History > 2006 > USA > Politics (II)

Star of the Right

Loses His Base at the Border

August 29, 2006
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLE

MUNCIE, Ind. — He supports tax cuts and the war in Iraq. He opposes stem cell research and the Medicare drug plan. He is a master of his movement’s medium, talk radio. Jesus Christ is his personal savior and Ronald Reagan his political idol.

Conjure what might be called the perfect conservative, and chances are he would look a lot like Representative Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who in just three terms has turned 100 House allies into a vanguard and himself into one of his party’s rising stars.

Or that was the case until this spring when he sought compromise in the rancorous immigration debate. His complicated plan would strengthen border security and send illegal immigrants home, but let most of them quickly return. Since then, Mr. Pence — named last year’s Man of the Year by the conservative weekly Human Events — has looked to some conservatives like this year’s Benedict Arnold. They say he has lent his conservative prestige to a form of liberal amnesty.

Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum called his plan “a sick joke.” Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer, threatened to punish politicians who supported it. Pat Buchanan, editor of The American Conservative, likened the betrayal to a scene from “The Godfather.”

Perpetually genial, prematurely gray, Mr. Pence, 47, said, “I was taken aback by the level of invective.”

“It’s a test of the character of the conservative movement in the 21st century,” he said. “We are either going to prove that we believe in the ideas enshrined on the Statue of Liberty or the American people will go looking elsewhere.”

Mr. Pence — who bills himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order” — pushed the plan on a recent trip across his district. He quoted the Bible. He quoted Ronald Reagan. He stood sweating in a tomato field beside Mexican workers. And when asked why an Indiana congressman was focused on the border, he responded with a ready phrase: “April 11, 1923.”

That is when his Irish grandfather, Richard Michael Cawley, a Chicago bus driver, arrived on Ellis Island. “We were especially close,” said Mr. Pence, who added that he sees his grandfather’s thrift and hard work in today’s immigrant generation.

Some members of the Muncie Chamber of Commerce had doubts. Some worried about cost. Some worried about compliance. But several complimented him for tackling a tough cause. “It is the greatest privilege of my life to represent you,” he said.

Though he comes from a family of Irish Catholic Democrats — his father ran a string of gas stations — Mr. Pence joined an evangelical fellowship group at Hanover College, drawn less by theological issues than by its more personal style of worship. His religion pulled him to the right. “I had a hard way of reconciling my commitment to biblical truth with the national Democratic Party’s commitment to abortion on demand,” he said.

His wife, Karen, teaches at a religious school, and sends out e-mail messages asking for the prayers of his supporters. “Please pray for the Holy Spirit to speak through him at the bbq,” a recent message read.

Mr. Pence, two years out of law school, made his first Congressional run in 1988 and lost narrowly to a longtime Democratic incumbent, Phil Sharp. He tried again two years later, in a negative campaign that won him just 42 percent of the vote. Mr. Pence was devastated.

“What was most painful to me was the bile in my throat over how I had responded,” he said. “My faith says if someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other. My response, after being attacked by my opponent, was to empty the silos on this guy.”

Mr. Pence delivered an unusual self-rebuke in an article called “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner.” Then he ran a conservative research group, the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, and was host of a talk radio show in Indianapolis. The seat opened up again in 2000 and Mr. Pence squeaked in — with civility, he said.

“I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad about it,” he often says.

Arriving in Washington, he was dismayed at conservatives’ support for government expansion. In 2001, he was one of 34 Republicans to oppose the No Child Left Behind Act, which expanded federal involvement in education. In 2003, he was one of 25 who opposed the Medicare drug benefit. “I was voting against big conservative government before it was cool,” he said.

Congressional leaders hinted at reprisals, but the base applauded, especially after a 2004 speech in which he warned that the movement was drifting into “the dangerous and uncharted waters of big government.”

Among those won over was Paul Weyrich, a fixture of movement conservatism. He said Mr. Pence had strong appeal among supporters of four major conservative causes: limited government, free enterprise, strong defense and traditional values.

“Nobody is perfect, but he comes pretty close,” Mr. Weyrich said. “He is what I’ve been waiting for in terms of leadership.”

Last year, Mr. Pence became head of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus. He quickly expanded its profile, and, rivals note, his own. Mr. Pence, unlike many conservatives, courts the news media.

His influence was apparent last fall after Hurricane Katrina, when Washington was suddenly filled with talk of new aid for the needy. Concerned about the cost, Mr. Pence’s group replied with Operation Offset, a plan to cut $500 billion over 10 years in programs that included Medicaid, tax credits for the poor, and care for people with AIDS.

It outraged the leadership, which accused him of showboating, and failed to pass. But it quickly changed the political dynamics, from starting programs to cutting them. Five months later, with Mr. Pence nearby, President Bush signed a bill that cut $39 billion over five years. “I think Operation Offset had something to do with that, though I would never boast of that,” Mr. Pence said.

Edwin J. Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington group, said Mr. Pence “has really been central to the revival of principled conservatism in the House.” Admirers have already begun a “Mike Pence for President” Web site.

But some colleagues grumble about what they call his self-promotion, and critics on the left see harshness behind the geniality. Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group, said that while the Republican effort was billed as deficit reduction, it in fact made the deficit larger. That is because the reductions were paired with $70 billion of tax cuts, mostly for the very well-to-do. “This is Robin Hood in reverse,” Mr. Greenstein said.

Barry Welsh, a Democrat challenging Mr. Pence this fall, is a Methodist minister who said, “I find it hypocritical that he claims such Christianity” while “cutting the benefits of those who need them.”

Mr. Pence argued that tax cuts help the poor by revving the economy. That may eventually prove true, but despite large tax cuts the poverty rate has risen in each of the last four years.

“That’s anecdotal,” Mr. Pence said in an interview last fall. Then he offered an anecdote — a story President Reagan told about a pipe fitter pleased to see the rich prosper, “because I’ve never been hired by a poor man.”

With Republicans worried about losing control of Congress in the midterm elections this fall, some moderates say Mr. Pence’s wing of the party has pushed it too far to the right; conservatives like Mr. Pence say that in accepting what they call big government, the party has not hewed to its conservative principles enough.

When Mr. Pence weighed in on immigration this spring, the issue, like much of the Republican agenda, was stalled and Republicans were deeply split. The House had passed a tough bill focusing on border security alone. The Senate had passed a broader measure that included a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here.

Mr. Pence tried to offer something to everyone. He included provisions to bolster the borders. After two years, if the government certified that those changes were in place, a guest worker program would begin. Those here unlawfully would have to leave the country and apply at job-placement centers. By requiring re-entry, Mr. Pence argues, the plan avoids amnesty and respects the rule of law. The guest worker visas could be renewed, with a chance of citizenship after 17 years.

Mr. Bush sent an approving signal by inviting Mr. Pence to an Oval Office meeting. And the proposal won a Senate co-sponsor in Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.

The idea, at best, faces an uphill fight when Congress reconvenes next week. But Tamar Jacoby, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who sees promise in Mr. Pence’s approach, said that without him, “the issue would be dead.”

So his critics fear. Team America, a conservative political action committee, now has a feature on its Web site called “Pence Watch.” Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, said the plan would encourage more illegal immigration and undermine cultural cohesion. But David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, credits Mr. Pence’s “courage to think outside the box.”

Does he worry his conservative image has been tarnished?

“I’m not completely immune to that thought,” Mr. Pence said, en route to a photo op in an Orestes, Ind., tomato field. Then he quoted from Micah in the Old Testament: “Do justice and love kindness.”

Star of the Right Loses His Base at the Border, NYT, 29.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/washington/29pence.html

Voters Find Some Machines Harder to Use        NYT        28.8.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/nyregion/28voting.html

Voters Find Some Machines

Harder to Use

August 28, 2006
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN

With New York State facing a looming deadline to modernize its election technology, a new report offers evidence that one of the two major types of voting machines being considered has a higher rate of unrecorded votes, suggesting that it is too confusing for many people.

The report, which the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law intends to release today, examined election records from thousands of counties across the nation since 2000. It is likely to animate long-simmering debates across the state’s 62 counties, which face a December deadline for deciding how to replace antiquated voting equipment.

For an overwhelming majority of the state’s 11.6 million registered voters, the changes will mean the end of the creaky lever machines that have been used for decades.

One of the two types of machines under consideration is the direct-recording electronic or D.R.E. systems, in which voters push a button or touch a screen to choose a candidate, and the ballot is automatically recorded and counted.

The other is the optical-scan system, in which voters mark an oval or arrow next to a candidate’s name on a paper ballot, which is then scanned into a machine at the precinct, allowing the voter to find and fix any errors.

The choice, however, is further complicated because the State Board of Elections has ruled that state law requires the use of a “full face” ballot — a ballot that displays all candidates for all races on a single page or screen.

The Brennan Center disagrees with the state board’s interpretation that a full-face ballot is required in New York.

In January, the Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, concluded that contrary to a widely held belief there, Connecticut law did not require full-face ballots.

The direct-recording electronic system is not inherently flawed, the report found, but when it is combined with full-face ballots, there seems to be more difficulty, particularly in areas with more black, Hispanic and low-income voters.

Such voters, according to the report, would find it easier to use digital machines that allow voters to make one choice and then flip to the next page, which is similar to what customers do at A.T.M.’s and airport check-in kiosks that dispense boarding passes. But the full-face requirement precludes the use of such machines.

In the absence of that option, optical-scan machines would be the best choice for counties, said Lawrence D. Norden, an associate counsel at the Brennan Center and an author of the report.

To adopt electronic machines with the full-face requirement, he said yesterday, “virtually guarantees that thousands of votes are going to be lost at every election.”

At stake in the decision between the two major types of machines is some $200 million in federal financing that the state will spend on new machines and other steps to modernize voting. To promote their products, a handful of manufacturers have hired lobbyists and aggressively courted county election commissioners.

John A. Ravitz, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, said yesterday that he had read a draft of the Brennan Center’s report and that its findings would be carefully reviewed by the board’s 10 members.

“We’re continuing to gather as much information as possible on both types of systems, both optical scan and D.R.E.,” said Mr. Ravitz, a former assemblyman.

Bo Lipari, executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, an organization that has been pressing for adoption of the optical-scan machines, said he hoped the report would have a major effect on the decision-making by counties.

“The implications of this report clearly show that the only viable voting system for New York State is precinct-based optical scans,” said Mr. Lipari, who represents the League of Women Voters of New York State on a committee that advises the state elections board on voting modernization.

However, support for the optical-scan ballots is by no means assured. Although optical-scan advocates say their systems are more cost-effective, proponents of direct-recording electronic system say the electronic machines do not waste paper and are easier for disabled people to use.

In March, the Justice Department sued New York State for failing to overhaul its election system as required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which was intended to prevent a recurrence of the Florida election debacle of 2000 and to help disabled people to vote. Unable to agree on a unified response to the federal law, Albany passed the decision along to localities.

For the Sept. 12 primary and the Nov. 7 election, the state and federal governments have agreed on a stopgap plan involving temporary machines for use by the disabled. But the counties still must choose machines to adopt over the long term. The state has yet to identify which machines will be acceptable. Eleven devices, made by a total of six manufacturers, are under consideration.

Besides New York, only one other state — Delaware — uses full-face ballots statewide, although some counties in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee also use them, according to David C. Kimball, a political scientist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and a co-author of the Brennan Center report.

For the report, Dr. Kimball reviewed election records for thousands of counties in 2000, 2002 and 2004. He compared the residual-vote rate — the difference between the number of ballots cast and the number of valid votes cast in a particular contest — across several voting systems. Residual votes occur because of “undervoting,” when voters intentionally or unintentionally make no selection, or by “overvoting,” when voters select too many candidates, invalidating the ballot for a particular contest.

Dr. Kimball found that elections involving both a touch-screen or push-button system and a full-face ballot generated a residual vote rate of 1.2 percent, compared with 0.7 percent for optical-scan ballots that are counted at the precinct.

For the study, he examined records for the 2004 presidential election from 2,402 counties. He found that the disparity between the two systems, in the percentage of unrecorded votes, was even higher in counties where the median income was less than $25,000 (2.8 percent versus 1.4 percent), where blacks made up more than 30 percent of the population (1.3 percent versus 0.9 percent) and where Hispanics made up more than 30 percent of the population (2.0 percent versus 1.2 percent).

(The report also examined two variants of the main new voting systems that are not applicable in New York State. These are optical-scan ballots that are counted centrally and do not allow voters to check their ballot for errors, and “scrolling” direct-recording electronic systems, which do not meet the “full face” requirement.)

“Any design feature that makes it more confusing or places more of a burden on the user increases the likelihood of errors, and that effect is more dramatic in low-income and minority communities,” Dr. Kimball said.

Mr. Norden added: “The digital divide is real. Full-face touch screen will put low-income and minority voters at a particular disadvantage.”

The report’s other two authors were Jeremy M. Creelan of the law firm Jenner & Block and Whitney Quesenberry, a designer who helps companies makes their Web sites easier to use.

    Voters Find Some Machines Harder to Use, NYT, 28.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/nyregion/28voting.html

Editorial

Voter Suppression in Missouri

August 10, 2006
The New York Times
 

Missouri is the latest front in the Republican Party’s campaign to use photo ID requirements to suppress voting. The Republican legislators who pushed through Missouri’s ID law earlier this year said they wanted to deter fraud, but that claim falls apart on close inspection. Missouri’s new ID rules — and similar ones adopted last year in Indiana and Georgia — are intended to deter voting by blacks, poor people and other groups that are less likely to have driver’s licenses. Georgia’s law has been blocked by the courts, and the others should be too.

Even before Missouri passed its new law, it had tougher ID requirements than many states. Voters were required, with limited exceptions, to bring ID with them to the polls, but university ID cards, bank statements mailed to a voter’s address, and similar documents were acceptable. The new law requires a government-issued photo ID, which as many as 200,000 Missourians do not have.

Missourians who have driver’s licenses will have little trouble voting, but many who do not will have to go to considerable trouble to get special ID’s. The supporting documents needed to get these, like birth certificates, often have fees attached, so some Missourians will have to pay to keep voting. It is likely that many people will not jump all of the bureaucratic hurdles to get the special ID, and will become ineligible to vote.

Not coincidentally, groups that are more likely to vote against the Republicans who passed the ID law will be most disadvantaged. Advocates for blacks, the elderly and the disabled say that those groups are less likely than the average Missourian to have driver’s licenses, and most likely to lose their right to vote. In close elections, like the bitterly contested U.S. Senate race now under way in the state, this disenfranchisement could easily make the difference in who wins.

The new law’s supporters say its purpose is to deter fraud. But there is little evidence of “imposter voting,” the sort of fraud that ID laws are aimed at, in Missouri or anywhere else. Groups in Missouri that want to suppress voting have a long history of crying fraud, but investigations by the Justice Department and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others, have refuted such claims in the past. If the Legislature really wanted to deter fraud, it would have focused its efforts on absentee ballots, which are a notorious source of election fraud — and are not covered by Missouri’s new ID requirements.

Because of the important constitutional issues these laws raise, courts will have the final say. Federal and state judges have already blocked Georgia’s ID law from taking effect, and although Indiana’s law was upheld earlier this year, that ruling is on appeal. Missouri voting-rights advocates recently filed suit against their state’s law.

Unduly onerous voter ID laws violate equal protection, and when voters have to pay to get the ID’s, they are an illegal poll tax. They are also an insult to democracy, because their goal is to have elections in which eligible voters are turned away.

    Voter Suppression in Missouri, NYT, 10.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/opinion/10thu1.html

Lamont Defeats Lieberman in Primary

August 9, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY

Ned Lamont, a Connecticut millionaire whose candidacy for the United States Senate soared from nowhere on a fierce antiwar message, won a narrow victory in the Democratic primary last night over the incumbent, Joseph I. Lieberman.

Senator Lieberman, a national party leader and the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, conceded defeat in a phone call to Mr. Lamont shortly before 11 p.m. But then, in a combative speech to supporters in Hartford that was carried live on television news, the senator declared that he was not dropping out of the race, but would instead run for re-election as an independent this fall.

“As I see it, in this campaign, we’ve just finished the first half and the Lamont team is ahead — but in the second half, our team, Team Connecticut, is going to surge forward to victory in November,” Mr. Lieberman told cheering supporters.

The senator said he was staying in the race because Mr. Lamont had run a primary campaign of “insults” and “partisan polarizing” that relentlessly blamed Mr. Lieberman for President Bush’s wartime policies, which the senator has supported and defended but also criticized at various points.

“For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot, I will not let this result stand,” Mr. Lieberman said of the Lamont victory.

Mr. Lieberman’s determination to remain in the race may soon collide with the will of many Democratic leaders in Washington and Connecticut, however. The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who is leading the effort to elect more Democrats in November, planned to announce this morning that they were supporting Mr. Lamont and that the party should unite around the nominee, according to Democrats close to both men. A spokesman for Mr. Schumer said a statement would be forthcoming, but declined further comment.

“Reid and Schumer will back Lamont, but the big question is if they will approach Joe about dropping out, because they don’t want to get his back up against the wall,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide who was involved in the Reid-Schumer discussions but was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Mr. Lieberman’s Democratic ally, privately congratulated Mr. Lamont last night and was expected to appear at a “unity press conference” with Mr. Lamont and other candidates at state party headquarters this morning. Two Lamont advisers said that they expected Mr. Dodd to help smooth Mr. Lieberman’s exit from the race; a spokeswoman for Mr. Dodd, however, said he would not play a go-between role to broker the senator’s exit.

A spokeswoman for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, restated Mrs. Clinton’s announced intentions to support the Democratic nominee in Connecticut — now Mr. Lamont. A spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, who campaigned for Mr. Lieberman last month, did not return a phone message late last night.

Unofficial returns this morning showed that Mr. Lamont won with 51.8 percent of the vote, with 98 percent of the electoral precincts reporting.

Even before Mr. Lieberman conceded last night, Lamont advisers were making plans to pressure him to drop out if he did not do so on his own. Tom Swan, Mr. Lamont’s campaign adviser, said last night that the candidate would appear on television morning talk shows to call on Mr. Lieberman to respect the will of the Democratic majority, and then send the same message at the unity event this morning. Mr. Lamont also intended to call national Democratic leaders in Washington, including Senate colleagues of Mr. Lieberman, and ask them to speak to the senator about dropping out, Mr. Swan added.

Mr. Lamont said that former Senator John Edwards, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2004, was the first Democratic leader to call him last night. Mr. Lamont also gave a prominent spot at a rally last night at his headquarters in Meriden to several African-American supporters, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

“We think that Joe should respect the will of the Democrats,” Mr. Swan said. “We will seek and welcome help from any Democratic leaders in making sure that Joe respects the will of Democratic voters.”

Advisers to the senator said last night that Mr. Lieberman was emboldened to continue in the race because of the narrow margin of Mr. Lamont’s victory. Yet the advisers said he might still drop out if the next round of opinion polls showed Mr. Lamont well ahead of Mr. Lieberman in the fall general election.

The Connecticut race drew national and even international attention this summer as a barometer of the mood of American Democrats over the Iraq war. Among political insiders, too, it was seen as a test for liberal bloggers to affect a major election, instead of merely commenting on politics in cyberspace.

Mr. Lieberman, a leading moderate Democrat, drew scorn from members of his own party for supporting the war and for forcefully defending President Bush’s foreign policy. Some voters also felt that Mr. Lieberman had lost touch with Connecticut after 18 years in the Senate, a period in which he was influential in national affairs, a vice-presidential nominee in 2000 and a presidential candidate in 2004.

Many liberals never forgave him for his friendly manner in a vice presidential debate against Dick Cheney in 2000, and they were further angered when Mr. Lieberman said on national television last year that he would have kept Terri Schiavo on a feeding tube against her husband’s wishes.

Mr. Lamont, a former Greenwich selectman who, at 52, has never held statewide office, capitalized on the disaffection by spending at least $4 million of his own money on hard-edged television commercials, like one in which Mr. Lieberman’s face changed into President Bush’s as an announcer said the senator “talks like George W. Bush and acts like George W. Bush.”

Mr. Lamont battled the perception that he was a multimillionaire pawn of the bloggers, trying to broaden his antiwar message with a liberal load of proposed federal programs, such as universal preschool and expanded health insurance.

The returns showed Lamont narrowly winning such cities as Danbury and New London and having a commanding edge in Norwalk and his hometown of Greenwich, where he captured 68 percent of the vote. He also held the edge in incomplete returns from New Haven. Mr. Lieberman was ahead in Stamford, which is in Mr. Lamont’s home county, Fairfield.

Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said last night that a Lamont victory would scramble Mr. Lieberman’s current edge in polls forecasting the general election.

“Lamont is going to get even more positive news coverage from his win, and Democrats will likely rally around their party’s candidate,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Lieberman will be viewed differently Wednesday — he will be viewed as the losing candidate.”

The hard-fought contest took an especially bitter turn this week as Lieberman advisers denounced the collapse of their campaign Web site, which disrupted communications among supporters on the final day of the campaign. The Lieberman camp blamed unnamed “political opponents.”

Yet it was not clear who was at fault. The Lieberman advisers said they had no evidence implicating the Lamont campaign and could not explain the precise nature of the problem, except to say that the campaign server’s bandwidth had been overwhelmed.

Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting for this article from Meriden, Jennifer Medina from Hartford and Avi Salzman from Stamford.

    Lamont Defeats Lieberman in Primary, NYT, 9.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/nyregion/09campaign.html?hp&ex=1155182400&en=f5e3cb38fb8e509e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Lieberman Explains His Stance on Iraq

August 7, 2006
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY and JENNIFER MEDINA

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman directly confronted the anger roiling the Democratic Party over Iraq yesterday, making a last-ditch attempt to explain his support for the war and to win back doubting voters in Connecticut before the state primary election tomorrow.

Using his strongest language of the campaign in a speech that might well determine his political fate, Mr. Lieberman essentially offered a new set of talking points for Democratic leaders who are struggling for the right words to reconcile their support for the war initially and the fiery antiwar views of many Democratic voters today.

Mr. Lieberman said that while he believed his vote to authorize the war in 2002 was correct, he now felt a “heavy responsibility” to end the war quickly. He said he wanted to withdraw American troops “as fast as anyone,” yet insisted that leaving Iraq now would be a “disaster” that could worsen the sectarian violence there. And while President Bush may share that view, he added, Connecticut voters were free not to.

“I not only respect your right to disagree or question the president or anyone else, including me, I value your right to disagree,” he said at a community center in East Haven.

Mr. Lieberman’s bid for a fourth term has become a bellwether campaign for the Democratic Party nationally as it seeks maximum political advantage — and protection — on Iraq in the 2006 midterm election and in the 2008 presidential race.

While Mr. Lieberman faces a particularly perilous challenge from an antiwar Democratic challenger, Ned Lamont, other Democratic senators up for re-election this year — from Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York to Maria Cantwell in Washington State — are facing questions and some criticism about where they have stood, and stand now, on the Iraq war.

Recent public opinion polls show Mr. Lamont, a multimillionaire cable executive from Greenwich, with a lead of 10 to 13 percentage points over Mr. Lieberman, who was his party’s nominee for vice president in 2000 and sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2004.

Mr. Lamont has surged in front in the last two weeks, as he has persistently thumped Mr. Lieberman as a war supporter and Bush ally.

In his speech, Mr. Lieberman sought to distance himself from the president and the White House war policy, while also standing his ground and making a plea for bipartisanship.

“I understand that many Democrats in Connecticut disagree with me and are angry about the war,” Mr. Lieberman said. “For some of them, I don’t think there is anything I can say to change your mind about whether we should have gone to war or when we should bring the troops home, and to a certain extent and to a real extent, at this point I’m not going to insult you by trying.”

He said he was not President Bush’s “best friend and enabler,” contrary to some sound bites from television commercials by the Lamont campaign, and noted that former President Bill Clinton and other prominent party leaders had endorsed him.

“Do you think any of those people would be supporting me if they really thought I was an enabler for George Bush?” Mr. Lieberman said. “Give me a break.”

Ticking off his disagreements with the president, from stem-cell research and global warming to the number of American troops in Iraq, Mr. Lieberman noted at the same time that he believed in working with Republicans on mutual goals, like creating jobs in Connecticut and investigating the 9/11 attacks.

“That’s something that distinguishes me from my opponent in this race; I don’t hate Republicans,” he said. “I know that sometimes in the United States Senate the best way to deliver for the people who sent me to Washington is to work with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. And I’ll tell you this: that doesn’t make me a bad Democrat, it makes me a better senator.”

Mr. Lieberman has long considered his moderate brand of politics and his independent streak as assets, but it appears, from interviews with voters and from the polls, that likely Democratic primary voters are looking for a little more partisan passion from their Senate candidate in this election.

Indeed, some Democratic voters reacted especially poorly to Mr. Lieberman’s announcement last month that he would run for re-election as an independent this fall if Mr. Lamont won the Democratic primary tomorrow.

Advisers to Mr. Lieberman said yesterday that he still planned to run as an independent if he loses to Mr. Lamont; current polls show that Mr. Lieberman would beat Mr. Lamont and the Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger.

As a way to win nomination and avoid the independent route, Mr. Lieberman had been under pressure from some of his own advisers to deliver a speech like the one he gave last evening, as both a peace offering to antiwar critics and an impassioned appeal to fence-sitting Democrats.

As late as Saturday night, Lieberman advisers said, it was not certain if Mr. Lieberman would deliver such remarks or stick to his stump speech that included Iraq but did not dwell on it.

By yesterday afternoon his advisers — led by Dan Gerstein, a former Lieberman aide and New York Democratic operative — were furiously writing and rewriting it, while Lamont aides prepared their own rebuttal to try to neutralize any positive effect that the speech might have for Mr. Lieberman.

Mr. Lieberman accused Mr. Lamont’s campaign of using “lies” and “bogus charges” to try to defeat him. He made his remarks alongside Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator of Georgia, who was defeated for re-election in 2002 after Republicans paired him in ads with Osama bin Laden because he had opposed some domestic security measures.

“My opponent has done his best to distort my record, spending more than $4 million of his own money to mislead people — or try to — into thinking that I am someone I am not,” Mr. Lieberman said. “This is not unlike what the Republicans did to Max Cleland four years ago.”

The defeat of Mr. Cleland, a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee, became a sore point for Democrats and a rallying cry for John Kerry in his presidential race in 2004.

Mr. Cleland, a sharp critic of President Bush’s war policy, said that he supported Mr. Lieberman in spite of their differences on the war, and added that the senator was feeling “tremendous pressure” over Iraq.

“Joe and I see things a little differently, but the end is the same, the country belongs to the Iraqis,” Mr. Cleland said.

Lamont aides, in a statement last night, said Mr. Lieberman did a “great disservice” to Connecticut voters because his remarks were so sharply critical of Mr. Lamont.

“The senator has finally chosen to talk about issues but we can’t help but notice that, like Karl Rove, he has chosen to appeal to people’s fears,” the Lamont statement read. “Our campaign has focused on the issues and Joe Lieberman’s record as a senator. Joe’s campaign has consisted of personal and false attacks about Ned.”

Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Lamont began the final Sunday of their primary race reaching out to voters at church, and they and their allies also appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows to make closing arguments for their candidacies.

In a taped segment on ABC News’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Mr. Lieberman said he believed he had been “scapegoated” on Iraq.

He also said that Mr. Lamont was a “center right Democrat” and not as liberal as Mr. Lamont’s antiwar message might suggest. He noted that Mr. Lamont, as a Democratic selectman in Greenwich, frequently cast the same votes as the two other board members, who were Republicans.

Mr. Lamont, who supports expanding the federal government’s role in education and health care, was asked during his own segment on the show if he was a liberal.

“I am a liberal. But when I mean a liberal, I think a progressive,” Mr. Lamont said. “I think, if you’re an entrepreneur in business, you see a problem, you want to address it head on; you want to solve it, I think, then you’re a progressive in government.”

Mr. Lieberman stopped at churches in Stamford and Bridgeport, where the preachers invoked faith to say that Mr. Lieberman would be nominated tomorrow. At the Congregation of the Community Tabernacle of Deliverance in Stamford, one preacher spoke of the biblical character of Joseph, who he said “refused to sell out to the haters.”

A few moments later, Mr. Lieberman added, “Joseph had faith that God will take care of the haters, and I have a certain faith that this Tuesday God will take care of the voters.”

When one preacher at the Bridgeport church asked, “Anybody going through hell right now?”

Mr. Lieberman leaned over to tap a woman sitting to his left and began to nod his head with a smile.

Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting for this article.

    Lieberman Explains His Stance on Iraq, NYT, 7.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/nyregion/07campaign.html?hp&ex=1155009600&en=52e1a4176a4f719a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Text of Lieberman's Speech

August 6, 2006
The New York Times
 

Remarks by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman at the East Haven Community Center on Aug. 6, 2006, as prepared for delivery:

I am honored to be joined by my friend Max Cleland, a true American hero, to talk to you about the truth and consequences of this campaign.

In two days Connecticut Democrats will be going to the polls to choose their candidate for U.S. Senate. This evening I want to make my closing argument for your support.

Throughout the last several months, I have done my best to highlight what’s at stake in this race. I’ve talked about all the work I have done to protect and create jobs, to lower the cost of health care, to improve our schools, to clean up our environment, and fight for social justice. And about the clear differences between my experience and my opponent’s, and who can best deliver for Connecticut and for our future.

Sadly, my opponent has done his best to distort my record, spending at least $4 million of his own money to mislead people into thinking that I am someone I am not. Not unlike what happened to Max Cleland four years ago.

The more I have talked to voters in these closing days, the more I am concerned they have been shortchanged in this campaign. Instead of hearing an honest debate about the issues that really matter to people, they have been overwhelmed with bogus charges about my Democratic credentials. Instead of having an honest discussion about your future, we’re getting negative politics at its worst.

You deserve better than that. You deserve the truth. I have always leveled with you, and I’m not going to stop now. When you go into the voting booth on Tuesday, I want you to know the facts and have a fair chance to make an honest choice about what’s best for your family, our state, and our future.

Let’s start with the biggest lie being told about me by the other side – the false charge that I am George Bush’s best friend and enabler. As Max’s friends in Georgia would say, that is a load of hogwash.

I am the only Democrat in America to run against George Bush in a national election twice. I even beat him and Dick Cheney once, if all the votes had been counted.

I campaigned against George Bush because I believe that his agenda was wrong for our country and our future. And that’s the truth.

In the Senate, I have acted on that conviction time and time again, standing against the President on most every big domestic issue. I did so because I believe that his policies were damaging to our state and country. And that’s the truth.

* I opposed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy that hurt the middle class.

* I opposed the Bush ban on stem cell research.

* I opposed the Bush constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

* I opposed the Bush bankruptcy bill.

* I opposed the President’s efforts to undermine affirmative action in the courts.

* I opposed his unilateral decision to pull out of the Kyoto global warming pact and the International Criminal Court.

* I opposed his ongoing assault on the environment. In fact, I led the fight against his plans to drill in the Arctic Refuge and to weaken standards for power plant emissions.

* And contrary to the lies of my opponents, time after time I stood with my fellow Democrats to oppose George Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security.

Now with all that said, I will never hesitate to work across party lines when it helps me get something done for the people of Connecticut.

Like saving the Groton sub base with Governor Rell and the entire Connecticut Congressional delegation. Like dramatically increasing transportation funding for Connecticut, cleaning up Long Island Sound, and targeting more money to public schools in our cities. Or like passing the 9/11 Commission bill with John McCain over the opposition of President Bush.

That’s something that separates me from my opponent – I don’t hate Republicans. I know that some times the best way to get things done in the Senate for my constituents is through bipartisan cooperation.

That doesn’t make me a bad Democrat. It makes me a better Senator.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask the state AFL-CIO, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, the Human Rights Campaign, and more than a dozen other leading progressive organizations that are standing by me in this primary, because I have stood by them in the Senate.

Or ask Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, Barbara Boxer, John Lewis, State Treasurer Denise Nappier, Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, state AFL-CIO President John Olsen, and dozens of other national and state Democratic leaders who have endorsed me – including many who opposed the war in Iraq.

Do you really think all these people would be strongly supporting me if they thought even for a minute that I was too close to George Bush?

On Iraq, as you know, I supported the resolution giving the President the authority to use force to take out Saddam Hussein, as did most Senate Democrats. I still believe that was right.

What I don’t think is right, as I have said over and over again, are many of the Bush Administration’s decisions regarding the execution of the war. The fact is, I have openly and clearly disagreed with and criticized the President for, among other things:

* not winning the support of our allies in the run-up to the war;

* not having a plan to win the peace;

* not putting enough troops on the ground;

* putting an American in charge of the Iraqi oil supply.

And I said that if I were President, I would ask Secretary Rumsfeld to resign. I first said that in October 2003.

I know as well as anyone we have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq and we have suffered more casualties than we should have. Don’t think for a minute I do not grieve for every casualty of this war.

In fact, as someone who voted for the war, I feel a heavy responsibility to try to end it as quickly and successfully as possible.

I have been to the front lines four times. I have been to Walter Reed and visited the brave men and women who have suffered awful injuries and sacrificed for their country the way Max Cleland did. I have visited with the families who have been devastated by the death of a son or daughter, a husband or a wife.

The last thing I want to do is needlessly add to that kind of heartbreak. I want to get our troops home as fast as anyone, probably more than most, and as I have repeatedly said, I am against an open-ended commitment.

But if we simply give up and pull out now, like my opponent wants to do, then it would be a disaster to Iraq and to us. We would run a high risk of allowing Iraq to become like Afghanistan when the Taliban were in charge, and Al Qaeda had safe haven from which to strike us.

It’s precisely because of the horrible cost of the war, and the impact that has had on public support for our mission in Iraq, that I have tried to present an honest, non-partisan, balanced picture of what’s happening on the ground there. I have been encouraged by the formation of the Iraqi unity government. But like a lot of Americans, both supporters and of opponents of the war, I am increasingly troubled by the sectarian violence in Iraq.

Now I understand that many Democrats in Connecticut disagree with me and are very angry about the war. I don’t think there is anything I can say to change your mind about whether we should have gone to war or when we should bring the troops home, and at this point I’m not going to insult you by trying.

What I will say is this: I not only respect your right to disagree or question the President, I value it. I was part of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s, so I don’t need to be lectured by Ned Lamont about the place of dissent in our democracy.

My opponent wants you to believe otherwise, to cement his distortion campaign against me. That’s why they keep repeating and misrepresenting a single comment I made in one speech, in which I said we undermine the President’s credibility at our peril.

I know that statement has been widely misconstrued, so let me address it head on. I did not suggest that the President or anyone else -- including me -- should be immune from criticism. The best proof of that is I myself have challenged the President’s policies on many occasions.

The point I was trying to make was about how we disagree. My concern was, and remains, that if opponents or supporters of the war go beyond disagreeing to exploiting the war for partisan political purposes, much like Republicans did to Max Cleland on homeland security, we could lose more than an election. We could put our mission in Iraq, the lives of thousands of American soldiers carrying it out, and our national security at risk. That is what I care about.

Here’s the bottom line: When you sort through the fact and fiction, the truth and consequences, you will see that I am the same person you have always known, fighting for what I sincerely believe is right for my state and country.

The big difference between my opponent and me is that I believe in solving problems. That you can remain true to Democratic ideals and find common ground to get things done for your constituents. That you can be compassionate in domestic policy and tough in foreign policy. That you can stand up for progressive values and still work with the other side to help people make a better life for themselves.

That’s what this all about. Not me. Not Ned Lamont. Or George Bush. This election is about you and which one of us is best qualified to give the people of Connecticut the best future you can have.

My opponent can distort my work all he wants. But he can’t change the fact that my record of experience and results makes me the best Democrat to serve Connecticut in the U.S. Senate.

The proof is in the pudding: 35 years of fighting and delivering for you -- for your jobs, your security, your health and safety, your environment, your opportunities, your families, your rights, and your future.

That’s why every major newspaper in Connecticut, including three more today, have endorsed me in this campaign. Even though many of them disagree with my position on Iraq, they recognized that I have worked my heart out to solve problems and produce results for you, and that I am the candidate who Connecticut Democrats can count on to build a better future for our state.

So let me close by saying this. If after hearing the truth about where I stand on Iraq, you still want to cast your vote solely on that one issue, then I respect your decision. But if you care about all the other issues facing us, and want to make real progress on them, then I ask once again for your trust and your vote on Tuesday.

    Text of Lieberman's Speech, NYT, 6.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/nyregion/06lieberman-text.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

New Registration Rules Stir Voter Debate in Ohio

August 6, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

CLEVELAND — For Tony Minor, the pastor of the Community of Faith Assembly in a run-down section of East Cleveland, Ohio’s new voter registration rules have meant spending two extra hours a day collecting half as many registration cards from new voters as he did in past years.

Republicans say the new rules are needed to prevent fraud, but Democrats say they are making it much harder to register the poor.

In the last year, six states have passed such restrictions, and in three states, including Ohio, civic groups have filed lawsuits, arguing that the rules disproportionately affect poor neighborhoods.

But nowhere have the rules been as fiercely debated as here, partly because they are being administered by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the secretary of state and the Republican candidate in one of the most closely watched governor’s races in the country, a contest that will be affected by the voter registration rules. Mr. Blackwell did not write the law, but he has been accused of imposing regulations that are more restrictive than was intended.

Under the law, passed by the Republican-led state legislature in January 2006, paid voter registration workers must personally submit the voter registration cards to the state, rather than allow the organizations overseeing the drives to vet and submit them in bulk.

By requiring paid canvassers to sign and put their addresses on the voter registration cards they collect, and by making them criminally liable for any irregularities on the cards, the rules have made it more difficult to use such workers, who most often work in lower-income and Democratic-leaning neighborhoods, where volunteers are scarce.

“In Washington, D.C., Congress may have passed the voting rights bill to extend voter participation,” said Katy Gall, organizing director of Ohio Acorn, an advocacy group that focuses on poor neighborhoods. “But out here at the grass roots, things are headed in the opposite direction.”

Ms. Gall said the group had collected fewer than 200 new voter registration cards in the last month, down from an average of 7,000 a month before the regulations took effect on May 2.

“Quit whining,” said the Rev. Russell Johnson, the pastor of Fairfield Christian Church, who chuckled while shaking his head. “We work with the same challenges that everyone else does and we’re not having trouble.”

Surrounded by cornfields and middle-income homes, Mr. Johnson’s 4,000-member evangelical church in Lancaster, Ohio, is part of a coalition of conservative groups that aims to sign up 200,000 new voters by November, he said.

In the past several elections, Republicans have been effective in registering voters and getting them to the polls. Mr. Johnson said conservatives were better able to depend on voter registration volunteers because the conservatives had a message that attracted people who were willing to work free.

But Republicans are in an uphill battle in the face of investigations involving Gov. Bob Taft, who has pleaded no contest to charges of failing to report thousands of dollars in gifts given to him, and of Representative Bob Ney, who has been linked to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Backers of the new regulations say they were needed, pointing to the fake names that appeared on voter registration cards in 2004, like Jive Turkey Sr.

“The new regulations have everything to do with preventing Jive Turkeys from showing up on cards the way they did last time,” said John McClelland, a spokesman for the state Republican Party. “They’ve got nothing to do with suppressing voter participation.” But elections experts and liberal grass-roots organizations say the new rules go too far.

“All this flak about Jive Turkey is a red herring,” said Catherine Turcer, the legislative director for Ohio Citizen Action, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Columbus. “Yes, his name showed up on a voter registration card along with Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins and Michael Jordan. But none of them showed up at the polls, which is really what matters, and cases like theirs were a total rarity that did not justify such restrictive new measures.”

Back in East Cleveland, the copier machine at the Community of Faith Assembly church was overheating, and Mr. Minor was about to do the same. One new rule requires paid canvassers to return signed registration cards within 10 days to county boards of elections or the secretary of state’s office, rather than to the group paying the canvassers.

To comply with the rule, Mr. Minor has created an elaborate system so the cards do not leave the possession of the canvasser, and so he can make copies of them to get reimbursed by the People for the American Way, which is financing his voter registration drive.

Another rule requires that all paid workers take an online training course. “The problem there is that we’ve got a computer that freezes up every time we try to load the online program,” Mr. Minor said.

Politics have also ratcheted up the debate. In 2004, Mr. Blackwell was a co-chairman of President Bush’s re-election committee, and while the new law would prevent him from holding such a position in the future, his dual role as electoral overseer and candidate for governor has become a favorite target of his opponents.

On July 10, at an Acorn event in Columbus, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Mr. Blackwell of a conflict of interest. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee followed suit with a letter to Mr. Blackwell, calling for him to relinquish his election duties as secretary of state. That sentiment has been echoed by Representative Ted Strickland, a five-term Democrat who has an 11-percentage-point lead over Mr. Blackwell in the governor’s race, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey released Aug. 1.

Mr. Blackwell, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has said he is only carrying out the law that was handed to him by the legislature. If he has any conflict of interest, Mr. Blackwell’s campaign has said, so do the Democratic secretaries of state in Iowa and Georgia, who also ran for governor.

Wendy R. Weiser, a law professor at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and a lawyer in several of the suits opposing new voter registration regulations, said Ohio must be considered in a national context.

In Florida, the League of Women Voters and other groups are suing over a new law that imposes heavy fines for candidates if they submit forms late or if there are errors on the forms, Ms. Weiser said. In Georgia, the legislature passed a voter-identification law last year requiring citizens to purchase a government-issued ID card to present at the polls, but it was blocked by a federal judge as being a modern-day poll tax.

“I do believe,” Ms. Weiser said, “there is a national trend of using the straw man of voter fraud as a way to impose restrictive regulations on voting and voter registration.”

But what, then, is to be made of Jive Turkey Sr.?

Ohio state officials have said that such names appeared because voter registration groups were paying their workers per registration card, which created an incentive to submit fake names. The new regulations forbid this type of payment, a move that all grass-roots organizations seem to agree is for the better.

As for the level of threat posed by Mr. Turkey: a report compiled in 2005 by Mr. Ney, the Ohio congressman, cited news media reports of “thousands” of cases of voter registration fraud being investigated by local officials. But a separate study last year by the League of Women Voters found that voter registration fraud did not necessarily result in fraud at the polls. Out of 9,078,728 votes cast in Ohio in 2002 and 2004, the report said, only four ballots were fraudulent, according to statistics provided by officials from the state’s 88 county boards of elections.

    New Registration Rules Stir Voter Debate in Ohio, NYT, 6.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/us/06ohio.html?hp&ex=1154923200&en=dad4364c51f51b3a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Albany Strategy Lets Rich Evade Donation Limits

August 4, 2006
The New York Times
By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY, Aug. 3 — As a candidate for governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer is barred from taking more than $50,100 from any single donor.

But that has not stopped wealthy donors from legally circumventing these state contribution limits to shower six-figure donations on the Spitzer campaign. Their technique? Using limited liability corporations as a vehicle to give well above the maximum the state allows.

In fact, this year’s statewide political campaigns are awash with donations from L.L.C.’s, which are business entities that can be set up for as little as a couple of hundred dollars and provide special tax benefits and limits on financial liability. Six of the eight major-party candidates for governor or attorney general have taken donations from individuals who have contributed the maximum and then donated further through L.L.C.’s.

The donations are legal in New York State races, but restrictions have been put on them at the federal level and in New York City races. Election watchdog groups say the donations violate the spirit of campaign finance laws that seek to limit the influence of wealthy donors.

“It’s yet another loophole that makes our already weak campaign finance laws meaningless,” said Rachel Leon, executive director of Common Cause New York, which has prepared an analysis of these donations and shared its findings with The New York Times. “We have the highest contribution limits of any state that has limits, but even those laws you can get around with these loopholes.”

Several donors to Mr. Spitzer, the leading candidate for governor, have gone above the $50,100 limit on personal donations by contributing through L.L.C.’s that often have the same address as the donor. A hedge fund manager, Barry Rosenstein, and his wife, Lizanne, have contributed $120,000 to Mr. Spitzer, while Howard Markel, a Manhattan lawyer, and his wife, Joan Mintz, have contributed $190,000. Jeffrey L. Berkowitz, the former business partner of Mr. Spitzer’s friend Jim Cramer, has donated $68,000.

Asked if the practice was in keeping with the spirit of the law, Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Spitzer, said, “Eliot’s made it very clear that he believes that New York’s campaign finance laws should be reformed to limit individual campaign contributions.”

Until campaign finance laws are changed, however, she said Mr. Spitzer “will continue to abide by the law.” All told, the Spitzer campaign has collected more than $600,000 from contributors who legally exceed the individual limit by also contributing through L.L.C.’s.

The phenomenon of statewide candidates’ accepting such donations was previously reported by The Times Union in Albany in April, and since then, the candidates have revved up their fund-raising, with their July campaign finance reports showing the breadth of the practice.

The $50,100 limit is for a candidate in an election with a primary. Candidates who do not face a primary have a limit of $33,900.

One of the biggest beneficiaries has been Charlie King, a Democratic candidate for attorney general. Mr. King, a lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor four years ago, has taken in nearly $560,000, or nearly a fifth of all of his fund-raising since 2003, from an old friend from Brown University named Kent M. Swig, a prominent real estate developer, or Swig family members, or L.L.C.’s connected to him or to his partners.

The contributions can take the form of either cash or donated office space. In fact, Mr. Swig appears to be using a network of L.L.C.’s that have ownership stakes in Mr. King’s campaign headquarters at 48 Wall Street to donate office space on a rotating basis so as not to exceed the contribution limit, effectively giving Mr. King free rent. One of Mr. Swig’s business partners, the real estate development firm Allied Partners, also has a stake in 48 Wall Street and has contributed office space.

“I’ve known Charlie for over 25 years,” Mr. Swig said in a statement. “We share the same vision for New York and I am proud to support his campaign.”

Caitlin Klevorick, a spokeswoman for Mr. King, said, “There is a need for meaningful campaign finance reform and Charlie wholly supports a system modeled after New York City’s, but until then we will be arguing every campaign season about how much is too much, from L.L.C.’s, from unions, from corporations and from individuals.”

Stephen L. Green, a Manhattan real estate developer, and his wife, Nancy, have donated $165,000 to the attorney general candidacy of Mr. Green’s brother Mark, with the help of L.L.C.’s, and $135,000 more to the campaign of Mr. Spitzer, who has not endorsed a candidate to succeed him. Other Green family members have donated more than $200,000 to Mark Green as individuals.

New York’s limit of $50,100 per candidate is already the highest among the 37 states that have a donation limit and far above the $2,100 limit for federal campaigns, according to a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. While corporations have a donation limit of $5,000, L.L.C.’s have the same limit as individuals in New York State.

In tightening restrictions on these donations, regulators at both the federal level and in New York City have either banned such giving through L.L.C.’s donations or factored them in with individual donation limits.

Is it not clear how many of the L.L.C.’s are legitimate businesses — many clearly are — and how many are simply set up as a channel for donations. But there is nothing to prevent an individual from setting up multiple L.L.C.’s for the express purpose of donating well beyond the individual limit, according to the State Board of Elections.

Candidates criticize the practice, but also do not seem inclined to disarm while other candidates take in huge donations.

“The L.L.C. exemption is a loophole big enough to push the Titanic through it,” said David Chauvin, press secretary for Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi, a Democrat running against Mr. Spitzer. “This is a dysfunctional system and Tom has a plan modeled on New York City’s program that will fundamentally reform and clean up the state’s campaign finance laws.”

Mr. Suozzi himself accepted $15,000 from Steven M. Napolitano, an executive at First American Title Insurance of New York, $50,000 from Mr. Napolitano’s wife, Lisa, and another $50,000 from Carnap L.L.C., which is listed at their home address. First American paid a $2 million fine in May and took a number of other steps to settle an investigation by Mr. Spitzer’s office into its business practices.

Andrew M. Cuomo, a candidate for attorney general, has accepted money from several donors who have given their legal limit and then donated through L.L.C.’s.

They include his former employer, Island Capital, a real estate investment fund, its chief executive, Andrew L. Farkas, and an additional L.L.C., which have donated a total of $125,000 to the Cuomo campaign.

“They are friends and supporters of the campaign,” said Wendy Katz, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo.

The developer Melvyn Kaufman donated $33,900 to Jeanine F. Pirro, the Republican candidate for attorney general. Because Ms. Pirro is unopposed on the Republican side, that was the maximum amount allowed, but an L.L.C. controlled by Mr. Kaufman, Wyojet, also contributed the limit with a $33,900 donation.

The only major statewide candidates who have not accepted these donations are the Republican candidate for governor, John Faso, and Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democratic candidate for attorney general. That might say more about the lack of fund-raising momentum for the two men, who are far behind in polls.

Susan Del Percio, a spokeswoman for Mr. Faso, said the campaign had no policy against such donations, adding, “It’s just in this case it hasn’t happened.”

Mr. Maloney tried to claim higher ground.

“I certainly don’t have any misgivings about being the only candidate here not using shadowy funding schemes,” he said.

    Albany Strategy Lets Rich Evade Donation Limits, NYT, 4.8.2006,http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/nyregion/04donate.html?hp&ex=1154750400&en=3175d305e7ee783d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote

August 3, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and RALPH BLUMENTHAL

TOPEKA, Kan., Aug. 2 — Less than a year after the Kansas Board of Education adopted science standards that were the most wide-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution, voters on Tuesday ousted the conservative majority on the board that favored those guidelines.

Several of the winners in the primary election, whose victories are virtually certain to shift the board to at least a 6-to-4 moderate majority in November, promised Wednesday to work swiftly to restore a science curriculum that does not subject evolution to critical attack.

They also said they would try to eliminate restrictions on sex education passed by the current board and to review the status of the education commissioner, Bob Corkins, who they said was hired last year with little background in education.

In a state where a fierce fight over how much students should be taught about the criticism of evolution has gone back and forth since 1999, the election results were seen as a significant defeat for the movement of intelligent design, which holds that nature by itself cannot account for life’s complexity.

Defenders of evolution pointed to the results in Kansas as a third major defeat for the intelligent design movement across the country recently and a sign, perhaps, that the public was beginning to pay attention to the movement’s details and, they said, its failings.

“I think more citizens are learning what intelligent design really is and realizing that they don’t really want that taught in their public schools,” said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education.

In February, Ohio’s board of education dropped a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution. Last year, a federal judge ruled that teaching intelligent design in the schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional. But Ms. Scott said that opponents of evolution were hardly finished.

“They’ve had a series of setbacks,” she said, “but I don’t think for one moment that this means the intelligent design people will fold their tents and go away.”

Supporters of intelligent design and others who had favored the Kansas science standards said they were disappointed in Tuesday’s outcome, but they said they had also won a series of little-noticed victories in other states, including South Carolina. There, supporters said, state officials decided this summer to require students to look at ways that scientists use data “to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.”

John G. West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a group in the forefront of the intelligent design movement, said any repeal of the science standards would be a disservice to students here, and an effort to censor legitimate scientific challenges to Darwin’s theories. Still, he said, no local political skirmish will ultimately answer the broad issue.

“The debate over Darwin’s theory will be won or lost over the science,” he said.

It is not clear, however, that the Kansas vote necessarily reflected a widespread change in thinking around the state. The overall turnout in Tuesday’s election was 18 percent, the lowest here in at least 14 years, a fact some local political experts attributed to low-key races statewide and painfully steamy weather.

Several groups that favored the teaching of evolution had worked to turn out moderate voters. The groups included the Kansas Alliance for Education, which raised more than $100,000 to campaign against the current majority and the science guidelines, and Kansas Citizens for Science.

If future school board elections turn out a different group of motivated voters, the results could shift again, as they have in previous elections.

Five seats were at stake in Tuesday’s vote, four of them held by the board’s conservative Republican majority. Two conservatives lost to moderates in the Republican primary, ensuring a shift in control on the 10-member state board. Both winners will face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are both considered moderates as well.

“We need to teach good science and bring the discussion back to educational issues, and not continue focusing on hot-button issues,” said Jana Shaver, a teacher and college trustee from Independence.

Ms. Shaver is one of the moderate winners in the Republican primary. She ran far ahead of the conservative candidate, Brad Patzer, who was trying to claim the seat of his mother-in-law, Iris Van Meter, who did not seek re-election.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Ms. Van Meter refused to speak to a reporter. “I have nothing to say to you,” she said.

Connie Morris, a former teacher and author who had described evolution as “a nice bedtime story,” also lost in the Republican primary, to Sally Cauble, another teacher.

Ms. Cauble, a local school board member from Liberal, said she favored returning to what she considered a more traditional science curriculum drawn up by a committee of science experts.

The Kansas standards, which were to take effect in classrooms in 2007, do not specifically require or prohibit discussion of intelligent design. They call for students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”

The guidelines also say that evolution “has no discernable direction or goal.” Experts say that language goes beyond the general requirement for critical analysis of evolution as adopted by some other states.

Some members of the state school board, who supported the guidelines and were not up for election, seemed frustrated at the prospect that the board would once again revisit the guidelines.

“If the liberals take over in January, which appears likely, then I am going to have very little to say about it,” said Steve E. Abrams, the board chairman.

Kathy Martin, a board member and supporter of the standards, said: “I assume we will go back over that stuff. I don’t see a need for it, but there you have it.”

Kansas has been over this ground before. In 1999, the state made national headlines by stripping its curriculum of nearly any mention of evolution. Two years later, voters removed several conservative board members, and the curriculum change was reversed.

Then, a conservative majority took hold in 2004 and revived the issue, leading to the bitter 6-to-4 vote last year, in which the board adopted the current standards.

Monica Davey reported from Topeka for this article, and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.

    Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote, NYT, 3.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/us/03evolution.html?hp&ex=1154664000&en=c43df5486e76b157&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Passing Down the Legacy of Conservatism

July 31, 2006
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLE

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Headed for what she called “conservative boot camp,” Christina Pajak grabbed the essentials: dress sandals, her Bible and “The Politics of Prudence” by Russell Kirk, the celebrated writer who a half-century ago gave the conservative movement its name.

If she had not found Kirk, he would have found her. At a monthlong retreat for college conservatives here, he was both required reading and a source of after-hours debate among students excited to hear him called “one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite philosophers.”

Young people with old books is a common sight on the conservative circuit, and perhaps a growing one. While the movement has long sought to transmit its intellectual heritage to its young, that mission shows signs of new urgency amid fears of ideological drift.

Everywhere young conservatives turn there are conferences, seminars and reading lists that promote figures from the movement’s formative years. Along with Kirk, they include such canonical names from the 40’s and 50’s as Friedrich A. Hayek, Frank S. Meyer, Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr.

Ms. Pajak, 18, who was home-schooled in Andover, Minn., will be a freshman this fall at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Wheaton, Ill. While her conservatism springs from her upbringing, the literature “helps me explain what I already believe,” she said. “I don’t want to just say, ‘Oh, it’s because I was raised this way.’ ”

Every political movement has its texts. But James W. Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, argues that the conservative focus on core thinkers has no exact parallel among liberals.

“It doesn’t mean they’re not interested in ideas,” Professor Ceaser said. “It means their approach to politics doesn’t rest on theory in the same way.”

Liberalism’s main tenets formed earlier, he said, in the Progressives’ expansion of government, and are conveyed as assumptions rather than matters requiring theoretical debate.

The retreat here is run by the Young America’s Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Arlington, Va., that has long run weekend seminars. A $2.5 million gift allowed the group to begin this expanded effort, the Ronald Reagan Leadership Academy. With an inaugural class of 26, it combines classroom study with public speaking lessons and visits to Reagan’s former ranch.

At a foundation event last year, Ms. Pajak met a fellow student who urged her to join him in reading “The Politics of Prudence.” Their long-distance romance now includes comparing notes about which of Kirk’s 10 conservative principles they find most compelling. (Ms. Pajak is partial to No. 1: “There exists an enduring moral order.”)

Many conservatives say they have to promote their own thinkers because scholars and journalists ignore them. “They don’t study us; they’re ignorant of who we are,” said Floyd Brown, who runs the foundation’s West Coast office. “You can find college courses on all sorts of radical left-wing ideas, but you can’t find a course on Russell Kirk.”

Donald Devine, a lecturer here, said the task of teaching conservatism had changed with political success. When he began to lecture four decades ago, “we had to make the term ‘conservative’ respectable,” he said. “Now ‘conservatism’ has become such a popular word it doesn’t mean anything. The challenge is to decide what is truly conservative.”

Two students here tried to do just that one night after dinner. Ana Lightle, a senior at the University of Baltimore, had just read Kirk’s book “The American Cause.” He wrote it after the Korean War, in part to define, as he saw them, the principles the United States had defended.

“Now we’re fighting a war in Iraq, and people say it isn’t our business,” Ms. Lightle said. “I have this core belief — that the true state of man is free — and the best way we have to be free so far is through democracy.”

“Kirk just nailed it on the head,” she said.

Matthew McCorkle had doubts. “The way President Bush has phrased it — ‘If you support terror we’ll take you out and install a democracy’ — may be biting off more than you can chew,” he said.

Mr. McCorkle, a junior at Hillsdale College in Michigan, countered with a different Kirk book, “The Roots of American Order,” which traces the roots of American civilization to ancient Jerusalem and Rome.

“My impression is that Iraq doesn’t have those roots,” Mr. McCorkle said. “We’re dealing with a sapling here.”

Kirk, who died in 1994, wrote 32 books, the most famous being “The Conservative Mind,” which was published in 1953. It championed 150 years of conservative thought, and offered “conservative” as a unifying label for the right’s disparate camps.

These days, a bookish conservative has many places to turn. The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y, runs programs on free-market economics. The Heritage Foundation, a Washington group, offers courses for interns and Capitol Hill staff members. The Claremont Institute, in Claremont, Calif., emphasizes the founding principles of the United States.

The emphasis on philosophy, over policy mechanics, may reflect the movement’s origins as an insurgency. “A conservative who stays simply at the level of fighting policy battles may win some significant victories, but he’s still playing the liberal game of tweaking big government,” said Charles R. Kesler, who runs the Publius fellowship program for Claremont. “These thinkers give you the chance to step back and think outside the liberal box.”

Here, the students’ conservatism varied. Jaimie Ucuzoglu wants to keep taxes low and abortion legal. Chris Meece calls abortion “barbaric.” Drawing on Kirk’s notion of “prudence,” Ms. Pajak, an abortion opponent, would allow it in rare cases because “if you tried to outlaw abortion right now, it’d still be there in the back alley.”

One common trait is a reverence for Reagan, who left office when they were infants. Most focused less on his policies than his magnetism, what Lauren Wilson called his “immense amount of character.”

“I love Ronald Reagan,” said Ms. Wilson, who attends Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “One of the biggest things was his affection for Nancy; it’s just obvious they were each other’s world.”

Some conversation strayed from the canon. Dormitory banter cheered on Ann Coulter, the best-selling provocateur. Arguing for private property, Mr. Devine, the lecturer, noted “there are bums all over here” downtown, and “they sit on public property, not private property.” He lamented the prosecution of Kenneth Lay, the late Enron executive convicted of fraud, by asking, “Do you think it’s possible for a rich person to get justice in the U.S. today?”

One highlight was a trip to Rancho del Cielo — “the Western White House” — which the Reagans sold to the foundation in 1998 for $4.5 million. It consists of a surprisingly modest stucco home, set on 680 acres of horse trails and mountain brush.

Lecturing from a tent beside the home, Mr. Devine, who was the head of government personnel in the Reagan administration, seemed moved as he remembered his old boss. He reminded the students that the president “gained strength from Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek” and urged them “to be as good and decent and helpful as Ronald Reagan.”

That reminded Ms. Pajak of another line from Kirk, his call for “more elevation of spirit.” Without that, she said, reading from her well-thumbed book, “order, freedom, and justice fall into ruin.”

    Passing Down the Legacy of Conservatism, NYT, 31.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/us/31camp.html

Conservative Pastor Steers Clear of Politics, and Pays

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

MAPLEWOOD, Minn. — Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.”

And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.

“Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’ ”

Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.

“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”

Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.

He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.

When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill said.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

    Conservative Pastor Steers Clear of Politics, and Pays, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30pastor.html?hp&ex=1154232000&en=fc81bfdd0ee7feb1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Hillary Clinton: "It's the American dream, stupid"

Tue Jul 25, 2006 2:46 AM ET
Reuters
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

DENVER (Reuters) - New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a possible White House contender in 2008, said on Monday the Bush administration had hurt working Americans and Democrats must offer new ideas to strengthen the middle class.

"Americans are earning less while the costs of a middle-class life have soared," Clinton told the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, a group that aided her husband Bill Clinton's rise to the presidency in 1992 but has clashed in recent years with the party's more liberal wing.

"A lot of Americans can't work any harder, borrow any more or save any less," she said in unveiling the group's "American Dream Initiative," a package of proposals to make college and home ownership more affordable, help small businesses, improve retirement savings and expand health insurance coverage.

Clinton said President George W. Bush and Republicans had "made a mess out of the country's finances." Rewriting her husband's famous 1992 campaign slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," she declared: "It's the American dream, stupid."

The yearlong initiative headed by Clinton was designed to give the party new ideas for midterm elections in November and for the White House race in 2008.

Clinton said she hoped the agenda would "unite Democrats and help elect Democrats" in November, when the party must pick up 15 seats in the House of Representatives and six seats in the Senate to regain control of Congress.

"This plan will make the basics of life in the middle class -- health care, education and retirement -- affordable for those who take responsibility," Clinton said.

"These ideas will make sure every American will get a fair wage, access to college and home ownership and a path out of poverty and into the middle class," she said.

Two other possible 2008 presidential contenders, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, also addressed the conference of 375 elected Democratic officials from 42 states.

"Everybody in the country understands what this administration has done wrong," Vilsack said. "It is important now for this country to understand what we need to do that's right."

Bayh said Democrats needed to reach out to the middle class if they wanted to reclaim control of Congress.

Republican National Committee spokesman Danny Diaz rejected the Democratic claims about the economy.

"Only liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton could attack an economy that has produced 5.4 million jobs in the last three years, grew 5.6 percent in the first quarter, increased payroll employment in 47 states and is the envy of the industrialized world," he said.

While much of the agenda covers familiar Democratic territory, it adds some new flourishes. An "American Dream Grant" would award money to states based on attendance and graduation from state colleges, while American Dream Accounts would enhance retirement savings and federally funded $500 "baby bonds" would be issued to each child born in America.

It also includes a commission to evaluate corporate subsidies and new rules to rein in federal spending.

The agenda is one of several packages of Democratic ideas floated by party groups and leaders who have yet to rally around a single party-wide agenda similar to the successful Republican "Contract with America" in 1994.

    Hillary Clinton: "It's the American dream, stupid", R, 25.7.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-07-25T064606Z_01_N23267486_RTRUKOC_0_US-DEMOCRATS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

Arrested Bush dissenters look to the courts

Posted 7/23/2006 1:24 AM ET
AP
USA Today

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — When school was canceled to accommodate a campaign visit by President Bush, the two 55-year-old teachers reckoned the time was ripe to voice their simmering discontent with the administration's policies.

Christine Nelson showed up at the Cedar Rapids rally with a Kerry-Edwards button pinned on her T-shirt; Alice McCabe clutched a small, paper sign stating "No More War." What could be more American, they thought, than mixing a little dissent with the bunting and buzz of a get-out-the-vote rally headlined by the president?

Their reward: a pair of handcuffs and a strip search at the county jail.

Authorities say they were arrested because they refused to obey reasonable security restrictions, but the women disagree: "Because I had a dissenting opinion, they did what they needed to do to get me out of the way," said Nelson, who teaches history and government at one of this city's middle schools.

"I tell my students all the time about how people came to this country for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, that those rights and others are sacred. And all along I've been thinking to myself, 'not at least during this administration.'"

Their experience is hardly unique.

In the months before the 2004 election, dozens of people across the nation were banished from or arrested at Bush political rallies, some for heckling the president, others simply for holding signs or wearing clothing that expressed opposition to the war and administration policies.

Similar things have happened at official, taxpayer-funded, presidential visits, before and after the election. Some targeted by security have been escorted from events, while others have been arrested and charged with misdemeanors that were later dropped by local prosecutors.

Now, in federal courthouses from Charleston, W.Va., to Denver, federal officials and state and local authorities are being forced to defend themselves against lawsuits challenging the arrests and security policies.

While the circumstances differ, the cases share the same fundamental themes. Generally, they accuse federal officials of developing security measures to identify, segregate, deny entry or expel dissenters.

Jeff Rank and his wife, Nicole, filed a lawsuit after being handcuffed and booted from a July 4, 2004, appearance by the president at the West Virginia Capitol in Charleston. The Ranks, who now live in Corpus Christi, Texas, had free tickets to see the president speak, but contend they were arrested and charged with trespassing for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts.

"It's nothing more than an attempt by the president and his staff to suppress free speech," said Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of West Virginia, which is providing legal services for the Ranks.

"What happened to the Ranks, and so many others across the country, was clearly an incident of viewpoint discrimination. And the lawsuit is an attempt to make the administration accountable for what we believe were illegal actions," Schneider said.

In Cedar Rapids, McCabe and Nelson are suing three unnamed Secret Service agents, the Iowa State Patrol and two county sheriff deputies who took part in their arrest. Nelson and McCabe, who now lives in Memphis, accuse law enforcement of violating their right to free speech, assembly and equal protection.

The two women say they were political novices, inexperienced at protest and unprepared for what happened on Sept. 3, 2004.

Soon after arriving at Noelridge Park, a sprawling urban playground dotted with softball diamonds and a public pool, McCabe and Nelson were approached by Secret Service agents in polo shirts and Bermuda shorts. They were told that the Republicans had rented the park and they would have to move because the sidewalk was now considered private property.

McCabe and Nelson say they complied, but moments later were again told to move, this time across the street. After being told to move a third time, Nelson asked why she was being singled out while so many others nearby, including those holding buckets for campaign donations, were ignored. In response, she says, they were arrested.

They were charged with criminal trespass, but the charges were later dropped.

A spokesman for the Secret Service declined to comment on pending litigation or answer questions on security policy for presidential events. White House spokesman Alex Conant also declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

But Justice Department lawyers, in documents filed recently in federal court in Cedar Rapids, outline security at the rally and defend the Secret Service agents' actions.

They contend the GOP obtained exclusive rights to use the park and that donation takers were ignored because they were an authorized part of the event. They also say McCabe and Nelson were disobedient, repeatedly refusing agents' orders to move.

"At no time did any political message expressed by the two women play any role in how (the agents) treated them," they wrote. "All individuals ... subject to security restrictions either complied with the security restrictions or were arrested for refusing to comply."

Defenders say stricter policies are a response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a small price for ensuring the safety of a world leader in an era of heightened suspicion and uncertainty.

But Leslie Weise says law enforcers are violating citizens' rights to voice objections within earshot of the president.

Last year, in Denver, Weise and two friends were evicted from a Bush town hall meeting on Social Security reform.

Weise, a 40-year-old environmental lawyer who is now a stay-at-home mother, opposes the war in Iraq and the administration's energy policies. Like friends Alex Young and Karen Bauer, Weise did some volunteer work for the Kerry campaign.

In the days before Bush's March 2005 town hall meeting, the trio toyed briefly with the notion of actively protesting the visit. But they said they decided against it because they had heard of arrests at Bush appearances in North Dakota and Arizona.

After parking Weise's car, the three, dressed in professional attire and holding tickets obtained from their local congressman, arrived at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. Young cleared security, but Weise and Bauer were briefly detained and told by staff they had been "identified" and would be arrested if they tried "any funny stuff," according to court records.

After finding their seats, they were approached again by staff and removed before Bush began speaking. Days later, Weise learned from Secret Service in Denver that a bumper sticker on her green Saab hatchback — "No More Blood for Oil" — caught the attention of security.

"I had every reason to attend that event, just as anyone else in the room had that day," said Weise. "If we raised security to a higher level just because we had an opinion different from the administration, I think that goes far beyond what is appropriate for this country."

Lawsuits by protesters are not always embraced by the courts. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge dismissed a suit challenging the arrests of six men who stripped down to thongs and formed a pyramid to protest the Abu Ghraib scandal when Bush paid a visit to Lancaster.

The judge ruled the authorities acted with probable cause and are entitled to qualified immunity, shielding them from liability. The ruling is on appeal.

Such efforts to segregate or diminish dissent are hardly new to American politics.

The ACLU has sued several presidents over attempts to silence opposition, as in 1997, when President Clinton tried to prevent protesters from lining his inaugural parade route. And during the tumultuous 1960s, it was not uncommon for hecklers and protesters to be whisked away or managed at a distance from rallies and events.

"In my mind, it all started with Nixon. He was the first presidential candidate to really make an effort to control their image and disrupt public interruption at events," said Cary Covington, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.

But political experts say the 2004 Bush campaign rewrote the playbook for organizing campaign rallies.

At the Republican National Convention in New York City and at other campaign stops, security segregated protesters in designated "free speech zones" set up at a significant distance from each rally. To get into events headlined by Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney, supporters were required to obtain tickets through GOP channels or sign loyalty oaths.

Political experts agree Bush 2004 went to greater lengths than Kerry officials — or any past campaign — to choreograph a seamless, partisan rally free of the embarrassing moments that attract media attention.

Gone are the days of candidates facing down hecklers or reacting to distractions like, the man who donned a chicken costume and pestered George H.W. Bush in 1991 after he balked at Bill Clinton's invitations to debate.

Anthony Corrado, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, said ticket-only events are an effective tool for rewarding legions of volunteers who work the phone banks, raise money and build support.

"In my view, the Republicans did a much better job of linking field volunteers with their schedule and events," Corrado said. "I had never seen it done to the extent it was on 2004 on the Republican side. And my guess is we'll probably see a lot more of it all."

    Arrested Bush dissenters look to the courts, UT, 23.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-23-bush-protesters_x.htm

Rallied by Bush, Skittish G.O.P. Now Embraces War as Issue

June 22, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, June 21 — Just a few weeks ago, some Republicans were openly fretting about the war in Iraq and its effect on their re-election prospects, with particularly vulnerable lawmakers worried that its growing unpopularity was becoming a drag on their campaigns.

But there was little sign of such nervousness on Wednesday as Republican after Republican took to the Senate floor to offer an unambiguous embrace of the Iraq war and to portray Democrats as advocates of an overly hasty withdrawal that would have grave consequences for the security of the United States. Like their counterparts in the House last week, they accused Democrats of espousing "retreat and defeatism."

That emerging Republican approach reflects, at least for now, the success of a White House effort to bring a skittish party behind Mr. Bush on the war after months of political ambivalence in some vocal quarters. As President Bush offered another defense of his Iraq policy during a visit to Vienna on Wednesday, Republicans acknowledged that it was a strategy of necessity, an effort to turn what some party leaders had feared could become the party's greatest liability into an advantage in the midterm elections.

The approach might yet be upended by more problems in Iraq, as Republicans were reminded this week with reports about two American servicemen who were abducted, tortured and apparently killed. Some polls show a majority of Americans continue to think that entering Iraq was a mistake, and pollsters say independent voters are particularly open to the idea of setting some sort of timetable for withdrawal, the very policy Democrats have embraced and Republicans are now fighting.

But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

White House officials including the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, outlined ways in which Republican lawmakers could speak more forcefully about the war. Participants also included Mr. Bush's top political and communications advisers: his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove; his political director, Sara Taylor; and the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett. Mr. Rove is newly freed from the threat of indictment in the C.I.A. leak case, and leaders of both parties see his reinvigorated hand in the strategy.

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Republicans say the cumulative effect would be to send a message of weakness to the world at a time of new threats from Iran and North Korea and would leave enemies controlling Iraq's vast oil reserves, the third largest in the world. (The book, including a chapter entitled "Rapid Response" with answers to frequent Democratic charges, was sent via e-mail to Republican lawmakers but, in an apparent mistake, also to some Democrats.)

A senior adviser to Mr. Bush said the White House had concluded that it was better to plunge aggressively into the debate on Iraq than to let Democrats play upon clear, public misgivings about the war. "This is going to be a big issue in this election," said the adviser, who was granted anonymity in exchange for agreeing to describe strategic considerations about the war. "Better to shape and fight it — as good and strongly as you can — than to try to run away from it."

In a telephone interview, Ken Mehlman, the Republican chairman, disputed the notion that the latest difficulties in Iraq would set back the effort to push the debate onto newly favorable terms for Republicans.

"The fundamental question," Mr. Mehlman said, "is if you think the enemy is more brutal than before, is the answer that you should surrender?"

Officials at the White House say they had always planned to use the formation of a new, permanent Iraqi government as a lever to seize control of a debate that had been slipping away from them. The killing of the top terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, provided another useful lift. And, they said, Democratic calls for speedy troop withdrawal provided an opening for them to use a "cut and run" argument against Democrats, which Mr. Rove used last week in a speech in New Hampshire.

Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, said House Republicans had been planning to introduce a resolution emphasizing the need to complete the mission in Iraq. But, he said, the House leaders worked in consultation with the White House to hone the final language of the resolution, which read in part that "the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war against all who oppose their ideology."

The strategy still required calming some uneasy Republicans,administration officials said. A participant in one White House meeting, who would discuss the intraparty debate only after being promised anonymity, said Mr. Bush's aides sought to convince lawmakers that the political situation was not so dire because polls had also shown dissatisfaction with progress in Iraq in 2004. Democrats say the climate is far different now, with a higher American death tally and fresh acknowledgments from even the administration that crucial mistakes were made.

"Two-thousand-six is not 2004," said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who is running the Senate Democrats' campaign effort. "The American people recognize that the commander in chief got us into Iraq and it is his job to get us out of Iraq."

But Republicans who have expressed nervousness about the war earlier this month seemed less so by the time of this week's Senate debate. In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a Republican who has frequently expressed concern about the war's effect on his prospects this year, said he favored a path that could be called "staying the course, or learning from our mistakes and now doing it right."

Mr. Shays echoed other Republicans by saying, "I would strongly oppose any premature departure from Iraq to help me or anyone else win election."

    Rallied by Bush, Skittish G.O.P. Now Embraces War as Issue, NYT, 22.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22capital.html?hp&ex=1151035200&en=23087ca8c839a956&ei=5094&partner=homepage

An A-to-Z Book of Conservatism Now Weighs In

June 21, 2006
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLE

WASHINGTON, June 20 — It has red states and blond pundits; home schoolers and The Human Life Review; originalists, monetarists, federalists and evangelists; and no shortage of people named Kristol.

Now American conservatism can claim another mark of distinction: an encyclopedia all its own.

It is a big deal, in terms literal — 997 pages — and metaphorical. Few insults have stung the movement's thinkers as much as the barb from Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, who said conservatives had no ideas, "just irritable mental gestures."

A half-century later, 251 contributors have weighed in, not so irritably, with a four-pound response.

"Feel the heft of it," said Lee Edwards, a former aide to Senator Barry Goldwater, who appears in the volume with a byline and an entry. "It's more than a book. It is, if you will, an estimate — it shows the maturation of the conservative movement."

And a timely one, at that. Sixteen years in the making, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia appears with American conservatism, the political movement, warring over its future direction.

"We've gone from history's adversary to destiny's child, but governing has brought a whole new level of challenge," said Jeffrey O. Nelson, publisher of ISI Books, the conservative press in Wilmington, Del., that produced the encyclopedia. Criticizing what he called the "big education, big spending, big war, big government" conservatism of Republican leaders, Mr. Nelson said he hoped that the book, whose list price is $35, would help the movement return to its small-government roots.

"If conservatism is going to succeed and thrive in the 21st century," he said, "it's got to look more like the conservative tradition as expressed in this book than the conservatism currently practiced in Washington."

Those people toiling in the capital trenches may not recognize the conservatism represented here. The book omits familiar names like Ann Coulter, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, Bill O'Reilly and Karl Rove.

It includes the journals University Bookman, circulation 2,600, and First Things. It gives Willmoore Kendall, a political scientist who died in 1967, three times as much ink as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Those proportions are appropriate, said a former student of Mr. Kendall, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, who called the reference book "terrific."

"Newt came and went rather fast but didn't leave hard fingerprints," Mr. Buckley said. "The quote, unquote conservative politicians have a pretty short lifetime in encyclopedia usage.

"It seems to me that if one were looking for orientation in such a world that the encyclopedia tries to serve that you would be more interested in Burckhardt," he said, a reference to Jacob Burckhardt, a 19th-century Swiss historian of the Renaissance, "than in any of more than 100 conservative senators in the past 50 years."

Garland Publishing started working on the encyclopedia in 1990. ISI Books took over the project 10 years later. ISI Books is part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which, as Page 436 explains, is a nonprofit group founded in 1953 to promote conservative ideas in colleges.

The encyclopedia is being featured by two conservative book clubs, Mr. Nelson said, and has sold nearly 20,000 copies since its release about two months ago. Along with Mr. Nelson, its editors were Bruce P. Frohnen, who teaches at the Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Jeremy Beer of ISI Books. Given its gestation, the book includes contributions from scholars who are long dead, including Russell Kirk, who in 1953 published a seminal book, "The Conservative Mind." Kirk, who died in 1994, wrote essays on John Adams and moral imagination. Mr. Nelson is his son-in-law.

Some entries wear their conservatism on their sleeve. Goldwater's "loyalties were to duty, honor and country." Ronald Reagan had a "vigorous and principled agenda." Bill Clinton was "corrupt."

Others plumb more obscure topics with no obvious tilt. "Public choice economics" describes a theory of how special interests wield power. Two of its proponents have won Nobel Prizes.

The discussion under "Jewish conservatism" acknowledges a history of anti-Semitism on the right. The entry on Abraham Lincoln explores a conservative split between admirers and those who think he laid the groundwork for "contemporary statist liberalism."

The longest entry belongs to "Straussianism," a school of political theory founded by a professor at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss, that emphasizes classical texts. Embraced by some leading proponents of the Iraq war, Straussianism is often regarded by those beyond its fold as opaque mumbo jumbo, a reputation that five pages of explanation may not dispel.

If there is a place where the rivers of the right converge, it appears to be the office of William Kristol, a Straussian editor and advocate, whose mother (Gertrude Himmelfarb), father (Irving Kristol), philosophy (neoconservatism) and magazine (The Weekly Standard) all earned separate entries.

Though Mr. Kristol was puzzled to read that he valued "the virtue of a citizenry" more than its prosperity or freedom, he declined to dwell on quibbles, praising the volume for concluding each entry with a short bibliography.

"What I liked most was that it encouraged you to read additional works," Mr. Kristol said.

Some quibbles are edifying. The entry about "God and Man at Yale," Mr. Buckley's most famous book, says it portrayed a campus "conspiracy" against capitalism and Christianity. But Mr. Buckley said his book "made a rather emphatic point to say there was no conspiracy, that people were acting out of their own impulses."

Another entry describes the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal as "pro-business." The page's editor, Paul A. Gigot, said the paper often criticized businesses that sought government favors and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 partly for an editorial called "Down With Big Business."

"We believe in capitalism, free markets and free people, not business over labor," Mr. Gigot said.

The volume treads lightly, when it treads at all, on matters of race. It describes the "courtesy and dignity" of Strom Thurmond, who as a South Carolina governor and senator led the South's effort to preserve segregation. It does not mention that Mr. Thurmond had a black daughter whose existence he kept secret.

George C. Wallace, who became governor of Alabama pledging "segregation forever," was "always more complicated than his critics allowed." The discussion of "Southern conservatism" pays tribute to the region's "precious Anglo-American continuity" and says nothing about Jim Crow.

Dan T. Carter of the University of South of Carolina said such entries offered a "pasteurized" view of racial history. "The rise of American conservatism owes, in some part, to racial animosity, and it's uncomfortable for many conservatives to deal with that," said Mr. Carter, a biographer of Wallace who describes his politics as liberal. "You don't have to say that conservatism capitulated to it. But you have to acknowledge it was there."

Mr. Nelson agreed that the encyclopedia's discussion of race was incomplete and said the next edition would include an entry about conservatives' reaction to the civil rights movement.

"Our forebears made a mistake on the issue," he said. "They were just wrong. I don't know how to say it more clearly than that."

The sheer mass of the volume left at least one subject with mixed feelings. Richard A. Viguerie, a founder of Moral Majority, was delighted to find himself portrayed as a "liberal bogeyman." But given the army of thinkers and doers who inhabit the book, Mr. Viguerie said, "we should have achieved more politically than we have."

That, Mr. Kristol said, was not a conservative view. "Conservative thinking," he said, "should teach you not to expect too much from politics, at least in the short run."

    An A-to-Z Book of Conservatism Now Weighs In, NYT, 21.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/books/21conserve.html