History > 2008 > USA > Politics (VII)

Daryl Cagle

cartoon

MSNBC.com

Cagle

25.10.2008

T to B:

Barack Obama,

John McCain

FACTBOX:

Electoral College elects president

Fri Oct 31, 2008
1:31am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - The Electoral College, not the popular vote, actually elects the president of the United States. Here are some facts about the Electoral College:

* There are 538 members of the Electoral College, allotted to each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on their representation in the U.S. Congress. The smallest states have three members while the largest state, California, has 55. Washington, D.C., which has no voting representation in Congress, has three, the same as the smallest state.

* It takes 270 votes to win election. The electors are pledged to one candidate or the other but there is no federal law requiring them to vote that way. There have been several incidents in which so-called faithless electors have voted for someone other than the candidate to whom they were pledged.

* In 48 states and the district, the candidate who wins the popular vote wins all of the state's electors. Nebraska and Maine have a proportional system of awarding electors.

* Electors, who are picked by the respective political parties, make two selections -- for president and for vice president. They may not vote for two candidates from their own state.

* Because a candidate could run up a big vote count in some states but lose others by narrow margins, the winner of the popular vote might not have the most electoral votes. The Electoral College has three times picked the candidate who lost the popular vote -- Republicans Rutherford Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and George W. Bush in 2000.

* The Electoral College meets in each state to cast its votes on a Monday early in December following the November popular election. The votes are then tallied in a joint session of Congress on January 6 of the following year.

* If no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives chooses among the top three candidates with each state having only one vote. If no vice presidential candidate receives a majority, the Senate decides between the top two candidates.

* The House has twice decided the outcome of the presidential race -- in the 1800 and 1824 elections. The Senate decided the vice presidency once, in the 1836 election.

* This unique system was the result of a compromise by the writers of the U.S. Constitution in the 18th century between those who wanted direct popular election and those who wanted state legislatures to decide. One fear was that at a time before political parties, the popular vote would be diluted by voting for an unwieldy amount of candidates.

(Writing by David Wiessler in Washington;

editing by David Alexander)

    FACTBOX: Electoral College elects president, R, 31.10.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUKTRE49U14I20081031?virtualBrandChannel=10112

The last unknown in White House race

-- who votes?

Fri Oct 31, 2008
3:07pm EDT
Reuters
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It is the last great unknown in a White House battle that has been polled and analyzed for nearly two years -- who will actually show up and vote?

The outcome of the race between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama rests on which unpredictable combination of new voters, young voters, black voters, suburban voters, white voters, Hispanic voters, rural voters and even sporadic voters cast a ballot in Tuesday's election.

Officials in both campaigns are predicting a record high turnout -- and a surge of new voter registrations and the long lines for early voting across the country appear to confirm those predictions.

But uncertainty about the makeup of the new electorate, and whether that high turnout could shatter historic voting patterns or simply reinforce them, casts doubt over opinion polls showing Obama with a solid lead on McCain.

"The question of who turns out to vote is the key to who becomes the next president," said Steven Schier, a political analyst at Carleton College in Minnesota.

Obama is hoping a big boost among new and sporadic voters, particularly blacks and the young, will propel him beyond the total of 56 million ballots for Democrat John Kerry in 2004.

But McCain campaign officials said there is no evidence a higher turnout will fundamentally change the makeup of the electorate -- or, they hope, the outcome on Tuesday.

"There is no question that turnout is going to be high," McCain pollster Bill McInturff said, predicting 130 million to 135 million voters by Tuesday -- about 10 million more than 2004 and 25 million more than 2000.

But he said turnout appeared to be higher in all demographic groups, potentially wiping out any advantages Obama gains from an increase in black and young voters.

"They make this race difficult to predict," McInturff said of the new voters, "but overall very, very close."

Obama officials are encouraged by the results of early voting. Officials in battleground states like Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and North Carolina report more Democrats than Republicans have cast early ballots, in some cases by bigger margins than in 2004.

In Colorado and North Carolina, the number of early votes already cast is more than half the total number of votes in 2004. In the vital showdown state of Florida, early voting hours have been extended and more than one-third of the 2004 total already has been cast.

'THE DIE IS CAST'

"The die is being cast as we speak. We think we've built up advantages in all of those states," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said. "So Senator McCain on Election Day is going to have to not just carry the day but carry it convincingly."

In Nevada, he said, 43 percent of Democrats who voted early are new or sporadic voters, and 19 percent of the Democrats who voted early in North Carolina had never voted in a presidential election before.

"We're kind of out of the land of theory in a lot of these states. We're beginning to see how the election is likely to unfold based on the early voting pattern," Plouffe said.

In Florida, which decided the 2000 election, Plouffe said Obama was making headway.

"We are doing much better with Hispanic voters in Florida than, certainly, was the case in 2004 and, we believe, in 2000 as well," Plouffe said.

"We are doing very well with Puerto Rican voters, Colombian voters. We're doing, I think, surprisingly well with younger Cuban voters," he said. Cuban voters are traditionally more conservative and tend to vote Republican.

But McCain campaign officials said Republicans, who usually lead among absentee voters, typically trail in early voting figures.

"We are used to operating in an environment where we have to pick up Democratic and independent support," McCain's political director Mike DuHaime said. "We are actively turning out conservative Democrats and independents who we believe will vote for John McCain."

While there is evidence black turnout has increased, young voters are less predictable. An Orlando Sentinel analysis of early voting in Florida found blacks made up 22 percent of those casting ballots before election day, even though they are just 13 percent of the state electorate.

But young people turned out in disproportionately low numbers, with only 15 percent of early voters under the age of 35. That group makes up 25 percent of the electorate.

"I think Obama needs both groups and he needs them in big numbers, and the youth vote is a real question," Schier said.

Both campaigns will launch a concerted get-out-the-vote drive in the final days. Republicans will activate a version of the 72-hour voter turnout plan that paid huge dividends for Bush in 2004.

Obama is relying on a vast sea of "several million" volunteers to help turn out supporters, Plouffe said.

"Our goal here is to talk to every single person who we think is an Obama supporter, every single one, in these states," Plouffe said.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

    The last unknown in White House race -- who votes?, R, 31.10.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE49U6YI20081031?virtualBrandChannel=10112

US Soldiers in Iraq Focus on War in Voting

October 31, 2008
Filed at 2:33 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) -- Car bombs rather than Obama, making it home rather than McCain dominate the talk among many U.S. soldiers in Iraq's deadliest city during the final countdown to America's presidential election.

Dangers, distance from home and the dawn-to-dark effort in an alien environment push U.S. politics into a corner for many soldiers -- especially in combat outposts where television and the Internet are not readily available.

''Regardless of who wins the election, we are going to be here 15 months. And our mission is not going to be fundamentally affected, at least in the short term,'' said Capt. Justin Davis Harper after returning from a patrol into the northern city of Mosul's most violent zone.

Harper, of Sherman, Texas, said ''a small minority are excited about elections'' in his 130-member ''Killer Troop'' of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. But most have not voted although they have had the opportunity to do so.

The U.S. military has traditionally tilted toward the Republican Party, and analysts said they do not expect this election to be different. But they also said Barack Obama's appeal to youth, African-Americans and Hispanics -- all groups over-represented in the military -- could cut into support for John McCain.

''Most soldiers talk about what they are going to get out of the election -- our pay raises, who will want to send us home or not,'' said Cpl. Sean Morton, a 25-year-old reconnaissance scout from Boston.

The voting process for troops overseas has been criticized as overly bureaucratic, antiquated and flawed.

Soldiers must request by mail an absentee ballot from the local election district where they last lived. Then they are sent a paper ballot to fill out and mail back. Some soldiers said they never got ballots.

But voting assistance officers stress they made every effort to help and encourage the 146,000 soldiers in Iraq to vote.

''Be Smart. Do your part. Vote!'' reads a poster in the Mosul unit's main room.

''It's cool to be able to vote out here and not miss out on what others at home are doing,'' said Morton, adding that he sent in his request for an absentee ballot six months ago but only received it last week.

The number of absentee military ballots applied for that ultimately get counted is consistently low. In the last federal election, only about 30 percent of overseas military ballots were tallied, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission and the Pew Center on the States.

At meal times in the vast dining hall at Mosul's Camp Marez, some soldiers set their trays near a large-TV screen invariably tuned to Fox News, which is widely regarded as espousing conservative viewpoints. But in line with the historic separation of military and civilian government, the troops have been told to keep their political opinions close to their chests.

''The general policy for anything to do with voting is to not expose any of our military members to interviews or filming during the election season. As service members, it is not appropriate to give any indication on how we feel concerning the presidential election,'' said Lt. Cmdr. David Russell, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

Some officers say they did not send in absentee ballots to underline their political neutrality.

''You can find every shade of opinion among the troops, right across the board,'' said Maj. John Oliver, an operations officer in the cavalry regiment. Oliver, from Fontana, Calif., did not vote.

How soldiers in Iraq or anywhere else vote will not be accurately known since government agencies do not make such data public.

''My guess is that the military will continue to vote Republican but less so in that direction because this time there are conflicting impulses at work,'' said Richard H. Kohn at the University of North Carolina.

McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam War POW, is attractive to service members and ''adept at its language,'' Kohn said. ''But at the same time, I detect a disappointment and even anger at the way Bush has managed, ranging from treatment of the wounded to gross errors in waging the war in Iraq.''

Peter D. Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, said Obama has appeal among the youth, African-Americans and Hispanics, which could boost his votes from the military where those groups are disproportionately represented.

In Mosul, some officers seemed less focused on the U.S. vote than the upcoming Iraqi provincial elections, which they hope will calm violence in this city 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Others hoped Iraqis will be inspired by seeing democracy in action in the United States.

In January ''we'll have a new government after a long political process and we will not have shed one ounce of blood,'' said Lt. Col. Brian R. Bisacre, of Wakefield, Mass., who commands the 728th Military Police Battalion. ''I think the Iraqi people will watch that and want to emulate that process.''

------

Associated Press photographer Maya Alleruzzo in Mosul contributed to this report.

    US Soldiers in Iraq Focus on War in Voting, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-ML-Iraq-Voting-From-War.html


 

John McCain reacts to the crowd

as he speaks at a rally at Defiance Junior High School in Defiance, Ohio. (AP)

Joe the Plumber Stands Up John McCain

WSJ        October 30, 2008, 1:42 pm
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/10/30/joe-the-plumber-stands-up-john-mccain/

McCain Pins Hopes

on Getting Party Faithful to Polls in Ohio

OCTOBER 31, 2008
The New York Times
By LAURA MECKLE

LANCASTER, Ohio -- At his field office in this small town outside Columbus, Steve Davis, the local county Republican chairman, has seen the polls showing Sen. John McCain trailing Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama. But he takes comfort in other numbers: 6,100 McCain-for-president yard signs distributed in Fairfield County this year versus 2,500 Bush signs in 2004.

Outside Cincinnati, some 100 miles to the southwest, Lori Viars is feeling good, too. This anti-abortion activist has put pro-McCain fliers on windshields in church parking lots, spent hours making phone calls and participated in "prayer conference calls," where people can dial in and pray together for a Republican win.

Both Ms. Viars and Mr. Davis live in Republican counties just outside major Ohio cities, the exurbs where Sen. McCain must run up the score if he hopes to win the state on Tuesday. It was here that President George W. Bush pulled out a narrow victory in 2004, drawing thousands more voters to the polls than outside experts thought possible, and ultimately clinching the race.

One key to Mr. Bush's re-election was the Republican party's nationwide get-out-the vote effort in the final 72 hours before election day. Operatives and activists built on months of phone calls and door knocks to turn out an unprecedented number of supporters from the conservative base.

Heading into the crucial final weekend, Republicans say their operation is even stronger and running ahead of where they were four years ago at this time. They say their targeting is more efficient, their workers more experienced and their technology better. The McCain campaign, using an operation funded by the Republican National Committee, has already made 19.6 million phone calls this year nationwide. That's more than 2004, says Mike DuHaime, Sen. McCain's political director. And 2004, he says, "was the gold standard for turnout."

Officials expect to make more than 15 million contacts, including phone calls and door knocks, just in these final days.

But Republicans also have a lot more ground to make up than they did four years ago. Back then, most polls showed Mr. Bush tied or with a narrow lead against his Democratic opponent Sen. John Kerry. In contrast, Sen. McCain has trailed Sen. Obama in every major national poll since mid-September. Polls show Sen. Obama with leads in enough battleground states to be able to secure an electoral-vote victory. He also has a stronger ground operation than Sen. Kerry had. In recent days, traders on Intrade, the political futures market, have given Sen. Obama a more than 80% chance of winning.

McCain aides say a victory Tuesday is still possible. Some national polls have shown a tightening of the race, with Sen. Obama's lead down to as little as three percentage points. Bill McInturf, Sen. McCain's chief pollster, argued this week that Sen. McCain is closing the gap in battleground states, gaining among non-college-educated men, rural voters, abortion opponents who vote on that issue, and Democrats who do not strongly identify with the party.

Mr. McInturf also says the campaign is seeing improvement with what he calls "Wal-Mart women," women without a college degree in households earning under $60,000. McCain aides say that his new focus on taxes, an argument centered on "Joe the Plumber" and his fears of rising taxes under Sen. Obama, is finally resonating.

And while analysts predicting an Obama victory point to signs of a record turnout among African-Americans and young people, two groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrat, Mr. McInturf says there could also be a record turnout among working-class whites. He says that group may be more receptive to Sen. McCain's message.

Political strategists widely agree that Sen. McCain can't win the election without Ohio. No Republican has gone to the White House without carrying the state. Polls now show Sen. Obama leading here, by four to nine percentage points. Sen. McCain is spending two of the last six days here, and twin efforts are under way to replicate Mr. Bush's 2004 performance.

The first is from the party infrastructure, which is implementing a plan to identify voters who need to be urged to the polls, figure out the best message to sway them and then deliver those messages. In Ohio alone last week, the campaign's 45 field offices aimed to make 627,848 calls. The campaign says it expects to have met or exceeded that number.

The other effort comes from evangelical Christian activists, a critical component of the GOP base, who are providing some of the muscle to make the party's plan work.

A McCain supporter in Elyria, Ohio, one of the many towns the candidate is targeting in his push for the state.
Sen. Obama's Ohio operation, with 89 field offices, including many in Republican parts of the state, is also making a big push in the final days. The campaign says it made 691,858 phone calls last week. On Saturday, it staged a run-through of its election-day operations. Volunteers are assigned to be part of either a red team, responsible for collecting data at the polls about who has not yet voted; a blue team, responsible for knocking on the doors of voters who haven't voted yet; or a white team, which provides logistical support.

David Axelrod, Sen. Obama's chief strategist, says of the McCain operation, "We can't control what they do, but we can control what we do. We're going to get our vote out."

Keeping Tabs on Voters

Using commercially available data, the Republican party also tailors its automated phone calls and mailings, focusing them on issues it suspects the voter contacted cares most about.

Chris McNulty, the RNC's Midwest regional director in Ohio, says he experienced this himself recently. He requested an absentee ballot but had not yet turned it in -- something the campaign can track by monitoring whose ballots have arrived at the secretary of state's office.

One night, Mr. McNulty came home to find a flier from the RNC urging him to send in his ballot and also to "support the troops." Mr. McNulty had never told anyone at the party that the war in Iraq was his top issue. He says the party figured it out from profiling done based on his magazine subscriptions and other commercially available data. "We had me right," he says. "I was completely thrilled."

Mr. McNulty also noticed that he only received that one piece of mail, which he thinks is because the RNC database shows that he votes in every election so needs less urging. His wife turned in her absentee ballot for Sen. McCain right away; she didn't get any mail.

In 2002, during statewide elections, Mr. McNulty helped run a test to see if contacting voters directly really made a difference. Officials picked two demographically similar precincts in Republican Butler County, outside Cincinnati, and did a full set of phone calls and door knocks in one and made no effort in the other. The result: 10% higher turnout in the targeted precinct.

By the 2004 presidential race, the Republicans were making so many calls, they had to hire round-the-clock data-entry staffers to enter the results -- mainly voters' support for various candidates -- into the database. In 2006, the GOP created bubble sheets that volunteers could fill out after every phone call and scan electronically. This year, volunteers enter voter responses by pushing buttons on the phones connected to the Internet. The data are immediately uploaded into a master database.

Last weekend, a dozen volunteers in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, were calling to urge voters to turn in their absentee ballots, ringing a bell in the center of the table whenever they found a McCain supporter. When one volunteer called a voter and was informed that the voter had died, she entered "4" on her Internet phone, updating the computer file so the number wasn't dialed again.

When volunteers got voice mail or answering machines, they punched a couple of buttons and the call was transferred to a recorded message -- in this case, it was a message from Gov. Sarah Palin.

Obama, McCain Signs

One new challenge for Republicans is that the Obama campaign has penetrated corners of Ohio that John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, barely touched. In Republican Warren County, which gave 66% of its votes to Mr. Bush in 2004, David Fornshell says he now sees Obama signs. The 35-year-old attorney, who works in neighboring Cincinnati and named his son Reagan after the former president, says that in 2004, "it would be a shock if you were driving down the street and saw a Kerry-Edwards sign."

Still, he thinks that the stronger Obama presence motivates local Republicans. One day he saw an Obama yard sign on Poplar Hill Drive. The next day, neighbors on either side had put up McCain signs.

Mr. Fornshell is part of a network of evangelical Christians who are now active in the campaign. Sen. McCain has long had a rocky relationship with social conservatives, and it took some of them a while to come around.

Ms. Viars, who has been putting pro-McCain fliers on windshields, has been involved in Republican and anti-abortion politics for 20 years. But ahead of Ohio's presidential primary, she worked hard for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. She helped to get him on the ballot in Ohio and stuck with him even when it was clear that Sen. McCain had the nomination wrapped up.

Then, in late June, she and other social conservatives met with Sen. McCain, and urged him to choose an anti-abortion running mate. She sent the campaign a check for $1 and wrote in the memo field, "More to come if you pick a conservative running mate." When Sen. McCain publicly floated the idea of a vice-presidential nominee who supports abortion rights, Ms. Viars complained loudly to her contacts at the campaign.

On Aug. 29, Sen. McCain was set to announce his pick in nearby Dayton, and like many others, Ms. Viars thought it would be Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who opposes abortion. She was fine with that. She painted a sign, "Conservatives for McCain-Pawlenty," and put it in her trunk as she and two friends set out for the event.

Palin Takes Swipe at ObamaJoe the Plumber Stands Up McCainSee reports from Washington and the campaign trail, at washwire.com.On the way, she got a call from her contact in the campaign, "We're hearing it's Sarah Palin," he told her. The three friends began to squeal with joy. They never dreamed they'd get a strong social conservative, a Christian and a woman to boot. "It was like the Beatles had arrived," she said.

Wavering Voters

Ever since, Ms. Viars has been fully dedicated to the cause. She spends hours making calls at phone banks. She spreads the word about McCain events in the area and this week, she plans to blast-email more than 2,000 people her picks for the election. "McCain picked a conservative [for his running mate] like we had hoped," she says. "We have to keep our end of the bargain."

Pastor Mark Fuller at Grove City Church of the Nazarene did his part on Sunday, nine days before the election. "It's your privilege as an American citizen. It is your responsibility as a follower of Jesus," he said, urging people to vote. "This is one way we can influence for the kingdom of God."

He encouraged congregants to check out the voter guides that had been distributed with the church bulletin and prepared by the Ohio Christian Alliance. The guides highlight Sen. McCain's anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage positions, leaving out the areas where his views run contrary, such as support for embryonic stem-cell research.

Some in the audience needed no persuasion. But others are wavering. Sam Gookin, 49, voted twice for Mr. Bush and says, "I don't think you can consciously call yourself a Christian and vote for someone who is pro-abortion." But, he adds, "it's hard not to focus on the economic issues."


Corrections & Amplifications

Cincinnati and its suburbs and exurbs are about 100 miles southwest of Lancaster, Ohio. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said they were to the southeast. The above article has been corrected.

    McCain Pins Hopes on Getting Party Faithful to Polls in Ohio, 31.10.2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122541241808686255.html

In Ohio,

McCain Is Everywhere

Even if Joe the Plumber Isn’t

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

MENTOR, Ohio — In case anyone was wondering if Ohio was a combat zone for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, consider that five days before the election the candidate took a 220-mile, six-stop, 12-hour bus tour across the northern breadth of the state. Along the way, he deployed his unofficial running mate, a disappearing and reappearing Joe the Plumber, to try to drive his points home.

“I know history,” Mr. McCain shouted out at a cold rally on Thursday morning in Defiance, a place whose name summed up his mood. “I know the last time anyone was elected president of the United States without carrying the state of Ohio was John F. Kennedy. My friends, we’re going to carry Ohio, and we’re going to win the presidency, and we need you out there working every single moment over the next five days.”

By the end of the day, Mr. McCain was on a roll. “I’ve been in a lot of campaigns, and I can feel momentum, and I can feel momentum in this room tonight!” Mr. McCain hollered at a rally in the gym at Mentor High School, shortly before the crowd began a deafening chant of “Joe the Plumber! Joe the Plumber! Joe the Plumber!”

For all of Mr. McCain’s Ohio hopes, the latest polls show that Senator Barack Obama has an edge in this perennial battleground, keeping the Republican ticket on an expensive offensive. Mr. Obama has more than 80 offices across the state, and tens of thousands of volunteers, and his campaign expects he will benefit because of the economic and mortgage crisis that has hit Ohio hard.

Still, Mr. McCain’s advisers say their own polling shows the race much closer and predict that Mr. McCain will eke out a narrow triumph here.

“We think we can win over a swath of conservative Democrats as well as independents and obviously Republicans,” said the campaign’s political director, Mike DuHaime.

What Mr. DuHaime and Mr. McCain’s other advisers leave unsaid is that without Ohio, Mr. McCain will most likely lose the election.

So, as Sandusky goes, so goes the nation, or so the McCain campaign hopes. To help, Mr. McCain enlisted Joe the Plumber, otherwise known as Samuel J. Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio, the McCain campaign’s embodiment of a small-business American everyman. But despite Mr. Wurzelbacher’s newfound celebrity, he had something of a wobbly start on Thursday.

“Joe’s with us today!” Mr. McCain called out at the rally at Defiance Junior High School. “Joe, where are you? Where is Joe? Is Joe here with us today?”

Nothing.

“Joe, I thought you were here today,” Mr. McCain continued, with dimmed enthusiasm.

Still nothing. The crowd murmured.

“All right,” Mr. McCain said, realizing that Joe was nowhere to be found. “Well, you’re all Joe the Plumbers!”

It turned out that Mr. Wurzelbacher, as he told CNN, had never received final confirmation from the McCain campaign that he was expected. The campaign, after watching Mr. McCain haplessly call out for Mr. Wurzelbacher on the cable networks, dispatched a car and rushed the plumber to Mr. McCain’s next event, in Sandusky, where Mr. Wurzelbacher spoke.

“All right guys, I didn’t prepare anything,” Mr. Wurzelbacher said at a rally at the Washington Park gazebo in Sandusky. “The only thing I’ve been saying is just get out and get informed. I mean, really know what you’re talking about when you’re talking about it. Don’t take everyone’s opinions. I came to my own opinions by research. Get involved in the government. That way we can hold our politicians accountable and take back our government. It’s all ours.”

Mr. Wurzelbacher is the man Mr. Obama encountered in Holland on Oct. 12 and told him in response to a question about the flat tax that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.” The McCain campaign seized on the remarks and has been trying to portray Mr. Obama as a socialist.

Mr. McCain’s Ohio bus tour took him from west to east, from Defiance to Youngstown, across solid Republican areas and then into “Reagan Democrat” counties where Mr. McCain wants to appeal to working-class and conservative Democrats. He will spend another full day here on Friday.

Mr. Obama, who has traveled extensively across the state, will be here again on Sunday.

Ohioans have come to expect no less. “This year some other states are trying to supplant our role as the decider,” said John C. Green, a political scientist and pollster who is director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron. “And I have to say, a lot of Ohioans are getting pretty irritated by that.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Virginia Beach.

    In Ohio, McCain Is Everywhere Even if Joe the Plumber Isn’t, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/politics/31mccain.html

On Washington State’s Ballot:

Doctor-Assisted Suicide

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — In the 11 years since Oregon became the first state to allow physician-assisted suicide, the worst fears have never been realized, even some of the law’s staunchest opponents say. Large numbers of people have not moved to Oregon to take advantage of the measure; through last year, 341 people had used it to hasten their death. And yet no other state has followed Oregon’s lead.

On Tuesday, however, its neighbor to the north, and in many ways its cultural reflection, will decide whether to adopt its own assisted-suicide law, the Washington Death With Dignity Act. The ballot initiative, modeled on Oregon’s, would let mentally competent, terminally ill adults obtain a doctor’s prescription for a lethal dose of medication.

Polls have shown that more Washington voters support the initiative than oppose it, but, like the Oregon measure, it is controversial and closely contested. Religious groups, along with some advocates for the disabled and some doctors, aggressively oppose it, raising questions about ethics and the way the Oregon law has been carried out.

Oregon’s measure has withstood legal challenge; in 2006, the United States Supreme Court rejected an effort by the Justice Department to stop doctors from writing lethal prescriptions. Yet Oregon’s experience has not created clear political momentum for assisted-suicide measures in other states, a circumstance that both sides say reflects the issue’s political tenderness.

“It’s a murky issue for politicians on either side, to be for it or against it,” said Peg Sandeen, executive director of the Death With Dignity National Center, based in Portland, Ore. An earlier incarnation of the group led the push for the Oregon law, and it is now helping, along with a second organization, Compassion and Choices, to promote the Washington measure.

Since Oregon narrowly approved its ballot initiative in 1994 — a court injunction prevented the measure from taking effect until voters rejected a repeal effort in 1997 — similar initiatives have failed in at least two states. In 1998, Michigan voters overwhelmingly rejected an assisted-suicide proposal, though supporters say that drive was poorly organized. In 2000, voters in Maine narrowly defeated a better organized campaign for a measure modeled on the Oregon law.

Voters in California had rejected a similar initiative before Oregon passed its measure, and Washington itself rejected such an initiative in 1991.

(In addition to referendums, all but a few legislative efforts in several states have run out of steam before a full floor vote.)

Supporters of the Washington measure say a variety of factors make this year different. Unlike the failed 1991 proposal, the current one would not allow doctors to administer the lethal drugs. Like the Oregon law, it would permit them only to prescribe the drugs, which patients would give themselves, orally.

Further, supporters note that the Washington initiative is the first such effort since the 2006 Supreme Court ruling, a factor that may make voters more comfortable about backing it.

It also has a prominent, and popular, supporter in a former Democratic governor, Booth Gardner, 72, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Mr. Gardner’s condition would not qualify him to invoke the proposed law, but he has said he hopes it will one day be extended to people with certain debilitating conditions not considered terminal.

Both Washington and Oregon have become increasingly Democratic, a factor leading the initiative’s opponents to make a point of saying that support for it should not be the presumed Democratic position. They say the measure could threaten vulnerable groups, including women (who, they say, are more likely than men to feel like a burden to others if incapacitated) as well as minorities, the elderly and the poor, who may be tempted to end their lives because they cannot afford health care.

Under the Washington proposal, two doctors, each making an assessment independent of the other’s, would have to determine that a patient had less than six months to live before that patient could receive a lethal prescription.

But Chris Carlson, chairman of the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide, the main opposition group, said he was found to have terminal carcinoid cancer in 2005 and was told then that he most likely had less than six months. Now Mr. Carlson, 61, describes his cancer as “dormant.”

“You’re encouraging people to prematurely give up hope, and I think that’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t think the state should be encouraging people to give up hope.”

    On Washington State’s Ballot: Doctor-Assisted Suicide, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/31death.html

With Ambitious Campaign, Obama Is Both Big Spender and Penny Pincher

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and MIKE McINTIRE

Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has collected a record-shattering $640 million, but only two of his staff members are among the 15 highest-paid workers in the general election, according to campaign finance records. The rest, including the three highest paid, are employed by Senator John McCain.

The Obama campaign, despite having more than 700 field offices across the country, compared with fewer than 400 for Mr. McCain, has spent slightly less on rent than its counterpart.

And even though Mr. Obama has raised $400 million more than Mr. McCain, he has spent less on fund-raising consultants.

Mr. Obama has devoted enormous sums in this election to nearly everything, including more than $280 million for advertising and $31 million for his campaign’s payroll. His half-hour prime-time commercial on Wednesday, which cost well over $3 million, was perhaps the most visible flexing of his financial muscle.

But the Obama campaign, under the watchful eye of its manager, David Plouffe, has worked hard to maintain a reputation for frugality. The campaign has escaped the glare that has come with spending excesses that dogged other candidates, including the millions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton handed to her pollster Mark Penn, John Edwards’s $400 haircuts and the large outlays for consultants and other expenses that nearly bankrupted Mr. McCain’s primary campaign last year.

“It’s both extravagant and frugal at the same time,” Joe Trippi, a former top adviser to Mr. Edwards and the manager of Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004, said about Mr. Obama’s operation. “Extravagant in its mission and ambition but frugal in how they implemented it.”

McCain campaign officials pointed to steps they have taken to save money, a challenge made urgent after the campaign’s implosion last year. But the campaign has also had far less to work with, constrained by the $84 million given to it for the general election under the public financing system.

Having opted out of public financing, Mr. Obama has spent far more than the combined total spent by President Bush and Senator John Kerry in 2004, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The Obama campaign’s gaping advantage is sharpest in its advertising budget and payroll. Last week, the Obama campaign spent nearly twice as much as Mr. McCain and the Republican National Committee on television advertising. Mr. Obama’s payroll had nearly 800 employees in the first half of October, twice as many as Mr. McCain’s, with far more Obama-paid workers in closely contested states than McCain-paid workers.

Nevertheless, a review of F.E.C. records shows that the Obama campaign has used several methods to keep expenses down.

Both campaigns have relied heavily on volunteers. The Obama campaign has increased its ranks beyond salaried employees who receive regular paychecks and benefits by enlisting hundreds of local per diem workers for get-out-the-vote efforts. The Obama campaign has made $3.2 million in per diem payments, many no more than a few hundred dollars and most often made for brief periods during the Democratic primaries. The McCain campaign has reported relatively few per diem expenditures.

Unlike its Republican counterpart, the Obama campaign has frequently used a provision in campaign finance law that allows supporters to donate work space for the campaign. The campaign has credited more than 250 people with making in-kind rent contributions totaling $210,000.

When Mr. Obama’s field workers arrived in Kentucky before that state’s primary in May, Flora Templeton Stuart, a lawyer in Bowling Green, offered to make her office and its seven phone lines available on weekends and evenings for about three weeks. The campaign booked a $100 in-kind contribution from Ms. Stuart, who said she felt more than compensated by being invited to stand behind the stage when Mr. Obama spoke at an event.

“My reward,” she said, “was to hug him.”

The use of in-kind donations for office space can be problematic if the estimated value is substantially lower than what it would cost to rent the same space on the open market. Kenneth A. Gross, a lawyer in Washington who specializes in election law, said the F.E.C. was usually reluctant to challenge a campaign’s estimates as long as some in-kind credit had been recorded.

To be sure, a close look at campaign finance data shows that the Obama campaign has indulged in its share of luxuries. It has spent more than $5 million on renting arenas and other places for Mr. Obama’s sprawling campaign events. Obama campaign officials also appear to have devoted significantly more than Mr. McCain’s organization to polling, about $3.8 million since July, compared with just over $1.1 million for the McCain campaign.

The Obama campaign spent more than $57,000 at the Four Seasons in Amman, Jordan, during the candidate’s overseas trip in July, although a spokesman said that much of that was for rooms for the traveling press corps and that the campaign would be reimbursed by the news organizations. The campaign spent about $60,000 on the staging for Mr. Obama’s speech in Berlin on that trip. Then there is the $140,000 that the campaign has spent at companies that make American flags, apparently mostly for campaign events, compared with just $7,000 spent by the McCain campaign.

But these seem to be more the exception than the rule.

The three highest-paid staff members in the presidential campaign since July, when the general election campaign began in earnest, were Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s speechwriter; Robert DeServi, who produces the campaign’s events; and Trey Walker, who manages Mr. McCain’s campaign in the mid-Atlantic region. The highest-paid Obama staff member was Julianna Smoot, his finance director.

The Obama campaign’s rules for limiting expenses are strict. Workers at the Chicago headquarters are reimbursed for trips to the airport only if they take public transportation. Staff members on the road receive a $30 per diem for meals, compared with $40 for members of the McCain campaign. In the primaries, the Obama campaign required workers to drive if they were going somewhere less than a five-hour drive away.

“Even though the budget was large,” Mr. Plouffe said, “because of the aggressiveness of the strategy, you really have to watch every dollar.”

The best-compensated people in campaigns are usually not staff members but consultants. Media consultants have typically received some of the biggest paydays from presidential campaigns, earning 6 to 7 percent of the total advertising purchases by Democrats in the last several elections. The Republicans saved money in 2004 by paying flat fees to their media strategists. Democratic campaigns, including Mr. Obama’s, began clamping down as well in this election, capping the fees.

Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said his firm, where Mr. Plouffe is a partner but is on leave, is likely to collect about 1 percent of the total amount spent on advertising. Democratic media consultants divided amongst themselves nearly $9 million in 2004, approximately what the Bush campaign paid its consultants for a more extensive advertising effort. Mr. Axelrod said he believed that the media firms involved in the Obama campaign would collect a similar amount, even though it has aired tens of millions of dollars more in advertisements.

Mr. Axelrod likes to joke that at the Obama headquarters, if someone waves a hand in front of the automated paper towel dispenser in the men’s room, a section of paper towel is dispensed; wave at it again and a note spits out, “See Plouffe.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

    With Ambitious Campaign, Obama Is Both Big Spender and Penny Pincher, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/politics/31spend.html

In Tight Race, Victor May Be Ohio Lawyers

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

COLUMBUS, Ohio — If the outcome of next week’s presidential election is close, this precariously balanced state could be the place where the two parties begin filing the inevitable lawsuits over voting irregularities, experts say.

The battles could be over the rules for a recount, or how to deal with voters who were not added to the rolls even though they registered properly and on time. Lawyers could fight over how to count the paper ballots used when the electronic machines break down, or whether a judge was correct in deciding to keep certain polls open late.

But the most likely source of litigation is the state’s heavy use of provisional ballots, which are issued when a voter’s identity or registration cannot immediately be verified or when polls stay open late. Ohio has a history of requiring large numbers of voters to use these ballots, which are easy to disqualify and are not counted until after the election.

“Provisional ballots are really the Achilles’ heel of our electoral process, because in a close race that is the pressure point lawyers use to try to undo the results,” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on voting litigation. “The larger the number of provisional ballots cast in a state, the more vulnerable the Achilles’ heel, and Ohio has for a couple of elections used more of these ballots than most any other state.”

In 2004 and 2006, Ohio, unlike most other states, increased the percentage of provisional ballots used by voters. In the 2004 presidential election, which hinged on Ohio, the margin between the candidates was about 118,000 votes, of 5.7 million cast. Of those, more than 158,000 were provisional ballots.

Even more of these ballots will be cast in Ohio on Nov. 4, voting experts predict, because many newly registered voters may bring the wrong form of identification to the polls, failing to comply with the state’s new voter law that requires all voters to show government-issued identification or an approved document with a voter’s name and address. Others may go to the wrong polling place, or show up at the polls only to find that they are not listed on the state’s new computerized voter registration list, which has already been the subject of intense partisan wrangling.

Provisional ballots were created by Congress in 1993 to ensure that voters would never be turned away without casting a ballot when they showed up at the polls.

But federal law said little about how these ballots should later be verified and counted. In Ohio, unlike most other states, the methods for determining which provisional ballots count vary by county.

“Our goal has been to get in front of this problem,” said Jennifer L. Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, who has issued directives over the past two weeks creating uniform standards for how counties must handle the ballots.

Ms. Brunner has instructed county election officials that they cannot disqualify a provisional ballot if a poll worker mistakenly gives one to a voter.

Provisional ballots will also come into play if a huge turnout causes long lines in Ohio, leading lawyers to ask the courts to keep polls open late. When polls are kept open after hours, the ballots cast must be provisional.

The latest state polls show Barack Obama with an edge of from three to nine points over John McCain, leaving Ohio in the tossup category. Problems with the ballots will not affect the outcome if the race is not close, but federal election officials and voting experts say they are closely monitoring their use and the possibility of lawsuits in Ohio and other swing states.

Rosemary Rodriguez, the chairwoman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, said members of the commission would be sent to Colorado, Florida, Indiana, New Mexico and Ohio on Election Day — all states where large numbers of provisional ballots were cast in past elections or where there have been voting problems.

Ms. Rodriguez added that the commission was also watching so-called place-holder lawsuits that have been filed recently in several states, including Colorado and Pennsylvania. These lawsuits allow parties to hedge their bets, so that if the margin is close, they will have a way to say they already raised concerns about various issues, including the role of Acorn, a left-wing organizing group, and the improper purging of some voters from the rolls.

“The conventional wisdom has been that litigation before an election is good because it helps clarify the rules, and litigation after an election is bad because it causes rancor and leaves the results uncertain,” said Doug Chapin, the director of Electionline.org, a Web site run by the Pew Center on the States, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group. “Place-holder lawsuits blur that dichotomy and allow parties to leave options open for themselves.”

Tova Wang, the vice president of research for Common Cause, a voting rights group, said she was also watching for legal fights in Florida. More than 12,000 voters there will be required to cast provisional ballots unless they can resolve discrepancies between their voter registrations and driver’s license or Social Security numbers.

Still, Ohio remains the focus of most of the attention on potential voting problems. Professor Foley, from Ohio State, said post-election litigation was more likely in Ohio because that state provided a long window of opportunity to contest provisional ballots. Ohio officials cannot count such ballots for 10 days after the election, while in Florida, officials must count them two or three days after polls close, he said.

If the margin is close, partisan lawyers in Ohio are already warmed up for a fight, having spent the last two months wrestling over accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression in at least eight lawsuits, one of which went to the Supreme Court.

There also remains concern about whether poll workers, contending with long lines, will instruct voters correctly. In the 2006 election, the first under Ohio’s new voter identification law, about 10,600 of the 128,000 provisional ballots cast were rejected because they were cast in the wrong precinct, even though state law requires poll workers to direct voters to their correct precinct before issuing a provisional ballot.

In 2004, some precincts in Franklin County, which includes Columbus, had lines with four-hour waits. The county also had one of the state’s highest rates of provisional-ballot use, as overwhelmed poll workers tried to use them to ease the lines.

Earlier this week, staring at a line where early voters had been waiting nearly an hour and a half, Michael Stinziano, the elections director in Franklin County, said he was confident his county would avoid the lines and the over-use of provisional ballots on Election Day.

“We have more machines and voters casting ballots early and that means things should move more smoothly this time,” he said.

    In Tight Race, Victor May Be Ohio Lawyers, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/politics/31ohio.html?hp

Colorado Agrees to Restore Voters to Rolls

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH and IAN URBINA

DENVER — Tens of thousands of Coloradans who had been removed from the state’s voter rolls will be allowed to vote in next week’s election and given extra protections so their ballots are counted, under an agreement reached late Wednesday in federal court here.

The voters’ names had been removed by Mike Coffman, the Colorado secretary of state, who said he did so because the voters had moved out of state or were listed more than once on the rolls. But Mr. Coffman was sued by a coalition of voting rights and other groups who said such purges were generally prohibited by federal law within 90 days of an election.

Under the agreement, voters removed from the rolls will be permitted to cast provisional ballots, and those ballots will be counted unless election officials can prove the voters were not eligible. To strike such ballots, county election officials must conduct an extensive records review on each one, a decision that must then be reviewed by Mr. Coffman’s office.

“This is unprecedented,” said Elizabeth Westfall, a lawyer for the Advancement Project, a civil rights group that helped file the lawsuit. “We are really thrilled that there will be this degree of unprecedented scrutiny and protection for these purged voters when they cast their provisional ballots.”

Mr. Coffman issued a statement Thursday saying he still believed that Colorado’s election practices adhered to federal law and that “our goal has always been to have a system in place where every voter, who has the legal right to cast a ballot, is allowed to do so.”

Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and an authority on voting litigation nationwide, said the settlement was noteworthy because many states had put the onus on voters to prove that their provisional ballots were legitimate before they could be counted. The settlement shifts this responsibility to the state, Mr. Foley said, and is more in keeping with the spirit of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, which calls for election officials to count a provisional ballot if they can determine the voter’s eligibility.

In Michigan, a federal appeals panel in Detroit delivered a similar victory on Thursday for about 5,500 voters who had been dropped from the rolls. The 2-to-1 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said state elections officials should not remove registered voters from the rolls, even if their voter ID cards had been returned as undeliverable. The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the United States Student Association Foundation and the Michigan branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

    Colorado Agrees to Restore Voters to Rolls, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/politics/31colorado.html?hp

Ted Stevens Receives a Hero’s Welcome in Alaska

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

ANCHORAGE — Two days after he was convicted on seven felony counts in Washington, Senator Ted Stevens returned to Alaska on Wednesday night to begin a six-day campaign sprint, telling several hundred supporters at a rally here that he would be vindicated on appeal and asking them to elect him to a seventh term.

“I will represent Alaska in the senate while my lawyers pursue the appeals to clear my name,” Mr. Stevens said.

Mr. Stevens faces a strong re-election challenge from Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, a Democrat. Even as top Republican leaders have called on Mr. Stevens to resign and many political experts believe his chances of re-election are slim, some people refuse to rule out the possibility of his winning, given his stature here.

The senator, a 40-year incumbent known for delivering billions of dollars of federal money and projects to Alaska, was met in an airplane hangar here on Wednesday night with chants of “We need Ted.”

Just two days earlier, he had been convicted of seven counts of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts and home renovations he received from a wealthy former oil services industry executive, William J. Allen. And before the rally, Mr. Stevens encountered still more pressure to step down.

Several leading Republican senators joined calls for Mr. Stevens to resign. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, was quoted by a newspaper in his home state as saying that “there is a 100 percent certainty” that the senate would vote to expel Mr. Stevens should he win re-election and his appeals fail. Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, have also called on Mr. Stevens to resign.

Mr. Stevens made no reference to those demands on Wednesday, but he spent half of his eight-minute speech criticizing his conviction. He expressed regret but stopped short of apologizing, saying he had been guilty only of naïveté.

“Like most people, I’m not perfect,” Mr. Stevens said at one point, before referring to Mr. Allen. “I naïvely trusted someone who I thought was an honest friend, when he was neither honest nor a friend. That naïve trust, however, has put all Alaskans and my family through an ordeal that I deeply regret.”

He accused federal prosecutors of being “willing to do anything to win” and he implied that holding his trial in Washington added to its illegitimacy.

“If I had had a fair trial in Alaska, I would have been acquitted,” he said to cheers.

He added: “By providing for an appeals process, our founding fathers knew that mistakes could be made and innocent men could be wrongly convicted. This is one of those times.”

Supporters in the crowd suggested that the only verdict that matters is the one on Election Day. One person carried a sign saying “Alaska Decides, Not D.C.”

Mr. Stevens plans to campaign in Fairbanks during the day on Thursday but will return to Anchorage for a debate with Mr. Begich on Thursday night. It will be the first time Mr. Stevens has appeared in person for a debate with Mr. Begich. In some debates, he has submitted videotaped answers to questions provided in advance while Mr. Begich answered questions in person.

One other legal matter has been settled for Mr. Stevens since his conviction: After questions arose over whether Mr. Stevens could vote because he is now a convicted felon, the Alaska Department of Law on Wednesday concluded that he would retain his voting rights until he received a sentence. His sentencing has not been scheduled.

    Ted Stevens Receives a Hero’s Welcome in Alaska, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/washington/31stevens.html?hp

A Small Party Pushes to Be a Statewide Force

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

RONKONKOMA, N.Y. — The taxicabs parked outside the train station here all carried campaign advertisements for a veteran Republican state senator, Caesar Trunzo. But as night fell on a neighborhood of weathered ranch homes jammed up against the Long Island Expressway, the door-knocking was all being done for his Democratic challenger, Brian Foley, by employees of yet another party: the Working Families Party.

“What issue is most important to you this election season?” asked Joe Kenton, 26, a scruffy South Dakotan who lives in Spanish Harlem and commutes to Suffolk County from the Working Families headquarters in downtown Brooklyn for about $500 a week. “Property taxes? Mr. Trunzo is for a cap, which means your taxes will go up 4 percent every year,” he said. “Would you say you’re likely to vote for Brian Foley?”

In just 10 years, the tiny Working Families Party has built a reputation for pulling off upset victories in low-turnout primaries and special elections, one or two at a time. Now, however, in a presidential election year, and with the Senate’s Republican majority endangered for the first time in decades, the party is putting its record on the line in half a dozen races from Ronkonkoma to Rochester. Democrats in the Senate have effectively outsourced their entire ground game to the unassuming army of Working Families canvassers at a price of about $700,000. On any given day, about 200 of its people are in the field.

“They’ve really delivered everything they said they would,” said Doug Forand, the Democratic Party strategist who cut the deal with Working Families.

The party’s higher statewide profile has attracted stepped-up criticism, meanwhile, with Republicans seizing on sloppy financial reporting and some Democrats privately cautioning against attributing too much power to what they argue is little more than a field operation for hire.

Victory would mean a chance to demand that newly empowered — and deeply indebted — Democratic lawmakers press the party’s liberal agenda on issues like progressive taxation, rent control and health care. A monumental achievement for any third party, let alone one so young.

Defeat? Dan Cantor, the party’s executive director, does not want to talk about it. “It’ll be a long two years in the wilderness if we don’t do this,” he said.

Until it failed to block Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s loosening of the city’s term limits law last week, the party was on a roll this year, beginning with its effort for Darrel J. Aubertine, whose Feb. 26 victory in an upstate Senate special election cut the Republican margin to one seat.

In last month’s Senate Democratic primaries, the Working Families Party helped the embattled Kevin S. Parker of Brooklyn fend off two challengers, one of them backed by the mayor; canvassed for Daniel L. Squadron, who unseated Martin E. Connor, a 20-year incumbent; and carried its endorsed candidate to victory in a primary near Buffalo. It also helped the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, pile up a wide enough victory margin over an unexpectedly able challenger to reinforce his grip on power.

“Ten years ago, if I told you Shelly Silver would anxiously be awaiting their help in his election, you’d tell me I was smoking dope,” said a member of the City Council who is close to the Working Families Party.

The muscle the party is flexing now — out of proportion to its ballot position behind the Democratic, Republican, Independence and Conservative Party lines — was amassed over years of grass-roots organizing, getting out the vote and “brand-building,” Mr. Cantor said.

Formed in 1998 by the auto- and communications-workers unions and the Acorn community group, the Working Families Party started out pushing for labor- and immigrant-friendly measures, like a so-called living wage, in the city, Suffolk and Westchester Counties. But it soon began using its cadre of canvassers and organizers in carefully chosen political races — mainly primaries — with noticeable effect.

The first proof of its strength came in a 2003 primary victory over a Syracuse councilman who had broken a promise to support a living-wage ordinance. “When you do that, people look at you differently; they vote differently,” said Bill Lipton, the party’s deputy director.

A year later, it spearheaded P. David Soares’s primary upset of the incumbent Democratic district attorney in Albany.

The party dallied with Senate Republicans in 2004, helping a Westchester senator gain a narrow edge over a Democratic challenger, and, in turn, won Senate support for a $2 increase in the state minimum wage.

In New York City, the party established itself in Brooklyn with two David-and-Goliath victories: Letitia James ’s in a 2003 special City Council election, the first by a minor party in a quarter-century, and Darlene Mealy’s upset of a well-known local Democrat in a Council primary in 2005.

Less well-known is its role in giving Democrats control of the Suffolk County Legislature, after it recruited a school-bus driver, Kate M. Browning, and she unseated the Republican majority leader in 2005.

“They can’t do it anywhere, but when you have a vulnerable incumbent or two, and they can focus their efforts, they can come in and be really strong,” Mr. Forand said.

The party’s full-time canvassers are paid — when there are no races to run, they solicit contributions door to door, adding to a database of supporters that now approaches 500,000 names statewide — so candidates must defray the costs.

For example, Mr. Parker, the state senator who fended off primary challengers, reported payments of $35,000 this year to Data and Field Services, a profit-making company set up by Working Families to act as a vendor to candidates. The party also sometimes rents out its canvassers to like-minded Democrats outside New York, in Bergenfield, N.J., for instance, prompting detractors to suggest that its idealism is alloyed with a thirst for cash.

“They’re the most wonderfully entrepreneurial political party I’ve ever come into contact with,” said James Featherstonhaugh, a longtime consultant to Senate Republicans.

But Mr. Lipton said there was far more money to be made in other lines of work, or in hiring out to Republicans. “Campaigns raise a lot of money, they need a field operation, and our people need to eat,” he said.

Until Republicans protested last week, the party, which advocates for campaign-finance reform, also routinely reported lump-sum payments of tens of thousands of dollars for so-called walking-around money, paid in cash on election days. A party lawyer said this week that it was filing amendments detailing who had received such money. But the party still does not report the salaries and names of its year-round workers, instead listing lump-sum payments to payroll-processing companies.

According to Mr. Cantor, the party’s major components include a nonprofit lobbying group, the Working Families Organization, which paid for the term-limits fight and other issue-oriented campaigns and which will spend about $500,000 this year; Data and Field Services; and the Working Families Party itself, which Mr. Cantor says will churn through about $2.7 million this year, hundreds of thousands of that from unions representing groups like the teachers, auto workers, communications workers, and health care workers. All told, Mr. Cantor said, he expected to raise and spend less than $4 million in 2008, a paltry sum compared with the tens of millions being spent by New York Democrats and Republicans.

The Senate races may be the Working Families’ highest priority, but among city residents it probably is better known for its role in opposing Mr. Bloomberg’s legislation to allow elected city officials to serve three four-year terms, rather than two.

Critics saw an ulterior motive: that Working Families had much to lose from an extension, because there would be far fewer contested elections in which its endorsement, and its canvass, could hold sway next year. And they questioned whether the battle would be a distraction from this November’s Senate elections.

But in just over two weeks of petitioning, postering, and feverish lobbying, the party turned the debate into a dogfight, its opponents grudgingly acknowledged. It also turned heads by threatening, in terms more often associated with political bosses than idealists, that council members who did not vote against the measure could get a primary challenge. (Likely targets include Ms. Mealy, the onetime Working Families standard bearer, who voted for the extension without saying why.)

“We’re not going to go after everybody, and it won’t be the only factor,” Mr. Lipton said. “But it will be a crucial factor in helping us figure out who we’re endorsing.”

    A Small Party Pushes to Be a Statewide Force, NYT, 31.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/nyregion/31working.html?hp

The Decided Go in Droves to Vote Early

October 30, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

HENDERSON, Nev. — At grocery stores across Las Vegas, voters are casting their ballots, and then shopping for bananas or hitting the slot machines a few feet away.

About 100 people have voted from the windows of their cars, A.T.M. style, in Orange County, Calif. Several busloads of voters pulled up to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland on Sunday, did what they came to do, and then repaired to a church across the street for some fried chicken.

In all its forms, early voting has been an election year hit. Enormous lines in Florida led Gov. Charlie Crist to issue an executive order extending early voting hours statewide from eight hours a day to 12, while in Georgia an elderly woman in Cobb County stood in the sun so long to vote that she collapsed.

For many, an early vote has been a stab at ending, at least in their own homes and hearts, the seemingly endless loop of campaign rhetoric, cascading polls and tension, according to interviews over the past several days with dozens of early voters in six states.

“I thought I might as well do this,” said Rhonda Woolcox, 83, who came to a community center here on Monday to cast her presidential vote for Senator John McCain of Arizona. “I wasn’t about to change my mind.”

Others seemed to view early voting as a leap of faith.

“I was afraid that if I voted early our votes wouldn’t be counted,” said Glynetter Prather, 44, who nonetheless cast her ballot in Florida for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. “I mean, there’s enough time to lose these ballots. And I hate to say that, but that’s Florida’s signature.”

Among some of the 32 states that allow their residents to vote early without an excuse, either by mail or in person, the verdict is already in from a full quarter of registered voters — well into the millions. In some counties across the nation, the percentages are far higher. The early voting will continue for several days in most of the states, but in Louisiana it is already closed, and it will end on Friday or Saturday elsewhere to give time to update the books to prevent people from voting twice.

In 2004, 22 percent of voters cast an early presidential ballot, and the number is expected to climb to 30 percent to 35 percent this year. “We have predicted a third of the electorate; I expect that we will meet that,” said James Hicks, research director at the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Although some states turn on their early voting tabulators before Election Day, none reveal the results until the polls close on Election Day itself and most do not begin counting a vote until then, said Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center in Houston, an association of elections officials.

No matter, one result is already known: Voters are drawn to the ballot boxes early.

In some places, like the three polling stations visited in the Las Vegas area on Monday, voters were rewarded with short waits and well-oiled systems designed to make them so. Several grocery stores offered electronic voting.

“We are the only state in the nation where you’ll hear, ‘Wet mop at Voting Booth 4,’ ” said Bob Walsh, a spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state.

In other states, lines snaked for hours and tested tempers. In New Orleans, for example, voters clocked six-hour waits this week.

In Jupiter, Fla., security guards have been hired to direct traffic and oversee the mild mayhem at a county library, where the parking lot has been jammed with the over-70 crowd competing for spots so they could cast a vote.

Early voting stations in Clayton County, Ga., which includes suburbs of Atlanta, stayed open until 1 a.m. one day last week to accommodate voters who had been delayed — some by as many as nine hours — by snags with the software that confirms voter registration.

Even with the problems and delays, voters in many states said they viewed the chance to vote early — without the constraint of the past of having to provide an excuse for not voting on Election Day — as a boon.

“In New Hampshire where we came from,” said Arthur Schuetz, 62, who voted Monday at the community center here in Henderson, “it is not socially acceptable to do anything but go to the polls on Election Day and stand in the snow talking with all your neighbors. But here you can vote in five minutes and go home. It’s super.”

Mr. Schuetz said he voted for Mr. McCain, a Republican, with enthusiasm. His wife, Linda, called the choice the “lesser of two evils.”

For those who work long hours and occasionally miss the chance to vote, early casting is helpful.

“Voting is always a problem for us nurses,” said Donna J. Simmons, 59, who cast a vote in Cleveland, anticipating a 12-hour shift on Election Day. “We’re always trying to work out ways to cover for each other so one of us can go and vote. I think this event is the most wonderful thing because voting is always such a challenge for people like me.”

So far, the early voting has attracted more Democrats than Republicans. For example, in North Carolina, according to state election officials, 58 percent of early voters have been registered Democrats compared with 25 percent registered Republicans. Democrats have also turned out in higher numbers in Florida, Iowa and New Mexico.

For the last few months, volunteers for Mr. Obama, a Democrat, in California, a state sure to go Democratic, have been making telephone calls to voters in neighboring Nevada, helping to perfect the lists of likely early vote-casters for get-out-the-vote canvassers. In Nevada, a Republican stronghold in past presidential elections, 52 percent of early electors in the population centers have been Democrats, 32 percent Republicans and 16 percent unaffiliated voters.

Some of them have cast their ballots at the Galleria at Sunset Mall in Henderson, where voters lined up to use three rows of machines sandwiched between two jewelry stores, a Mervyn’s department store and a stand selling face cream.

Volunteers waved citizens, some carrying shopping bags, to the open machines with little American flags festooned to sticks. Leah Darrington, 30, came with four couples to vote, and the adults took turns entertaining the five children who were brought along.

Dee Welch gave her son DeLano an admonishing tug as he tried to drag her from the rows of voting machines to a toy store. “I’m getting in line to vote for president,” Ms. Welch said firmly. “So you behave!”

There were elderly couples who shuffled carefully along the slick mall floor, scores of parents pushing strollers, couples holding hands as they affixed the “I voted” stickers to their shirts, and several first-time voters.

“It was fun,” said Christie Kaminska, 20, who picked Mr. Obama for her first presidential vote. “I have class on Tuesday, and I heard from someone at school I could vote here. Plus, I have some things I needed to return.”

In Pittsboro, N.C., Zaw Min Thu, 36, a refugee from Myanmar who came to the United States eight years ago, cast his first vote, for Mr. Obama, this week.

“I wanted to check it out because of my work schedule,” said Mr. Thu, who works as a housekeeper at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Our government is a military government, and the government is not good,” he said. “That’s why I vote today.”

The Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, one of the largest black churches in Cleveland, has pulled nearly 200 churchgoers over the past few weeks to early voting polls.

“I look at this as a form of cholesterol removal from the clogged circulatory system of this nation’s election process,” said Larry Harris, the pastor there. “We know we’re looking at record-breaking turnout for this election. It’s going to be difficult to count all the votes that day. And if the weather is bad, some of these people will just stay home. So we need to get people out early, and make sure that every vote counts.”
 

Reporting was contributed by Robbie Brown in Georgia, Tom Collins and Mark Holan in Florida, Paul Cuadros in North Carolina, Dan Frosch and Mindy Sink in Colorado, and Chris Maag in Ohio.

    The Decided Go in Droves to Vote Early, NYT, 30.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/us/politics/30early.html

NC Elections Board Extends Early Voting Hours

October 30, 2008
Filed at 2:21 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- North Carolina polling places may stay open an extra four hours Saturday to accommodate early voters.

The state Board of Elections voted unanimously Thursday to order all 100 counties to keep their early voting sites open until 5 p.m. instead of 1 p.m. unless local officials decide it's unnecessary.

The decision highlights the remarkable turnout and long lines seen across the surprise swing state since early voting began two weeks ago.

More than 1.7 million people -- or 30 percent of registered voters -- cast a ballot through Wednesday night.

North Carolina last cast its 15 electoral votes with a Democratic presidential nominee in 1976. But an Associated Press-GfK poll released this week shows the race too close to call.

    NC Elections Board Extends Early Voting Hours, NYT, 30.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Early-Voting-North-Carolina.html

McCain, GOP Gain Ground on Obama Ads in Key States

October 30, 2008
Filed at 2:20 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After weeks of being out-advertised by Barack Obama, John McCain and the Republican Party are nearly matching the Democrat ad for ad in key battleground markets.

Ad spending and ad placement data obtained from Democratic and Republican operatives show that in the closing days of the campaign the Republican voice has grown louder in states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

For instance, Obama had been scheduled to buy about $2.5 million in Florida ads for the last week of the campaign. McCain is now set to spend about $1.6 million and the Republican National Committee added $1.5 million to their buy in the state this week. Obama appears to have added more weight to his ads since.

The ad war is especially noticeable in Florida's central corridor, which includes Tampa, Orlando and West Palm Beach.

Those near-parity levels in crucial states come with a price. McCain has had to trim back his ads in Minnesota, Maine, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, giving Obama even greater edges there.

A map of the states where McCain and the RNC are spending their money also illustrates the defensive nature of their 11th hour strategy. Except for Pennsylvania, the McCain-GOP focus was on trying to hold states that President Bush won in 2004.

And while the GOP may have turned up the volume in crucial states, Obama had outspent them for weeks with ads that promoted his cause and attacked McCain.

The last round of ads comes as national polls show Obama with a lead but with McCain closing in. State polls, however, are the more important barometer of how the election might turn out. And by that measure, Obama is in a much better spot, with clear holds of past Democratic states and competing in what have been reliably Republican states.

''They've got to pull the perfect straight here and they don't have any margin for errors,'' said Evan Tracey, a media consultant who tracks political advertising. McCain is ''doing this at the expense of the Wisconsins and the Minnesotas. Clearly they're on their heels now.''

Obama also retains a financial advantage over McCain, permitting him to air ads on national broadcast and cable networks that reach every state in the country. At no time was that financial superiority more evident than Wednesday night, when Obama aired a half-hour, prime-time infomercial on NBC, CBS and Fox as well as BET, MSNBC, Univision and TV One.

Obama gained his money edge by bypassing the public financing system for the general election -- the first major party candidate to do so since the campaign reforms of the Watergate era. He had initially pledged to accept the limits of public funds if McCain did, but later changed his mind. McCain, by deciding to accept public financing, was left to spend only $84 million in September and October.

''If Sen. Obama had kept his word and abided by the legal FEC financing system, the two campaigns would have been at advertising parity all along,'' said Brad Todd, whose firm, OnMessage Inc., is running the GOP's independent expenditure operation.

Still, Todd added, ''The most important five days of any presidential campaign are the last five days.''

Indeed, the RNC has stepped in with significant aid. The party's independent expenditure arm, which cannot coordinate spending with McCain, has spent about $21 million in ads against Obama since Monday, according to party filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Party ads have been both broad and targeted.

The RNC had been targeting Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Just this week it added West Virginia and Montana, previously strong Republican states that Obama has managed to move toward him. It launched a new ad Thursday in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and Florida markets that seeks to raise doubts about Obama's lack of executive experience. ''Can you hand your nation to a man who has never been in charge of anything?'' the ad says.

The RNC also planned to air a Virginia-specific ad aimed at the state's veterans and the workers who rely on its military presence. The ad, airing only in Norfolk, warned that Obama would slice military spending, endangering jobs in the state. ''America's safety depends on Virginia,'' the ad states. ''And Virginia's economy depends on our military.''

The Obama campaign issued two new ads Thursday that aides called the ''closing argument.''

One of the ads takes a positive tone as it contends that Obama is ''a leader who'll bring us together,'' citing high-profile endorsements from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican, and billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

The other spot was a swipe at McCain and Bush, placing the two in the mirrors of a car heading down the road and passing signs featuring a negative view of McCain policies. At the end, McCain and Bush appear together in the rearview mirror as the spot asks: ''Look behind you. We can't afford more of the same.''

------

On the Web:

RNC ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v1Rxu--qQW4x0

Obama ad: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/his-choice--ad/

    McCain, GOP Gain Ground on Obama Ads in Key States, NYT, 30.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Campaign-Ads.html

Election Days Away, Obama Keeps Sense of Urgency

October 30, 2008
Filed at 9:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KISSIMMEE, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says he doesn't want to look back on the final days of the campaign and regret not doing something to help sway voters.

Both Obama and his Republican rival, John McCain, are stepping up their efforts to reach voters in swing states as next week's election draws closer.

In an interview broadcast Thursday on ABC's ''Good Morning America,'' Obama said that when the polls close, he doesn't want to ask himself if there was an argument he didn't make or a hand he didn't shake.

Obama is targeting Florida, Virginia and Missouri on Thursday while McCain is taking the fight to Defiance, Ohio, in a quest to tilt the few remaining swing states his way.

Obama holds leads in polls nationally.

    Election Days Away, Obama Keeps Sense of Urgency, NYT, 30.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Campaign-Rdp.html

New Registrations Give Georgia Blacks More Power at the Polls

October 30, 2008
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

LITHONIA, Ga. — Just a few blocks off Max Cleland Boulevard, named for the Democrat defeated by Senator Saxby Chambliss in a bitter Congressional race six years ago, a line has formed that could be problematic for Mr. Chambliss’s own re-election this year.

Hundreds of voters, most of them black residents of bedroom communities east of Atlanta, are waiting to cast early ballots, motivated by the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama but many also taking the opportunity to vote for Jim Martin, Mr. Chambliss’s Democratic opponent.

“I voted for Jim because I like what he is saying, not just because he is Democratic,” Iris Epps said as she exited Lithonia Middle School after waiting about 90 minutes on Tuesday evening to cast her ballot. She said the wait would have been even longer earlier in the day.

Like several other Senate and House candidates in North Carolina, Ohio and Connecticut, Mr. Chambliss finds himself in a tight race even though only months ago he was considered a cinch for re-election. A significant part of his problem is the surging participation by African-American voters, their ranks bolstered by the newly registered, a group expected to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats this year.

In Georgia, where Mr. Obama’s organization worked hard to register new voters but did not mount a full-blown campaign because the state seems beyond his reach, black voters in Atlanta and the surrounding areas have been standing in line for hours. Many are among the tens of thousands of newly registered voters.

New registrations of black voters ran more than 25 percent higher this year than four years ago, with especially high registration among black women.

Nearly 1.4 million Georgians have voted, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, and more than a third were black. (Blacks make up just over 29 percent of registered voters in the state, which keeps track of racial data under civil rights laws.) Early voting began Sept. 22, and this week the state opened extra polling stations and extended their hours.

The development is not lost on Mr. Chambliss. “There has always been a rush to the polls by African-Americans early,” he said at the square in Covington, a quick stop on a bus tour as the campaign entered its final week. He predicted the crowds of early voters would motivate Republicans to turn out. “It has also got our side energized, they see what is happening,” he said.

Mr. Martin, who stood in a daunting line on Tuesday to cast his own early ballot at the Fulton County government center in Atlanta, said the greater the turnout, the better his chances.

“I am honored to have a lot of African-American support,” said Mr. Martin, a former director of the state Human Services Department and a longtime state legislator who was greeted with handshakes and encouragement by waiting voters as he worked his way to the end of the queue snaking through the building. “But I have broad-based support across the state — people who want change.”

The Georgia race was initially considered out of reach for Democrats. But Mr. Chambliss has been hurt by his vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout — which was widely unpopular, both among conservatives and African-Americans — and by a flood of tough attack advertisements from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The contest is one of the longshots Democrats would need to win to reach a 60-vote majority in the Senate that would let them thwart filibusters.

“A month ago this would have been a cakewalk,” said Merle Black, an expert on Southern politics at Emory University. “This is not the election that they thought they were running.”

The Georgia race has another twist. To be declared the winner, a candidate needs to receive more than 50 percent of the vote — an absolute majority. Both the tight race reflected in the polls and the presence of a third-party Libertarian candidate, Allen Buckley, raise the possibility that neither Mr. Chambliss nor Mr. Martin will break 50 percent, forcing a runoff on Dec. 2. If a 60-vote Senate hangs in the balance, the runoff could take on outsized importance.

Mr. Chambliss and his allies acknowledge a rough patch after his bailout vote, which was uniformly opposed by Republican House members from the state, a glaring divide the senator quickly sought to bridge through a stepped-up schedule of appearances.

As he spoke to small but politically active crowds of conservatives in Covington and Conyers this week, Mr. Chambliss assured his audiences that survey trends were in his favor. But he urged them to beat the bushes for every available Republican vote.

“It is important that you talk to everybody you are friends with, you work with, you go to church with, you drink coffee with, whatever it may be, and make sure that on Nov. 4 they turn out to vote,” Mr. Chambliss exhorted a flag-waving group gathered in Covington’s town square, warning against a liberal takeover of Washington.

Mr. Martin has, with the help of national Democrats, hammered Mr. Chambliss for his support of Bush administration economic policies, most recently with highly visible television commercials attributing Georgia job losses and economic pain to “Saxby economics.”

Democrats would revel in defeating Mr. Chambliss. In 2002, they accused him of libeling Mr. Cleland, a badly wounded and decorated Vietnam veteran, with an advertisement that questioned his commitment to fighting terrorism. They now view Mr. Martin as the potential key to a 60-vote Senate, a distinction with which Mr. Martin seems slightly uncomfortable.

“I think that is overstated,” said Mr. Martin, who said he does not see himself as a filibuster warrior but as someone with a bipartisan history and a lawmaker who would “go up to the United States Senate and stick up for the middle-class Georgian.”

As in Senate races in North Carolina and Mississippi and a handful of House races, Democrats are closely monitoring African-American participation, calculating that a significantly increased turnout could tip the balance for their candidates.

Mr. Black, the political scientist, said that if strongly Democratic African-American voters make up more than a third of the electorate, Mr. Martin needs to secure about a quarter or slightly more of the white vote to assemble a majority. “It is certainly doable,” Mr. Black said.

The black voters who waited patiently at the Lithonia Middle School seemed aware of the difference their votes could make.

“This is the most important election,” said Cathy Blakeney of Stone Mountain, who not only voted herself but made sure her 22-year-old son showed up as well. “Based on the economic conditions and people losing their jobs and people losing their homes and the economy not growing and banks going under, I was going to make sure that I came out and voted and that he came out and voted, too.”

    New Registrations Give Georgia Blacks More Power at the Polls, NYT, 30.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/us/politics/30chambliss.html

Editorial

The Success of Early Voting

October 30, 2008
The New York Times

A lot is going wrong in this election, from malfunctioning electronic voting machines to voters being purged mistakenly from the rolls. But one thing is going very right: early voting. In the more than 30 states that allow early or no-excuse absentee voting, voters have been casting ballots in record numbers. Early voting has many advantages. The main one is that it makes it likely that more eligible voters will participate in democracy.

Election Day has traditionally been held on a single day — a Tuesday. Congress scheduled federal elections on Tuesdays because they worked well for farmers and Sabbath observers. But in the 21st century, having one day to vote is an antiquated relic. Voters have to fit in a visit to the polls with their work, family and other responsibilities. Many cannot find the time, particularly when lines are as long as they have been in recent times.

The answer, as many states have discovered, is to move away from a single day of voting and allow voters to cast ballots over a period of days or weeks. Voters across the country have responded enthusiastically. In Florida, more than one million people have already cast ballots at early voting centers, some waiting on lines for hours to do so. In Georgia, too, more than one million people already have voted, a big jump from the less than 500,000 people who voted early four years ago.

Some people are wary of early voting. As Susan Saulny reported in The Times on Wednesday, there are rumors in the African-American community in Jacksonville, Fla., that early voting is a scam and that the votes cast early would be discarded. Given Florida’s history with electoral mischief, some skepticism about election procedures is not only understandable, but necessary.

But the truth is that early voting actually makes it harder for the forces of disenfranchisement to stop eligible voters from casting ballots. If election officials try to require voters to present ID when it is not required by law, early voting gives voters a chance to simply return the next day. Dirty tricks are also harder to pull off. If political operatives want to jam get-out-the-vote telephone lines, as they did on Election Day in New Hampshire in 2002, it would be harder to do if people voted over two weeks.

Early voting also reduces the burden on election systems that are often stretched near to the breaking point. In 2004, voters waited in lines as long as 10 hours. And there is every indication that lines on Tuesday, in some places and at some times, will again be extraordinarily long. The more people who vote early, the fewer who will be lined up at the polls on Election Day.

Now that it is clear how successful the early-voting process has been, the states that have not adopted it — including New York — should do so. Congress should also mandate early voting for federal elections — ideally as part of a larger federal bill that would fix the wide array of problems with the electoral system. Today, the idea that all voting must occur in a 15-hour window, or less, on a single day is as outdated as a punch-card voting machine.

    The Success of Early Voting, NYT, 30.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/opinion/30thu1.html

Obama blankets TV with ad

29 October 2008
USA Today
By Kathy Kiely

SUNRISE, Fla. — Barack Obama pulled out all the political and technological stops Wednesday, barnstorming across Republican territory and blanketing the airwaves.

As an unusual 30-minute commercial aired on several broadcast and cable networks, the Democratic presidential nominee appeared here at a packed basketball arena with his running mate, Joe Biden. In what Obama aide Linda Douglass described as "a bit of a high-wire act," the campaign cut from the pre-taped ad with a live feed from the rally.

Obama's ad ran simultaneously on several broadcast and cable networks at a cost of more than $3 million. It intertwined the stories of families facing financial and personal difficulties with segments in which the candidate discussed how he plans to help them and other Americans like them overcome their challenges.

"This election is a defining moment," Obama said during the beginning of the ad. "The chance for our leaders to meet the demands of these challenging times and keep faith with our people."

The ad included testimonials about Obama from leading politicians, including two former rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden and Gov. Bill Richardson. The ad didn't mention his current rival, Republican John McCain.

The airing of the ad highlighted the enormous financial advantage enjoyed by Obama, whose fundraising has been so successful that he opted out of the public campaign-finance system. McCain, who accepted public funding, is limited to $84 million for the general election campaign. Obama raised $153 million in September alone, and spent $106 million in the month of September.

After the rally, Obama was to head to his first joint campaign appearance with former president Bill Clinton, timed for the 11 p.m. ET news in central Florida, the state that gave President Bush the White House in 2000 and helped re-elect him in 2004. The pair's rally in Kissimmee, just outside Orlando, was scheduled to start at the same time that an interview Obama had with Jon Stewart aired on the comedian's Daily Show.

In the Stewart interview, Obama joked that his own children were appalled at his big television buy. He quoted his 10-year-old daughter, Malia, as saying " 'hold up a second. Are you saying that my programs are going to be interrupted?'

"I said, 'No, we didn't buy on Disney.' So she was relieved," Obama said.

In a sign of his confidence that his Democratic base is secure, Obama spent the day trolling for votes here and in North Carolina, two states where early voting is underway and where Republican presidential candidates usually win. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina was Jimmy Carter in 1976. The last to win Florida was Clinton, who beat Bob Dole here 48%-42% in 1996.

The former president's willingness to share a stage with Obama also represents a sign of Obama's success in unifying the party after a bruising primary with the Clinton's wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

In Raleigh, Obama poked fun at attacks on his economic policies by McCain. "By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret Communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten," he told a lunchtime crowd of 28,000 in Raleigh.

Contributing: Fredreka Schouten

    Obama blankets TV with ad, UT, 29.10.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-10-29-obama-tvad_N.htm




 

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
leaves his campaign plane Wednesday in Raleigh, N.C..
His TV blitz includes a half-hour infomercial and appearances
on Nightly News,The Daily Show and The Rachel Maddow Show.

By Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images

    Obama takes his case to country with infomercial        UT        29.10.2008
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-10-29-Obama-infomercial_N.htm

Obama takes his case

to country with infomercial

29 October 2008
USA Today
From staff and wire reports

NORFOLK, Va. — Barack Obama, hoping to build momentum heading into the Nov. 4 elections, is mounting a full-court press on television Wednesday including an interview with a prominent network anchor, a taped appearance on a comedy show and a 30-minute infomercial across most networks.

His high-profile campaigning in Florida will also include his first joint appearance on the stump with former President Bill Clinton that will likely draw national news coverage.

His Republican rival, John McCain, who is also in Florida, will try to counter some of the Obama TV blitz with an appearance on CNN's Larry King Live.

Obama's 30-minute ad will air at 8 p.m. ET on CBS, NBC and Fox at a cost of around $1 million per network. It will also run on Univision, BET, MSNBC and TV One.

The ad, campaign aides said, is expected to be a video montage of typical people talking about the challenges they face, with the Illinois Democrat explaining how he can help.

"He'll be able to give greater details about where he wants to lead," says Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod.

It will feature a live segment of Obama at a rally in Florida, according to a campaign adviser.

McCain crisscrossed the Sunshine State in an effort to rally critical support in the traditional Republican stronghold that President Bush carried twice.

"We've got to win the state of Florida, my friends," McCain told supporters at a lumber yard in Miami, noting that his campaign is "a few points down" nationally and "the pundits have written us off."

McCain's lead pollster, Bill McInturff, in a memo released by the campaign, takes issue with a flurry of polls giving Obama a notable edge in polls in key battleground states. McInturff argues that the McCain campaign is "functionally tied" across these states and says undecided voters will break heavily for the Republican candidate.

The Miami and Palm Beach rallies were billed as "Joe The Plumber" events, in reference to Ohio man and Obama critic Joe Wurzelbacher. McCain has cast Wurzelbacher as the symbol of business people who would be hurt by Obama's plan to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000.

In describing the "fundamental difference" between Obama and him, McCain said, "he thinks taxes are too low and I think spending is too high,." and suggested his rival's tax policies smack of socialism.

At a rally in Raleigh, N.C., Obama fired back at such labels.

"I don't know what's next," Obama said to laughter from the crowd. "By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten."

McCain also scheduled a private meeting with former top military officers who advise him on national security and was expected to issue a statement afterward on security threats to the nation.

In an appearance in another key battleground state, McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, delivered a policy speech in Toledo, Ohio, that called for a "clean break" from the Bush administration's energy policies, which she says relied too much on importing foreign oil.

She also criticized her home-state senator, Republican Ted Stevens, who was convicted this week on seven counts of failing to disclose gifts he received from an oil executive.

"Alaska's senior senator is not the first man to discover the hazards of getting to close to oil money interests with agenda of their own," she said.

Obama's TV blitz on Wednesday includes an interview in Raleigh, N.C., by Charlie Gibson of ABC's World News.

Later, in Florida, the Illinois Democrat planned to tape an appearance on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that will run at 11 p.m. ET.

To cap his round of TV interviews, Obama, who has provided limited news media access in recent weeks, will give interviews to Brian Williams, anchor of NBC's Nightly News and to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

Contributing: David Jackson, in Miami; Douglas Stanglin, in McLean, Va.; the Associated Press

    Obama takes his case to country with infomercial, UT, 29.10.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-10-29-Obama-infomercial_N.htm

Ex-Detroit Mayor Begins Prison Term

October 29, 2008
The New York Times
By NICK BUNKLEY

DETROIT — As mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick traveled around town in a black Cadillac Escalade, relished his ever-present entourage of admirers and surrounded himself with as many as 21 bodyguards. But for the next four months, Mr. Kilpatrick must spend 23 hours of each day alone, in Cell 14J-4 of the Wayne County Jail.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kilpatrick, a former middle school teacher who became Detroit’s youngest mayor at age 31, was formally sentenced and began serving a sentence for obstruction of justice and assaulting a police officer. In September, Mr. Kilpatrick resigned and agreed to the jail time as part of a plea deal with prosecutors.

“You were defiant, sometimes arrogant and oftentimes accusatory to people you blamed for your situation,” Judge David A. Groner of Wayne County Circuit Court told Mr. Kilpatrick, who did not speak at his sentencing hearing but shook his head in disagreement as the judge admonished him. “At a time when this city needed transparency, accountability and responsibility, you exhibited hubris and privilege at the expense of this city.”

A lawyer for Mr. Kilpatrick, Gerald Evelyn, admitted that the former mayor “has been downed by his own conduct” but argued that “he has done a lot of good for the city of Detroit, and people have chosen to ignore that.”

Mr. Kilpatrick was jailed more than nine months after the eruption of a scandal that heaped more misery and embarrassment upon this economically depressed city and state. Text messages published by The Detroit Free Press showed that Mr. Kilpatrick had lied under oath when he denied having an extramarital affair with his chief of staff, Christine Beatty, and that he conspired with Ms. Beatty to fire police officers who might have revealed their indiscretions. The city settled a lawsuit by those officers for $8.4 million.

A judge last week released hundreds more pages of text messages containing more romantic and sexually explicit exchanges between Mr. Kilpatrick and Ms. Beatty and from Mr. Kilpatrick to other, unidentified women. The messages suggest that Mr. Kilpatrick and Ms. Beatty paid for a weekend together in Colorado with money from a tax-exempt nonprofit group.

In some exchanges, Mr. Kilpatrick and Ms. Beatty remind one another to erase the messages from their city-issued pagers. The messages, from 2002 through 2004, his first years in office, were archived by the service provider, SkyTel of Clinton, Miss., and obtained by prosecutors.

Ms. Beatty, who resigned after the scandal broke and is charged with seven felonies including perjury, has declined to settle with prosecutors and is preparing for trial in January.

Mr. Kilpatrick, 38, is scheduled for release in late February, when residents who twice elected him will vote in a special primary to determine who will finish his term. Until then, his home will be a sparse, 150-square-foot cell whose past inhabitants include Jack Kevorkian, the so-called suicide doctor. The cell is separated from others and reserved for high-profile inmates; it is the same cell where Mr. Kilpatrick spent a night in August for violating his bond. He will be given an hour a day for solitary recreation outside his cell.

The jail is overseen by Sheriff Warren Evans of Wayne County, one of 18 people now running for mayor. Other candidates include the city’s interim mayor, Kenneth V. Cockrel Jr.; Dave Bing, a former Detroit Pistons star who runs an automotive supplier in Detroit; State Representative Coleman A. Young II, whose father was the Detroit mayor from 1974 to 1993; Freman Hendrix, who narrowly lost to Mr. Kilpatrick in 2005; and Sharon McPhail, who was one of Mr. Kilpatrick’s lawyers.

The top two finishers in February’s nonpartisan primary will face off in May. The winner will have just three months to settle in before the regularly scheduled primary in August, which determines the candidates for an election in November.

Mr. Kilpatrick, who must pay $1 million restitution to the city, will be on probation for five years, during which he is barred from seeking elected office.

    Ex-Detroit Mayor Begins Prison Term, NYT, 29.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/us/29detroit.html

Jacksonville Journal

Sense of Unease in Some Black Voters

October 29, 2008
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — For weeks now, James Jones has been extra courteous in traffic and at the gas station because he has an Obama sticker on the back of his truck. “Something like that might make a difference for Barack Obama,” Mr. Jones explained. “I’m not taking a chance.”

Mr. Jones, a black warehouse worker, bought campaign signs for his yard and made sure his family had valid voter registration cards. He and his wife cast their votes 10 days early to avoid last-minute problems at the polls.

So imagine Mr. Jones’s disappointment this week when he got word of a rumor making its way around his humble southeastern part of town — that early voting is nothing more than a new disenfranchisement scam, that early votes are likely to be lost and never counted.

“I went to the library where I voted and I said, ‘Ma’am, I heard rumors that early voting is dangerous, is that true?’ ” Mr. Jones, 47, said he had asked an election worker. “She said: ‘It’s pretty well safe. I wouldn’t worry about it.’ ”

But in conversations with about a dozen Jacksonville residents in cafes, outside churches and at their homes over three days, Mr. Jones and many of his black neighbors worry anyway, unable to put aside the nagging feeling that somehow their votes will not be counted.

Wounds have not healed here in Duval County since the mangled presidential election of 2000, when more than 26,000 ballots were discarded as invalid for being improperly punched. Nearly 40 percent of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly Democratic-leaning African-American communities around Jacksonville, a reality that has caused suspicions of racial bias to linger, even though intentional disenfranchisement was never proved.

Now, in a show of early election enthusiasm, more than 84,200 people have already voted in Duval County, surpassing the number of early votes cast in the last presidential election. Added to 33,800 absentee ballots collected so far, the numbers show that 22 percent of registered voters cast their ballots as of Oct. 27, county election officials said.

But amid excitement over Mr. Obama’s historic candidacy and the chance that the country might choose an African-American president within a matter of days, there is an unmistakable sense of anxiety among blacks here that something will go wrong, that victory will slip away.

“They’re going to throw out votes,” said Larone Wesley, a 53-year-old black Vietnam veteran. “I can’t say exactly how, but they are going to accomplish that quite naturally. I’m so afraid for my friend Obama. I look at this through the eyes of the ’60s, and I feel there ain’t no way they’re going to let him make it.”

Mr. Wesley refuses to vote early. “I don’t believe the machines work properly in general,” he said, “and they really don’t work properly when they think you’re voting for Obama.”

Mr. Wesley’s wife, Paris, disagrees and thinks the best thing she can do is get to her polling place before Nov. 4. “I want to go early so that if I see and hear anything that’s not in keeping with the rules and regulations, I can make a call,” she said. “As far as faith in the system, I don’t have faith in the system. I just pray we have people in the polls who will be honest and watchful.”

Some things have not changed since 2000: Florida is still a battleground. Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, are in hot pursuit of the state’s 27 electoral votes, which could prove crucial for victory.

Other important things have changed. In 2004, there were only minor glitches. Duval County has done away with its old confusing ballot and upgraded its scanning machinery. It also has a new elections supervisor, Jerry Holland, who has reached out to blacks and earned their respect.

The skepticism about early voting is confounding to many officials because it is intended to make voting easier and more accessible, and was recently promoted in Jacksonville by Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama.

Mr. Holland said that the number of people, including blacks, who had turned out to vote early showed that misgivings were not widespread. Of the 84,273 residents who had voted as of Sunday, more than 30,900 were black.

“Obviously, we’ve come a long way since 2000,” Mr. Holland said. “For some people, it may have taken eight years to rebuild confidence. For others, it might take another election cycle. The goal is to keep building confidence one voter at a time.”

He added: “We will have record numbers. It may be feasible to get 50 percent of our voters before the election.”

Still, suspicions linger that something — faulty machines, misread ballots, mysteriously lost votes — will deny Mr. Obama some of the support that he has.

“I vote in a predominantly minority area,” said Monica Albertie, 27, a health care executive. “I worry about getting there and all of a sudden the electricity doesn’t work. Anything can happen. I know that sounds silly, but these are real concerns. We have a record of getting excited, then being disappointed. You get paranoid. What if the bus system shuts down that day?”

Ms. Albertie said she was “on the fence” about early voting, because “I don’t want my early vote to get lost.”

Her friend Susan Burroughs, who is also a health care executive, said she planned to vote early but felt “queasy.”

“You know, you don’t want to get too excited because it could go in just the opposite direction,” Ms. Burroughs said. “You read the papers here, and you know, there was something wrong with the machine over here, they lost the votes over there, they had to recount votes. That makes a lot of people leery.”

“My queasiness is that we shouldn’t become too comfortable with the polls showing he’s ahead,” she said. “It means nothing until you cast your vote, and the tally is in.”

Mr. Jones also expressed a sense of queasiness.

“I feel good, and I don’t feel good,” he said. “I’m thankful to God that this is happening in my lifetime, that I get to see it. But I’m not ready to celebrate anything. This could be a very tricky time for us. I don’t trust the polls. And the state of Florida in the past has had a lot of crooked things going on.”

    Sense of Unease in Some Black Voters, NYT, 29.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/us/politics/29anxiety.html?hp

Obama Gets a Different Kind of Chilly Reception

October 28, 2008
Filed at 11:53 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHESTER, Pa. (AP) -- The World Series got suspended. Obama politics never stop.

Democrat Barack Obama carried on Tuesday with an outdoor rally at Widener University, outside Philadelphia, despite a cold, steady rain that made the temperature feel freezing.

About 9,000 people came out to hear the presidential contender. They stood in mud.

''I just want all of you to know that if we see this kind of dedication on Election Day, there is no way that we're not going to bring change to America,'' Obama told the shivering crowd.

The weather was so miserable that Obama's rival, Republican John McCain, canceled a rally 50 miles north in Quakertown -- hardly insignificant, given the dwindling campaign time.

Even Major League Baseball suspended the fifth game of the World Series in Philadelphia because of the same wet conditions Monday night, a first in the history of the baseball championship.

Gone were Obama's suit and tie. He wore jeans, sneakers and a waterproof raincoat. Still, shunning an umbrella, he got soaked. Obama later changed clothes before resuming his events.

McCain and Obama converged on Pennsylvania, a vote-rich state where Obama leads but McCain remains hopeful of a turnaround. Later, Obama was heading to Virginia, a longtime Republican state where he leads in polls.

Closing in on history, the front-running Obama has returned to broad, uplifting themes of change in hopes of ending the campaign in the most positive light.

The election is in one week.

Obama promised better days ''if we're willing to reach deep down inside us, when times are tough, when it's cold, when it's raining, when it's hard -- that's when we when stand up.''

Gunning for the 270 electoral votes the Democrat needs to win the White House, Obama is almost exclusively targeting tossup red states, the label for the ones that trend Republican. Any one of them might tip him to victory. Combined, they could give him a dominant win.

Meanwhile, he can afford to spend little time at all defending Democratic blue states except for one -- Pennsylvania -- where McCain is pushing hard to nab a win.

McCain and running mate Sarah Palin held a rally in Hershey, Pa., on Tuesday before going their separate ways -- McCain to North Carolina, another contested state, while Palin stays in Pennsylvania. The event they scuttled in Quakertown was to be held at a baseball stadium.

Obama's rally was in the strategic Philadelphia suburb of Chester.

The small city is in Delaware County, a pivotal swing area of the state. Neighborhoods here range from economically depressed to working class to ritzy. Republicans hold an edge over Democrats in voter registration, and both campaigns are surging to get out the vote. Chester itself is predominantly black, but the broader county has a mostly white population.

The event was a cross-state bookend to Obama's appearance Monday in Pittsburgh, where he pledged to cut taxes for the middle class and help factory workers as much as company owners.

Obama was then heading to Virginia, which is offering up intense political interest this year. Obama is vying to become the first Democrat for president to win the state in 44 years.

The Illinois senator was staging a rally at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, an area which has posted one of Virginia's largest gains in voter registration this year.

At night, Obama will campaign in Norfolk, Va., a major military community. This will be Obama's ninth trip to Virginia since he clinched the Democratic Party's nomination in June.

McCain and Palin are campaigning aggressively in Virginia, too. The transformation of the Washington-savvy northern Virginia region, coupled with distaste for an unpopular president, no longer makes the commonwealth reflexively Republican.

------

On the Net:

McCain: http://www.johnmccain.com

Obama: http://www.barackobama.com

    Obama Gets a Different Kind of Chilly Reception, NYT, 28.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Obama.html

New to Campaigning, but No Longer a Novice

October 28, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY

AKRON, Ohio — On a visit to her husband’s campaign office here the other day, Michelle Obama was handed a phone and a script of talking points and made calls to a few undecided voters. Mrs. Obama mixed policy on taxes and health care with chitchat about Ohio, laughter about her life in politics and tidbits about her family.

After a couple of calls, she realized that she had not been following the typewritten notes. “I didn’t look at the script,” she said, speaking more to herself than to the volunteers on the phones next to her.

But no matter. While some of Senator Barack Obama’s advisers once viewed Mrs. Obama as an unpredictable force who sometimes spoke her mind a little too much, she is now regarded within the campaign as a disciplined and effective advocate for her husband. She has also, advisers believe, gone a long way toward addressing her greatest unstated challenge: making more voters comfortable with the idea of a black first lady.

Mrs. Obama and her aides have carefully chosen her appearances on the national stage this fall, mostly selecting high-profile venues that are politically safe. Joking Monday night with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show,” she told of her older daughter’s ordering Mr. Obama not to “mess with my TV” regarding his 30-minute commercial on Wednesday night, which will pre-empt some shows. She also expressed some sympathy for Gov. Sarah Palin over the recent wardrobe controversy, while noting that the Obamas bought their own clothes.

By the standards of a national political campaign, Mrs. Obama does maintain a somewhat limited schedule. (She has stumped outside Chicago on 20 of the 57 days since Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall election season.) Most of the time she is at home taking care of the couple’s 10- and 7-year-old daughters, a choice that advisers hope will pay dividends among women of all races who can relate to her priorities.

But when she is at political events — occasionally with Mr. Obama, though much more often on her own — she is drawing large crowds, speaking with new confidence and generally avoiding gaffes as she confronts one of the trickiest tasks in the campaign. Many voters view first families as symbols of the nation, and Mrs. Obama is selling a package that for large numbers of Americans poses a real change.

Addressing a raucous rally in a gym here on Friday, Mrs. Obama had the crowd — a mix of a few thousand black and white voters — laughing and cheering throughout.

“So many precious little babies like that one!” she said after noticing one infant near the stage. “Just completely delicious!”

The audience roared with delight. And many clapped, too, when she said: “I also come here as a mother; that is my primary title, mom in chief. My girls are the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I think about when I go to bed. When people ask me how I’m doing, I say, ‘I’m only as good as my most sad child.’ ”

In one sign of the campaign’s confidence in her, Mrs. Obama is being deployed where it matters most. Since Labor Day, she has spent three days campaigning in Florida and two days each in Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as days in other swing states (sometimes two in a day).

She usually holds rallies (her biggest was with 11,000 people in Gainesville, Fla., last week) or small round tables on the needs of working women and military families, the two groups she speaks about the most. On Saturday, she delivered the Democratic Party’s weekly radio address, urging her husband’s supporters to turn out on Election Day.

As first lady, Obama advisers say, Mrs. Obama would focus first on her family and then on the issues facing women and military spouses as those groups deal with the economic crisis and the return of troops from Iraq. She also plans to take up national service as an issue, aides say. She will not have a major policy role, they say, and does not plan to have an office in the West Wing.

Advisers to the spouses of past Democratic nominees — Teresa Heinz Kerry in 2004, Tipper Gore in 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1992 — say they spent more time campaigning in the fall than has Mrs. Obama. All their children were older, however, and Mrs. Kerry and Mrs. Clinton were often sent to secondary media markets, because they were unpopular with some undecided voters and independents.

Chris Lehane, an adviser and spokesman for the Gore campaign, said Mrs. Gore traveled constantly in the fall of 2000, and he described a somewhat larger traveling retinue than Mrs. Obama has. (She is accompanied by a handful of aides and a Secret Service contingent, but there is no press corps on her plane.)

Echoing private comments of some Obama advisers, Mr. Lehane said he believed that the Obama campaign had been unsure at first about Mrs. Obama’s potential appeal, in part because of some early missteps and in part because of the novelty of a black woman’s auditioning for the role of first lady.

“My sense,” Mr. Lehane said, “is that the campaign was initially apprehensive, because they recognized that she was going to be treated unfairly and held to a hard-to-meet standard.”

Indeed, for months Mrs. Obama was a political target. A Fox News anchor referred to an affectionate fist bump between the Obamas as a “terrorist fist jab.” Republicans, including Cindy McCain, criticized her for saying in February that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” (They omitted the words that followed: “And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”) A blogger supporting Senator Clinton spread an unfounded rumor that Mrs. Obama had once used the word “whitey.”

The Obamas’ need to deal with race as a factor in the campaign came to the fore this spring as Mr. Obama confronted incendiary remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who had married the couple and baptized their children. As the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, Mr. Obama has often drawn on his biracial experience to help bridge racial divides. Mrs. Obama does not have that background to draw on, making her political challenge that much more complex.

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said in an interview that Mrs. Obama, not being a politician, had gone through a period of “getting comfortable” with campaigning. She learned a great deal on her own, Mr. Axelrod said, noting that aides had not had to tell her to avoid fist bumps or remarks like “proud of my country” in the future.

“I didn’t think she needed to be told,” he said. “She is very, very smart and sensitive, and I think she learned from experience that in this business, you have to be very precise with your words so people don’t misinterpret them. That’s part of the learning experience. There’s no question that she’s learned.”

Still, the Obama campaign has limited interviews that would entail tough questions from national newspapers and cable news programs. “There is not one vote she will get from doing Wolf Blitzer,” an aide said.

Instead, she has appeared several times on the morning network programs and on entertainment shows like “The View,” “Ellen,” “The Daily Show,” “Rachael Ray” and, twice each, “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight.”

If Mrs. Obama is not as blunt as she once was (in describing some of her husband’s habits, for instance), she is by no means hiding her personality, either. On “The Tonight Show,” she noted that she and her husband still sparred privately like the lawyers they are, and added: “You want to know how Barack prepares for a debate? He hangs out with me, and he’s ready.”

At the Akron rally, she drew appreciative laughter from many in the audience when, her voice at once growing hushed and yet rising in pitch, she referred to her husband as “baby” while sharing an anecdote.

“My assumption,” she said, “is that Barack Obama is going to be the underdog until he is sitting in the Oval Office. At the start of this, I said to him, ‘Look, baby, you can do a lot of things.’ He believes he can do a whole lot. If he works hard, he can change the world.”

But, she added, if he is to win, he needs for his supporters to be sure to vote. The audience erupted in applause.

    New to Campaigning, but No Longer a Novice, NYT, 28.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/us/politics/28michelle.html?hp

Alleged Plot to Kill Obama Stuns Tenn. Town

October 28, 2008
Filed at 11:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BELLS, Tenn. (AP) -- In a rural Tennessee county where you can't buy alcohol or even find a Wal-Mart, residents of tiny Bells stopped each other to ask if anyone knew the pale-skinned young local accused of plotting to kill dozens of black people, including Barack Obama.

It was a jolt to find out on Monday that a 20-year-old who grew up among them was one of two white supremacists accused of plotting a national killing spree that would ultimately target Obama, the Democratic candidate for president.

The town surrounded by fertile cotton fields is safe and certainly not known for breeding neo-Nazis, they agreed.

''If we had any skinheads in this county I wasn't aware of it. We hardly know what they are,'' said Sam Lewis, who lives across the street from the mother of suspect Daniel Cowart. Cowart, he said, grew up in the comfortable, well-maintained neighborhood and wasn't known as a troublemaker.

''His mother is a real sweet, nice girl, and this comes as a shock and a surprise,'' Lewis said.

Cowart is charged along with Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., with planning a killing spree to shoot and decapitate black people and top it all off by attacking Obama. The charges were made public Monday, and the Obama campaign has not commented about the alleged plot.

Cowart and Schlesselman are charged by federal authorities with possessing an unregistered firearm, conspiring to steal firearms from a federally licensed gun dealer and threatening a candidate for president. They were being held without bond.

Authorities describe the two as neo-Nazi skinheads, and an affidavit from a federal agent says they devised a plot to kill 88 people -- beheading 14 of them.

The numbers 14 and 88 are symbols in skinhead culture, authorities said, referring to a 14-word phrase attributed to an imprisoned white supremacist: ''We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children'' and to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H. Two ''8''s or ''H''s stand for ''Heil Hitler.''

The two were taken into custody the night of Oct. 22, said Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives Agent Brian Weeks. Authorities pulled them over because they had shot out the window of a church and used sidewalk chalk to draw racially motivated words, the numbers 14 and 88 and a swastika on Cowart's car, he said.

The killing spree was initially to target a predominantly black school, which was not identified in court documents. It was to end, authorities said, with the two suspects -- dressed in white tuxedos and top hats -- blasting guns from the windows of a speeding vehicle aimed at Obama.

The reported threat of attacking a school filled with black students worried Police Chief Fred Fielder. Helena-West Helena, with a population of 12,200, is 66 percent black. ''Predominantly black school, take your pick,'' he said.

The young men said they expected to die in the attack, the affidavit said.

In Helena-West Helena, on the Mississippi River in east Arkansas' Delta, Schlesselman was described as a ''troubled child'' by a woman who works with his adoptive father, Mark Schlesselman.

The father works as a parts manager at Riddell Flying Service, said Marty Riddell, a co-owner of the company located in one of the nation's poorest regions, trailing even parts of Appalachia in its standard of living.

Riddell said she tried to offer Paul Schlesselman a pet lizard she couldn't care for, but was warned by his family that ''he would hurt it.''

''They might have done that man a favor picking that kid up,'' Riddell said. ''He was a troubled child already.''

Schlesselman's father did not return a phone call to the flying service.

On the other hand, a former high school classmate of Cowart's in Bells said he was quiet but friendly. But it took Lacy Doss a minute to recognize the young man in the news photo brandishing a large rifle.

''I was shocked to think I was sitting in class with this guy and now he's being charged with some crazy stuff,'' said Doss, 18. ''He was a nice person, to me anyway. He was quiet. He really didn't talk much.''

Joe Byrd, a lawyer representing Cowart, said he was reviewing the charges against his client ''as well as the facts and circumstances of his arrest'' and was not yet prepared to comment.

No one answered the door at Cowart's mother's house, and no lights were on inside.

Matt Hawkins, 21, the clerk at a filling station-convenience store in the center of the town of 2,300 residents about 70 miles northeast of Memphis, said customers asked each other about Cowart, looking for people who might know him.

''One friend of mine said he knew who he is, but that's about it,'' Hawkins said. ''We're a small town. Nothing much goes on around here, no shootings or nothing.''

City Attorney Jasper Taylor said Cowart most recently lived with his grandparents in a southern, rural part of the county. He moved away, possibly to Arkansas or Texas, then returned over the summer, Taylor said.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville, Tenn., field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, said authorities took the threats seriously.

''Even if they were just to try it, it would be a trail of tears around the South,'' Cavanaugh said.

At this point, there does not appear to be any formal assassination plan, Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said.

''Whether or not they had the capability or the wherewithal to carry out an attack remains to be seen,'' he said.

------

Associated Press writers Erik Schelzig in Nashville, Tenn., Jon Gambrell in Little Rock, Ark., and Eileen Sullivan and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.

    Alleged Plot to Kill Obama Stuns Tenn. Town, NYT, 28.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Skinhead-Plot.html

Editorial

The Candidates’ Health Plans

October 28, 2008
The New York Times
 

The nation’s health care system is desperately in need of reform — as far too many Americans know from grim, personal experience. In this election, Barack Obama and John McCain are offering starkly different ideas for how to fix that system.

There is no shortage of problems:

¶ Some 45 million Americans lack health insurance, limiting their ability to get timely care.

¶ The costs of medical care and health insurance are rising much faster than household incomes, making it increasingly difficult for people to afford either.

¶ People can’t carry their insurance from one job to another, limiting their mobility. Outside the workplace, it is hard to find affordable insurance.

¶ Despite the wealth and technological prowess of this country, the quality of medical care often lags behind that available in other industrialized nations.

Both candidates have largely accepted the prevailing expert wisdom on ways to improve quality and lower health care costs over the long run, such as relying more on electronic medical records and better management of the chronically ill. But they have very different ideas on the best way to make insurance available and affordable for all Americans.

We believe that Mr. McCain’s plan, which relies on reshaping the tax code, is far too risky. It is likely to erode employer-provided group health insurance and push more people into purchasing their own insurance on the dysfunctional open market, where insurers often reject applicants with pre-existing conditions.

Mr. Obama has focused primarily on extending coverage to a big chunk of the 45 million uninsured Americans by expanding existing private and public programs with the help of federal subsidies and mandates. His boldest innovation would be a new federally regulated exchange where Americans not covered at work would be able to choose — as federal employees currently can — among a variety of private group policies. He would also create a new public program to compete with the private insurers.

Mr. Obama’s plan is a better start than Mr. McCain’s. But it is still not likely to help all Americans who need and deserve affordable, high-quality medical care.

As voters weigh their choice for next Tuesday’s election, we offer this detailed review of the two candidates’ plans.

THE MCCAIN PROPOSAL Mr. McCain’s main idea is to change the tax code so that workers would have to pay income taxes on the value of their employer’s contribution to their health insurance. In return, all Americans, whether currently insured or not, would receive a tax credit of $2,500 for an individual or $5,000 for a family to buy health insurance, either through their employer or on the open market.

Mr. Obama has derided this plan as giving tax credits with one hand and taking them away with the other. But the tax credits are initially so generous that a great majority of workers would end up ahead: their tax credit would exceed the tax they would have to pay on their employer-provided insurance.

They could stay in the same health plan at work and have extra money that could be applied to other health care costs. Or they could buy policies in the open market. As good as that sounds, a $5,000 credit would not go very far toward buying a typical $12,000 family policy but might well suffice for the young and healthy, who get preferable rates.

Mr. McCain correctly recognizes that there are disadvantages to linking insurance to jobs — as thousands of laid-off American workers already are discovering — and that there is an intrinsic inequity in the current tax code that favors those who have employer plans over those buying individual coverage.

The great danger is that Mr. McCain’s plan will fragment the sharing of risks and costs — the bedrock of any good insurance plan — by enticing young, healthy workers to bail out of their employers’ group policies to seek cheaper insurance on their own. Their older or less healthy colleagues would be left behind, which would drive up premiums at work. The rising costs could lead many companies to drop their health coverage entirely.

The proposal also offers little protection for older and sicker people forced to buy policies in the open market. Mr. McCain says the federal government would help underwrite high-risk pools like those operated by many states to cover such patients. But the subsidies his aides have talked about — some $7 billion to $10 billion a year — would fall far short of the amount needed.

Mr. McCain would loosen state regulations on insurers by allowing companies to sell across state lines. Some states require insurers to accept all applicants and provide specified standard benefits, and they limit the ability of companies to base premiums on health status. In the name of promoting competition, Mr. McCain’s plan would free companies from those terms. Anyone who lost insurance as a result would have to seek coverage through the high-risk pools.

THE OBAMA PLAN Mr. Obama would do far more than his opponent to address the nation’s shameful failure to provide health coverage for all citizens. He would require all parents to get coverage for their children and expand Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. He would also require large and midsize companies to offer health insurance to their workers or pay into a kitty to subsidize coverage elsewhere — a provision that Senator McCain castigates as a “fine” but that really is their fair share of the burden.

Mr. Obama says the government would provide subsidies to encourage small employers to offer coverage and to help low-income people buy insurance. This is not a government-run program — as Mr. McCain claims — but it does give the government a much bigger role than it now has by expanding public programs and creating a new national plan.

Mr. Obama would also greatly increase government regulation of the insurance industry. He would require insurance companies to take every applicant and meet a minimum standard of benefits, and he would prevent them from charging higher premiums based on an applicant’s health. Some states have similar requirements now and insurance companies still sell policies there.

COVERAGE Some experts estimate that the McCain plan would reduce the number of uninsured only modestly because millions of people would drop or lose employer coverage, and not many more than that would buy policies outside of work. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that the McCain plan would lower the number of uninsured by a mere two million in 2018, out of a projected 67 million uninsured in that year. The Obama plan would cut the number by 34 million, the center says, but still leave nearly 33 million uninsured.

The McCain campaign makes an optimistic prediction that up to 30 million of the uninsured might take out policies using their tax credits. If so, those policies would probably be meager — with high deductibles, large co-payments and limited benefits — and unlikely to provide much help in a crisis.

COSTS Despite all the Republican warnings about high-spending Democrats, McCain’s plan could be a lot more expensive than Mr. Obama’s, at least in the early years, and possibly in the long term. This is because the generous tax credits would drain federal revenues faster than the tax on employer policies would replenish them.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that the McCain plan would cost the federal government $1.3 trillion over 10 years, and the Obama plan $1.6 trillion. Using different assumptions, the Lewin Group, a consulting firm, estimates that the McCain plan would increase federal spending by $2.05 trillion over 10 years, compared with $1.17 trillion for the Obama package.

Neither candidate has persuasively explained how he would pay for his plan. Mr. Obama says he would apply the money saved by rescinding Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy and hoped-for savings from reforming the health care system, but there is considerable doubt those savings will materialize quickly.

Mr. McCain also counts on cost-containment measures but is mostly relying on market forces to reduce the cost of health insurance and health care. He expects that people who buy their own coverage will shop for cheaper policies and make more careful choices about what medical care they really need. Among the dangers is that chronically ill people may forgo needed treatments.

Mr. Obama’s plan is the better one because it would cover far more of the uninsured, spread risks and costs more equitably and result in more comprehensive coverage for most Americans. We fear Mr. McCain’s plan would jeopardize employer-based coverage without providing an adequate substitute. At a time when so many employers are reducing or dropping coverage, that is not a risk that the country can afford to take.

    The Candidates’ Health Plans, NYT, 28.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/opinion/28tue1.html

Today on the Presidential Campaign Trail

October 28, 2008
Filed at 12:30 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

IN THE HEADLINES

Obama gets his normal cheering crowd at cold, outdoor rally ... With polls showing Pa. slipping away, McCain says 'it's wonderful to fool the pundits' ... McCain says Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens 'broke his trust' with citizens and should resign ... With visits and money, Obama narrows race in Montana while McCain stays away

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Obama gets a different kind of chilly reception

CHESTER, Pa. (AP) -- Democrat Barack Obama carried on Tuesday with an outdoor rally at Widener University, outside Philadelphia, despite a cold, steady rain that made the temperature feel freezing.

About 9,000 people came out to hear the presidential contender. They stood in mud.

''I just want all of you to know that if we see this kind of dedication on Election Day, there is no way that we're not going to bring change to America,'' Obama told the shivering crowd.

The weather was so miserable that Obama's rival, Republican John McCain, canceled a rally 50 miles north in Quakertown -- hardly insignificant, given the dwindling campaign time.

Gone were Obama's suit and tie. He wore jeans, sneakers and a waterproof raincoat. Still, shunning an umbrella, he got soaked. Obama later changed clothes before resuming his events.

McCain and Obama converged on Pennsylvania, a vote-rich state where Obama leads but McCain remains hopeful of a turnaround. Later, Obama was heading to Virginia, a longtime Republican state where he leads in polls.

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McCain says pundits being fooled, promises victory

HERSHEY, Pa. (AP) -- Republican John McCain on Tuesday vowed to pull in upset in Pennsylvania, as polls show him trailing the Democratic presidential ticket in this key battleground state.

''It's wonderful to fool the pundits because we're going to win the state of Pennsylvania,'' McCain said as he campaigned with running mate Sarah Palin. The state has 21 electoral votes up for grabs.

''I'm not afraid of the fight. I'm ready for it,'' McCain told supporters at a noisy morning rally.

Palin defended the campaign's harsh attacks on Obama.

''Our opponent is not being candid with you about his tax plans,'' said Palin. ''It is not mean-spirited and it is not negative campaigning to call out someone on their record.''

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McCain says convicted Alaska senator should resign

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republican John McCain called Tuesday for Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens to resign in the aftermath of his felony convictions in a federal corruption case, saying the longtime Republican ''has broken his trust with the people.''

McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has not called for Stevens to quit. On Monday, following the guilty verdicts, Palin said, ''I'm confident Sen. Stevens will do what's right for the people of Alaska.''

A jury on Monday found Stevens, 84, guilty on seven counts of trying to hide more than $250,000 in free home renovations and other gifts from a wealthy oil contractor. He asked his Senate colleagues as well as Alaska's voters to stand by him as he appeals the convictions.

In a statement issued by his campaign, McCain said the convictions were ''a sign of the health of our democracy that the people continue to hold their representatives to account for improper or illegal conduct, but this verdict is also a sign of the corruption and insider-dealing that has become so pervasive in our nation's capital.''

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With visits and money, Obama narrows race in Mont.

HELENA, Mont. (AP) -- Republican John McCain has history on his side in Montana. Democrat Barack Obama has 19 campaign offices.

Montana is typically safe territory for Republican presidential candidates. President Bush won the state by about 20 points in both 2000 and 2004, and only two Democrats -- Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Bill Clinton in 1992 -- have carried the state since 1948.

But Obama staked out Montana early as a potential battleground state and he's sticking with it to the end. McCain, confident of winning the state's three electoral votes, is virtually ignoring it, although the Republican National Committee will begin airing ads in Montana for the first time Wednesday.

Obama's campaign didn't back off when the state appeared to be a shoo-in for McCain in September. And now McCain's lead appears to be in doubt. A recent Montana State University-Billings poll showed the race within the margin of error, with Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 40 percent among likely voters, and 10 percent undecided.

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THE DEMOCRATS

Barack Obama attended a rally in Chester, Pa., before heading to the Virginia towns of Harrisonburg and Norfolk.

Joe Biden campaigns in the Florida towns of Ocala and Melbourne.

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THE REPUBLICANS

John McCain and Sarah Palin held a rally together in Hershey, Pa. A joint rally in Quakertown, Pa., was canceled because of weather. McCain then holds an event in Fayetteville, N.C.

Palin also talks to voters in the Pennsylvania towns of Shippensburg and State College.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY:

''When we get a protest like that, I'm always tempted to tell security let them stay, maybe they'll learn a thing or two.'' -- Sarah Palin, after the Republicans' rally was interrupted briefly by Democrat Barack Obama backers waving signs.

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STAT OF THE DAY:

According to the Census Bureau, 24 percent of voters in 2004 said they registered to vote at a county or government registration office -- the most common method of registering.

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Compiled by Ann Sanner.

    Today on the Presidential Campaign Trail, NYT, 28.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-2008-Race-Rundown.html

Businesses Wary of Details in Obama Health Plan

October 27, 2008
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK

AGAWAM, Mass. — Dave Ratner, owner of Dave’s Soda and Pet City, is pretty sure he is about to get “whacked” by the new state law that requires employers to contribute to health care benefits for their workers or pay a $295-per-employee penalty. In order to avoid thousands of dollars in fines, Mr. Ratner is considering not adding part-time workers at his four pet supply stores in Western Massachusetts.

But the penalty in Massachusetts is picayune compared with what some health experts believe Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, might impose as part of his plan to provide affordable coverage for the uninsured. Though Mr. Obama has not released details, economists believe he might require large and medium companies to contribute as much as 6 percent of their payrolls.

That, Mr. Ratner said, would be catastrophic to a low-margin business like his, which has 90 employees, 29 of them full-time workers who are offered health benefits.

“To all of a sudden whack 6 to 7 percent of payroll costs, forget it,” he said. “If they do that, prices go up and employment goes down because nobody can absorb that.”

Writ large, that is one of the significant concerns about Mr. Obama’s health plan, which like this state’s landmark 2006 law would subsidize coverage for the uninsured by taxing employers who do not cover their workers. And it is a primary reason that so-called play-or-pay proposals have had an unsteady history for nearly two decades.

With Mr. Obama’s plan, business leaders say, the devil will be in the unknown details.

Mr. Obama would prohibit insurers from rejecting applicants because of medical conditions, require health insurance for children and create a new federal health plan to provide comprehensive coverage to the uninsured. Those beneath certain income levels would be granted tax credits to make premiums affordable, and small businesses would be offered tax credits to provide benefits.

The tax credits are projected to cost at least $110 billion. Mr. Obama has said he would pay for it primarily by raising income taxes on those making more than $250,000 and by reducing health spending. But when he announced the plan in May 2007, he emphasized that employers would share in the cost.

“We will ask all but the smallest businesses who don’t make a meaningful contribution today to the health coverage of their employees to do so by supporting this new plan,” he said.

Left undefined has been what size firms would be exempted, what constitutes a “meaningful contribution,” and how much noncompliant businesses would be required to pay. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, badgered Mr. Obama in two of their debates to define the penalty, but Mr. Obama did not rise to the bait.

“We made a decision even before the plan was rolled out not to decide,” said David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who speaks for the campaign on health care. “It’s not that there’s a decision out there that we’re not telling. It’s literally that we’ve decided not to decide.”

That may be smart politics. But it makes business groups nervous that Mr. Obama might impose an unmanageable burden. They also worry that any time his health plan faces a shortfall, businesses will be asked to up their ante, as has happened in Massachusetts.

“Play-or-pay can become a blank check to an already overcapitalized health care system,” said Helen B. Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents 300 companies.

Business groups also have concerns that Mr. McCain’s plan to change the tax treatment of health benefits would erode employer-sponsored insurance.

Mr. Cutler said the Obama campaign regarded play-or-pay less “as a revenue raiser” than as a way of “leveling the playing field.” It would hold accountable those employers whose uninsured workers might seek treatment in emergency rooms or enroll in government insurance plans, with costs subsidized by others through higher premiums and taxes. Mr. Cutler said the expense to businesses would be offset by savings from Mr. Obama’s proposals to reduce health spending, though that is an uncertain prospect.

Several econometric models have assumed that Mr. Obama would have to set his penalty near 6 percent of payroll (Mercer, a benefits consulting firm says that large employers typically pay 15 percent). Recent play-or-pay proposals in California and Pennsylvania put the figure at 3 or 4 percent, and both failed in part because of business opposition.

Hawaii is the only state that requires employers to provide health benefits, while Vermont, like Massachusetts, gently fines those who do not. Several other states have enacted similar laws over the last two decades, but they have been repealed, rejected by voters or challenged in court.

Economists believe the cost of health benefits is ultimately shifted to employees through lower wages. When wages cannot be lowered, layoffs may result. Katherine Baicker of Harvard and Helen G. Levy of the University of Michigan have projected that play-or-pay might push 224,000 workers into that category.

When negotiating their health plan, Massachusetts lawmakers rejected a payroll tax and instead set a “fair share contribution” that was low enough to appease businesses. The amount also was kept low to steer clear of the 1974 federal law prohibiting states from regulating multistate group insurance plans. Companies with 10 or fewer full-time equivalent employees were exempted.

State officials hoped the penalty would generate a little revenue, but recognized it was not likely to prompt employers to start offering coverage. It raised only $7.7 million in its first year, well under projections. So when a substantial budget gap opened in the $869 million health plan this year, Gov. Deval Patrick asked businesses to help fill the hole.

He compromised on a revised formula that is projected to bring in $30 million by increasing the number and average size of firms that will be penalized. The state expects 1,100 businesses to be fined, up from 855, or about 3 percent of eligible companies.

The deal left business leaders satisfied for the moment. They recognize that the $295 penalty is a fraction of the $4,000 that Massachusetts employers spend to insure an individual worker.

But businesses worry the state will raise their obligation each year. They argue they have already absorbed costs of insuring 159,000 workers with group coverage since the state began mandating insurance (a total of 439,000 have enrolled, giving the state the country’s highest insurance rate).

“You want the system to work,” said Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts. “You just want to make sure there isn’t more cost-shifting to businesses because they are paying their fair share.”

State officials are gratified that — contrary to national trends — the share of employers offering health benefits has increased slightly. One fear about play-or-pay is that if the penalty is too low employers will stop offering coverage and pay the fines instead, shifting workers to government insurance programs.

But leaders here also are sensitive to the possibility that further increases in the penalty might stymie wage and job growth.

“In this day and age,” said Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, the state secretary of health and human services, “it wouldn’t take much of a change in policy to push some entities over the brink.”

    Businesses Wary of Details in Obama Health Plan, NYT, 27.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/us/politics/27healthcare.html

Obama Offering Closing Case to Voters in Ohio

October 27, 2008
Filed at 7:32 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- Looking ahead to closing his case against John McCain in Ohio, Barack Obama argues that voters there have a chance to reject ''politics that would divide a nation just to win an election.''

Fresh off rollicking rallies in Colorado, Obama faced a more sober reality on Monday in Ohio. Polls show a tight race in the state that sealed President Bush's 2004 re-election.

Obama is giving what his campaign calls the ''closing argument'' of his presidential bid in Ohio, where he already lost once this year, to fellow Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton.

''In one week, you can put an end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election; that tries to pit region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat; that asks us to fear at a time when we need hope,'' Obama said in prepared comments released in advance early Monday by his campaign.

The longest presidential contest in history is down to just eight days, with Obama and Republican McCain dueling for the electoral riches of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obama's struggles to connect with white working-class voters in Ohio helped fuel that defeat in the primaries. Economic concerns are even worse now with the country in a financial crisis, and perhaps headed for deep recession, with growing numbers of people out of work.

And as Ohio goes, often goes history. No Democratic contender for the presidency has won without Ohio's support in nearly 50 years -- since John F. Kennedy in 1960.

So it is a strategic choice that Obama will deliver his next speech in the industrial northeast Ohio city of Canton. His campaign touts it as his closing case, although there will presumably be other final arguments during the final, frenetic days of the campaign.

Obama is sticking to his theme of linking McCain to President Bush, the unpopular leader of his party.

''After twenty-one months and three debates, Senator McCain still has not been able to tell the American people a single major thing he'd do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy,'' Obama said.

McCain's campaign says that's false.

As one example, McCain has proposed using part of a $700 billion financial bailout package to buy up troubled mortgages, and then negotiate easier loan terms with the homeowners. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said both Bush and Obama have been ''recklessly opposed'' to that.

Obama is working to solidify his lead in national and key state surveys, while McCain is looking for a comeback in a year that has Republicans pushing against severe headwinds.

Unlike in other key states, Obama has struggled to sustain a big lead in Ohio despite pounding McCain with TV ads and building a strong get-out-the-vote operation.

Both he and McCain will be in both Ohio and neighboring Pennsylvania on Monday.

Ohio never really recovered from the post-Sept. 11 recession. Long a manufacturing bastion, Ohio has lost almost 250,000 factory jobs since 2000. The unemployment rate is at 7.2 percent, well above the national average of 6.1 percent.

Ohio has 20 electoral votes. It takes 270 to win the presidency.

Pennsylvania is the only state that Democrat John Kerry won four years ago that both candidates are expected to visit before Election Day. With 21 electoral votes, it hasn't voted for a Republican president since 1988, but McCain is working the state aggressively.

Public polls show Obama comfortably leading in Pennsylvania, though private Republican surveys show a closer race.

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Associated Press Writers Liz Sidoti and Andrew Welsh-Huggins contributed to this story.

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On the Net:

McCain: http://www.johnmccain.com

Obama: http://www.barackobama.com

    Obama Offering Closing Case to Voters in Ohio, NYT, 28.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Obama.html

End of Battle Centers on Turf Bush Carried

October 27, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are heading into the final week of the presidential campaign planning to spend nearly all their time in states that President Bush won last time, testimony to the increasingly dire position of Mr. McCain and his party as Election Day approaches.

With optimism brimming in Democratic circles, Mr. Obama will present on Monday what aides described as a summing-up speech for his campaign in Canton, Ohio, reprising the themes he first presented in February 2007, when he began his campaign for the presidency.

From here on out, Mr. Obama’s aides said, attacks on Mr. McCain will be joined by an emphasis on broader and less partisan themes, like the need to unify the country after a difficult election.

Mr. McCain has settled on Pennsylvania as the one state that Democrats won in 2004 where he has a decent chance of winning, a view not shared by Mr. Obama’s advisers.

But Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, are planning to spend most of their time in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana, all states that Republicans had entered the campaign thinking they could bank on.

Mr. McCain will stick with the message he has embraced over the last week, presenting Mr. Obama as an advocate of big government and raising taxes. His advisers say they will limit the numbers of rallies where he and Ms. Palin appear together, to cover more ground in the final days.

While some Republicans said they still had hope that Mr. McCain could pull this out, there were signs of growing concern that Mr. McCain and the party were heading for a big defeat that could leave the party weakened for years.

“Any serious Republican has to ask, ‘How did we get into this mess?’ ” Newt Gingrich, the former Republican house speaker, said in an interview. “It’s not where we should be, and it’s not where we had to be. This was not bad luck.”

As Mr. Obama uses his money and political organization to try expand the political map, Mr. McCain is being forced to shore up support in states like Indiana and North Carolina that have not been contested for decades. His decision to campaign on Sunday in Iowa, a day after Ms. Palin campaigned there, was questioned even by Republicans who noted polls that showed Mr. Obama pulling away there. But it reflected how few options the campaign really has, as poll after poll suggests that Mr. Obama is solidifying his position.

Mr. McCain has found relatively small crowds — particularly compared with those that are turning out for Mr. Obama — even as he has campaigned in battleground states.

His campaign has become embroiled by infighting, with signs of tension between Mr. McCain’s advisers and Ms. Palin’s staff, and subject to unusual public criticism from other Republicans for how his advisers have handled this race.

Republicans and Democrats said there were signs that two states that had once appeared overwhelmingly Republican, Georgia and South Carolina, were tightening, in part, because of surge of early-voting by African-Americans. An Obama win in the states seemed unlikely — and no plans were immediately on his itinerary to travel to them — but it is a sign of how volatile a year this is that more states would seem to be coming into play, rather than being settled, as the election approaches.

Mr. McCain’s aides said they remained confident that they could win. They said their candidate did not plan to introduce any kind of formal closing speech, the way Mr. Obama is doing, but would instead hammer home the issues of taxes and spending they said appeared to be giving them some steam.

“We feel good that when people hear the message about spreading the wealth versus raising taxes , they respond,” said Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain adviser. “It’s just a matter of whether, given Obama’s saturation paid advertising, we can get the message out there.”

The contours of these final days suggest a culmination of a strategy that Mr. Obama’s advisers put in place at the beginning: to use his huge fund-raising edge to try to put as many states in play as possible and overwhelm Mr. McCain in the final days of the race.

“It’s now a big map, so you have to be in a lot of states over the last eight days,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager.

As of right now, Pennsylvania is the only Democratic-leaning state Mr. Obama is planning to visit, and that is only in response to what Mr. Obama’s advisers argued was Mr. McCain’s misplaced faith that he could win there. More strikingly, Mr. Obama also is making a vigorous push in Florida, after a campaign stop there last week convinced his advisers that he has a real shot of winning there.

Mr. Obama is to spend at least part of two days in the state, including a late-night rally with former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday in Orlando timed to make the 11 p.m. news.

Mr. Obama’s aides said that his closing speech, written with his top speechwriter, Jon Favreau, would return to the theme that he offered when he announced his candidacy, calling for change. Mr. Obama’s advisers said that after a long and often acerbic campaign, they believed voters were hungering for that kind of positive appeal to close out the race.

That said, they made clear that while attacks on Mr. McCain might diminish, they would not by any means disappear. “We’re in a good place right now, but nine days is a long time, so we’re just going step upon the gas,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist. “It’s time to sum up the case in broader terms.”

The closing argument will be amplified by Mr. Obama in a 30-minute prime time infomercial presented across the major television networks on Wednesday in a rare and expensive move by a presidential candidate.

His aides said they were going to great lengths to make certain that no one becomes lulled by polls showing Mr. Obama in a strong position. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Mr. Obama’s running mate, has forbidden any discussion of the election result or what happens after Election Day, said David Wade, his press secretary.

“This is someone who won his first Senate race by 3,162 votes, and he hasn’t hesitated to remind his traveling staff that he expects this race to be no different,” Mr. Wade said.

Mr. Obama began boiling down his pitch to voters on Sunday, raising a question to supporters in Denver: “Don’t you think it’s time that we want to try something new?”

At Civic Center Park, tens of thousands of people spilled from an outdoor plaza outside the golden-tipped Capitol as Mr. Obama returned to the city where he accepted the Democratic nomination two months ago.

“Just this morning, Senator McCain said that he and President Bush share a common philosophy,” Mr. Obama said. “I guess that was John McCain finally giving us a little straight talk, and owning up to the fact that he and George Bush actually have a whole lot in common.”

The tensions between the McCain and Palin camps have been played out mainly in anonymous attacks from both sides over how Ms. Palin was first presented as a candidate and, most recently, over the dispute that arose following the disclosure that the Republican National Committee had spent $150,000 on clothing and accessories for Mrs. Palin and her family.

A McCain adviser came to the back of Mr. McCain’s plane on Sunday to say, only on the condition of anonymity, that those reports were overblown.

Mr. Obama opens the last eight days of the race with an incursion into several Republican-leaning regions of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina. With his Democratic supporters already highly motivated, aides said, Mr. Obama is purposefully focusing on voters who may need to take one final measure of him.

As he opens the week with a stop in Canton on Monday, Mr. Obama is working to offset Mr. McCain’s margins in conservative stretches of both states. He also is taking what could be a final trip to Pennsylvania, staging a stop in Pittsburgh and to the Philadelphia suburbs to counter an intense push by Ms. Palin in the state this week.

Mr. McCain is in Ohio on Monday, before heading to Pennsylvania.

Reporting was contributed by John M. Broder in Washington, Julie Bosman in Kissimmee, Fla., Michael Cooper in New York, and Larry Rohter from Iowa.

    End of Battle Centers on Turf Bush Carried, NYT, 27.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/us/politics/27campaign.html?hp

Voter 'anger' has Dems set for big gains in Congress

26 October 2008
USA Today
By John Fritze

WASHINGTON — Out of money and down by double digits in the polls a month ago, Georgia Democrat Jim Martin's campaign for U.S. Senate was all but dead. Now, those polls show, it's dead even.

The race for the Georgia Senate seat should have been as comforting as peach cobbler for Republicans, but this month the non-partisan Cook Political Report changed its outlook for Sen. Saxby Chambliss' re-election from a safe bet to a tossup.

"The mood across the country is not particularly good right now," says Chambliss, a first-term senator who adds that he suspected the early lead wouldn't stick. "We knew it was going to be very close."

An unpopular president, fundraising doldrums and the burden of defending 27 more open seats than the Democrats are factors forcing GOP leaders to play defense in congressional races across the USA, as the Democrats angle for even wider majorities. Open seats do not have an incumbent.

Democrats have a 38-seat advantage in Congress now and, despite their own low approval ratings, the party could add as many as 28 seats in the House and seven to nine in the Senate, according to Cook.

As late as September, many Republicans thought the energy created by vice presidential pick Sarah Palin and the party's populist response of drilling to reduce gas prices could stem the losses.

But that was before the economic meltdown sent financial markets — and GOP poll numbers — tumbling as Americans linked the downturn to the Bush White House.

Even once-safe Republican seats — such as in North Carolina where Sen. Elizabeth Dole faces Democrat Kay Hagan — have become the focus of tight races.

In Minnesota, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman is in a contentious contest with Democrat Al Franken, the writer and comedian. Others, such as Chambliss and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., still have leads, but narrow ones.

Democrats seized control of Congress in 2006, picking up 36 seats. Usually when a party wins big one year it has to defend the gains in the next election, notes Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

This year, however, polls indicate Democrats are en route to bucking that trend.

"Republicans are still hung over from 2006, and they're about to get kicked in the gut again," says David Wasserman, who tracks House races for Cook.

"Voters are intent on taking out their anger on the party they perceive to have mishandled the economy."

Battling for open seats

Northern Virginia sent Republican Rep. Tom Davis to Congress for 14 years. This year, Davis is retiring, and his voters are flirting with a Democrat.

"The district is turning bluer by the hour," says Democratic candidate Gerry Connolly, who faces Republican Keith Fimian for Davis' seat. "The Republican label is a tough label this year."

The race, which Cook predicts is likely to go Connolly's way, illustrates a major problem Republicans face: a high number of hard-to-defend seats left open by retirements.

Republicans are leaving open five Senate seats; Democrats, one. In the House, 29 Republican seats are open, and Cook predicts 16 of those are in jeopardy of going Democratic.

Six Democratic seats are vacant in the House, but the GOP appears to have a shot at winning just one, in northern Alabama.

Defending an open seat is harder, in part because challengers lack the visibility and fundraising muscle that come with elected office. In 2006, 94% of House incumbents and 79% of senators won re-election, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Open seats also cost more to win.

First-time winners in open House races two years ago spent an average $700,000 more than successful incumbents, the center reports. This year, polls show Democrats ahead for open Republican Senate seats in Virginia, New Mexico and Colorado.

"People really do want change," says Democratic Rep. Mark Udall, who the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report forecasts to win the Colorado Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Wayne Allard.

Hoping to defy conventional wisdom, Republicans are pressing on. In Northern Virginia, Fimian says he believes his race against Connolly will be closer than predicted.

"The more people I get in front of, the better my chances," he says.

Republican Bob Schaffer, who is trailing Udall in Colorado's Senate race, says his polling shows 10% of voters are undecided. He expects many of those voters to break his way Election Day.

"People are making their minds up that the economy and pocketbook issues are the driving force behind their decision-making," says Schaffer, a former energy executive who describes himself as the low-tax candidate.

"If this race is about the economy, I'm going to win."

Like many Republican candidates, Schaffer acknowledges Democrats will pick up seats. But, he says, "we don't intend for it to be in Colorado."

For Democrats, the challenge is different.

They need to defend incumbents who won in Republican-leaning districts two years ago. Four freshmen House Democrats are in races Cook calls tossups.

Democrats boost spending

Democrat Larry Kissell, a North Carolina social studies teacher who has never held public office, came within 329 votes of Republican Rep. Robin Hayes in 2006.

This year, Kissell's party isn't taking any chances.

The Democratic Party's national fundraising arm is helping Kissell overcome his financial disadvantage by pumping $1.7 million into his campaign — one of the biggest infusions of party support in the nation.

"The money itself controls the volume knob on a lot of things," Kissell spokesman Thomas Thacker says.

Outside cash has paid for TV ads that link Hayes to President Bush.

"Robin Hayes must have his head in the clouds," the narrator of one ad says as a picture of Hayes floats in the sky. "He seems to think George Bush's economic policy is working."

The party that controls Congress typically has an advantage in fundraising. So far in this general election, Democratic candidates have spent 29% more than Republicans — a reversal from 2006, when Republicans outspent Democrats, according to the center's analysis.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has spent $52 million on "independent expenditures" to help its candidates, according to the congressional newspaper Roll Call.

By contrast, the National Republican Congressional Committee has spent $12 million.

"The fact the DCCC is bankrolling this race is very telling that Larry Kissell needs Washington to run this race for him," Hayes said in a statement.

"The effect is that the voters are being bombarded with negative attacks that come from Washington, D.C."

Democrats poured $1.5 million into central Arizona's 3rd District, where Democrat Bob Lord is running against seven-term Republican Rep. John Shadegg.

And in Ohio's 15th District, the Democratic Party has spent $1.5 million to back Mary Jo Kilroy, who is seeking an open seat.

"Democrats are more energized, organized and well-funded than the Republicans," says Nathan Gonzales, political editor at Rothenberg.

"Republicans either don't have the money to respond in some districts or can't respond at the same levels."

'Blame the Republicans'

As bad as the political climate was for Republicans during the summer, it got worse in September when the financial crisis forced the Bush administration to ask Congress for a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.

Incumbents in both parties said they received thousands of phone calls from constituents angry that the government would consider using taxpayer money to bail out private institutions. Many members in tight elections voted against the measure.

Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., supported the bill and came under fire from his Democratic opponent, Oregon House Speaker Jeff Merkley, who called it "incredibly fiscally irresponsible."

The two are locked in a tight race that Congressional Quarterly says has no clear favorite.

"It goes right to the heart of Gordon Smith's view that you let the big boys do what they want, this willingness to put your hands over your eyes," says Merkley, who aired a TV ad criticizing Smith over the bailout just before Congress approved it.

Smith's campaign manager, Brooks Kochvar, argues that Merkley's message is not resonating.

"Sen. Gordon Smith faced a decision to do something, though not perfect, to help Main Street, or to do nothing at all," Kochvar says. "Our opponent's message is to do nothing at all."

Anger over the economy is likely to hurt Republican incumbents no matter how they voted on the bailout, says David Rohde, a political science professor at Duke University.

That resentment explains the Democrats' momentum, he says.

"The negative perceptions of Bush and the Republican administration have spilled over to Republicans more generally in Congress," he says.

"Here, more than anywhere, people tend to blame the Republicans because they blame Wall Street."

Turnout may change the game

Another factor that could drive House and Senate races has nothing to do with the congressional candidates: turnout in the historic presidential race.

Nearly 590,000 new voters have registered in Georgia in the past year, for instance, and both Senate candidates there say they are watching the effect Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's candidacy may have on black voters, who tend to choose Democrats.

Most polls have given Republican presidential nominee John McCain a slight lead in Georgia, which could help Chambliss.

So far, however, African Americans are casting a disproportionately high number of early voting ballots. Black turnout for Obama also could affect congressional races in North Carolina and Mississippi.

"Our challenge is for those first-time voters who are coming out to say 'I want to vote for Barack Obama for president' is to make sure they stay in the booth long enough and vote for the congressional candidates," says Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., chairman of the DCCC.

Davis, a former chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee, says high voter registration does not necessarily translate into turnout on Election Day.

"But there is no question that there is going to be an enhanced African-American turnout in this," he says.

"They are unlikely to vote for Obama and come back in significant numbers for Republicans at the congressional level."

Martin, the Democratic Senate candidate in Georgia, says it is not just an increase in black voters that will shape the election.

"People are coming from all different sectors of our society to exercise their rights as citizens to vote," he says.

"They're demanding change, and they're participating in numbers that we've not seen in many, many years."

    Voter 'anger' has Dems set for big gains in Congress, UT, 26.10.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-10-26-congress_N.htm

McCain Stepping Up Assault on Obama Out West

October 25, 2008
Filed at 5:07 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- John McCain is stepping up his assault on Democratic rival Barack Obama and stumping energetically in the West, forced to defend his home turf from a stern Democratic challenge less than two weeks before the election.

McCain swept through Colorado and New Mexico, looking to reverse polls showing him trailing in states that have been reliably Republican in recent elections, with nine electoral votes at stake in Colorado and five in New Mexico. He was detouring briefly into Texas before heading to Iowa, in hopes of putting that state's seven electoral votes in play.

Seeking to energize his backers in key states, McCain headed back to the political basics of labeling Obama a tax-and-spend liberal ''more interested in controlling wealth than creating it'' and warning of giving Democrats unchecked powers in Washington.

His challenge was daunting in the campaign's closing days. With a big financial advantage, Obama is far outspending McCain on television advertising, and even as McCain stumped through Colorado he was cutting back on his paid media in that state. He sounded undeterred.

''This is going to be a tough state, but we're going to be up late and we're going to win here,'' said McCain. ''Let me give you some straight talk: We need to win Colorado on Nov. 4.''

It's unusual for presidential candidates to be defending neighboring states in the campaign's closing days, but McCain was doing so vigorously.

Along the way, McCain was moving to build more distance from an unpopular President Bush.

''We cannot spend the next four years as we have much of the last eight, hoping for our luck to change at home and abroad,'' McCain said. ''We have to act, we need a new direction and we have to fight for it.''

Heading to Iowa, McCain is looking to make up for some lost ground in a state campaign aides argue is closer than the public polling shows. Running mate Sarah Palin was set to swing through the state on Saturday, and McCain shows up Sunday to make an appearance on ''Meet the Press'' from Iowa, as well as hold a campaign rally. It's off to battleground Ohio after that, where polls show that state's 20 electoral votes up for grabs.

    McCain Stepping Up Assault on Obama Out West, NYT, 25.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-McCain.html

Building a White House Team Before the Election Is Decided

October 25, 2008
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — With the economy in tatters at home and two wars still raging abroad, Senator Barack Obama’s team is preparing for a fast start, should he win the election, to what could be the most challenging and volatile transition between presidents in 75 years.

Mr. Obama’s advisers are sifting résumés, compiling policy options and discussing where to hold his first news conference as president-elect. Democrats say Mr. Obama hopes to name key members of his White House, economic and security teams soon after the election. His transition chief has even drafted a sample Inaugural Address.

Presidential nominees typically start preparing for transitions before the election, but Mr. Obama’s plans appear more extensive than in the past and more advanced than those of Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent. Mr. McCain has also assigned confidants to prepare for a transition but instructed them to limit their activities as he tries to rescue his foundering campaign, Republicans said.

Already the capital is buzzing with discussion about who would fill top positions. Obama advisers mention Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, as a possible White House chief of staff, and Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary. To demonstrate bipartisanship, advisers said Mr. Obama might ask two members of President Bush’s cabinet to stay, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Mr. McCain might also want Mr. Gates to stay, according to Republicans close to the campaign, or he might reach beyond the party by tapping Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat turned independent, to head the Pentagon or the State Department. Republicans said possible Treasury secretaries include John A. Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Robert B. Zoellick, the president of the World Bank. And some see former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman as chief of staff.

No Time to Wait

Neither campaign would publicly discuss its transition planning for fear of appearing presumptuous with little more than a week to go before voters render their judgment. But as the nation braces to change leaders for the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, White House officials and independent analysts said it was especially imperative for both campaigns to be prepared because of the acute economic and national security threats confronting the country.

“The stakes are higher than ever,” said Joseph W. Hagin, who helped steer Mr. Bush’s transition eight years ago and then served as deputy White House chief of staff until last summer. “You don’t have a lot of time, especially today. There’s not much time for a shallow learning curve. It’s very steep.”

The handover from Mr. Bush to his successor was already shaping up as the first wartime transition in 40 years, and the White House has instituted new policies to smooth the process. The collapse of Wall Street only heightened the urgency, making this potentially the most tumultuous change of power since Franklin D. Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in the throes of the Great Depression in 1933.

Both campaigns have been forced to recalibrate their post-election thinking and consider how involved the president-elect should be in asserting leadership in the 77 days between the election and the Jan. 20 inauguration. In setting economic policy, Mr. Bush would presumably be willing to defer to some degree to Mr. McCain should he win; the Democratic Congress would presumably follow Mr. Obama’s lead.

Mr. Obama has already signaled support for a lame-duck Congressional package of public works spending, aid to cities and states and tax rebates for workers. Democrats close to his campaign anticipate that he would not wait for the inauguration to weigh in on economic policy in other ways as well.

“His inclination is very much going to be to try to help shape the direction of policy” with the Bush administration, rather than “just let them stew in it until Jan. 20,” said a senior adviser, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Still, if he does win, Mr. Obama has to be careful about going too far before he actually takes office, as he seemed to acknowledge the other day.

“We are going to have one president at a time until Jan. 20, when the new president is sworn in,” he said after meeting with advisers in Richmond, Va. “So, you know, there is always a transition period. I don’t want to get too much ahead of ourselves.”

And Mr. McCain has been quick to accuse Mr. Obama of overconfidence. “Senator Obama is measuring the drapes,” he said on the campaign trail the other day, as he often has.

Reflection of Campaigns

Interviews with dozens of Republicans and Democrats over the past two weeks suggest that the transition efforts mirror the campaigns — where Mr. Obama’s is methodical and highly regimented, Mr. McCain’s is more tightly held and seat of the pants.

Mr. Obama’s transition team is led by a former White House chief of staff, John D. Podesta, who has been preparing for the task at the research organization he runs, the Center for American Progress, since long before it was clear who would win his party’s nomination. Two longtime advisers to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the vice-presidential nominee — Edward Kaufman and Mark H. Gitenstein — are serving as his representatives to the team, although Mr. Biden is said to be so superstitious that he refuses to discuss the transition.

Mr. Podesta has been mapping out the transition so systematically that he has already written a draft Inaugural Address for Mr. Obama, which he published this summer in a book called “The Power of Progress.” The speech calls for rebuilding a “grand alliance” with the rest of the world, bringing troops home from Iraq, recommitting to the war in Afghanistan, cutting poverty in half in 10 years and reducing greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050.

The Obama team has four groups, which in turn are divided into roughly a dozen subgroups, according to Democrats informed about the effort. At first, they said, there were three main groups — for personnel, executive actions and legislative strategy — but the team recently added a fourth reflecting the imperatives of the economic crisis and known as lame duck.

As he sets about trying to build a team, Mr. Obama has several possibilities for White House chief of staff, most notably Mr. Daschle, his close adviser, although that could be complicated because Mr. Daschle’s wife is a lobbyist. Other possibilities mentioned by Democrats include Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, former Commerce Secretary William M. Daley and Mr. Obama’s Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse. Mr. Podesta, who held the job under President Bill Clinton, could also be recruited for another tour of duty.

Besides Mr. Gates, some Obama advisers favor keeping Dr. James B. Peake, the veterans affairs secretary. But Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has made clear to colleagues that he has no desire to stay on no matter who wins, and neither nominee is inclined to ask him, associates say. Instead, Obama advisers are weighing a short-term appointment of an elder statesman to get through the current crisis and help instill confidence in global markets. The names being mentioned include the former Federal Reserve chief Paul A. Volcker and former Treasury Secretaries Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers.

But one senior adviser said it would be important to send a message of change at a time of economic crisis. “You can expect a fresh face instead of a recycled face” at the Treasury, the adviser said. He said that would include the boyish-looking Mr. Geithner, 47, who worked at the Treasury under Mr. Clinton and his Republican predecessors and has generally gotten high marks for his role in shaping the government response to the current crisis.

To run his transition effort, Mr. McCain tapped Mr. Lehman, the former Navy secretary who served on the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. Two other advisers, William E. Timmons, a Washington lobbyist, and William Ball, another former Navy secretary, are assisting.

Like other 9/11 commissioners, Mr. Lehman has expressed strong concern over slow transitions that leave a new administration short-handed to deal with an early crisis. But Mr. McCain has been leery about being too forward-leaning. Many Republicans who would normally be consulted about plans and personnel said they had detected little preparation — perhaps, they said, out of a sense that it would only be an exercise in “going through the motions,” as one put it.

Many Republicans believe Mr. McCain would bring his top campaign staff with him to the White House, including Rick Davis, the campaign manager, whose history as a lobbyist has come up repeatedly during the election. Others who would most likely accompany Mr. McCain to the White House include Mark Salter, his adviser and alter ego; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, his economics adviser; and Randy Scheunemann, his national security adviser.

For the Treasury, some Republicans said McCain might turn to his primary rival, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, or even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. Mr. Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of state, is a possibility for either the State Department or the Treasury Department, Republicans said.

A Helping Hand

The Bush administration has extended more help to its would-be successors than any past White House, relying on an intelligence law Mr. Bush signed after the 2004 election authorizing the government to conduct pre-election background checks on transition officials designated by the campaigns.

For the first time, the president-elect’s advisers will be given interim security clearances and access to classified information the day after the election.

The White House also formed a 14-member transition council that met last week for the first time to coordinate everything from passing over domestic security duties to helping the new team find parking. Mr. Bush’s aides are preparing a series of briefings and a proposed schedule that they will offer the incoming team.

Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff, has made a seamless transition a priority, mindful of the rocky, recount-shortened period in 2000-1 and a slow confirmation process that left many national security officials still unconfirmed when Al Qaeda attacked eight months into the administration.

Several Republicans said Mr. Bolten was planning to recruit his predecessor, Andrew H. Card Jr., to help guide this year’s transition.

White House aides said their interest was strictly nonpartisan and noted that they would offer each campaign the exact same help.

“This is not about politics,” said Blake Gottesman, Mr. Bolten’s deputy. “It’s about good governance. Everything will be done with full parity.”

    Building a White House Team Before the Election Is Decided, NYT, 25.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25transition.html

Op-Ed Columnist

The Endorsement From Hell

October 26, 2008
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda’s apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated.

“The transcendent challenge of our time [is] the threat of radical Islamic terrorism,” Senator McCain said in a major foreign policy speech this year, adding, “Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House.”

That’s a widespread conservative belief. Mitt Romney compared the threat of militant Islam to that from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Some conservative groups even marked “Islamofascism Awareness Week” earlier this month.

Yet the endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

“From their perspective, a continuation of Bush policies is best for recruiting,” said Professor Nye, adding that Mr. McCain is far more likely to continue those policies.

An American president who keeps troops in Iraq indefinitely, fulminates about Islamic terrorism, inclines toward military solutions and antagonizes other nations is an excellent recruiting tool. In contrast, an African-American president with a Muslim grandfather and a penchant for building bridges rather than blowing them up would give Al Qaeda recruiters fits.

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of “Islamofascism” elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests. Perhaps the best example is one of the least-known failures in Bush administration foreign policy: Somalia.

Today, Somalia is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur or Congo. The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame. But Bush administration paranoia about Islamic radicals contributed to the disaster.

Somalia has been in chaos for many years, but in 2006 an umbrella movement called the Islamic Courts Union seemed close to uniting the country. The movement included both moderates and extremists, but it constituted the best hope for putting Somalia together again. Somalis were ecstatic at the prospect of having a functional government again.

Bush administration officials, however, were aghast at the rise of an Islamist movement that they feared would be uncooperative in the war on terror. So they gave Ethiopia, a longtime rival in the region, the green light to invade, and Somalia’s best hope for peace collapsed.

“A movement that looked as if it might end this long national nightmare was derailed, in part because of American and Ethiopian actions,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. As a result, Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism have surged, partly because Somalis blame Washington for the brutality of the Ethiopian occupiers.

“There’s a level of anti-Americanism in Somalia today like nothing I’ve seen over the last 20 years,” Professor Menkhaus said. “Somalis are furious with us for backing the Ethiopian intervention and occupation, provoking this huge humanitarian crisis.”

Patrick Duplat, an expert on Somalia at Refugees International, the Washington-based advocacy group, says that during his last visit to Somalia, earlier this year, a local mosque was calling for jihad against America — something he had never heard when he lived peacefully in Somalia during the rise of the Islamic Courts Union.

“The situation has dramatically taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “The U.S. chose a very confrontational route early on. Who knows what would have happened if the U.S. had reached out to moderates? But that might have averted the disaster we’re in today.”

The greatest catastrophe is the one endured by ordinary Somalis who now must watch their children starve. But America’s own strategic interests have also been gravely damaged.

The only winner has been Islamic militancy. That’s probably the core reason why Al Qaeda militants prefer a McCain presidency: four more years of blindness to nuance in the Muslim world would be a tragedy for Americans and virtually everyone else, but a boon for radical groups trying to recruit suicide bombers.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground , and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof .

    The Endorsement From Hell, NYT, 26.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/opinion/26kristof.html?em

Obama, McCain Target the West's Toss-Up States

October 25, 2008
Filed at 3:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

RENO, Nev. (AP) -- Barack Obama and John McCain venture into the next-to-last weekend of their testy presidential campaign with the same target -- winning the rest of the West.

Once reliable Republican territory, much of the West has seen its politics and demographics shift over the last decade. Three states considered still in play to varying degrees -- Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico -- could be vital if the electoral math gets tight.

Obama was resuming his campaign in Nevada on Saturday with rallies in Reno and Las Vegas before holding one at night in Albuquerque, N.M. The Democrat put aside political events on Thursday night and Friday to spend time with his grandmother in Hawaii, whom he described as gravely ill.

McCain, pivoting from his three stops in Colorado on Friday, will also be pushing hard in New Mexico on Saturday. He is holding rallies in Albuquerque and in Mesilla, farther south.

As the collapsing economy consumes voter attention, McCain has seized a line of attack that Obama is poised to deepen the problem by raising taxes. He said in Denver that Obama won't target the rich but rather the middle class by putting it ''through the wringer.''

Obama counters that he would lower taxes for most wage-earners and that McCain's tax plan favors wealthy corporations. He has tagged McCain as being out of time and ideas.

Polls show the path to the winning tally of 270 electoral votes is tricker for McCain, a Republican weighed down by the economic crisis and an unpopular incumbent president.

Obama, wary of overconfidence among his backers, is charting multiple winning paths.

That's where 19 electoral votes out West factor into the equation.

Nevada, with five votes, is posing the toughest challenge for Obama; the race is a tossup. Colorado is competitive, though Obama has a slight edge in polls in the state that offers nine votes. Obama is more deeply favored to win New Mexico's five votes.

President Bush carried all three states in 2004. Obama, the front-runner nationally with 11 days until the election, is focusing his time on plucking away states Bush won four years ago.

Obama could win the White House by hanging onto all the states that Sen. John Kerry won four years ago and then sweeping the three Western states getting attention this weekend.

McCain, though, has mounted comebacks before. Political momentum can change fast.

Part of the West's demographic change includes larger numbers of Hispanics, a traditionally Democratic-leaning group that has posed a challenge for McCain. The most recent Gallup poll showed Obama leading among registered Hispanic voters, 61 percent to 29 percent.

    Obama, McCain Target the West's Toss-Up States, NYT, 25.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Campaign-Rdp.html

While McCain Looked Away, Florida Shifted

October 25, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

MIAMI — For Senator John McCain, it was not supposed to be this way. From a commanding lead last spring, in a state where Senator Barack Obama did not campaign in the primaries and only hired a state director in June, Mr. McCain is now locked in a neck-and-neck race for a trove of electoral votes that is vital to his hopes of victory.

His once-close relationship with Gov. Charlie Crist is reportedly strained. And Mr. Obama has blanketed the state with advertising and built a huge get-out-the-vote operation — on vivid display this week in the long lines for early voting. The sight dispirited Republican leaders here.

Even as state Republicans sent up flares over the summer, warning that the Florida of 2008 is not what it was in 2004, Mr. McCain yielded the airwaves to Mr. Obama, focusing his attention, money and energy on other states. Mr. McCain’s campaign waited until Sept. 1 to begin a serious round of advertising.

Mr. McCain clearly could still win the state’s 27 electoral votes. But the battle in Florida is offering — on the widest stage of any of the contested primary states — an object lesson in the disparities in the resources, aggressiveness and political cunning that Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama are taking to contests across the country.

It is a case study of the troubles of the McCain campaign, the problems of its own making as well as those caused by forces beyond the campaign’s control, including a deeply troubled economy that is sharply driving up home foreclosures in many areas of the state. And it provides vivid evidence of the Obama campaign’s success in using its money and organizational skills to put Republicans on the defensive in once-safe states.

“He has the best political organization for a presidential campaign that I have ever seen here,” Tom Slade, a former state Republican chairman, said of Mr. Obama. “Bar none. He has run a phenomenally good campaign.”

Mr. Obama’s huge financial advantage has turned out to be more lopsided here than in any of the other contested states, displaying, in an outsized way, what Mr. McCain is facing in states like Colorado and Indiana.

For the week that ended Thursday, Mr. Obama spent $4.2 million on advertisements, compared with $1 million by Mr. McCain, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, an independent group that monitors campaign advertising. It was almost impossible to turn on a television this week without seeing an Obama advertisement showing Mr. McCain saying he had voted with President Bush “90 percent of the time.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign moved to exploit this state’s increasingly popular, and relatively new, early voting program in a way Mr. McCain did not. He came here for two days this week — as did Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton — using high-profile appearances to hand out literature and urge supporters who turned out to vote, often right up the street from the rally. The result could be seen in long lines of people at early voting sites.

Mr. McCain’s advisers said they had put far less effort into the early voting program, instead sticking with what has worked for Florida Republicans for a decade: building up their margin with absentee ballots. But several Republicans said they were afraid that emphasis was missing the way voting behavior is changing here.

Mr. Obama has used sophisticated measures here to find and register new supporters. And Florida statistics this week, which sent a shiver of fear through Republicans, attest to his success: Democrats now have a 660,000 edge in voter registration over Republicans in the state, compared with a Democratic advantage of 280,000 voters in 2006.

Buzz Jacobs, the southeast regional manager of Mr. McCain’s campaign, suggested that Democrats would have trouble getting all those new voters to the polls. “They traditionally have a better voter registration system, and we have a better turnout operation,” he said.

But even several state Republicans said they saw evidence that Mr. Obama was bringing new and highly effective methods to the state to find voters and turn them out.

“I’ve gotten seven calls from live Obama volunteers — and the reason I’m getting calls is because I signed up on their Web site to get notifications from their campaign,” said Sally Bradshaw, a Republican who was a senior political adviser to Jeb Bush, the former governor.

Ms. Bradshaw, who supported Mitt Romney in the primary, had signed up for the list to keep informed about a rival. “I haven’t received any McCain calls,” she said.

Mr. McCain is in this spot today in part because of the conclusion by his campaign this summer that Florida, if competitive, was not as tough as it once was, and that there were more pressing states. Mr. Bush won here by five percentage points in 2004. The Democratic Party had earned months of bad publicity by pressuring its presidential candidates not to campaign in the state before its primary because Florida scheduled its vote earlier than party rules allowed.

Political history suggested that Mr. Obama, as an African-American, would have trouble winning support from two of the state’s key constituencies: Hispanics and Jews. And this is the state of one of Mr. McCain’s great primary triumphs: His decisive victory here in January effectively handed him his party’s nomination.

Mr. McCain’s advisers decided to focus on other states, limiting spending in a very expensive state. His chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, said he was not surprised to see things get tight, particularly as the housing market collapsed here, putting the economy front and center. “We always suspected that would happen,” he said.

The developments have forced Mr. McCain’s campaign to devote precious candidate time and dwindling resources here in the final days of the campaign, at a time when Mr. McCain is facing pressure to shore up his position in other states Mr. Bush won in 2004. He spent a day here on Thursday traveling the state, and will be back next week; Gov. Sarah Palin, his running mate, will be here Sunday.

“It was a strategic error on their part,” said Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe.

Here as in much of the country, there have been strains between the local Republican organization and the McCain campaign about how to run in the state. Until Thursday, Mr. Crist, a Republican whom Mr. McCain said he had considered for the vice-presidential slot on the ticket, kept what appeared to be a definite distance from the McCain campaign, and made remarks — including one disputing Mr. McCain’s contention that the voting process here was subject to fraud — that were clearly unhelpful to Mr. McCain.

In an interview, Mr. Crist disputed the notion that he was anything but whole-hearted in his support for Mr. McCain, and noted that he was accompanying him on a trip he was doing across Florida this week.

“I really don’t know what that’s derived from,” Mr. Crist said. “I’m doing everything I possibly can. I’m excited about his candidacy. I love the guy.”

Still, Mr. Crist’s associates said he had been irked that after everything he had done for Mr. McCain — many Republicans think he would not have won Florida, and thus the nomination, without the last-minute endorsement of Mr. Crist — the McCain campaign, at the last minute, had refused to broadcast a seven-minute video introduction he had prepared for the convention.

From a more pragmatic point of view, Mr. Crist’s associates said he was concerned about becoming too closely identified with Mr. McCain’s campaign, worried that he would hurt his own standing with what one aide described as “Crist-Obama voters.”

Some leaders said they had been stymied in their efforts to get help from the McCain campaign, though they said that was now beginning to change.

“I did have and do have a frustration about getting people here to keep South Florida in the thick of things,” said Chip LaMarca, the Republican chairman from Broward County. “We had numerous telephone conversations and conference calls. We look forward to having more support here.”

    While McCain Looked Away, Florida Shifted, NYT, 25.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25florida.html?hp

Democrats Headed Toward Big Gains in House, Senate

October 25, 2008
Filed at 4:21 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democrats are on track for sizable gains in both houses of Congress on Nov. 4, according to strategists in both parties, although only improbable Southern victories can produce the 60-vote Senate majority they covet to help them pass priority legislation.

A poor economy, President Bush's unpopularity, a lopsided advantage in fundraising and Barack Obama's robust organizational effort in key states are all aiding Democrats in the final days of the congressional campaign.

''I don't think anybody realized it was going to be this tough'' for Republicans, Sen. John Ensign, chairman of the party's senatorial campaign committee said recently. ''We're dealing with an unpopular president (and) we have a financial crisis,'' he added.

''You've got Republican incumbent members of the Congress'' trying to run away from Bush's economic policies, said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who chairs the House Democratic campaign committee. ''And they can't run fast enough. I think it will catch up with many of them.''

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California predicted recently that Democrats would win at least 14 House seats in Republican hands.

But numerous strategists in both parties agreed a gain of at least 20 seems likely and a dozen or more GOP-held seats are in doubt. Only a handful of Democratic House seats appear in any sort of jeopardy. They spoke only on condition of anonymity, saying they were relying on confidential polling data.

In the Senate, as in the House, only the magnitude of the Democratic gains is in doubt.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, head of the Democratic committee, said his party would have to win seats in ''deeply red states'' to amass a 60-seat majority, but added, ''We're close.''

Obama's methodical voter registration efforts in the primary season and his current get-out-the-vote efforts are aiding Democratic candidates in several Southern races. They start with North Carolina, where GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole trails in the polls, and include Georgia and Mississippi, where Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Roger Wicker respectively are in unexpectedly close races.

''Overall, I think Obama will help us in the South because, first, his economic message resonates with Southerners, both white and black, and obviously there will be an increased African-American turnout,'' Schumer said.

Also in a close race is the Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, although that is not a state where Obama has made much of an effort.

Compounding Republican woes, the same economy that has soured voters on their candidates is causing some of the nation's wealthiest conservative donors to stay on the campaign sidelines.

Freedom's Watch, a conservative group that once looked poised to spend tens of millions of dollars to help elect Republicans, had spent roughly $3 million as of midweek. Its largest single contributor is Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire with gambling interests in the United States and China.

Democrats hold a 51-49 majority in the current Senate, counting two independents who vote with them. In the House, Democrats have 235 seats to 199 for Republicans, with one vacancy.

It has long been apparent that Democrats would retain control of both houses of Congress, and in recent weeks, the party's leaders have mounted a concerted drive to push their Senate majority to 60. That's the number needed to overcome a filibuster, the technique of killing legislation by preventing a final vote. If Obama were to win the White House, it would be the Republicans' last toehold in power.

In reality, Ensign noted this week that even if Democrats merely draw close to 60 seats, they will find it easier to pick up a Republican or two on individual bills and move ahead with portions of their agenda that might otherwise be stalled.

Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to pick up seats in Virginia, New Mexico and Colorado where Republicans are retiring.

Additionally, GOP Sens. John Sununu of New Hampshire, Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Gordon Smith of Oregon are in jeopardy. So, too, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, whose fate may rest on the outcome of his corruption trial, now in the hands of a jury in a courthouse a few blocks from the Capitol.

Even if they win all four of those races -- a tall order -- Democrats would be two seats shy of 60 and looking South to get them.

In the House, Democrats are so flush with cash that they have spent nearly $1 million to capture a seat centered on Maryland's Eastern Shore that has been in Republican hands for two decades.

It is one of 27 races where the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent $1 million or more -- a total that the counterpart Republican group has yet to match anywhere.

''We've had to hold most of our resources for the final two weeks and that's beginning to make a difference,'' said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the GOP House committee.

Cole declined to make an overall prediction. ''A lot depends on what happens presidentially in the next 10 days. We're very closely tied with John McCain and we got a lot of open seats and a strong financial disadvantage,'' he said. He predicted the party's Republican presidential candidate would mount a strong finish and help other candidates on the ballot.

Still, the party's campaign committee recently pulled back from plans to advertise on behalf of incumbents in Michigan, Florida, Colorado and Minnesota who face competitive challenges.

For its part, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently invested in a race in the Lincoln, Neb., area held by Republican Rep. Lee Terry. Obama has a dozen or more paid staff as well as volunteers there hoping to win one electoral vote.

Democrats express confidence they will pick up at least two and possibly three Republican-held New York seats where incumbents decided against running again and at least one each in Illinois, Virginia, Ohio, New Mexico and Arizona. There are additional opportunities in at least a half-dozen other states.

Republican incumbents in greatest jeopardy include Reps. Don Young in Alaska, Tom Feeney and Ric Keller in Florida, Joe Knollenberg and Tim Walberg in Michigan, Marilyn Musgrave in Colorado, Jon Porter in Nevada and Robin Hayes in North Carolina.

Among the few Democrats in close races are Reps. Nick Lampson in Texas, who is in a solidly Republican district; Tim Mahoney in Florida, who recently admitted to having two extramarital affairs; Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire and Paul Kanjorski in Pennsylvania.

    Democrats Headed Toward Big Gains in House, Senate, NYT, 25.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Congress-Stakes.html

G.O.P. Senses Opportunities in Statehouse Races

October 25, 2008
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

Unlike their counterparts in Congress, who are expecting a wave of Democratic Party victories on Election Day, lawmakers in statehouses across the country are finding there are as many opportunities for Republicans as Democrats.

The bad news for Republicans in 2006, when Democrats surged to power and majority control in many legislative chambers, is now their good fortune as Democrats struggle to retain those gains.

“There are vulnerable Democrats in traditionally Republican seats, and the natural dynamic is that Republicans would win back at least some of these,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “But the name brand for the Republican Party has taken a hit, and these lower-party races could be one of the places that that shows up. It’s a mixed-up year.”

Of the top 12 battleground chambers as identified by the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan research group, six are considered opportunities for a flip from a Republican to Democratic majority, and six are the reverse, with possible flips from Democratic to Republican control.

Certainly, many Democrats are getting a boost from an energized party and the growth of newly registered voters, candidates and party leaders say. But Republicans also see chances for gains.

State lawmakers touch American daily life in myriad ways, including economic development and road repair. And many of the victors of 2008 will be in office in 2010, when statehouses get to flex some muscle. That is when Congressional boundaries will be redrawn under the next census; in almost every state, the party in power in the legislature gets a big voice in making the map that can have a profound impact on future elections.

Altogether, 79 percent of the nearly 7,400 state legislative seats are up for grabs. And of the 84 chambers in 44 states that are having legislative elections, at least 28 are being seriously fought over for majority control, according to the Conference of State Legislatures.

“This is the table-setting election for 2010,” said Tim Storey, who tracks elections at the Conference of State Legislatures.

Races like Nancy Riley’s in Oklahoma, which could determine whether a tie in the Senate between Republicans and Democrats is broken, epitomize the fractured terrain that voters and candidates are facing. Ms. Riley was a Republican, first elected to the Senate in 2000, but then became a Democrat in 2006. This is her first run since the switch, and she is counting on voters not getting too worked up about it.

“The people know where I stand, and what I stand for,” said Ms. Riley, a first-grade teacher by training. “They’ve seen me for eight years at bake sales, football games and chamber of commerce events.”

In other races, voters might be confused about which banner a candidate is even sailing under.

Ryan Zinke, for example, a Navy special forces veteran who describes himself as a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican” in running for the Senate from Whitefish, Mont., advocates tough regulation of big business, environmental protection and a government that watches out for the little guy. Many of the positions are not so different from those espoused by his opponent, Brittany MacLean, a Democrat who has worked for conservation groups.

In almost every race, candidates and party officials around the country say, economic anxiety is a common thread. The concerns are filtered through a prism of local issues, like schools and sales taxes, and altered as well by access — many Americans can personally lobby their local state representative over coffee or on back-to-school night. But that is always how it is on the political front lines, candidates and officeholders say.

In Maine, Mary Black Andrews, a Republican with a colorful résumé (nursing, followed by a stint as a jam-and-jelly business entrepreneur), is facing Peter B. Bowman, a Democrat and retired Navy officer and first-term senator. The race is a linchpin to whether Democrats — currently the majority by one seat in Augusta — can retain control.

Both candidates are grappling with an abrupt shift this year in the tourism economy, the lifeblood of the district with its fine dining, overnight stays, day trips and fried clams, as visitors have cut back their spending.

In Indiana, where Democrats control the House 51 to 49, Republicans are hoping to swing to the majority by picking up seats that Democrats narrowly won in 2006. Democrats have the same idea — they are looking at three districts barely won by Republicans. The House is particularly vulnerable to majority-minority flips, having switched party control 15 times in the last 80 years.

One of those races pits a Democratic challenger, Mary Ann Sullivan, an educational consultant, against an incumbent, Jon Elrod, in a working-class district in Marion County, which includes Indianapolis. Jobs and property taxes shape their discussion.

“The economy. The economy. The economy,” Ms. Sullivan said. “It’s just dominating everything.”

But with narrow margins in many states, the “what ifs” are also everywhere.

If Democrats gain control of the New York State Senate — a distinct possibility, people in both parties say, with only a one-seat Republican majority — it will be the first time since 1935 that all of New York’s government will be in control of one party.

If Democrats in Minnesota can pick up five seats in the House — a long shot, but possible — they will have veto-proof majorities in both chambers in facing Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Mr. Pawlenty, whose term expires in 2011, has been campaigning fiercely around his state to support Republicans in the Legislature and to stave off an outcome that would sharply diminish his power in St. Paul.

But in keeping with their out-of-the-spotlight nature, local races also do not always move with national tide. Since 1940, the party winning the White House has added seats in state legislatures about two-thirds of the time.

Voter registration surges — a keystone effort of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign in particular as the Democratic nominee for president — might also strike a glancing blow in only some races because the numbers are in many cases concentrated in areas where Democratic state legislators are not endangered.

Ms. Riley, the switched-party Democratic senator in Tulsa, said the voter-register numbers run up by the Obama campaign will mean nothing to her chances one way or another. She said “he doesn’t poll well in the district.”

The opposite is the case in the suburbs of Las Vegas, where the Republicans’ 11-to-10 majority in the State Senate is being tested by surging numbers of Democratic voters and widespread pain from the housing meltdown that has hit Nevada hard.

Democrats there have taken aim at two incumbent senators, including a former candidate for governor, Bob Beers, trying to portray him and other Republicans as out of step with the new emerging mainstream.

“We’re playing a lot of defense,” said Zac Moyle, executive director of the Nevada Republican Party.

Dan Frosch contributed reporting.

    G.O.P. Senses Opportunities in Statehouse Races, NYT, 25.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25states.html?hp

Obama Makes Visit to a Most Beloved Supporter

October 25, 2008
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

HONOLULU — For the last 21 months, she has followed the odyssey of his presidential campaign like a spectator on a faraway balcony.

She underwent a corneal transplant to see him on television. She reluctantly agreed to film a political advertisement when he urgently needed to reassure voters about his distinctive American roots. She told him during one of their frequent telephone conversations that it might not hurt if he smiled a bit more.

And on Friday, Senator Barack Obama spent the day here saying goodbye.

At the Punahou Circle Apartments, a place of his own childhood, Madelyn Dunham, his grandmother, lay gravely ill. For weeks, Mr. Obama has talked to doctors and tracked her condition. When she was released from the hospital last week after surgery to repair a broken hip, he received word that he should not wait until after the election to make what he believes is most likely a final visit.

It was an unusual departure from the tug-of-war of the presidential campaign, particularly with only 11 days remaining in the race. But his advisers say he told them that the trip was not negotiable. He was absent when his mother died here in 1995, a mistake he said he did not intend to repeat with her mother, a stalwart in his life.

Mr. Obama has reached the closing days of his run for the White House without embarking on a formal biographical tour. In a candidacy built on biography, and criticized for its celebrity, his advisers believed that substance, as well as an overseas trip in July, was a wiser course.

But a biographical tour of sorts has unfolded around him here on the one-day visit to see the woman who was a guiding force in his life and who played a supporting role in his candidacy, from the Iowa caucuses to his marquee speech on race in Philadelphia to his general-election effort to win over voters in red states.

The moment Mr. Obama stepped off the plane here late Thursday evening, after a nine-hour flight from Indianapolis, his motorcade drove directly to his grandmother’s 12-story apartment building, on a residential section of South Beretania Street.

His return to Hawaii was carried live on the local news, but his arrival was subdued. He did not wave to the cameras. There were no leis to welcome him on the breezy airport tarmac. “Somber Obama returns home” was the banner headline in The Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Friday.

Thursday night’s visit to Mrs. Dunham, who will turn 86 on Sunday, lasted a little more than an hour. Mr. Obama then returned on Friday to her 10th-floor apartment, where he lived from the age of 10. Also present was his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who lives in Hawaii. The apartment was flooded with flowers and good wishes from strangers who wrote that they had come to know her from his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”

As a light morning mist fell, the sandal-clad senator took a brief walk around his old neighborhood, a pair of sunglasses covering his eyes.

Family friends in Hawaii say Mrs. Dunham is suffering from cancer, among other ailments, but Obama advisers, told by the senator not to release any details of her condition, declined to confirm or deny those reports. She is known, however, to suffer from osteoporosis and poor eyesight.

“One of the things I wanted to make sure of is that I had a chance to sit down with her and talk to her,” Mr. Obama said Friday on the ABC News television program “Good Morning America.” “She’s still alert and she’s still got all her faculties, and I want to make sure that — that I don’t miss that opportunity right now.”

“She is getting a sense of long-deserved recognition at — towards the end of her life,” he added.

As Mr. Obama flew west across six time zones on his way here, he stayed in the secluded front cabin of his campaign plane. He read, slept and briefly talked with a handful of aides who came along. The knot in his red tie was loosened as he walked down the aisle of the plane to stretch his legs, but he kept his distance from a small group of reporters who accompanied him.

It was a starkly different mood from that during a flight nine months ago, when Mr. Obama made a pilgrimage to Kansas for his first visit to the town of El Dorado, where his maternal grandparents had originally lived.

A smile washed over his face on that late January day as he spoke about the woman he calls Toot, his own shorthand for “tutu,” a Hawaiian term for “grandparent.”

“She can’t travel,” he told reporters then. “She has a bad back. She has pretty severe osteoporosis. But she’s glued to CNN.”

Back then, when Mr. Obama was in the opening stages of his Democratic primary fight, he spoke wistfully about his grandparents, whose all-American biography had become critical to establishing his own American story. He told of how his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, had fought in World War II while his grandmother worked on B-29s at a Boeing plant in Wichita.

“My grandparents held on to a simple dream: that they would raise my mother in a land of boundless dreams,” Mr. Obama said. “I am standing here today because that dream was realized.”

In only one campaign commercial, made during the primary race, can Mrs. Dunham be heard speaking. Her osteoporosis was advanced, and she hunched so severely that it was hard for filmmakers to capture her spirit and words of support for her grandson.

In August, as he prepared to accept the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama delivered a long-distance message to her in a televised speech.

“Thank you to my grandmother, who helped raise me and is sitting in Hawaii somewhere right now because she can’t travel, but who poured everything she had into me and who helped me become the man I am today,” Mr. Obama said. “Tonight is for her.”

    Obama Makes Visit to a Most Beloved Supporter, NYT, 25.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25obama.html

Editorial

Barack Obama for President

October 24, 2008
The New York Times
 

Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.

As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

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Mr. Obama has met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change. He has shown a cool head and sound judgment. We believe he has the will and the ability to forge the broad political consensus that is essential to finding solutions to this nation’s problems.

In the same time, Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.

Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound.

Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts. Mr. Obama has another vision of government’s role and responsibilities.

In his convention speech in Denver, Mr. Obama said, “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.”

Since the financial crisis, he has correctly identified the abject failure of government regulation that has brought the markets to the brink of collapse.

The Economy

The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies. Those ideas have been proved wrong at an unfathomable price, but Mr. McCain — a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution” — is still a believer.

Mr. Obama sees that far-reaching reforms will be needed to protect Americans and American business.

Mr. McCain talks about reform a lot, but his vision is pinched. His answer to any economic question is to eliminate pork-barrel spending — about $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget — cut taxes and wait for unfettered markets to solve the problem.

Mr. Obama is clear that the nation’s tax structure must be changed to make it fairer. That means the well-off Americans who have benefited disproportionately from Mr. Bush’s tax cuts will have to pay some more. Working Americans, who have seen their standard of living fall and their children’s options narrow, will benefit. Mr. Obama wants to raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation, restore a climate in which workers are able to organize unions if they wish and expand educational opportunities.

Mr. McCain, who once opposed President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy as fiscally irresponsible, now wants to make them permanent. And while he talks about keeping taxes low for everyone, his proposed cuts would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent of Americans while digging the country into a deeper fiscal hole.

National Security

The American military — its people and equipment — is dangerously overstretched. Mr. Bush has neglected the necessary war in Afghanistan, which now threatens to spiral into defeat. The unnecessary and staggeringly costly war in Iraq must be ended as quickly and responsibly as possible.

While Iraq’s leaders insist on a swift drawdown of American troops and a deadline for the end of the occupation, Mr. McCain is still talking about some ill-defined “victory.” As a result, he has offered no real plan for extracting American troops and limiting any further damage to Iraq and its neighbors.

Mr. Obama was an early and thoughtful opponent of the war in Iraq, and he has presented a military and diplomatic plan for withdrawing American forces. Mr. Obama also has correctly warned that until the Pentagon starts pulling troops out of Iraq, there will not be enough troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, has only belatedly focused on Afghanistan’s dangerous unraveling and the threat that neighboring Pakistan may quickly follow.

Mr. Obama would have a learning curve on foreign affairs, but he has already showed sounder judgment than his opponent on these critical issues. His choice of Senator Joseph Biden — who has deep foreign-policy expertise — as his running mate is another sign of that sound judgment. Mr. McCain’s long interest in foreign policy and the many dangers this country now faces make his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska more irresponsible.

Both presidential candidates talk about strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia, including NATO, and strongly support Israel. Both candidates talk about repairing America’s image in the world. But it seems clear to us that Mr. Obama is far more likely to do that — and not just because the first black president would present a new American face to the world.

Mr. Obama wants to reform the United Nations, while Mr. McCain wants to create a new entity, the League of Democracies — a move that would incite even fiercer anti-American furies around the world.

Unfortunately, Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, sees the world as divided into friends (like Georgia) and adversaries (like Russia). He proposed kicking Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized nations even before the invasion of Georgia. We have no sympathy for Moscow’s bullying, but we also have no desire to replay the cold war. The United States must find a way to constrain the Russians’ worst impulses, while preserving the ability to work with them on arms control and other vital initiatives.

Both candidates talk tough on terrorism, and neither has ruled out military action to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But Mr. Obama has called for a serious effort to try to wean Tehran from its nuclear ambitions with more credible diplomatic overtures and tougher sanctions. Mr. McCain’s willingness to joke about bombing Iran was frightening.

The Constitution and the Rule of Law

Under Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the justice system and the separation of powers have come under relentless attack. Mr. Bush chose to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the moment in which he looked like the president of a unified nation, to try to place himself above the law.

Mr. Bush has arrogated the power to imprison men without charges and browbeat Congress into granting an unfettered authority to spy on Americans. He has created untold numbers of “black” programs, including secret prisons and outsourced torture. The president has issued hundreds, if not thousands, of secret orders. We fear it will take years of forensic research to discover how many basic rights have been violated.

Both candidates have renounced torture and are committed to closing the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But Mr. Obama has gone beyond that, promising to identify and correct Mr. Bush’s attacks on the democratic system. Mr. McCain has been silent on the subject.

Mr. McCain improved protections for detainees. But then he helped the White House push through the appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied detainees the right to a hearing in a real court and put Washington in conflict with the Geneva Conventions, greatly increasing the risk to American troops.

The next president will have the chance to appoint one or more justices to a Supreme Court that is on the brink of being dominated by a radical right wing. Mr. Obama may appoint less liberal judges than some of his followers might like, but Mr. McCain is certain to pick rigid ideologues. He has said he would never appoint a judge who believes in women’s reproductive rights.
 

The Candidates

It will be an enormous challenge just to get the nation back to where it was before Mr. Bush, to begin to mend its image in the world and to restore its self-confidence and its self-respect. Doing all of that, and leading America forward, will require strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand.

Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance. Watching him being tested in the campaign has long since erased the reservations that led us to endorse Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries. He has drawn in legions of new voters with powerful messages of hope and possibility and calls for shared sacrifice and social responsibility.

Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.

He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform.

Mr. McCain could have seized the high ground on energy and the environment. Earlier in his career, he offered the first plausible bill to control America’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Now his positions are a caricature of that record: think Ms. Palin leading chants of “drill, baby, drill.”

Mr. Obama has endorsed some offshore drilling, but as part of a comprehensive strategy including big investments in new, clean technologies.

•

Mr. Obama has withstood some of the toughest campaign attacks ever mounted against a candidate. He’s been called un-American and accused of hiding a secret Islamic faith. The Republicans have linked him to domestic terrorists and questioned his wife’s love of her country. Ms. Palin has also questioned millions of Americans’ patriotism, calling Republican-leaning states “pro-America.”

This politics of fear, division and character assassination helped Mr. Bush drive Mr. McCain from the 2000 Republican primaries and defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004. It has been the dominant theme of his failed presidency.

The nation’s problems are simply too grave to be reduced to slashing “robo-calls” and negative ads. This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.

    Barack Obama for President, NYT, 24.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/opinion/24fri1.html?ref=opinion

McCain and Obama Hurl Broadsides at Each Other Over Taxes and Jobs

October 24, 2008
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and JEFF ZELENY

SARASOTA, Fla. — Senator John McCain pummeled Senator Barack Obama as an enemy of small business during a “Joe the Plumber” bus tour across central Florida on Thursday, although Joe the Plumber was not actually along for the ride.

As Mr. Obama headed to Hawaii to visit his ailing grandmother, it was unclear if Mr. McCain would temporarily let up in his criticism of his opponent, but he exercised no restraint on Thursday. All day long, his campaign plucked other “Joes” from the crucial swing counties of the Interstate 4 corridor and put them in front of microphones to echo Mr. McCain’s position that small-business owners would be unfairly taxed should Mr. Obama win the White House.

There was the talkative Gary the Dentist in Altamonte Springs (Gary Coatoam of Coatoam Periodontal, where Mr. McCain stopped in the late morning), who told reporters right off the bat in his office, as the candidate stood by, that “I just wanted to say that I believe Senator McCain is the answer to what all of us have been looking for.”

There was Jim the Produce Stand Owner in Plant City (Jim Meeks of Parkesdale Farms), who led Mr. McCain through his landmark open-air shop in a conservative pocket of Hillsborough County. There was Ramon the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President (Ramon Ojeda) who had lunch with Mr. McCain and Gov. Charlie Crist in Orlando at Mi Viejo San Juan, a restaurant in the middle of the city’s booming and Democratic-leaning Puerto Rican community.

President Bush won the I-4 corridor in 2004, but Mr. Obama has made inroads, and recent polls showed him with a solid edge over Mr. McCain statewide.

Mr. McCain started his day at a lumber yard in Ormond Beach, where he stepped up his criticism of the Bush administration by pounding the lectern and demanding that the government support his plan to buy troubled mortgages from homeowners. “And why isn’t the Treasury secretary not ordering them to do that?” Mr. McCain asked, referring to Henry M. Paulson Jr.

All day long, Mr. McCain told crowds that his opponent would say anything to get elected. “Senator Obama may say that he’s going to soak the rich, but it’s the middle class that are going to get wet,” Mr. McCain shouted to big applause at a rally in Sarasota.

In Ormond Beach, Mr. McCain said: “We finally learned what Senator Obama’s economic goal is. As he told Joe the Plumber in Ohio, he wants to, quote, ‘spread the wealth around.’ He believes in redistributing the wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs and opportunities for all Americans. Senator Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie.”

“Socialist!” someone in the crowd yelled.

As millions of Americans already know, “spread the wealth around” comes from Mr. Obama’s encounter with Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, known since as Joe the Plumber, outside Toledo on Oct. 12, when Mr. Wurzelbacher wondered aloud if Mr. Obama might support a flat tax. Mr. Obama replied that he did not think it was fair for someone as well-off as himself to pay the same tax rate as a waitress, and then added, “And right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody, and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Based on this comment, the McCain campaign has been trying to paint Mr. Obama as a socialist.

Mr. Obama spoke on Thursday to a crowd in downtown Indianapolis that the local authorities estimated at 35,000 people, and he hit Mr. McCain as supporting corporate tax cuts.

“If Senator McCain wants to defend tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, that’s his choice,” Mr. Obama said at the rally at the American Legion Mall. “But I say, let’s end tax cuts for companies that ship American jobs overseas, and give them to companies that create good jobs right here in Indiana, in the United States of America.”

Mr. Obama then left for Honolulu to visit his 85-year-old grandmother, Madelyn Payne Dunham. He is expected to spend much of Friday with her before flying to a rally Saturday in Reno, Nev.

While Mr. Obama is only going to be gone for one full day, it is still an unusual occurrence at this point in a presidential campaign.

“It’s not optimal, but there was never any debate or discussion or anything,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Mr. Obama, said in an interview Thursday. “Barack’s grandmother is one of the formidable people in his life. He wants to go see her on the advice of her doctors. He had to do it now. So we’ll just make do.”

    McCain and Obama Hurl Broadsides at Each Other Over Taxes and Jobs, NYT, 24.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/us/politics/24campaign.html?ref=politics

In South Dakota Race, Gauging the Impact of a Senator’s Health

October 23, 2008
The New York Times
By DIRK JOHNSON and DAVID HERSZENHORN

RAPID CITY, S.D. — Senator Tim Johnson speaks slowly and haltingly, and is sometimes difficult to understand. He moves with a cane, and spends much of his time in a wheelchair. He rarely addresses large crowds, and he has declined a request to debate his Republican challenger in next month’s election.

Mr. Johnson’s supporters in South Dakota, a state with a large share of older people familiar with health problems, say they have been inspired by his display of grit in battling back from a brain hemorrhage nearly two years ago.

But questions about Mr. Johnson’s health — until now largely off limits and deemed unseemly — are being raised publicly by his Republican opponent, Joel Dean Dykstra, a state representative. Mr. Dykstra said voters “want some evidence as to whether he can hold his own.”

It is sensitive territory, but some voters say they fret that Mr. Johnson’s health issues could shortchange South Dakota in Washington, especially during a time of deep financial crisis.

“I have a lot of respect for Johnson,” said Jack Lefler, a 72-year-old retired Caterpillar worker. “But I don’t think he’s physically able to compete” with the politicians from other states.

Before his hemorrhage in December 2006, Mr. Johnson — a Democrat in a largely Republican state — had been considered vulnerable by Republicans, having won re-election in 2002 by a margin of just 524 votes out of more than 330,000 cast.

Now, though, even voters like Mr. Lefler acknowledge that they are in the minority.

“We’re a loyal state,” Mr. Lefler said, “so people will back Johnson.”

Most polls show Mr. Johnson, who is seeking a third term, leads Mr. Dykstra by comfortable margins.

“South Dakota is a very kind state,” said Steve Jarding, a Harvard political scientist on leave to run Mr. Johnson’s re-election campaign. “People were rooting for Tim — Democrats, Republicans, independents — they wanted him to be O.K.”

On mornings when the Senate is in his session, Mr. Johnson plows through stacks of memorandums and his daily press clippings, newspapers and magazines. And he maintains a regular calendar of meetings with constituents and others. On Tuesday, he traveled to Washington from South Dakota to meet on Wednesday with officials from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, ahead of a Senate banking committee hearing.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of the committee, said Mr. Johnson had been a full participant in recent months as the committee dealt with the effects of the mortgage and financial crises.

“Obviously, having a conversation is slower because of his speech,” Mr. Dodd said. “But there’s nothing slower about his mind.”

Some things have changed. Mr. Johnson no longer drives himself to work. He uses e-mail less frequently in favor of face-to-face conversations with his staff. And he is less likely to jump up to make his own photocopies or fetch pens from a supply cabinet, aides said.

Mr. Johnson, in an interview here, said he had been a legislative powerhouse for South Dakota, leading the drive for federal approval of two huge water projects. Since returning to the Senate in September 2007, after a nine-month absence, he has not missed a vote.

“I had my most successful year ever,” he said.

Mr. Johnson was recently here in Rapid City for Native American Day, a holiday South Dakotans observe while other states mark Columbus Day. Wearing a bolo tie with a Medicine Hat design, he sat in a wheelchair at the Black Hills Pow Wow, when an elderly woman moved toward him to whisper in his ear.

“You’re a true friend to the native people,” Phoebe Kuecker, 84, who belongs to the Rosebud Sioux tribe, said she told him, as she clasped his shoulder.

With nine reservations in the state, American Indians account for perhaps 10 percent of the vote in South Dakota. In his last election, in 2002, Mr. Johnson won 94 percent of the vote among the Oglala Sioux, the state’s biggest tribe.

South Dakota can seem like two different states, divided by the Missouri River. To the west, where Republicans dominate (except for Indian Country), the culture seems drawn from the Old West: cattle ranches, old gold towns, the Black Hills. To the east, where Democrats are more competitive, corn and soybean farms outnumber ranches, and the financial and technological sectors are important players.

Despite its Republican leanings, South Dakota has produced some high-profile Democrats, including two senators, Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, and George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972.

While Mr. Dykstra has sought to portray Mr. Johnson as too liberal for the state, most South Dakotans seem to see him mostly as a pragmatist. As a show of Mr. Johnson’s political strength, and his popularity among conservatives, he recently won the endorsement of the National Rifle Association. He has also been endorsed by Dave Munson, the Republican mayor of the state’s biggest city, Sioux Falls.

Mr. Johnson visited 20 cities in August, and is in the midst of a state tour now, but much of his time is spent in private meetings. He visited the popular South Dakota broadcaster Tony Dean not long before Mr. Dean’s death on Sunday.

“He came to see me when I was in the hospital,” said Mr. Johnson, explaining his visit to the ailing Mr. Dean, evoking the sort of loyalty and sense of caring that tends to resonate in South Dakota.

For his part, Mr. Dykstra, a social conservative educated at Oral Roberts University, has called Mr. Johnson a “workman-like, bring-home-the-bacon” sort of politician.

Democrats here heartily welcome the description. People in some parts of the country might consider earmarks a symbol of waste, but in South Dakota, according to Mr. Jarding, the Johnson aide, “if we don’t get earmarks, we don’t have water running to some people’s houses.”

Mr. Dykstra’s references to Mr. Johnson’s health seem to have gained little traction. Among many South Dakotans, even talking about Mr. Johnson’s medical history seems out of bounds. Rob Wasilk, a 39-year-old road construction worker, said all that counted was Mr. Johnson’s work in the Senate.

“I don’t care what Johnson’s voice sounds like,” Mr. Wasilk said. “His record speaks for itself.”

By historical standards in the Senate, Mr. Johnson could hardly be considered incapacitated. Seniority rules the day, and there is a long tradition of lawmakers remaining in office well into old age and regardless of infirmities.

In 1946, for instance, Senator Arthur Capper, Republican of Kansas, then 81, became chairman of the Agriculture Committee, even though he was almost totally deaf and could not make himself understood. And in the 1940’s, Senator Carter Glass, Democrat of Virginia, remained in office even though illness kept him confined to a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.

These days, Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who will turn 91 next month, always enters the Senate chamber in a wheelchair. And Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, has been mostly absent from the Capitol since his brain tumor was diagnosed in May.

When in Washington, Mr. Johnson mostly uses a wheelchair, but he typically walks into the Senate chamber for votes, steadying himself with a cane — partly a matter of pride, his aides say, and a signal to his colleagues and to C-Span viewers everywhere of his recovery.

Dirk Johnson reported from South Dakota, and David Herszenhorn from Washington.

    In South Dakota Race, Gauging the Impact of a Senator’s Health, NYT, 23.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/us/politics/23dakota.html

McCain Escalates Populist Rhetoric

October 24, 2008
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

Senator John McCain escalated his economic rhetoric at a blustery rally in Florida on Thursday morning while his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, prepared to fly to Hawaii to visit his 85-year-old grandmother, who is gravely ill after breaking her hip.

On the heels of a 514-point slide in the stock market on Wednesday and worse-than-expected jobless claims, both candidates are zeroing in on taxes and jobs as the presidential race enters its final days.

Mr. Obama has been pushing back against Republican criticism of his tax proposals, saying that Mr. McCain’s economic plans would aid “Joe the CEO,” alluding to Mr. McCain’s frequent references to his middle-class Everyman, Joe the plumber.

McCain infused a populist note into his speech Thursday, looking at the candidates’ competing tax plans through the lens of how each would affect small businesses. He said Mr. Obama would raise taxes on small-business owners, stifling job growth and sending the economy into a deeper recession.

“We shouldn’t be taxing our small businesses more as Senator Obama wants to do,” Mr. McCain told a crowd in Ormond Beach. “Senator Obama wants to spread the wealth around. That means fewer jobs at their businesses and fewer jobs here in Florida.”

Republicans won Florida and its 27 electoral votes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and the state has become a must-win battleground for Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama is making a charge for the state, and has outspent Mr. McCain by $15 million on television advertising, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.

Mr. McCain is holding a “Joe the Plumber” bus tour throughout the state on Thursday, and ending the day with a campaign rally in Sarasota.

“Florida’s a battleground,” Mr. McCain said on Thursday morning. “We have to win it.”

Between hammering away at Mr. Obama’s tax policies and questioning the Democratic nominee’s readiness to face an international crisis, Mr. McCain took a few more veiled swings at the Bush administration, saying that government debt had ballooned over the past eight years while the dollar had weakened.

Mr. Obama is speaking to supporters in Indianapolis later in the morning, and will then take two days off the campaign trail to visit his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, in Honolulu. In an interview on Thursday morning on the CBS “Early Show,” Mr. Obama discounted the idea that he faces any political risks from stepping away from the campaign 12 days before the election.

“I think most people understand that if you’re not caring for your family then you’re probably not the kind of person who’s going to be caring for other people,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama was raised by a single mother, and his maternal grandparents played a large role in his upbringing. His mother died of ovarian cancer in 1995 before Mr. Obama could visit her to say goodbye, and he said Thursday that he did not want to repeat that mistake.

“My grandmother’s the last one left,” he said. “She really has been the rock of the family, the foundation of the family.”

    McCain Escalates Populist Rhetoric, NYT, 24.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/us/politics/24campaign.html?hp

Biden Says McCain Is Getting Out of Control

October 23, 2008
Filed at 12:44 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday that Republican rival John McCain is ''getting a little loose'' at a time when the nation needs a steady hand.

Campaigning in NASCAR country, Biden employed car racing terminology for bumping to describe the contentious final days of the campaign. He told supporters in Charlotte that he's worried about how the Republicans have been acting as the two campaigns have been ''trading a little paint'' recently.

''What worries me most is the McCain campaign seems to have gotten a little loose,'' Biden said. ''John's getting a little loose. He doesn't have much of a steady hand these days. Now's the time we most need a steady hand.''

The Delaware senator told the crowd the nation needs to unite to address the challenges ahead. He called Republican robocalls ''scurrilous'' and said ads portraying Obama as an extremist hurt the American people.

''It is corrosive to American society,'' Biden said. ''It's awfully hard to build anything with that kind of corrosion.''

Although warning of the dangers of political divisions, Biden took aim at McCain. Deriding McCain's effort to dissociate himself from President Bush, Biden accused the Arizona senator of ''quacking like George W. Bush.''

And after botching McCain's name, Biden joked he no longer knew his longtime Senate colleague.

''John McClain. John McClain. Excuse me, John McCain. John McCain -- I don't recognize him anymore,'' Biden said to laughter from several hundred supporters in attendance.

Biden's criticisms appeared to refer to a mailer distributed by North Carolina's Republican Party last week. The ad tries to link Obama to 1960s radical William Ayers with pictures of Ayers, including his mug shot, and a description of Ayers' violent anti-Vietnam war activities from decades ago. The mailer declares the two are friends and says Obama is ''not who you think he is.''

Obama has condemned Ayers' radical activities, which occurred when Obama was a child. He met Ayers a quarter century later when Ayers was an education professor at the University of Illinois and a Chicago neighbor. They worked on the boards of two nonprofit charitable groups from the mid-1990s to 2002, and Ayers held a meet-the-candidate event for Obama when he first ran for the Illinois senate, but the two are not close.

Biden was on a bus tour through college campuses in North Carolina's more liberal corridors -- the fast-growing urban areas that have pushed the state toward the Democrats for the first time in decades. He also planned stops in Winston-Salem and Raleigh.

McCain's campaign announced he would return to the state Tuesday.

    Biden Says McCain Is Getting Out of Control, NYT, 23.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Biden.html

If Elected ...

Rivals Split on U.S. Power, but Ideas Defy Easy Labels

October 23, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — John McCain has said his worldview was formed in the Hanoi Hilton, the jail where as a prisoner of war he learned to stand up to his country’s enemies and lost any youthful naïveté about what happens when America shows weakness.

Barack Obama has written that his views began to take shape in the back streets of Jakarta, where he lived as a young boy and saw the poverty, the human rights violations and the fear inspired by the American-backed Indonesian dictator Suharto.

It was there, Mr. Obama wrote in his second autobiography, that he first absorbed the “jumble of warring impulses” that make up American foreign policy, and received a street-level understanding of how foreigners react to “our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism” and to Washington’s “tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption and environmental degradation.”

As the campaigns tell the story, those radically different experiences in different corners of Southeast Asia have created two men with sharply different views about the proper use of American power.

Mr. McCain’s campaign portrays him as an experienced warrior who knows how to win wars and carries Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick, even if he occasionally strays from Roosevelt’s advice about speaking softly. Mr. Obama’s campaign portrays him as a cerebral advocate of patient diplomacy, the antidote to the unilateral excesses of the Bush years, who knows how to build partnerships without surrendering American interests.

But as the campaign has unfolded, both men have been forced into surprising detours. They may have formed their worldviews in Hanoi and Jakarta, but they forged specific positions amid the realities of an election in post-Iraq, post-crash America — where judgment sometimes collides with political expediency.

The result has included contradictions that do not fit the neat hawk-and-dove images promoted by each campaign. As spelled out in presidential debates, in written answers provided by their campaigns, and in an interview with Mr. McCain in January, some of their views appear as messy and unpredictable as the troubles one of them will inherit.

For example, it is Mr. McCain — the man who amended the words of a Beach Boys song last year to joke about bombing Iran’s nuclear sites — who says he could imagine a situation in which Iran’s behavior changes so much that he would be willing “to consider” allowing Iran to enrich its own uranium, producing a fuel that could be used for nuclear power — but only under highly restrictive conditions that ensure it could never be used for weapons.

Mr. Obama, the candidate who has expressed far more willingness to sit down and negotiate with the Iranians, said in an e-mail message passed on by an aide that in any final deal he would not allow Iran to produce uranium on Iranian soil, the same hard-line view enunciated by the Bush administration.

Consider the delicate issue of Pakistan, where it is Mr. Obama who has been far more willing than Mr. McCain to threaten sending in American troops on ground raids. Mr. McCain, by contrast, argues that Pakistan must control its territory. “I don’t think the American people today are ready to commit troops to Waziristan,” he said, months before Mr. Bush signed secret orders this summer authorizing ground raids in Pakistan, including the violent sanctuaries of North and South Waziristan.

Mr. McCain, now the Republican nominee, agreed to an interview during the primary campaign. Obama aides answered questions at length, but Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, citing the pressures of time in the campaign, declined requests dating to June to be interviewed in detail on how he would handle potential confrontations beyond Iraq that could face the next president.

It is worth remembering that presidential campaigns are usually terrible predictors of presidential decision-making. John F. Kennedy said virtually nothing about building up troops in Vietnam in 1960, nor did Richard M. Nixon talk in 1968 about engineering an opening to China. George W. Bush, in an interview at his ranch 10 days before his first inaugural in 2001, lamented that sanctions against Saddam Hussein looked like “Swiss cheese” but did not appear, at that time, to be heading toward a military confrontation with him.
 

New Look at Engagement

With the endgame slowly playing out in Iraq, the potential confrontation over neighboring Iran and its nuclear program has emerged as the No. 1 case study in how Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would use diplomacy and the threat of military force against a hostile state. Based on their careers and their statements, Mr. McCain’s threshold for pre-emptive military action seems lower than Mr. Obama’s.

For each candidate, the debate over Iran has been somewhat treacherous. Mr. Obama knew his interest in pursuing diplomacy could leave him vulnerable to criticism as a potential appeaser; Mr. McCain, known for his “Bomb Iran” ditty, had to demonstrate that he would not be trigger-happy.

In the end, both men have proved more comfortable in declaring that they would never allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state than in explaining how they would obtain the leverage to stop Iran’s nuclear program peacefully. And neither has dealt publicly with the harder question of what to do if Iran assembles all the fuel and components needed for a weapon but stops just short of actually making one.

Mr. Obama’s declaration that he would engage Iranian leaders without preconditions has dominated the debate and opened him to Mr. McCain’s accusation that he is a naïf, willing to give legitimacy to the Iranian regime. Mr. Obama has backtracked a bit, arguing that he never suggested that the first meetings would be at the presidential level, and that preconditions are less important than “careful preparations.”

When pressed, Mr. Obama has said that “we will never take military options off the table” and that he would not give the United Nations “veto power” over deciding to strike nuclear facilities.

The harder question is how to force Iran to give up its uranium enrichment quickly, before it produces enough material to build a weapon — a threshold American and European intelligence officials say may be crossed fairly early in the next presidential term. Mr. McCain has been more vociferous in emphasizing that “we have to do whatever’s necessary” to stop Iran from obtaining a weapon. In 1994, when North Korea was at a similar stage in its nuclear weapons program, Mr. McCain said on “Meet the Press” on NBC that if diplomacy failed to shut down the country’s production facilities within months, “then yes, military air strikes would be called for.”

But in a post-Iraq world, Mr. McCain has been more circumspect. He no longer talks about “rogue state rollback,” the phrase he used in 2000 to describe a strategy of undermining governments like those in North Korea, Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Mr. McCain said in interviews last year and early this year that risking military action against Iran might be better than “living with an Iranian bomb.” Recently, he has expressed more interest in changing Iran’s behavior than changing the government, and has said that his Beach Boys ditty was a bad attempt at humor: “I wasn’t suggesting that we go around and declare war.”

But the main prescription Mr. McCain has offered relies on gradually escalating economic sanctions, the same path taken by the Bush administration. So far that strategy has been a complete failure: Iran has 3,800 centrifuges, up from a few hundred experimental centrifuges when the administration began, and enough, in theory, to make a bomb’s worth of fuel in a year.

Questions to both campaigns in the past few weeks have yielded another example of role reversal. While Mr. McCain seems willing to consider that Iran might someday be trusted to produce its own nuclear fuel, Mr. Obama does not. The director of foreign policy for the McCain campaign, Randy Scheunemann, said that if Iran was in compliance with United Nations resolutions, “it would be appropriate to consider” letting it produce uranium under inspection, which Iran has said is its right.

Mr. Obama’s position is closer to the zero-tolerance approach adopted by the Bush administration. “I do not believe Iran should be enriching uranium or keeping centrifuges,” he said in an e-mail message passed on by aides.

Mr. Obama does seem more willing to dangle in front of the Iranians a “grand bargain” that would spell out benefits — diplomatic recognition, an end to sanctions — as a reward for halting its enrichment of uranium and allowing full inspections of the country. Richard J. Danzig, considered a candidate to be secretary of defense in an Obama administration, said Mr. Obama was willing to “put out a more positive side to the agenda to lead the Iranians toward making the right choices here.”

But Mr. Obama has also been more specific in describing the kind of sanctions he might reach for if the Iranians continue on the current path. “If we can prevent them from importing the gasoline that they need, and the refined petroleum products, that starts changing their cost-benefit analysis,” he said.

Some experts have counseled caution about such an approach, one that the Bush administration has stopped short of taking. A blockade, however, could constitute an act of war, and most experts believe Iran could respond in kind by cutting off oil exports, increasing prices and leading to shortages.

When to Intervene

While Mr. McCain reminds audiences that he vowed to do whatever it took to win in Iraq, he has been extraordinarily reluctant when it comes to the war in Afghanistan to advocate cross-border attacks into Pakistan, even though top military commanders have publicly said that is a prerequisite to victory. Mr. McCain has dismissed Mr. Obama’s advocacy of military action inside Pakistan as unwise, saying his rival does not appreciate how Pakistanis would react to an incursion by an ally, even into ungovernable territory Pakistan itself has never really controlled.

That was Mr. Bush’s view as well until July, when he issued secret orders allowing American Special Operations forces to conduct ground incursions into Pakistan, to keep insurgents from forming a safe haven. Mr. McCain has not condemned Mr. Bush’s action, but he has suggested that such operations should never be discussed in public and that Mr. Obama had made a rookie’s mistake by raising the possibility.

“The last thing we should be doing is telegraphing to Pakistan that we are going to violate their sovereignty,” Mr. Scheunemann said last week, when asked if Mr. McCain was opposed to military action over the border, or just opposed to talking about it. “Senator Obama’s stubborn insistence on publicly threatening to attack targets in Pakistan and limit military assistance is swagger, not statesmanship.”

Mr. Obama has frequently said he would send American personnel over the border to kill leaders of Al Qaeda. In his speech at the Democratic convention, Mr. Obama accused Mr. McCain of focusing on the wrong war — Iraq — and he vowed to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants.

But American policy since the attacks of Sept. 11 has backed hunting down Qaeda members anywhere, including inside Pakistan. A harder question is whether to go into Pakistan to hunt down Taliban or other militant groups using the sanctuary to mount attacks against Americans in Afghanistan or to strike the Pakistani government. On that question, Mr. Obama has been ambiguous, and his campaign has declined to clarify his statements.

Humanitarian Aid

When it comes to sending troops to protect the oppressed, it is Mr. Obama who has sounded a lot more like an interventionist than Mr. McCain.

Mr. McCain has long been a skeptic of sending American troops on humanitarian quests — whether for peacekeeping, peacemaking or missions that morphed from one to the other. He has reminded voters that he opposed military interventions in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia in the 1990s. He has often asked what good American troops can do in a single year when the conflict they are parachuting into has roiled for centuries, and he has often demanded to see an exit strategy before troops were committed.

Mr. Obama has praised what the United Nations calls a “responsibility to protect,” a doctrine that elevates aiding oppressed populations over respecting national borders. Mr. McCain has agreed, but both men have emphasized the need for case-by-case judgment.

In Foreign Affairs, Mr. Obama laid out a position that is the opposite of President Bush’s attitude in 2000 but sounds much like his attitude now. Mr. Obama wrote that he would use the military to “support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations or confront mass atrocities.” But he cited the first President Bush as the example to follow in gaining “the clear support and participation of others.”

In a debate in early October, Mr. Obama said that in Darfur the United States “could be providing logistical support, setting up a no-fly zone, at relatively little cost to us” if it had help from other nations. But when pressed, Mr. Obama’s aides said that he would be hesitant to commit American ground troops, who are in short supply because of the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan.
 

Dealing With Great Powers

Within hours of the Russian attack on Georgia in August, Mr. McCain was on the phone to his foreign policy advisers, seeking to calibrate the right response. It was a critical moment for a man who has surrounded himself with members of both warring camps in the Republican Party — the neoconservatives nursing their wounds after Iraq went bad, and the pragmatists who rose again in Mr. Bush’s second term.

“He had people telling him, ‘John, you want to think about the long term — we need the Russians on Iran, and the Georgians sort of invited this,’ ” a friend who talked to him in that period said. But in the end, Mr. McCain stepped out with a strong defense of Georgia, while Mr. Obama issued a more even-handed statement, calling for all sides to return to the uneasy status quo that had prevailed in South Ossetia.

While Mr. Obama’s reaction was much closer to the Bush administration’s, Mr. McCain seized on the moment to portray Mr. Obama as weak. Mr. McCain’s friends say his criticism of Russia was a direct outgrowth of his prisoner-of-war experience and his cold war upbringing. He regularly reminds voters than when he looks into the eyes of Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, he sees three letters: K.G.B.

The difference has also played out in how Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama have embraced a proposal by four prominent cold warriors — former Senator Sam Nunn, former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, and former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger — toward reducing the American nuclear arsenal to zero. Both candidates have said they support the goal, but Mr. McCain has sounded less enthusiastic, saying he would reduce nuclear weapons “to the lowest level we judge necessary.” Many conservatives also object to deep cuts in the arsenal, saying that could harm the country’s ability to remain the world’s dominant superpower and encourage nuclear challengers to build up to American levels.

By contrast, Mr. Obama, who was only 28 when the Berlin Wall fell, has argued that unless the United States and Russia radically reduce their stockpiles, they will never persuade smaller nations like Iran and North Korea to forgo their nuclear weapons programs.

Both men say they share the goal of keeping the United States the most powerful nation on earth. Mr. McCain emphasizes hard power first, though his advisers say that on global warming, among other issues, he has shown a flexibility that President Bush rarely demonstrated. More than any previous presidential candidate, Mr. Obama has emphasized the idea of soft power — the ability to lead by moral example and nonmilitary action — and his challenge if elected, his advisers acknowledge, is to convince the world that an untested young senator also has a steely edge.

    Rivals Split on U.S. Power, but Ideas Defy Easy Labels, NYT, 23.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/us/politics/23policy.html?hp

CORRECTED: Obama Lead on McCain Grows to 12 Points
 

October 23, 2008
Filed at 3:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

(Restores dropped work :lost in paragraph 7: Zogby said McCain, 72, appeared to have lost the traction...)

By Andrew Quinn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama's lead over Republican rival John McCain has grown to 12 points in the U.S. presidential race, with crucial independent and women voters increasingly moving to his side, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

With less than two weeks before the November 4 election, Obama leads McCain 52 percent to 40 percent among likely voters in the latest three-day tracking poll, which had a margin of error of 2.9 points.

Obama has made steady gains over the last four days and has tripled his lead on McCain in the past week of polling.

"Obama's expansion is really across the board," pollster John Zogby said. "It seems to be among almost every demographic group."

The Illinois senator saw his lead among women -- who are expected to play a decisive role in this election -- increase to 18 points from 16 points on Wednesday.

And independent voters, who have been the target of intense campaign efforts by both sides, have now swung behind Obama by a 30-point margin, 59 percent to 29 percent.

Zogby said McCain, 72, appeared to have lost the traction he won after the third and final presidential debate last week.

"McCain can still try to turn it around, but he has to find focus," Zogby said, adding that economic issues, which dominated the campaign amid turmoil in the credit, housing and financial markets, still appeared to be working in Obama's favor.

Other recent national polls have given Obama a narrower lead, but Zogby said he was confident in his sampling methods.

The latest poll showed a continued erosion of McCain's support even among his "base" voters.

While Obama wins the backing of 86 percent of Democrats, only 81 percent of Republicans back the Arizona senator -- down from figures in the low 90s immediately after the Republican national convention in early September.

Obama holds a 6-point lead among men, 48 percent to 42 percent, while white voters -- who had been among McCain's core support groups -- now only back McCain by a 2-point margin.

Independent Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr held relatively steady at 2 percent and 1 percent respectively. Three percent of voters said they remained undecided, unchanged from Wednesday.

The rolling tracking poll surveyed 1,208 likely voters in the presidential election. In a tracking poll, the most recent day's results are added while the oldest day's results are dropped to monitor changing momentum.

The U.S. president is determined by who wins the Electoral College, which has 538 members apportioned by population in each state and the District of Columbia. Electoral votes are allotted on a winner-take-all basis in all but two states, which divide them by congressional district.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

    CORRECTED: Obama Lead on McCain Grows to 12 Points, NYT, 23.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-us-usa-politics-poll.html

McCain in New Hampshire Emphasizing Taxes

October 23, 2008
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

Senator Barack Obama on Wednesday dismissed Republican criticisms that he lacks the experience to face an unexpected international crisis early in his presidency, saying the next president will be tested, no matter who is elected on Nov. 4.

In recent days, the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, has seized on comments from Mr. Obama’s running mate, Senator Joseph Biden Jr., predicting “an international crisis, a generated crisis” to test Mr. Obama’s strength and character. For Republicans, Mr. Biden’s comments offered a chance to pivot away from the economy and highlight their candidate’s military background and national-security experience.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Obama elaborated on Mr. Biden’s larger point while seeming to chide the language the vice presidential candidate had employed.

“I think that Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes, but I think that his core point is that the next administration’s going to be tested regardless of who it is,” Mr. Obama said. “The next administration’s going to be inheriting a whole host of really big problems.”

Mr. Obama also pushed back against Republicans who have equated his tax proposals with socialism. Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, said Mr. Obama wanted to “redistribute the wealth” in America, to the detriment of small businesses.

“It’s not a very plausible argument that he’s making right now,” Mr. Obama said, referring to Mr. McCain’s economic critique, “and I think it’s an indication that they have run out of ideas.”

As Mr. Obama campaigned in the swing state of Virginia on Wednesday, Senator John McCain returned to New Hampshire, hoping to reignite his presidential campaign in the state that handed him much-needed victory in this year’s primary.

“I know I can count on you again to come from behind,” Mr. McCain told a crowd in Manchester.

It is Mr. McCain’s second day campaigning in a state that supported Democrats during the 2004 presidential election. He spent Tuesday holding rallies in Pennsylvania, and on Wednesday he made a play for New Hampshire’s four electoral votes before traveling to events in Ohio.

“It doesn’t matter what the pundits think or how confident my opponent is,” Mr. McCain said in his speech. “The people of New Hampshire make their own decisions, and more than once, they’ve ignored the polls and the pundits, and brought me across the finish line first.”

Mr. McCain once again homed in on economic issues. He criticized Senator Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on Americans with more than $250,000 in taxable income, saying the Democratic nominee’s economic plans would hurt small businesses, weaken the dollar and widen the federal deficit.

He said Mr. Obama’s promises to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans would amount to “just another government giveaway” for lower income Americans who pay little or no income taxes. Mr. McCain said he would reduce taxes on businesses and capital gains and increase the child tax credit.

“My tax cut is the real thing,” Mr. McCain said.

Both candidates are focusing on the flagging economy as the presidential race enters its final 13 days before the November election. Mr. Obama is holding rallies on Wednesday in Virginia, and on Tuesday he convened an economic panel in Palm Beach, Fla., where he moderated a discussion featuring governors from Democratic swing states and business leaders supporting his campaign.

In returning to New Hampshire, Mr. McCain was coming back to friendly territory where he salvaged his 2008 presidential campaign. After coming in fourth place in the winter’s Iowa caucuses, Mr. McCain pulled off a five-point win over Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts in the New Hampshire primaries, reviving his presidential bid at a crucial moment.

Jennifer Donahue, political director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, said Mr. McCain’s appearance Wednesday could give him traction in a state where voters are resistant to advertising and more receptive to face-to-face contact with candidates.

“He’s seeing a place that has given him a chance twice before when he was left for dead,” Ms. Donahue said in a telephone interview. “If you’re looking at a map where you’re 10 points down nationally, and very few states are looking rosy or red, you do come back to New Hampshire and try to close the deal.”

Dean Spiliotes, a New Hampshire political analyst, said the state seemed to be leaning toward Mr. Obama, and he questioned whether one campaign event could put New Hampshire into Mr. McCain’s column. But he said Mr. McCain himself could reap some dividends from the appearance.

“McCain seems to come back here whenever he feels that he needs to recapture his mojo,” Mr. Spiliotes said. “He seems to get energized. He seems to come out of here more focused.”

    McCain in New Hampshire Emphasizing Taxes, NYT, 23.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/us/politics/23campaign.html?hp

Reporter's Notebook

After a Year on the Road, Obama Is Changing His Tempo

October 22, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POWELL

ROANOKE, Va. — Where’s Miles Davis? Who kidnapped Elvis?

Up there on the riser in the Virginia arena, there is this careful guy reading from a teleprompter and keeping his tone not exactly monotone but not exactly soaring, and he is repeating more or less the same lines that he read the night before and the same lines he will read the day after.

Once, the artist formerly known as Barack Obama, the slim, smooth-faced fellow with the close-cropped hair and the trumpet of a voice would riff on 14 varieties of hope and propel crowds higher and higher until he sent them spinning out into the night ready to change the world. Teleprompters were for the earthbound.

Now this candidate, with noticeably more gray flecking his hair, is talking about “the changes and reforms we need.” He goes on about “a new era of responsibility and accountability on Wall Street and in Washington.” He hankers for “common-sense regulations to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again.”

“Bottom-up growth,” he promises brightly.

What happened to the “fierce urgency of now”?

It is tempting, in contrasting the Obama of a year ago with the presidential candidate of today, to conclude that Miles Davis has turned himself into Barry Manilow. That is not quite the case; he still draws crowds — 100,000 in St. Louis on Saturday — that would warm a rocker’s heart. And his words can still soar, as when he and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton formed a campaign duet Monday in Florida. But this Mr. Obama is a consciously, carefully, intentionally more grounded one, and a touch duller for the metamorphosis.

The slow muting of Mr. Obama’s rhetorical dial, particularly noticeable as world markets gyrate and unemployment spikes, speaks to a candidate who has run a rigorously disciplined campaign. His goal a year ago was to soar while rivals still cast their eyes down; now he must convince voters that he can walk just a step or two ahead of them, and so help navigate treacherous ground.

Hope is about paying the mortgage.

“He is intent on making a very pointed and precise case,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist. “We are offering a solid leader with a sober vision.”

At his most effective, this 47-year-old Democrat forces everyone — his Republican rival, his aides, the voters — to adapt to his tempo. So Mr. McCain entered each debate frowning, scoffing and tossing pugnacious roundhouses; Mr. Obama, playing with a grin, slipped to this side and to that, reframing questions, fighting on his terms.

The Obama of the campaign trail is at once more prosaic and perhaps more proficient. Early this year, when his appearances were more happening than rally, one could count on a constant: Someone would scream, “I love you, Obama!”

And Mr. Obama would, almost without looking up, answer quickly, “I love you back.”

Then the McCain campaign began running commercials portraying Mr. Obama as a separated-at-birth celebrity brother of Paris Hilton.

Shouts of “I love you” went unrequited this past weekend.

Mr. Obama is of two minds about the artifice of politics. Last spring he often resisted the impulse to pretend he was just folks; he held tight to his gerunds. And, slender fellow though he is, he refused to gorge on the artery-clogging sausage and sweets found on the campaign trail.

But to listen in Roanoke last weekend was to hear him backstroking in the regional accent pool. “We went to this din-ah,” he told the crowd, sounding a bit like a fellow who wandered down from the Appalachian Mountains. “Y’know, I lahk some sweet potato pie.”

And a little later: “I don’t think it’s right,” said the Harvard-trained lawyer. “In fact, it ain’t right.”

No indeedy.

Mr. Obama rarely pushes down hard on the base pedal on race. History suffuses his campaign; there is no need to make explicit what is so evident. Black crowds, from Fayetteville, N.C., to North Philadelphia, recognize precisely the historical narrative playing out before their eyes.

As Mr. Obama roams the whiter hinterlands of Missouri, Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina, he as often travels with a white companion — particularly those popular among the white working class — Governors Ted Strickland of Ohio and Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, and Senators Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jim Webb of Virginia.

He is just like you, they tell audiences. He grew up middle class. He is a father and a husband. Their talks can be quite frank. From time to time, though, words strain at the bounds of what the eye can see. So Mr. Webb, a red-haired, proudly Scots-Irish pol with a John Wayne cadence, introduced Mr. Obama in Roanoke and began: He’s one of you.

Mr. Webb offered a complicated formula that involved putting to the side Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father, then tracing the lineage of Mr. Obama’s white mother, who was born in Kansas to parents whose grandparents came from Kentucky and whose ancestors somewhere in their wanderings from Ireland and Scotland presumably settled for a spell in southwestern Virginia.

Mr. Webb finished with a broad smile. He has divined the backwoods white bonafides of an urbane, mixed-race Chicagoan.

“They say he’s not like you.” He shook his head, sternly. “Barack Obama is just like you.”

The crowd puzzled for a second, then clapped at his effort.

On Tuesday in Lakewood, Fla., Mr. Obama held a “jobs summit” with Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, and Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. The crowd tensed, pulsed, here he comes, that man who makes so many hearts leap.

“Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”

No he can’t, not today. The candidate wags his head and asked, politely, for silence. “No cheerleading. We have some serious business to do.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Miami.

    After a Year on the Road, Obama Is Changing His Tempo, NYT, 22.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/us/politics/22obama.html

McCain Fights to Keep Crucial Blue State in Play

October 22, 2008
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and JEFF ZELENY

MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — People are scratching their heads: Why is Senator John McCain here?

Senator Barack Obama has a double-digit lead in recent Pennsylvania polls. Senator John Kerry beat President Bush here in 2004. The previous three Democratic presidential candidates won, too. And this year there are 1.2 million more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state.

But in these frantic last weeks of the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain has lavished time and money on this now deep-blue state — he made three stops here on Tuesday — as if his political life depended on it. And, from his campaign’s point of view, it does.

“We need to win Pennsylvania on Nov. 4, and with your help — with your help — we’re going to win!” Mr. McCain shouted to the crowd in his first appearance of the day, at a manufacturing plant in Bensalem, north of Philadelphia, where he said that Mr. Obama would raise their taxes and was too untested to handle an international crisis.

Mr. McCain’s strategists insisted that the state and its 21 electoral votes were within reach and crucial to what they acknowledge is an increasingly narrow path to victory. They say that their own polls show Mr. McCain only seven or eight percentage points behind Mr. Obama. (The state polls that show Mr. Obama with a double-digit lead, all conducted in recent weeks, include surveys by Marist, Quinnipiac, Rasmussen, SurveyUSA and The Allentown Morning Call.)

Mr. McCain’s strategists argue that their candidate has a dual appeal: to the pro-gun working-class voters in the western coal country, many of whom supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the Democratic primary, and to independents and moderates in the swing counties around Philadelphia.

“When we look at our numbers, we think we’re competitive here,” Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s closest adviser, told reporters in Harrisburg on Tuesday. He added, “We would like to get as many Clinton supporters as we can.”

Another reason for Mr. McCain’s focus on Pennsylvania may be the shrinking electoral map, as Mr. Obama’s dominance leaves Mr. McCain with fewer and fewer competitive states to campaign in, and the need to avoid another embarrassing concession like Michigan, which the campaign abandoned early this month.

Conceding Pennsylvania two weeks before the election would be too much an admission of failure, said G. Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, where Mr. McCain appeared before a raucous rally of 7,000 people with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, in September.

“I think it psychologically devastates the entire national campaign if they decide they’re going to pull up stakes and walk away,” Mr. Madonna said.

One of McCain’s senior strategists, Charles Black, said that the campaign had fared better in Pennsylvania than in any other blue state in recent months, and that Mr. McCain was a different candidate than President Bush, who waged a long and expensive battle here four years ago. “Bush came close here, but he did badly in the Philadelphia suburbs,” Mr. Black said, arguing that Mr. McCain’s old “maverick” label would have greater appeal in those suburbs, even though Mr. McCain has run a traditional Republican general election campaign.

Philadelphia is one of the only major cities in the country where Mr. McCain’s advertising campaign is anywhere near as voluminous as that of Mr. Obama’s. But even there, he lags nonetheless. On Tuesday, Mr. McCain effectively reduced his advertising campaigns in five other states — Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Wisconsin — in what Democrats suspected was an effort to divert resources to a more robust advertising effort here (though the savings from those moves had yet to show up in the state as of Tuesday night).

Mr. McCain’s advisers have contended that they do not expect white voters to reject Mr. Obama, of Illinois, simply because he is black. When Mike DuHaime, the campaign’s political director, was asked in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday what effect he thought race would play in Pennsylvania, he replied, “I hope there is none.”

Mr. DuHaime rejected comments made last week by a Pennsylvania Democrat, Representative John P. Murtha, who told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, speaking of his home base, that “there is no question that Western Pennsylvania is a racist area.”

Mr. McCain referenced Mr. Murtha’s comments in his third stop of the day, at Robert Morris University here, when he said, “I think you may have noticed that Senator Obama’s supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately.” As the crowd booed, Mr. McCain became tangled up in the rest of his remarks. “And you know, I couldn’t agree with them more,” he said, to silence, and then wandered around in a verbal thicket before finally managing to say, “I could not disagree with those critics more; this is a great part of America.”

Mr. Obama, who was in Florida on Tuesday, had no immediate plans to return to Pennsylvania in coming days, perhaps the most telling sign that his strategists were comfortable with his position there. But Democratic officials in the state said they had been urging the Obama campaign to send the senator back there at least once more before Election Day to shore up support.

An aggressive ground game for Mr. Obama, meanwhile, is under way in all corners of Pennsylvania, where hundreds of campaign workers and tens of thousands of volunteers were manning 80 field offices in what Democrats described as the largest organizational effort in state history.

Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said the voter registration edge was about twice as much as the party enjoyed in the 2004 presidential race. But even with that edge, he said, history suggested that the state would remain close until the final moment. Lyndon B. Johnson was the only Democratic presidential candidate in 50 years to capture more than 51 percent of the vote.

“I’m always cautious about Pennsylvania, but there seems to be something different about this whole effort,” Mr. Casey said in an interview on Tuesday. “The dynamic has changed dramatically, not just around the country, but in particular in Pennsylvania, because of the confluence of the economic situation.”

After spending last weekend reaching out to undecided voters on a Casey family bus tour across the state, Mr. Casey said the skepticism among older voters toward Mr. Obama had started to fall away after they saw the two candidates side by side at the debates.

“There were some people, a certain percentage of undecided voters, who had not seen them both on the same stage,” Mr. Casey said. “It definitely moved some older voters into his column.”

Still, Democratic officials in the state said they did not believe that Pennsylvania was absolutely locked up for Mr. Obama. Party leaders are not relying on polling, in case voters are not telling pollsters the truth, but rather on neighbor-to-neighbor efforts to identify supporters.
 

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Moon Township, Pa., and Jeff Zeleny from Lake Worth, Fla. Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting from Washington.

    McCain Fights to Keep Crucial Blue State in Play, NYT, 22.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/us/politics/22pennsylvania.html?hp

Sour Note For American Muslims In Election Campaign

October 21, 2008
Filed at 1:00 p.m. ET
By REUTERS
The New York Times

CHICAGO (Reuters) - These are uneasy times for America's Muslims, caught in a backwash from a presidential election campaign where the false notion that Barack Obama is Muslim has been seized on by some who link Islam with terrorism.

The Democratic White House candidate, who would be the first black U.S. president and whose middle name is Hussein, is a Christian. Son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, he spent part of his childhood in largely Muslim Indonesia.

The idea Obama is Muslim has circulated on the Internet for months, presented by some as a fact to reinforce the position that Obama is not a suitable candidate for the White House.

Not since the election of John Kennedy as the first Catholic U.S. president in 1960 has the faith of a White House hopeful generated so much distortion, said about 100 "concerned scholars" and others who have signed an October 7 proclamation aimed at countering Islamophobia they say is on the rise.

In recent weeks:

-- More than 20 million video disc copies of a film called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" were included as advertising supplements in newspapers across the country, many in battleground states where Obama is in a close fight with Republican candidate John McCain. The film, distributed by a private group unaffiliated with the McCain campaign, features suicide bombers, children being trained with guns, and a Christian church said to have been defiled by Muslims.

-- A city council candidate in Irvine, California, who is Muslim convert, said he got a telephone call saying "I want to cut your head off just like all the other Muslims deserve," the Los Angeles Times reported.

-- A mosque in a suburb of Chicago, Obama's home city, was vandalized four times in less than two months, with anti-Islamic messages left on its outer walls, and windows and doors broken.

-- An account of an Ohio rally for McCain running mate Sarah Palin, filed by Al Jazeera and posted on YouTube, shows a woman saying "he is not Christian, and this is a Christian nation," and a second woman saying she opposes Obama because of "the whole Muslim thing. A lot of people have forgotten about 9/11 (the September 11, 2001, attacks). It's a little unnerving."

"It is frightening to see at this point the label 'Arab' or 'Muslim' being used de facto as an insult," said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R).

There is a feeling, he said, that hate crimes increase as Islamophobia rises in public discourse, including that going on peripherally in this election campaign.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican crossing party lines to endorse Obama on Sunday, made a demand for tolerance when he referred to Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors.

"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?" he asked on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion 'he's a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.' This is not the way we should be doing it in America," Powell said, while making clear such sentiment was not coming from McCain himself.

Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population of 305 million, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, though some believe that number is low. About a third of the world's population is Christian, another 21 percent Muslim.

Daniel Varisco, anthropology chair at Hofstra University, said he wrote the "statement of concerned scholars" after seeing Islamophobia on the rise.

"The attempts to label Senator Obama a terrorist or rhyme his name with Osama (bin Laden) or accent his middle name (Hussein), as well as false claims about his being sworn into (U.S. Senate) office on a Koran, demonstrate how near to the surface anti-Islamic sentiment is in the United States," he said.

Circulating such falsehoods "avoids playing the race card directly but at the expense of Muslims," he said.

The Clarion Fund, which distributed the film "Obsession," through a huge newspaper advertising buy, says it is an independent education group focused "on the most urgent threat of radical Islam" and that placing the film in the hands of readers in battleground election states was an attempt to grab attention.

Spokesman Gregory Ross said, "we have no political or religious affiliations to any group whatsoever."

The Islamic Circle of North America has meanwhile opened an offensive of sorts -- a campaign promoting Islam and seeking converts. It said it placed advertising signs inside 1,000 cars in New York's subway network.

In Chicago the group had a number of city buses adorned top to bottom with pro-Islam advertising, headlined "Islam: The Way of Life of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad."

Rehab of the Chicago C.A.I.R. office said that kind of approach may work to a limited degree, "but really the crux of the issue is not learning about the details of a religion but rather interacting with and understanding that the average Muslim is no different than yourself."

(Editing by Andrew Stern and Frances Kerry)

    Sour Note For American Muslims In Election Campaign, NYT, 21.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-us-usa-politics-muslims.html

Stateside

In Bush Stronghold, Obama Pulls Even With McCain

October 21, 2008
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Lorie McCoy, 40, a flight attendant, was bustling out of a library here the other day, loaded down with books. She is worried about how an upended economy might affect the airline industry, and so she is also taking classes.

“I’m looking for a better, higher-paying job,” Ms. McCoy said. For that reason, she said, she is voting for Senator Barack Obama.

“He is speaking to a lot of people’s issues,” she said. “With all these factory closings, he’s speaking to the middle class.”

It is through voters like Ms. McCoy, who moved to North Carolina eight years ago, that Mr. Obama has achieved a milestone: He is now running neck and neck with his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, in the state, and is even slightly ahead in some polls.

This once-red state is now a raging battleground, along with a few others where Mr. Obama has sought to expand his electoral map.

“For a Republican to be tied at this point in the election in North Carolina is unfathomable,” said Hunter Bacot, a political scientist at Elon University, which Gov. Sarah Palin, Mr. McCain’s running mate, visited last week.

No Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina since Jimmy Carter did so in 1976. The state has long been a bastion of cultural conservatism; it was in Greensboro last week that Ms. Palin said she loved visiting the “pro-America” parts of the country.

But this is a new landscape, even from four years ago, when President Bush defeated Senator John Kerry (and his running mate, John Edwards, of North Carolina) by 12 percentage points in the state.

The turnabout can be traced to an influx of new voters and a change in demographics; a slowing of the state’s economy and the collapse of the nation’s financial system; Mr. Obama’s extensive ground organization, huge financial advantage and amount spent on television (seven to one over Mr. McCain); the state’s large population of blacks and students; and Mr. McCain’s neglect of the state.

The relative position of the candidates was evident in their visits to the state last weekend.

Mr. McCain spoke to a few thousand people in Concord, in Cabarrus County, which is an exurb of Charlotte and which voted lopsidedly in 2004 for Mr. Bush (67 percent to 33 percent). On a sunny Saturday morning, Mr. McCain’s audience seemed made up mainly of his base. They cheered loudly when he mentioned Ms. Palin and “Joe the Plumber,” the Ohio man who has become a symbol of Mr. McCain’s newly fashioned economic message, that Mr. Obama’s statement about wanting to “spread the wealth around” revealed him to be a socialist.

Mr. McCain had spoken briefly the week before in Wilmington (also Bush country), but until then he had not visited the state since the May primaries. His plea was blunt: “We have to win the state of North Carolina, and I’m counting on you to do it.”

On Sunday, in a fortuitous bit of timing, Mr. Obama spoke in Fayetteville, dense with military families, in his first appearance after being endorsed by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Mr. Obama’s visit to the area, which voted marginally for Mr. Bush in 2004, was his sixth trip to the state since the primaries, and he was reaching beyond his base.

“The men and women from Fayetteville and all across America who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag,” Mr. Obama said.

The state is one of the fastest-growing in the country, becoming home to more immigrants as well as transplants from other states who tend to be more moderate than the natives. This means both a less conservative electorate and a labor force that is growing faster than the supply of jobs.

“Somewhere, former conservative icon Senator Jesse Helms must be turning over in his grave at the prospect of Obama winning North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes,” James Bennett, the managing editor of the local newspaper, The Independent Tribune, wrote after Mr. McCain’s visit. “The Republican stronghold that elected Helms to five terms in the Senate no longer exists.”

Social conservatives were never thrilled with Mr. McCain in the first place; analysts say that Ms. Palin initially gave him a boost here, but now she does not appear to be drawing support from beyond the base.

Polls show that the economy is by far the most important issue for voters.

Tom Jensen, a Democratic pollster in Raleigh, said the McCain camp was “counting on the conservative view prevailing over the economy, which is why they haven’t spent any money here, which is why it’s gotten as difficult for them as it has.”

Parts of the state, especially around the affluent Research Triangle Park area, show strong economic growth. But others are still suffering from a decline in textiles and furniture making. The state’s unemployment rate hit 7 percent in September, its highest level in six years.

Even the state’s banking industry is on edge. The recent merger of Wachovia, based in Charlotte, with Wells Fargo has created great uncertainty, with possible layoffs in the offing.

“The Bush years have been very tough on North Carolina, especially the trade policies,” said Marc Farinella, Mr. Obama’s state director here. “And that’s why this race has become so competitive.”

As the economy has slowed, the Obama campaign has also stuck to its game plan, building a corps of 17,000 volunteers, registering voters and now focusing on getting them out to vote.

While Mr. McCain was speaking at the arena in Concord, a small Obama field office a few miles away bustled with volunteers. They made hundreds of phone calls; others picked up computerized voter lists to canvass; others enter information collected during the day to give up-to-date print-outs to canvassers the next day.

The fruits of their labors are beginning to show. The state registered 600,000 new voters this year, 48 percent of them Democrats, 21 percent Republicans, the rest unaffiliated. In early voting, which began Thursday, more than 114,000 people had gone to the polls — 64 percent of them Democrats, 21 percent Republicans and 15 percent unaffiliated.

Among the early voters in Greensboro on Friday was Maria Adams, 46, who owns an employment agency. She stayed in line even after being told she would have to wait an hour and a half. “It’s worth it,” she said. “McCain is too hardline and too old and too erratic. He’s out of touch with what matters today, which is the economy.”

Mike Duhaime, the national political director for the McCain campaign, said he still felt confident of winning North Carolina. Democrats who win statewide offices are “more centrist” than Mr. Obama, Mr. Duhaime said.

Representative Robin Hayes, a Republican who represents this area and is facing a tough re-election fight, said North Carolina was “closer than they want it to be,” and for all of the time and money that Mr. Obama has invested here, “he still can’t close the deal.”

“There are significant doubts in people’s minds,” Mr. Hayes said. And indeed, several voters expressed such doubts, picking up on messages put out in McCain campaign robocalls and through false Internet rumors about Mr. Obama’s background and affiliations.

Mr. Hayes spoke to the crowd in the arena before Mr. McCain took the stage, and drew on the local pastime to offer encouragement. “If you’re a Nascar fan, and I’m sure you are,” he said, “all you got to win is the last lap.”

    In Bush Stronghold, Obama Pulls Even With McCain, NYT, 21.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/us/politics/21carolina.html

Obama Appeal Rises in Poll; No Gains for McCain Ticket

October 21, 2008
The New York Times
By MEGAN THEE

As voters have gotten to know Senator Barack Obama, they have warmed up to him, with more than half, 53 percent, now saying they have a favorable impression of him and 33 percent saying they have an unfavorable view. But as voters have gotten to know Senator John McCain, they have not warmed, with only 36 percent of voters saying they view him favorably while 45 percent view him unfavorably.

Even voters who are planning to vote for Mr. McCain say their enthusiasm has waned. In New York Times and CBS News polls conducted with the same respondents before the first presidential debate and again after the last debate, Mr. McCain made no progress in appealing to voters on a personal level, and he and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, had alienated some voters.

Personal appeal is an intangible element in voters’ decisions. Each voter has a personal reason for connecting with a candidate or not. But the percentage of those who hold a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama is up 10 points since last month. Opinion of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Obama’s running mate, is also up, to 50 percent last weekend from 36 percent in September.

In contrast, favorable opinion of Mr. McCain remained stable, and unfavorable opinion rose to 45 percent now from 35 percent in September. Mrs. Palin’s negatives are up, to 41 percent now from 29 percent in September.

Mr. Obama’s favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls. Mrs. Palin’s negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign.

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Sept. 21-24, with re-interviews completed Friday through Sunday of 518 adults, 476 of whom are registered voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus five percentage points for all adults and voters.

Among the voters who said their opinion of Mr. Obama had improved, many cited his debate performance, saying they liked his calm demeanor and the way he had handled the attacks on him from the McCain campaign.

Of those who said their opinion of Mr. McCain had been tarnished, many cited his attacks on his opponent, the choice of Ms. Palin as his running mate and his debate performance.

“Even though I am a Democrat, there was a strong possibility I would have voted for McCain,” said Yolanda Grande, 77, a Democrat from Blairstown, N.J. “What pushed me over the line was McCain’s choice of vice president. I just don’t think she is qualified to step in if anything happened to him.”

Marina Stefan contributed reporting.

    Obama Appeal Rises in Poll; No Gains for McCain Ticket, NYT, 21.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/us/politics/21poll.html?hp

In Fine Print, a Proliferation of Large Donors

October 21, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and GRIFF PALMER

Much of the attention on the record amounts of money coursing through the presidential race this year, including in Senator Barack Obama’s announcement on Sunday of his $150 million fund-raising haul in September, has focused on the explosion of small donors.

But there has been another proliferation on the national fund-raising landscape that was not fully apparent until the latest campaign finance reports were filed last week: people who have given tens of thousands of dollars at a time to help the candidates.

Enabled by the fine print in campaign finance laws, they have written checks that far exceed normal individual contribution limits to candidates, to joint fund-raising committees that benefit the candidates as well as their respective parties.

Many of these large donors come from industries with interests in Washington. A New York Times analysis of donors who wrote checks of $25,000 or more to the candidates’ main joint fund-raising committees found, for example, the biggest portion of money for both candidates came from the securities and investments industry, including executives at various firms embroiled in the recent financial crisis like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG.

The joint fund-raising committees have been utilized far more heavily this presidential election than in the past. Mr. Obama’s campaign has leaned on wealthy benefactors to contribute up to $33,100 at a time to complement his army of small donors over the Internet as he bypassed public financing for the general election. More than 600 donors contributed $25,000 or more to him in September alone, roughly three times the number who did the same for Senator John McCain.

And Mr. McCain’s campaign, which had not disclosed most of these donors until last week, has taken the concept to new levels, encouraging deep-pocketed supporters to write checks of more than $70,000, by adding state parties as beneficiaries of his fund-raising.

All told, each candidate has had about 2,000 people give $25,000 or more to his various joint fund-raising committees through September.

“What we’re seeing is an emphasis on the high-end check that we have not seen since the days of soft money,” said Anthony J. Corrado Jr., a campaign finance expert at Colby College in Maine.

The Times examination of donors who wrote checks of $25,000 or more through September found some notable differences in the industries from which Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain drew their largest contributions.

Compared with Mr. Obama, Mr. McCain drew a slightly larger percentage of his big-donor money from the financial industry, about a fifth of his total. The next biggest amount in large checks for Mr. McCain came from real estate and then donors who identified themselves as retired. With his emphasis on offshore drilling, Mr. McCain has also enjoyed heavy support from generous benefactors in the oil and gas industry, a group Mr. Obama drew relatively little from.

After the financial arena, Mr. Obama drew the most in checks of $25,000 or more from retirees and lawyers — Mr. McCain collected significantly less in large donations from lawyers — followed by those in real estate.

Mr. Obama also drew a significant amount from big givers in the entertainment industry, who contributed relatively little to Mr. McCain. In contrast, donations from the private equity and hedge fund industries accounted for a significantly greater amount of the giving from Mr. McCain’s largest donors, compared with Mr. Obama’s.

Certain companies were especially generous to a particular candidate. Three top executives of Merrill Lynch, for example, wrote checks of $28,500 each to Mr. McCain; among them was the chief executive, John A. Thain. A dozen employees at Goldman Sachs wrote checks of $25,000 or more to Mr. Obama.

Donations to these joint fund-raising committees have surged this election cycle, taking in nearly $300 million this year through September — with Mr. McCain collecting slightly more than Mr. Obama — compared with $69 million in 2004. Campaign finance watchdogs call it a worrisome trend, saying the heavy emphasis on such arrangements brings candidates one step further into the embrace of major donors.

“This is subverting the whole notion of candidate contribution limits,” said Steve Weissman, associate director for policy at the Campaign Finance Institute.

Individuals are normally limited to contributing $2,300 to presidential candidates for the primary and another $2,300 for the general election. But the joint fund-raising committees allow donors to enjoy the clout that comes with writing a single large check that can cover the maximum contributions to the candidates, as well as $28,500 to the national party. In Mr. McCain’s case, that check could also include $10,000 apiece for several state parties and $2,300 to a legal compliance fund for the general election. The money directed to the national and state parties can then be used to help the candidates under certain restrictions.

More than 1,800 people had donated $25,000 or more as of the end of September to Mr. McCain through his various “victory” committees, according to Federal Election Commission filings and data compiled by Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group. More than 300 people had contributed $50,000 or more.

As for Mr. Obama, about 2,000 people had donated $25,000 or more to his joint fund-raising committees through September, including more than 500 who have given $30,000 or more.

McCain finance officials introduced their main joint fund-raising committee, McCain Victory 2008, in the spring. Mr. McCain was still able to accept primary money, so money was divided between his primary campaign coffers, the Republican National Committee, several state parties and his compliance fund, for a maximum check of $70,100.

Mr. McCain is now taking public financing for the general election, but he has continued to raise money through his joint fund-raising committees, something that frustrates campaign finance watchdogs, because they argue that a goal of public financing is to get candidates out of the private money-raising business.

“It undermines the whole spirit of the system,” said David Arkush, director of Congress Watch at Public Citizen.

Indeed, Mr. McCain collected $10.6 million just last week for the Republican Party at an event in New York he headlined with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

The largest donors typically get V.I.P. treatment at fund-raisers, including dinner and a photo with the candidate.

Gordon V. Smith, a Maryland home builder, and his wife, Helen, gave $67,800 each to Mr. McCain this year and attended a fund-raiser at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Va. Mr. Smith was later invited to an intimate dinner for major donors with Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager. Mr. Smith, who said he was a staunch believer in free enterprise, called the meeting a “stroke” for big donors but said he had had a chance to offer some policy ideas. “Will the campaign talk to any donor? Even if you give 10 bucks, they’ll talk to you, but you might talk to a volunteer,” he said.

Arguably the biggest whales of all are the several dozen who contributed $70,000 or more to Mr. McCain. They included Marvin Gilliam, an executive at Cumberland Resources, a Virginia coal-mining company where several top officials made sizable contributions to Mr. McCain, as well as Mr. Gilliam’s wife, Marcia; Joe Ricketts, founder of the securities firm TD Ameritrade; and Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay and a prominent McCain surrogate, who contributed a total of $92,400, according to F.E.C. records, although some will apparently need to be refunded because of federal contribution limits.

The Obama Victory Fund funnels money to his campaign coffers and the Democratic National Committee. The largest check a donor could write for the primary and the general elections was $33,100. Mr. Obama also has a separate committee that distributes money to 18 battleground states.

More than 500 donors contributed more than $30,000 each to Mr. Obama. They included James E. Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy, a power company based in Charlotte, N.C.; Melanie Griffith, the actress; and John M. Noel, chief executive of Travel Guard, an affiliate of the insurance giant AIG.
 

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

    In Fine Print, a Proliferation of Large Donors, NYT, 21.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/us/politics/21donate.html?hp

Campaigns Barnstorm Into Crucial Swing States

October 21, 2008
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY

The campaigns of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain barnstormed into the crucial swing states of Colorado, Florida and Missouri on Monday as the presidential race headed toward its final two weeks ahead of the Nov. 4 election.

Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, is speaking at rallies in the suburbs of St. Louis and Kansas City on Monday while his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is giving speeches across Colorado. Republicans won both states in the 2004 presidential election, but polls this year have shown a dead heat or leads for Mr. Obama.

At a rally Monday morning in St. Charles, Mo., Mr. McCain stressed economic themes and hammered Mr. Obama’s tax plans, saying they would stifle small businesses. He again cited Joe the Plumber, an Ohio plumber who has become a campaign archetype in Republican rallies since Mr. McCain repeatedly invoked him during the third presidential debate.

“As Joe has reminded us all, America did not become the greatest nation on Earth by giving money to the government to spread the wealth around,” Mr. McCain told supporters, referring to a quotation from Mr. Obama.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama sought to ride the momentum from his record $150 million worth of fundraising in September and this weekend’s endorsement from former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, is scheduled to speak on Monday in Tampa and Orlando, where he and his former primary rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, are to make their first joint appearance since June.

In an interview on Monday’s The Today Show, Mr. Obama once again reminded his supporters that, despite a lead in national polls, “We do not let up.” He also provided a few new details of the Powell endorsement, saying that he had not spoken to Mr. Powell until after he had announced his support for Mr. Obama, and that Mr. Powell could play a role in an Obama administration.

“He will have a role as one of my advisers,” Mr. Obama said. “He’s already served in that function even before he endorsed me. Whether he wants to take a formal role, whether there’s something that’s a good fit for him, I think is something he and I would have to discuss.”

    Campaigns Barnstorm Into Crucial Swing States, NYT, 21.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/us/politics/21campaign.html?hp

Obama Recasts

the Fund-Raising Landscape

October 20, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

Senator Barack Obama’s announcement on Sunday of his record-shattering $150 million fund-raising total for September underscored just how much his campaign has upended standards for raising money in presidential campaigns.

His campaign has now raised more than $600 million, almost equaling what all the candidates from both major parties collected in private donations in 2004.

It is a remarkable ascent to previously unimagined financial heights — Mr. Obama’s September total more than doubled the record $66 million he collected in August — that has been cheered by some and decried by others concerned about the influence of money in politics. The impact on the way presidential campaigns are financed is likely to be profound, potentially providing an epitaph on the tombstone of the existing public finance system.

Campaign finance watchdog groups said Sunday that Mr. Obama’s September haul bolstered their arguments for the need to revamp the presidential public financing system to restore its relevancy. It is an effort that has recently faltered in Congress.

Democrats, though, may be reluctant to surrender the significant money-raising advantage they have developed over Republicans, saying that Mr. Obama, by cultivating millions of small donors over the Internet, has built what amounts to a parallel public financing system that is arguably more democratic.

“I think there’s going to be a fight inside the Democratic Party on this,” said David Donnelly, a director of Campaign Money Watch, a watchdog group.

In this election cycle, all of the major presidential candidates, except for former Senator John Edwards, opted out of the public financing system for the primary. Mr. Obama became the first major party candidate to bypass the public money for the general election since the system began in the 1970s, backing away from an earlier pledge to accept it if his opponent did as well. It was a move the campaign of Senator John McCain and campaign finance watchdog groups harshly criticized.

But any effort to fix the system would be complicated by loopholes that permit wealthy individuals and moneyed interests to exert outsize influence, including through 527 groups, which can accept unlimited contributions.

“If you locked me up in a room and said, ‘You fix it,’ I’m not sure there is a way,” said Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004 and a senior adviser for Mr. Edwards in the Democratic primary last year.

Tad Devine, a former senior strategist for Senator John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, said there were plenty of arguments that what Mr. Obama had done was healthy for the democratic process.

“What we’re going to have to figure out,” Mr. Devine said, “is why this is not only good for the Democratic Party but it’s good for the country.”

An examination of Mr. Obama’s intake in September lends credence to arguments by both sides. David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, said in a video message sent to supporters that Mr. Obama had 632,000 new donors in September, bringing the campaign’s total to 3.1 million. The average contribution, Mr. Plouffe said, was less than $100.

The full details of how the Obama campaign raised its money in September will not be available until Monday, when it files its official report with the Federal Election Commission. But a separate filing by the Obama Victory Fund, which is the campaign’s joint fund-raising operation with the Democratic National Committee, underscores that Mr. Obama has also been powered by major donors, many of them with interests in Washington, as well.

Mr. Obama’s joint money-raising committee, which can take in checks of more than $30,000 that are divided between the campaign and the D.N.C., collected $69 million in September. The fund funneled $32 million in September to the Obama campaign’s coffers and $26.5 million to the national committee.

The D.N.C., which can spend money on Mr. Obama’s behalf with certain restrictions, announced Sunday it collected nearly $50 million in September and had $27.4 million in cash on hand at the end of the month.

Coupled with his appeals to small donors over the Internet, Mr. Obama has maintained an aggressive, high-dollar fund-raising schedule. More than 600 people wrote checks of $25,000 or more to the Obama Victory Fund in September. They included Dwight Howard, the Orlando Magic basketball star; Andrea Jung, the chief executive of Avon; Gregory Brown, president of Motorola; and Charles E. Phillips Jr., president of Oracle.

McCain finance officials and other campaign finance experts initially anticipated that the Republican National Committee’s stockpile of cash and strong fund-raising, along with the $84 million Mr. McCain received in public financing, might be enough to stay within range of the Obama financial juggernaut.

The R.N.C. announced this month that it raised $66 million in September, which exceeded fund-raisers’ expectations, and officials said it had finished the month with about $77 million in the bank. But the Obama campaign has been outspending the McCain campaign on television by three-and-a-half-to-one, even with spending by the R.N.C. factored in, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which analyzes advertising spending.

    Obama Recasts the Fund-Raising Landscape, NYT, 20.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/us/politics/20donate.html?hp

Obama Lead Shrinks in National Poll

October 20, 2008
Filed at 1:14 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

THE POLL: CNN-Opinion Research Corp., national presidential race among likely voters

THE NUMBERS: Among likely voters Barack Obama 49 percent, John McCain 43 percent.

OF INTEREST: Obama's six percentage point lead over McCain occurred when three minor party candidates were included. This is down from his 11-point lead in the same poll taken Oct. 3-5. When the two candidates were matched exclusively, Obama led by 5 percentage points -- 51 percent to 46 percent.

Fifty-two percent of said that if elected McCain's policies would differ from those of his predecessor, President Bush. Forty-eight percent said his policies would not differ from Bush's.

DETAILS: Conducted Oct. 17-19 by telephone with 746 likely voters. The sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

    Obama Lead Shrinks in National Poll, NYT, 20.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Poll-2008-National.html

The Doctor’s World

Many Holes

in Disclosure of Nominees’ Health

October 20, 2008
The New York Times
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.

Fifteen days before the election, serious gaps remain in the public’s knowledge about the health of the presidential and vice-presidential nominees. The limited information provided by the candidates is a striking departure from recent campaigns, in which many candidates and their doctors were more forthcoming.

In past elections, the decisions of some candidates for the nation’s top elected offices to withhold health information turned out to have a significant impact after the information came to light. This year, the health issue carries extraordinary significance because two of the four nominees have survived potentially fatal medical problems that could recur.

If elected, Senator John McCain of Arizona, 72, the Republican nominee, would be the oldest man to be sworn in to a first term as president and the first cancer survivor to win the office. The scars on his puffy left cheek are cosmetic reminders of the extensive surgery he underwent in 2000 to remove a malignant melanoma.

Last May, his campaign and his doctors released nearly 1,200 pages of medical information, far more than the three other nominees. But the documents were released in a restricted way that leaves questions, even confusion, about his cancer.

A critical question concerns inconsistencies in medical opinions about the severity of his melanoma; if the classification of his melanoma is more severe, it would increase the statistical likelihood of death from a recurrence of the cancer.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, 65, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, had emergency surgery in 1988 for an aneurysm in an artery in his brain and elective surgery for a second one. His campaign released 49 pages of medical records to The New York Times late last week showing that he was healthy, but the documents did not indicate whether he had had a test in recent years to detect any new aneurysm.

The two other nominees are younger and apparently in good health, but less is known about their medical history. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, 47, the Democratic presidential nominee, released a one-page, undated letter from his personal physician in May stating that he was in “excellent” health. Late last week, his campaign released the results of standard laboratory tests and electrocardiograms from his checkups in June 2001, November 2004 and January 2007. The findings were normal.

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, 44, Mr. McCain’s running mate, has released no medical information.

There may be no serious problems with the health of any of the nominees. But absent fuller disclosure, there is no way for the electorate to know.

The health of the four nominees is a matter of concern because in the past a number of candidates, and in some cases their doctors and aides, have distorted, kept secret or spoken about the facts only at the last minute when medical events forced the issue. Examples include Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (depression), Senator Paul E. Tsongas (cancer), Senator Bill Bradley (heart rhythm abnormality) and, as a vice-presidential nominee, Dick Cheney (heart disease).

I am a physician who has covered the health of presidential candidates for 36 years. Since 1980, The Times has made it a practice to question nominees for president and other high political offices and, with their permission, their doctors about their health.

The Times has requested such interviews with Mr. Obama since last spring and with Mr. McCain and his doctors since March 2007. None were granted. More recently, The Times sent letters to all four nominees requesting interviews about their health with them and their doctors. None agreed.

The candidates’ health has drawn little attention for most of this long campaign season despite the importance of the issue. But since Mr. McCain selected Ms. Palin as his running mate in August, questions about his health have intensified. In recent weeks, more than 2,700 physicians have signed a petition that ran as an advertisement demanding that Mr. McCain fully release his health records; the petition is sponsored by Brave New Films, the company led by Robert Greenwald, a Hollywood filmmaker who has contributed $2,250 to Democratic candidates and has made a number of anti-McCain videos. Beyond the advertisement, Mr. McCain’s health has become the subject of both speculation and distortion on the Internet and other media.

The following is a summary of the publicly known medical information about all four nominees and the outstanding questions about each.
 

John McCain

Mr. McCain’s difficulty raising his arms and his sometimes awkward gait are remnants of severe, untreated injuries he suffered in Vietnam. Mr. McCain, a Navy pilot, broke both arms and his right knee when his jet was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. He experienced additional wounds while being tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner of war. Mr. McCain may eventually need joint replacements, according to his doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Mr. McCain has released more details about his health than the other three nominees, though he has done so in a phased way and has apparently not agreed to any extensive interviews about his health. A handful of reporters were allowed to view his records during his bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. Another group of reporters were permitted to see newer records last May. By not allowing reporters to interview him or his doctors extensively about his entire medical history, he has made it impossible to get a complete picture of his diagnoses and treatment.

In 1999, early in his first run for the presidency, Mr. McCain allowed a small number of reporters, including me, to review an estimated 1,500 pages of his medical records without photocopying or recording the information.

In doing so, Mr. McCain gave the public its broadest look at the psychological profile of a presidential candidate. He released psychological records about him that were amassed as part of a Navy project to gauge the health of former prisoners of war. Assessments were based on standard psychological tests and what Mr. McCain told his doctors after his release. The records mentioned that in 1968, about eight months after his capture and after some particularly brutal beatings from his North Vietnamese captors, Mr. McCain attempted suicide, trying to hang himself with his shirt.

The records and his doctors, whom I interviewed with the senator’s permission in 1999, said he had never been given a diagnosis of a mental health disorder or treated at the project’s center for a mental health disorder.

The records also showed that a surgeon removed a melanoma from Mr. McCain’s left shoulder in 1993. Melanomas can be a far more deadly form of skin cancer than the more common basal cell and other types.

In early August 2000, just as Mr. McCain’s rival George W. Bush was about to receive the Republican presidential nomination, Dr. John F. Eisold, the attending physician at the United States Capitol, detected two more melanomas, Mr. McCain’s second and third.

One on Mr. McCain’s left arm was determined to be the least risky type, in situ. But the one on his left temple was dangerous.

A few days after detection of the melanomas, Mr. McCain sought care for them at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. Mr. McCain’s campaign said this year that the left-temple melanoma was 2.2 millimeters at its thickest part and graded as Stage IIA on a scale in which Stage IV is the worst. Stage II meant that the melanoma had not spread into the lymph nodes. The number of melanomas is less significant than the thickness measured in the pathology assessment of any one of them.

Mr. McCain underwent extensive surgery on his face and neck for the melanoma on Aug. 19, 2000. Surgeons removed more than 30 lymph nodes, and pathologists then determined that all of them were cancer free.

In March 2007, as Mr. McCain was making his second bid for the Republican nomination, The Times began asking his campaign for permission to speak with the senator and his doctors, citing the history of such interviews.

On May 6, 2008, Jill Hazelbaker, a McCain spokeswoman, denied the requests, writing in an e-mail message that The Times was “not at the top of the list” and including a link to a Times editorial that had criticized Mr. McCain for not disclosing health information and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York for not disclosing financial records.

On May 23, Mr. McCain allowed a small pool of journalists, including three doctor-reporters, though none from The Times, to spend three hours reviewing a newer set of his Mayo Clinic records. That set, 1,173 pages, included records from 2000 to 2008 but none of the records made available in 1999. Again, the campaign did not allow the journalists to photocopy any documents.

Mr. McCain’s Mayo Clinic doctors answered selected reporters’ questions by telephone, but only for 45 minutes instead of the scheduled two hours. The McCain campaign did not allow New York Times reporters to ask questions in the teleconference.

The clinic doctors said that Mr. McCain was in good health and that no medical reason precluded him from fulfilling all the duties of president.

The doctors said that a fourth melanoma they detected on the left side of his nose in 2002 was also in situ, the least dangerous type. All four melanomas that Mr. McCain experienced were primary, or new, and there was no evidence that any of them had spread, the doctors said.

However, the reporters’ summary cited a report dated Aug. 9, 2000, from two pathologists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington who examined a biopsy of the melanoma taken from Mr. McCain’s left temple a few days earlier.

The Armed Forces pathologists suggested that the left-temple melanoma had spread from another melanoma, known as a metastasis or satellite lesion. “The vertical orientation of this lesion,” the report said, “with only focal epidermal involvement above it is highly suggestive of a metastasis of malignant melanoma and may represent a satellite metastasis of S00-9572-A,” which is the “skin, left temple, lateral” biopsy.

The pool report was by nature unable to provide a complete portrait of Mr. McCain’s recent medical history. It left several questions, including about the number of biopsies and when they were done. On Aug. 18, 2000, Dr. John D. Eckstein, Mr. McCain’s personal physician at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, noted in Mr. McCain’s records that there were two biopsies of the left temple. Dr. Eckstein’s note did not say where and when the biopsies were performed. The Armed Forces report cited one biopsy, so presumably a second was performed in Scottsdale. The Armed Forces pathologists said a melanoma had developed over a skin scar whose origin was unclear.

A skin lesion, not one of the four melanomas, had been removed from Mr. McCain’s left temple in 1996 and interpreted as being benign; some experts have speculated that it might have been misdiagnosed, and thus the origin of the 2000 melanoma.

The Armed Forces pathologists did not speak in the teleconference in May 2008, and questions raised by their report have remained unanswered. The selected reporters did not ask about that report, and the Mayo Clinic doctors did not discuss it. A complete Mayo pathology report was apparently not included in the pool summary.

In interviews, several melanoma experts questioned why the Mayo Clinic doctors had performed such extensive surgery, because the operation was usually reserved for treatment of Stage III melanoma, not Stage IIA.

On Aug. 18, 2000, the day before Mr. McCain’s operation, his surgeon, Dr. Michael L. Hinni, wrote in the records that he planned to do the extensive operation because of the size and location of Mr. McCain’s melanoma. In the teleconference in May 2008, Dr. Hinni explained that because the melanoma was two centimeters across he had to make “a 6-by-6-centimeter island of skin, a fairly sizable wound” to remove it.

It is not known whether the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale asked pathologists outside the Mayo system for an independent review.

If Mr. McCain’s 2000 left-temple melanoma was a metastasis, as the Armed Forces pathologists’ report suggested, it would be classified as Stage III. The reclassification would change his statistical odds for survival at 10 years from about 60 percent to 36 percent, according to a published study.

The greatest risk of recurrence of melanoma is in the first few years after detection. His age, his sex and the presence of the melanoma on his face increase the risk.

The fact that Mr. McCain has had no recurrence for eight years is in his favor. But cancer experts see the 10th anniversary as an important statistical benchmark, and that would not occur until 2010.

In May, his dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Suzanne M. Connolly, said in the teleconference that though there was no way to predict with certainty Mr. McCain’s chance of a recurrence, she judged it to be less than 10 percent. But melanoma is known to be quirkier than most cancers; doctors cite occasional cases in which melanomas come back after 15 or 20 years.

Melanomas can spread to various areas in the body, including the skin and any internal organ. In general, such spreading means the melanoma would not be curable. Treatment would depend in part on what organ or tissues are involved and could include additional surgery, chemotherapy, biologics, vaccines and radiation.

Many such treatments can be debilitating and impair an individual’s physical and mental stamina. If the patient was the president, the location of a recurrence and its treatment could raise the need to invoke the 25th Amendment, elevating the vice president to president, at least temporarily.

On the trail, Mr. McCain has played down concerns about his age by pointing to the vigor of his mother and her twin sister at age 96. Mr. McCain’s father died in 1981 at age 70 after a heart attack.

In the May teleconference, Dr. Eckstein said that he had not detected any memory deficits in Mr. McCain and that the senator had not reported any. Dr. Eckstein did not report whether Mr. McCain had taken any baseline cognitive tests.

Mr. McCain has kidney stones and takes a statin for high cholesterol but has no evidence of significant heart disease, his doctors said.

In making his medical information public, Mr. McCain released his confidentiality in the traditional patient-doctor relationship.

For its part, the Mayo Clinic says it agreed to yield control over all of Mr. McCain’s medical information to his campaign and to refer all questions to the campaign. Pool reporters inspected the records at a hotel near the clinic, which sent the records there under security. In the teleconference, the doctors answered questions by telephone at the clinic with no reporters present.

Dr. Eckstein, Mr. McCain’s doctor, said he understood that the campaign had released all the McCain records to the pool reporters. But a spokeswoman at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, asked if the institution could verify that the campaign had released all the records to the reporters, said she did not know whether the doctors had checked to be sure.

Last week, The Times contacted the McCain campaign to fill in gaps in the medical records. Ms. Hazelbaker, the McCain spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail message: “As you know, we disclosed over 1,200 pages of Senator McCain’s medical history to Dr. Altman’s colleagues in the press earlier this year. We also arranged a Mayo Clinic briefing with three of Senator McCain’s physicians that Dr. Altman listened to by phone. Additionally, we released a detailed document outlining his most recent physical and lab test results. It was an unprecedented level of disclosure, and Dr. Altman can look at the public document on our Web site if he wishes to do so. It was certainly more significant than the one-page doctor’s note Obama released, though I have little hope The Times will report it that way.”

Barack Obama

On May 29, six days after the McCain campaign’s disclosures about his recent health, Mr. Obama’s campaign released an undated, single-page letter from his doctor in Chicago attesting to Mr. Obama’s “excellent health.”

The six-paragraph letter from Dr. David L. Scheiner said Mr. Obama had no known medical problems that would affect his ability to serve as president. Until the release of test results last week, the letter was the only information that Mr. Obama had made public about his health.

Dr. Scheiner’s assessment was based on regularly examining Mr. Obama since March 23, 1987. Mr. Obama’s last checkup was on Jan. 15, 2007, a day before he created a presidential exploratory committee and more than a year before his campaign released the letter from Dr. Scheiner, a general internist who practices at the University of Chicago Hospitals and the Rush University Medical Center.

The letter was short, the Obama campaign said, because Mr. Obama had not had any serious health problems. The campaign declined to make Dr. Scheiner available for an interview.

Mr. Obama has had a notable medical problem: a difficulty in stopping smoking. It is not known how heavily he smoked. Dr. Scheiner wrote that Mr. Obama began smoking at least two decades ago and had made several efforts to stop. Mr. Obama has used Nicorette gum “with success,” Dr. Scheiner wrote, without defining success.

Nicorette, which contains smaller amounts of nicotine than cigarettes do, is a replacement therapy intended to ease the craving for nicotine and other withdrawal effects of cigarette smoking.

Dr. Scheiner did not say when Mr. Obama had started using Nicorette, how much he had used or for how long he had used it. Reporters have often observed him chewing it.

Mr. Obama said he quit smoking in 2007 when he began his presidential campaign. But he has “bummed” cigarettes since then, he has said.

Also, Dr. Scheiner did not provide a standard measure of smoking risk. It is known as pack years — the number of packs smoked a day multiplied by the number of years a person has smoked. The pack-year number is used to help determine a patient’s risk of developing lung cancer, heart disease and other tobacco-related ailments.

Information about Mr. Obama’s smoking is relevant because studies show that the risk of cancer and other tobacco-related serious diseases declines after an individual stops smoking, but not until then.

According to the newly released documents, in January 2007 Mr. Obama had a total cholesterol level of 173 (HDL 68 and LDL 96) and triglycerides of 44. Those levels were normal.

Sarah Palin

Nothing is known publicly about Ms. Palin’s medical history, aside from the much-discussed circumstances surrounding the birth of her fifth child last April. Ms. Palin has said that her water broke while she was at a conference in Dallas and that she flew to Anchorage, where she gave birth to her son Trig hours after landing.

Last week Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Ms. Palin, said the governor declined to be interviewed or provide any health records.

Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In 1988, Mr. Biden was working out on a shoulder press weight machine in the Senate gym when a pain shot through his neck. On the train home to Wilmington, Del., the neck pain returned more severely. His head ached. The right side of his body went numb. A doctor later diagnosed a pinched nerve, and a pain clinic prescribed a neck brace.

Shortly thereafter, on a trip to Rochester, Mr. Biden was alone in his hotel room when he felt a sharp stab in the back of his neck and a lightning flash in his head. The rip of pain was like none he had ever experienced. Nothing Mr. Biden did, including curling up in the fetal position, relieved the pain. He lay unconscious on the floor for five hours, he wrote in his autobiography, “Promises to Keep” (Random House, 2007).

The next morning, he felt somewhat better and flew home. His wife, Jill, summoned from the school where she taught, immediately took him to a hospital. Doctors determined he had a berry-shaped bulge in an artery that was leaking blood into his brain. Such bulges, or aneurysms, can tear at any time. Ruptured aneurysms are fatal in about 50 percent of cases. Up to 20 percent of survivors remain severely disabled. A Roman Catholic priest gave Mr. Biden last rites.

After a harrowing ambulance trip to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, a team of neurosurgeons put a clip on the artery to stop the bleeding. While recuperating, he suffered a major complication: a blood clot lodged in his lung.

A few weeks later, surgeons operated on a second aneurysm on the opposite side of his brain. Though it had caused no symptoms, it still could have burst as the first one did.

Mr. Biden returned to the Senate after a seven-month absence.

Now, a question arises: Has Mr. Biden developed a new aneurysm over the last two decades that could burst?

Doctors, who long thought that berry aneurysms were a once-in-a-lifetime event, now generally believe that they can recur. About 5 percent or less of patients who have had a berry aneurysm develop new ones at the original site or elsewhere in the brain.

“Over the last two decades,” said Dr. Robert F. Spetzler of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, “we have learned much more about aneurysms, and the fact is that when you have had one aneurysm, you are more likely to develop another one. Although the likelihood is very low, it does exist.”

Doctors’ views vary widely on what types of brain imaging tests to recommend to patients who have had a berry aneurysm and when to do them. Some conduct no tests. Others periodically conduct tests like magnetic resonance angiograms.

Mr. Biden has “recovered fully without continued effects” from the aneurysm, Dr. Eisold, the Capitol physician, said in a letter released by the campaign. Dr. Eisold, a specialist in internal medicine, has a longstanding policy not to talk to reporters about his patients, even with their permission.

The Obama-Biden campaign referred me to Dr. Matthew A. Parker, an internist in Washington, who reviewed Mr. Biden’s records and also spoke with Dr. Eisold about them. Dr. Parker said that Dr. Eisold told him that brain imaging tests were not needed now because Mr. Biden had done well for the 20 years after the aneurysm. “It is a nonissue,” Dr. Parker said Dr. Eisold told him.

Dr. Parker, who is associated with George Washington University Hospital and Sibley Memorial Hospital, said he had not treated or met with Mr. Biden and did not have a direct connection to the campaign. Federal Election Commission records show that Dr. Parker contributed the maximum, $2,300, to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign on March 13, 2008.

The medical records released by the campaign contain a summary of Mr. Biden’s operation and hospital stay in 1988 but no notes from a neurologist or neurosurgeon since then. So it is not known whether Mr. Biden has had recent brain imaging scans or has been evaluated by a neurologist or neurosurgeon recently. Dr. Parker said he did not ask Dr. Eisold when a neurologist or neurosurgeon last examined Mr. Biden.

Four leading neurosurgeons interviewed separately in this country and Europe said that as a vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Biden should have had recent brain imaging studies to detect any new aneurysm, because if one is found he might face more neurosurgery and be out of work for weeks or longer.

“What would I do in this situation?” said Dr. Eugene S. Flamm, the chairman of the department of neurological surgery at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “I would say, get an M.R.A. and check. You can’t just play the statistics.”

Doctors caring for political leaders and other prominent people often face difficulty in ordering tests that might clarify a situation for such patients but that are not recommended for all patients.

Dr. Parker said, “Some people will say, well, given the high-profile nature of the situation, we should do the test to be sure.” But, he added, “that is not necessarily wise.”

Among the reasons is a desire to avoid anxiety among patients and because doctors may not know what to do about an equivocal finding.

Dr. Parker said that even when he “pressed Dr. Eisold on the very same thing, given the circumstances” with Mr. Biden, Dr. Eisold “was very definitive about” not doing brain scan tests now.

The question of an aneurysm aside, the documents show Mr. Biden to have relatively minor health problems, including chronic sinusitis and allergies. He has an enlarged prostate, but a biopsy showed no evidence of cancer. With the help of a statin, he has normal cholesterol levels: 173 (HDL 47 and LDL 98) and triglycerides of 133.

In Summary

All in all, the gaps and paucity of information leave the electorate with insufficient information to fully judge the health of the nominees. The information that has been released is a retreat from the approach that most campaigns took over the last 10 elections.

In an earlier time, there was a kind of gentlemen’s agreement between officials and the news media that permitted serious health conditions to be played down or kept secret.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was crippled by polio more than a decade before he became president and, by his fourth term, he had developed serious heart disease, but the public was largely shielded from the profound effects. And while much was made of John F. Kennedy’s bad back and the rocking chair that gave him relief, it was only in the years after his assassination that his case of Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder, became widely known.

What might be called the modern era of disclosure arguably began in 1972, when Mr. Eagleton had to step down as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee because he had not informed his running mate, Senator George McGovern, of his history of depression.

In 1992, Mr. Tsongas, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for president, spoke to me to assure the public that he was free of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, after a bone marrow transplant in 1986. In interviews, his doctors at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute backed his assertion that he was cancer free. But in fact the cancer had recurred, and Mr. Tsongas eventually withdrew from the race. He died two days before his first term would have ended.

Other candidates who made themselves and their doctors available include the elder George Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore and John Kerry. A leading example of openness was Ronald Reagan, whose age, 69, had become an issue in the 1980 election. Mr. Reagan authorized his doctors to be interviewed. He also agreed to an interview himself, against the wishes of his aides, answering all my questions, including what would he do if he became senile as president.

“Resign,” he said.

    Many Holes in Disclosure of Nominees’ Health, NYT, 20.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/us/politics/20health.html

Obama Raises

More Than $150 Million

in September

October 20, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign announced on Sunday that it had raised more than $150 million in September, a record-shattering amount underscoring again the unprecedented amounts of money he has attracted.

Mr. Obama’s contributions in September more than doubled the $66 million he had collected in August, which had already far exceeded what previous presidential campaigns had raised in a single month.

In a videotaped message included in an e-mail to supporters, David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, said that Mr. Obama had added 632,000 new donors in September, bringing the campaign’s total to 3.1 million. The average contribution, Mr. Plouffe said, was $86.

Mr. Plouffe said the money has enabled the campaign to expand to traditional Republican strongholds, noting it had begun to pour resources into West Virginia. He also sought to portray the campaign’s fund-raising success as evidence of Mr. Obama’s grassroots support.

“The two groups that have given us the most contributions are retirees and students, which shows how Barack’s call for change has spanned the generations,” Mr. Plouffe said. “Nurses, teachers, small business owners. It really is the fabric of America that has built this campaign.”

The full details of how the Obama campaign raised its money in September will not be available until Monday, when it files its official report with the Federal Election Commission. But a separate filing by the campaign’s joint fund-raising committee with the Democratic National Committee, the Obama Victory Fund, underscores that Mr. Obama has also been powered by major donors as well.

Mr. Obama’s joint fund-raising committee, which can take in checks of more than $30,000 that is divvied up between the campaign and the D.N.C., collected $69 million in September. The fund funneled $32 million in September to the Obama campaign’s coffers and $26.5 million to the D.N.C.

The D.N.C., which can spend money on Mr. Obama’s behalf under certain restrictions, announced this morning it collected nearly $50 million in September and had $27.4 million in cash on hand at the end of the month.

The Republican National Committee announced earlier this month it had raised $66 million in September, which had exceeded fundraisers’ expectations, and finished the month with about $77 million in the bank.

Mr. Obama’s fund-raising success comes in the wake of his decision to back away from an earlier pledge to accept public financing for the general election if his opponent did as well, a move the McCain campaign has sought to use against him.

McCain finance officials and other campaign-finance experts had anticipated that the R.N.C.’s stockpile of cash and strong fund-raising, along with the $84 million Mr. McCain received in public financing, would be enough to at least stay within range of the Obama fund-raising juggernaut. The R.N.C. finished August with $76 million in the bank, along with another $18 million transferred to it by the McCain campaign. But the Obama campaign has been outspending the McCain campaign by 4 to 1 on television, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, which analyzes ad spending. The R.N.C. is limited to spending about $19 million in coordination with the McCain campaign but can spend unlimited amounts independently. Even with the R.N.C.’s independent expenditures factored in, the Obama campaign is still outspending Mr. McCain by 3 ½ to 1, according to CMAG.

Coupled with his appeals over the Internet, Mr. Obama has maintained an aggressive high-dollar fund-raising schedule. Just last week, 10 hours after he left the stage of the final presidential debate, he arrived at a morning fund-raiser at the Metropolitan Club in New York in which more than 120 people paid $30,800 each to hear him speak.

More than 600 people wrote checks of $25,000 or more to the Obama Victory Fund in September, including the actresses Melanie Griffith and Rita Wilson; Orlando Magic basketball star Dwight Howard; Andrea Jung, the chief executive of Avon; Gregory Brown, the president of the telecommunications giant Motorola; and Charles E. Phillips Jr., the president of the software company Oracle.

Mr. Obama has now raised more than $600 million since his campaign began, easily another record. Putting that figure in perspective, in 2004, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates together raised a record $684 million by the time of their conventions. (Both Senator John F. Kerry and President Bush later opted for public financing for the general election). That was nearly double the $350 million the candidates raised in 2000.

Before the Obama campaign, the record for the single biggest monthly fund-raising month was held by Senator John F. Kerry, when he collected $44 million in March 2004 after clinching the Democratic nomination. Mr. Obama exceeded that total last February, when he raised $55 million while competing against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    Obama Raises More Than $150 Million in September, NYT, 20.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/us/politics/20donate.html?hp

Op-Ed Columnist

The Real Plumbers of Ohio

October 20, 2008
The new York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America’s divisions — divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions — he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the “silent majority,” the regular guys — white guys, it went without saying — who didn’t like the social changes taking place.

It was a winning formula. And the great thing was that the new packaging didn’t require any change in the product’s actual contents — in fact, the G.O.P. was able to keep winning elections even as its actual policies became more pro-plutocrat, and less favorable to working Americans, than ever.

John McCain’s strategy, in this final stretch, is based on the belief that the old formula still has life in it.

Thus we have Sarah Palin expressing her joy at visiting the “pro-America” parts of the country — yep, we’re all traitors here in central New Jersey. Meanwhile we’ve got Mr. McCain making Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a k a Joe the Plumber — who had confronted Barack Obama on the campaign trail, alleging that the Democratic candidate would raise his taxes — the centerpiece of his attack on Mr. Obama’s economic proposals.

And when it turned out that the right’s new icon had a few issues, like not being licensed and comparing Mr. Obama to Sammy Davis Jr., conservatives played victim: see how much those snooty elitists hate the common man?

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

Third, Ohio plumbers have been having growing trouble getting health insurance, especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10 employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent in 2000.

And bear in mind that all these data pertain to 2007 — which was as good as it got in recent years. Now that the “Bush boom,” such as it was, is over, we can see that it achieved a dismal distinction: for the first time on record, an economic expansion failed to raise most Americans’ incomes above their previous peak.

Since then, of course, things have gone rapidly downhill, as millions of working Americans have lost their jobs and their homes. And all indicators suggest that things will get much worse in the months and years ahead.

So what does all this say about the candidates? Who’s really standing up for Ohio’s plumbers?

Mr. McCain claims that Mr. Obama’s policies would lead to economic disaster. But President Bush’s policies have already led to disaster — and whatever he may say, Mr. McCain proposes continuing Mr. Bush’s policies in all essential respects, and he shares Mr. Bush’s anti-government, anti-regulation philosophy.

What about the claim, based on Joe the Plumber’s complaint, that ordinary working Americans would face higher taxes under Mr. Obama? Well, Mr. Obama proposes raising rates on only the top two income tax brackets — and the second-highest bracket for a head of household starts at an income, after deductions, of $182,400 a year.

Maybe there are plumbers out there who earn that much, or who would end up suffering from Mr. Obama’s proposed modest increases in taxes on dividends and capital gains — America is a big country, and there’s probably a high-income plumber with a huge stock market portfolio out there somewhere. But the typical plumber would pay lower, not higher, taxes under an Obama administration, and would have a much better chance of getting health insurance.

I don’t want to suggest that everyone would be better off under the Obama tax plan. Joe the plumber would almost certainly be better off, but Richie the hedge fund manager would take a serious hit.

But that’s the point. Whatever today’s G.O.P. is, it isn’t the party of working Americans.

    The Real Plumbers of Ohio, NYT, 20.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/opinion/20krugman.html

McCain Suggests

Obama Tax Plan Is Socialist

In St. Louis, Obama Rally Draws 100,000

OCTOBER 19, 2008, 7:49 A.M. ET
The WAll Street Journal
By LAURA MECKLER

CONCORD, N.C.—Sen. John McCain opened a new attack on rival Barack Obama's tax plan Saturday, suggesting it amounts to socialism.

He also accused Sen. Obama of wanting to turn the Internal Revenue Service into a welfare agency because his tax plan would give a tax credit to people who earn too little to owe federal income taxes.

"At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives," the Republican presidential nominee said in a radio address. "Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut. It's just another government giveaway."

At an afternoon McCain rally in Woodbridge, Va., a woman yelled out about Obama, "He's a socialist!"

From St. Louis, Sen. Obama replied that both candidates want to cut taxes. But he said he would cut taxes for working Americans where Sen. McCain would favor corporations and wealthy taxpayers.

"John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people 'welfare,'" he said.

The McCain attack came as he campaigned in a pair of Republican-leaning states: North Carolina, when polls show Sen. McCain in a tight race, and later in Virginia, where he is trailing. A sign at the Virginia rally expressed hope for a reversal. It showed a map of Virginia and said: "Red since 1964," the last time a Democrat took this state.

Underscoring Sen. Obama's frontrunner status, the Illinois senator attracted a U.S. record crowd of 100,000 beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Sen. McCain turned out a few thousand people at a community center in Concord, N.C. and about the same in Virginia.

The McCain campaign is tying the new attack to "Joe the Plumber," a Holland, Ohio, man named Joe Wurzelbacher who met and told Sen. Obama that he fears his taxes could go up under his plan. At the North Carolina McCain rally on Saturday, handmade signs read "Let Joe Keep his Dough," and "Fight for Joe the Plumber."

The campaign's Southeast regional campaign manager, Buzz Jacobs, said the campaign has launched "Joe the Plumber" coalitions of small business people worried about tax increases. The campaign already had small business coalitions in place, but the new ones are meant to emphasize the new theme.

And in a phone call Friday, Sen. McCain invited Mr. Wurzelbacher to campaign with him, possibly as soon as Sunday when he visits nearby Toledo.

Subsequent reporting has concluded that Mr. Wurzelbacher would likely see a tax cut, not an increase, under the Obama plan. But the McCain campaign has seized on part of Sen. Obama's lengthy answer to him when they met last Sunday: "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," the Illinois senator said.

That encounter has been the centerpiece of Sen. McCain's campaign ever since.

"We learned that Sen. Obama's economic goal is, as he told Joe, is to quote `spread the wealth around.' Spread the wealth around!" he told the North Carolina crowd, which replied with a chorus of boos. "We've seen that movie before in other countries and [in] attempts by the liberal left in this country before. Sen. Obama believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs and opportunities for all Americans."

Sen. Obama replied that it's a matter of values. His plan values work, not just wealth, he said. And after largely dodging Joe the Plumber, Sen. Obama referred to him on Saturday as one of the working people who would receive a tax cut under his plan.

"It's time to give a tax cut to the teachers and janitors who work in our schools; to the cops and firefighters who keep us safe; to the waitress working double shifts, the nurses in the ER," he said. "And yes, the plumbers, fighting for the American dream."

Sen. Obama would give a $500 tax refund to middle-class workers, even if they earn too little to owe federal income taxes. The Obama campaign says the money is meant to offset the payroll taxes that these workers pay. Several other tax credits would also be refundable and therefore available even to those who do not pay income taxes. He plans to raise taxes on individuals earning over $200,000 and families who make more than $250,000. Most others, he said, would see a tax cut.

Sen. McCain rejected the notion of giving tax breaks to people who don't pay income taxes. "Since you can't reduce taxes on those who pay zero, the government will write them all checks called a tax credit. And the Treasury will have to cover those checks by taxing other people, including a lot of folks just like Joe. In other words, Barack Obama's plan to raise taxes on some in order to give checks to others it isn't a tax cut; it's just another government giveaway."

He did not mention that his health care plan also uses refundable tax credits—$2,500 per person or $5,000 per family toward the purchase of health insurance. It, too, would be available to people who don't owe income taxes.

The rhetoric in Sen. McCain's radio address was even sharper than his words on the stump. He invoked the notion of socialism, a economic theory that typically refers to government ownership of what is now private enterprise.

"You see, [Obama] believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it," Sen. McCain said. "Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism." He added: "In other words, Barack Obama's tax plan would convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency, redistributing massive amounts of wealth at the direction of politicians in Washington."

Some of his supporters are picking up the attacks, and taking them even further. A bumper sticker and a T-shirt made up by one of this supporters, who declined to give his name, read: "Support Joe the Plumber. Vote McCain Palin. Obama's friends are terrorists & communists." The terrorist reference is likely a nod to the McCain campaign's charge that Sen. Obama was closer than he has said to a 1960s era radical who is now a college professor.

Sen. McCain also painted Mr. Wurzelbacher as a victim of attacks from the Obama campaign. "Joes didn't ask Sen. Obama to come to his house, and Joe didn't ask to be famous," Sen. McCain said at his rallies. "He certainly … didn't ask for the political attacks on him from the Obama campaign."

The national media descended on Mr. Wurzelbacher after Sen. McCain repeatedly mentioned him in Wednesday's debate. They discovered that he would probably qualify for a tax cut under the Obama plan, that he may not be properly registered to vote and is not a licensed plumber.

Asked for examples of attacks from the Obama campaign, a McCain spokesman offered several quotes from Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, where he said that he doesn't know any plumbers who make more than $250,000 a year—and therefore would face higher taxes under Sen. Obama's plan. He also said on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" that he was worried about "Joe the real plumber with a license."

—Amy Chozick in St. Louis contributed to this article.

    McCain Suggests Obama Tax Plan Is Socialist, WSJ, 19.10.2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122435566048047731.html

AP IMPACT:

Mortgage Firm

Arranged Stealth Campaign

October 19, 2008
Filed at 12:36 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.

In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI's chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain's campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.

Freddie Mac's payments to DCI began shortly after the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent Hagel's bill to the then GOP-run Senate on July 28, 2005. All GOP members of the committee supported it; all Democrats opposed it.

In the midst of DCI's yearlong effort, Hagel and 25 other Republican senators pleaded unsuccessfully with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to allow a vote.

''If effective regulatory reform legislation ... is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole,'' the senators wrote in a letter that proved prescient.

Unknown to the senators, DCI was undermining support for the bill in a campaign targeting 17 Republican senators in 13 states, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The states and the senators targeted changed over time, but always stayed on the Republican side.

In the end, there was not enough Republican support for Hagel's bill to warrant bringing it up for a vote because Democrats also opposed it and the votes of some would be needed for passage. The measure died at the end of the 109th Congress.

McCain, R-Ariz., was not a target of the DCI campaign. He signed Hagel's letter and three weeks later signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill.

By the time McCain did so, however, DCI's effort had gone on for nine months and was on its way toward killing the bill.

In recent days, McCain has said Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were ''one of the real catalysts, really the match that lit this fire'' of the global credit crisis. McCain has accused Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama of taking advice from former executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and failing to see that the companies were heading for a meltdown.

McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, or his lobbying firm has taken more than $2 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dating to 2000.

Obama has received $120,349 in political donations from employees of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; McCain $21,550.

The Republican senators targeted by DCI began hearing from prominent constituents and financial contributors, all urging the defeat of Hagel's bill because it might harm the housing boom. The effort generated newspaper articles and radio and TV appearances by participants who spoke out against the measure.

Inside Freddie Mac headquarters in 2005, the few dozen people who knew what DCI was doing referred to the initiative as ''the stealth lobbying campaign,'' according to three people familiar with the drive.

They spoke only on condition of anonymity, saying they fear retaliation if their names were disclosed.

Freddie Mac executive Hollis McLoughlin oversaw DCI's drive, according to the three people.

''Hollis's goal was not to have any Freddie Mac fingerprints on this project and DCI became the hidden hand behind the effort,'' one of the three people told the AP.

Before 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were Democratic strongholds. After 2004, Republicans ran their political operations. McLoughlin, who joined Freddie Mac in 2004 as chief of staff, has given $32,250 to Republican candidates over the years, including $2,800 to McCain, and has given none to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

On Friday night, Hagel's chief of staff, Mike Buttry, said Hagel's legislation ''was the last best chance to bring greater oversight and tighter regulation to Freddie and Fannie, and they used every means they could to defeat Sen. Hagel's legislation every step of the way.''

''It is outrageous that a congressionally chartered government-sponsored enterprise would lobby against a member of Congress's bill that would strengthen the regulation and oversight of that institution,'' Buttry said in a statement. ''America has paid an extremely high price for the reckless, and possibly criminal, actions of the leadership at Freddie and Fannie.''

Nine of the 17 targeted Republican senators did not sign Hagel's letter: Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Christopher ''Kit'' Bond and Jim Talent of Missouri, Conrad Burns of Montana, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and George Allen of Virginia. Aside from the nine, 20 other Republican senators did not sign Hagel's letter.

McConnell's office said members of leadership do not sign letters to the leader. McConnell was majority whip at the time.

Eight of the targeted senators did sign it: Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, Larry Craig of Idaho, John Ensign of Nevada, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, George Voinovich of Ohio and David Vitter of Louisiana. Santorum, Crapo and Bunning were on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and had voted in favor of sending the bill to the full Senate.

On Thursday, Freddie Mac acknowledged that the company ''did retain DCI to provide public affairs support at the state and local level.'' On Friday, DCI issued a four-sentence statement saying it complied with all applicable federal and state laws and regulations in representing Freddie Mac. Neither Freddie Mac nor DCI would say how much Goodyear's consulting firm was paid.

Freddie Mac paid DCI $10,000 a month for each of the targeted states, so the more states, the more money for DCI, according to the three people familiar with the program. In addition, Freddie Mac paid DCI a group retainer of $40,000 a month plus $20,000 a month for each regional manager handling the project, the three people said.

Last month, the concerns of the 26 Republican senators who signed Hagel's bill became a reality when the government seized control of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae amid their near financial collapse. Federal prosecutors are investigating accounting, disclosure and corporate governance issues at both companies, which own or guarantee more than $5 trillion in mortgages, roughly equivalent to half of the national debt.

Freddie Mac was so pleased with DCI's work that it retained the firm for other jobs, finally cutting DCI loose last month after the government takeover, according to the three people familiar with the situation.

Freddie Mac's problems began when Hagel's legislation won approval from the Senate committee.

Democrats did not like the harshest provision, which would have given a new regulator a mandate to shrink Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae by forcing them to sell off part of their portfolios. That approach, the Democrats feared, would cut into the ability of low- and moderate-income families to buy houses.

The political backdrop to the debate ''was like bizarre-o-world,'' said the second of three people familiar with the program. ''The Republicans were pro-regulation and the Democrats were against it; it was upside down.''

Sen. Richard Shelby, the committee chairman at the time, underscored that in a statement Wednesday, saying that with Democrats already on their side, it was not surprising that Freddie Mac and Freddie Mae went after Republicans. ''Unfortunately,'' said Shelby, R-Ala., ''efforts then to derail reform were successful.''

In a sign of bad things to come, Freddie Mac was already having serious problems in 2005. Auditors had exposed massive accounting issues, so improved regulation was one obvious remedy.

Once Freddie Mac's in-house lobbyists failed to keep Hagel's bill bottled up in the committee, McLoughlin responded by secretly hiring DCI.

DCI never filed lobbying reports with Congress about what it was doing because the firm was relying on a long-recognized gap in the disclosure law.

Federal lobbying law only requires reporting and registration when there are contacts with a legislator or staff.

''To have it stealthy, not to let people know who is behind this, in my opinion is unethical,'' said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University who long has taught courses about lobbying.

Goodyear is a longtime political consultant from Arizona who resigned from the Republican convention job this year after Newsweek magazine revealed he had lobbied for the repressive military junta of Myanmar.

McLoughlin, Freddie Mac's senior vice president for external relations, was assistant treasury secretary from 1989 through 1992 in the administration of President Bush's father. McLoughlin served as chief of staff to Sen. Nicholas Brady, R-N.J., in 1982 and to Rep. Millicent Fenwick, R-N.J., from 1975-79.

Seven of the 17 targeted Republican senators were in the midst of re-election campaigns in 2006, and according to one of the three people familiar with the program, Freddie Mac and DCI hoped those facing tough races would tell their Republican colleagues back in Washington that ''we've got enough trouble; you're making it worse with Hagel's bill.''

Five of the seven DCI targets who ran for re-election in 2006 lost, and Senate control switched to the Democrats.

A Freddie Mac e-mail on May 4, 2006 -- the day before Hagel's letter -- details the behind-the-scenes effort that Freddie Mac and DCI generated to hold down the number of Republicans signing Hagel's letter urging a full Senate vote. It said:

''What I'm asking is that DCI get a few of their key well-connected constituents from each state to call in to the DC office of their Republican senators and speak to the (legislative director) or (chief of staff) and urge them not to sign the letter. The following could be used as a short script.''

The proposed script read: ''We can all agree that Fannie's and Freddie's regulator should be strengthened but unfortunately, S.190 goes too far and could potentially have damaging effects on Georgia's -- example -- home buyers.''

According to the third of the three people familiar with the program, ''DCI was asked to help keep senators from signing; it was a big part of their effort that year and it was viewed as a success since many DCI targets did not sign the letter.''

DCI's progress after the first four months of the campaign was spelled out in a 19-page document dated Dec. 12, 2005, and titled, ''Freddie Mac Field Program State by State Summary Report.''

A snippet of a senator-by-senator breakdown of the efforts says this about Maine's Snowe:

''Philip Harriman, former state senator, co-chair of Snowe's 2006 campaign, personal Snowe friend, major GOP donor and investment adviser, has written the senator a personal letter on this issue. Dick Morin, vice president Maine Association of Mortgage Brokers, has been in direct contact with Sen. Snowe's committee staff, has sent a letter to Snowe, and is pursuing a dozen(s) of letters from his members.''

On Wednesday, Snowe's office issued a statement saying that she ''literally gets hundreds of 'Dear Colleague' letters seeking support for their positions that she does not sign. Had this legislation come up for a vote in 2006, she certainly would have considered it on its merits -- as she does every vote. Just last July, she voted for the housing bill that established a new, stronger regulator.''

Rosario Marin, a staunch McCain supporter who spoke at the GOP convention in September, was among the people DCI used in carrying out the campaign.

Marin, the U.S. treasurer during the first term of the Bush administration, went to Missouri and to Montana, Burns' state, where she spoke out against Hagel's bill.

At the time, Burns, who ended up losing his re-election bid, was caught up in a Washington influence peddling scandal centering on disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Marin's visit triggered a local newspaper story in which the reporter contacted Burns' staff for comment. Burns' office told the newspaper the senator was not supportive of the latest version of Hagel's bill.

On Wednesday, Marin, now state consumer services secretary in California, issued a statement confirming that her trips to Missouri and Montana were in her capacity as a DCI consultant.

The December 2005 summary listing 17 Republican targets outlines the inroads DCI was making.

''On day one'' of the effort, Sen. George Allen of Virginia had not addressed Hagel's bill and his legislative aide for housing was not assigned to it, the report said.

''Today,'' the report added, ''the senator is aware of the issue and ... at the moment he is undecided.'' Allen's deputy chief of staff ''has said that the senator will take into consideration before he decides that Freddie Mac is located in Virginia and is one of the largest Virginia employers.''

''Grasstops/opinion leaders James Todd, president, the Peterson Companies wrote to both senators,'' the report added. ''Milt Peterson, the founder and CEO of the company is one of Allen's major donors.''

In the end, Allen, who lost his bid for re-election in 2006, did not sign Hagel's letter.

    AP IMPACT: Mortgage Firm Arranged Stealth Campaign, NYT, 19.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-The-Influence-Game-Housing.html

If Elected ...

Candidates Agree

on Need to Address Global Warming

October 19, 2008
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama part company on many issues, but they agree that the Bush administration’s policies on global warming were far too weak.

Both candidates say that human-caused climate change is real and urgent, and that they would sharply diverge from President Bush’s course by proposing legislation requiring sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury.

Such rare agreement has both industry and environmental groups expecting a big shift, no matter who is elected, on three fronts where the United States has been largely static for eight years: climate legislation, expansion of nonpolluting energy sources and leadership in global talks on fashioning a new climate treaty.

But quick progress could be held hostage to the financial crisis and the prospect of a worldwide recession. The economic turmoil could force the next president to delay legislation that imposes major new costs on struggling businesses or raises energy prices for consumers.

Mr. McCain, of Arizona, has repeatedly pointed to his longtime focus on global warming, including a fact-finding trip with other lawmakers to the thawing Arctic and his co-authorship, in 2003, of the first comprehensive legislation seeking mandatory limits on heat-trapping gases.

But in recent weeks he has taken heat from some environmental activists for statements on the stump implying that he might not seek mandatory emission cuts. His campaign has not said how the ailing economy would affect his climate agenda.

A high priority is helping revive the nuclear-power industry because nuclear plants produce no greenhouse gases, once built. Mr. McCain claims a byproduct of his nuclear push would be the creation of thousands of new jobs.

Mr. Obama, of Illinois, insists that his energy plan, which is largely framed around measures that could have climate benefits, would remain a top priority even in the face of economic troubles.

Rather than increasing joblessness, he says, his proposals to create federal programs to cut energy waste and to help Detroit retool and retrain to make fuel-sipping hybrids would create jobs.

A top environmental goal of both candidates is enactment of climate-change legislation centered on a “cap and trade” mechanism that sets a ceiling on emissions that declines over time. Businesses and institutions that cannot hit the targets must buy permits from those that achieve bigger cuts than required.

But the devil on such bills is in the many details. (A fight over such details also contributed to the death of a climate bill that the Senate debated earlier this year.)

The permits issued under Mr. Obama’s bill would be bought by businesses through an auction before they were traded. Mr. Obama says he would use $150 billion of the auction revenue over 10 years — a small amount of the total flow — to help improve nonpolluting vehicles, wind and solar power, technology for capturing emissions from power plants, and other energy technologies. The brunt of the funds, he says, would help reduce costs faced by industries and citizens affected by the transition to a low-carbon economy. Mr. McCain’s approach, according to his Web site, would distribute the permits initially at no cost, and move to auctioning “eventually.”

Some economists and environmentalists have criticized the distribution of free permits as a handout to industry, noting that the European Union — which initially set up its trading system that way — saw the prices for pollution permits collapse. At the same time, some European power companies made windfall profits from their permits and ultimately heat-trapping gas emissions increased.

Mr. McCain would also initially allow businesses to meet all their emission targets either directly or by buying a kind of credit, called an offset, generated by, say, a landowner who can prove fields or trees are sopping up a certain tonnage of carbon dioxide or a business that can prove an investment avoided emissions that would otherwise have happened. His Web site says the fraction of emission reductions allowed through offsets “would decline over time,” but offers no specifics. Calls and e-mail messages to the McCain campaign were not answered.

Environmentalists tend to prefer Mr. Obama’s approach, which many analysts say has less wiggle room and, in theory, sends a stronger message to companies that rely on fossil fuels to seek nonpolluting sources or reduce energy use.

Several representatives of industries said that, if forced, they would prefer the less aggressive targets and looser terms of Mr. McCain’s plan. But some appear to think they will not need to choose for a long while in any case, given the state of the global economy.

“Most industries are sort of keeping their powder dry at this point,” said Scott H. Segal, a lawyer and lobbyist at Bracewell & Giuliani who represents energy companies.

Without more details, it is not possible to estimate the costs of either candidate’s cap-and-trade plan, but economists generally agree that Mr. McCain’s would be less costly because of the offsets. But such offsets may also delay real decreases in greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite Mr. McCain’s early focus on climate change and the need for legislation, some environmental groups have sharply chided him lately, pointing to campaign statements seemingly softening his stance on firm caps on heat-trapping gases.

The League of Conservation Voters gave him the lowest possible score for his voting record in 2007 on subsidies or spending for renewable energy. Environmental bloggers derided his choice of running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, who has questioned whether global warming is caused by human activity and who elicits chants of “drill, baby, drill” on the stump for her support of oil drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama also support ocean drilling and oppose drilling in the Arctic refuge.

Joseph Romm, a physicist who writes the ClimateProgress.org blog and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit research group generally aligned with Democrats, said that Mr. McCain “has provided ample evidence in the last year or so that he is not serious about clean energy and he has increasingly walked away from the climate issue.”

Mr. Obama, after taking heat from some environmentalists for championing coal use as an Illinois state senator, has been hailed by environmental groups for sticking with a mandatory cap on emissions with steadily rising costs for permits bought by polluters.

Still, his advisers lately have emphasized that he might have to compromise to get bipartisan support for a climate bill, something he has said he wants. Strident opponents of climate legislation, echoing the views of industry figures, do not appear worried that a bill will come together any time soon, no matter who is in the White House.

“I believe the current financial difficulties,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, “will only reinforce the public’s concerns about any climate bill that attempts to increase the costs of energy and jeopardizes jobs in the near term.”

Van Jones, an environmental activist from Oakland, Calif., and the author of “The Green Collar Economy,” has criticized Mr. McCain as the vanguard of a new movement with an environmental veneer but bad intentions.

“The climate deniers got chased out of town, but in their place you’ve got the rise of the Dirty Greens,” he said in a recent interview. These are “people saying ‘I’m for solar, wind, geothermal, but I’m also for tar sands, coastal drilling.’ ”

Over all, the hurdles facing legislation restricting gases released by burning coal and oil, which still underpin the economy, remain so daunting that many experts who favor capping emissions appear to be focusing on actions a president could take with a pen stroke.

Both candidates have said they would grant California a long-sought waiver under the Clean Air Act allowing that state to set its own limits on automobile emissions of carbon dioxide, the main human-generated greenhouse gas. The Bush administration turned down California’s request in January.

David D. Doniger, who directs climate policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council and worked in the Clinton administration on the issue, said this move would set in motion a wave of pent-up state actions following California’s lead, and the resulting bottom-up pressure could force Congress to pursue a climate bill.

The same upward push could result, he said, if the next president orders the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 ruling in 2007, rebuffed the Bush administration and said the Clean Air Act gave the agency the authority to restrict the gas.

If Mr. Obama is elected, such a move appears likely. Heather Zichal, policy director for energy, environment and agriculture for the Obama campaign, said he would reduce emissions through actions at the E.P.A. and other government agencies.

“While he strongly believes that Congressional action is needed,” Ms. Zichal said, “he is also committed to employing the considerable powers Congress has granted to the executive branch.”

Mr. McCain has not specified whether he would seek to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Some environmental groups say the next president could attack the energy, economic and climate problems at once with a grand program to remake the electrical grid, greatly expand sources of nonpolluting power like wind turbines and solar arrays, and boost energy efficiency.

Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have both picked up on that theme.

When addressing energy on the campaign trail, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin have tended to focus on expanding supplies of fossil fuels even as they mention the need for solar panels, tapping geothermal energy and the like. They call this an “all of the above” strategy.

One of Mr. McCain’s main talking points on nonpolluting energy sources is a promise to build 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030.

Energy specialists say that is a difficult goal because of the high cost — one estimate is that each plant would cost $10 billion — and unresolved questions about where to store nuclear waste. Another issue is the lack of American expertise in building such plants after decades of opposition.

Mr. Obama has given muted support to nuclear power but has repeatedly said his prime goal is an ambitious, sustained push for efficiency and new climate-friendly technologies, like plug-in hybrid cars and improved solar panels. Among other steps, he would create a national project to cut energy waste with federal subsidies to insulate one million low-income homes a year.

He and Mr. McCain continue to mention “clean coal” in the context of climate change, even though teams of researchers have concluded that investments in large-scale tests of ways to capture and bury carbon dioxide from coal combustion would be required on a scale far beyond the federal spending either candidate is calling for.

    Candidates Agree on Need to Address Global Warming, NYT, 19.20.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/us/politics/19climate.html

Among Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule

October 19, 2008
The New York Times
By MARK LEIBOVICH

BANGOR, Me. — It is not unusual for fans of Sarah Palin to shout out to the Alaska governor in the midst of her stump speeches. It is noteworthy, however, that the crowds are heavily male.

“You rock me out, Sarah,” yelled one man, wearing a red-checked hunting jacket as Ms. Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, strode into an airplane hangar here on Thursday. He held a homemade “Dudes for Sarah” sign and wore a National Rifle Association hat. Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone” blared over the loudspeakers, and the man even danced a little — yes, a guy in an N.R.A. hat dancing in a hangar, kind of a Sarah Palin rally thing.

“I feel like I’m at home,” Ms. Palin said, looking out at a boisterous crowd of about 6,000. “I see the Carhartts and the steel-toed boots,” she said, the first reference being to a clothing brand favored by construction workers and the burly types who make up much of the “Sarah Dude” population. “You guys are great,” she said while signing autographs.

Guys think Ms. Palin is great, too, or at least many of those who come to hear her. They sometimes go to extraordinary lengths. “I woke up at 2 a.m. so I could get my work done before 6 and get here by 7,” said Mike Spencer, a chef from Dexter, Me. Mr. Spencer waited in the chilly hangar — in a “Nobama” T-shirt — for almost three hours.

At the height of Palinmania, soon after she made her national debut in September, Ms. Palin’s popularity among men was striking. Her favorability ratings were higher among men than women (44 percent to 36 percent), according to a New York Times poll, even though she was chosen in part because of her expected appeal to women. Since then, Ms. Palin has endured a tough month politically, and her favorability ratings have dropped among both sexes, but more so among men (down 13 points, to 31 percent in the latest Times poll.)

She has been widely attacked, even by a growing number of conservatives, as being essentially unserious and uncurious. “She doesn’t think aloud. She just ...says things,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote Friday. “She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation.”

All the while, Ms. Palin’s stoutest defenders are often the Joe Sixpacks in her crowds, who shrug off her critics, ridiculers and perceived adversaries in the news media. They say they appreciate Ms. Palin for, above all else, how “real” and “like us” she is.

“Katie Couric and Tina Fey are going to do their thing, but it doesn’t bother me at all,” said Rob McLain, an insurance agent from Avon, Ind., who attended a packed Palin rally at an amphitheatre in Indiana on Friday night. Mr. McLain wore a “Proud to be voting for a hot chick” button and was joined by his wife, Shannan (“Read my lipstick” button on lapel), and his 6-week-old son, Jaxon (“Nobama” button on beanie).

“The criticism is part of the process,” Mr. McLain said, adding of Ms. Palin, “Who can’t trust a mother?”

The testosterone flows at many of her events. Head-banging guitar chords greet her: she entered a fund-raiser in North Carolina on Thursday to the decidedly un-dainty chords of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” “That was kinda cool,” she marveled from the stage. Everyone laughed. The event raised $800,000.

While there are plenty of women, including wives and daughters of male fans, at Ms. Palin’s appearances, they acknowledge they are outnumbered. “This is not a ladies campaign,” declared Linda Teegan at a rally in Weirs Beach, N.H., on Wednesday. She was taking a crowd snapshot. “There seem to be lots and lots of guys here,” she said. “I’d guess 70-30, maybe 65-35, men to women. It’s quite noticeable to me.”

The dudes tend to make themselves noticed. “You tell ’em baby,” a man yelled out at a rally Wednesday night on a high school football field in Salem, N.H.

And Ms. Palin tells ’em, peppering her rallies with references to guy-themed stuff — hunting, fishing, hockey. She introduced her husband, Todd, as Alaska’s First Dude.

“He is a guy who knows how to work with his hands,” she said to loud applause.

Her recent events drew scruffy high-schoolers in backward baseball caps, tank-topped bikers in bandanas and long-bearded veterans in berets. They crashed the rope line for photos and autographs. “Marry me, Sarah,” a man implored in Weirs Beach, N.H., while Ms. Palin held up a tow-headed toddler and patted his little chest. She ignored, or didn’t hear, the proposal, but signed the dude’s ratty baseball cap.

Yes, some men come to ogle the candidate, too. “She’s beautiful,” said a man wearing a John Deere T-shirt in Weirs Beach. “I came here to look at her,” he said, and his admiration for Ms. Palin’s appearance became more and more animated. Sheepish over his ogling, he declined to give his real name (“Just call me ‘John Deere’ ”).

But some male fans do seem to feel a deeper connection to Ms. Palin. To a surprising degree, they mention the unusual nature of her candidacy, the chance to make history, break the glass ceiling.

“They bear us children, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it’s time we let a woman lead us,” said Larry Hawkins, a former truck driver attending a rally late Thursday at Elon University in North Carolina. Mr. Hawkins said he would rather vote for Ms. Palin than for “McCain and Obama combined.”

Men have done plenty to mess up the country, he said. “The sexual drives and big egos of male leaders have gotten in the way of politics in this country.” Mr. Hawkins said he talked to fellow truckers, and a lot of them feel the same way. “They think it’s time for a woman, too,” he said. “This one. Palin is our kind of woman.”

There is a kind of “conservative feminism” here, and several men cite the appeal of Ms. Palin as a can-do caretaker. She can be glimpsed lugging an overstuffed bag of books, papers and baby supplies onto her plane and bottle feeding her infant son, Trig.

“I love the idea of someone like her being allowed into the White House,” said Matt Cude, who drove three-hours to Weirs Beach from Jericho, Vt. It would be “absolutely fantastic,” he said, both for women and for the country.

Mr. Cude brought along his teenage daughter, Kate, who was holding a copy of National Review, with Ms. Palin on the cover. Kate made her way to the front of a rope line and asked Ms. Palin to sign it. Ms. Palin did so, signing her name in large letters across the headline, which said, “The One.”

    Among Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule, NYT, 19.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/us/politics/19palin.html

Democrats Try to Take

a Senate Seat in Mississippi

October 19, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

JACKSON, Miss. — As a Democrat running for the Senate in the Republican stronghold of Mississippi, Ronnie Musgrove faces a challenge that was summed up in the angry words of a middle-aged white voter doing business at the courthouse here this week.

“I wouldn’t vote for him if he was the last man on earth,” said Roger Case, an employee of a fire-extinguisher company, as Mr. Musgrove campaigned a few yards away.

Blacks in the courthouse beamed at Mr. Musgrove, a lanky former governor; his fellow whites, however, mostly looked the other way.

Mississippi has not elected a Democrat to an open Senate seat since 1947, but that is not stopping the Democratic Party from heavily financing a major effort here, one of a handful of states — including Minnesota, North Carolina and possibly Oregon — it thinks it can pull from Republicans this fall in a reach for the filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.

More than $3 million has been spent by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to support Mr. Musgrove; turn on a television here and the candidates can be found flailing at each other’s ethics, morals and probity in what local analysts say is a never-seen-before barrage of negative advertisements.

Mr. Musgrove has inched up in the polls and one recent survey showed him statistically even with the Republican incumbent, Roger Wicker, a former congressman appointed in December to fill the Senate seat vacated by Trent Lott.

The odds for a Democratic pickup, however, out of all the states in play, may be longest in Mississippi.

The numbers in this state, which has perhaps the most racially polarized electorate in the nation, do not favor the Democrat: whites, a majority, overwhelmingly vote Republican, and 85 percent of them voted for President Bush in 2004. Even if there is a record black turnout, Mr. Musgrove would have to receive about 30 percent of the white vote to win.

Nonetheless, analysts give Mr. Musgrove, a hill-country populist who championed education in his terms as governor and lieutenant governor, a better-than-passing chance, particularly as the credit squeeze penetrates even here.

“He’s got a shot,” said W. Martin Wiseman, a political scientist at the Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University, noting a surge in voter registration in the state that has topped 170,000 since Jan. 1. “There’s an unknown out there, and it’s going to work in Obama’s behalf.”

In mostly black Hinds County, which includes Jackson, there are now more than 20,000 new voters on the rolls since 2004, a plus for Mr. Musgrove, who has managed to attract enough white support in the past to be elected twice to statewide office.

“His dilemma is how to keep every one of those conservative whites and get all the Obama vote,” Dr. Wiseman said. “It’s not easy to do in a conservative state like Mississippi. He wouldn’t have a shot if it weren’t for Obama.”

If Mr. Musgrove wins, it would be an even bigger coup for Democrats than the House seat the party scored in Mississippi last spring. But the hostility of the political environment is palpable.

“It won’t be Muskrat,” said Steve Covington, the patriarch of a family tent-rental business at the Mississippi State Fair here, employing a common term of derision for the former governor, when asked whom he was voting for.

“Both of them are crooks,” Mr. Covington said, chuckling. “One of them’s just a little bit less.”

Out of 20-odd white voters interviewed at random here last week, only four said they would vote for Mr. Musgrove.

Mr. Wicker and Mr. Musgrove roomed together as state senators in Jackson in the early 1990s and are similar in appearance — narrow, white-haired and in their 50s. Mr. Wicker, 57, a reserved, somewhat taciturn Air Force veteran, was known as an ally of Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, in his early years in Congress, where he was president of the freshman class in 1994.

Anti-abortion and pro-school prayer, he nonetheless bucked his state’s conservative former governor, Kirk Fordice, as a state senator in voting for a tax increase in support of education.

The intensity of their battle has only increased as Mr. Musgrove continued his unexpected climb in the polls.

“It’s really no longer about Ronnie Musgrove and Roger Wicker; it’s about the direction our country takes,” Mr. Wicker told a partisan crowd at a fish fry in rural Scott County, linking his opponent to Mr. Obama, whom he called, to murmurs of assent, “the most liberal person ever to run for the president of the United States.”

Mr. Musgrove — 52, conservative, anti-abortion, pro-gun, the son of a road-crew worker who died of pneumonia when the candidate was 7 — calls himself a “Mississippi Democrat” to separate himself from the national party. But he carries the albatross that led to his failure to win re-election as governor in 2003: he supported ridding the Mississippi flag of its Confederate emblem.

Many Mississippi white voters hated the idea and turned out in force to defeat it in a referendum, and they have not forgotten.

“I ain’t voting for him,” said Kerry Epperson, a supervisor at U.P.S. who was having lunch at a fried-fish restaurant as Mr. Musgrove went table-to-table nearby. “I didn’t like the way he run as governor. I didn’t like the way he handled the flag issue.”

Mr. Wicker is making sure the flag issue stays on voters’ minds, running a ubiquitous television advertisement that says Mr. Musgrove “tried to kill our state flag.” At the fish-fry rally for the Republican, an outsized flag, Confederate heraldry intact, presided over the room. On the highway into Jackson, billowing, gargantuan Mississippi and American flags fly over a giant banner promoting the ticket of the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, and Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin.

Mr. Wicker is identifying himself with all three banners, a strategy to compensate for his unknown status outside his home precincts in the northern part of Mississippi, though he represented it over seven terms in Congress. “I’m also a conservative,” he began at a debate with Mr. Musgrove here last week, before going on to associate himself with the word “conservative” four times in rapid succession.

There are also reminders along the way of Mr. Musgrove’s divorce while in office — Mr. Wicker frequently cites the stability of his own marriage — and frequent mentions of the Democrat’s contributions from executives of a failed, state-backed beef-processing plant that cost Mississippi some $55 million. Two of those executives have pleaded guilty to giving an illegal “gratuity” to Mr. Musgrove.

Mr. Musgrove, for his part, avoids mentioning the Democratic nominee for president, Senator Barack Obama, but does connect his Republican opponent at every opportunity with hated “Washington” — his own term of derision, and one he is betting has potency in a climate of fear that has penetrated even in an insular state that for generations has considered itself immune to national trends.

“Washington told Wall Street, ‘We’re going to let y’all regulate yourselves,’ ” Mr. Musgrove told bleary-eyed students at Millsaps College here one recent morning. “The Republicans were in charge. They never said a word.”

Privately, some Democratic insiders still give the edge to Mr. Wicker, in a state where the word “liberal” is still the most potent scarecrow of all. Still, the new voters make the equation an uncertain one.

“You’ve got a lot of folks who have never voted, or were dormant,” said Dr. Wiseman, the political scientist, “who are likely to vote in greater numbers than ever before, and they’re breaking for Obama.”
 

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting from Washington.

    Democrats Try to Take a Senate Seat in Mississippi, NYT, 19.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/us/politics/19miss.html

Today on the Presidential Campaign Trail

October 19, 2008
Filed at 3:32 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

IN THE HEADLINES

As racism is stirred on campaign trail, Alaska minorities question Palin on diversity ... Democratic, GOP senators criticize McCain for 'robo calls' linking Obama to '60s-era radical ... McCain aide says Republican nominee remains strong in 'real Virginia' away from Washington

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Alaska's minorities feel ignored by Palin

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Alaska's black leaders say they're not surprised to see Gov. Sarah Palin at the center of the controversy over injecting the race issue into the presidential campaign.

Palin, Republican John McCain's running mate, has repeatedly insisted that Barack Obama's former preacher, the inflammatory Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a legitimate issue even though McCain himself has said it's out of bounds.

''She has no sensitivity to minorities,'' said the Rev. Alonzo Patterson, a Baptist minister and president of the Alaska Black Leadership Conference. ''She's really inciting a lot of African-Americans to get out and vote.''

Since taking office in December 2006, Palin has had a sometimes tense relationship with black leaders, who say they've been ignored in their efforts to get more minorities hired in her administration.

In Alaska, blacks chafed when Palin failed to issue a proclamation last year endorsing a festival that marks the freeing of slaves, though she did issue one this year. On the campaign trail, her events sometimes have attracted fringe groups hostile to minorities. At one rally attended by Palin, a supporter told a black cameraman to ''sit down, boy.''

This week, in the final debate of the campaign, Obama himself noted the hateful tone of some the McCain-Palin crowds, singling out Palin herself for not doing enough to ease the friction.

Many of Palin's black constituents say they are disgusted with the campaign's racial overtones.

''It's really been like you're going to a Ku Klux Klan rally,'' said Javis Odom, an Anchorage minister. ''Gov. Palin is really showing her true colors on the national stage.''

The Palin administration says her appointments and chief advisers reflect the state's diversity. For example, her communications director, Bill McAllister, is part black.

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McCain draws bipartisan criticism for 'robo calls'

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Senators in opposing political parties asked Republican presidential candidate John McCain to stop the automated phone calls that link Democratic candidate Barack Obama to a 1960s radical.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican and Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, made separate appeals to McCain on Friday. Collins faces a tough race for re-election and serves as a co-chairwoman of his Maine campaign.

''These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics,'' Collins spokesman Kevin Kelley said. ''Sen. Collins urges the McCain campaign to stop these calls immediately.''

Coleman, in a tight re-election campaign, said he hoped all candidates and outside groups would stop their attacks.

In Nevada, a four-page campaign flier mailed this week by the state Republican Party also focused on Obama's past relationship with former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, calling the college professor a ''terrorist, radical, friend of Obama'' and featuring several images of Obama and Ayers.

Reid told reporters at a news conference in Las Vegas that he's surprised at the ''scummy'' tactics employed by McCain's presidential campaign and ''can't believe John McCain knows what's going on.''

The McCain campaign says the calls are warranted because Obama's connection to Ayers -- the two met many years after Ayers' anti-Vietnam War activities had ended -- raises questions about the Democrat's judgment and record.

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McCain aide says he's strong in 'real' Virginia

WOODBRIDGE, Va. (AP) -- A top aide to John McCain said the Republican presidential nominee still has a strong chance of winning the state because of his support in ''real Virginia,'' the downstate areas far removed in distance and political philosophy from the more liberal northern part of the state.

''As a proud resident of Oakton, Va., I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia,'' McCain senior adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer said Saturday on MSNBC. ''And that's really what you see there. But the rest of the state, real Virginia, if you will, I think will be very responsive to Sen. McCain's message.''

Program host Kevin Corke asked Pfotenhauer if she wanted to retract the comment, prompting her to reply, ''I mean 'real Virginia' because northern Virginia is where I've always been, but 'real Virginia' I take to be the -- this part of the state that is more Southern in nature, if you will. Northern Virginia is really metro D.C.''

Earlier this month, McCain's brother, Joe, told those at an event for the Republican nominee that two Democratic-leaning areas in Northern Virginia, Arlington and Alexandria, were ''communist country.'' He quickly apologized and called the remark a joke.

The senator's campaign headquarters is in Arlington, as is the home he uses while in Washington. McCain also attended high school in Alexandria.

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THE DEMOCRATS

Barack Obama stops in Fayetteville, N.C.

Joe Biden holds a rally in Tacoma, Wash.

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THE REPUBLICANS

John McCain speaks with Jewish leaders in a teleconference and holds campaign rallies in Westerville and Toledo, Ohio.

Sarah Palin holds a rally in Roswell, N.M.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY:

''Hard economic times, a disappointing Republican administration and the seductive promises of a master orator are pushing America toward a European-style social democracy. If you don't want that to happen, vote for Republican Sen. John McCain.'' -- The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune in its endorsement of McCain.

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STAT OF THE DAY:

New Mexico has five electoral votes up for grabs in presidential election.

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Compiled by Ann Sanner and Ronald Powers.

    Today on the Presidential Campaign Trail, NYT, 19.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-2008-Race-Rundown.html

Republicans Rain

Negative Automated Calls on Voters

in Swing States

October 18, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY and JO BECKER

Voters in at least 10 swing states are receiving hundreds of thousands of automated telephone calls — uniformly negative and sometimes misleading — that the Republican Party and the McCain campaign are financing this week as they struggle to keep more states from drifting into the Democratic column.

Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, has denounced such phone calls in the past: In the 2000 primaries, Mr. McCain was a target of misleading calls that included innuendo about his family, and he blamed them in part for his loss to George W. Bush. This January, too, in South Carolina, Mr. McCain described the calls against him as “scurrilous stuff,” and his campaign set up a “truth squad” to debunk them.

On Friday, a Democratic official in Minnesota said he had received one of these so-called robocalls and had tracked it to a company owned by a prominent Republican consultant, Jeff Larson. According to published news reports, Mr. Larson and his previous firm helped develop the phone calls in 2000 that took aim at Mr. McCain.

A spokesman for the McCain campaign could not say Friday night whether it had contracted with Mr. Larson’s current company, FLS Connect. Phone messages left for Mr. Larson were not answered Friday, nor were messages left at a subcontractor, King TeleServices, which is making the actual calls to voters in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Democrat, Christopher Shoff, a commissioner in Freeborn County, said the automated call described Mr. Obama as putting “Hollywood above America” because he attended a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills hours after the federal government seized control of the insurance giant American International Group. The call was first reported by The Huffington Post.

“It is a disgusting form of negative campaigning,” Mr. Shoff said in an interview, “calling people randomly off a computerized list, during dinner time, and reciting a message that is misleading, as I knew it to be. Republicans should be talking about serious issues.”

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said the “Hollywood” robocall was based in fact. “I would argue that much of these calls are based on hardened facts that American voters should consider,” Mr. Bounds said.

Another McCain spokesman, Brian Rogers, said the automated calls placed this year were different from those used against Mr. McCain in 2000 because they were “100 percent true.” Mr. Rogers added that it was “crazy” to compare these calls to the calls in 2000, which sought to hurt Mr. McCain by describing his “interracial child” — a reference to the McCains’ adopted daughter from Bangladesh.

On Friday, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, urged Mr. McCain to stop placing automated calls in her state, The Associated Press reported.

Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said Mr. McCain’s use of automated calls in this campaign showed “just how much Senator McCain has changed since then — adopting not only President Bush’s policies but his tactics.” In response to the calls, the Obama campaign on Friday added a link on its Web site to FightTheSmears.com, asking supporters to report robocalls.

Mr. LaBolt said the Obama campaign was currently making robocalls, but he added: “The focus of all of our communications is on the direction Senator Obama will take the country and on policy differences between the candidates on issues like health care.” Republican National Committee officials said they were not aware of any Obama robocalls.

Such calls are a relatively cheap way to reach large numbers of voters in a short time. A review shows that the current calls on Mr. McCain’s behalf are uniformly negative and at times misleading.

The phone campaign hammers familiar themes that have been playing out for months in the campaign, focusing on Mr. Obama’s past associations and trying to portray him as a friend of radicals and liberal Hollywood celebrities.

In one widely reported call, Mr. McCain raises Mr. Obama’s links to William Ayers, a founder of the 1960s-era radical Weather Underground. “You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers,” a recorded voice says.

Mr. Obama, 47, and Mr. Ayers, now a 63-year-old education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, served together on two of that city’s philanthropic boards as well as on the board of an education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The two men have been described as friendly, but are not known to be close.

In an Oct. 10 letter to The New York Times, William C. Ibershof, the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s, expressed outrage that Mr. Obama was being tarred with the association, adding that he was pleased to learn that Mr. Ayers had “become a responsible citizen.”

The “Hollywood” robocall, meanwhile, asserts that “on the very day our elected leaders gathered in Washington to deal with the financial crisis, Barack Obama spent just 20 minutes with economic advisers, but hours at a celebrity Hollywood fund-raiser.”

The information is based on a newspaper report from Sept. 16, when the government took control of the American International Group in an $85 billion bailout. Mr. Obama attended a cocktail reception that night in Beverly Hills that featured celebrities like Barbra Streisand and Leonardo DiCaprio, after a 20-minute briefing by economic advisers.

But Mr. LaBolt said Mr. Obama’s schedule that day also showed that he was briefed by staff members twice more and spoke with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

Mr. McCain was not in Washington, either, on the day Mr. Obama was in Beverly Hills; he was campaigning in Ohio. The Obama campaign noted that Mr. McCain had also raised money from Hollywood.

Voters in North Carolina have received calls accusing Mr. Obama of opposing legislation aimed at protecting aborted fetuses that show signs of life, a position the call states is “at odds even with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.”

“Please vote,” the call continues, “vote for candidates that share our values.”

The 2003 measure in Illinois that Mr. Obama opposed was virtually identical to federal legislation that Mr. Bush signed into law in 2002 after it was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. But Mr. Obama and other opponents of the Illinois bill have said that the state already had a law protecting aborted fetuses born alive. The Illinois State Medical Society, which also opposed the legislation, said the bill would increase civil liability for doctors and interfere with their patient relationships.

Michael Cooper and Michael Moss contributed reporting.

    Republicans Rain Negative Automated Calls on Voters in Swing States, NYT, 18.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/us/politics/18robo.html

Dwayne Booth

Mr. Fish        Cagle        17.10.2008

Obama’s Ad Effort

Swamps McCain and Nears Record

October 18, 2008
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

PHILADELPHIA — Senator Barack Obama is days away from breaking the advertising spending record set by President Bush in the general election four years ago, having unleashed an advertising campaign of a scale and complexity unrivaled in the television era.

With advertisements running repeatedly day and night, on local stations and on the major broadcast networks, on niche cable networks and even on video games and his own dedicated satellite channels, Mr. Obama is now outadvertising Senator John McCain nationwide by a ratio of at least four to one, according to CMAG, a service that monitors political advertising. That difference is even larger in several closely contested states.

The huge gap has been made possible by Mr. Obama’s decision to opt out of the federal campaign finance system, which gives presidential nominees $84 million in public money and prohibits them from spending any amount above that from their party convention to Election Day. Mr. McCain is participating in the system. Mr. Obama, who at one point promised to participate in it as well, is expected to announce in the next few days that he raised more than $100 million in September, a figure that would shatter fund-raising records.

“This is uncharted territory,” said Kenneth M. Goldstein, the director of the Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin. “We’ve certainly seen heavy advertising battles before. But we’ve never seen in a presidential race one side having such a lopsided advantage.”

While Mr. Obama has held a spending advantage throughout the general election campaign, his television dominance has become most apparent in the last few weeks. He has gone on a buying binge of television time that has allowed him to swamp Mr. McCain’s campaign with concurrent lines of positive and negative messages. Mr. Obama’s advertisements come as Republicans have begun a blitz of automated telephone calls attacking him.

The Obama campaign’s advertising approach — which has included advertisements up to two minutes long in which Mr. Obama lays out his agenda and even advertisements in video games like “Guitar Hero” — has helped mask some of Mr. Obama’s rougher attacks on his rival.

“What Obama is doing is being his own good cop and bad cop,” said Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of CMAG, who called the advertising war “a blowout” in Mr. Obama’s favor.

Based on his current spending, CMAG predicts Mr. Obama’s general election advertising campaign will surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign by early next week. Mr. McCain has spent $91 million on advertising since he clinched his party’s nomination, several months before Mr. Obama clinched his.

The size of the disparity has even surprised aides to Mr. McCain, who traded accusations with Mr. Obama over the advertising battle in this week’s debate, with Mr. Obama telling Mr. McCain that “your ads, 100 percent of them have been negative” and Mr. McCain saying that “Senator Obama has spent more money on negative ads than any political campaign in history.”

The most recent analysis of the presidential advertisements by the University of Wisconsin, based on the period from Sept. 28 through Oct. 4, found that nearly 100 percent of Mr. McCain’s commercials included an attack on Mr. Obama and that 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s advertisements, which were more focused that week on promoting his agenda, included an attack on Mr. McCain.

That finding reflected the McCain campaign’s strategy of trying to make Mr. Obama an unacceptable choice in the eyes of undecided voters and Mr. Obama’s goal of making undecided voters comfortable with him.

But the Wisconsin Advertising Project says that since Mr. Obama wrapped up the Democratic nomination in June, 54 percent of Mr. McCain’s advertisements have been completely focused on attacking him, roughly a quarter have mixed criticism of Mr. Obama with a positive message about Mr. McCain, and 20 percent have been devoted solely to promoting Mr. McCain.

In the same period, the study found that 41 percent of Mr. Obama’s advertisements had been devoted solely to attacking Mr. McCain, one-fifth mixed criticism of Mr. McCain with a positive message about Mr. Obama, and 38 percent were solely devoted to promoting Mr. Obama.

The group reported that Mr. Obama has also had several weeks in which his advertising was nearly 100 percent negative or contrast advertisements, though considerably fewer such weeks than Mr. McCain has had.

The percentages do not reflect the vastly greater number of spots run by Mr. Obama. But Mr. Goldstein said Mr. McCain had shown more purely negative advertisements than Mr. Obama had, in spite of Mr. Obama’s spending advantage.

Here in Philadelphia, the biggest media market in a critical state, both candidates showed a mix of positive and negative advertisements on Friday. The spots seemed to show up across the dial as regularly as the affable Geico gecko or the ambling ne’er-do-wells of FreeCreditReport.com.

During “Dr. Phil” on the CBS affiliate here, Mr. Obama showed a minute-long positive commercial recounting “one of my earliest memories: going with Grandfather to see some of the astronauts, being brought back after a splashdown, sitting on his shoulders and waving a little American flag.”

But minutes earlier during the late afternoon news on the NBC station, Mr. Obama had criticized Mr. McCain over a health care plan that an announcer alleges “could leave you hanging by a thread.”

Toward the end of the 4 p.m. newscast on the CBS station, Mr. McCain ran one of his rare purely positive spots, speaking directly into the camera and telling viewers, “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they?” He promises, “I have a plan for a new direction for the economy.”

But on the NBC affiliate an advertisement approved by Mr. McCain was tying Mr. Obama to Antoin Rezko, a Chicago real estate developer convicted of fraud who is listed as among the friends Mr. Obama is said to reward “with your tax dollars.”

That spot was co-sponsored by the Republican National Committee, which is allowed to split the costs with Mr. McCain on an unlimited number of advertisements, helping him to double the number of advertisements he can buy.

Mr. McCain has used such advertisements to keep up with Mr. Obama’s advertising in vital cities like this one, where the campaigns have combined to spend the most in the general election but where Mr. Obama has recently outpaced Mr. McCain by nearly two to one. But such advertisements come with a caveat: they must include a reference to Congressional issues and leaders, making the message generally less direct.

The spot with Mr. Rezko also shows the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, and Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.

But for every city like Philadelphia, in a state Mr. McCain views as important to his chances for victory, there are those like Miami, Washington and Chicago, where Mr. Obama has often been able to run advertisements nearly unopposed. Washington and Chicago are particularly expensive, and Mr. Obama will easily win both. But their stations reach parts of the contested states of Indiana and Virginia.

Mr. McCain is also getting help from the Republican Party’s independent advertising unit, but it cannot coordinate with the party leadership or Mr. McCain’s campaign, meaning it is not always in line with Mr. McCain’s campaign message. And a smattering of outside groups are running hard-charging advertisements against Mr. Obama, but he has the money to immediately meet those attacks with spots directly addressing their charges.

Now spending almost as much as he can in local television markets, Mr. Obama has increased his advertising on the broadcast television networks, including on National Football League games and soap operas.

“They’re doing the networks” said Mr. Tracey, of CMAG, “because they’ve saturated these markets and they’re looking for more time.”

Last Sunday, Mr. Obama bought so heavily on football games and other nationally televised programs that, according to CMAG, he spent $6.5 million on a day when Mr. McCain spent less than $1 million.

    Obama’s Ad Effort Swamps McCain and Nears Record, NYT, 18.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/us/politics/18ads.html?hp

Bruce Plante

Tulsa World        Tulsa, OK        Cagle        16.10.2008

L to R :

John McCain,

U.S. President George W. Bush

McCain, Obama Get Tough,

Personal in Final Debate

October 16, 2008
Filed at 1:14 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (AP) -- John McCain repeatedly assailed Barack Obama's character and campaign positions on taxes, abortion and more Wednesday night, hoping to transform their final presidential debate into a launching pad for a political comeback. ''You didn't tell the American people the truth,'' he charged.

Unruffled, and ahead in the polls, Obama parried each accusation, and leveled a few of his own.

''One hundred percent, John, of your ads, 100 percent of them have been negative,'' Obama shot back in an uncommonly personal debate less than three weeks from Election Day.

''It's not true,'' McCain retorted.

''It absolutely is true,'' said Obama, seeking the last word.

McCain is currently running all negative ads, according to a study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But he has run a number of positive ads during the campaign.

The 90-minute encounter, seated at a round table at Hofstra University, was their third debate, and marked the beginning of a 20-day sprint to Election Day. Obama leads in the national polls and in surveys in many battleground states, an advantage built in the weeks since the nation stumbled into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

With few exceptions, the campaign is being waged in states that voted Republican in 2004 -- Virginia, Colorado, Iowa -- and in many of them, Obama holds a lead in the polls.

McCain played the aggressor from the opening moments of the debate, accusing Obama of waging class warfare by seeking tax increases that would ''spread the wealth around.''

The Arizona senator also demanded to know the full extent of Obama's relationship with William Ayers, a 1960s-era terrorist and the Democrat's ties with ACORN, a liberal group accused of violating federal law as it seeks to register voters. And he insisted Obama disavow last week's remarks by Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat, who accused the Republican ticket of playing racial politics along the same lines as segregationists of the past.

Struggling to escape the political drag of an unpopular Republican incumbent, McCain also said, ''Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. ... You wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.''

Obama returned each volley, and brushed aside McCain's claim to full political independence.

''If I've occasionally mistaken your policies for George Bush's policies, it's because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people -- on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities -- you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush,'' he said.

McCain's allegation that Obama had not leveled with the public involved the Illinois senator's decision to forgo public financing for his campaign in favor of raising his own funds. As a result, he has far outraised McCain, although the difference has been somewhat neutralized by an advantage the Republican National Committee holds over the Democratic Party.

''He signed a piece of paper'' earlier in the campaign pledging to accept federal financing, McCain said. He added that Obama's campaign has spent more money than any since Watergate, a reference to President Nixon's re-election, a campaign that later became synonymous with scandal.

Obama made no immediate response to McCain's assertion about having signed a pledge to accept federal campaign funds.

Asked about running mates, both presidential candidates said Democrat Joseph Biden was qualified to become president, although McCain added this qualifier: ''in many respects.''

McCain passed up a chance to say his own running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was qualified to sit in the Oval Office, though he praised her performance as governor and noted her work on behalf of special needs children. The Palins have a son born earlier this year with Down Syndrome.

Obama sidestepped when asked about Palin's qualifications to serve as president, and he, too, praised her advocacy for special needs children.

But he quickly sought to turn the issue to his advantage by noting McCain favors a spending freeze on government programs.

''I do want to just point out that autism, for example, or other special needs will require some additional funding if we're going to get serious in terms of research. ... And if we have an across-the-board spending freeze, we're not going to be able to do it,'' he said.

In addition to differences on taxes and spending, McCain said Obama advocated trade policies that recalled those of Herbert Hoover, who presided over the start of the Great Depression.

Obama has called for tougher provisions in trade negotiations, arguing that is necessary to avoid undercutting the wages paid American workers.

McCain also said Obama has aligned himself with ''the extreme aspect of the pro-abortion movement in America'' and had voted present while in the Illinois Legislature on a measure to ban one type of procedure late in a woman's pregnancy.

Obama said the bill would have undermined Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that granted abortion rights, and had been opposed by the Illinois Medical Society.

''I am completely supportive of a ban on late-term abortions, partial-birth or otherwise, as long as there's an exception for the mother's health and life, and this did not contain that exception,'' he added.

McCain sarcastically paid tribute to ''the eloquence of Senator Obama. He's (for) health for the mother. You know, that's been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything.''

McCain's allegation about class warfare stemmed from one of Obama's campaign appearances last weekend.

In Ohio on Sunday, Obama was approached by a man who said, ''Your new tax plan's going to tax me more.''

A video clip caught by Fox News shows Obama replying, ''It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success, too. And I think that when we spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.''

McCain referred repeatedly to that voter, Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber from Toledo, Ohio.

Wurzelbacher watched Wednesday night's debate and said he still thinks Obama's plan would keep him from buying the small business that employs him.

McCain's reference to Ayers reprised campaign commercials he has run to try and raise doubts about Obama's fitness to serve.

Ayers, who was a member of the violent Weather Underground in the 1960s, hosted a meet-the-candidate event for Obama in an Illinois race many years later.

''The fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Sen. McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me,'' Obama replied.

    McCain, Obama Get Tough, Personal in Final Debate, NYT, 16.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Presidential-Debate.html

McCain Presses Obama in Final Debate

October 16, 2008
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

Senator John McCain used the final debate of the presidential election on Wednesday night to raise persistent and pointed questions about Senator Barack Obama’s character, judgment and policy prescriptions in a session that was by far the most spirited and combative of their encounters this fall.

At times showing anger and at others a methodical determination to make all his points, Mr. McCain pressed his Democratic rival on taxes, spending, the tone of the campaign and his association with the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers, using nearly every argument at his disposal in an effort to alter the course of a contest that has increasingly gone Mr. Obama’s way.

But Mr. Obama maintained a placid and at times bemused demeanor — if at times appearing to work at it — as he parried the attacks and pressed his consistent line that Mr. McCain would represent a continuation of President Bush’s unpopular policies, especially on the economy.

That set the backdrop for one of the sharpest exchanges of the evening, when, in response to Mr. Obama’s statement that Mr. McCain had repeatedly supported Mr. Bush’s economic policies, Mr. McCain fairly leaped out of his chair to say: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

Acknowledging Mr. McCain had his differences with Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama replied, “The fact of the matter is that if I occasionally mistake your policies for George Bush’s policies, it’s because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people — on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities — you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush.”

The debate touched on a wide variety of issues, including abortion, judicial appointments, trade and climate change as well as the economy, with the candidates often making clear the deep differences between them.

But it also put on display the two very different temperaments of the candidates with less than three weeks until Election Day. The lasting image of the night could be the split screen of Mr. Obama, doing his best to maintain his unflappable demeanor under a sometimes withering attack, and Mr. McCain looking coiled, occasionally breathing deeply, apparently in an expression of impatience.

Sitting side by side with only the host, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, between them on the stage at Hofstra University, Mr. McCain made clear from the start that he was going to follow the prescriptions of many of his supporters — among them his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska — and try to put Mr. Obama on the defensive and shake him from his steady debate style.

Seizing on an encounter in Ohio this week with a voter — Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber — who told Mr. Obama that he feared that his tax policies would punish him as a small-business owner, Mr. McCain pressed his attack on Mr. Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. Mr. Obama’s plan would raise taxes on filers earning more than $250,000 a year, a category that includes some small businesses, but would cut taxes on households earning less than $200,000 a year.

Seeking to suggest that Mr. Obama would hurt the economy and many entrepreneurs, Mr. McCain said, “The whole premise behind Senator Obama’s plans are class warfare — let’s spread the wealth around,” repeating a phrase Mr. Obama had used to Mr. Wurzelbacher in explaining the rationale for his upper-income tax increase.

“Why would you want to do that — anyone, anyone in America — when we have such a tough time, when these small-business people like Joe the Plumber are going to create jobs unless you take that money from him and spread the wealth around,” Mr. McCain said.

The plumber came up directly or indirectly 24 times during the debate, an Everyman symbol of the divide between the candidates on how best to address the economy.

As he has done in previous encounters, Mr. Obama looked into the camera and repeated his plan: “Now, the conversation I had with Joe the Plumber, what I essentially said to him was, five years ago, when you weren’t in the position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then. And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now.”

Coming on a day that the Dow Jones average had one of its worst drops in history, Mr. Schieffer tried something other moderators had failed to do this fall: get the two candidates to enumerate which proposals they would specifically have to postpone or cut in the face of an economic environment that has changed drastically since they first drew up their plans.

Neither man went very far, though Mr. McCain perhaps offered a more detailed list. Repeating his pledge of an across-the-board spending cut, he said, “Well, one of them would be the marketing assistance program. Another one would be a number of subsidies for ethanol.”

Mr. Obama, for his part, specifically cited the “$15 billion a year on subsidies to insurance companies,” a component of the Medicare program. But, he said more generally, “we need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don’t work, and I want to go through the federal budget line by line, page by page. Programs that don’t work, we should cut.”

Still, though the winner of this election will inherit the most sweeping federal intervention in financial markets in at least three generations, the debate, while not short of policy discussions, was at least as much about the styles of the two men as they engaged one another.

In the days before the debate, Mr. Obama had appeared to have goaded Mr. McCain, saying in an interview with ABC News that he did not know why Mr. McCain had not personally made an issue of Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Ayers, with whom he worked with on two nonprofit boards, in their last debate considering that Mr. McCain’s campaign had done so repeatedly in recent weeks.

And there was some degree of anticipation over whether Mr. McCain would do so this time. He did, though only after a bit of prompting from Mr. Schieffer, who, in a question about the tone of the campaign directed at both men, asked Mr. McCain specifically, “Your running mate said he palled around with terrorists.”

Mr. McCain initially did not address that point directly.

But as Mr. Schieffer seemed prepared to move to another topic, Mr. McCain returned to Mr. Ayers on his own. Mr. McCain seemed most agitated in that moment, saying: “I don’t care about an old, washed-up terrorist. But as Senator Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship. We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with Acorn, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

He was referring to a community activist group that focuses on housing issues and has been running voter registration efforts in many states that have drawn accusations of fraud.

Mr. Obama’s aides said during the day that he was preparing for the Ayers question.

“Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago. Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts,” Mr. Obama said. “Ten years ago, he served and I served on a board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan’s former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.”

On Acorn, Mr. Obama said, “Apparently what they have done is they were paying people to go out and register folks. And apparently some of the people who were out there didn’t really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names. Had nothing to do with us. We were not involved.”

Speaking of his involvement with the group, he said, “The only involvement I’ve had with Acorn was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people register at D.M.V.’s.” Mr. Obama’s campaign made some payments to an affiliate of Acorn.

Mr. Obama said sternly as Mr. McCain bristled, “And I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Senator McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me.”

    McCain Presses Obama in Final Debate, NYT, 16.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/us/politics/16debate.html?hp

    Related > http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/transcripts/third-presidential-debate.html