. Palin, by contrast, had once suggested that the Clinton campaign, in complaining of sexism, hadn't helped other female politicians.) A tight-lipped Amy Poehler, "SNL's" faux Hillary, described sexism as "an issue which I am surprised to hear people suddenly care about."

Speaking yesterday, Mrs. Clinton appeared uninterested in finding a place in the all-Palin, all-the-time rhetoric that has dominated political commentary lately. She barely mentioned the GOP vice presidential candidate and never specifically criticized her.

"No way; no how; no McCain; no Palin," she said in her most direct mention of the GOP figure.

The chief targets of her criticism were the policies of the Bush administration which she blamed for rising unemployment and a loss of manufacturing jobs overseas in working-class communities such as this one.

Mrs. Clinton accused the Bush administration of acting as though nothing can be done about such job losses. "That is what John McCain says," she continued, "It is not what Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the Democrats say."

There was some irony in Mrs. Clinton's use of the issue of exported jobs in advancing Mr. Obama's candidacy. It was that issue that Mr. Obama had tried to use as a silver bullet against her candidacy during the Ohio primary when he portrayed her as a champion of trade policies that had led to the flight of American jobs overseas.

But that was then, and this is seven weeks before the general election.

As her speech ended and the session broke up, many listeners sought refuge from the gym's rising temperatures with a quick dash to the exits. But others lingered at the rope line surrounding the makeshift stage, seeking handshakes, pictures and autographs.

The scene resembled countless other post-rally encounters over the last 19 months, in Iowa, New Hampshire and here in Ohio. For more than half an hour, a patient senator chatted smiled, and wrote a neat, script, "Hillary," on books and T-shirts. Only this time, some of the T-shirts said, "Obama."

Another female political leader, Gov. Janet Napolitano, of Arizona, campaigned in Pittsburgh yesterday for Mr. Obama, visiting in Baldwin where she lived from age 4 to 6 while her father worked at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; in Mt. Lebanon, where she met with Obama volunteers and a woman's group; and at Chatham University, where she got an earful from Obama supporters who think the Democrats need to fight more fiercely.

"It's frustrating to see so many lies perpetrated by the McCain campaign and not see a more forceful response," said Georgia Blotzer.

By James O'Toole, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 15, 2008

For the last two weeks, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has fueled Senator John McCain's surge so that most national polls show he is now running neck and neck with Senator Barack Obama in the presidential election. But for the next two months, how well Mr. McCain handles his relationship with President Bush may matter more for his election chances.

Modern political history shows that it will not be easy. Since ratification in 1951 of the constitutional amendment barring any candidate from winning more than two presidential elections, five nominees have sought to extend their party's control of the White House for a third straight term. Four of them failed.

The most recent example, Vice President Al Gore in 2000, illustrates the challenge. His political circumstances diverged from Mr. McCain's in important ways. Yet Mr. Gore, too, felt compelled to distance himself from a polarizing incumbent and establish a strong independent theme against a newcomer promising change.

"At times it may look like a game of Twister," said Tad Devine, a Gore 2000 campaign adviser. His candidate fell short by 537 votes in Florida.

Analysts in both parties consider Mr. McCain's task more difficult - but hardly impossible.

The Clinton Question

President Bill Clinton represented a conundrum for Mr. Gore's 2000 campaign. He had a robust record of economic achievement, but the boom had begun to fade. He retained job approval ratings well above 50 percent, but he carried the personal disgrace of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Campaign strategists differed, then and now, on the right tactics for his vice president. Mr. Gore "should have used President Clinton all the time," said Matthew Dowd, a top 2000 Bush campaign official. The Clinton White House shared that view.

The Gore campaign did not. Mr. Clinton "had viscerally low marks with key groups of swing voters," said a top strategist, Carter Eskew.

"I saw the same numbers," said Daron Shaw, one of Mr. Dowd's colleagues in the Bush campaign, who agreed the Democratic candidate needed to strike a separate path.

Mr. Gore did so in two ways. For his running mate he tapped Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who had blistered Mr. Clinton's personal conduct. And when Mr. Gore spoke as "my own man" at the Democratic convention, he promised a populist fight against "powerful forces" constraining Americans' economic future.

For a while, it worked. Trailing after the Republican convention, Mr. Gore moved into an early September lead over Mr. Bush.

But voters' attention shifted toward personal contrasts that favored the genial Texas governor over the sometimes-awkward Mr. Gore. In debates, the Democrat might have alienated more voters with impatient sighs than he attracted with policy arguments.

"There were not major issues driving the election," recalled Michael Feldman, an aide to the Gore campaign. "That's how the campaign devolved into a conversation about who you'd like to have a beer with."

A Risky Strategy

Today Americans fret about the economy, fear the country is headed in the wrong direction and strongly disapprove of the Republican incumbent's job performance. That makes Mr. McCain's challenge "much tougher," said Fred Steeper, a Republican pollster.

Mr. McCain's complicated history with Mr. Bush represents a mixed blessing. Battling to overcome conservatives' distrust in the Republican nomination race, Mr. McCain embraced White House economic policies he had earlier scorned.

Lately, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, has kept his physical distance from Mr. Bush, who did not even attend the Republican convention. Mr. McCain underscored that distance by reaching all the way to Alaska for Ms. Palin as his running mate and joining Mr. Obama, of Illinois, in embracing the theme of "change."

What the Republican ticket has not done, however, is break with Mr. Bush on the centerpiece issue of the economy. Ms. Palin displayed little familiarity with economic policy details in her interview last week with Charles Gibson of ABC News, but the instincts she articulated matched Mr. Bush's preference for minimizing government's role.

"They have separated a bit but haven't really enunciated" any shifts in policy, Mr. Dowd said. "It's almost like their slogan is, 'If you want a change from us, vote for us' - or 'We broke it, let us fix it.' "

Thus Mr. Obama vows to hammer away at the idea that a McCain presidency would represent a third Bush term. At the same time, Mr. McCain still has 50 days to tack toward the middle, and a running mate whose popularity on the right can provide political cover.

Having run against Mr. Bush once before, some Democrats also warn, Mr. McCain may retain enough credibility to shift gears and try it again.

"The Obama campaign is making the Bush-McCain relationship the strategic focus of their entire campaign," Mr. Eskew said. "This is perhaps understandable given Bush's numbers, but it is risky."

By JOHN HARWOOD, The New York Times, September 14, 2008

WASHINGTON - After largely staying on the sidelines, the types of independent groups that so affected the 2004 presidential campaign are flooding back as players in the final sprint to the election this fall, financing provocative messages on television, in mailboxes and through the Internet.

MoveOn, a progressive group started a decade ago, says it will double its advertising budget to $7 million and start a campaign this week that ties the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, to lobbyists.

The Service Employees International Union has begun a $2.1 million advertising campaign that criticizes Mr. McCain's economic record, while a smattering of smaller liberal groups are testing out more limited television campaigns, including one by two groups - Brave New PAC and Democracy for America - that asserts his experience as a prisoner of war "is not a good prerequisite" to be president.

The Minutemen, a group calling for stricter border security, has filed paperwork with election officials reporting that it is running mailers against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee for president.

An anti-abortion group, BornAliveTruth.org, announced Monday it would begin running an advertisement against Mr. Obama in New Mexico and Ohio that features a woman who survived a botched abortion.

And the American Issues Project, a conservative group whose main backer is a major fund-raiser for Mr. McCain, said it was considering whether to expand its efforts beyond its existing advertisement that links Mr. Obama to the 1960s radical William Ayers Jr.

Hewing to their reformist themes, the McCain and Obama campaigns initially tried to discourage such activities on their behalf. But as the race has intensified in its closing weeks, the campaigns have increasingly turned a blind eye to the activities of these groups, which sometimes operate outside campaign finance rules and with little accountability.

The activities have led aides to both candidates to trade accusations that the other is secretly behind the new attacks by the independent groups. Campaign watchdogs are on the lookout for whether the activities run afoul of election laws that prohibit coordination between the groups and the campaigns.

Citing changes to the rules that make it easier for outside groups to advertise right up to Election Day, political advertising analysts predicted that the new efforts would be the start of a crescendo of attacks.

"I think in the next two weeks you are going to see a lot more of these coming out of the woodwork," said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which monitors expenditures on advertising. "They want to get messages out there that are the most disruptive politically, and the closer you are to Election Day the more disruptive you are by definition."

Mr. Tracey said he doubted that the efforts, many of them at their nascent stages, would come anywhere near matching the level of activity in 2004. So far this year, the outside groups have spent roughly a tenth of the $75 million that their predecessors had at this point four years ago on television advertising. Then, most flocked to help the campaign of the Democratic nominee that year, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, when it was short of cash.

The leaders of the groups say their donors and members have stepped up their efforts because polls suggest the race has gotten closer and become increasingly dominated by harsh exchanges between the campaigns.

Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn, said he decided to step up the group's advertising plans after donations rose significantly when Mr. McCain decided to pick as his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, a social conservative whose addition to the ticket gave Mr. McCain a boost in several public polls.

"We're just following our members' mandate," Mr. Pariser said.

MoveOn's membership has grown to 4.2 million from 3.2 million in the past year, largely because of the popularity of Mr. Obama's candidacy. The group is also planning to spend $4 million on voter registration efforts in swing states, focusing on young voters.

Other Democratic strategists said that donors' fears about how the Obama campaign might react to an independent media effort had faded amid what they believed to be more encouraging signals from Obama officials, as well as a growing sense of urgency as the race has tightened.

Steve Phillips, the president of PowerPac.org, an independent group that supported Mr. Obama in the Democratic primary, said it was moving ahead with plans for a $10 million effort focused on turning out black and Latino voters. Mr. Phillips is also talking to others about an outside media effort that attacks Mr. McCain.

"There is another set of conversations going on about advertising - and around hard-hitting advertising, frankly," he said. "A lot of people want to hit back hard."

Mike Lux, a Democratic political consultant, and Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, are leading another set of discussions on the left about supporting an outside effort. The pair convened a conference call last week for potential donors to discuss where they might funnel their money, specifically encouraging a focus on older white women.

Similar activity continues on the right, with new donors like Raymond Ruddy - a former supporter of Mitt Romney, who sought the Republican nomination this year - kicking in $350,000 for the advertisement against Mr. Obama on abortion by BornAliveTruth.org.

One of the largest groups, American Issues Project, received its initial $2.8 million from the financier Harold Simmons, who, aside from raising tens of thousands of dollars for Mr. McCain, also financed the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

The group's president, Ed Martin, said that donations continued to come in and that his group was weighing its options as it contemplated its final moves.

"Certainly there's going to be a lot of action down the stretch, and we want to be part of it," Mr. Martin said. "It's not like the election isn't close."

By Jim Rutenberg and Michael Luo, The New York Times, September 15, 2008

1. Which presidential candidate from New York would carry the state in November, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani?

2. Whom should Gov. Eliot Spitzer appoint to the Senate to fill Clinton's term if she goes to the White House?

To say things didn't work that way is one of the great understatements of modern New York politics.

Clinton lost the Democratic nominating contest to Barack Obama. Former GOP front-runner Giuliani failed to win a single Republican primary or caucus despite spending tens of millions of dollars.

Even if Clinton had won, Spitzer wouldn't have been the one deciding who'd replace her. The Democrat resigned as governor in March after he was linked to a prostitution ring.

"A lot can change in six months," Miringoff says. And so New York is back in the role it has played in presidential elections for the past 20 years.

"In presidential politics, New York's votes are already assigned," says Maurice Carroll, a former longtime New York City newspaper political reporter now doing polling on New York issues for Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. "So why should either Obama or McCain give much attention to New York, except for the money, except for the publicity?"

Peter LaMassa, 39, of Massapequa, Long Island, says he doubts the presidential candidates will even bother running many campaign ads in New York.

"It makes you question the whole electoral process," says LaMassa, who works in financial services. "I think it's sort of disappointing that only the battleground states get all the attention. It makes some states irrelevant and others so important."

Even with polls tightening to show Republican John McCain might have a chance to carry the state against Democrat Obama - a Siena (College) Research Institute poll released Monday had Obama up 46%-41% - New York is still irrelevant, Baruch College political scientist Douglas Muzzio points out.

"If Obama is in trouble in New York, that's the least of his worries," Muzzio says.

For New York, it used to be different.

For six successive presidential elections, from 1928 to 1948, at least one New Yorker was the presidential candidate of one of the major parties.

In 1944, two New Yorkers squared off: incumbent Democratic President (and former New York governor) Franklin D. Roosevelt and Republican Gov. Thomas E. Dewey.

Roosevelt, the only man ever elected president four times, was the sixth (and last) New Yorker to be president. He died in office in April 1945.

In 1948, Dewey seemed likely to make it five presidential wins in a row for New Yorkers, but he managed to blow a big lead to Democrat Harry Truman.

In those days, "New York was a leader with both parties because its demographic and population characteristics converged with the national demographic and population characteristics," says State University of New York-New Paltz Vice President Gerald Benjamin, the leading academic expert on New York government and politics.

As the country became more suburban and the South and West surged, New York became less important, he says.

"There's no doubt New York has lost some of its luster," says Gov. David Paterson, the former lieutenant governor who got the top job when Spitzer left.

The rest of the country seemed less tolerant of the sometimes boisterous, aggressive attitude of many New Yorkers, some of whom in turn resented the shift.

"New York seems to get lost in the shuffle sometimes," says Kandi Desrosiers, 43, from Rensselaer, N.Y.

Tara Golden of Albany, 28, concurs.

"Democrats always get the New York vote," she says. "I'm a Republican, so I don't really care about Hillary Clinton, (but) I think Giuliani would have been good."

Lamont Pinckney, 40, a digital editor who lives in the Bronx, says he doesn't mind if the presidential candidates focus their attention elsewhere in the remaining weeks of the campaign. "I don't feel it's right to spend so much time in New York when other states have issues and problems," he says.

New Yorkers have had their moments in the sun in recent decades.

Former governor Mario Cuomo became an instant national celebrity after his "Tale of Two Cities" keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic convention, and he seemed poised to be a serious contender for the nomination in 1988 and 1992, but he never put his hat in the ring.

"All you need is the right circumstance," he said this week when asked what it takes to be a hit on the national stage. "If you get there, and get lucky, anything can happen."

By Jay Gallagher, USA TODAY, September 16, 2008

CHICAGO -- Obama family sightings used to be common in Hyde Park, and many residents walked by the presidential candidate's home on a regular basis without thinking much of it.

No longer.

Since late August, concrete and steel barricades have cordoned off Barack Obama's block -- and a sizable stretch of the perpendicular streets on either side of it -- in this Chicago neighborhood. Viewed on an unremarkable Monday afternoon, 51st Street just south of his home was guarded by five Chicago police squad cars and at least six uniformed officers, plus plainclothes guards and Secret Service personnel. Concrete traffic barriers and steel crowd control fences closed off the sidewalk in front of Obama's house; across the street, passersby were partitioned off by a line of steel fences and told by guards to keep moving.

Locals on their way home from work, shopping and school said the new measures are a significant inconvenience, but one they are willing to put up with to ensure the safety of their hometown senator and hands-down electoral favorite.

"I think they're going too far," said high school student Jerman Freeman, 14, who -- along with four friends -- narrowly missed being hit by a car as he stepped into traffic to cross the street away from the barricades on his way home from school. "It's not like I'm going to rush Obama if I see him on the street. They should at least have crossing guards for us. But I want him to be the next president, so if this is what they need to keep him safe, it's okay."

Jay Poston, who lives in a complex across the street from the Obamas' corner, said the measures "will definitely take some getting used to." She remembers more relaxed days when, she said, she would see the Obamas on the porch and her daughter was a counselor in a program attended by one of Obama's daughters at the local Jewish Community Center.

"They're probably keeping track of all our visitors and comings and goings. My phone's probably tapped right now," she said, only half-joking. "It's strange to see all this. But that's the way of our world."

Signs prohibiting parking, stopping or standing along the stretch of 51st Street south of Obama's house have been installed, and the local bus stops have been relocated. Belinda Stewart, a 47-year-old building services worker who lives nearby, noted this will make the already difficult parking situation even worse, especially once winter snow restrictions kick in.

"They should give us permits so people who live nearby can still park on that street," she said.

Michelle Gilbert, 47, an attorney who lives several blocks away, is a member of the Jewish reform temple across the street from Obama's house, inside the barricades.

"At first people were asking me if something was wrong at the temple," she said. "Some people didn't even know he lived there, but they do now."

Thanks to the changes, she has had to keep reminding herself to go straight instead of turning when she drives home, she said, and changed her dog-walking route.

"I don't mind," she said. "It's not a big deal to the dog."

By Kari Lydersen, The Washington Post, September 15, 2008

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Sen. John McCain struggled Monday for a consistent economic message in the face of the weekend's Wall Street meltdown, saying first that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong" and then abruptly shifting to say the fundamentals are "at great risk."

At a morning rally in Jacksonville, McCain noted what he called "tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street,'' but continued to say he believes the economy is sound -- a line from his stump speech for which Democrats have mocked him.

"Our economy, I think, is still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times,'' McCain said. "I promise you, we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street."

Sen. Barack Obama seized on McCain's assessment of the health of the economy, blasting the Republican for being "disturbingly out of touch" with the reality that everyday Americans face.

"I just think he doesn't know," Obama said in Grand Junction, Colo. "He doesn't get what's happening between the mountain in Sedona where he lives and the corridors of Washington where he works.... Why else would he say, today, of all days -- just a few hours ago -- that the fundamentals of the economy are still strong? Senator -- what economy are you talking about?"

By the afternoon, McCain had altered his message. Speaking before a town hall meeting with a Hispanic organization in Orlando, McCain sought to explain that his earlier comments had been intended as praise for the resilience of American workers.

"And my opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals -- the American worker and their innovation, their entrepreneurship, the small business, those are the fundamentals of America, and I think they're strong," he said in Orlando.

But a few moments later, he described the country's current financial situation as "a crisis" and repeatedly said he was concerned about the fundamentals of the economy.

"I know Americans are hurting,'' McCain said. "The fundamentals of our economy are at risk.... And those fundamentals are threatened, they are threatened and at risk because some on Wall Street have treated Wall Street like a casino.''

He repeated that message several times, each time sounding more worried and less reassuring.

"Our economy is at risk today, have no doubt how serious this problem is,'' McCain said. "We've got to fix this economy, which the fundamentals of are at great risk right now.... I want to promise you that it's my highest priority. "

In separate appearances, McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, both assailed a corporate culture on Wall Street that they promised to change if elected. They condemned payouts to the CEOs of financial institutions which are now failing.

"We've seen self-interest, greed, irresponsibility, and corruption undermine these hardworking American people," McCain said in Orlando as he campaigned with former Rep. Jack Kemp, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and others.

"We're going to reform the way that Wall Street does business and put an end to the greed that has driven our markets into chaos," he said. We'll stop multimillion-dollar payouts to CEOs that have broken the public trust."

Palin, holding a solo rally in Golden, Colo., vowed that "John McCain and I are going to put an end to the mismanagement and abuses in Washington and on Wall Street."

Obama took up the same theme. He called the economic news "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" and attempted to link the failures of the institutions to Bush policies that McCain supported.

"I certainly don't fault Senator McCain for these problems," Obama said. "But I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It's the same philosophy we've had for the last eight years -- one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that
prosperity trickles down to everyone else."

Obama also lashed out at CEO salaries, releasing a letter in which he had urged regulators to block golden parachutes for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives.

"Last week, while John McCain praised the plan to rescue Fannie and Freddie without raising any concerns about a golden parachute for their CEOs, I urged Secretary Paulson and Director Lockhart to reject these multimillion dollar bonuses," Obama said. "And I am glad these bonuses will not come to pass."

McCain also released a new television ad, titled "Crisis," which argues that McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, will clean up Wall Street and impose "tougher rules" without "special interest giveaways."

"Our economy in crisis," the ad says. "Only proven reformers John McCain and Sarah Palin can fix it....Leadership, experience for the change we need."

McCain officials continued to press their case that Obama would raise taxes, a move they said would worsen the financial crisis and threaten the pocketbooks of middle-class taxpayers (Obama's plan does not raise taxes on households earning less than $250,000 a year.)

"Today's economic news is a reminder of how out-of-touch Obama's plans to raise taxes are." said Republican National Committee spokesman Alex Conant. "With Americans' jobs and savings in jeopardy, this is no time to raise taxes like Obama proposes."

In Jacksonville, McCain said that "We believe that the time had come and gone that the taxpayers should be viewed as the solution to the problems that are not of their making.''

He called for an "environment'' of "robust energy supplies, lower inflation, control health care costs, access international markets'' and reducing the "burden" of government.

Without specifics, he said "The McCain-Palin administration will be replacing the outdated patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight and bring transparency and accountability to Wall Street.''

Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, accused McCain of repeating "widely debunked lies about Barack Obama's record on tax cuts and his false claim to have never requested a single earmark or pork project for the state of Arizona."

By Robert Barnes and Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post, September 16, 2008

Yesterday's meltdown on Wall Street brought the economy roaring back to the center of the presidential campaign, and the question for the final seven weeks of the general-election campaign is whether Barack Obama or John McCain can convince voters that he is capable of leading the country out of the morass.

McCain faces the bigger challenge. As the Republican nominee, he must answer for what has happened on President Bush's watch and offer a plausible explanation for why his conservative administration would be genuinely different. Obama already is attacking him as ill-equipped to deal with the financial crisis and has aggressively moved to tie a future McCain administration to a lobbyist-dominated Washington culture.

Obama's challenge is different. He begins with the reality that Democrats are seen as the party that is more trusted to deal with the economy. Despite that, he has struggled through much of the year to develop a compelling economic message. Where he remains suspect is on the strength of his leadership and his ability to connect with working- and middle-class voters.

McCain is playing on those qualms in his counterattacks.

Even before yesterday's bad news, the economy was the top issue on voters' minds. But over the past two weeks, other issues -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin being the most obvious -- have dominated the political discussion. That phase of the campaign may have ended.

Neither has truly won the confidence of voters, and yesterday neither offered fresh ideas about how to deal with what has become a mess of huge proportions.

By McCain's own admission, the economy is not his natural turf, and his comments yesterday seemed less than sure-footed. At his first event of the day, he acknowledged that the economy is in difficult straits and promised to shake up Washington and Wall Street. But he also said he still thinks that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

The Obama campaign pounced on those words, saying they showed McCain to be "disturbingly out of touch" with the reality that everyday Americans face. At a rally in Grand Junction, Colo., Obama wondered: "What economy are you talking about?" The comments also seemed at odds with McCain's new television commercial that declares an economic crisis.

By the time the Republican nominee had made the short flight to Orlando for a town hall meeting, his campaign had e-mailed reporters new remarks he would deliver. They seemed a 180-degree turn. If McCain's earlier comments had seemed designed to reassure, his new ones were dire. "The American economy is in a crisis -- in a crisis," he repeated.

Obama has been under pressure from Democrats, nervous about McCain's post-convention rise in the polls, to refocus his campaign message on the economy. Campaigning in Colorado, he described the recent series of events as "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" and accused Washington and Wall Street of failures.

"I certainly don't fault Senator McCain for these problems," he said. "But I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It's the same philosophy we've had for the last eight years -- one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else."

Obama accused McCain of embracing a philosophy that has opposed tougher regulations -- "one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises." McCain's campaign accused Obama of embracing "pessimism, defeatism and weakness" in questioning the Republican's praise of the ingenuity and vitality of American workers and charged that an Obama administration would mean higher taxes and burdensome regulation just when the economy can least afford it.

"Everything that's been happening in the last week and a half reminds voters what's at stake in this election," Democratic pollster Peter Hart said. "Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

-- they all may sound like arcane terminology to the voters. But in the end they know it's about housing, about the ability to invest in new ideas, and it's about holding on to jobs."

As a result, voters will be looking for more than accusations and boilerplate from the two nominees. "How the candidates respond to this will be critical to Americans' assessment of whether they're ready for the job," Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said in an e-mail. "In the big picture of this campaign, this issue is a 'jump ball.' "

That the issue of the economy is anywhere close to even between the candidates is remarkable. Given that Republicans have controlled the White House for the past eight years and that the normal advantage Democrats hold as the party best able to handle the economy, Obama ought to have a clear edge over McCain.

The Democratic nominee does score higher than his rival on the economy, but not by as much as he should, which is why Democratic strategists have been urging his campaign to refocus its message on the economy and to do so more forcefully.

In a memo issued over the weekend, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg concluded that by emphasizing a reform message aimed at shaking up Washington, McCain and Palin had managed to draw even with Obama on who would stand up to special interests in Washington, narrow the gap between the two tickets on the economy and diminish the importance of economic issues as the most significant driver of voters' decisions.

Greenberg predicted in a telephone interview that the economy "will soar as a voting issue" because of the huge shocks that have hit Wall Street. "It will force the discussion to a very serious thing -- not that Palin is frivolous -- but I think now people want to know where McCain and Obama are going to take the country."

The challenge for McCain and Obama is to help people understand what has happened. The shocks have come from many directions this year. The mortgage crisis and the wave of foreclosures hit from one direction. Rising world oil prices -- and with them higher prices at the gas pump and for the coming winter's supply of home heating oil -- seemingly came from another.

Added to that is the collapse of financial giants, beginning with the bailout of Bear Stearns and continuing through Sunday's decision not to bail out Lehman Brothers. These financial market meltdowns have both symbolic and real effects on average Americans, even if they cannot understand exactly what has happened or why.

President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are on the front lines of this crisis now, but come January, McCain or Obama will be in charge. They have less than 50 days to demonstrate they're capable of dealing with it.

Howard Wolfson, who was communications director for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Democratic primary campaign, described the financial meltdown as a "3 a.m. moment" for Wall Street. "Will either candidate offer an explanation of the problem and a plan to fix it that will reassure voters and break through the din?" he asked.

After all the uproar and chatter of the past two weeks, the campaign may be heading back to fundamentals.

By Dan Balz and Robert Barnes, The Washington Post, September 16, 2008

In the military culture that shaped John McCain, there is no more important responsibility than the promotion boards that select the right officers for top positions of command. It's a sacred trust in McCain's world, because people's lives are at stake.

McCain wrote in his memoir of the officer's responsibility for those who serve under him: "He does not risk their lives and welfare for his sake, but only to answer the shared duty they are called to answer."

McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee. Two weeks later, it is still puzzling that he selected a person who, for all her admirable qualities, is not prepared by experience or interest to be commander in chief. No promotion board in history would have made such a decision.

Because of Palin's dynamism and political appeal, she's being hailed as an "inspired choice," to use President Bush's words. And she certainly has energized the Republican ticket: The polls show it, as do the enthusiastic crowds. And if a politician's primary responsibility is to get elected, this may indeed have been a sublime choice. But was it the right one? And what does it tell us about McCain?

McCain is 72, and he has had a serious bout with a virulent form of cancer. Thus, he had a special responsibility to pick a running mate who could be, in effect, a deputy commander -- someone who could take over for him if his health should fail. The country is at war, as McCain so often reminds us, and he was picking someone who might be responsible for the security of the nation.

McCain's appeal is that he presents himself as a man of principle -- a person who will do the right thing, even if it is politically costly. He did that in championing the troop surge in Iraq, and he has taken courageous stands in the Senate for years. He defied his party on issues he believed in -- from ethics reform to climate change to torture.

But John McCain also likes to win. And he has an impulsive streak, sometimes bordering on recklessness, which is described by many of his friends and by McCain himself in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers." The desire to win, and the impulsiveness, converged in his decision to pick Palin -- a bold move that has allowed McCain to regain his maverick identity.

Palin is an immensely engaging political personality. But that doesn't make her a suitable commander in chief for a nation at war. She has almost no knowledge or experience of foreign affairs; no military leader would entrust command to someone so inexperienced or unprepared. Her performance in her first major interview did little to allay concerns. In speaking about Russia, for example, she was much sharper in tone than the Bush administration has been.

Barack Obama faces a similar question, but he has been in the national spotlight for four years and has traveled, studied, prepared -- and chose in Joe Biden a running mate who is one of the Senate's real experts on foreign policy. The country will watch Palin's performance in interviews and the debate with Biden, but right now she seems a genuinely risky bet.

Thinking about the Palin choice, you begin to ponder other moves McCain has made on the road to winning the Republican nomination. McCain was right a few years ago to warn that Bush's tax cuts would have potentially ruinous fiscal consequences; now he favors extending the cuts that have produced a crisis of debt and deficit. Why did he switch his position, other than political opportunism?

McCain even seems to have forgotten what saved his greatest legislative achievement, which is campaign finance reform. When he was asked during the Saddleback Church debate which Supreme Court justices he would not have nominated, he named Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens. It happens that those are four of the five justices who voted in 2003 to uphold the McCain-Feingold law.

In May 2006, after McCain had courted the Rev. Jerry Falwell in an effort to win conservative support, I asked him if he was bending his principles for the sake of winning. "I don't want it that badly," McCain answered. "I will continue to do what is right. . . . If that means I can't get the Republican nomination, fine. I've had a happy life. The worst thing I can do is sell my soul to the devil."

He was right.

By David Ignatius, The Washington Post, September 14, 2008

GRAND JUNCTION - Presidential hopeful Barack Obama used the financial meltdown thousands of miles away on Wall Street to tout his message of change here today, saying that Washington and Wall Street weren't "minding the store" and that ordinary working Americans need a stable economy to pay their bills and mortgages.

Obama, who said the United States has found itself in the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, didn't blame Republican opponent John McCain but said the economic philosophy he subscribes to would result in the same problems.

"It's the same philosophy we've had for the last eight years, one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else," said Obama, standing before a barn built at the turn of the last century and a stack of security-enhancing hay bales.

It was the first visit to the Western Slope by a Democratic presidential candidate since Harry Truman arrived in 1948.

That historic fact did not escape the crowd of more than 4,000 who stood in line for hours Saturday to get tickets and then stood in line again for hours today in the hot sun to gain entrance to an unusually bucolic setting for national political stumping.

The site of Obama's speech, the Cross Orchards Living History Farm, is a restored apple farm now surrounded by subdivisions in a city growing faster than just about anywhere else in Colorado because of a nearby oil and gas boom.

Obama touched on energy and agriculture issues in a speech that hewed fairly close to his standard stump speech. But in his expanding on details of his energy, health care and tax-reform plans, his speech played well to a mostly working-class crowd who sported a lot of Obama T-shirts and buttons.

"That was a speech he needed to give. He attacked McCain point by point," said former Mesa County public defender David Eisner as he filed out of the farm past rows of antique tractors.

"Totally awesome," was high school freshman Noah Bradford's assessment after he took an excused absence from school to see Obama.

Obama's initial attempt to localize his speech by referring to the Ute Indians, brought some nervous groans from the crowd when he mispronounced "Ute." But that gaffe was overlooked after his speech gathered steam.

"It was a strong speech. He has a lot of confidence. He is someone willing to go outside the box," said Clement Frost, chairman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. Frost drove four hours from Ignacio this morning to accept an invitation from the Obama campaign to shake the candidate's hand.

The campaign issued other surprising invitations.

Reeves Brown, the Republican director of the Club 20 lobbying group for Western Slope issues, said he responded to a "very generous" invitation to meet Obama after his speech.

Brown said he wasn't swayed from his support of John McCain but called Obama's talk "a great political speech."

He added, "I'm skeptical that a senator from Chicago is going to have the West's best interests at heart."

Bill Haggerty, a Democratic political activist who writes a hiking column for a local newspaper, said he was shocked when he received a phone call Sunday afternoon during the Broncos game asking whether he would like to introduce Obama.

Haggerty garnered a loud cheer from the crowd when he held up a Grand Valley-grown peach during the introduction. He earned thanks from Obama when he gave him a basket of peaches for the road.

The speakers who warmed up the crowd for Obama - Rep Kathleen Curry, D-Gunnison; U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar; Gov. Bill Ritter; and Mesa County Commission candidate Dan Robinson - hit on issues paramount in the West: water protection, energy development, sportsmen's rights, environmental protection, farming and ranching.

Obama also made a number of references to the importance of protecting water in the West.

"He went to some local issues like water," said retired environmental scientist Frank Nemanich. "I think it's really great to see someone come to western Colorado and do that."

By Nancy Lofholm and Allison Sherry, The Denver Post, September 15, 2008

The Democrat's latest attack on John McCain takes poor aim at his age and knowledge of technology.

After running a brilliant and historic primary battle to defeat Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign is now in disarray. Why?

Perhaps it's because Barack Obama has never run a competitive race against a Republican. After all, Obama won his U.S. Senate seat in Illinois by running against Alan Keyes, a fire-and-brimstone, right-wing black carpetbagger from Maryland (or perhaps Mars) who had no real ties to Illinois.

Now, facing John McCain's blistering ads, Obama seems unable to fight fire with fire. The Democratic rank and file are furious (while simultaneously denouncing McCain's negativity).

Obama, they may be realizing, doesn't know how to close the deal.

Nonetheless, the Obama campaign has vowed, once again, to take the gloves off and go after McCain hard, linking him to President Bush and highlighting the fact that the Arizona senator is out of touch.

One flaw with this supposed course correction is that it isn't one. McCain-Bush-Economy has been Obama's message for months now. Indeed, ABC News' Jake Tapper wrote on his blog that this is actually the fourth time Team Obama has pledged to engage in a bracing round of fisticuffs.

To prove his newfound determination to go bare knuckle against McCain, Obama unveiled a new TV ad, to air in key states.

It begins with the date "1982," a picture of a disco ball and footage of McCain in clunky glasses from his first year in Washington. "Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn't," explains the announcer. "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 $200 billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class." All the while it shows ancient computers and a cordless phone that looks like a World War II-era walkie-talkie.

The tax-cuts and economy barbs are familiar boilerplate. What's new is the charge of computer illiteracy and the blatant attempt to attack McCain as too old for the job -- and that speaks volumes.

First, the ad is dishonest. McCain has been one of the Senate's leading authorities on telecom and the Internet.

In 2000, Forbes magazine called him the "Senate's savviest technologist." That same year, Slate's Jacob Weisberg gushed that McCain was the most "cybersavvy" of all the presidential candidates that year, a crop that included none other than Al Gore. Being chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Weisberg explained, "forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him."

Weisberg, an Obama booster, now disingenuously mocks McCain as "flummoxed by that newfangled doodad, the personal computer."

One reason McCain is not versed in the mechanical details of sending e-mail and typing on a keyboard is that the North Vietnamese broke his fingers and shattered both of his arms. As Forbes, Slate and the Boston Globe reported in 2000, McCain's injuries make using a keyboard painfully laborious. He mostly relies on his wife and staff to show him e-mails and websites, though he says he's getting up to speed.

"It's extraordinary," Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said, "that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn't know how to send an e-mail." For the record, President Clinton sent exactly two e-mails while in office, according to the archives in his presidential library.

Besides, by this logic, Obama is even less qualified to be commander in chief because, unlike McCain, Obama has never fired a gun, flown a plane or led men during wartime.

And if the Obama campaign did not intend to mock a disabled veteran, what does it say about his supposedly "cybersavvy" campaign that they don't know how to conduct a five-minute Google search to find out these things?

But the most revealing aspect of the ad is who it speaks to. According to Gallup, Obama has a 20- to 30-point advantage over McCain among 18- to 29-year-olds. Indeed, his base (not counting African American voters) is upscale college kids and new-economy young voters. These are the voters most likely to think being able to send an e-mail is, like, totally crucial.

The only other constituency -- other than the press -- that will be jazzed by such an attack are the Web-symbiotes of the left-wing netroots, another demographic Obama has locked up.

Older Americans, working-class Americans, veterans and other voters Obama desperately needs probably won't care and might even take offense at Obama's condescension.

There are two explanations for the ad. One is that Obama released it to reassure his base that he's serious about attacking McCain, not to win over swing voters. That, or the campaign actually thinks it's an effective ad.

Either way, the lesson is the same: Obama doesn't know how to get outside his echo chamber. He talks about being bipartisan to hard-core liberals who like the words, but he hates actual deviation from the liberal line. He talks about new ideas, but he merely repackages old ones.

He is a candidate who has never had to sell himself to voters who weren't already sold. And it shows.




By Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2008

One week ago today, I launched Stumper's general-election coverage with an in-depth look at where the "Race for the White House" stood in the wake of the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions. While the national polls had swung about 9 points in John McCain's direction since the Democrats left Denver, the Real Clear Politics electoral map still tilted every so slightly toward Barack Obama, 273 to 265. But the Illinois senator's slim lead was hardly set in stone--as I noted at the time. "No battleground state polls have been released since the second day of the Republican Convention," I wrote. "If the national surveys are right and McCain has in fact received a 5-point post-St Paul bounce, that enthusiasm will almost certainly trickle down." I promised to revisit the map once the dust had settled.

Well, now it has. And what it shows is ... drumroll, please ... more of the same. According to Real Clear Politics, this week's map, posted above, is identical to last week's. Obama is still leading 273 electoral votes to 265.

Does that mean that Obama has emerged unscathed? Hardly. The Democratic nominee may have managed to maintain his razor-thin eight-vote margin--but he's done it by the skin of his teeth. Even if McCain has yet to flip a state, a closer look at the latest battleground polling reveals that the Arizonan's gains have, in fact, trickled down. They've had two effects. First, a handful of red states that Obama once hoped to win now seem either out of reach or more favorable to McCain, whether temporarily or permanently. And second, McCain is suddenly within striking distance in a group of Blue States where Obama until recently enjoyed a comfortable lead. The result: a campaign that once boasted about redrawing the electoral map by targeting an unprecedented 18 battlegrounds has been forced to focus on a more familiar swath of states--and even play defense in places it had hoped to win easily. In the last week, the Red States have gotten redder--and the Blue States have gotten purpler.

Take Montana and Georgia. In 2004, George W. Bush won the former by 20.5 percent and the later by 16.6 percent. But after clinching the Democratic nomination in early June, Obama put both states on his target list and deployed hundreds of volunteers and staffers to Atlanta and Helena to open field offices and register voters. He had reason for optimism. In early July, Rasmussen showed Obama ahead in Montana by 5 points; at the same time, an Insider Advantage poll put him a mere 2 points behind McCain in Georgia. But the latest surveys from those same firms tell a different story. According to an Insider Advantage sounding released last Thursday, McCain now leads 56-38 in the Peach State--an 18-point gulf. Meanwhile, the first postconvention poll by Rasmussen gives the Republican an 11-point advantage in the Treasure State, 53-42. Real Clear Politics has McCain ahead by an average of 13.4 percent in the former and 9.0 percent in the latter. Which means they may be out of reach.

The news for Obama in the key Bush states of Ohio and Florida isn't any better. In late July, the battle for the Sunshine State was tied at about 45 percent on average, and after Denver, Obama trailed by as little as 2.6 percent. But in the post-St. Paul period, McCain's Florida numbers have skyrocketed. Since last Monday, four surveys have hit the wires, with PPP (McCain +5), Quinnipiac (+7) and Insider Advantage (+8) all showing a growing lead for McCain; only FOX News still puts Obama within striking distance. According to the RCP average, McCain now boasts his largest edge (5 percent) since late June. The McCainward shift in the Buckeye State looks much the same. Of the six polls released since St. Paul, five show the Arizonan ahead--boosting him to his biggest RCP lead in this crucial, close-run battleground (2.5 percent) since mid-May. Even Virginia, a Bush state where Obama had held McCain to a tie for much of the cycle, seems to have drifted right. There, McCain now leads by 2.6 percent, 49.3 to 46.7--the largest margin for either candidate since May. The Republican nominee has also edged ahead in the latest polls out of New Mexico and Nevada--both Red in 2004, both leaning toward Obama before St. Paul.

But the most troubling developments for the Dems are probably in two states Kerry won in 2004: Pennsylvania and Minnesota. At the end of July, Obama led in the Keystone State by a whopping nine points, 51.7 percent to 41.7 percent; at the start of September he was ahead by a healthy five, 47.4 to 42.4. The three polls released since St. Paul, however, show McCain closing fast. In the Quinnipiac survey, McCain trails by a measly three points after lagging by seven in mid-August; Strategic Vision and Rasmussen put him within two. Overall, Obama's average lead in Pennsylvania--2.3 percent--is his smallest since capturing the nomination. And while a CNN/Gallup poll released between the conventions gave Obama a 12-point lead in Minnesota, the two soundings out since the GOP left the state earlier this month suggest that McCain is either tied with Obama at 45 percent (Star Tribune) or trailing by a statistically insignificant 2-percent margin (Survey USA). Couple that with the surprising 46 Obama-43 McCain result in the latest Washington survey, and the Rust Belt and upper Midwest are starting to look too close for Chicago's comfort.

It's not all doom and gloom for Obama. So far this month, he's seems to have solidified his narrow margin in Michigan and New Hampshire (states McCain is hoping to flip) while expanding his edges in the Bush states of Iowa and Colorado, where he now leads by 9.7 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively. If he wins these states in November--along with Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin and New Mexico--he wins the White House. New Democratic registrations and Chicago's sophisticated field operation will surely help. But what the last week of polling has shown beyond any doubt is that McCain's successful convention and shocking choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate have shifted the map ever so slightly to the right, transforming a landscape that favored Obama into a landscape that favors, well, no one. For the next six weeks, then, expect Obama and Joe Biden to play defense (Pennsylvania, Michigan) as well as offense (Colorado, Virginia, Nevada) while focusing much of their attention on the king of all swing states: Ohio. But don't expect the final map to look all that different from 2004.

By Andrew Roman, Newsweek, September 15, 2008

WASHINGTON -- In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and intellectual elite.

Over the weekend, the moneyed class became much more vulnerable. The foolishness of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties" never sounded so up to date.

Americans don't mind wealthy and even rapacious capitalists as long as they deliver the goods to everyone else. But when the big boys drag everyone else down, Americans rise up in righteous anger. The New Deal political alignment endured for decades because the financial elites were so profoundly discredited by the Great Depression. The New Deal coalition dissolved only when prosperity began to seem durable and only after the GOP discovered the joys of baiting Hollywood, the media and the academy.

There is always something slightly phony about anti-elitist politics. Plenty of investment bankers are Democrats, and Republican politicians who claim to speak for devoutly religious cultural conservatives are usually far removed from the world (and the values) of those whose votes they court and whose resentments they stoke.

But the captains of John McCain's campaign figured they might wring one more election victory out of the culture war. They ridiculed Barack Obama as the celebrity candidate loved by Europeans -- Europe is always in the elitist camp -- and harped on his unfortunate comments, ripped out of context, about "bitter" voters who "cling to guns or religion."

For good measure, McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. A religious and proudly gun-toting mom, Palin has turned expertise itself into a badge of elitism, proclaiming pleasure in her lack of a "big fat resume" that "shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment."

But anti-Washington politics is itself rooted in the interests of the financial elite. When the private economy goes haywire, it is always the federal government that has to step in. When those whom Teddy Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth" get out of hand, Washington is the only town with the authority to hold their power in check.

Therefore, the party of the business elite has always pursued its interests behind slogans proclaiming a war on Washington and its "bureaucrats" -- and never mind that a little more regulation might have prevented the subprime-mortgage-buying, short-term-profit-maximizing Wall Streeters from wrecking the economy.

All of a sudden, the culture war seems entirely beside the point, an unaffordable luxury in a time of economic turmoil. What politicians actually believe about the economy, what fixes they propose, whether they side with the wealthy few or the hurting many -- these become the stuff of elections, the reasons behind people's votes.

And nothing more exposes the hypocrisy of financial elites riding the coattails of those who revere small-town religious values than a downturn that highlights the vast gulf in power between the two key components of the conservative coalition. Even cultural conservatives will start to notice that McCain's tax policies are geared toward the wealthy investing class and Obama's toward the paycheck crowd. Even the most ardent friends of business have begun to argue that a re-engagement with sensible regulation is essential to restoring capitalism's health.

For some time, McCain's strategists figured they could deflect attention from the big issues by turning Palin into a country-and-western celebrity and launching so many ill-founded attacks on Obama that the truth would never catch up. The approach of the McCain strategists reflected a low opinion of average voters and some Obama supporters began worrying they might be right.

But those so-called average voters understand the difference between low- and high-stakes elections. They develop a reasonably good sense of who is telling the truth and who is not. And though it sometimes takes a while -- and a shock like this week's economic news -- these voters almost always turn on politicians who manipulate cultural symbols by way of escaping the consequences of their policies.

In 1936, FDR argued that "private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise." He insisted that "freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place."

The stakes in this year's election went way up this week. The days of Paris, Britney, and the exploitation of divisions around race, gender and religion are over.

By E. J. Dionne, The Washington Post, September 16, 2008

The chaos on Wall Street that exploded over the weekend - and caused to Dow to drop by more than 500 points on Monday alone - is, obviously, bad news for just about everyone. But strictly in terms of the looming election, now fewer than 50 days away, the timing may be something of a gift to Barack Obama and the Democrats, who have watched in bafflement since late August as their once-dominant political position has eroded.

Long before this week, the economy had already emerged as the top issue - by far - on the minds of voters. Now, Americans will be inundated with stories about the potentially devastating fallout from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the perilous footing of A.I.G. - thereby focusing their attention even more on the economy and their own financial security.

An election driven by economic anxiety generally works to the Democrats' advantage, simply because more voters tend to identify with the party's economic message than with the G.O.P.'s. Obviously, this doesn't hold when tough economic times coincide with Democratic leadership - like in 1980, when a staggering "misery index" helped seal Jimmy Carter's fate - but it's the Republicans who have owned the White House for the past eight years; bad economic news should only confirm the public's assumptions about their agenda. This may bolster Mr. Obama's frantic effort to make this year's election a referendum on George W. Bush's presidency.

Some clumsiness on John McCain's part also offer Mr. Obama an opportunity in the face of the financial crisis.

First, there is Mr. McCain's close association with Phil Gramm, his old Senate ally and (until July) one of his favorite campaign surrogates. Largely anonymous before this campaign, Mr. Gramm is now widely known for his statement to the Washington Times over the summer that America is in "a mental recession" and that "we have sort of become a nation of whiners." Mr. Obama and the Democrats, needless to say, have relentlessly harped on these words. The problem for Mr. McCain is that they reinforce voters' suspicions about whether Republicans understand and relate to their economic plight.

The financial crisis offers a fresh opening for Mr. Obama to fan the Gramm flames, since it was Mr. Gramm who, back in his Senate days, was one of the prime movers behind the deregulation that has been blamed for ushering in the sub-prime mortgage crisis that led directly to this week's events.

Mr. McCain, who initially named Mr. Gramm one of his campaign co-chairmen, has distanced himself from his friend's remark. But Mr. McCain himself has let slip a few comments of his own that also lend themselves to the old caricature of a Republican Party indifferent to economic struggle. During the Republican primaries, he took heat for admitting that "the issue of economics is not something that I've understood as well as I should," and then this Monday - just as Americans were digesting the stunning news from Wall Street - he declared in a Jacksonville, Florida speech that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

This is more than sufficient to provide Mr. Obama with a strong set of talking points on the stump and in the debates. Over and over, he can tie the financial crisis to the Bush administration and to the deregulation efforts of Mr. Gramm, all while invoking Mr. Gramm's and Mr. McCain's problematic statements. To voters who are naturally skeptical Republicans when the subject is the economy, this indictment will have the ring of truth.

There are a couple of catches for Mr. Obama, though.

The first is that, for all of his much-discussed oratorical capabilities, he is not a particularly talented communicator when it comes to meat-and-potatoes economic issues. He has forged a powerful connection with a chunk of the electorate, but this is largely the result of his own charisma, compelling biography, and the instinctive sense of many people that he represents "the future."

This magic doesn't work nearly as well on swing voters facing economic distress. With these voters, Mr. Obama's party label is his best - and perhaps only - recommendation. When he talks about the economy, he uses the right words, but he lacks the ability of Bill Clinton, who masterfully capitalized on an economic downturn in 1992, to communicate empathy, understanding and wonkish competence all at the same time.

Another problem is that Mr. McCain has been more effective than expected in distancing himself from Mr. Bush. His own reputation as a maverick, an image beaten into most voters' heads over the last decade, helps him in this regard, as does his more recent effort to link that maverick streak to his heroic service in Vietnam. And the selection of Sarah Palin has created even more space.

Mr. McCain is portraying the financial crisis as the product of a selfish band of Wall Street insiders not too different from the Washington insiders he and Mrs. Palin bash on the campaign trail every day. It's not implausible that swing voters will view the G.O.P. candidates as mavericks who happen to be Republicans - and not Republicans masquerading as mavericks.

Fighting an election on the economy against a backdrop of Republican rule and a Wall Street meltdown is, on paper, close to a dream scenario for the Democrats. But it may not be as easy as they think to profit from it.

By Steve Kornacki, The New York Observer, September 16, 2008

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain called for stricter regulations as financial woes deepened on Wall Street, while their campaigns exchanged political volleys over the crisis.

Obama, the Democratic nominee, said President George W. Bush's policies have caused "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.'' He also called for "modernizing'' regulations at a rally in Grand Junction, Colorado.

McCain, the Republican nominee, vowed to "clean up Wall Street'' and "replace the outdated, patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight'' at an event in Jacksonville, Florida. "We will never put America in this position again,'' he said.

Both candidates were trying to score points with voters looking for reassurance after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. became the latest casualty on Wall Street. Barclays Plc and Bank of America Corp. abandoned takeover talks yesterday, forcing Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, into the biggest bankruptcy filing in history.

"People need to have confidence that the candidates for president have some solutions for the way out of this mess,'' said Democratic consultant Peter Fenn. He said both McCain and Obama will have to provide details on how they would avert any further meltdown in the markets.

More Regulation

Neither man vying to replace Bush offered specific fixes today for the crisis other than calling for more regulation.

Obama, 47, an Illinois senator, consulted this morning with his top economic advisers, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. While his campaign issued a statement early in the morning, Obama didn't speak about the crisis until almost five hours after McCain made his first public remarks in Jacksonville.

McCain's campaign also quickly released a television ad, with shots of the Lehman Brothers and New York Stock Exchange building emblems, that says "our economy is in crisis'' and "only proven reformers McCain and Palin can fix it.'' The reference is to McCain's vice-presidential running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska.

The Obama campaign returned fire, highlighting comments McCain, 72, an Arizona senator, made in Florida about the state of the economy.

Fundamentals Strong?

"People are frightened by these events,'' McCain told several thousand supporters in Jacksonville this morning. "The fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very, difficult'' times, he said.

Obama's campaign pounced on the words, alerting reporters where to find a video and calling McCain "out of touch.'' Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden told supporters in Saint Clair Shores, Michigan, that only McCain thinks great progress has been made under the Bush administration.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I could walk from here to Lansing, and I wouldn't run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain,'' Biden said.

At a later appearance in Orlando, Florida, McCain emphasized the strength of the American worker, small businesses and American innovation and entrepreneurism. "Those are the fundamentals of America and I think they are strong,'' he said.

Americans will be weighing the candidates' words carefully, said Julian Zelizer, a history and public affairs professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. "One thing Americans look for in times of turmoil is someone who has a vision and someone who looks like they can make it through the turmoil,'' he said.

Trickle Down

An upending on Wall Street will trickle down to many other Americans because of widespread stock ownership, said David Primo, a political science professor at the University of Rochester in New York. McCain may also have a tougher time dealing with the political fallout than Obama, he said.

"The meltdown cuts against Republicans because, rightly or wrongly, they are viewed as the party closest to Wall Street,'' Primo said.

The two campaigns are using similar language to blame both the government and the banks.

"Too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store,'' Obama said.

Palin told supporters in Golden, Colorado, today that "Washington has been asleep at the switch'' and "management on Wall Street has not run these institutions responsibly.''

White House spokewoman Dana Perino, responding to Obama's attack, said the Bush administration is focusing on the market and economy. "We will leave the partisan politics and empty rhetoric to others,'' she said in an e-mailed statement.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made a similar remark to reporters. "I'm not focused on politics right now,'' he said.

Reducing Disruptions

Speaking at the White House, Bush said policy makers are working to "reduce disruptions'' in the markets. "In the long run, I'm confident that our capital markets are flexible and resilient and can deal with these adjustments,'' he said.

Lehman, the 158-year-old firm, filed a Chapter 11 petition with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan today. The company had lost 94 percent of its market value this year.

Instability in the financial and credit markets left Lehman officials struggling to keep the firm afloat, Ian Lowitt, the firm's chief financial officer, said in a court filing in the bankruptcy case. Liquidity problems plagued Lehman earlier this year, he said.

Bear Stearns Cos., Merrill Lynch & Co. and more than 10 banks couldn't survive this year's credit crunch.

The meltdown will be linked to Bush, the Republicans and McCain's support of Republican philosophies, said Stephen Wayne, a government professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

"It is Obama's turn to bat,'' Wayne said. "Even if he misses, he fans the fires of economic discontent and generates support for the need to change. He may, however, have to change his slogan from 'Yes, we can' to 'Yes, we must!'''

By Kristin Jensen, Bloomberg, September 15, 2008

The 2008 presidential contest between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain is taking place against an economic backdrop that is more troubled than at any time in the past generation.

Rising unemployment, falling real incomes and resurgent inflation are exacting a tremendous toll, putting the economic security of tens of millions of Americans at risk. The disparity of wealth and income between those at the top of the economic scale and everyone else is greater than at any time in decades. And the next president will take office in the teeth of the worst housing crash since the Great Depression.

The two major-party candidates offer sharply varying prescriptions for how to stabilize housing, fix the economy and put the standard of living for working people and the middle-class once again on a rising path. The differences between Obama and McCain are deep-seated, both in their philosophies and their likely policies.

Voters will have a choice between the two dominant economic philosophies that have defined American politics for decades, represented by Democrats and Republicans. For all the focus on personalities, Obama and McCain are not unique. When it comes to economic policy, both are firmly rooted in the main current of their parties.

McCain hews to the Reaganite philosophy that the free market works best to manage the economy. He believes that economic growth cures most ills, benefiting rich, poor and middle class alike. Government should promote growth by cutting taxes across the board and getting out of the way of business. He seems more genuinely committed to small government than the Bush administration and recent Republican majorities in Congress, which stuck to the party's program on taxes, but didn't follow through on spending.

Obama is guided by the notion that growth alone doesn't automatically provide people health care, help them pay for college or offer them training for 21st century jobs. Government should use its powers of taxing, spending and regulating to reduce inequality and benefit people at the bottom and middle of the income spectrum. He would cut taxes for most households, but raise them for those with the highest incomes.

Emphasis on growth

"McCain seems to have put a tremendous amount of emphasis on economic growth. The policies to achieve that are to keep taxes low and government small," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington think tank.

"Obama is concerned about the fairness of the tax burden, and he wants to make investments in things that will strengthen the economy, such as infrastructure. His priorities will be a fairer shake for the middle class and more active help for people who are struggling."

Although voters will have genuine alternatives, the fog of campaign rhetoric is obscuring their true nature. Both Obama and McCain are putting forward economic plans that are more properly viewed as programs for getting themselves elected than for governing.

"Both are proposing massive tax cuts, and the spending cuts they're talking about don't come remotely close to paying for them," said Howard Gleckman, senior research associate at the nonpartisan Urban Institute in Washington. "These guys are both making promises they can't possible keep."

Specifically, McCain says he would make permanent the Bush administration's individual income tax cuts, most of whose benefits have gone to upper-income households. He would press for an array of additional tax cuts, including a reduction in the corporate tax rate.

In contrast to George W. Bush, who pumped up federal spending more than any president since Lyndon Johnson, he would freeze the discretionary portion of federal spending - which doesn't include Social Security, Medicare and military spending - and eliminate so-called earmarks, the funding for special projects pushed by members of Congress.

"We're not about business as usual," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior policy adviser. "McCain would return to an era when every year we made tough spending decisions."

On housing, McCain proposes a program similar to the one President Bush put in place to encourage private lenders to refinance subprime borrowers who can't meet loan terms.

Obama offers a scaled-down, 21st century version of traditional liberalism in which tax cuts play a larger role than new spending initiatives. He would offer tax credits of up to $1,000 for an estimated 150 million low- and middle-income Americans, roll back Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year but keep them for those making less, subsidize health insurance for low- and middle-income workers, and boost spending for education, infrastructure and alternative energy development.

He would also crack down on predatory lending and create a fund to help hard-pressed mortgage borrowers keep their homes, though he hasn't provided details.

"This is not a big government plan," said Austan Goolsbee, Obama's senior economic adviser. "The single biggest line in the Obama budget is tax cuts for ordinary Americans."

Both candidates have voiced support for the government takeover of the giant mortgage resellers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. McCain has said he wants to see the two agencies turned back to the private sector and broken up into smaller companies.

Digging a deeper hole

Looming over the economic choices the next chief executive will make is a ballooning federal budget deficit, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at a near-record $407 billion this fiscal year and $438 billion next year, equal to about 3 percent of the entire U.S. economy. The fiscal shortfall could grow even larger as the bills come due for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rescue costs, plus other outlays to safeguard the financial system. The deficit will restrict the new president's ability to carry out some of the initiatives the candidates tout in their campaigns.

Both candidates promise to slash the deficit or even bring the budget back to balance during his term in the White House. Independent experts scoff.

"Both will simply dig the fiscal hole deeper and put us more into hock to foreigners," Sawhill said. "McCain's proposals are even less fiscally responsible than Obama's."

The Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, calculates that Obama's tax cuts would reduce revenues by a total of $5.4 trillion from 2009 to 2018. McCain tax plans would dig a deeper $7.4 trillion hole based on policy documents provided by his campaign and reach a staggering $11 trillion if the candidate's promises made in stump speeches are taken at face value.

Goolsbee counters that Obama would trim the deficit by ending the Iraq war and removing subsidies now going to Medicare and student loan providers, among other steps. McCain would rely on economic growth and unspecified spending cuts to eliminate the deficit, Holtz-Eakin said.

Some things will have to go

Skeptics argue that spending reductions and economic growth couldn't possibly make up for lost revenue of this magnitude, making large deficits inevitable. The key question, they say, is what campaign promises will be sacrificed when the new president faces the harsh reality of limited resources.

"Obama will have trouble with the ambition of spending he's looking for," said Jonathan Nagler, a political scientist at New York University. "Somewhere, something will have to go, but I don't think it will be the middle-class tax cut, and I don't think it will be health care."

As for McCain, "if he makes the Bush tax cuts permanent, I don't know what he will do," Nagler said.

It's not just the deficit that will set limits on economic policy. Given McCain's commitment to Republican tax-cutting politics and Obama's embrace of Bill Clinton-style limited government, the real issue is how much either man would alter the economy's fundamental direction.

"So much of what's going on is a consequence of open markets and globalization. When you look at what these guys are talking about doing, it's pretty minor stuff," the Urban Institute's Gleckman said.

"When I was in Minneapolis, I talked with a cabdriver who had lost his job refurbishing cell phones when the company moved the plant to China. What would Barack Obama or John McCain do for him?"

Where the candidates stand on key economic issues

	Barack Obama	John McCain
Taxes	Supports ending Bush income tax cuts for households with income above $250,000. Would offer tax credit up to $1,000 to middle-class households and eliminate taxes on seniors making less than $50,000. Would raise top rate on capital gains.	Would extend all Bush income tax cuts. Would lower corporate tax rate and maintain current capital gains rate. Would offer tax credit of up $5,000 for those buying health insurance. Would ban Internet taxes.
Spending	Would spend $15 billion annually on alternative energy development and $18 billion on education. Would cut earmarks to 2001 levels and end subsidies to the oil and gas industry.	Would institute a one-year freeze on nonmilitary discretionary spending. Would veto earmarks. Would provide $7 billion to $10 billion in subsidies to state health insurance pools for high-risk patients.
Budget deficit	Seeks to reduce the deficit by raising taxes on wealthy, cutting special interest spending, closing corporate tax loopholes and ending Iraq war. Supports pay-as-you-go rules that require new spending or tax cuts to be paid for by new revenue or cuts in other programs	Would balance the budget by 2013 by boosting economic growth and clamping down on spending. Would work with Congress on a bipartisan deficit reduction plan.
Social Security, Medicare	Opposes benefit cuts or privatization. Seeks greater efficiencies and cuts in subsidies to Medicare providers. Would impose payroll tax on earnings above $250,000.	Would supplement Social Security with private accounts. Says reform of the programs is needed to address long-term budget deficit. Opposes payroll tax increases.
Trade	Supports free trade agreements only if they include protections for labor and the environment.	Believes globalization is an opportunity for Americans and supports initiatives to reduce trade barriers.
Housing	Would create fund to help homeowners avoid foreclosures.	Would encourage lenders to refinance responsible subprime mortgage borrowers who can't afford existing loans.

By Sam Zuckerman, San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain is trying to put to rest the ethical controversy that's come to be known as "Troopergate," releasing e-mails supporting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's contention that she dismissed her public safety commissioner over budget disagreements, not because he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law.

And, the campaign says, Palin is unlikely to speak with an investigator hired by the state legislature to look into the matter.

Among the e-mails released was one of farewell written by the public safety commissioner himself, Walt Monegan, when he was fired in July. In it, he suggested the governor had reason to believe she had lost his support, and urged his former colleagues to communicate better with her.

"For anyone to lead effectively they must have the support of their team, and I had waited too long outside her door for her to believe that I supported her," he wrote. "Please, choose a different path."

The controversy erupted in the weeks following the firing, as it emerged that Palin, her husband, Todd, and several high-level staffers had contacted Monegan about state trooper Mike Wooten, who had gone through a nasty divorce from Palin's sister before she became governor. While Monegan says no one from the administration ever told him directly to fire Wooten, he says they didn't have to: There was nothing subtle about the repeated contacts.

In July, the four Democrats and eight Republicans on Alaska's Legislative Council voted unanimously to investigate the circumstances of Monegan's dismissal. Although Monegan was an at-will employee who could be fired for almost any reason, lawmakers wanted to see whether Palin tried to use her office to settle a personal score with Wooten.

The state Senate Judiciary Committee voted Friday to issue subpoenas to 13 people, including Palin's husband, to compel cooperation with the investigation. The campaign said it didn't know if Todd Palin planned to challenge his subpoena.

The governor has not been subpoenaed, but the investigator hired by the legislature, Steve Branchflower, said Friday he is interested in speaking with her. Campaign spokesman Ed O'Callaghan said that was unlikely as long as the investigation "remains tainted."

Though the governor initially said she'd cooperate, after she became McCain's running mate in late July, her lawyer sought to have the three-member state Personnel Board take over, alleging that public statements made by the Democratic chair of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Hollis French, indicated the probe was politically motivated.

French had said the results of the investigation could constitute an "October surprise" for the McCain campaign. He later apologized. The campaign also insists that French, Branchflower and Monegan are friends, even though the men say they only know each other professionally and have never socialized.

Democrats charged that the McCain campaign was trying to stall the investigation.

"Rather than cooperating with the investigation, the Republican presidential campaign is doing everything it can to stall and smear," said Patti Higgins, chairwoman of the Alaska Democratic Party.

McCain campaign spokeswoman Meg Stapleton denigrated Monegan at a news conference Monday, accusing the three-decade cop of "insubordination," "obstructionist conduct" and a "brazen refusal" to follow proper channels for requesting money.

When Monegan was fired, the governor offered to let him head the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Asked why someone with a history of insubordination would be given such a position, Stapleton said that without having to deal with a budget, Monegan would be able to focus on alcohol abuse issues.

The governor "respects the fact that he was respected in the community," she said.

Thomas Van Flein, a lawyer for the governor's office, cited the newly released e-mails Monday in asking the Personnel Board to find no probable cause for an ethics investigation.

In an interview Monday night, Monegan said Palin never raised concerns about his management. In fact, at an event in May, she singled him out and praised his efforts to reduce violence against native women.

"In my time as a commissioner, the governor has never talked to me about complaints about my efforts," Monegan said.

He said all he meant to convey in his farewell letter was that because he was being fired, the governor must have believed he didn't support her, and to the extent his communication skills were to blame, others should avoid his mistake.

The e-mails made clear that some Palin staffers believed Monegan and the Department of Public Safety worked outside normal channels. One was written in May by Randy Ruaro, then a special assistant to Palin, to the governor's budget director, and concerned efforts to pay for and build a crime lab.

"I FEEL YOUR PAIN! DPS is constantly going off the reservation," he wrote.

In February, Monegan signed a public letter of support for a $3.6 million project designed to keep troubled teens off the street in Anchorage - even though the governor had vetoed the project last year and hadn't included money for it in her budget this year.

"I am stunned and amazed - do you know anything about this?" budget director Karen Rehfeld wrote to two other high-level staffers when she learned of the letter.

"Think about that: one of the governor's own cabinet members publicly contradicting her veto decision," Stapleton said.

Monegan acknowledged he shouldn't have signed the letter, because it put the governor in the awkward position of defending her veto decision. But he said he thought of the letter as simply making another run at getting funding for a worthy project.

The last straw, the McCain campaign said, was in July, when Monegan planned to travel to Washington to seek federal money for a plan to assign troopers, judges and prosecutors who could exclusively handle sexual assault cases - one of the state's most intractable crime problems.

In a July 7 e-mail, John Katz, the governor's special counsel, noted two problems with the trip: The governor hadn't agreed the money should be sought, and the request was "out of sequence with our other appropriations requests and could put a strain on the evolving relationship between the Governor and Sen. (Ted) Stevens."

Four days later, Monegan was fired. He said he had kept others in the administration fully apprised of his plans to go to Washington.

By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press, September 16, 2008

WASHINGTON, (AFP) - It took a real-world crisis to wrench the White House race away from lipstick and pigs, with the Wall Street meltdown offering a sudden chance of a breakout moment for Barack Obama or John McCain.

After feuding all year over who could best handle a "3 am" call in the White House, the candidates faced a real judgment call when iconic investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, sparking global stocks contagion.

Multiple polls show the staggering US economy is the number one issue 49 days before election day, but also reveal Democrat Obama and Republican McCain have yet to convince a majority of voters they know how to fix it.

"Neither one of them has been able to craft a message that has been able to reach the American people," said Andrew Dowdle, assistant professor of political science at the University of Arkansas.

Both McCain and Obama went in search of that message Monday, courting voters who fear seeing their pension funds evaporate in the stocks freefall amid warnings other revered US financial instutitions were on the rocks.

Their focus on issues issue contrasted with last week's gutter politics which included the McCain camp accusing Obama of insulting Republican vice presidential pick Sarah Palin, in a distortion of his use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig."

Obama Monday immediately blamed eight years of Republican rule for the crisis, and predicted McCain would bring four more years of the same.

His Republican rival promised a regulatory reform drive in Wall Street, and said Obama would hike taxes and thwart economic growth.

But the Arizona Senator, who now leads his rival by a few points in national polls, opened himself up by declaring in Florida that the fundamentals of the economy were "strong."

"Senator McCain, what economy are you talking about?" Obama asked at a campaign event in Colorado, as his supporters immediately branded McCain as out of touch and the inheritor to the Bush administration's economic legacy.

Earlier in the campaign Obama tried to capitalize on a comment by McCain that he did not know as much about the economy as he should.

Republicans have controlled the US purse strings for eight years, the unemployment rate is at a five-year high of 6.1 percent, gasoline and food prices are soaring and house prices are tumbling.

Obama and the Democrats seem yet to have reached the levels of empathy with hard-pressed voters achieved by his primary rival Hillary Clinton, or famously by her husband Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign.

"It is amazing that they have not been able to do that to this point," said Dowdle.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll earlier this month found 47 percent of voters trusted Obama to run the economy and 42 percent trusted McCain. The Democrat had enjoyed a much wider lead on the issue for much of this year.

McCain has struggled to navigate away from Bush economic legacy, and Democrats argue that his economic policies barely differ from those of the current president.

But Carly Fiorina, a top economic advisor to McCain, blamed Wall Street, lax regulation by the Bush administration and two years of Democrats in control of Congress for the economic blight.

On MSNBC Fiorina accused the Bush administration of presiding over a "Wild, Wild, West," with little regulation -- positioning McCain as a agent of reform and change -- not a prisoner of the president's legacy.

McCain's spokesman Tucker Bounds issued an acidic response to Obama's complaints about the Arizona senator's "fundamentals" comment.

"Barack Obama's short career as a public servant has been defined by pessimism, defeatism and weakness in the face of the great challenges of our time," he said.

"His lack of faith in American workers may explain his willingness to raise taxes during a struggling economy, but it is not way to lead our country."

That comment appeared to be a direct attempt to draw attention to Obama's short time as a national figure, and to raise doubts that he was fit to take on the daunting challenge of pulling the US economy out of its hole.

McCain is expected to press home that argument against Obama in three potentially decisive presidential debates beginning on September 26.

Obama supporters will see the forums as his best chance to finally thrust home a winning message on the economy.

By Stephen Collinson, AFP, September 15, 2008

ELYRIA, Ohio (AP) - Campaigning for Barack Obama in battleground Ohio, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton targeted Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on Sunday by using a slightly revised applause-line delivered at last month's Democratic convention.

Clinton told a crowd of 1,200 supporters - many wearing "Hillary for President" T-shirts leftover from her bitter primary fight with Obama - that Palin and Republican presidential nominee John McCain would only continue the failed policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

"No way, no how, no McCain and no Palin," she said as the audience erupted in cheers.

Clinton campaigned heavily in the state in the weeks leading up to her March 4 Democratic primary win, and she returned to economically troubled northeast Ohio on Sunday to urge her supporters to work just as hard for Obama and Joe Biden, the Democratic nominees for president and vice president.

"This election is going to be a game-changer," Clinton said at Lorain County Community College, about 30 miles east of Cleveland. "We have the opportunity to go beyond the failed policies of the last eight years."

Rep. Betty Sutton of Akron, a Clinton supporter during the April and May primaries, introduced a recently laid-off Ohio auto plant worker, who then introduced Clinton.

Keeping her remarks to just 20 minutes, Clinton spoke about the economy, a topic she was expected to address again at a rally in Akron later Sunday.

Clinton recently campaigned for Obama in Florida, another swing state, and was one of several high-profile Democratic women who vouched for Obama in Ohio over the weekend. They included Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano.

By JOE MILICIA, The Associated Press, September 15, 2008

Three months after closing her presidential campaign, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton remains a major factor in the race. The big question is how many of her supporters in the Democratic primaries will transfer their enthusiasm or at least their votes to the party's nominee, Sen. Barack Obama - especially now that Sen. John McCain is running with a woman, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, as No. 2 on the Republican ticket.

Pollster William Arnone, a former Clinton adviser, has found that many of the New York senator's backers are still at risk of defecting to McCain. He surveyed 328 of Clinton's "most fervent" supporters during the week of the GOP convention in St. Paul and found that 77 percent planned to vote for Obama, 11 percent back McCain, and the rest are either undecided or plan to stay home.

Last week, reporters following Clinton on the trail noted how little she criticized Palin, and one group of active Clinton backers even issued a press release defending Palin, saying she had been the victim of media smears because she is a woman.

"The very notion that Sarah Palin should not have accepted this nomination because she is a mother with demanding challenges underscores just how far we have to go," said leaders of the group, called the WomenCount PAC, which was formed in May to rebut calls for Clinton to get out of the race.

Among those the group cited for smearing Palin were liberal radio host Ed Schultz, Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn and CNN correspondent John Roberts.

WomenCount founder Rosemary Camposano, a former Silicon Valley public relations executive, says the PAC isn't planning to campaign for Obama and doesn't even plan to endorse a candidate for president because of the "emotional" nature of the Democratic nominating campaign for many women.

"Our membership is very skewed in how they are going to go," Camposano says. "By far most will remain loyal to the Democratic Party, but a lot of women feel the Democrats abandoned women and women's issues. They are mad enough to abstain, write in Hillary Clinton or vote for McCain."

The group includes a number of female business executives, including Susie Tompkins Buell, founder of the clothing label Esprit; Stacy Mason, a former Washington, D.C., newspaper editor and publisher; and Amy Rao, founder of the tech firm Integrated Archive Systems. And it is supporting a number of Democratic women running for Congress, among them Jeanne Shaheen, the former New Hampshire governor trying to unseat Republican Sen. John E. Sununu.

Camposano says WomenCount's biggest campaign this fall will be titled "Stop the Silence on Sexism." She won't talk about details, but the group is still hopping mad at Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, and at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not doing more to defend Clinton from what Camposano calls "outright bashing." Both party leaders, she said, were "incredibly disloyal."

Meanwhile, another group of Clinton backers, calling themselves Democrats For Principle Before Party, has already bought space for a print ad in the battleground state of Michigan aimed at undermining Obama, and is pledging more to come. "Can the country trust a presidential candidate who is the product of a corrupt process?" asks the ad, which ran in the Lansing State Journal.

Heidi Li Feldman, a Georgetown University Law School professor who co-founded the group, ran ads in major Washington publications, including CQ Today, in advance of the Democrats' Denver convention to pressure party leaders to give Clinton a vote at the convention. Ultimately party leaders acquiesced, but Feldman says Dean and the Obama campaign intimidated Clinton delegates and pressured the New York senator to release her supporters from their obligation to vote for her. The vote was short-circuited when Clinton called for Obama's nomination by acclamation.

Feldman says she is now rallying support to have Clinton elevated to Senate majority leader next year, in place of Harry Reid of Nevada, and to have Dean removed as chairman of the DNC. All the energy the group put into winning Clinton a convention vote "is now going to be channeled into making sure the Democratic Party does not inherit such incompetent leadership as we have had to endure this election season," she says.

By Shawn Zeller, CQ Politics, Sept. 14, 2008

ELYRIA, Ohio, Sept. 14 -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday made a pair of campaign stops in this important battleground for former rival Sen. Barack Obama, generating large, passionate crowds -- and barely mentioning Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

"This election is going to be a game changer," an energized Clinton (D-N.Y.) said. "We have the opportunity to go beyond the failed policies of the last eight years. I hear a lot of talk about this election, people asking, 'Who are you for?' That's not right question. The right question is: 'Who is for you?' "

Clinton mentioned Palin just twice in speeches here and in Akron, in one instance repeating an earlier line: "No way, no how, no McCain and no Palin."

Since the Republican Convention, Clinton has pointedly avoided directly criticizing Palin as she campaigns for Obama (D-Ill.), a strategy endorsed by the Obama campaign. The goal, Obama campaign strategists said, is to refocus the race on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and to avoid a clash between the two women. Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), who has been overshadowed since Palin's selection, is expected to add to that effort with sharper attacks against McCain this week.

Palin remained in the headlines on Sunday even as she spent the day in Denver without any public events. The Alaska governor has been spending her down time with McCain staffers and former aides to President Bush preparing for her next interview -- with conservative radio host Sean Hannity on Tuesday -- and for the vice presidential debate on Oct. 2.

McCain attended a NASCAR event in New Hampshire, where he met with drivers before the race. "Thank you for your support for the men and women in the military," McCain told the drivers. "When I'm in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're watching you. You are their role model."

Obama did not have any public events Sunday, but his campaign continued its recent effort to discredit both members of the Republican ticket. Obama aides mocked the McCain campaign after Palin on Friday misstated how much Alaska contributes to the national energy supply, a day after McCain said she "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America."

Palin said Alaska provides 20 percent of the national supply, but the Obama campaign circulated an assessment by the nonpartisan FactCheck.org saying that that assertion is "not true, not even close," with Alaska providing 3.5 percent.

Both Obama and Palin will spend part of this week in a handful of Western battlegrounds. Obama will campaign in Grand Junction and Pueblo, Colo., on Monday and then has stops in New Mexico and Nevada, where Palin held a rally Saturday night. Obama plans to target Latino voters and women on his swing, while Palin has been emphasizing her kinship with the Western ethos.

At a campaign stop in Carson City, Nev., on Saturday night, Palin played up the lifestyle similarities between her state and Nevada. She mentioned that her husband, Todd, is a pilot, and that they named their third daughter Piper after his plane. She praised Chuck Yeager as the first pilot to break the sound barrier, adding that maybe now a woman can break another glass ceiling -- ascending to the second-highest office in the country. She noted that the event site was, at other times, a roller hockey rink.

"I think I'm looking at a whole lot of hockey moms for McCain here!" Palin said.

Campaigning on her own, Palin drew thousands to her appearance, though the crowd appeared to be well smaller than the 10,000 that Nevada Lt. Gov. Brian K. Krolicki declared were there. (A McCain campaign aide had said about 3,500 were expected.)

In Ohio, more than 1,000 supporters waited in line for hours to cram into the stuffy atrium of a community college to listen to Clinton, with hundreds more ushered into an overflow auditorium.

While supporters were mixed about whether Clinton should directly assail Palin's views on issues that affect women, they were adamant that no Clinton supporter would back Palin.

"They couldn't be more different," Barbara Price said. "It's important everyone know the facts, because the facts have to win out--and Hillary stands for working people and so does Obama."

Of course, Price added, Obama "would have had a better go of it had he picked Hillary for his running mate."

By Lois Romano and Anne E. Kornblut, The Washington Post, September 15, 2008

For evidence of how intensely the presidential candidates are battling over women, consider their investment in Oprah Winfrey. After the news programs, "Oprah" is the chief recipient of campaign advertisements this year, with Senator John McCain buying more commercial spots on the program in the last month than Senator Barack Oba,a - even though Ms. Winfrey herself is backing Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, is teaming stars from soap operas and "Sex and the City" with congresswomen in contested states. Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, is sending tailored mailings on taxes to women who drive minivans, watch "The Biggest Loser" or "Lost" and know their way to the nearest big-box store.

And both campaigns are trying to highlight the issues they think will draw more support from women, with Mr. Obama emphasizing pay equity and abortion rights and Mr. McCain playing up his "maverick" image and raising questions of respect.

The fierce, and complicated, competition for the female vote has been escalated by Mr. McCain's selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. Even before the Palin selection, Mr. Obama was moving to shore up support from women, especially those who had supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

Now Obama campaign officials are stepping up their efforts, and both campaigns are recalibrating pitches to women to navigate cultural forces and policy positions that can give them an advantage.

In particular, they are competing for working-class white women, the group that could be especially pivotal in the states likely to decide the election.

For Mr. Obama, the push for women means emphasizing that he is running against Mr. McCain, not Ms. Palin, and drawing attention to Mr. McCain's record on issues that particularly resonate with women: his opposition to abortion rights, his votes against expanded health insurance for children and pay equity legislation, and his support for private investment accounts for Social Security, of concern among white women over 50, a group Mr. Obama has had trouble winning over.

This week, Obama events have a theme, "Women for the Change We Need," as the campaign tries to connect with women in conference calls, rallies and registration drives.

The campaign will also begin increasing advertising on television programs watched by women - besides "Oprah," some of the biggest investments for the campaigns have been during "Dr. Phil," "Live With Regis and Kelly" and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."

Each campaign is also beginning to put more spots on Lifetime, and a McCain media buyer recently lamented that the Food Network did not accept political advertising.

Mr. McCain will continue to campaign this week with Ms. Palin, with a rally on Tuesday in Ohio, an important state for working-class women. The two are expected to be together frequently in the seven remaining weeks of the campaign.

Beyond that, the McCain campaign's strategy is to emphasize personality, capitalizing on the booming celebrity of Ms. Palin, highlighting Mr. McCain's story as a war hero, showcasing their families, and trying to keep alive the anger about sexism that many women felt during Mr. Obama's primary campaign against Mrs. Clinton.

Democrats have relied heavily on women in recent presidential elections - so much so that McCain strategists say they believe that to win they need to run even among women over all, and lead among white women.

Women have voted in greater proportions than men for almost three decades - in 2004, nearly nine million more women voted than men, 67.3 million to 58.5 million. But the hard-fought candidacy of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain's selection of Ms. Palin as the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket have put new cultural and ideological elements more fully into play.

"It's because there were these women who supported Hillary Clinton, some of whom so visibly said they might not support Obama or might sit it out or vote for John McCain," said Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers who has written extensively on the gender gap in voting. "That really called attention to the fact that women were going to be critically important."

Mr. McCain's strategists do not expect to win more than a small fraction of Mrs. Clinton's supporters. But they do see blocs of women they think they can win.

Democrats have been accused of taking women for granted, in part because they have been able to count on them: More women have voted Democratic in the last four presidential cycles. More men have voted Republican in all but two of the last nine, the exceptions being 1976, when Jimmy Carter was the Democratic candidate, and 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected.

But white women have voted Republican in all but two of the last nine presidential elections. In 1992, they were evenly divided between the first President Bush and Mr. Clinton; in 1996, they voted for Mr. Clinton, 48 percent to 43 percent. And while unmarried women have consistently given their majority to Democrats, married women gave President Bush the majority in 2004.

"It's about how much Democrats can maximize the gender difference and how much the Republicans can hold it down," Ms. Carroll said.

The McCain campaign's polling identifies two ripe demographics: So-called Wal-Mart women, who shop at the store at least once a week, earn less than $60,000 a year, have less than a college education, and hold a poor impression of Mr. Bush; they tend to call themselves independents and say their economic situation is fair or poor, listing the economy as their prime election issue. McCain strategists believe this group will be attracted by the ticket's "maverick" image.

The second group is women in important suburbs in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The McCain campaign is also on the offensive in trying to stoke anger about perceived sexism. The campaign has designated a squad of prominent Republican women to call out what they see as gender-based smears against Ms. Palin. Last week, it released two spots accusing Mr. Obama of being "disrespectful" toward her.

Mr. Obama appears to have a strong advantage among young, unmarried women. But, said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser: "We are not ceding women with children. We have a candidate whose wife is a working mom with two young children."

In part, the Obama campaign is emphasizing the Republican ticket's opposition to abortion rights. The campaign ran a radio advertisement during the Republican convention calling the party's platform on abortion "extreme" because it did not include an exception for rape or incest.

But that issue alone may not swing many women. In a Gallup poll in May, 14 percent of women said that a candidate for major office must share their view on abortion (about the same percentage as among men). For half the women in the poll, abortion was one issue among many affecting their decision.

The Obama campaign is also emphasizing Mr. McCain's opposition to pay equity legislation, with a television spot that began running on Sunday saying that he "just doesn't get it."

The Obama campaign's focus on women this week will start with a conference call Wednesday between 20,000 women in leadership positions nationwide and Mr. Obama's running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who the campaign believes commands respect among women, particularly because of his advocacy for laws against domestic violence. Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama will then hold rallies with women Thursday and Friday, setting up a weekend of voter registration, beauty shop canvassing and mobilizing events.

To secure working-class women, the campaign sees Mrs. Clinton as its best surrogate, and has sent her to Florida, Nevada and Ohio, states she won in the primaries. In recent days, female aides and surrogates to Mr. Obama have also begun arguing in television appearances that Mr. McCain has a history of insensitivity toward women - recalling a joke he made about Chelsea Clinton's appearance when she was a teenager, or his going along at a South Carolina event last year when a woman used a coarse term to refer to Mrs. Clinton. (Mr. McCain now frequently lauds Mrs. Clinton.)

Though there is little question that Ms. Palin's bursting onto the scene has put pressure on the Obama campaign, it is unclear how much difference she will make. Geraldine A. Ferraro created a small bounce in the polls when Walter F. Mondale chose her as his running mate in 1984, making her the first woman on a major party ticket. But in the end, the nation went in a landslide for President Ronald Reagan.

"Ultimately in that election," Ms. Carroll said, "people voted the top of the ticket."

By Kate Zernike, The New York Times, September 15, 2008

CHICAGO - Senator Barack Obama raised more money in August than any presidential candidate has ever recorded in a one-month period, with his campaign disclosing on Sunday that it collected $66 million and drew 500,000 first-time donors to his candidacy.

The record-setting figures and particularly the new supporters who can contribute again before Election Day were crucial for Mr. Obama, who was heading into the general election as the first major-party candidate to forgo public financing. The campaign amassed its millions of dollars through an aggressive Internet drive, by attracting some of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's donors and as concerns increased over a tightening contest.

David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, said more than 2.5 million people had contributed since the race began.

"The 500,000 new donors to the Obama campaign demonstrate just how strongly the American people are looking to kick the special interests out and change Washington," Mr. Plouffe said in an e-mail message on Sunday.

While the amount surpassed the previous record of $55 million set in February by Mr. Obama, it is in line with ambitious goals his campaign set in June, when he decided to back away from his pledge to take public financing. Mr. Obama may need to match or even exceed the new record this month and next to compete with Senator John McCain and the Republican National Committee.

Even with the impressive August fund-raising, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee appear to have started September with slightly less at their disposal than Mr. McCain and the Republican National Committee for the general election sprint.

Mr. McCain set a personal record in August by raising $47 million. And Republicans started September with just more than $100 million, according to party officials and fund-raisers for Mr. McCain. That amount reflects money coming from the national committee, a balance left in Mr. McCain's primary account that has been transferred to the party, and money held in a joint account for both entities, as well as several state parties.

Mr. Plouffe said Sunday that the Obama campaign began September with $77 million in its bank account. Democratic officials said the party raised about $17 million in August and finished with a similar amount in the bank. The combined total gave Democrats an estimated $94 million in available cash for the presidential race. There is greater urgency, though, on behalf of Mr. Obama's campaign since he did not receive $84 million from the Treasury - as Mr. McCain did - when he formally accepted his party's nomination.

It was not yet clear how much the four-day Democratic National Convention at the end of August - designed to show Democrats, including former supporters of Mrs. Clinton, coalescing around Mr. Obama - drove a surge in contributions. Nor was it clear how much of the money came in after Aug. 29, when Mr. McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.

By this point in presidential campaigns, candidates usually step aside and let their party organizations raise money for advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts, but Mr. Obama's schedule is filled with fund-raising events. He will take time away from campaigning in battleground states and fly Tuesday to California for a reception and a dinner in Beverly Hills. On Friday, he is scheduled to raise money at two galas in Miami.

The Obama campaign is also getting outside help, including from Mrs. Clinton, of New York, who appeared at a $1,000-per-plate dessert reception on Sunday at a home in Wilmette, Ill.

Over all, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has collected more than $440 million so far in contributions, shattering previous records. The monthly record before Mr. Obama's candidacy was $44 million, which Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts collected in March 2004 after he clinched the Democratic nomination.

While Mr. McCain is scheduled to appear at four fund-raisers in the next two months, others are raising money for him. Members of his fund-raising team said they hoped to bring in an additional $100 million, which would give the campaign and the national committee about $300 million for advertising, get-out-the-vote efforts and other priorities.

A full analysis of how the campaigns are raising and spending their money will not be available until Sept. 20, when they file their reports with the Federal Election Commission. But judging from what both campaigns raised and had left in the bank at the end of the month, it appears that Mr. Obama only slightly outspent Mr. McCain in August, a stark contrast to the previous month. Mr. McCain, of Arizona, appeared to have spent just over $50 million in August, up from the $32 million he spent in July, while Mr. Obama spent about $55 million, a similar amount to the prior month.

In the final two months of the campaign, Ms. Palin has created new fund-raising opportunities for both parties. Mr. Obama's campaign said $10 million was raised in the 24 hours after Ms. Palin accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination, and she has continued to help energize Democratic donors.

At the same time, Republican officials said Ms. Palin's presence in the race have rallied the party's large and small contributors, quadrupling online fund-raising.

While Mr. McCain and his party are expected to have similar resources, the Obama campaign will have more control over how it spends its money because the bulk is being raised directly for its coffers. And Mr. McCain will face an array of restrictions in how he can use the money raised by the national committee.

By Jeff Zeleny and Michael Luo, The New York Times, September 15, 2008

With top Dems fearing Barack Obama is in a hole, the Obama campaign has made a weird decision. It's going to dig that hole deeper, harder and faster.

No more Mr. Nice Guy, Obama vows. He's going to really start hitting John McCain now. He's going to make voters understand that McCain equals four more years of George Bush.

It's a weird decision because Obama has been doing exactly that for four months. The problem is not that Obama hasn't hit McCain hard enough or linked him to Bush often enough. The problem is that he hasn't done anything else.

How about a new idea? How about putting some meat on the bony promise of "change"?

And what happened to that post-partisan uniter who took the country by storm during the early primaries by offering an optimistic vision for America? Why not bring him back?

Apparently that Obama has left the building. He's been replaced with a party man who sees the other side as evil and beneath contempt. Consider these bitter words from campaign boss David Plouffe that outlines the Obama plan for the stretch run.

"John McCain has shown that he is willing to go into the gutter to win this election," Plouffe wrote in a memo circulated Friday. "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."

That rant might be comfort food for the nervous base, but will likely alarm independents who already aren't sure about Obama. By further scaring them with scorched-earth partisanship, the Obama team will only cede to McCain the label of the real independent.

Indeed, even as Sarah Palin has rallied the GOP base, McCain himself has ramped up efforts to secure his brand as a maverick willing to cross party lines. Obama's response appears to be surrender of the high ground.

The decision to stick with a mostly-nasty approach should finally end the myth that the Obama campaign is a flawless machine. It had an extraordinarily appealing candidate, a message of change to an unhappy nation and made brilliant tactical decisions that defeated the Clintons.

But that was last season. Since then, it has frittered away four months and, even before Palin rocked the race, Obama was coasting as the presumptive President. He secured his base in Europe, but neglected West Virginia, where Clinton beat him by 40 points. Poll-wise, he remains where he was when Clinton quit in June.

Now faced with an energized and disciplined opponent, Team Obama is doubling-down on an approach that failed to seal the deal despite a beatable McCain, a favorable environment and a fawning media.

The decision is extra odd given what seemed a growing consensus before the Democratic convention that Obama needed to better connect with middle-class voters. That consensus was that hammering home an economic message of hope and help was the answer and the plan, supporters said then.

But Obama didn't do it in his acceptance speech, and he hasn't done it since. Lately he's been so startled by Palin that he took to attacking her himself instead of leaving it to others.

His tax plan is one area where Obama has failed to press an economic advantage. He says his plan, while raising levies on high earners, would mean a tax cut for 95% of the working class. If true, that's a helluva plan. Yet Obama himself has done little to explain the details and how much individuals would benefit at different income levels.

There was even more ominous language in the Plouffe memo. After throwing in the name of Karl Rove, which is boob bait for Bush haters, Plouffe promised to summon the furies of the liberal press to expose McCain and Palin. "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," Plouffe wrote.

Ah, yes, the press. I guess that means more Charlie Gibsons of the world looking down with disgust at Palin as though she was soiling his shoes. Even The New York Times allowed that Gibson, in his ABC interview, came off as "supercilious," which is a fancy way of saying arrogant.

By all means, more arrogance toward the heartland. Just what Obama needs.

By Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News, September 14th 2008

Even though I detest her politics, as I watched Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's much-anticipated interview with ABC News's Charles Gibson, God help me, I had to admire her steeliness.

Since the Republican vice presidential candidate's approval rating appears to be immune to facts--notably, that she is entirely unprepared to hold the second-highest office in the land--let's admit that ballsiness is an essential part of Sarah Palin's "relatability."

Last week, Nation columnist Patricia J. Williams examined the "frontierswoman" aspect of Palin's profile, and astutely took apart the reasons why that can-do, gun-toting Annie Oakley image so quickly and firmly grabbed hold of GOP convention delegates and the press. In record time, the number of references to Palin as a g-droppin', huntin', fishin', Wal-Mart Mom, has transported us back to the era of Manifest Destiny, when America's Western expansion (and a hankerin' for gold) required women to man up or die.

This does have some appeal, and maybe it is time we stop fretting about Palin's hypocrisy and contradictions and acknowledge the positive part of her persona. It does exist, and recognizing it does not require you to dismiss her obvious shortcomings.

As Williams points out, there are probably more than a few of us who drift off, from time to time, on the delicious fantasy of what it would feel like to draw down with shotgun on the misbehaving men in our lives. We don't know if Palin has ever done such a thing, but it appears she sure as hell could. I have to own up to the part of me that admires that. After watching her with Gibson, it's safe to say that it took a spine of titanium to stay upright in that chair as "Charlie" scowled at her over the top of his reading glasses: I, too, am a graduate of a state university, and instantly recognized Palin's ginned-up bravado and cramming-before-finals anxiety. Watching her struggle to stay on-message--she never did answer the question of whether its OK for US forces to launch raids in Pakistan without that government's knowledge or approval--a small part of me was rooting for her to pull it off. Does that qualify as situational ethics on my part? I don't know. But I do know that by over-intellectualizing this steeliness factor, and by underestimating its power to sway voters, we are not being true to our cultural history.

It is no accident that in the last century, the women authors who changed the literary game, and the heroines they created, are all of the ballsy variety--Zora Neal Hurston, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mitchell, Maya Angelou. Fiction writers and journalists are mere scribblers of history, while politicians are the high-stakes actors in our national drama. But I think we risk throwing shade across a part of our political future by failing to acknowledge the value of Sarah Palin's abundant moxie.

Is this critique sexist? Should I turn in my feminist card? I'm happy to entertain any charges of sexism that may result from my deconstruction of the catnip part of the Palin aesthetic. Yes, we're entering the rabbit hole of the "why is it okay for blacks to call each other the N-word but not okay for-whites?" territory of feminist critique, but I've got thick skin, and I am also consistent: I'm black, I don't call other blacks the N-word, and I don't want other blacks to use that word, either. I'm a woman who doesn't call other women the B-word, and I will call out anyone who is foolish enough to direct either of those words at me.

As for feminist street cred, eh: I'm more concerned with being scrupulous--and pragmatic--enough to recognize the whirl of ambiguities that make humans so interesting. Dick Cheney manages to love his lesbian daughter, which is good. And yes, the self-disciplined Condoleezza Rice is an appropriate role model for black girls. Plus, as we learned from the Hillary Clinton presidential candidacy, charges of sexism can be the red herring in a procedural crime drama worthy of P.D. James.

Progressives and feminists who sneer at women unwilling to separate that stimulus-response "I heart ballsy women!" from the business at hand--"Does she have the intellect and experience to be vice president?"--are spinning their wheels. They also conveniently overlook the possibility that Palin's raw ambition is very close to the self-confidence we want to encourage in our daughters. Sarah Palin is a strong woman, and that is good. Her politics, and what they may lead her to create for our democracy... not so much.

By Amy Alexander, The Nation, September 12, 2008

Unemployment has risen to its highest level in five years. Uninsured Americans top 47 million. Real wages have fallen in relation to inflation for every educational group in America except for those with professional degrees since 2000. Those recent census figures, plus an unpopular war, have made this a great year for Democrats. Yet, less than two months to Election Day, the party is in a panic.

Their presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, has lost his momentum and his mojo. Sen. John McCain, newly infused with mojo-by-proxy in the form of his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is exciting his own party's base for a change. While Obama's campaign tries to sort out the surprises and come up with a new game plan, polls show the electorate rapidly coming together into a dead heat, at best.

Yet, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, our national presidential debate found itself hung up on pig's lips. McCain's campaign accused Obama of dissing Palin when he used "lipstick on a pig" to talk about McCain's economic ideas. Palin has famously described herself as a pit bull with lipstick, but the pig metaphor had previously been used by Obama and McCain. The argument is silly, but its impact is very serious. Team McCain pushed Team Obama off-message for at least two days that the Illinois senator will never get back.

What went wrong For Obama? Quite simply, McCain targeted his opponent's strongest themes and attacked them -- until he could make them his own.

For example, McCain attacked Obama's lack of Washington experience and had no more success than Sen. Hillary Clinton did in the Democratic primaries. So McCain morphed himself into an "agent of change." What kind of change? He hasn't been very detailed on that. But, he would argue, neither has Obama.

McCain's "celebrity" ads that compared Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton helped to stop Obama's mid-summer momentum. Then, after Obama's big Democratic Convention speech, McCain produce a celebrity of his own. Gov. Palin suddenly brought something McCain's campaign desperately needed: excitement among conservatives who, pre-Palin, were reluctant to vote for McCain without pinching their noses.

Another surprise: Palin helped conservatives to hijack identity politics. As much as Obama avoided mentioning race and other "issues that divide us" in his campaign, Palin eagerly offered herself as an icon to working "hockey moms" everywhere. Sure, conservatives have long decried those who rally politically around race and gender, but they don't mind as much when the rallying comes in support of their home team.

Palin may not know much about the particulars of the "Bush Doctrine," as she revealed in her first sit-down with a network news reporter. But ignorance of foreign policy details didn't stop the rise of President Bush, either. More significant to McCain is the "one of us" appeal she offers to "small town" voters, a term that has become a synonym for voters who find the skinny guy with the funny name from Illinois to be, shall we say, a bit too "exotic" for their tastes.

What's Obama to do now? First, he needs to get serious. He needs to remind voters of what's at stake. He needs to remind Americans of how the nation voted for a nice small-town sort of guy in 2000 and 2004 and look at what it got us. Eight years later, jobs and home mortgages are down, budget deficits and fuel prices are up and our foreign policy is best described as "Shoot from the hip."

With that in mind, Obama should not let the niceties of liberal political correctness prevent his campaign from tying McCain and Palin to Bush. Palin makes that easy. She's a harder hardliner than McCain. The issue is not lipstick on a pig but the Bush years in high heels.

Third, Obama needs to put the Clintons to good use. I don't know what Obama and Bill Clinton discussed in their private Sept. 11 lunch in New York. But Obama should have had his big ears tuned in to advice from the master on how to reach those voters who have been the slowest to embrace the senator from Illinois as "one of us."

McCain and Palin reportedly plan to campaign together more frequently than running mates usually do. That spares McCain the awkward sight of drawing smaller crowds than his running mate might attract by campaigning alone. It also offers an opportunity for Obama to make use of his strongest surrogates while Obama and Sen. Joe Biden, his running mate, campaign elsewhere. Even if they secretly want Obama to lose, so Hillary Clinton can run in 2012, the Clintons don't want to risk being blamed for Obama's loss if he does.

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services Inc., September 14, 2008

Striding across a sweltering strip-mall parking lot with her clipboard in hand, Monica Bell, a community field organizer in Orlando, Fla., was looking for former convicts to add to the state's voter rolls.

Antonious Benton, a gold-toothed 22-year-old with a silver skull-shaped belt buckle, a laconic smile and a criminal record, was the first person she approached.

"I can't vote because I got three felonies," Mr. Benton told Ms. Bell. He had finished a six-month sentence for possession of $600 worth of crack cocaine, he said. But Ms. Bell had good news for him: The Florida Legislature and Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican, changed the rules last year to restore the voting rights of about 112,000 former convicts.

"After you go to prison - you do your time and they still take all your rights away," Mr. Benton said as he filled out a form to register. "You can't get a job. You can't vote. You can't do nothing even 10 or 20 years later. You don't feel like a citizen. You don't even feel human."

Felony disenfranchisement - often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests - affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups. But voter registration and advocacy groups say that recent overhauls of these Reconstruction-era laws have loosened enough in some states to make it worth the time to lobby statehouses for more liberal voting restoration processes, and to try to track down former felons in indigent neighborhoods.

"You're talking about incredible numbers of people out there who now may have had their right to vote restored and don't even know it," said Reggie Mitchell, a former voter-registration worker for People for the American Way. In Florida, "we're talking tens of thousands of people," he said. "And in the 2000 election, in the state of Florida, 300 people made the difference."

A loose-knit group of national organizations working to restore voting rights includes the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn (Ms. Bell's employer); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and the Brennan Center for Justice.

Two other groups, the Sentencing Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, said they had given briefings to officials for Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign about how to register former felons. But the Obama campaign has been reluctant to acknowledge any concerted effort.

An Obama spokesman, Bill Burton, said via e-mail, "We are trying to register voters across the country and follow the state laws wherever we are."

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor and senior adviser to the Obama campaign on criminal justice issues, said he had briefed campaign officials about felony disenfranchisement issues and the various and often-confusing state requirements to restore voting rights to former convicts.

Campaign volunteers get briefed on specific state laws governing voting rights restoration in case they come across former felons during general voter registration drives, Mr. Ogletree said, "but it's not as if the Obama campaign said, 'Here's a plan for felony disenfranchisement.' "

None of the felony voter registration organizations contacted for this article could recall hearing from Senator John McCain's campaign. And a campaign spokesman said there had been no effort to reach out to former prisoners specifically.

Last month, Obama campaign workers took down a sign at their headquarters in Pottstown, Pa., that said "Felons can vote," because it might have sent the wrong message.

"The fear is that it might cost them more votes to be portrayed as the candidate of the felons than it could gain them," said Anthony C. Thompson, a New York University law professor and Obama campaign adviser. "This is a mistaken belief, in my view, when there are tens of millions of citizens with criminal records."

In fact, felony voter restoration efforts have received bipartisan support in many states including Alabama, Florida, Indiana and Maryland. Still, surveys have shown that about 70 percent of former convicts lean Democratic, according to Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota criminologist who said that had led some to believe that Democrats benefited from felony voter restoration more than did Republicans.

"That's because of the high rate of incarceration among African-Americans, who have strong Democratic preferences," Mr. Uggen said, "and because many people who have committed felonies are working class, relatively young, unmarried and in particular individuals with less than a high school education. These are all demographics that traditionally align themselves with the Democrats."

Muslima Lewis, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida, said: "Really, you're not having a full participatory democracy if you disenfranchise so many people. It weakens the whole system and, in particular, communities of color."

All of Us or None, a prisoner-advocacy organization in San Francisco, held a rally last month about restoration of voting rights in California. Also last month, the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition successfully lobbied the Denver County jail system to begin registering felons upon their release.

The A.C.L.U. is also advising lawyers' groups planning to deploy to polling places in November to enforce the rights of former convicts who have restored their voting privileges.

According to the A.C.L.U. only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners, parolees and probationers to vote. Thirteen states allow parolees and probationers to vote, eight states reinstate probationer voting rights, and 20 states restore voting rights to people who have completed their sentences, although each state has different processes, exceptions and limits on eligibility requirements. Kentucky and Virginia permanently disenfranchise nearly all felons.

Florida's felony voter registration law divides applicants into three categories based on the seriousness of their crimes: nonviolent criminals, the biggest group, need not apply for restoration of voting rights and just need to re-register. Violent criminals, but not murderers or rapists, must apply to the clemency board. The board either grants those rights immediately or investigates on a case-by-case basis. The most violent criminals are subjected to a more rigorous investigation and must attend a hearing of the clemency board, which meets only four times a year, before their rights can be reinstated.

Despite the state's liberalization of felony voter procedures, only 9,000 out of a potential 112,000 former convicts in Florida registered to vote in the last year, according to a report last month in The Orlando Sentinel. Part of the reason is that thousands of notifications sent by the state went to the wrong addresses because of poor data and former prisoners’ high mobility.

Fred Schuknecht, the director of administration for the Florida Clemency Board, acknowledged in an interview that there was a backlog of 60,000 former felons who could potentially have their rights restored, but must first be reviewed by the agency. Despite the fact that 3,500 newly released prisoners are added to the caseload every month, the Legislature cut 20 percent of the staff devoted to felony voter restoration cases, Mr. Schuknecht said.

Further, Ms. Bell said that many former convicts shun attention, even if that means abdicating their voting rights.

"You might want them to fill out the registration form, but they have an outstanding warrant," she said. "And in order to help them, I need to ask what their crimes are, but they might not want to say."

Cheria Murray, 24, of Orlando, regained voting rights this year, after serving a two-day jail sentence with two years' probation for grand theft in 2003. Ms. Murray lives in a housing project where, she said, many people had been stripped of their rights because of their records.

Her companion, Duane Miller, 28, recently returned from serving a sentence for illegal firearm possession, and has not applied to reinstate his voting rights.

Ms. Murray said she thought about restoring her voting rights only recently, inspired by the presidential campaign.

"When I saw Barack Obama, that's when I got excited to get my rights back," she said. "I wanted to vote for history."

By Solomon Moore, The New York Times, September 13, 2008

MANCHESTER, N.H. - With Hurricane Ike cutting a savage path through Texas, Senator Barack Obama canceled plans to appear on the season premiere of "Saturday Night Live" and asked voters to consider the "quiet storms" taking place in the lives of many Americans as they weigh their choice in the presidential race.

After Mr. Obama asked supporters to send prayers and donations to victims of the Gulf Coast storm, he aggressively attacked his Republican rivals and argued that Senator John McCain would do little to improve the nation's economic condition. While he pared back his campaigning because of the hurricane, his criticism of Mr. McCain reflected the new urgency of the contest.

"John McCain doesn't get it," Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said on Saturday at a large rally here at Veterans Memorial Park. "He doesn't know what's going on in your lives. He is out of touch with the American people."

Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, took a day away from campaigning Saturday, but his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, held a rally in Anchorage before setting off for Carson City, Nev., and her first campaign swing without him.

Before a large, raucous crowd in a pavilion in Nevada on Saturday evening, Ms. Palin called on Americans to "pull together" and to offer help to those affected by the storm. "Today and in the days ahead," she said, "the American heart will be on display."

After Mr. McCain, of Arizona, attends a Nascar race on Sunday, they are expected to resume their joint appearances.

A day after Ms. Palin sat down for her first national television interviews since being named the Republican vice-presidential candidate, she barely mentioned the opposing ticket, focusing instead on what she described as her and Mr. McCain's records as mavericks. "We're going to Washington, D.C., to shake things up," she said, to approving screams from the crowd. She also conveyed a broad, upbeat message, one that some members of the audience later said appealed to their sense of optimism and to their wish that politics not be quite so mean.

"America is an exceptional country," Ms. Palin said, "and you are all exceptional Americans."

In Alaska, along with what has become her stump speech - a slight variation from her address at the Republican convention - Ms. Palin lavished affection on her home state and promised to carry its message to the rest of the country. "I pledge to do my level best," she said, "and to be worthy of the confidence that this beautiful state has put in me."

Though she has her critics at home, Ms. Palin cheerily offered a reminder of the state's sparse population. "You know, thank you, God, for that," Ms. Palin said. "We're small enough to be family. And we can look past some political differences to work as a family."

While the hurricane provided another diversion from the presidential race, the Democratic and Republican rivals continued to raise the intensity of their exchanges in dueling television advertisements. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, was planning to introduce a new line of criticism on Saturday, but aides said he canceled his appearance to keep the partisan attacks at bay.

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, criticized Mr. Obama for leveling partisan critiques in a campaign rally as millions of residents along the Gulf Coast were battling the storm.

"It says a lot about Barack Obama's judgment that while his campaign canceled his appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live' and his running mate stayed home, Obama went ahead and delivered a series of scathing personal attacks," Mr. Bounds said in a statement. "Today's attacks mark a new low from Barack Obama."

At his rally here, held on a sun-splashed New England day, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said the McCain-Palin ticket would be an extension of President Bush's eight years in office. He seized on a line from the Republican convention as an example of how, he said, the Republican ticket would not offer a new direction on energy policy.

"When you see at the Republican convention everyone shouting 'drill, baby, drill,' that's not a slogan for a 21st-century America," Mr. Obama said. "We are going to create a new energy policy that actually leads us into the 21st century and creates thousands of new jobs."

In Anchorage, Ms. Palin said a McCain-Palin administration would press for more energy exploration, to which the crowd began chanting, "Drill, baby, drill!"

A similar cheer went up several times in the crowd in Nevada, to which Ms. Palin answered: "You're right! You are right! Drill, baby, drill!"

Mr. Obama flew back to Chicago after his appearance in New Hampshire, scrapping his plan to appear alongside the swimmer Michael Phelps on "Saturday Night Live." His aides said it would be inappropriate to be making jokes in the wake of the hurricane.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to resume his campaigning on Monday as he begins a swing through the contested Western states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

By Jeff Zeleny and Monica Davey, The New York Times, September 13, 2008

Republicans had targeted the Democratic vice presidential nominee over Hunter Biden's work as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

The law firm, Sharp & Barnes, represents Russell DeLeon and his wife, Ruth Parasol, according to lobbying records.




The Associated Press, September 13, 2008

Joyce Behar, co-host of 'The View,' calls his Web ads lies. Obama 'shouldn't have said it,' McCain insists.

NEW YORK -- Taking his campaign to the daytime talk show circuit Friday, John McCain said his camp was not out of bounds when it released a Web video this week suggesting that his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, compared Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin to a pig.

The controversy began Tuesday evening after Obama told the crowd at a town hall meeting in Lebanon, Va., that McCain's efforts to present himself as an agent of change were disingenuous. Arguing that the Arizona senator does not differ from President Bush on issues such as tax policy and " Karl Rove-style politics," Obama added: "That's not change. . . . You can put lipstick on a pig, and it's still a pig."

McCain's surrogates expressed outrage, claiming the comment was a clear reference to Palin because she is the only candidate in the race who wears lipstick and because her signature line in her convention acceptance speech was that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick.

During McCain's appearance on ABC's " The View" on Friday, co-host Joy Behar asked him why he approved a campaign Web video that showed Obama's pig remark after a frame that read "Barack Obama on Sarah Palin."

"They're lies," Behar said, referring to that video and another McCain ad, about Obama's record on sex education.

"Actually, they are not lies," McCain replied crisply.

"He shouldn't have said it," McCain said of Obama's pig remark. "He chooses his words very carefully, and this is a tough campaign."

McCain added that the harsh tone of the campaign would be different if the Illinois senator had accepted his invitation to appear at joint town halls across the country this summer.

McCain, making a concerted effort to win over female voters, generally received a warm reception from the live audience, though he drew boos when he reaffirmed his position that the abortion rights ruling in Roe vs. Wade was "a very bad decision" that should be overturned.

His appearance also offered another chance to strongly defend Palin's experience as governor of Alaska for nearly two years and, before that, mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, for four years. "She's ignited a spark in America," he said.

In a lighter moment, co-host Barbara Walters needled McCain about his recent statements that Palin is the greatest vice presidential candidate "in the history of the United States."

"Greater than John Adams, who became president? Greater than father George Bush who became president? That sound a little strong?" Walters asked.

McCain chuckled: "Politicians are never given to exaggeration or hyperbole, as you know. But the fact is, I think she's a great person, she's a great governor. . . . I'm very happy and very pleased to have her."

He and his wife, Cindy, also taped an appearance on "Rachael Ray," to air Sept. 22, in which he extolled his "regular guy" interests, including barbecuing -- he divulged his ribs recipe, which he can cook on his four grills -- and his favorite TV shows: "Lost," " The Office" and "24."

"My hero is Jack Bauer," he said. "He always escapes. I never escape."




By Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2008

The race for the White House has become a battle over which candidate can convince voters he is better suited to challenge the status quo.

WASHINGTON -- With Republican John McCain edging ahead of Democrat Barack Obama in the latest polls, the two candidates are now locked in a bitter political fight over a core issue: who can best claim the mantle of change.

Obama, who founded his campaign on a pledge to reform Washington, on Friday unleashed new TV advertisements, revised his stump speech and released a strategy memo that all challenge McCain's efforts to cast himself as a maverick and reformer who can bring change.

McCain vowed in a TV interview to appoint Democrats and independents to his administration if elected. His campaign also unveiled an ad that promises, "Change is coming," the cry McCain has adopted since he accepted his party's nomination Sept. 4.

The latest back-and-forth highlighted the fact that both campaigns believe that whoever can make the best case for changing Washington will win the White House. Rather than the economy, Iraq or other specific issues, "change" has become the most heated subject of debate as the race enters its final seven weeks.

McCain's shift has been most dramatic since he chose Sarah Palin, the little-known governor of Alaska, as his running mate two weeks ago. Since then, he has largely abandoned his long-standing claim that his 26 years of experience in Congress was his chief qualification for the Oval Office.

Instead, McCain is breaking new ground in presidential politics by essentially bashing his own party, as well as his opponent, as he casts himself as someone who can change the way Washington does business.

Experts say no candidate in memory has worked so hard to disassociate himself from the party he now leads as presidential standard-bearer. In speeches and printed handouts, McCain rarely even identifies himself as a Republican.

His advertising goes further. A TV ad launched last week in Ohio and other battleground states suggests that McCain and Palin are at war with their own party. "He battled Republicans and reformed Washington," the announcer intones. "She battled Republicans and reformed Alaska."

In his new TV ads and in campaign events Friday, Obama struck back by insisting McCain represents "more of the same" as President Bush, and he ridiculed McCain's claims that he is not a traditional Republican.

"John McCain's economic policies are identical to George Bush's. His tax policies are identical to George Bush's. His education policy, which is essentially nothing except arguing for vouchers -- identical to George Bush's," Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, told a rally of about 1,500 people in Concord, N.H.

"John McCain has not broken with his party. He is not offering anything different than what we've seen out of George Bush for the last eight years.

"Change has to be more than a slogan," Obama says to the camera in one new ad.

Obama's aides said privately that they will try to ignore Palin, a public sensation who has helped reinvigorate McCain's campaign, and that they expect her high profile to diminish as her novelty wears off. They hope to refocus voters' attention on McCain's record of voting to support Bush administration policies.

For now, McCain's recasting of himself as the agent of change appears to be paying off. According to the latest Gallup survey, 54% of Americans believe McCain would be effective in changing the way things are done in Washington -- close to the 61% who believe that about Obama.

McCain "has been saddled with the scarlet letter R, " for Republican, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "He's trying to change the scarlet letter to an I. He's trying to run as an independent."

The senator from Arizona has a record of sometimes criticizing his own party and reaching out to Democrats on issues such as immigration and campaign finance reform. And candidates for national office often lambaste Washington even as they seek to move or extend their stay there.

But McCain's fervent attempt to carve a new public image goes deeper, analysts say.

When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in St. Paul, Minn., he avoided uttering the name of the current, unpopular White House occupant. But Bush got off easy compared with his party.

"We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptation of corruption," McCain declared.

Some GOP veterans warn that McCain risks going too far and alienating the grass-roots Republicans he needs to lick envelopes, knock on doors and get out the vote on election day.

"He's walking a tightrope there," said Stuart Spencer, a former advisor to President Reagan, citing McCain's party-bashing convention speech. But he added: "Part of the Democratic position is they're going to tie him to Bush, and he's got to untie himself. This is one way of doing it."

Don Sipple, another veteran Republican strategist, called the tactic "kind of dicey," given McCain's long tenure in Washington.

Other presidential nominees have chided their own party or railed against its excesses, "but McCain has clearly distanced himself" more than previous candidates, said Alan Brinkley, a historian and presidential scholar at Columbia University.

In 1968, Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, then vice president, publicly broke with President Johnson by calling late in the campaign for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam. But he lost to Richard M. Nixon. In 1976, Republican President Ford could not escape the Watergate taint of the disgraced Nixon White House in which he served as vice president, and he lost to Jimmy Carter.

In 1992, Bill Clinton successfully ran as a "different kind of Democrat," one who occasionally would criticize his own party, but still a Democrat.

Ken Khachigian, another Republican operative, said he didn't anticipate a backlash from party regulars.

"I think the party's smelling victory, and to the extent that he's found a way to get there, I'm not so sure they're going to be bothered by it," he said. "Victory is a great unifier, believe me."




By Bob Drogin and Mark Barabak, Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2008

CONCORD, N.H. - Senator Barack Obama portrayed Senator John McCain as out of step with America's concerns as he opened an aggressive front on Friday in television advertisements and campaign appearances that were intended to pacify Democrats who are jittery over the direction of the presidential campaign.

"We can't afford four more years of out-of-touch, you're-on-your-own leadership in Washington," Mr. Obama said in Dover, N.H. "John McCain likes to rail against the Washington herd, but the truth is when it comes to issues that really matter in your lives, he's been running in that herd for 26 years."

As he began a two-day campaign trip to New Hampshire, Mr. Obama also sought to tie his Republican rival to President Bush more closely through a coordinated, partywide message. He barely mentioned the newest figure in the race, the one who has sharply changed the political dynamic - Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska - as he tried to turn the contest back into a one-on-one fight with Mr. McCain.

But it was the Republican ticket that continued to dominate national television coverage on Friday, with Ms. Palin appearing again on ABC News in a hourlong prime-time special on the program "20/20"; that followed an interview with the anchor Charles Gibson that was broadcast on Thursday night.

And Mr. McCain spent a good part of his day in television studios in New York City, hoping to extend his appeal to female voters in an appearance on "The View" and a taping of Rachael Ray's cooking show.

While his surroundings on "The View" appeared comfortable, with Mr. McCain sitting on a sofa, he faced sharp questioning over the tone and substance of the presidential campaign. Asked whether he had changed as a candidate, he said, "I'm the same person as I always was."

A day after the two men suspended their divisive campaign to commemorate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Obama amplified his criticism of Mr. McCain through new television advertisements that portrayed his 72-year-old rival as an entrenched Washington politician who is out of touch.

The advertisements - among the most pointed attacks to be put out by Mr. Obama - depicted Mr. McCain as he looked when he was first elected to Congress in 1982 and mocked his declaration that he does not use a computer or send his own e-mail messages, attempting to undermine the new argument from Mr. McCain that he is the candidate of change.

"The good news is that in 53 days, the name George W. Bush won't be on the ballot," Mr. Obama told voters in Dover. "But make no mistake, George W. Bush's policies will be on the ballot."

Mr. Obama mentioned Mr. McCain and President Bush in the same sentence again and again. He seized on a comment made by Mr. McCain at a forum in New York City on Thursday night when, trying to praise Ms. Palin, he said Washington politicians can be "divorced from the day-to-day challenges people have."

"From where he and George Bush sit, maybe they just can't see," Mr. Obama said. "Maybe they are just that out of touch, but you know the truth and so do I."

At a town meeting, one man told Mr. Obama that he was concerned the Democratic ticket would suffer the same fate as the party's last two candidates, Senator John Kerry and Vice President Al Gore, because of "attack ads and the smear campaign."

Mr. Obama said he preferred the high road, adding, "I'm not going to start making up lies about John McCain."

Mr. McCain, who did not appear at any campaign events on Friday, faced stiff questioning about his advertisements on "The View," a show that has become a must-stop for candidates and their spouses. Joy Behar, one of the hosts, criticized him for a pair of recent advertisements - one that accuses Mr. Obama of favoring "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarten pupils and one that suggests his "lipstick on a pig" comment was a sexist slight directed at Ms. Palin.

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Ms. Behar said. "They are lies."

Mr. McCain said they "are not lies" and defended them.

When reminded that he, too, had made the comment about putting "lipstick on a pig" when referring to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. McCain offered a distinction and said he was talking about health care.

"He chooses his words very carefully," Mr. McCain said. "He shouldn't have said it."

Ms. Palin was a subject of conversation everywhere on Friday, it seemed, except at Mr. Obama's rallies in New Hampshire, where he strived to steer the conversation back to the men at the top of the ticket.

"I'm glad that the debate now is all about change, and we are going to spend a lot of time talking about who can actually deliver change in Washington," Mr. Obama said. "I think it's Obama-Biden and not McCain."

By Jeff Zeleny and Larry Rohter, The New York Times, September 12, 2008

On Wednesday, thousands of people crowded into a Fairfax County park for Sen. John McCain's first rally in the Washington region with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose appearance drew the same sort of media attention that she has enjoyed since joining the GOP ticket just more than two weeks ago.

The same day, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. hosted a town hall meeting in New Hampshire with a crowd of more than 800. Biden hasn't made much of a splash since joining the Democratic ticket, but on this day, he did. In response to a question, he voiced a view many Democrats now hold, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) "might have been a better pick than me" to be Sen. Barack Obama's running mate.

When the senator from Illinois tapped Biden late last month, most Democrats were exuberant, thinking he would add badly needed experience and foreign policy credentials to the ticket, deliver attacks against McCain and bolster Obama's support among voters who have been skeptical of his candidacy.

But the buzz around Palin has left Biden largely obscured and generating so little attention that some Democrats are questioning whether he was the right pick.

When asked about Biden's impact, Democratic pollster Doug Schoen said: "What impact? The best thing you can say about Biden is he has no discernible impact. It's like it's two against one."

Many Clinton supporters say Palin's presence has only strengthened their argument that Obama should have chosen the senator from New York instead.

"I'm a big Joe Biden fan, but it's clear to me if Obama had picked Hillary, we wouldn't be in this mess," said Allida M. Black, a George Washington University professor who served on Clinton's national finance committee during the primaries. Lamenting that Obama's lead in the polls has vanished since the Palin pick, Black said the senator's campaign "should have seen this coming."

While Palin has become a pop culture phenomenon, Biden has done what most vice presidential candidates do: campaign in front of small audiences, host fundraisers and try to avoid gaffes. And Biden defenders argue that although Palin has so far campaigned alongside McCain -- and might continue to do so for much of the rest of the run -- the Democratic ticket is reaching twice as many audiences and media markets by traveling separately.

And although Biden's comments about Clinton drew national attention, a report in the Nashua Telegraph carried exactly the sort of headline the Obama campaign had envisioned when it picked Biden: "In city, Biden tears into McCain."

"When you come into these states as president or vice president, you make a tremendous impact," said strategist Tad Devine, who was an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004. "If they keep Palin with McCain, they are hitting half the markets of the Obama campaign. That's a real liability for them."

Obama aides suggested that when Biden was picked, the selection was a "governing decision" as well as a political choice, saying his foreign policy experience would be an asset to the younger Obama if they prevail in November. In the meantime, Biden's prescribed role has been to attack McCain and pitch Obama to working-class voters, seniors, Jewish voters and other demographics that have been slow to embrace the man at the top of the ticket.

"There's no question that Senator Biden has strengths with some voters that haven't been a core base of Barack Obama's voters, and that's a huge advantage," said Anita Dunn, an Obama strategist.

This week, the senator from Delaware will seek to elevate his place in the debate, taking on McCain's foreign policy views in a speech in Michigan on Monday and making a bus tour through Midwestern battleground states. But Obama's efforts will continue to focus on building up Obama and making the argument against McCain, not tearing down Palin, aides said.

On the stump, Biden's speeches are full of attempts to connect Obama to audiences and cast him as an average American. Biden speaks fondly of a slumber party in Denver at which Obama's two daughters joined Biden's three granddaughters. He noted the "chemistry" between their wives.

"If Barack Obama grew up in my neighborhood in Scranton or Claymont or Wilmington, Delaware, he would have been the guy who had my back," Biden told a crowd in West Palm Beach, Fla., on a recent campaign stop. "If you're looking for a very sophisticated Harvard graduate who went to Columbia undergrad and was president of the Law Review, he's totally intellectual. Baby, you ain't seen nothing yet. This guy is steel."

Biden often goes into great detail about his friendship with McCain, with whom he has served in the Senate since 1987, while slamming McCain's policies.

Edward G. Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania and a Clinton backer during the primaries, said Biden is a major asset to Obama in the Keystone State. "He may not have quite as much of a discernible impact as Governor Palin, but over the long run, he might prove more valuable," Rendell said. "He's a great person in energizing our traditional base."

Obama aides dismiss recent national polls that showed female voters shifting toward McCain after he picked Palin. Instead, Dunn argued, the selections of Biden and Palin, along with the excitement surrounding the conventions, helped both parties consolidate their bases.

Despite the attention gap Palin has created, many Democrats maintain that it will be clear by Election Day that Biden is a stronger candidate than Palin.

"You've had this dynamic of Sarah Palin sucking the oxygen out of the room . . . and Joe Biden has had his role kind of pushed to the side by this energy around Palin," said Steve Grossman, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

"I say to my friends, 'Look, folks, you have to take a deep breath and count to 10. There will be any number of times in the next 52 days where the American people will have a look at Joe Biden, and, at the end of the day, he will bring rock-solid credentials and good judgment on national security.' "

By Perry Bacon Jr., The Washington Post, September 14, 2008

Michael Hooks voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary, but he didn't tape any Clinton signs on the walls of his downtown Erie hair salon.

Customers walked in with Barack Obama campaign buttons and signs. Hooks tacked those up instead.

They're still displayed today -- with just over seven weeks until the election between Sen. Obama and Sen. John McCain.

"I put Obama stuff in my shop because I didn't want to argue with black people," he said. "I didn't want to upset my customers."


Black customers make up about 60 percent of his business.

Hooks, 42, is black man. But the Erie Democrat is coming late to the Obama party. He will now vote for Obama.

But whether they joined late or joined early, an overwhelming majority of black voters will cast their votes for Obama on Nov. 4 -- a can't-miss voting bloc for the Democrat who could become the nation's first black president.

Most polls show that Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, will capture at least 90 percent of the black vote. Black voters typically vote for Democratic presidential candidates, though the percentage could be even higher this year.

A Quinnipiac University poll in August showed 94 percent of black voters will choose Obama.

That alone wouldn't translate into victory.

"If he becomes president of the United States of America, it's going to be white America that dictates that," said Hooks before three customers entered the shop and interrupted a brief break.

Shawn Grady, 44, of Erie, who's working as a full-time volunteer for Obama, agreed that support from white voters would be a key to Obama winning the election.

"It has to be a cross-section of America. We don't have the numbers to do it ourselves," said Grady, who is a black man and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the Air Force. He heard Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Most polls now show a tight race for the presidency after the Republican National Convention and McCain's surprise vice presidential selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, 44, a fiscal and social conservative. Political analysts say McCain's selection does more to shore up his conservative base than it does to win over female voters who wanted a Clinton presidency.

Yet, an ABC News/Washington Post poll last week shows a dramatic shift in how white women could vote.

White women, who supported Obama by 50 percent and McCain by 42 percent before the GOP convention, now favor McCain by 53 to 41 percent, the poll showed.

However, Obama, 47, still holds an advantage in what counts -- the projected electoral vote over the 72-year-old McCain -- though he's lost ground lately.

Race and gender
With Obama and Palin on the tickets, Hooks said race and gender are the main factors in this historic presidential race.

Hooks is disappointed that Obama didn't select Clinton as his running mate -- the so-called Democratic dream team.

"He should have picked Hillary. She fought him to the end (of the primaries)," he said.

Hooks said Obama "allowed society" to dictate his choice of Sen. Joe Biden as his vice president. Biden, 65, is what Obama isn't -- a white man, older, more experienced in the Senate and in foreign affairs, and a Catholic with blue-collar roots.

Hooks, a part-time student at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania who's majoring in criminal justice, said he supported Clinton in the primary because she and former President Bill Clinton know the "ins and outs of the political game" in Washington, D.C.

"Biden was supposed to balance him out -- complement his weaknesses. I would have taken the person that had (18) million votes," he said, referring to Clinton's total votes for the Democratic nomination.

"Not that I'm not cheering for the underdog or the black man, but he wouldn't do any better job than Hillary," he said.

Lyn Twillie-Darby, 48, an Erie Insurance employee, is another recent convert to the Obama camp. The longtime Clinton supporter and black Democrat initially believed that Clinton was the best choice in the Democratic primary.

"I felt Obama should wait his turn ... he was a spoiler in that sense," she said.

She began to slowly switch her support to Obama -- and voted for him in the primary -- because she was disturbed by "some of the antics I saw coming from the Clinton camp."

Particularly troubling to Twillie-Darby was former President Bill Clinton comparing Obama's overwhelming victory in South Carolina's Democratic primary to Jesse Jackson's wins there in 1984 and 1988.

Jackson wasn't a serious contender afterward, and the former president's comments -- which included references to the state's demographics and Obama's heavy support among black voters -- angered many black voters.

"It was like he was saying, 'Well, black folks will just vote for Obama anyway,"' Twillie-Darby said.

Twillie-Darby, who's now solidly behind Obama, said she hopes that people who are racially skeptical of Obama "would vote their pocketbooks and not their prejudices.

"Because if you vote your prejudices, you won't be voting for Obama. I hope people are concerned for the future of our children and what they have to contend with in the future, economically speaking," she said.

First time in the booth
Erie resident Doug Stewart, 35, a temp worker in the plastics industry, said he's voting for the first time -- inspired by Obama's candidacy for the highest office in the land.

"It's important to me as a black man ... that nothing is impossible," said Stewart, a Democrat.

Stewart said he believes an Obama presidency would heal some past racial wounds.

"It's important after all the hatred and the segregation that the blacks have faced to see a black man step up ... and prove he has the ability to do it ... for all people," he said.

But Stewart said the 44th president would be elected based on whom people think is the most qualified.

And on that score, Robert Vincent, the owner of Beez Appliances, 916 Parade St., said Obama and McCain demonstrate shortcomings for the Oval Office.

Yet the Democrat said he's leaning toward Obama.

"I don't know as a first-time senator if he's ready for the job of president," said Vincent, 51, who is a black man.

"But I have a lot of doubts about McCain, too. And picking Palin? I thought it was just game-playing, myself," he said.

Vincent said he thinks McCain's choice of running mate had more to do with the white female vote that Obama needs than with qualifications.

Rozenne Adams, 85, a retired beautician and part of the black demographic expected to vote heavily for Obama, echoed the theme of Obama's campaign by calling for change in Washington.

But Adams, a Democrat, is skeptical because she said Washington seems to change even the change agents.

But she offered a unique perspective: "At least they'd be new lies, fresh lies."

This historic election of race and gender has turned politics upside down, but don't expect to see that colorblind slogan on any candidate's bumper sticker.




BY JOHN GUERRIERO & KEVIN FLOWER, Erie Times-News, September 14. 2008

Also: Barack Obama is far ahead in the polls -- of other countries.

Regardless, there wasn't much question who the star of the show was.



Obama is far ahead -- abroad

This is the way matters have been going of late for Barack Obama. New poll numbers are in that give him an overwhelming advantage over McCain -- and they will help him not one whit.

Indeed, Republicans will probably figure out a way to spin the results against him.

The BBC World Service poll gauged attitudes toward the U.S. presidential race in 22 other countries -- and found Obama the preference in every one, in many cases by overwhelming margins.

Obama's best showing was in Kenya, his father's home country, where a whopping 87% supported him. Five percent backed McCain. Italy emerged as his second-place hotbed of support: 76% favored Obama, 12% McCain.

The Democrat's overseas trip this summer that included stops in France, Germany and Britain may have sparked taunts from the GOP, but it paid off in this poll. In each of those countries, support for Obama swamped McCain's showing.

The findings for America's two closest neighbors? Canada: Obama 66%, McCain 14%. Mexico: Obama 54%, McCain 16%.

The race was closest in India, where the figures were Obama 24%, McCain 15%. As those numbers indicate, a large proportion of India's citizens didn't care to pick between the two. Russians shared that attitude: There, fully 75% did not express a preference. Among those who did, the findings were Obama 18%, McCain 7%.

Overall, among the 22,000 foreigners interviewed, Obama was backed by 49% and McCain by 12%, with the rest of the respondents taking a pass.

The survey also found that in 17 of the 22 nations, the most common view is that an Obama White House would mean "America's relations with the rest of the world are likely to get better." Under a President McCain, "relations will stay about the same as they are now," 19 countries opined.




By DON FREDERICK AND ANDREW MALCOLM, Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2008

He keeps the focus on McCain, whom he denigrates at every opportunity. Biden also sticks to the script.

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Even as he mounts unceasing attacks on his Republican rival, Barack Obama is ignoring the person on the ticket who is the center of attention: Sarah Palin.

A few syllables are all Obama expends on the Republican vice presidential nominee. He'll mention "McCain-Palin" when he's on the trail; beyond that, her name is practically taboo.

Last week, Obama rolled out what his campaign billed as a more aggressive persona. And he is indeed denigrating John McCain at every turn. Given his new eagerness to slash at McCain's record, his silence on Palin's is even more conspicuous.

Palin is the focus of a raging national debate over her qualifications for high office.

Twice at a town hall event in Dover, N.H., on Friday, Obama fielded questions that invoked Palin. One man described her as a "feminine version of Dick Cheney and George Bush" and asked Obama why she had garnered so much attention. Obama didn't bite.

He stuck to his talking points, turning back to McCain and repeating the argument that the Arizona senator was a figure from the past, falsely running on a promise to shake up Washington.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 7,000 here Saturday morning, Obama hewed to that theme: "John McCain doesn't get it," he said. "He doesn't know what's going on in your lives. He is out of touch with the American people."

Normally, the Democratic vice presidential nominee might be expected to eviscerate Palin. But Obama's No. 2, Joe Biden, is sticking to the script. When he gets a question about the Alaska governor, he too shifts back to McCain.

Guiding the Obama campaign is a conviction that Palin will either fade or implode.

One aide privately predicted the Palin phenomenon would "go away."

Outside public view, Obama aides are doing what that they can to nudge that process along, steering reporters to unflattering stories about Palin. An Obama aide on Saturday sent out an e-mail highlighting a Boston Globe article that disclosed that Palin, contrary to what the McCain campaign had said, had never visited Iraq.

David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, said Obama was shunning Palin "because she's not the candidate for president."

Democratic operatives offer another reason: Obama doesn't want to give her more publicity. Were he to target Palin, he might detract from the critique of McCain he is trying to drive home every day.

Chris Kofinis, communications director for John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign, said: "Palin right now is the flavor of the week. And the reality is she's going to rise or fall based on how she performs in the public eye. The last thing you want to do as a campaign is to fuel more media attention toward her when you don't need to."

Obama has some practice with this. In May, late in his primary battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton, he abruptly stopped paying her much attention. Clinton continued to campaign as if she were locked in a fight with Obama; Obama campaigned as if his only opponent was McCain. He began appearing in states that were important in the general election, ignoring the remaining primaries under the assumption that they didn't matter.

His strategy worked.

This time around, though, his supporters, anguished over his disappearing lead in the polls, say they'd like to see Obama show more fight. With Palin dominating news coverage for much of the last two weeks, they'd like to hear what Obama has to say about her qualifications. Or at least a word from Biden.

Walking out of the town hall event in Dover, Joyce Blanchard, 59, of Hampton Falls, said she had hoped to hear more about the dynamics of a race that seems to be turning in McCain's favor.

"I wish he would come out in defense of himself. He needs to stand up," she said. "People want to see that. He could benefit greatly by actually saying something that people want to hear."




By Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2008

The Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee promises a cheering Carson City crowd ethics reform, lower taxes and energy self-sufficiency.

CARSON CITY, NEV. -- Seeking to win this swing state's five electoral votes, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin made her first solo campaign stop in the lower 48 states Saturday, promising ethics reform, lower taxes and energy self-sufficiency.

Palin, greeted by chants of "Sarah, Sarah," spoke to about 3,500 people for about 20 minutes. She was interrupted frequently by cheers and applause. And she led the audience in the now-familiar refrain: "Drill, baby, drill."

"In a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to expand opportunity for new energy development," the Alaska governor said, promising she and John McCain would push to "drill now to make this nation energy-self-sufficient."

Palin did not mention Barack Obama or Joe Biden, a departure from her early days on the trail when she harshly criticized the Democratic presidential ticket.

But she did take a veiled swipe at Michelle Obama, saying that John McCain, "like you and like me, is always proud to be an American." (In February, Michelle Obama controversially said that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.")

After her speech, Palin and her husband, Todd -- whom she called him the "first dude" and who she noted is a United Steelworkers union member -- spent more than half an hour signing autographs and shaking hands before heading to two more swing states, Colorado and Ohio.

"I love her," said Juliene Allman, who manages a dental office in Reno. "She is an all-American woman. She is like all of us."

It might seem odd that Palin made Nevada's capital city her first solo stop outside of Alaska, but Carson City is in a battleground region in a battleground state. Obama is to visit this week.

The state is narrowly divided. Bill Clinton carried it in 1992 and 1996. George W. Bush won it in 2000 and 2004, each time by about 21,500 more votes than his foes.

The visits underscore how close the outcome could be on Nov. 4.

"George Bush won our state because of rural Nevada, twice," Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said in a warm-up for Palin on Saturday, urging the crowd to "turn out like never before."

Thanks to a labor-backed voter registration effort, Democrats have expanded their ranks to 458,900, compared with 397,200 Republicans. Roughly a fifth of the state's voters, or about 150,000, are nonpartisan.

Obama is almost certain to win in Las Vegas and Clark County, where organized labor representing casino workers is strong and Democrats hold a 92,200-voter advantage. But even there, more than 100,000 voters are registered with no party preference.

The McCain-Palin ticket will probably win in rural parts of the state.

That means the Carson City-Reno-Sparks area could tip the balance. Republicans hold an edge, 97,000 voters to 89,000 Democrats, in the area encompassing Carson City and Washoe County, where Reno and Sparks are located.

"Washoe County is where it is going to be decided," said political scientist David Damore, of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Obama and McCain both are airing television ads here. Obama is attacking McCain for supporting nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain -- not a popular stand in the Silver State. McCain's ads charge that Obama intends to raise taxes, also unpopular in a state with no income tax. Obama has vowed to raise taxes only for the wealthiest Americans.

Like Republicans, Democrats view Reno, Sparks and Carson City as battleground cities. The union UNITE-Here, which represents casino workers, has undertaken a significant independent campaign in northern Nevada. It has targeted roughly 35,000 voters, most of whom have Spanish surnames.

"If you don't move the needle in Washoe County, it undercuts what you can do in Las Vegas," said Jack Gribbon, the organizer overseeing the union's independent campaign.

In her remarks, Palin delivered several feel-good lines: "America is an exceptional country and you are all exceptional Americans." Perhaps she aimed to differentiate herself from Obama, who sometimes talks about "ordinary Americans."

She also repeated two of her most popular lines: that she turned down federal earmarks for the "bridge to nowhere" and that she put the state-owned jet on EBay. By the time Palin canceled the bridge between Ketchikan and its island airport, it had become clear Congress would not pay for it. Alaska did take the money that had been earmarked for the bridge and spent it elsewhere. And the plane failed to sell on EBay; a broker later sold it at a loss.

She also said she had confronted the oil industry in her state. "Whatever they're running now, it is not the state of Alaska," she said.

On Friday, all Alaska residents had received checks for $3,300, thanks in part to a rebate that Palin had pushed to help cover high energy costs. "They can spend it better than government can," she said, and promised "tax reform" if she and McCain win. "We're trusting people with their money."

Palin played to the crowd, talking about the annual air show held in the area, mentioning that her husband flies small planes, and saying that they named one of their girls Piper, after the plane maker.

She singled out aviator Chuck Yeager, who was in the crowd, noting that he broke the sound barrier and saying she hoped to break through the glass barrier.

"You guys get it," Palin said. "You understand the need to put the pride back into America. We can do this because we are an exceptional nation."

"She's a real firecracker," said Renee Major, a first-grade teacher in Reno. She wore a button that had a photo of Palin firing a rifle; it said: "Read my lipstick, change is coming."

Major said she had "kind of" planned to vote for McCain before he tapped Palin; afterward, she said, she became an enthusiastic booster.

Like others interviewed, she brushed aside criticism that Palin might not be well-versed on all the issues: "She is holding her own with the old boys."

Ron Brandow came from Lake Tahoe, where he was vacationing, to hear Palin.

"Who could get excited about McCain? When Palin came on, she added such energy. She added excitement," he said.

"I'm 67, and she's the first person who is running for national office who is a common person," said Brandow, who is from Houston.

Palin started her day in Alaska with a rally at the Dena'ina Civic & Convention Center in Anchorage. Although the Obama campaign has targeted Alaska, with its three electoral votes, the state is almost certain to vote Republican.

With her husband and three of their children, Willow, Piper and Trig, at her side, Palin urged Alaskans to help the victims of Hurricane Ike.

Palin drew some of the wildest applause when she stated: "In a McCain-Palin administration, we are going to drill now."

"It's not just Alaska realizing how desperately we need to be energy independent," she said, adding that Americans tell her: "Thank you, Alaska, for safe, responsible, ethical development of an American source of energy. Thank you for Alaska's foresight in this."




By Dan Morain and Erika Hayasaki, Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2008

It's happening around the coffee machine at work and the dinner table at home. Your hear it at football games, cocktail parties and on supermarket lines. It's consuming unmeasurable chunks of cyberspace.

It's the Sarah Palin Conversation, and these days it can seem to be the only one we're having - especially women, for whom it's becoming increasingly passionate and partisan. We're having this conversation whether we love her or hate her.

For Angela Hampton, it was the tailgate talk at last weekend's Appalachian State football game in Boone, N.C., where she and her friends munched on sides and dips and discussed John McCain's new running mate. The tone was overwhelmingly positive.

"We all decided we really like her, based on her freshness," says Hampton, a 34-year-old mother who works in the loan department of a bank. "It's what I keep hearing: She's a breath of fresh air, just what we need to shake things up." Hampton, a registered Republican, was nonetheless planning to vote Democrat this year - until she watched Palin's convention speech.

"I thought, wow," says Hampton. "I was hooked. I really think she represents the true American woman." And though her tailgating friends, more conservative than she, readily agreed, her mother does not: A staunch Democrat, she's firmly in Obama's column.

In Richmond, Va., Margaret Turman Kidd spent last weekend having The Conversation with her own visiting mother, trying to convince her that the Alaska governor is the wrong choice.

"I finally had to make myself stop talking," says Kidd, 31, who's voted both Democratic and Republican in the past. "I hope I was at least making her stop and think."

But Kidd's mother, a former Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter, likes Palin - partially, her daughter says, because of her personal qualities and also, she guesses, because she's a woman. And that's an issue that Kidd, like many women, is struggling with: Wouldn't it be thrilling to see a woman VP, no matter what her policies?

"No doubt, that's compelling," says Kidd. "But I just don't feel she's the RIGHT woman. There are other women out there who have much more experience. I try to keep an open mind, but the more that comes out, the less I like her."

While some women, in conversations, applaud the Republicans for nominating a woman, others call it a cynical, even insulting plug for their votes. These women agree with Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon whose recent essay, "Palin: wrong woman, wrong message," has been circulated widely via e-mail.

Also making the rounds is an e-mail from Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, telling women that "if you can only do one thing, it should be to tell every woman you meet that McCain and Palin are the most anti-choice, anti-women pair imaginable." Another, from two magazine editors in New York, is titled "Fury, Dread, Palin" and invites women to a blog, "Women Against Sarah Palin."

Then there's the endless chatter on message boards everywhere. "OK, who's interested in joining me for an online mom campaign against Palin?" reads a post this week on urbanbaby.com. "What makes Obama more qualified than Sarah Palin?" reads another.

For devotees of Facebook, the social networking site, there are hundreds of groups to join, both for and against Palin: "Governor Sarah Palin for VP Fans." "Sarah Palin is Awesome." "I Have More Foreign Policy Experience Than Sarah Palin." "My Pet Rock is More Qualified Than Sarah Palin to Be Vice President."

Nancy Connors, a lifelong Democrat from Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., is amazed by all the back-and-forth. "The e-mail traffic from women is astounding," she says. "I must get five or six a day, some from women I don't even know." A former Clinton supporter, she says she's deeply concerned by what she sees as Palin's "nonexistent qualifications."

"We'd be the laughingstock of the world," says Connors. "Can you imagine her trying to negotiate with Putin?" Yet the 56-year-old consultant avoids workplace conversations, feeling they're inappropriate. Instead, she plans to work phone banks for Obama.

Polls suggest he could use the help, especially in the crucial voting bloc of white women. An Associated Press-GfK poll released Friday found Obama leading women overall by 5 points, but McCain leading by 12 points among white women. Asked which candidate "cares a lot about people like you," white women chose McCain first (47 percent), then Palin (45 percent), then Obama (38 percent).

And Palin ranked higher, at 42 percent, than either McCain or Obama when white women were asked which candidate shares their values and principles "a lot." The poll of likely voters was conducted Sept. 5-10.

"She's definitely energized the election, no matter what your leaning is," says Sue Wagner, a mother of four in University Park, Md. Wagner, 41, doesn't work outside the home, but encounters plenty of Sarah Palin conversations nonetheless - often between mothers at school dropoff time, or at the playground. "There's a debate going on, but it's pretty friendly," she says.

Wagner decided long ago that she was voting for Obama. But her friend Katy Huggins isn't so sure anymore. Huggins, also a mother of four, admires Obama, and though she's a registered Republican, she'd been planning to vote for the Democrat.

Then she watched Palin's convention speech.

"I was like, wow, I want YOU to be president!" says Huggins, who adds that she isn't much of a McCain fan. "I could completely relate to her on a lot of levels, especially as a mom. That's what my world is about now." Since then, Huggins has engaged in the Palin conversation with friends, fellow moms, even teachers at school, many of whom start by asking, "Hey, what do you think about that lady?"

Huggins is still undecided. But she says one thing is clear: "Every person I have spoken to is intrigued. Democrats, Republicans, everyone. They're all fascinated with her."

By JOCELYN NOVECK, The Associated Press, September 13, 2008

CARSON CITY, Nevada (Reuters) - Out on the road as a solo act, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin fired up a large crowd in Nevada on Sunday by pledging to shake up Washington if elected with John McCain on November 4.

After a farewell rally in her home state of Alaska, Palin flew to the "lower 48" U.S. states to campaign on her own in Nevada, Colorado and Ohio over the next few days before rejoining McCain.

Alaska Gov. Palin, 44, has quickly soared from political unknown to popular Republican politician in the space of two weeks, helping the 72-year-old McCain vault into a slight lead in public opinion polls over Obama.

The Obama campaign, which has struggled to respond to the Palin phenomenon, has issued fierce attacks against her in an attempt to undermine her credibility as a self-styled reformer.

She sought to reach out to voters beyond the traditional Republican base to independents who may well make the difference in McCain's battle against Obama.

"We're going to take our case for reform, that needed reform in Washington D.C., to voters of every background, of every party or no party at all," she said.

Only the second woman ever to win a vice presidential nomination, she urged voters to help her break "the glass ceiling" and elect a woman to the No. 2 U.S. office.

Having helped McCain generate large rallies when appearing with him, she showed herself to be a powerful draw as a solo act. Thousands of supporters cheered "Sarah, Sarah."

"It's going to be a hard-fought contest here in beautiful Nevada," she said. "With your help, we are going to win. We're going to Washington D.C. to shake things up."

She stuck to some parts of her record that Democrats have sought to question. She said she killed a controversial $398 million bridge project in Alaska dubbed "the Bridge to Nowhere," without mentioning she had initially been for the project.

"I told Congress thanks but no thanks on that Bridge to Nowhere, that if the state wanted to build that bridge, we would build it ourselves," she said.

And she said again that, as Alaska governor, she put up for sale on eBay a "luxury jet" used by the previous governor, without mentioning that it did not sell and she had to hire a broker to sell it.

Palin hewed closely to Republican doctrine on calling for increased drilling for offshore oil due to gasoline prices that have soared to record levels this year. She also said McCain would expand development of alternative sources of energy.

"Drill baby drill," the crowd cheered.

Out of respect for U.S. efforts to grapple with Hurricane Ike, Palin held back from criticizing Obama.

At her rally in Anchorage, Palin made an indirect reference to some critics who have argued that her experience leading sparely populated Alaska did not prepare her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency if John McCain were to win the November 4 election.

Palin said she had heard critics say "'Oh, you're a sparsely populated state,' and at a time like this, I say, you know, thank you, God, for this."

"We're small enough to be family and we can look past some political differences to work as a family and to protect one another and to make each other's lives a bit better, a bit more secure. We're going to look out for each other in Alaska," she said.

She spoke a day after a state legislative committee in Anchorage ordered subpoenas of her husband, Todd Palin, and 12 others to question them about charges that the Palin as governor abused her power by firing a public safety commissioner who refused to fire a state trooper involved in a bitter divorce with her sister.

By Steve Holland, Reuters, September 13, 2008

CARSON CITY, Nev. - Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin made her first solo campaign appearance outside her home state Saturday, sticking largely to a speech that has boosted her popularity among Republican faithful but drawn criticism for having misstatements.

The Alaska governor repeated her claim to have killed the now-famous "Bridge to Nowhere," which her running mate, Arizona Sen. John McCain, has derided as wasteful pork. Palin first approved of the project. She turned against it only after it proved to be a political embarrassment.

"We're going to take our case for reform, that needed reform in D.C., to voters of every background, every party, no party," she said. "We're going to shake things up."

Palin spoke less than 20 minutes, using a teleprompter, at the late Saturday event in a roller hockey rink. She drew a loud and boisterous crowd eager to get their first look at the previously unknown candidate who's brought a fresh energy to the McCain bid. A group of roughly 5,000 broke into chants of "Drill, baby, drill!" and "Sarah! Sarah!"

"We are going to drill now to make this nation energy efficient," she said. "You're right, drill, baby, drill!"

Palin's first steps alone on the trail without McCain have been cautious. After a morning rally in Anchorage, the Alaska governor flew to Reno, Nev. and drove 30 miles to the sleepy state capital, the sort of small community she is expected to win over.

The rally was the only public event planned in Nevada before Palin headed to Denver. She had no events scheduled Sunday, and is expected to rejoin McCain on the campaign trail next week.

Palin's bid to become the first female vice president and her appeal as America's latest "everywoman" have remained key elements of her stump speech. She repeated her hopes "to break a glass ceiling once and for all" and was introduced by Nevada Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki as a "hockey mom with attitude."

In the cavernous outdoor rink, where women appeared to outnumber men, Palin claimed to see her counterparts.

"I think I'm looking at a whole lot of other hockey moms for McCain out here!" she said, before introducing "Alaska's first dude," her husband, Todd.

The governor has limited her public appearances and chances to mingle with voters or reporters since leaving McCain's side earlier in the week. She returned to Alaska to say goodbye to her son, Track, whose U.S. Army unit was deploying to Iraq.

Palin arrived Wednesday in Fairbanks to an adoring crowd of 2,000 supporters and the next day spoke, in her capacity as governor, at the deployment ceremony. The military forbids campaigning at such events.

Palin spent much of her time in Alaska preparing for and conducting a series of televised interviews with ABC News.

As she left her home state early Saturday she told a crowd of more than 2,000 that she'd return at the end of the campaign.

"We've got a little travel coming the next 52 days," Palin told a cheering crowd of more than 2,000 gathered at the city convention center. "But I'll be home in November and I'd really like to bring my friend," she said, referring to McCain.

To critics who question whether her experience as a small-town mayor and as governor has prepared her to serve as vice president, she said: "We're small enough to be family, and we can put aside political differences to work as a family."

Asking for prayers and support for the victims of Hurricane Ike, she told supporters that "it's time for Americans to pull together and to help where the need is greatest."

About two hours after Palin's speech Saturday, hundreds of people protesting the policies of Palin lined a busy Anchorage street, waving signs and chanting "Obama!"

In addition to Obama supporters, the protesters included those who don't agree with Palin's positions against abortion, her support for the Iraq war and other issues. One woman held a sign that read, "I'm Bail'in on Palin!" Another said, "Pro Woman, Anti-Palin." Another read, "What About Healthcare?"

"We're not alone. A lot of people are worried about the nomination of Sarah Palin," said rally organizer Angie Doroff, 46, as cars drove by honking their horns in support.

Palin stayed for two days at her Wasilla home on Lake Lucille, missing a hastily planned rally of about 100 supporters gathered at a hotel near her home Friday evening. Organizers had hoped she'd stop by or say a few words through a special video conference connection they had set up.

By KATHLEEN HENNESSEY, Associated Press, September 14, 2008

WASHINGTON - John McCain defied all sense of geography Sunday by going north and south at the same time.

The Republican presidential contender was visiting the battleground state of New Hampshire to attend a NASCAR race especially popular in GOP strongholds down South.

The twofer let McCain spend time in a state where Democrat Barack Obama has opened a lead - and campaigned Saturday - while simultaneously prospecting in a different region he is counting to be part of his Election Day base.

The Arizona senator underscores his effort with a rally Monday in Jacksonville, Fla., another pivotal electoral state where a series of recent polls have shown him leading Obama. McCain won the Republican primaries in Florida and New Hampshire this year.

"In a state like New Hampshire, no one knows better than John McCain that it's direct voter contact that sways the electorate. Seizing the opportunity to meet with voters on a large stage in New Hampshire makes an enormous amount of sense," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.

McCain was attending the Sylvania 300 Sprint Cup Series race at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. His running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was spending a down day in Denver. McCain was being accompanied by his wife Cindy, who recently attended NASCAR events in Indiana and Pennsylvania.

The self-described "lead foot" has joked she is on a first-name basis with several Arizona Highway Patrolmen. She and her son Jack also built a so-called drift car and competed as a team in an amateur competition.

McCain had no public events Saturday, instead spending most of the day at his campaign headquarters in suburban Washington. He used part of that time to prepare for his three debates with Obama, the first of which is on Sept. 26 at the University of Mississippi.

In his weekly radio address, McCain criticized Congress for lacking accomplishments during the past two years - a period when the Democrats regained control over the House and Senate from the Republicans.

"Now Senator Obama wants you to believe that things will get better if Democrats control both the Congress and the presidency," McCain said. "But when Americans demand change in Washington, one-party rule where power is an end of itself isn't exactly what they have in mind."

By GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press, September 14, 2008

WASHINGTON, (AFP) - Barack Obama seems finally to have hit on a strategy to fight the Sarah Palin phenomenon: sidestep the feisty Republican vice presidential pick and turn full fire on an "out of touch" John McCain.

Palin's explosive debut left Obama's Democratic White House campaign flailing for an initial response as she trumped him as the freshest and most magnetic character in the history-making 2008 race.

Appearing on the "Late Show with David Letterman" Wednesday, the first African-American with a serious shot at the White House mused ruefully on how he had been upstaged.

"We didn't know much about her. Honestly, she's a skilled politician. There's no doubt that she has been a phenomenon," Obama said.

The Alaska governor made instant converts of the Republican conservative base, kick-started McCain's misfiring campaign and wiped out Obama's small but consistent leads in national opinion polls.

But the Democrat is now firing back -- branding 72-year-old McCain as an economic illiterate stuck in the pre-Internet era, while vowing to parry a negative post-convention Republican barrage.

"I think Palin's candidacy was such a surprise and she was such an unknown that it threw off the Obama campaign and drew them away from their message," said Kathleen Kendall of the University of Maryland.

Early Obama camp responses to Palin's broadsides seemed churlish, open to Republican complaints of sexism and left a candidate determined to elevate political discourse stuck in the trenches of snarling soundbite politics.

As visions of defeat on November 4 and Democratic panic engulfed liberal blogs, the Obama camp had a rethink.

The new battleplan turns the heat on McCain, and not his charismatic sidekick.

A day after Obama huddled with Bill Clinton, one of the former president's top aides, political bruiser Rahm Emanuel, led a fresh bid to frame the choice before voters -- with a distinctly Clintonian tone.

"What John McCain is offering you is two for one," the Illinois congressman said.

"George (W.) Bush's economic policies and Dick Cheney's foreign policy -- you're going to get four more years of just what you got for the last eight years."

Later Friday, Emanuel passed up a chance on MSNBC to critique Palin's shaky performance in her first major television interview.

A blistering memo by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe only mentioned the Alaska governor in passing. For the first time in days the Illinois Senator skipped references to Palin at a rally in New Hampshire Friday.

Their reasoning was clear: deprive Palin of the spotlight and make a new attempt to twin McCain with unpopular Republican President Bush.

Ironically, Bush's political guru Karl Rove warned in a Wall Street Journal article on Thursday that attacking Palin was bad politics for Obama.

"These assaults highlight his own tissue-thin resume, waste precious time better spent reassuring voters he is up for the job and diminish him -- not her," Rove wrote.

Democrats view Rove with a mixture of dread and awe, and might ask, if Palin has been so influential, shouldn't the party try to take her down?

"It is not a good idea to dwell on her," said Bruce Buchanan, a political analyst at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Sooner or later it is going to be about McCain again."

But will an assault on McCain also dim Palin's influence on the race?

Polls in battleground states reveal that Palin is drawing increasing support among the crucial voter group of white, working class women.

In Quinnipiac University surveys, McCain's support among white women voters grew four percentage points in Ohio and five points in Pennsylvania since August 26.

Cue Hillary Clinton: the Democratic former first lady and Obama's vanquished primary foe was set to campaign for Obama in northeastern Ohio on Sunday, no doubt aiming to fire up her white, working-class base for Obama.

Clinton has so far not publicly attacked Palin, amid reports she does not want to detract from the Obama campaign with a headline-grabbing public spat with the Alaska governor.

But the shape of the electorate also suggests that Clinton alone may not be a decisive factor in stemming the flow of women away from Obama towards McCain.

"Hillary got about 10 million votes in the Democratic primary from women," said Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University polling institute.

"You will probably see about 62 million women vote in November -- it's the other 52 million that Palin is aimed at -- if they get some of the Hillary voters that is gravy."

By Stephen Collinson, AFP, September 14, 2008

WASHINGTON - The question of whether Sarah Palin has ever been to Iraq pushed Obama aides Saturday to accuse the McCain campaign of outright lies, distortions and distractions to the American people.

Since Republican presidential nominee John McCain tapped the Alaska governor to be his running mate on Aug. 29, questions about her experience have been fueled by her relatively brief tenure in office, as well as a dearth of foreign travel.

Palin made a well-documented trip to Kuwait and Germany last year to visit U.S. troops, and over time, the governor and her staff have revealed she also visited Canada and Mexico. Meanwhile, her aides clarified that a purported visit to Ireland was little more than a refueling stop during her trip to the Middle East.

On Saturday, a Palin aide told The Associated Press the governor also traveled one-quarter mile into Iraq during her July 2007 trip to participate in a re-enlistment ceremony for a member of the Alaska National Guard. Palin did not mention the excursion when asked about her foreign travels last week during a two-part ABC News interview because the bulk of her trip was elsewhere, said spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt.

That answer appears to contradict one provided to The Boston Globe, which reported Saturday that McCain-Palin aides had twice revised their description of Palin's visit to Iraq.

The newspaper said unnamed aides initially explained that Palin had visited a "military outpost" inside Iraq. The Globe said campaign aides and members of the Alaska National Guard subsequently explained that she did not venture beyond the Iraq/Kuwait border when she visited the Khabari Alawazem Crossing on July 25, 2007.

Lt. Col. Dave Osborn, commander of the 3d Battalion, 207th Infantry of the Alaska National Guard, who was in charge of the 570 local troops serving in Kuwait and Iraq, said Palin did not cross in Iraq.

"You have to have permission to go into a lot of areas, and (the crossing) is where her permissions were," Osborn told the newspaper during a telephone interview Friday.

But Schmitt said Palin was accompanied by a Pentagon general who oversees National Guard matters.

"According to the general who traveled with her, while she was there she presided over a re-enlistment ceremony of an Alaskan National Guard soldier," the spokeswoman said.

The discrepancy prompted a blistering memorandum to campaign reporters by aides to Democratic nominee Barack Obama. The Illinois senator and his staff have been criticized in some party circles lately for not responding forcefully enough to McCain and Palin since her surprise addition to the Republican ticket.

"Since naming Gov. Palin as their vice presidential nominee, the McCain campaign has distorted, distracted and outright lied to the American people about her record in a desperate attempt to hide the fact that a McCain/Palin administration would be nothing more than a continuation of the failed Bush policies of the last eight years," the memo read.

Among other things, the memo cited the Iraq-visit dispute, as well as Palin's claims to be a fiscal conservative despite significant growth in the Alaska state budget.

By GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press, September 14, 2008