History > 2007 > USA > Politics (I)

A Candidate, His Minister

and the Search for Faith

April 30, 2007
The New York Times
By JODI KANTOR

CHICAGO — Members of Trinity United Church of Christ squeezed into a downtown hotel ballroom in early March to celebrate the long service of their pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One congregant stood out amid the flowers and finery: Senator Barack Obama, there to honor the man who led him from skeptic to self-described Christian.

Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.

Few of those at Mr. Wright’s tribute in March knew of the pressures that Mr. Obama’s presidential run was placing on the relationship between the pastor and his star congregant. Mr. Wright’s assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government have drawn criticism, and prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.

Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate who says he was only shielding his pastor from the spotlight, said he respected Mr. Wright’s work for the poor and his fight against injustice. But “we don’t agree on everything,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve never had a thorough conversation with him about all aspects of politics.”

It is hard to imagine, though, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright. The Christianity that Mr. Obama adopted at Trinity has infused not only his life, but also his campaign. He began his presidential announcement with the phrase “Giving all praise and honor to God,” a salutation common in the black church. He titled his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” after one of Mr. Wright’s sermons, and often talks about biblical underdogs, the mutual interests of religious and secular America, and the centrality of faith in public life.

The day after the party for Mr. Wright, Mr. Obama stood in an A.M.E. church pulpit in Selma, Ala., and cast his candidacy in nothing short of biblical terms, implicitly comparing himself to Joshua, known for his relative inexperience, steadfast faith and completion of Moses’ mission of delivering his people to the Promised Land.

“Be strong and have courage, for I am with you wherever you go,” Mr. Obama said in paraphrasing God’s message to Joshua.

It is difficult to tell whether Mr. Obama’s religious and political beliefs are fused or simply run parallel. The junior senator from Illinois often talks of faith as a moral force essential for solving America’s vexing problems. Like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Edwards, his fellow Democratic candidates, he expresses both a political and a religious obligation to help the downtrodden. Like conservative Christians, he speaks of AIDS as a moral crisis. And like his pastor, Mr. Obama opposes the Iraq war.

His embrace of faith was a sharp change for a man whose family offered him something of a crash course in comparative religion but no belief to call his own. “He comes from a very secular, skeptical family,” said Jim Wallis, a Christian antipoverty activist and longtime friend of Mr. Obama. “His faith is really a personal and an adult choice. His is a conversion story.”

The grandparents who helped raise Mr. Obama were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists. His mother was an anthropologist who collected religious texts the way others picked up tribal masks, teaching her children the inspirational power of the common narratives and heroes.

His mother’s tutelage took place mostly in Indonesia, in the household of Mr. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, a nominal Muslim who hung prayer beads over his bed but enjoyed bacon, which Islam forbids.

“My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s younger half sister. But Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school and then a Muslim public school where the religious education was cursory. When he was 10, he returned to his birthplace of Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attended a preparatory school with a Christian affiliation but little religious instruction.

Years later, Mr. Obama met his father’s family, a mix of Muslim and Christian Kenyans. Sarah Hussein Obama, who is his stepgrandmother but whom Mr. Obama calls his grandmother, still rises at 5 a.m. to pray before tending to her crops and the three orphans she has taken in.

“I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent interview in Kenya.

From Skepticism to Belief

This polyglot background made Mr. Obama tolerant of others’ faiths yet reluctant to join one, said Mr. Wright, the pastor. In an interview in March in his office, filled with mementos from his 35 years at Trinity, Mr. Wright recalled his first encounters with Mr. Obama in the late 1980s, when the future senator was organizing Chicago neighborhoods. Though minister after minister told Mr. Obama he would be more credible if he joined a church, he was not a believer.

“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”

Still, Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views.

Followers were also drawn simply by Mr. Wright’s appeal. Trinity has 8,500 members today, making it the largest American congregation in the United Church of Christ, a mostly white denomination known for the independence of its congregations and its willingness to experiment with traditional Protestant theology.

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.”

Audacity and Hope

It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.

In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”

Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister.

It also helped give him spiritual bona fides and a new assurance. Services at Trinity were a weekly master class in how to move an audience. When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church.

But he developed a tone very different from his pastor’s. In contrast with Mr. Wright — the kind of speaker who could make a grocery list sound like a jeremiad — Mr. Obama speaks with cool intellect and on-the-one-hand reasoning. He tends to emphasize the reasonableness of all people; Mr. Wright rallies his parishioners against oppressors.

While Mr. Obama stated his opposition to the Iraq war in conventional terms, Mr. Wright issued a “War on Iraq I.Q. Test,” with questions like, “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?”

In the 16 years since Mr. Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard, Mr. Wright has presided over his wedding ceremony, baptized his two daughters and dedicated his house, while Mr. Obama has often spoken at Trinity’s panels and debates. Though the Obamas drop in on other congregations, they treat Trinity as their spiritual home, attending services frequently. The church’s Afrocentric focus makes Mr. Obama a figure of particular authenticity there, because he has the African connections so many members have searched for.

To the many members who, like the Obamas, are the first generation in their families to achieve financial success, the church warns against “middleclassness,” its term for selfish individualism, and urges them to channel their gains back into the community.

Mr. Obama has written that when he became a Christian, he “felt God’s spirit beckoning” and “submitted myself to His will and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.” While he has said he shares core Christian beliefs in God and in Jesus as his resurrected son, he sometimes mentions doubts. In his second book, he admitted uncertainty about the afterlife, and “what existed before the Big Bang.” Generally, Mr. Obama emphasizes the communal aspects of religion over the supernatural ones.

Bridging Religious Divides

He has said that he relies on Mr. Wright to ensure “that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible.” He tends to turn to his minister at moments of frustration, Mr. Wright said, such as when Mr. Obama felt a Congressional Black Caucus meeting was heavier on entertainment than substance.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama is reaching out to both liberal skeptics and committed Christians. In many speeches or discussions, he never mentions religion. When Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, does speak of faith, he tends to add a footnote about keeping church and state separate.

But he also talks of building a consensus among secular liberal and conservative Christian voters. Mr. Wallis, the antipoverty advocate who calls himself a “progressive evangelical,” first met Mr. Obama 10 years ago when both participated in traveling seminars on American civic life. On bus rides, Mr. Wallis and Mr. Obama would huddle, away from company like George Stephanopoulos and Ralph Reed, to plot building a coalition of progressive and religious voters.

“The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect 10 point plan,” Mr. Obama says in one of his standard campaign lines. “They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of man.”

He often makes reference to the civil rights movement, when liberals used Christian rhetoric to win change.

Mr. Obama reassures liberal audiences about the role of religion in public life, and he tells conservative Christians that he understands why abortion horrifies them and why they may prefer to curb H.I.V. through abstinence instead of condoms. AIDS has spread in part because “the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down, and needs to be repaired,” he said to thunderous applause in December at the megachurch in California led by the Rev. Rick Warren, a best-selling author.

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s ties to Trinity have become more complicated than those simply of proud congregation and favorite son. Since Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, the church has received threatening phone calls. On blogs and cable news shows, conservative critics have called it separatist and antiwhite.

Congregants respond by saying critics are misreading the church’s tenets, that it is a warm and accepting community and is not hostile to whites. But Mr. Wright’s political statements may be more controversial than his theological ones. He has said that Zionism has an element of “white racism.” (For its part, the Anti-Defamation League says it has no evidence of any anti-Semitism by Mr. Wright.)

On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”

Provocative Assertions

Such statements involve “a certain deeply embedded anti-Americanism,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies religious issues and public policy. “A lot of people are going to say to Mr. Obama, are these your views?”

Mr. Obama says they are not.

“The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” he said in a recent interview. He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks, Mr. Obama said, but “it sounds like he was trying to be provocative.”

“Reverend Wright is a child of the 60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through,” Mr. Obama said. “He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.”

Despite the canceled invocation, Mr. Wright prayed with the Obama family just before his presidential announcement. Asked later about the incident, the Obama campaign said in a statement, “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church.”

In March, Mr. Wright said in an interview that his family and some close associates were angry about the canceled address, for which they blamed Obama campaign advisers but that the situation was “not irreparable,” adding, “Several things need to happen to fix it.”

Asked if he and Mr. Wright had patched up their differences, Mr. Obama said: “Those are conversations between me and my pastor.”

Mr. Wright, who has long prided himself on criticizing the establishment, said he knew that he may not play well in Mr. Obama’s audition for the ultimate establishment job.

“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”

Reuben Kyama contributed reporting from Nyangoma-Kogelo, Kenya.

    A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith, NYT, 30.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/us/politics/30obama.html?hp

Giuliani Broadens

His Message on Terrorism

April 26, 2007
By MARC SANTORA
The New York Times

MANCHESTER, N.H., April 25 — In his two months on the campaign trail, the central animating theme of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign has been that his performance as New York mayor on Sept. 11, 2001, makes him the best candidate to keep the United States safe from terrorists.

But when Mr. Giuliani broadened that message here on Tuesday night, saying that Democrats “do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us” and that if they were elected the United States would suffer “more losses,” the response from his Democratic rivals was swift and pointed.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois accused Mr. Giuliani of “taking the politics of fear to a new low.” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York used the remarks to link Mr. Giuliani to a failure by the Bush administration to quash Al Qaeda. John Edwards called the remarks “divisive and just plain wrong.”

The skirmishing, some of the most intense between the parties in the young 2008 campaign, suggests that a line of attack that the administration used in 2004 would again be a central Republican theme.

In his speech before Republicans here on Tuesday night, Mr. Giulani called the fight against terrorism “the defining conflict of our time.” If a Democrat were elected president, he said, they would “wave the white flag” in Iraq, cut back on surveillance of terrorists, restrict the ability of law enforcement officials to gather intelligence and limit interrogation techniques, curtailing their effectiveness.

“Make no mistake about it, the Democrats want to put us back on defense,” he said.

In the end, he added, the United States would prevail regardless of who was in office, but if it was a Democrat, there would probably be greater loss of life before that victory was achieved.

The Democrats’ rapid response reflected a desire among their candidates not to let themselves be painted as weak, as many party loyalists believe occurred in 2004. It also reflected a sensitive chord embodied by Mr. Giuliani’s candidacy, the symbolism of the Sept. 11 attacks, which Democrats often note occurred under a Republican president.

To that end, Mrs. Clinton focused on what she said were the failed policies of the Bush administration that have only put the United States more at risk.

“The plain truth is that this administration has done too little to protect our ports, make our mass transit safer and protect our cities,” she said. “They have isolated us in the world and have let Al Qaeda regroup.”

Here in New Hampshire, Mr. Giuliani’s statements about the Democrats were greeted enthusiastically, suggesting how his approach may resonate among Republican primary voters skeptical of withdrawal timetables for Iraq and wary of criticism of the administration.

Facing the critical barrage, Mr. Giuliani struck back, taking particular aim at Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate leader.

“Here is the thing that the Democrats do not get and all these attacks and the things Harry Reid is doing and the presidential candidates indicate,” Mr. Giuliani said on “The Sean Hannity Show,” the syndicated radio program. “They do not seem to get the fact that there are people, terrorists in this world, really dangerous people that want to come here and kill us. That in fact they did come here and kill us twice and they got away with it because we were on defense because we weren’t alert enough to the dangers and the risks.”

Mr. Giuliani’s focus on terrorism, and so closely linking it to the Iraq war, could pose political risks, particularly in a general election. Since the 2004 campaign, the situation in Iraq has worsened, and with polls showing widespread disapproval of the president’s conduct of the war, the Democrats have grown bolder.

To leave Iraq, in Mr. Giuliani’s view, would be to create an even more dangerous front in the fight against terrorism where terrorists would be able to destabilize the region and eventually direct attacks on the United States. Mr. Giuliani has studiously avoided criticizing the administration, not only on Iraq but also on some basic measures in fighting terrorism like wiretapping without warrants.

On Wednesday, that provided a clear opening for Democrats. The Democratic National Committee used the former mayor’s remarks to highlight his failure “to prepare New York City for the second attack on the World Trade Center.”

Mr. Edwards used the comments to link the Iraq failures to the fight against terrorism. “As far as the facts are concerned,” he said, “the current Republican administration led us into a war in Iraq that has made us less safe and undermined the fight against Al Qaeda.”

    Giuliani Broadens His Message on Terrorism, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/us/politics/26giuliani.html?hp

McCain Officially

Enters Presidential Race

April 25, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and MICHAEL COOPER

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., April 25 — Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, began his second bid for the White House today by embracing the war in Iraq but distancing himself from six years of White House rule. He criticized the way the war in Iraq was fought, how returning veterans had been treated and spending policies that he said saddled Americans with debt.

Mr. McCain said Americans were wary of “old politics” marked by partisan infighting and petty brawling, and repeatedly said — in a state where independent voters are allowed to vote in either primary — that a McCain presidency would be marked by an effort to reach accommodations with political opponents.

“Americans are acutely aware of our problems and their patience is at end for politicians who value incumbency over principle, and for partisanship that is less a contest of ideas than an uncivil brawl over the spoils of power,” he said, adding, “They’re tired of it.”

Mr. McCain did not mention President Bush by name in the course of his 29-minute speech, delivered under grey skies and before an often listless crowd. But a contrast between himself and the president appeared clearly drawn and seemed aimed not only at some of the policies of the Bush administration, but the political strategy that has become Mr. Bush’s hallmark of winning the White House by trying to maximize the turn-out of Republican base voters.

“I’m running for President of the United States,” he said. “Not yesterday’s country, not a defeated country, not a bankrupt country, not a timid and frightened country, not a country fragmented into bickering interest groups with no sense of the national interest, not a country with a bloated, irresponsible and incompetent government.”

“To keep those promises, I can’t just win this election by a few votes in a few counties in a few states,” he said. “I need a mandate from you big enough to convince Congress that Americans want this election to be different. You want to change the politics of selfishness, stalemate and delay; move this country forward and stake our claim on this century as we did in the last.”

Mr. McCain spoke at what his aides viewed as a pivotal time in a candidacy that has gone through some difficult days. Mr. McCain has spent three years preparing for a campaign in which he had long been viewed as the presumptive frontrunner for his party’s nomination. But the announcement today had the feel of a re-launch, reflecting that Mr. McCain finds himself in the unexpected position of trailing rivals in some of early measures of the strength of a candidacy: particularly in fundraising, which Mr. McCain himself said today had been lackluster, and in early polls.

Mr. McCain delivered his speech in flat tones and in front just a few hundred people who turned up for the outdoor event; he drew only a few rounds of applause. But his speech was laced with sharp rhetoric that appeared directed not only at Mr. Bush, but also at Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York whose early success — again, measured by fundraising and polls — has proved to nettlesome for Mr. McCain.

Again without mentioning Mr. Giuliani by name, Mr. McCain sought to undercut what had been the former mayor’s biggest political claim to fame — his stewardship of New York City after the attacks of Sept. 11 — by noting the problems with firefighters’ radios on the day of the attack that made it impossible for city authorities to order rescue workers out of the Twin Towers.

“When Americans confront a catastrophe, natural or man-made, they have a right to expect basic competence from their government,” he said. “They won’t accept that firemen and policemen are unable to communicate with each other in an emergency because they don’t have the same radio frequency.”

    McCain Officially Enters Presidential Race, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/us/politics/25cnd-Mccain.html?hp

Court Ruling

Catapults Abortion

Back Into ’08 Race

April 19, 2007
The New York Times
By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, April 18 — Both sides in the abortion struggle predicted that the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday would escalate the drive for new abortion restrictions in state legislatures and push the issue of abortion rights — and the Supreme Court — squarely into the 2008 presidential election.

The decision was a major victory for social conservatives, a validation of their decade-long strategy of pushing for step-by-step restrictions on abortion while working to change the composition of the Supreme Court.

“This decision is a powerful and timely reminder of the enormous significance of presidential elections and their pivotal impact on the makeup of the Supreme Court,” said Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“Thank God for President Bush,” Mr. Land said, “and thank God for Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.”

Clarke D. Forsythe, president of Americans United for Life, said the decision would restore power to the states and make it easier to enact “common-sense regulations” on abortion. The “partial-birth” ban, aimed at a type of abortion known medically as intact dilation and extraction, was the product of years of effort by abortion opponents in states and on Capitol Hill. The legislation was twice vetoed by President Bill Clinton and, in a previous version, ruled unconstitutional by a different makeup of the Supreme Court.

Abortion rights advocates said they were shaken by the 5-to-4 ruling upholding the ban and asserted that the ruling cut to the heart of the protections of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision recognizing a constitutional right to abortion. They said it also underscored the stakes of the 2008 presidential election, arguing that the next president will almost certainly appoint a justice who could shift the balance of the court on Roe itself.

Abortion rights supporters clearly hoped for a replay of the abortion politics of the late 1980s, when the majority for Roe was also considered uncertain, mobilizing advocates into a more potent political force.

“Until this decision, I think a lot of people were skeptical about whether Roe could be overturned,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “But there clearly is no longer a presumption that women’s health will be protected by the courts.”

The reaction from the presidential candidates was quick and along party lines, and largely seemed aimed at their party’s base, which frames primary elections.

Republicans, who have worked hard to court conservatives opposed to abortion, hailed the decision as a long overdue stand against an “unacceptable and unjustifiable practice,” as Senator John McCain of Arizona, put it. “It also clearly speaks to the importance of nominating and confirming strict constructionist judges who interpret the law as it is written, and do not usurp the authority of Congress and state legislatures,” he added.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican former mayor of New York and a longtime supporter of abortion rights, said the court “reached the correct conclusion."

Democrats denounced the decision as an “alarming” retreat from years of Supreme Court precedent safeguarding women’s health, in the words of Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois.

“I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women,” Mr. Obama added.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, also described the decision as “a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman’s right to choose and recognized the importance of women’s health.”

The reaction among independent and moderate voters will be closely watched.

Until now, even some elected officials who supported abortion rights were uncomfortable dealing with the procedure singled out in the 2003 law. . Abortion opponents considered the legislation a valuable teaching tool to highlight what they asserted was the extraordinary reach of the Roe decision. On final passage in the Senate in 2003, 17 Democrats joined with 47 Republicans to support the ban.

But some Democrats said this new court decision could change the political landscape, just as the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case did, by striking moderates as an unwarranted government intrusion into medical decisions.

On Capitol Hill, Democratic abortion rights leaders vowed to push for legislation that would codify the Roe decision, a long-sought goal of liberals. But activists on both sides said that was an uphill battle.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and a staunch supporter of abortion rights, said she planned to reintroduce that legislation. But she acknowledged, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

    Court Ruling Catapults Abortion Back Into ’08 Race, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/us/politics/19react.html?hp

2008 Candidates

on Spot Over Gun - Control

April 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Gun control has been treated with a mix of silence and discomfort in the presidential campaign, a stance that may become insupportable once the nation finds its voice in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech mass murder.

Democrats have been deliberately muted for months on an issue that, by their own reckoning, contributed to and perhaps sealed their defeat in the 2000 presidential election. That's when Al Gore's call for gun registration cost him votes in rural America and dulled the party's appetite for taking on the gun lobby.

Top Republicans in the race are trying to close ranks with their party's conservative base on a variety of issues, making gun control an unusually sensitive one for them, too, thanks to their liberal views in the past.

Enter the massacre at Blacksburg, Va., an attack so horrific it froze the presidential campaign in place. Candidates called off events and expressed only sorrow, not opinion, in the first hours.

Advocates of any stripe raised their gun agenda at their peril.

''I think that people who want to take this within 24 hours of the event and make it their political hobby horse to ride ... I've got nothing but loathing for them,'' Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said. ''To those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere.''

But the bloodiest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, with 33 dead, is certain to set off a debate that those who would be president can hardly sit out in the days and weeks ahead.

Rudy Giuliani waded gently into it Wednesday, a day after GOP rival John McCain said that the attack did not throw him off his support for constitutional gun rights.

''Obviously, this tragedy does not alter the Second Amendment,'' Giuliani said in a statement. ''People have the right to keep and bear arms and the Constitution says this right will not be infringed.''

His emphasis on state-by-state solutions to gun control in the GOP primaries contrasts with his past enthusiasm for a federal mandate to register handgun owners -- an even stiffer requirement than registering guns.

Giuliani, as New York mayor and former Senate candidate, and Mitt Romney, as Massachusetts governor, supported the federal ban on assault-type weapons, background checks on gun purchases and other restrictions reviled by many gun-rights advocates.

The other New Yorker in this race, Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also supported proposals for state-issued photo gun licenses, as well as a national registry for handgun sales, in positions laid out for crime-weary New Yorkers in 2000.

In this campaign, candidates in both parties who've ever taken a shot at a prey are playing up their hunting credentials. Others are highlighting their allegiance to the constitutional right to bear arms or avoiding the question altogether.

Now such questions are unavoidably in their face.

''Not talking about an issue may be successful in the short term but it's never a successful long-term strategy,'' said James Kessler, policy and gun-control specialist at Third Way, a Democratic centrist group. ''I don't think that a candidate will be punished for supporting gun safety measures this time around.''

But, he said he thought that after Columbine, lawmakers could pass legislation requiring background checks on weapons bought at gun shows ''and we didn't.''

Mass shootings have often been the catalyst for legislative action on gun control, with mixed results.

And with Democrats controlling Congress partly on the strength of new members from rural parts of the country, few lawmakers were expecting the Virginia Tech assault to revive the most far-reaching gun-control proposals of the past, such as national licensing or registration.

In 1999, after the Columbine High School killings in Colorado left 15 dead,lawmakers unsuccessfully introduced dozens of bills to require mandatory child safety locks on new handguns, ban ''Saturday night specials,'' increase the minimum age for gun purchases and require background checks on weapons bought at gun shows.

A month after the Columbine shootings, then-Vice President Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to advance a juvenile crime bill that included gun show restrictions. But the bill died in negotiations with the House.

McCain has a long record of voting for gun rights in the Senate but changed some of his views, sponsoring legislation to support the gun show restrictions he once opposed.

And Democratic candidate John Edwards, despite recently highlighting his boyhood outings hunting birds, rabbits and deer as well as his respect for gun ownership rights, backed his party's main gun control measures when he was in the Senate.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, as a state lawmaker in the 1990s, supported a ban on semiautomatic weapons and tougher state restrictions on firearms.

Gun control seemed far from the minds of voters before the murders Monday. In an AP-Ipsos poll taken last week in which respondents were asked to name the most important problem facing the country, few if any spontaneously mentioned guns or gun control. That's likely to change in response to the Blacksburg rampage.

The Virginia Tech senior and Korean native identified as the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, was a legal permanent resident of the U.S., meaning he could legally buy a handgun unless he had been convicted of a felony. The campus killings were carried out with 9 mm and .22-caliber handguns.

''I think when a guy walks in and shoots 32 people it's going to cause there to be a lot of policy debate,'' President Bush said. ''Now is not the time to do the debate until we're actually certain about what happened and after we help people get over their grieving.''

Associated Press writers Liz Sidoti and Ann Sanner contributed to this story.

    2008 Candidates on Spot Over Gun - Control, NYT, 18.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Gun-Control-2008.html

Clinton trails Obama

in first-quarter collections

15.4.2007
USA Today
By Fredreka Schouten

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton banked more than $24 million to fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, about $6 million more than Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

However, the freshman senator outraised her in the first three months of the year for the primary fight: $24.8 million to Clinton's $19.1 million, according to campaign-finance reports filed Sunday with the Federal Election Commission. The former first lady has more in the bank in part because her total includes $10 million transferred from her Senate campaign.

Obama also raised $1 million for the general election if he becomes the Democratic nominee, and his donations come from 104,000 contributors.

Overall, Clinton raised $26 million from Jan. 1 through March 31 for the primary and general elections from 60,000 donors.

"Hillary's air of inevitability has been breached by the strength of Obama's numbers," said lawyer Kenneth Gross, a campaign-finance expert.

Former North Carolina senator John Edwards raised $13 million for the primaries and has $9.8 million in the bank, according to his FEC report.

The first-quarter reports are the public's first glance at who is giving to candidates, which states provide them with the most donors and how they are spending their money. Next year's presidential contest — the first since 1928 in which no sitting president or vice president is seeking his party's nomination — could set records and top $1 billion in fundraising, according to former FEC chairman Michael Toner.

Clinton, Obama and Edwards combined have not only outraised their top Republican counterparts — Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain — they have also put away more money in the bank. Still, campaign-finance experts say it's too soon to tell whether the monetary support will translate to votes next year.

Clyde Wilcox, a government professor at Georgetown University in Washington, said there's a danger in reading too much into early fundraising numbers. "We don't even vote for a year."

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has the most in the bank for the Republican primary fight: $11.8 million. Giuliani, who leads most national polls for the Republican nomination, has $10.8 million for next year's primaries, according to the report he filed Friday.

By contrast, Arizona Sen. John McCain spent nearly two-thirds of his first-quarter money, leaving him with only $5.2 million so far for next year's primaries and caucuses. He also has $1.8 million in debt.

On Sunday, Clinton touted having more cash available than any other White House contender. "These numbers indicate the tremendous support for Sen. Clinton from every walk of life and every part of America and assure us that we will have the resources needed to compete and win," campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle said.

Obama's camp also claimed wide support. "The final tally is true testament to the desire for a different kind of politics in the country, and a belief at the grass-roots level that Barack Obama can bring out the best in America to solve our problems," finance chairwoman Penny Pritzker said.

Among other Democrats, Bill Richardson raised $6.2 million with $5 million available for the primaries. Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., has $2.8 million banked. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., has $7.5 million, including $4.7 million from his Senate campaign.

Among other Republicans, FEC reports show Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback has $807,000 in the bank. Texas representative Ron Paul has nearly $525,000 in cash.

Contributing: Alan Gomez

    Clinton trails Obama in first-quarter collections, UT, 15.4.2007,  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-15-clinton-campaign_N.htm

In 5-Year Effort,

Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud

April 12, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

In Miami, an assistant United States attorney said many cases there involved what were apparently mistakes by immigrants, not fraud.

In Wisconsin, where prosecutors have lost almost twice as many cases as they won, charges were brought against voters who filled out more than one registration form and felons seemingly unaware that they were barred from voting.

One ex-convict was so unfamiliar with the rules that he provided his prison-issued identification card, stamped “Offender,” when he registered just before voting.

A handful of convictions involved people who voted twice. More than 30 were linked to small vote-buying schemes in which candidates generally in sheriff’s or judge’s races paid voters for their support.

A federal panel, the Election Assistance Commission, reported last year that the pervasiveness of fraud was debatable. That conclusion played down findings of the consultants who said there was little evidence of it across the country, according to a review of the original report by The New York Times that was reported on Wednesday.

Mistakes and lapses in enforcing voting and registration rules routinely occur in elections, allowing thousands of ineligible voters to go to the polls. But the federal cases provide little evidence of widespread, organized fraud, prosecutors and election law experts said.

“There was nothing that we uncovered that suggested some sort of concerted effort to tilt the election,” Richard G. Frohling, an assistant United States attorney in Milwaukee, said.

Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the Loyola Law School, agreed, saying: “If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant. But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.”

For some convicted people, the consequences have been significant. Kimberly Prude, 43, has been jailed in Milwaukee for more than a year after being convicted of voting while on probation, an offense that she attributes to confusion over eligibility.

In Pakistan, Usman Ali is trying to rebuild his life after being deported from Florida, his legal home of more than a decade, for improperly filling out a voter-registration card while renewing his driver’s license.

In Alaska, Rogelio Mejorada-Lopez, a Mexican who legally lives in the United States, may soon face a similar fate, because he voted even though he was not eligible.

The push to prosecute voter fraud figured in the removals last year of at least two United States attorneys whom Republican politicians or party officials had criticized for failing to pursue cases.

The campaign has roiled the Justice Department in other ways, as career lawyers clashed with a political appointee over protecting voters’ rights, and several specialists in election law were installed as top prosecutors.

Department officials defend their record. “The Department of Justice is not attempting to make a statement about the scale of the problem,” a spokesman, Bryan Sierra, said. “But we are obligated to investigate allegations when they come to our attention and prosecute when appropriate.”

Officials at the department say that the volume of complaints has not increased since 2002, but that it is pursuing them more aggressively.

Previously, charges were generally brought just against conspiracies to corrupt the election process, not against individual offenders, Craig Donsanto, head of the elections crimes branch, told a panel investigating voter fraud last year. For deterrence, Mr. Donsanto said, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales authorized prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against individuals.

Some of those cases have baffled federal judges.

“I find this whole prosecution mysterious,” Judge Diane P. Wood of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, said at a hearing in Ms. Prude’s case. “I don’t know whether the Eastern District of Wisconsin goes after every felon who accidentally votes. It is not like she voted five times. She cast one vote.”

The Justice Department stand is backed by Republican Party and White House officials, including Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser. The White House has acknowledged that he relayed Republican complaints to President Bush and the Justice Department that some prosecutors were not attacking voter fraud vigorously. In speeches, Mr. Rove often mentions fraud accusations and warns of tainted elections.

Voter fraud is a highly polarized issue, with Republicans asserting frequent abuses and Democrats contending that the problem has been greatly exaggerated to promote voter identification laws that could inhibit the turnout by poor voters.

The New Priority

The fraud rallying cry became a clamor in the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential election. Conservative watchdog groups, already concerned that the so-called Motor Voter Law in 1993 had so eased voter registration that it threatened the integrity of the election system, said thousands of fraudulent votes had been cast.

Similar accusations of compromised elections were voiced by Republican lawmakers elsewhere.

The call to arms reverberated in the Justice Department, where John Ashcroft, a former Missouri senator, was just starting as attorney general.

Combating voter fraud, Mr. Ashcroft announced, would be high on his agenda. But in taking up the fight, he promised that he would also be vigilant in attacking discriminatory practices that made it harder for minorities to vote.

“American voters should neither be disenfranchised nor defrauded,” he said at a news conference in March 2001.

Enlisted to help lead the effort was Hans A. von Spakovsky, a lawyer and Republican volunteer in the Florida recount. As a Republican election official in Atlanta, Mr. Spakovsky had pushed for stricter voter identification laws. Democrats say those laws disproportionately affect the poor because they often mandate government-issued photo IDs or driver’s licenses that require fees.

At the Justice Department, Mr. Spakovsky helped oversee the voting rights unit. In 2003, when the Texas Congressional redistricting spearheaded by the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, was sent to the Justice Department for approval, the career staff members unanimously said it discriminated against African-American and Latino voters.

Mr. Spakovsky overruled the staff, said Joseph Rich, a former lawyer in the office. Mr. Spakovsky did the same thing when they recommended the rejection of a voter identification law in Georgia considered harmful to black voters. Mr. Rich said. Federal courts later struck down the two laws.

Former lawyers in the office said Mr. Spakovsky’s decisions seemed to have a partisan flavor unlike those in previous Republican and Democratic administrations. Mr. Spakovsky declined to comment.

“I understand you can never sweep politics completely away,” said Mark A. Posner, who had worked in the civil and voting rights unit from 1980 until 2003. “But it was much more explicit, pronounced and consciously done in this administration.”

At the same time, the department encouraged United States attorneys to bring charges in voter fraud cases, not a priority in prior administrations. The prosecutors attended training seminars, were required to meet regularly with state or local officials to identify possible cases and were expected to follow up accusations aggressively.

The Republican National Committee and its state organizations supported the push, repeatedly calling for a crackdown. In what would become a pattern, Republican officials and lawmakers in a number of states, including Florida, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington, made accusations of widespread abuse, often involving thousands of votes.

In swing states, including Ohio and Wisconsin, party leaders conducted inquiries to find people who may have voted improperly and prodded officials to act on their findings.

But the party officials and lawmakers were often disappointed. The accusations led to relatively few cases, and a significant number resulted in acquittals.

The Path to Jail

One of those officials was Rick Graber, former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party.

“It is a system that invites fraud,” Mr. Graber told reporters in August 2005 outside the house of a Milwaukeean he said had voted twice. “It’s a system that needs to be fixed.”

Along with an effort to identify so-called double voters, the party had also performed a computer crosscheck of voting records from 2004 with a list of felons, turning up several hundred possible violators. The assertions of fraud were turned over to the United States attorney’s office for investigation.

Ms. Prude’s path to jail began after she attended a Democratic rally in Milwaukee featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton in late 2004. Along with hundreds of others, she marched to City Hall and registered to vote. Soon after, she sent in an absentee ballot.

Four years earlier, though, Ms. Prude had been convicted of trying to cash a counterfeit county government check worth $1,254. She was placed on six years’ probation.

Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.

“I made a big mistake, like I said, and I truly apologize for it,” Ms. Prude said during her trial in 2005. That vote, though, resulted in a felony conviction and sent her to jail for violating probation.

Of the hundreds of people initially suspected of violations in Milwaukee, 14 — most black, poor, Democratic and first-time voters — ever faced federal charges. United States Attorney Steven M. Biskupic would say only that there was insufficient evidence to bring other cases.

No residents of the house where Mr. Graber made his assertion were charged. Even the 14 proved frustrating for the Justice Department. It won five cases in court.

The evidence that some felons knew they that could not vote consisted simply of a form outlining 20 or more rules that they were given when put on probation and signs at local government offices, testimony shows.

The Wisconsin prosecutors lost every case on double voting. Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was accused of multiple voting in 2004 because officials found two registration cards in her name. She and others were acquitted after explaining that they had filed a second card and voted just once after a clerk said they had filled out the first card incorrectly.

In other states, some of those charged blamed confusion for their actions. Registration forms almost always require a statement affirming citizenship.

Mr. Ali, 68, who had owned a jewelry store in Tallahassee, got into trouble after a clerk at the motor vehicles office had him complete a registration form that he quickly filled out in line, unaware that it was reserved just for United States citizens.

Even though he never voted, he was deported after living legally in this country for more than 10 years because of his misdemeanor federal criminal conviction.

“We’re foreigners here,” Mr. Ali said in a telephone interview from Lahore, Pakistan, where he lives with his daughter and wife, both United States citizens.

In Alaska, Rogelio Mejorada-Lopez, who manages a gasoline station, had received a voter registration form in the mail. Because he had applied for citizenship, he thought it was permissible to vote, his lawyer said. Now, he may be deported to Mexico after 16 years in the United States. “What I want is for them to leave me alone,” he said in an interview.

Federal prosecutors in Kansas and Missouri successfully prosecuted four people for multiple voting. Several claimed residency in each state and voted twice.

United States attorney’s offices in four other states did turn up instances of fraudulent voting in mostly rural areas. They were in the hard-to-extinguish tradition of vote buying, where local politicians offered $5 to $100 for individuals’ support.

Unease Over New Guidelines

Aside from those cases, nearly all the remaining 26 convictions from 2002 to and 2005 — the Justice Department will not release details about 2006 cases except to say they had 30 more convictions— were won against individuals acting independently, voter records and court documents show.

Previous guidelines had barred federal prosecutions of “isolated acts of individual wrongdoing” that were not part of schemes to corrupt elections. In most cases, prosecutors also had to prove an intent to commit fraud, not just an improper action.

That standard made some federal prosecutors uneasy about proceeding with charges, including David C. Iglesias, who was the United States attorney in New Mexico, and John McKay, the United States attorney in Seattle.

Although both found instances of improper registration or voting, they declined to bring charges, drawing criticism from prominent Republicans in their states. In Mr. Iglesias’s case, the complaints went to Mr. Bush. Both prosecutors were among those removed in December.

In the last year, the Justice Department has installed top prosecutors who may not be so reticent. In four states, the department has named interim or permanent prosecutors who have worked on election cases at Justice Department headquarters or for the Republican Party.

Bradley J. Schlozman has finished a year as interim United States attorney in Missouri, where he filed charges against four people accused of creating fake registration forms for nonexistent people. The forms could likely never be used in voting. The four worked for a left-leaning group, Acorn, and reportedly faked registration cards to justify their wages. The cases were similar to one that Mr. Iglesias had declined to prosecute, saying he saw no intent to influence the outcome of an election.

“The decision to file those indictments was reviewed by Washington,” a spokesman for Mr. Schlozman, Don Ledford, said. “They gave us the go-ahead.”

Sabrina Pacifici and Barclay Walsh contributed research.

    In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud, G, 12.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html?hp

Panel Said to Alter

Finding on Voter Fraud

April 11, 2007
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON, April 10 — A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.

Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats.

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

The topic of voter fraud, usually defined as people misrepresenting themselves at the polls or improperly attempting to register voters, remains a lively division between the two parties. It has played a significant role in the current Congressional investigation into the Bush administration’s firing of eight United States attorneys, several of whom, documents now indicate, were dismissed for being insufficiently aggressive in pursuing voter fraud cases.

The report also addressed intimidation, which Democrats see as a more pervasive problem.

And two weeks ago, the panel faced criticism for refusing to release another report it commissioned concerning voter identification laws. That report, which was released after intense pressure from Congress, found that voter identification laws designed to fight fraud can reduce turnout, particularly among members of minorities. In releasing that report, which was conducted by a different set of scholars, the commission declined to endorse its findings, citing methodological concerns.

A number of election law experts, based on their own research, have concluded that the accusations regarding widespread fraud are unjustified. And in this case, one of the two experts hired to do the report was Job Serebrov, a Republican elections lawyers from Arkansas, who defended his research in an e-mail message obtained by The Times that was sent last October to Margaret Sims, a commission staff member.

“Tova and I worked hard to produce a correct, accurate and truthful report,” Mr. Serebrov wrote, referring to Tova Wang, a voting expert with liberal leanings from the Century Foundation and co-author of the report. “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”

He added: “Neither one of us was willing to conform results for political expediency.”

For contractual reasons, neither Ms. Wang nor Mr. Serebrov were at liberty to comment on their original report and the discrepancies with the final, edited version.

The original report on fraud cites “evidence of some continued outright intimidation and suppression” of voters by local officials, especially in some American Indian communities, while the final report says only that voter “intimidation is also a topic of some debate because there is little agreement concerning what constitutes actionable voter intimidation.”

The original report said most experts believe that “false registration forms have not resulted in polling place fraud,” but the final report cites “registration drives by nongovernmental groups as a source of fraud.”

Although Democrats accused the board of caving to political pressure, Donetta L. Davidson, the chairwoman of the commission, said that when the original report was submitted, the board’s legal and research staff decided there was not enough supporting data behind some of the claims. So, she said, the staff members revised the report and presented a final version in December for a vote by the commissioners.

“We were a small agency taking over a huge job,” said Ms. Davidson, who was appointed to the agency by President Bush in 2005. “I think we may have tried to do more research than we were equipped to handle.” She added that the commission had “always stuck to being bipartisan.”

The commission, which was created by Congress in 2002 to conduct nonpartisan research on elections, consists of two Republicans and two Democrats. At the time of the report, one of the two Democrats had left for personal reasons and had not yet been replaced, but the final report was unanimously approved by the other commissioners.

Gracia Hillman, the Democratic commissioner who voted in favor of releasing the final report, said she did not believe that the editing of the report was politically motivated or overly extensive.

“As a federal agency, our responsibility is to ensure that the research we produce is fully verified,” Ms. Hillman said. “Some of the points made in the draft report made by the consultants went beyond what we felt comfortable with.”

The Republican Party’s interest in rooting out voter fraud has been encouraged by the White House. In a speech last April, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser, told a group of Republican lawyers that election integrity issues were an “enormous and growing” problem.

“We’re, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” Mr. Rove said. “I mean, it’s a real problem.”

Several Democrats said they believed that politics were behind the commission’s decision to rewrite the report.

“This was the commission’s own study and it agreed in advance to how it would be done, but the most important part of it got dropped from the final version,” said Representative José E. Serrano, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees the commission. “I don’t see how you can conclude that politics were not involved.”

Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, another New York Democrat, who requested the draft report from Ms. Davidson during a subcommittee hearing last month, agreed.

“By attempting to sweep this draft report under the rug, the E.A.C. is throwing out important work, wasting taxpayer dollars and creating a cloud of suspicion as to why it is acting this way,” he said.

Some scholars and voting advocates said that the original report on fraud, for which the commission paid the authors more than $100,000, was less rigorous than it should have been. But they said they did not believe that was the reason for the changes.

“Had the researchers been able to go even further than they did, they would have come to same conclusions but they would have had more analysis backing them up,” said Lorraine C. Minnite, a political science professor at Barnard College who is writing a book on voter fraud. “Instead, the commission rewrote their report and changed the thrust of its conclusions.”

Ray Martinez III, the Democrat who left the commission for personal reasons, quit last August. He said in an interview that he was not present for any discussion or editing of the voter fraud report.

Mr. Martinez added, however, that he had argued strenuously that all reports, in draft or final editions, should be made public. But he said he lost that argument with other commissioners.

“Methodology concerns aside, we commissioned the reports with taxpayer funds, and I argued that they should be released,” he said, referring to the delay in the release of the voter ID report. “My view was that the public and the academics could determine whether it is rigorous and if it wasn’t then the egg was on our face for having commissioned it in the first place.”

In recent months, the commission has been criticized for failing to provide proper oversight of the technology laboratories that test electronic voting machines and software. The commission is also responsible for conducting research and advising policy makers on the implementation of the Help America Vote Act, the federal overhaul of election procedure prompted by the 2000 Florida debacle.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting.

    Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud, NYT, 11.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/washington/11voters.html?hp

Most Florida felons

to regain voting rights

5.4.2007
AP
USA Today

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Most Florida felons will regain voting and other civil rights more quickly after completing their sentences under changes approved Thursday by the governor and the state clemency board.
Republican Gov. Charlie Crist pushed the change, saying the rights to vote, hold office and serve on a jury were fundamental to being part of a democratic society.

With 3-1 vote by Crist and the other members of the state's clemency board, state officials will begin the restoration process for felons once they complete their sentences. Previously, many felons needed to go before the board, which can take years to hear a case because of backlogs.

The change doesn't include the right to have a gun, which still isn't restored automatically for people with felony convictions. But it does make it easier for ex-felons to get occupational licenses, denied to people who haven't had their civil rights restored.

Florida was one of three U.S. states, along with Kentucky and Virginia, that required ex-felons to take action to restore their civil rights no matter how long they had been out of prison. Other states have waiting periods before restoration, though most restore rights automatically when felons complete their sentence.

The lone opponent on the Florida board was Attorney General Bill McCollum, also a Republican, who said that many felons aren't reformed and should have to earn their rights by staying crime-free for a certain time.

Few have accused Crist of being too lenient on criminals. When he served in the state Senate he was known as "Chain Gang Charlie," and one of his high priorities this year is to return most violent probation violators to prison.

The Crist plan was a compromise with other board members who were concerned about going too easy on dangerous criminals. The 20% of felons finishing their sentence who have committed any one of a number of serious crimes will still need the clemency board to sign off on their case to get their rights back.

Those who have committed the worst crimes, such as murder or attempted murder, will still have to get on a waiting list to go before the board.

There isn't agreement on how many eligible ex-felons are out there, though it's definitely more than a half-million people.

State Corrections Secretary Jim McDonough said the agency would do what it could to find those people and tell them they can now easily have their rights restored quickly.

Crist said that the process for restoring rights was a vestige of a time better left in the past — and that he didn't want Florida to be among a minority of states still clinging to it.

"Justice delayed is justice denied," he said. "And people are waiting."

Florida's previous refusal to erase the prohibition has been seen among many blacks as an unfair effort to limit members of their community from a full place in the state's civil affairs.

State Rep. Joyce Cusack, who is black, called it a "historic time."

"A new day is upon us where we encourage our ex-offenders to be active participants in our democracy by voting and seizing opportunities of employment for a new life," said Cusack, a Democrat.

Some advocacy groups said the new rule doesn't go far enough because it stops short of full automatic restoration of civil rights. Ex-offenders must still wait for the clemency board to send them a notice that their rights are restored.

    Most Florida felons to regain voting rights, UT, 5.4.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-05-florida-felons-voting_N.htm

Obama Shows His Strength

in a Fund-Raising Feat

on Par With Clinton

April 5, 2007
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY
and PATRICK HEALY

DES MOINES, April 4 — If there was any doubt that Senator Barack Obama could stand toe to toe with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, at least in raising money, the matter was settled on Wednesday as Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign announced raising $25 million in the first three months of the year.

Mr. Obama’s total for the first fund-raising period of the 2008 presidential race was close to Mrs. Clinton’s. She reported Sunday that she had raised $26 million, but declined to provide a breakdown of contributions for the primary season versus the general election. Mr. Obama said $23.5 million of the money he raised was for the primary season.

“It’s been a truly historic response,” Mr. Obama said in an e-mail message to supporters, “a measure of just how hungry people are to turn the page on this era of small and destructive politics and repair our American community.”

Mr. Obama, who arrived in Iowa on Wednesday evening for a campaign trip, was the last major candidate to disclose his figures for the first quarter of this year, purposefully keeping his tally under wraps for a dramatic unveiling designed to show his breadth of support. He said he had received donations from 100,000 people, half of whom contributed through the Internet, including thousands who gave $25.

Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton spent Wednesday at their home in Chappaqua, N.Y., at a previously scheduled retreat with top aides. A Clinton campaign official said they had reached their fund-raising goals for the first quarter and emphasized that both Clintons would pursue donors even more vigorously over the next three months.

The Obama campaign said fund-raising had exceeded goals that were set when Mr. Obama entered the race in January. Over the last 11 weeks, campaign officials said, event attendance often doubled expectations and low-dollar contributions have poured in. Last Saturday, the final day of the quarter, officials said the campaign had raised $500,000 on its Web site alone.

“There is a freshness and enthusiasm out there that certainly does not guarantee future financial success,” David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, said in an interview. “But it’s a tremendous asset to have.”

The Obama campaign reported raising $6.9 million using the Internet, compared with $4.2 million by the Clinton campaign. While raising money on Web sites provides a far cheaper — and faster — alternative to direct mail and fund-raising events, it remains difficult to gauge whether online success translates into electoral success, as Howard Dean illustrated in the last Democratic presidential race.

Still, several Clinton donors privately wondered whether Mrs. Clinton was having trouble converting contributors from her two Senate races into donors for her presidential bid. She began this race with a database of more than 250,000 donors, and received money from 50,000 contributors in the first quarter. Mr. Obama said he began his national campaign with a far smaller database, but attracted 100,000 contributors.

Fred P. Hochberg, a Democratic fund-raiser in New York who is helping Mrs. Clinton, said it was far too soon to tell if the gap in donors was troubling.

“You’ve really got to wait and see,” Mr. Hochberg said. “Who knows what his Internet operation was like compared to hers? And 50,000 people is a lot of donors. They both have a lot of donors.”

The Clinton campaign declined to provide a breakdown of Mrs. Clinton’s separate fund-raising totals for the primary campaign account and the general election account. Candidates are allowed to receive up to $4,600 per donor — $2,300 for the primary season and $2,300 for the general election.

Both the Clinton campaign and the Obama campaign declined to disclose how much money they had in the bank. All the figures will be made public by April 15, when reports must be filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Penny Pritzker, finance chairwoman for the Obama campaign, met with major fund-raisers at a breakfast Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan and later spoke to fund-raisers across the country on a conference call. One topic of discussion, according to participants, was what some supporters said was a need to refocus attention from Mr. Obama’s fund-raising toward a series of policy speeches he intends to make in the next quarter.

Mr. Obama, a longtime advocate of public financing and campaign finance overhaul, is seldom eager to talk about his fund-raising. While his campaign trumpeted the news on Wednesday, requests for interviews with the candidate were denied.

“The average citizen cares not one whit about this,” David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist said in an interview. “Nonetheless, as a new candidate starting up from scratch, given the capacities of some of the other campaigns, we knew that this was a test of whether we were real or not and whether we had the capacity to hang in there for the long term.”

Jeff Zeleny reported from Des Moines, and Patrick Healy from New York.

    Obama Shows His Strength in a Fund-Raising Feat on Par With Clinton, NYT, 5.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/us/politics/05obama.html

Clinton camp reports record haul

2.4.2007
USA Today
By Jill Lawrence

WASHINGTON — New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton shattered the record for presidential fundraising in the first quarter of the year before an election with receipts of $36 million, her campaign said Sunday.

Clinton's total includes $10 million transferred from her 2006 Senate campaign committee and some non-primary money donated for a general-election campaign if she becomes the Democratic nominee. Spokesman Howard Wolfson said that "considerably more" of the $26 million raised this year is for the primaries, but the breakdown isn't tabulated yet.


Campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe, a former national party chairman and longtime fundraiser, said Clinton's fundraising reflected "enormous enthusiasm" for her, but "nobody ever said we were going to walk away with it." He said he expected Illinois Sen. Barack Obama to raise a similar amount.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the campaign has received "tremendous grass-roots support" but is not ready to release numbers. In one area, Obama had an edge. Clinton said she had 50,000 donors. Obama was closing in Sunday evening on 84,000, according to his website.


John Edwards, who ran in 2004, raised more than $14 million — twice his first-quarter total in 2003 — from more than 37,000 donors. Campaign officials said about $1 million was for the general election. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson raised more than $6 million, spokesman Pahl Shipley said.


Before now, the highest off-year, first-quarter total was $13.5 million reported in 1995 by Republican Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. Figures for other 2008 candidates were not available Sunday. All first-quarter reports are due April 15 at the Federal Election Commission.

Anthony Corrado, a campaign-finance expert at Colby College in Maine, said Clinton's total is similar to what President Bush raised in the second quarter of 2003, when he was running for re-election unopposed. "Clearly this was designed to be a pre-emptive strike," he said. "They want to create an impression of strength."

    Clinton camp reports record haul, UT, 1.4.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-01-clinton-donations_N.htm

Thompson Declares Candidacy,

Joining G.O.P. Field

April 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:08 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on Sunday joined the crowded field of Republicans running for the White House in 2008 and proclaimed himself the ''reliable conservative'' in the race.

Thompson, who was health and human services secretary during President Bush's first term, also said he is the only GOP candidate who has helped assemble both a state and federal budget.

Since announcing last year he was forming a presidential exploratory committee to raise money and gauge support, Thompson has lagged behind better-known rivals.

Thompson, 65, has focused his strategy on Iowa, which holds the nation's first caucuses for presidential nominees. He has made weekly visits to the state and sought to make the case that it will take a candidate who can carry the Midwest to win the nomination.

''Things are started to coalesce and I feel very, very optimistic about my future,'' Thompson said Sunday, despite his single-digit polling.

''I am the reliable conservative. My record shows that. All that people have to do is look at my record, and I am one individual that they can count on,'' Thompson said.

Discussing some campaign issues, he said:

--He would have ''a completely different Iraq strategy'' from the president's. Thompson said he would ''demand'' that the Iraqi government vote as to whether it wanted the U.S. to remain in the country. If the answer were yes, ''it immediately gives a degree of legitimacy.'' If the answer were no, ''We would get out, absolutely. It's a duly elected government.''

--He would veto the war spending bills in Congress that have timelines for a U.S. exit from Iraq. ''This is an invitation to continue the kind of civil war that's going on right now. I think it's the worst mistake,'' Thompson said.

--Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has made ''terrible mistakes'' in the handling of the fired federal prosecutors. ''I would not have appointed Mr. Gonzales. I would have appointed somebody that was loyal to me,'' Thompson said.

At a recent news conference in Wisconsin, Thompson called himself ''the dark horse candidate. I was a dark horse candidate for governor. I was a dark horse candidate when I ran for the Assembly. I am the underdog, and I don't mind that.''

The son of a grocer, Thompson spent 14 years as governor of Wisconsin, pushing for an overhaul of the state's welfare laws. He also championed a school choice program for Milwaukee.

His time in Bush's Cabinet included anthrax attacks, a flu vaccine shortage and passage of the Medicare prescription drug benefit law.

In 2006, he briefly flirted with the idea of running for governor but in the end decided not to seek his old job. He had considered running for president in 2000 but scrapped that, too, deciding he lacked support.

The leading GOP candidates in the race include former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Thompson was interviewed on ''This Week'' on ABC.

    Thompson Declares Candidacy, Joining G.O.P. Field, NYT, 1.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Thompson-2008.html?hp

News Analysis

Democrats Are Building on Unity

Over Iraq Pullout

March 29, 2007
The New York Times
By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, March 28 — No one has seemed more surprised by the Democrats’ success in pushing an exit strategy for Iraq than the Democrats.

Their aggressiveness and unity on a major foreign-policy challenge to the president is a striking change for a party that has, on many occasions over many years, seemed to be on the defensive on national security issues.

In fact, for much of the post-Vietnam era, the Republican advantage on those issues has been a defining feature of American politics. Many Democrats felt they needed to prove, again and again, that their party was tough enough to defend the nation’s interests — to fight the notion, often stoked by Republicans, that Democrats were the party of George McGovern and the nuclear freeze.

Critics on the party’s left complained that Democratic leaders had grown risk-averse, too consumed with defending against old charges from the 60s and 70s, too reluctant to stand up against the president.

But the Democratic votes over the past five days, calling for the withdrawal of most American combat troops from Iraq next year despite repeated threats of a presidential veto, show how much that image has shifted.

In the debate on Capitol Hill, Republicans mounted the same arguments that have proved so unsettling to the Democrats in the past: that they advocated policies of retreat, failed to support the troops, lacked the necessary resolve to use force to fight terrorism.

In the House, they chose as their closing speaker Representative Sam Johnson, Republican of Texas, who spent 42 months in solitary confinement as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He asserted that the consequences of American withdrawal were then, and would be now, catastrophic.

But Democrats, across the ideological spectrum, did not back down.

“It was an amazing outcome when you think about it,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the party’s whip, after the Senate vote. “We’ve been able to keep a very thin majority in the Senate together on major votes on Iraq with only a very few defections.”

To a large extent, the party is responding to political circumstances that would embolden even the most cautious lawmaker. President Bush’s political standing has plummeted as the war has dragged on. Confidence in the Republican Party’s leadership on national security has also fallen. By October, the two parties were even when a New York Times/CBS News poll asked which would do a better job on terrorism; in the fall of 2002, Republicans had a 42-point advantage.

More to the point: “The public really wants something done about Iraq,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. A Pew poll released this week found that 59 percent of Americans supported a deadline for combat troops to be withdrawn in 2008.

Democratic resolve was also fueled by Mr. Bush’s decision in January to pursue a troop buildup in Iraq rather than begin a pullout.

“The president’s response just drove many people on the fence to our side,” Senator Durbin said. “The idea of sending more soldiers into this was exactly the opposite of what the American people were looking for.”

It seemed, many Democrats say, a direct defiance of the voters in last year’s midterm elections.

The broader question is whether the war forges an enduring change in the Democratic Party, its stance and its credibility on national security. Many strategists are already warning that over the long haul, it is not enough to be antiwar: the Democrats need a strong, affirmative vision of foreign policy.

“If getting out of Iraq defines entirely who the Democrats are on national security, then over the long run, it will be a disaster,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. Rather, Iraq needs to be part “of a larger strategy aimed at showing how to protect America’s national security interests,” he said.

Former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who played a key role in military policy during his years in Congress, said the intellectual challenge facing the Democrats was immense, but so were the potential payoffs.

“What challenges the Democrats now is fashioning — not just muscular, not just more — but a more sophisticated approach to security,” he said, “and that requires you to comprehend the security needs of the 21st century. That’s the prize to be won, because the Republicans are in huge disarray now.”

Democratic Congressional leaders say they are moving in the direction of an alternative foreign policy vision. They added money in the new legislation, for example, for the conflict in Afghanistan. And policy groups in various wings of the party are working on their own proposals.

Ultimately, though, the party’s foreign policy will be defined on the presidential campaign trail, by the candidates and eventually the nominee. “Congress can only take this so far,” Senator Durbin said. “We deal with dollars and with votes.”

Even so, the votes in the House and Senate have already transcended the standard incrementalism of legislative work. And it may prepare the way for even more aggressive challenges to come.

Julian E. Zelizer, a historian at Boston University, noted that these votes, like the early votes on civil rights legislation, were critical to the Congressional psyche. “Every time you take a vote like this, and you survive, and there’s no big payback, it encourages you to do more,” he said.

Which may explain the ferocity of the pushback from the White House.

    Democrats Are Building on Unity Over Iraq Pullout, NYT, 29.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/washington/29assess.html?hp

Far From Inevitable,

McCain Retunes ’08 Engine

March 16, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

MASON CITY, Iowa, March 15 — Senator John McCain of Arizona worked hard for years to make himself the all-but-inevitable 2008 Republican presidential nominee, assembling a formidable machine of advisers and contributors, repairing his relationship with the Bush White House and reaching out to conservatives long wary of his views.

As he began what was supposed to be a triumphant day with his first bus trip across Iowa on Thursday, he was instead faced with a sense among some Republicans that his campaign had faltered in the early going and that his political identity had been blurred rather than enhanced by his efforts to position himself as first in line for the nomination.

As he rolled out of Des Moines on the Straight Talk Express, the vehicle that in the 2000 campaign became a potent symbol of his message and appeal, he was in some ways starting over, reintroducing himself to voters and reporters and trying to address a host of questions that follow him everywhere he goes.

“Everybody says, ‘We just want you to be like last time,’ ” he said amid a welter of microphones in what turned into a daylong conversation with reporters, punctuated by the occasional meeting with voters. “Last time we lost! But I haven’t changed any, and as we go through the town hall meetings and the debate, I can make that abundantly clear.”

Polls show he is viewed less favorably by voters today than he was when he left the presidential race of 2000. Mr. McCain finds himself trailing Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York among Republican voters in some early polls, which, though hardly predictive of how anyone might vote a year from now, suggest Republicans might be looking for a new face.

Mr. McCain’s methodical effort to calm conservatives seems to have achieved only limited success, as he was reminded Thursday at a town hall meeting here when a voter challenged him over his stance on immigration. At the same time, the appearance that he has veered to the right may well have cost him critical support among independent voters who once flocked to his candidacy, analysts said.

And as was clear from the rolling procession of local and national television crews that interviewed him throughout the day, Mr. McCain has not put an end to questions about his age, either with deliberately rigorous campaign excursions or with the patter of jokes that have become a standard part of his repertory. “I knew you’d bring that up,” he said with a wan smile when another television interviewer asked him if he was too old, at 70, to be president. “I think I’m doing fine.”

So it was that an updated version of the Straight Talk Express was pressed back into service for the start of four days of campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire. And Mr. McCain was back on board, promising to expound — at length and with candor — on any question presented as he sought to recapture his Happy Warrior campaign of 2000 and to pivot from the uneasy start of his second campaign.

“This is the way I campaign best: Get on the bus, get off the bus,” Mr. McCain said as the Straight Talk drove circles through downtown Des Moines to permit three networks to get five minutes with him. “I love it.”

Again and again, Mr. McCain said he was pleased with the state of his campaign, unconcerned about a new swell of criticism about his ideological credentials by conservatives this week, and not concerned about early polls. “I am convinced that we are going to be just fine — our campaign is going to be just fine,” he said.

Mr. McCain drew strong crowds at the two town hall meetings he held Thursday, perhaps both by a chance to hear him and to have the free meal offered by the campaign. While he seemed lethargic as the day began, by his second and final public appearance — after being repeatedly questioned by reporters about whether he really had his heart in running again — he had grown increasingly brisk and energized by the applause and another hour of questioning. He seemed in particularly good spirits as he bantered with reporters on the back of his bus.

Whatever problems he might have faced on the public front, behind the scenes, his experienced team of advisers and operatives has been busy raising money, and a strong fund-raising report next month could go a long way toward alleviating concern in Republican circles about the strength of his candidacy.

Still, Mr. McCain’s decision to reprise such a well-known symbol of his 2000 candidacy was evidence of the concern in Mr. McCain’s campaign about the problems he faces in trying to adjust to an election that is not unfolding the way it had hoped.

The outsider of 2000 is now an insider: the familiar face of Washington and the Republican Party, tied to an unpopular war and an unpopular president. It has, as his own advisers said, not been an easy adjustment.

On Thursday, even as he promised a stream of the candid comments that distinguished him in 2000 — “Anything, anything you want to talk about,” he said — he steered clear of offering opinions on two of the biggest issues on the political landscape this week. He declined to say whether he agreed with the assertion by Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that homosexuality is immoral, or whether he thought Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales should be ousted for his handling of the firing of federal prosecutors.

“Congressional hearings should be held,” he said. “A lot of this information is very disturbing.”

As he campaigned for support in what is perhaps the most conservative Republican electorate in the country — Iowa caucus voters — he encountered reminders that he faces deep suspicion because of, among other things, his support for an immigration bill that would permit some illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship.

“I want to know on behalf of veterans why you are not doing more to protect our borders,” said Jeff Heiden, a member of the Air National Guard.

Robert Parker, 72, a retired business teacher, recalled that Mr. McCain had initially opposed Mr. Bush’s tax cuts. “I have been concerned about his consistency,” Mr. Parker said. “He was against the tax cuts.”

Mr. McCain has come under fire for not attending two high-profile gatherings of conservatives in the past two weeks, and the sponsor of one of them, the Club for Growth, issued a report attacking his effort to present himself as a fiscal conservative by recalling his opposition to the tax cuts.

The bus trip “worked very well for him last time,” said Pat Toomey, the president of the Club for Growth. “But it works less well for him now, as he tries to tell people he’s this real conservative candidate and people look at his opposition to the tax cut.”

David A. Keene, who ran the Conservative Political Action Conference, the other conservative event Mr. McCain missed, said the senator had made some progress in repairing relations, but not a significant amount. “His whole thing of trying to get right with the base part of the party, the Bush part of the party, worked,” he said. “But I think he’s been kicking it away.”

If elected, Mr. McCain would be 72 when he took the oath of office, the oldest president ever inaugurated.

The persistence of questions about his age has stirred concern among Mr. McCain’s advisers, particularly as the campaign has focused considerable attention on Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat who, at 45, could be Mr. McCain’s son.

The latest New York Times/CBS News Poll found that 59 percent of Republicans believed the ideal age of a president was in the 50s. Thirteen percent said the 60s. The number who selected 70s as the ideal age was too low to measure in the poll.

Mr. McCain’s supporters said whatever problems he might be having now, they continued to view him as the strongest candidate. “I wouldn’t trade places with anybody else on the field,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a longtime McCain supporter. “I believe at the end of the day, Republican voters will be looking for a combination of conservatism and electability, and I think John is the best choice when you look at these two qualities.”

    Far From Inevitable, McCain Retunes ’08 Engine, NYT, 16.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/us/politics/16mccain.html?hp

Gingrich Admits Affair

During Impeachment

March 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:47 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

''The honest answer is yes,'' Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. ''There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards.''

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.

''The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge,'' the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. ''I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials.''

Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.

Gingrich has said he is waiting to see how the Republican field shapes up before deciding in the fall whether to run.

Reports of extramarital affairs have dogged him for years as a result of two messy divorces, but he has refused to discuss them publicly.

Gingrich, who frequently campaigned on family values issues, divorced his second wife, Marianne, in 2000 after his attorneys acknowledged Gingrich's relationship with his current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is.

His first marriage, to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, ended in divorce in 1981. Although Gingrich has said he doesn't remember it, Battley has said Gingrich discussed divorce terms with her while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.

Gingrich married Marianne months after the divorce.

''There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them,'' he said in the interview. ''I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I'm ... not proud of.''

Gingrich's congressional career ended in 1998 when he abruptly resigned from Congress after poor showings from Republicans in elections and after being reprimanded by the House ethics panel over charges that he used tax-exempt funding to advance his political goals.

------

On the Net:

Focus on the Family interview (to be posted in full Friday): http://listen.family.org/daily/

    Gingrich Admits Affair During Impeachment, NYT, 9.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gingrich-Affair.html?hp

In ’05 Investing,

Obama Took Same Path as Donors

March 7, 2007
The New York Times
By MIKE McINTIRE
and CHRISTOPHER DREW

Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.

One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.

The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.

The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.

“He went about this process to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest, and he had no knowledge of the stocks he owned,” Mr. Burton said. “And when he realized that he didn’t have the level of blindness that he expected, he moved to terminate the trust.”

Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months that he owned the stocks.

Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to invest in two relatively obscure companies, whose backers happen to include generous contributors to his political committees. Among those donors was Jared Abbruzzese, a New York businessman now at the center of an F.B.I. inquiry into public corruption in Albany, who had also contributed to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that sought to undermine John Kerry’s Democratic presidential campaign in 2004.

Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas’ purchase of a home.

Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks — even in companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit from legislation they advance — and indeed other members of Congress have investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit themselves.

Mr. Obama’s sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash accounts, a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned $2,000 on the biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the satellite communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the Obama campaign.

Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after receiving a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was set up.

The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden financial success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He had signed a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports show that he received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.

His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama’s political donors bought the adjacent lot.

The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.

But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was also a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public securities filings show.

Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr. Haywood declined to comment.

Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr. Obama initiated what he has called “one of my top priorities since arriving in the Senate,” a push to increase federal financing to fight avian flu.

Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia, and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to call for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an urgent public health threat.

His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005, he introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and urging the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.

Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt, the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another bill to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.

Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company’s chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was “aggressively going forward” with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.

The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other areas, provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005, including one on Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a treatment for avian flu “in a relatively short time.”

Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the company’s stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or about $1 a share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they never talked to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the company has received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs for treating ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received any federal money for its avian flu research.

The company’s stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006 when it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the company still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the drug.

Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama’s stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a promising start.

He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications Commission ruled in favor of the company’s effort to create a nationwide wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.

Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama’s political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The company’s chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator in Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.

In May 2005, Mr. Abbruzzese, who was vice chairman of Tejas and a principal investor in Skyterra, contributed $10,000 along with his wife to Mr. Obama’s political action committee — a departure from his almost exclusive support of Republicans. Eight months earlier, for instance, he had contributed $5,000 to the Swift Boat group, and he has given $100,000 to the Republican National Committee since 2004.

Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno. The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno’s personal business dealings, including whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for Senate approval of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese’s companies. Both men have denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Skyterra’s share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low 30s, and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on Nov. 1, 2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today trades below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company’s top officials had not been aware of Mr. Obama’s investment.

    In ’05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors, NYT, 7.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/us/politics/07obama.html?hp

Recalling Civil Rights,

Democrats Seek Black Votes

March 4, 2007
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

SELMA, Ala., March 3 — Representative John Lewis, whose political career grew out of the civil rights movement, had longed for the day he could vote for someone that he believed could become the nation’s first black president. So when Senator Barack Obama entered the race, he was on the cusp of declaring his support.

Until Bill Clinton called.

Now, Mr. Lewis said, he is agonizing over whether to choose Mr. Obama, whom he once described as “the future of the Democratic Party,” or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“One day I lean one way, the next day I lean another way,” said Mr. Lewis, Democrat of Georgia. “Sometimes, you have to have what I call an executive session with yourself, a come-to-Jesus meeting, and somehow, some way we will all have to make a decision.”

In the opening stretch of the 2008 Democratic presidential contest, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, are embroiled in what party officials believe is one of the most competitive scrambles for black supporters since the Voting Rights Act was passed four decades ago. The chief rivals will be here on Sunday when the Clintons and Mr. Obama commemorate the 42nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when hundreds of activists — Mr. Lewis among them — crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge during a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

Representative Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama, invited Mr. Obama to deliver the keynote address at the historic Brown Chapel on Sunday. After Mr. Obama agreed, Mr. Davis said, Mrs. Clinton accepted an invitation to speak at a church just down the street. And two days ago, Mr. Clinton said he would join his wife in Selma, the first time since she formally entered the race that he has been called on to use his clout so directly to give her a hand.

“Her timing speaks for itself,” said Mr. Davis, who supports Mr. Obama.

It will be the first time Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama share the same campaign turf, and curiosity was building Saturday evening as hundreds gathered in the historic district for the weekend festival. Aides to Mrs. Clinton dismissed suggestions that they were following Mr. Obama, but members of Congress traveling to Selma said they were encouraged by her allies to attend her speech, not his.

Mr. Obama also adjusted his schedule, a spokesman said, postponing a fund-raiser in Boston on Sunday evening after learning that the Clintons would be attending the daylong series of events here.

Mr. Edwards declined an invitation. He plans to be in California on Sunday to deliver a speech — about Selma and civil rights — at the University of California, Berkeley.

Black voters are a crucial component of the Democratic electorate. In 2004, despite intensive efforts by President Bush to break the Democratic dominance, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won about 89 percent of the black vote.

In contested primaries, particularly in South Carolina, black support could be vital to the Democratic nominee. About 50 percent of the primary voters in South Carolina are black, and the state is fourth in line on the nominating calendar. Alabama, where about 60 percent of the primary voters are black, is making plans to move its contest to Feb. 2. And at least 16 states are considering voting on Feb. 5, including Florida, California, Illinois, New York and Texas, all states where black voters could hold considerable sway.

But the weekend appearances also offer a window into a broader struggle among the candidates to define themselves to the country and to associate themselves with the legacy of the civil rights movement in a way that could help them appeal not only to blacks but also to white Democratic voters who are proud of their party’s role in that struggle.

Mr. Obama, who was born in 1961, four years before the Selma march, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, far from the civil rights battles that played out in the American South. While he plunged into racial issues as a young adult, he has traveled to the region only in recent years, beginning to build relationships with older leaders of the movement.

Mrs. Clinton, who was born in 1947, had her political sensibilities forged during the tumult of the late 1960s. She has benefited from her husband’s immense popularity among black voters, built gradually during their years in Arkansas and then the White House. Mr. Clinton will be in Selma to be inducted into the Voting Rights Hall of Fame.

Mr. Edwards, who was born in 1953 and raised in North Carolina, often discusses growing up in the segregated South and the obligation that brings him to address issues of race and class. He has courted black support in both of his presidential campaigns.

For Mrs. Clinton, the Selma appearance could be a test of her ability to connect with black audiences, and of Mr. Clinton’s ability to transfer his political aura to his wife.

It also gives Mr. Obama a chance to show he can compete with the Clintons, both in connecting the language and themes of the civil rights movement to the politics of today and in keeping the spotlight on himself in the middle of a head-to-head political spectacle.

“President Clinton remains popular and Senator Clinton will benefit a lot from that, but there are a lot of African-Americans who see the possibility of this,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who supports Mr. Obama. “People say, ‘He’s like my son or my grandson, and before I die, I’d like to have a chance to vote for someone who can win.’ ”

Clinton advisers said they were not concerned about polls showing some early signs of a tightened race for black support. They have been honing both a public message and a private political strategy to deal with what they acknowledge is the unmatchable personal appeal of Mr. Obama as a black candidate courting black voters.

“African-Americans historically align with people based on issues, not personality,” said Minyon Moore, a senior Clinton adviser who, among other things, has focused on building support in the black community. “People will look at her record, look at her biography, look at her experience, and support her as a real champion of their issues.”

Asked how Mrs. Clinton would compete for black votes with Mr. Obama Ms. Moore said: “It’s probably a proud moment for us all. But there’s so much history to be made this time around — having the first woman president, having the first African-American nominee, having the first Latino nominee.” The latter was a reference to Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, another Democratic candidate.

Ertharin Cousin, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, said Mr. Obama needed to introduce himself to all voters, including blacks. “We have a responsibility to tell his story, to paint his narrative,” Ms. Cousin said. “He may not be of the civil rights era, but he is definitely an extension of the work that was done of that era.”

While Mr. Obama must appear credible to civil rights leaders, he is also looking beyond the establishment of black political leaders. He is seeking to give voters a deeper look at him, advisers said, hoping to drive home the notion that a black candidate can win the presidency.

For Mrs. Clinton, the strategy for reaching black voters at this early stage of the campaign involves strong outreach to black elected officials, business leaders and others, followed by phone calls to reinforce her candidacy from her husband and supporters like Robert L. Johnson, who founded Black Entertainment Television.

Mrs. Clinton is seeking to deepen her own relationships with black voters, Mr. Johnson said. “When she’s running for president, it’s far more important that someone say, ‘Gee, it’s Hillary Clinton on the phone,’ and not, ‘President Clinton’s calling to ask if we can support his wife,’ ” Mr. Johnson said. “Hillary knows the black community’s attachment to her husband doesn’t transfer to her.”

It may, however, buy her time to win over voters on her own.

Mr. Lewis, one of the few icons of the civil rights era still active in politics, has been enamored with Mr. Obama since he arrived in Washington. Long before Mr. Lewis knew Mr. Obama would run for president, he invited him to headline a 40th anniversary gala of the Voting Rights Act, saying, “I think the hopes and dreams and aspirations of so many of us are riding on this one man.”

Nevertheless, his strong sentiment toward Mr. Clinton has been enough for him to remain neutral in the presidential race.

“I talked with President Clinton. I know him a little better than I know Mrs. Clinton,” Mr. Lewis said. “Some of us are caught in between, but isn’t it healthy that we have the luxury to choose between two wonderful, gifted politicians?”

Patrick Healy and John M. Broder contributed reporting.

    Recalling Civil Rights, Democrats Seek Black Votes, NYT, 4.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/us/politics/04campaign.html?hp

Giuliani Says

He Is Running for President in ’08

February 15, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday removed any lingering doubts that he was running for president, and, without mentioning President Bush by name, offered pointed criticism on how the Iraq war has been handled.

He said that the United States went to war with far too few forces and was wrong to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s military and government, and he conceded that if more information had been available about Iraq’s weapons, Congress never would have approved the war.

Mr. Giuliani has behaved like a presidential candidate for months, forming an exploratory committee, raising money, building a campaign staff and making appearances around the country. But until now, he has repeatedly stopped short of a definitive statement of his intentions — even joking about his nondeclarations in recent days.

Republican activists and consultants, citing his early withdrawal from the 2000 Senate race, said he needed to put to rest fears that he might not follow through. But in characteristic fashion, Mr. Giuliani said he would do things on his own timetable.

But on “Larry King Live” on CNN yesterday, Mr. Giuliani twice said, “Yes, I’m running,” according to a transcript provided by CNN before the interview was broadcast. Asked if he would make a formal announcement of the kind favored by other candidates, he said, “I guess you do.”

On the issue that looms largest over the campaign, Iraq, Mr. Giuliani used the interview to offer a harsh assessment of the Bush administration’s decision-making. His comments more closely aligned him with his chief rival in Republican primary polls, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has supported the war, as Mr. Giuliani does, but has criticized its conduct.

“I would remove Saddam Hussein again,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I just hope we’d do it better and we’d do it in a different way.”

Most important, he added, the United States, which has had 120,000 to 160,000 troops at a time in Iraq, should have gone in with “maybe 100,000 to 130,000 more.”

In addition, “I would have us not disband” the Iraqi military or purge the government of Baath Party members, because “that meant getting rid of the entire civil service,” he said, adding: “The country had no infrastructure.”

“There was a real doubt as to whether we could do this nation building,” he said, and as it has turned out, “we’re not going to do it.”

Mr. Giuliani has often stood closely by the president on national security issues since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and yesterday declined to blame the administration or any official by name. “Of course there were mistakes,” he said. “Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes.”

Mr. King asked if Mr. Giuliani would agree that the Senate would have voted unanimously against the war if it were known that Mr. Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

“Yes, I guess,” he said, but he added that such a vote would say nothing about whether the war was right.

Leaving Iraq now would give neighboring Iran “a major, major ability to expand their activities,” he said.

He added, “Two Shiite countries right next to each other, slaughtering, you know, where one group at least is slaughtering Sunnis.”

Western intelligence services have attributed most of the violence in Iraq — against both Americans and other Iraqis — to Sunnis, although the role of Shiite militias has grown.

Campaigning for other Republicans last year, Mr. Giuliani offered a full-throated defense of the war and said that Democrats simply did not understand the threat posed by terrorists. As recently as last weekend, speaking to the California Republican Party, he said that the nation was fortunate to have a leader as decisive as Mr. Bush, who Mr. Giuliani said understood what was at stake.

But in the last month, Mr. Giuliani has tempered that support by saying that Americans must be prepared for the idea that the war will not go well, even with the president’s recent addition of 21,500 more troops.

“I’m not confident it’s all going to turn around,” he said yesterday. “Who knows that? I mean, you never know that in the middle of the war. I’m confident that we have to try to make a turnaround and we just can’t walk out.”

Most Republicans still support the war, polls show — as do their party’s three leading presidential candidates, Mr. McCain, Mr. Giuliani and Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor — but most independent voters and Democrats oppose it.

Mr. Giuliani’s warnings of setbacks and criticism of war planning could serve him well politically if things continue to go badly in Iraq.

On abortion, an issue that sets him apart from much of his party, he declined to say whether it would bother him if the Supreme Court were to overturn the landmark decision Roe v. Wade.

“I don’t think it would hurt me or help me,” said Mr. Giuliani, who has long said he favored keeping abortion legal. “It would be a matter of states making decisions.”

He has said lately that he would appoint “strict constructionists” to the bench, a phrase taken by many conservatives — and, yesterday, by Mr. King — to mean judges who would not support the Roe decision.

“I don’t know that,” he said. “You don’t know that.”

When Mr. King asked him to define what a strict constructionist is, Mr. Giuliani said, “There are a lot of ways to explain that,” and did not elaborate.

    Giuliani Says He Is Running for President in ’08, NYT, 15.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/us/politics/15rudy.html?hp&ex=1171602000&en=743160747f19de94&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Romney formally announces '08 bid

Updated 2/13/2007 11:53 AM ET
USA Today
By Jill Lawrence

DEARBORN, Mich. — Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romey formally entered the presidential race today with a call for "innovation and transformation in Washington" and asserted his Republican rivals are not up to the task.

"I do not believe Washington can be transformed from within by lifelong politicians," the former corporate CEO told a crowd of supporters and students at the Henry Ford Museum here. "I do not believe Washington can be transformed … by someone who's never run a corner store, let alone the largest enterprise in the world."

Romney devoted a chunk of his speech to foreign policy and did not abandon President Bush on Iraq. "So long as there is a reasonable prospect of success, our wisest course is to seek stability in Iraq, with additional troops to secure the civilian population," he said.

But Romney also said that "America must regain our standing in the world" and suggested he would forge closer partnerships with other nations to support moderate Muslims and block Iran's nuclear ambitions. He said the U.S. role in the world must be defined "not only in terms of our might, but also by our willingness to lead, to serve and to share."

On the domestic front, he said he would pursue as president the same goals he pursued as the conservative governor of a liberal state: strong families, lower taxes, successful schools, health care that is affordable and portable, and "leaders who strive to demonstrate enduring values and morality."

Romney was accompanied by his wife of 37 years, Ann, and his five sons, five daughters-in-law and 10 grandchildren. He talked of his childhood in Michigan and invoked his late father George's legacy as an auto executive and six-year governor of the state.

The next stop on Romney's announcement tour is Iowa, followed Wednesday by South Carolina and New Hampshire. All four states have early primaries or caucuses that will help determine the GOP nominee. The Michigan primary is tentatively set for Feb. 5, 2008.

Back in 2000, Arizona Sen. John McCain bested President Bush in Michigan's Republican primary, which was open to independent voters, and is working to win again. His campaign scheduled a press conference in Lansing the same day as Romney's announcement to showcase support from elected state officials. On Monday, McCain announced his Massachusetts leadership team.

Romney has been endorsed by more than four dozen Michigan legislators and several members of the state's congressional delegation, including Rep. Pete Hoekstra, former chairman of the House intelligence committee, who is Romney's intelligence adviser.

Ed Sarpolus, an independent pollster based in Lansing, said governors usually announce presidential candidacies in states they've governed — but Romney "needs to demonstrate that he isn't Massachusetts." He said Michigan will help him project a Midwestern identity.

"It helps him establish roots and family ties. It's a good fundraising state for him and a good organizational state for him. You can potentially win it if you need it," Sarpolus said.

A recent state poll by his company, EPIC/MRA, shows Romney well behind McCain, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Romney trails the same trio nationally.

Still, he is viewed as a potentially strong candidate, in part because of his fundraising prowess. In one day last month he gathered 400 top supporters at the Boston convention center to make calls on his behalf; the event netted $6.5 million.

Romney's potential hurdles include his Mormon religion — he would be the first Mormon president if elected — and his changing positions on issues such as abortion, gay rights, emergency contraception and stem-cell research. He has moved rightward on all of them.

In his announcement speech, he said that "I believe in the sanctity of human life." He also said that "people and their elected representatives should make our laws, not unelected judges."

Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts as a result of a Massachusetts court ruling. Romney pushed for and won passage of a bill that puts gay marriage on the ballot so voters can make the decision.

Romney also worked with his Democratic legislature to pass the country's first statewide, universal health-coverage plan. It requires individuals to have health-insurance policies, just as they must have car insurance. Coverage would be free for the poorest people; others would pay on a sliding scale.

This month Romney announced an economic plan that would make the Bush tax cuts permanent; simplify the tax code; make dividends, interest and capital gains tax-free up to a ceiling (he suggested $5,000 for joint filers); reduce regulations on business and banking; and set spending targets and veto budget bills if Congress overshoots them.

Romney is best known nationally for stepping in to help rescue the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. As CEO of the organizing committee, he averted financial ruin, cleaned up corruption and oversaw an extensive security operation for the games a few months after 9/11.

Romney settled in his adopted state after earning law and business degrees at Harvard, eventually founding a venture capital firm that invested in companies such as Staples and Domino's Pizza. In 1994, he was the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate against Sen. Edward Kennedy. He staked out moderate positions on gay rights, abortion and other social issues, but lost. Eight years later he won the governorship.

    Romney formally announces '08 bid, UT, 13.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-02-13-romney-2008_x.htm

Obama opens 2008 race

in historic setting

Sat Feb 10, 2007 5:16AM EST
Reuters
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois (Reuters) - Democratic Sen. Barack Obama opens his 2008 White House run on Saturday in a setting rife with symbolism and historic links to Abraham Lincoln's fight to end slavery.

Obama, 45, a rising party star who would be the first black U.S. president if elected, launches his campaign outside the old state Capitol where Lincoln famously decried slavery in an 1858 speech and declared "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

In a video presentation on his Web site, Obama said the kickoff to his campaign would begin "a journey to take our country back and fundamentally change the nature of our politics."

His candidacy has intrigued Democrats looking for a fresh face and sparked waves of publicity and grass-roots buzz about the first black presidential candidate seen as having a chance to capture the White House.

Obama has vaulted quickly into the top tier of a crowded field of Democratic presidential contenders along with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards.

Five other Democrats are contending for the nomination, including New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Joseph Biden of Delaware.

An exploratory trip to New Hampshire in December drew sold-out crowds, hordes of media and positive reviews for Obama.

But the freshman senator from Illinois has faced questions and doubts about his relative lack of experience, his policy views on a wide range of issues and on whether the United States is ready to elect a black to the White House.

Obama has shrugged off questions about his experience and resisted efforts to define his candidacy by race, saying a fresh perspective is needed to break through Washington gridlock on issues like energy, health care and the Iraq war.

Asked in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview to be aired on Sunday if being black would hold him back as a candidate, Obama said, "No ... if I don't win this race it will be because of other factors -- that I have not shown to the American people, a vision for where the country needs to go," Excerpts were released on Friday.

SPEEDY ASCENT

Obama was an early opponent of the war and has called for a phased withdrawal of troops starting in May. He opposes President George W. Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

Obama's political rise has been astonishingly fast. He gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention before he was even elected to the U.S. Senate, and he has authored two bestselling books and appeared on numerous magazine covers.

The son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review and served eight years in the Illinois Legislature in Springfield before going to Washington.

Obama will follow up his announcement with a three-day campaign swing to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire and his hometown of Chicago.

    Obama opens 2008 race in historic setting, R, 10.2.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0923153320070210

Editorial

23-Month Campaign

January 29, 2007
The New York Times

In the old days, presidential races were one-year events. John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy on Jan. 2, 1960, and was elected that November. Earlier this month, would-be candidates who were still deciding whether to run in 2008 were being accused of reckless delay. Presidential campaign pundits were saying that if Senator Hillary Clinton had waited another minute to announce, Senator Barack Obama would have locked up every New Hampshire county committee member and hedge fund billionaire.

This really is an election on hyperspeed.

Part of this is due to the peculiarities of the race. President Bush is so unpopular that a power vacuum is opening up in Washington and, for the first time in many election cycles, both parties’ nominations are wide open. The Internet is also fueling the overdrive, with “netroots primaries,” in which the voting has already begun.

The biggest factors, though, are money and an ever-compressed schedule. California, Illinois, Florida and New Jersey are all maneuvering to move up their primaries to next February. That has candidates rushing to lock up the big donors — and bypassing the public finance system. Senator Clinton has already made clear that she will be opting out for both the primary and the general election. Senator John McCain, a major supporter of campaign finance reform who is no longer sponsoring a big reform bill that once bore his name, seems likely to do the same, with many candidates to follow. The problem with the 23-month campaign is not just the fatigue it will inspire, but the effect on democracy. Bundlers — master fund-raisers who package individual contributions into big ones — will have even more power. There is no way to stop candidates from hurling their hats into the ring so early. But there are things that can, and should, be done.

The national parties should stop the states’ mad race to have first-in-the-nation primaries. They should adopt a schedule that reformers have been proposing for years: regional primaries that rotate, so that voters in every state eventually have a turn to be among the first to vote. Congress should fix the broken public financing system, which has not been significantly updated since it was adopted in 1974. Spending limits need to be raised, to keep pace with ever-rising costs. More money needs to be put in the fund, and there should be more flexibility to help candidates who accept public financing compete against big-money candidates who opt out.

If Hillary vs. Obama vs. Rudy vs. McCain is already starting to feel old, remember that there are more than 600 days to go. We will never return to the time when presidential campaigns unfolded handshake by handshake in New Hampshire — and we shouldn’t — but Congress and the national parties can set a more thoughtful 21st-century pace.

    23-Month Campaign, NYT, 29.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/opinion/29mon1.html

Death Knell May Be Near

for Public Election Funds

January 23, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The public financing system for presidential campaigns, a post-Watergate initiative hailed for decades as the best way to rid politics of the corrupting influence of money, may have quietly died over the weekend.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York became the first candidate since the program began in 1976 to forgo public financing for both the primary and the general election because of the spending limits that come with the federal money. By declaring her confidence that she could raise far more than the roughly $150 million the system would provide for the 2008 presidential primaries and general election, Mrs. Clinton makes it difficult for other serious candidates to participate in the system without putting themselves at a significant disadvantage.

Officials of the Federal Election Commission and advisers to several campaigns say they expect the two candidates who reach Election Day 2008 will raise more than $500 million apiece. Including money raised by other primary candidates, the total spent on the presidential election could easily exceed $1 billion.

People involved in the Republican primary campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona say he, too, is beginning to seek private donations for the primary and general elections, albeit with the option of returning them. A longtime proponent of campaign finance change, Mr. McCain has recently removed his name as a co-sponsor of a bill to expand the presidential public financing program.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, another Republican primary contender, has already decided to forgo public financing for the primaries. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a rival to Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, declined to comment, as did spokesmen for several other candidates.

In a sense, Mrs. Clinton was merely confirming what many in Washington already knew: that the public financing system has failed to keep pace with the torrents of money flowing toward the presidential elections. In 2004, President Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, each opted out of the system for the primaries but not the general election. By accepting the public financing, they had to agree not to raise or spend any private money for the period after their nominating conventions.

But when Mr. Bush raised some $270 million, and Mr. Kerry about $235 million, it became clear that major-party candidates could raise far more from private donors than from the public system.

“The 2008 race will be the longest and most expensive presidential election in American history,” said Michael E. Toner, chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “Top-tier candidates are going to have to raise $100 million by the end of 2007 to be a serious candidate.” He added: “We are looking at a $100 million entry fee.”

The turn away from public financing is the twilight of a system once welcomed as a new era of clean government.

In 1986, a decade after the first publicly financed presidential election, a bipartisan commission headed by Robert Strauss, the former Democratic Party chief, and Melvin R. Laird, the secretary of defense under President Richard M. Nixon, concluded: “Public financing of presidential elections has clearly proved its worth in opening up the process, reducing the influence of individuals and groups, and virtually ending corruption in presidential election finance.”

Formed to curb candidates’ dependence on big donors without running afoul of Supreme Court rulings protecting political spending as a form of free speech, the system provides taxpayer money for candidates who voluntarily agree to abide by spending limits.

Any primary candidate who raises an initial $100,000 in small donations receives federal money to match the first $250 of each donation. For 2008, candidates could receive matching grants of as much as $25 million for the primary season, grants of about $15 million for a nominating convention and grants of about $83 million for the general election.

The system is financed by taxpayers who check a box on their returns to allocate $3 to an election fund, with about 33 million people a year in recent years directing a total of about $400 million to each quadrennial presidential election.

But the fund has faced chronic shortfalls as the percentage of taxpayers contributing has declined to less than 10 percent last year from over 30 percent in the 1970s. Those who could tap wealthy supporters began looking for ways to outmaneuver it almost from the beginning.

In the 1980 Republican primary, for example, John B. Connally, the former Texas governor, became the first candidate to reject public money and outraise his rivals, but his candidacy failed to catch on.

By the mid-1980s, candidates and donors were circumventing the spending limits by raising unlimited “soft money” donations to party committees from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals. The party committees used the money to help support a candidate’s presidential campaign or to attack his opponent.

In 2002, Congress changed the campaign finance laws to ban soft money contributions to party committees, and donors turned instead to so-called 527 groups, which could still spend unlimited contributions.

By 2000, two Republican candidates, the billionaire Steve Forbes and Mr. Bush, had turned down public money for the primary campaign. Mr. Bush became the first major-party nominee to do so. And in 2004, for the first time, both the Democratic and the Republican nominees turned down public financing for the primaries.

For Mrs. Clinton and other 2008 candidates, deciding this early to turn down public financing means that she can immediately begin building two war chests, one for the primary and one for the general election. Candidates can raise twice as much from each individual donor: $2,100 for the primary and $2,100 for the general, for a total of $4,200.

It also means that the presidential candidates will be more beholden than ever to the so-called bundlers, often lobbyists, who solicit donations to present to campaigns in a lump sum. In 2004, President Bush honored his biggest bundlers by calling them Pioneers and Rangers who raised $100,000 or $200,000, respectively.

Beginning with the first quarterly disclosure of presidential campaign finances, due at the end of April, candidates can show off their cash on hand as a deterrent to competitors. Mrs. Clinton, who faces doubts among some Democratic primary voters about whether she can win the general election, may be able to point to her general election fund-raising as evidence of her strength.

Candidates who wait until 2008 to start raising contributions for the general election may be starting too late to catch up. In 2004, for example, Mr. Kerry demonstrated during the primaries that he could raise far more money than public financing provided. But by the time he had won the nomination it was too late to raise private money to compete in the general election, and he relied instead on public financing.

On Monday, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, who is weighing another presidential bid, said, “It’s smart for Democrats to keep their options open.”

Mr. Toner, chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said he expected that even if the major candidates bypassed the election fund, the money would still be used by dark horses. Any hypothetical surplus would remain in the fund, he said.

Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have proposed legislation to revamp and expand the presidential primary financing system, but the ideas have not gained much traction in recent years. Phil Singer, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said she would support “modernizing” the system.

Spokesmen for the Democratic leaders of both chambers say they like the idea. But Republicans are wary. “The most massive poll ever taken on any subject is taken on the subject of using tax dollars for political campaigns,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, said in a statement.

“That poll is taken every April 15 on our tax return,” he said, referring to the voluntary check-off. “About 10 percent of Americans choose to participate; 90 percent choose not to.”

Charles E. M. Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development, a business group that advocates for election laws, said, “It may take a collapse of the system in order to build it back up.”

For now, Mr. Kolb added, “obituary may be the right word.”

    Death Knell May Be Near for Public Election Funds, NYT, 23.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/us/politics/23donate.html?hp&ex=1169614800&en=7b41674f5942d683&ei=5094&partner=homepage

To Critics, It’s Just Pork;

Others See Democracy

January 22, 2007
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

ALBANY, Jan. 21 — To some people, member items — the grants that lawmakers award, with little debate and much secrecy, to community groups and pet projects back in their home districts — symbolize the worst of New York’s political culture. Member items have gone to fix the roof of a hunting club near Albany, help finance a pro-wrestling hall of fame in Schenectady and, most infamously, open a cheese museum in the city of Rome.

But to Dale M. Volker, a Republican state senator from western New York, member items are nothing less than the Legislature’s purest expression of self-government and a bulwark against power-grubbing governors through the ages. It is a sentiment echoed by other lawmakers, who in interviews offered spirited defenses of such spending.

“I personally believe it is the biggest democratization of the Legislature in all the years that I’ve been there,” Mr. Volker, a 32-year veteran of the Senate, said in an interview. “I contend that the reason we cannot get rid of member items is that it would reduce the power of democracy in the Legislature. The problem we have is, a lot of our people truly believe in democracy.”

But the nonbelievers in this sort of democracy are legion. In recent months, member items have faced renewed scrutiny from government watchdogs, judges and some politicians. Late last year, a court ruling forced both chambers of the Legislature to release a precise list of member items, with the sponsors’ names attached. And earlier this month, the new attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, said his office would begin combing through the current fiscal year’s member items to ensure the grants were given properly.

Critics of the items have also been bolstered by a spate of federal investigations into members’ use of the grants.

State Senator Efrain González Jr., a Democrat, faces charges that he diverted such grants for personal use, while Assemblyman Brian M. McLaughlin, also a Democrat, was indicted last year on charges that he skimmed money from a Queens community group to which he had directed grants over the years.

Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader and the one of the Capitol’s most generous purveyors of member items, is the subject of an investigation that is examining, among other things, grants he steered to a company in which his friend was an investor.

But in interviews last week with lawmakers, members of both chambers energetically defended the grants. Some, like Mr. Volker, described them as a way for rank-and-file members to have greater say in the allocation of taxpayer dollars, decisions over which governors and legislative leaders have typically exerted the most sway.

Others put forth the traditional argument that despite the occasionally goofy item that grabs headlines, a vast majority of the spending goes to worthy causes.

“You’re not funding something that’s illegal. You’re not funding something that’s wrong,” said Senator Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who during the last two years has handed out $4.6 million worth of member items. “You’re funding something that helps your community: ambulances or fire patrol or health care.”

Keith L. T. Wright, an Assembly Democrat from Harlem, noted that he and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, gave millions to a biological research institute at City College, in Mr. Wright’s district.

“This center is going to help find the cure for cancer, for Alzheimer’s, for diabetes,” he said. “But all we hear about is money being given to the cheese museum.”

Other members said that allowing lawmakers to hand out grants was superior to letting government agencies do it.

In a statement, Senator Owen H. Johnson, a Republican from Suffolk County who disbursed $6 million in member items during the last two years, acknowledged that “member item initiatives have received a great deal of attention and scrutiny lately, and many have argued that the process itself needs reform.”

Regardless, Mr. Johnson said, he opposes allowing such appropriations “to be made by bureaucrats in Albany who have no intimate knowledge of the local communities in question or familiarity with individual groups that provide services.”

But not everyone agrees. Assemblymen William L. Parment, a western New York Democrat, said he understood why his colleagues like member items, but believed they should be abolished completely.

“I participated in the process, and I get a small amount of member items,” Mr. Parment said. “But I’ve always felt that the member item process is not a good public policy, and we really ought to have categorical grant programs. And if we want to fund little leagues or fire trucks, you create an item for it and the groups apply on a merit-based need.”

Those criticisms were echoed by people outside the Legislature who said the occasional cheese museum wasn’t the only reason to oppose the way member items were handed out.

“The critique of the system starts with the secrecy and its fundamental unfairness,” said Blair Horner, the legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group. “The money is doled out really outside of public purview. But on top of that, it’s doled out as a function of political power, not based on need. So yeah, there are some wonderful programs that get funded, but the question is whether or not the system allocates money fairly.”

About $200 million goes to member items each year, including $30 million that is under the governor’s discretion. And that does not include a number of similar grants financed with borrowed money. In the last nine months of last year Governor George E. Pataki and the Legislature authorized borrowing nearly $1.9 billion for a number of initiatives, some similar to member items.

Members of the majority party in both the Senate and the Assembly get far more money than the minority. In the Senate, for example, Mr. Bruno and nine of his closest allies were responsible for nearly a third of the roughly $150 million in Senate member items during the last two fiscal years.

Some members argued last week that the system balances out, since the Assembly is dominated by urban Democrats, and the Senate by upstate and suburban Republicans.

“You have the Democrats in control of the Assembly, and Republicans control the Senate,” said Senator Serphin R. Maltese, a Queens Republican. “Republicans can help the groups in their districts, and Democrats can help the groups in their districts.” (Some districts, others point out, are represented by an Assembly Republican and a Senate Democrat, meaning that they don’t have a state legislator in the majority in either chamber.)

Relatively few lawmakers, however, expressed any great worry over the recent steps toward altering the member item process, such as Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s announcement with Mr. Bruno and Mr. Silver last week that they would end the practice of creating pots of member item money in each year’s budget to be divvied up by the leaders in secret.

Each grant will now be specified in the next budget, allowing a modicum of public scrutiny, although the budget will still include such pots for other kinds of state spending.

“You have more transparency, but you still have the equity issue,” said Rachel Leon, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a civic group.

Mr. Maltese, for one, said he welcomed the change. “I’ve always felt full disclosure is the best course,” he said. “The only difficulty I’ve encountered is that when one group gets something, the other ones sometimes get jealous if they don’t get the same amount. I solved that by giving equivalent money to all the different ambulance corps.”

Mr. Wright said he believed making the items more visible would, in fact, help lawmakers.

“I like when people know that my folks are getting money,” he said. “It shows that I am somewhat of an effective legislator.”

Itemizing the member money, he said, would also make it easier for him to find items he had requested when looking through the thousands of pages that make up the state budget each year.

“Sometimes, I don’t know where my stuff is,” he said.

    To Critics, It’s Just Pork; Others See Democracy, NYT, 22.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/nyregion/22pork.html

Rush of Entries

Gives ’08 Race Early Intensity

January 22, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER
and PATRICK HEALY

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 — Two years before the next president is inaugurated and a full year before the first vote is cast, the contest for the White House is off to a breathtakingly fast start, exposing an ever-growing field of candidates to longer, more intensive scrutiny and increasing the amount of money they need to remain viable.

On Sunday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, held her first campaign event, highlighting her focus on health care a day after declaring her plans to run. Another Democrat, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, entered the fray, the eighth member of his party to do so. And the day was not terribly different in its pace of activity from many others in recent weeks.

The scale and swiftness of the action has the potential to upset the traditional timetables and conventions of presidential campaigning.

John Weaver, a senior adviser to Senator John McCain’s presidential effort, said the intensified announcement season and compressed primary calendar would force campaigns to develop a strong national apparatus and well-organized field efforts state by state.

“It makes it nearly impossible for a dark horse candidate to break out of the pack and challenge the front-runner(s) and thus isn’t healthy for the process,” Mr. Weaver wrote in an e-mail message on Sunday. “All of these states, who are moving up early, want to play and have an impact. But oddly enough, it ultimately will limit the legitimate candidate choices for the nation at large in the primary process.”

The candidates could be forced to move more quickly to take positions on big issues, stripping them of the chance to run on more gauzy platforms in the early stages and therefore exposing them to more direct criticism from rivals, interest groups and the news media. They will face earlier encounters with one another — New Hampshire and South Carolina are planning full-scale debates this spring — that will require them to display both policy expertise and a comfort level in front of the cameras.

They will be getting intensive scrutiny from opposition research operations, the news media and the public for that much longer, increasing the chances that a gaffe or position change could harm their campaigns. Deep into competition for experienced staff members, most candidates are already putting together operations in multiple states.

Kevin Madden, press secretary for the exploratory committee set up by former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, said his organization was already “beginning to put our teams together” for the early contests in New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, Michigan and several states beyond. “It’s happened at a very advanced pace,” Mr. Madden said, “but you can’t complain and wring your hands. You just have to work harder, faster.”

Because they do not want competitors to be raising money unchallenged, more candidates are declaring their intentions earlier, which in turn means the entire field needs more money to sustain campaigns for a longer time.

There are now a dozen serious contenders from both parties competing in a presidential race that for the first time in more than half a century will not include an incumbent — either the president or the vice president — on the ballot or even a definitive front-runner.

“Crowded fields force early announcements,” said Jennifer Palmieri, an adviser to John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina who is seeking the Democratic nomination. “Candidates are concerned there will not be enough oxygen left for them if they wait too long. Having crowded fields in both parties has exacerbated this phenomenon.”

Just hours after Mrs. Clinton made her candidacy official on Saturday, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas joined the race for the Republican nomination. Last week, Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, opened a presidential exploratory committee, emphasizing the wide-open nature of the race.

The early start of the presidential race may make it difficult for the new Democratic leaders in Congress to generate public support and media attention for their agenda. Seven sitting members of the House and Senate have declared their candidacies and several others are said to be considering it, distracting them from legislative business and drawing news coverage away from Congress and out onto the campaign trail.

John D. Podesta, a former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton and president of the Center for American Progress, said some of the early candidates surely recall the lesson of Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the Democrat who waited to jump into the last presidential race until the fall of 2003.

Given the lateness of his entry, and his limited resources, General Clark decided to skip the Iowa caucuses and focus on the New Hampshire primary. Iowa became an unexpectedly fierce contest, with John Kerry emerging as a winner and quickly rolling on to victories in New Hampshire and other early primary states.

“You need to get a foothold early and organize and get people to rally around you and your message,” Mr. Podesta said, “and the need to build momentum is real.”

The candidates and the early primary states are chasing each other in a mad circle, with two new states, Nevada and South Carolina, squeezing into the first weeks of the primary calendar. A number of other states, including California, New Jersey, Michigan and Illinois, are considering moving up their primaries so that they are not left out of the nominating process. With their expensive media markets, these states could quickly bankrupt candidates who have trouble raising money.

The intensity of the early action is fueled in part by President Bush’s political weakness, brought on largely because of the unpopularity of the war in Iraq.

“If Bush were doing well and had a continuing ability to get things done and command the national stage, I think there would be far less focus on the campaign,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian.

While presidential campaigns have been getting gradually longer over the past few decades, the acceleration in the 2008 cycle is particularly pronounced. The first President Bush announced his candidacy for the 1988 Republican nomination in October 1987; the eventual Democratic nominee in that election, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, had declared six months earlier.

Bill Clinton formally announced his candidacy for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination on Oct. 3, 1991, about three and a half months before the Iowa caucuses. George W. Bush announced his exploratory committee for the 2000 presidential race in March 1999 and began his campaign in June 1999.

By comparison, Mr. Edwards of North Carolina, the 2004 vice-presidential nominee, has traveled to Iowa 16 times since the beginning of last year, building his organization there in hopes of scoring an early triumph that carries him into the next contests.

“The earlier process will reward candidates who truly have a succinct, credible, authentic and passionate message which can sustain itself over the long nature of the campaign,” said Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004.

He also said that in 2007 candidates would be rewarded by scoring points in “nonvoting events” such as media attention, their standings in the polls and the size and response of crowds, because those sorts of factors will help winnow the field more than the primaries still a year away.

Despite the intense focus by most candidates on showing that they can raise the money to run a long and expensive campaign, having a big bank account, Mr. Dowd argued, may actually not be as important in the early stages of this presidential cycle as it was in previous ones.

“It’s for two reasons: the early process will not involve paid media as much, and new technology allows little cost to talk directly to voters,” he said. “And the early process will make it more important for a campaign to know how to respond to knowable and unknowable events in next 12 months.”

Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist who worked on the presidential campaigns of Representative Richard A. Gephardt in 2003 and Senator John Kerry in 2004, warned that candidates and their aides, no matter how tired they become, would have to stay on their toes because any misstep might be captured on tape and circulated on the Internet.

“Every move they make in Iowa and New Hampshire will be on YouTube,” Mr. Elmendorf said. “The only certainty by January ’08 is that people will be pretty tired.”

Besides taking a toll on the declared candidates, the length and cost of current campaigns also deters potential entrants. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and former Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia were considered among the brightest Democratic prospects, but both declined to run. They cited the crowded field, the endless burden of fund-raising and the brutal personal cost of today’s presidential campaigns.

Robin Toner and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Washington, and Adam Nagourney from Atlanta.

    Rush of Entries Gives ’08 Race Early Intensity, NYT, 22.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/us/politics/22campaign.html?hp&ex=1169528400&en=e12b8d73732cd34f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Analysis:

Clinton Enters Historic Race

January 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:43 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination with unrivaled political strengths and challenges to match, a former first lady turned senator, soon to be tested in a campaign unlike any other in American history.

While Clinton seeks to become the first woman commander in chief, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is in the early stages of what promises to be the most credible White House campaign ever by a black politician.

One year before the first caucus and primary votes are cast, sheer star power sets them apart from the pack of contenders who will now begin to debate the war in Iraq, health care, federal deficits and more.

''All things considered, she is a little bit more a front-runner than Senator Obama,'' said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster not aligned with any candidate. He put the odds at ''better than 50-50 that the nominee will come from that pair.''

That is to the chagrin of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, embarking on a bid to become the first Hispanic to preside from the Oval Office. Not to mention the white men in the race -- a group that includes the party's 2004 vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, as well as Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and possibly others to follow.

''Clinton is widely respected among Democratic voters of all stripes for being very smart and someone with important leadership qualities,'' Garin said.

''Among Democrats the Clinton years are remembered as some of the best times, not just for the party but for the country.''

The former first lady won a second Senate term last fall after raising more than $40 million, much of it from donors who presumably understood her ambition did not end with re-election to Congress. Her most recent filings indicate a campaign treasury in excess of $13 million.

Many of the senior strategists who worked on her husband's two winning campaigns are now on her payroll, and Clinton loyalists around the country await a summons to duty.

Clinton joins the race after six years in the Senate from New York in which she has worked to establish a political identity independent of her husband's.

She took a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and fought for anti-terrorism money for New York City. She tended so well to the concerns of upstate constituents that she carried more than three dozen counties in 2006 that had supported President Bush two years earlier.

But the Clinton years are remembered, even by Democrats, for more than good times, from the endless Republican assaults on the president and his wife to Monica Lewinsky and impeachment. Look carefully at the video posted on her Web site and notice the former president's image in photographs on the table behind her.

Widely viewed by Democrats as the pre-eminent politician of his generation, he is blurry and in the background. He will not stay that way, and one of her challenges will be to bring him into the best possible focus for her candidacy.

Garin referred to another one. ''The Clinton campaign needs to recognize that voters have questions about Hillary Clinton and whether she can be a unifying figure.''

No candidate chooses to run as a divisive figure, but Obama, in particular, seems intent on casting himself as a fresh new leader.

''Challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most,'' he said on a video posted to his Web site. ''It's the smallness of our politics. ... We have to change our politics, and come together around our common interests and concerns as Americans.''

Republicans look at Clinton with something like grudging respect.

''Her strengths are she is very smart, she is very tough and she is very calculating. And I don't think that we should underestimate the appeal she would have to suburban women,'' said Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican party who is not aligned with any of this year's GOP contenders.

''On the downside, she is very polarizing at a time when polarization is not an appealing trait in candidates in either party. And she doesn't always calculate correctly.''

Clinton knows that she has been viewed as a divisive figure and began trying to reshape opinion on Day One. ''We all need to be part of the discussion if we're all going to be part of the solution. And all of us have to be part of the solution,'' she said on a video posted on her new campaign Web site.

Clinton joins the race at a time when the war in Iraq dominates, an issue that Gillespie noted may cause her some difficulty with the anti-war activists who will help pick the Democratic nominee.

As a woman, particularly running in wartime, Clinton bears an especially heavy burden as she tries to establish her qualifications to become commander in chief.

Like many Democrats, she voted to authorize the war in Iraq when the issue came before Congress in 2002. Like others, she grew increasingly critical of the Bush administration as the months passed and the casualties mounted.

But Edwards, for one, made a point of apologizing for his vote, and she has not.

Returning from a recent trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, she sought to strike a balance.

She said the United States should deploy more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, and announced she will introduce legislation capping the number of troops in Iraq.

''I do not support cutting funding for American troops, but I do support cutting funding for Iraqi forces if the Iraqi government does not meet set conditions,'' she said.

------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- David Espo has covered politics for the Associated Press since 1980.

    Analysis: Clinton Enters Historic Race, NYT, 20.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Democrats-2008.html

Clinton Enters ’08 Field,

Fueling Race for Money

January 21, 2007
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY and JEFF ZELENY

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday, immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the first Democratic primary, the competition for campaign donations.

“I’m in,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail message to supporters early yesterday morning. “And I’m in to win.”

If successful, Mrs. Clinton, 59, would be the first female nominee of a major American political party, and she would become the first spouse of a former president to seek a return to the White House.

Her entrance into the race followed Mr. Obama’s by less than a week, and highlighted the urgency for her of not falling behind in the competition for money, especially in New York, where the battle has already reached a fever pitch.

George Soros, the billionaire New York philanthropist, has made maximum donations in the past to both candidates, for instance, and last week he faced a choice: support Mr. Obama, who created his committee on Tuesday, or stay neutral and see what Mrs. Clinton and others had to say. In his case, the upstart won. Mr. Soros sent the maximum contribution, $2,100, to Mr. Obama, the first-term senator from Illinois, just hours after he declared his plans to run.

“Soros believes that Senator Obama brings a new energy to the political system and has the potential to be a transformational leader,” said Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidential operation is only one day old, but she already finds herself in a breakneck competition against Mr. Obama for fund-raising supremacy in two towns that she and her husband have mined heavily for political gold: New York and Hollywood. Mr. Obama’s entrance into the race has also put up for grabs other groups that are primary targets for Mrs. Clinton, including African-Americans and women.

At this early stage in the nomination fight, securing donations and signing up fund-raisers are among the best ways of showing political strength in a crowded field (seven Democrats and counting). And Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are looking to raise at least $75 million this year alone.

Advisers said yesterday that they had begun corralling donors to build quickly on the formidable $14 million that Mrs. Clinton already had in the bank. They predicted that they would outpace Mr. Obama, though they acknowledged that he is moving impressively to try to match Mrs. Clinton’s national fund-raising network, which has been in the making far longer than his.

Mrs. Clinton faces some fatigue among donors after more than 15 years of Clinton fund-raising, Democratic contributors and strategists said, and some skepticism about whether she can win. Yet she has the Democrats’ most popular rainmaker at her full disposal, former President Bill Clinton, and she has influential friends like the lawyer and power broker Vernon E. Jordan Jr. to help keep African-American donors and others by her side.

Notably, no prominent Clinton fund-raiser has moved to Mr. Obama’s camp (though his aides are working on it). Mrs. Clinton has also lined up a powerful roster of fund-raising and economic advisers in New York, including the financiers Roger Altman, Steven Rattner, Blair W. Effron, Alan Patricof and Mr. Rattner’s wife, Maureen White, a former finance chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

“Maureen and I will happily do everything we can to help her,” Mr. Rattner said. “Based on our long relationship with her, we feel that she has demonstrated incontrovertibly that she would be an effective candidate and a terrific president.”

For all of the attention swirling around Mr. Obama, meanwhile, he faces many obstacles as he seeks to become the nation’s first black president. His background, including a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, has elevated his appeal, but it does little to answer questions about whether he has the experience to serve in the White House.

Picking off Clinton loyalists is no easy task, either. Hours after opening his fund-raising committee on Tuesday, Mr. Obama convened separate conference calls with donors in Chicago and on the East and West Coasts; in the East Coast phone call, according to participants, Mr. Obama asked them to keep an open mind about his candidacy even if they had been allies of Mrs. Clinton.

James Torrey, chairman of the global hedge fund Torrey Funds, said he signed on with Mr. Obama not as a snub to Mrs. Clinton, but because he believed that the Illinois senator had the best chance of inspiring Democrats and other voters.

“I know it’s perceived as an anti-Hillary thing,” Mr. Torrey said in an interview Friday. “I think she’s marvelous, I think she’s a great senator, but I’d rather see Barack Obama as president. I think the Republicans will make it their life’s work to bring her down.”

Several New York and Hollywood donors offered a similar assessment: they liked Mrs. Clinton as a senator, but worried that her approval rating in the presidential sweepstakes hovered at only 40 percent, despite having nearly 100 percent name recognition.

Some of her veteran supporters in New York are now on the fence, including the business executives Orin S. Kramer and Robert Zimmerman, who are active in Democratic politics. Others say they plan to play it safe and contribute to both candidates. In Los Angeles, the producers David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg are working to plan a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama after he officially enters the race, which he is scheduled to do on Feb. 10. Mr. Geffen has signed on with Mr. Obama, while Mr. Katzenberg and Mr. Spielberg have not decided which candidate to formally endorse.

Yet hedging bets with a spread of donations could prove perilous with the Clinton camp, said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is president of the New School University.

“The Clintons value loyalty, and I don’t think they are going to risk offending her,” Mr. Kerrey said of Mrs. Clinton’s traditional supporters, noting that he spoke to several undecided Democrats last week. Referring to Mr. Obama, he added: “He’s got to reach out to Hillary’s supporters and hope he can persuade some of them. If he doesn’t, she’s the nominee.”

Mr. Zimmerman said he was enthusiastic about Mrs. Clinton. Asked why he had not aligned with her yet, he said: “It’s appropriate and respectful to hear every candidate’s message.”

Mr. Obama is putting together his own finance team to focus on New York. He has hired Julianna Smoot, who helped tap Wall Street money as part of a record-setting team at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York. He has also dispatched a fund-raiser, Jenny Yeager, to run his New York operation, and he is calling on Robert Wolf, chairman of UBS Americas, to raise money. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Wolf, who has donated to Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats, confirmed that he planned to help Mr. Obama.)

In New York, chief executives, lawyers, entertainers, gay men and lesbians, African-Americans and women have been prominent in political fund-raising for decades — though usually they are picking among outsiders, not hometown friends and allies. Yet the 2008 race will test personal and political loyalties, with Mrs. Clinton preparing to announce a run and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and perhaps former Gov. George E. Pataki moving to seek the Republican nomination. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is also being encouraged to run as an independent.

The attention given to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama is making fund-raising that much more difficult for other Democrats. Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, decided not to run in part because of the fund-raising challenge. While former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina still hopes to tap into a network of supporters among trial lawyers, his former profession, and to build an army of grass-roots donors, strategists for other candidates conceded that raising money would be an uphill battle and said it was an open question whether there was room for more than one alternative to Mrs. Clinton.

“I just got off the phone with someone who said, ‘It’s between Edwards and Obama,’ and with a little nudging I pushed him over to the Obama camp,” said Jeh Johnson, a partner at the Paul, Weiss law firm in New York who has been making fund-raising calls on behalf of Mr. Obama.

Mr. Johnson, who was general counsel for the Air Force in the Clinton administration, said younger Democrats and women — crucial parts of Mrs. Clinton’s base — were excited about Mr. Obama. “I haven’t encountered many New Yorkers who say, ‘No, I’m not interested, I’m a Hillary supporter,’ ” he said.

The competition for supporters — and contributors — extends well beyond New York. And Mr. Obama could complicate Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising efforts in Chicago, another lucrative base for Democrats. In her Senate re-election bid last year, she raised nearly $700,000 from Illinois, her native state.

One Democratic operative, who has knowledge of Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising operation in the Midwest, called donors in Chicago last week after Mr. Obama’s announcement, asking whether it would be foolhardy to sign onto the Clinton campaign if he was in the race. While party officials say Mr. Obama will have an advantage in Chicago, they said Mrs. Clinton would still find considerable support there.

While Mr. Obama has never run a national campaign, his political action committee, the Hopefund, has aggressively attracted a broad base of contributors from across the country, including Mr. Katzenberg, Mr. Geffen and Mr. Spielberg.

In the New York entertainment industry, too, Mr. Obama’s candidacy has received raves. Hours after his announcement Tuesday, the Broadway producer Margo Lion sent out an e-mail message urging her friends to donate to him — making clear that the theater community was not locked down by Mrs. Clinton.

“Along with many others in the industry, I will be producing a fund-raiser at the St. James Theater later this spring” for Mr. Obama, Ms. Lion wrote. “We need to find a new direction for our country, and finally, we have the man to do it.”

Patrick Healy reported from New York, and Jeff Zeleny from Washington. Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from New York.

    Clinton Enters ’08 Field, Fueling Race for Money, NYT, 20.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/us/politics/21hillary.html?hp&ex=1169355600&en=71254e612de4c93b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Clinton Says

‘I’m In to Win’ 2008 Race

January 20, 2007
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY

Six years after making history by winning a United States Senate seat as first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this morning that she was taking the first formal step to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, a journey that would break yet more political barriers in her extraordinary and controversial career.

“I’m in,” she says in a statement on her new campaign Web site. “And I’m in to win.”

Mrs. Clinton, 59, called for “bold but practical changes” in foreign, domestic, and national security policy and said that she would focus on finding “a right end” to the Iraq war, expanding health insurance, pursuing greater energy independence and strengthening Social Security and Medicare.

In her statement, Mrs. Clinton also squarely confronted an issue that concerns many Democrats: Whether she can, in fact, win the presidency. Some voters still associate her most with the controversies of the Clinton administration, and Republicans have long attacked and caricatured her, and plan to brand her as indecisive on Iraq.

“I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine,” Mrs. Clinton said on the Web site. “After nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in New York and two landslide wins, I can say I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.”

If successful, Mrs. Clinton would be the first female nominee of a major American political party, and she would become the first spouse of a former president to seek a return to the White House. President Bill Clinton left office in 2000 after two terms marked by robust economic expansion and a series of investigation into his personal life and the Clintons’ business dealings.

The successes and shadows of those years will likely loom over Mrs. Clinton, who was both a hands-on adviser and a divisive presence in his administration.

Yet Mrs. Clinton has become a major political figure in her own right: She is broadly popular with women, African-Americans, and other core groups in the Democratic Party, and she is one of the party’s best fundraisers and most sought-after speakers. She is admired by many independents and Republicans in New York, winning re-election last year by 30 points. While she is not associated with any major piece of legislation, she is widely regarded as an effective, thoughtful lawmaker who has built bipartisan ties.

Her early support for the Iraq war, however, and her unpopularity in the 1990s have stirred doubts among Democrats about whether she can win the presidency. And she remains an enigma and a caricature to many people: Radically liberal, coldly ambitious, or ethically compromised. Her friends say that she is none of these, but acknowledge that part of her challenge is letting voters see the full her and not simply a controlled, rehearsed politician — no easy task for such a private and protective person.

Mrs. Clinton announced that she was forming a committee to raise money for a presidential campaign in an e-mail message sent this morning to thousands of supporters, as well in a video and the statement on her Web site.

Beginning Monday at 7 p.m., she plans to hold three nights of live video discussions online in which she will answer voters’ questions. She pledged in her statement to continue “a national conversation about how we can work to get our country back on track.”

Her old Senate campaign Web site was also transformed this morning, with a new banner — “Hillary for President” — as well as a page for fund-raisers (“Hillraisers”), and a series of essays and campaign memos that promote her presidential candidacy.

“This is a big election with some very big questions,” she said on her Web site. “How do we bring the war in Iraq to the right end? How can we make sure every American has access to adequate health care? How will we ensure our children inherit a clean environment and energy independence? How can we reduce the deficits that threaten Social Security and Medicare?” Senator Clinton is the seventh Democrat to join the likely field of candidates that will officially start vying for the nomination next January, in the Iowa presidential caucuses.

She joins Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who announced plans to run on Tuesday; former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the 2004 vice presidential nominee; Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut; former Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa; and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio. An eighth, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, is expected to declare on Sunday that he is forming an exploratory committee as well.

Mrs. Clinton appears at the head of the Democratic pack in many national polls, yet she is in a tighter spot in some voter surveys in Iowa and New Hampshire, which kick off the presidential nominating process. Recent polls show Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards doing well in those states.

Her entry into the race was long anticipated; even before she won her Senate seat in 2000, people joked about the restoration of the Clinton White House someday, with her in the Oval Office.

Her advisers this week have rejected the idea, spreading in Democratic circles, that she would rush to announce as a way to overshadow Mr. Obama, who has engendered intense Democratic interest as a steady critic of the Iraq war and as a skilled orator who comes across as a nonpartisan and unifying force in politics.

Like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama is also poised to make history. If successful in the primaries, he would be the first African-American to win the Democratic nomination. He is her only real rival at this point in drawing huge crowds of voters at political stops and driving the 2008 political discussion in the media.

This past week alone has shown the ways that the Clinton and Obama candidacies are intersecting: He announced Tuesday and dominated political coverage in the media; she swept in on Wednesday, fresh from her trip to Iraq, and appeared on the network morning shows to talk about the war (pushing the news of his candidacy to second place); later that day, he issued a statement embracing a cap on American troops in Iraq, hours after she had made a similar proposal. And they are now both jockeying for donors in New York, Hollywood, and elsewhere.

If Mr. Obama’s ideas and experience are still under development — a concern for some Democrats — Mrs. Clinton’s agenda and history are a mixed bag for many voters.

Her political message flows from centrist Democratic views — or, as she likes to say, common sense: Staking out pragmatic, doable, middle-of-the-road positions that can win the broadest popular support. She supports abortion rights, for instance, but has called abortion a “tragic choice” and speaks urgently about the need for more adoptions. She supports a ban on flag burning, but would not go so far as to amend the Constitution, as some conservatives wish. She supports gay rights generally, but not gay marriage.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has sought to offer himself as a fresh start for national politics after a succession of presidents named Bush, Clinton, and Bush — and after four decades of divisive rancor, from the sixties and Vietnam to Roe v. Wade, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Lewinsky scandal, and now the Iraq war.

On Iraq, perhaps the most defining issue for Democratic candidates in the race at this stage, Mrs. Clinton voted in October 2002 to authorize President Bush to use military force. As is her style, Mrs. Clinton, a Wellesley-educated, Yale-trained lawyer, offered arguments for and against that vote on the floor of the Senate that day; she urged more diplomatic efforts, but also said of her vote, “I cast it with conviction.”

While she has not explicitly repudiated that vote, she has moved away from it, becoming a forceful critic of the White House war strategy and saying last month that she would not vote the same way today.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama — as well as the other five people running — have sufficiently different histories and political postures on Iraq that it could be a pivotal issue for voters choosing between them. Mr. Obama, for his part, was a member of the Illinois legislature in 2002, where he was a vocal opponent of invasion.

Both senators, like most of the other Democrats running, are now fierce opponents of the Bush war plan. Mr. Obama, Mr. Edwards, and Mr. Biden have sought to raise their profiles in the media as war critics, giving speeches and interviews about Iraq and, after Mr. Bush’s address to the nation last week, appearing on news outlets to criticize him.

Mrs. Clinton is a more cautious politician, preternaturally so, and she does not gravitate toward the cameras; they gravitate toward her. She did not appear on television after the president’s speech; instead she went to Iraq to hear from military commanders, a means of fashioning and updating her views on the war.

That careful, deliberate style impresses some Democrats but irritates and deflates many others: She tends to tweak her views and her rhetorical nuances to position herself in the center of most issues, leaving an uninspired impression for some. Political analysts say she is neither a firebrand nor a stem-winder in public, though privately she can be sharply opinionated, outspoken, sarcastic, and funny. Part of the challenge for the Clinton campaign will be showing the different facets of her personality to voters and humanizing her for those who find her too polarizing or too calculating or too moderate.

Indeed, she is already the most overly scrutinized politician in America — from her political positions to her wardrobe and hairstyles — and she is careful and sensitive about her public profile. She has worked hard in the Senate to form alliances with Republicans, including some of those who sought to remove her husband from office in 1999 after it was revealed that he had tried to hide information about his extra-marital affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

Some of her friends chide her for still being the “Goldwater girl” of her youth, growing up in a Republican household in the Chicago suburbs. Advisers say that she is not predisposed to risk, but rather pursues “evidence based decision-making” — a favorite phrase of hers — and avoiding the appearance of suddenly changing her positions or seeming indecisive.

Indeed, most of her life in politics and the law was devoted to methodical, behind-the-scenes work: After attending Yale Law School, where she met Mr. Clinton, she worked on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of President Richard M. Nixon. She then moved to Arkansas and married Mr. Clinton, and she became his political partner and a senior policy adviser when he was governor there.

After his election as president in 1992, Mrs. Clinton took on the role of crafting and shepherding his administration’s massive proposal for universal health insurance. But the complexity of the proposal, and the secrecy of the White House deliberations, sapped support among members of Congress, and Mrs. Clinton — while praised for some of her public presentations — shared the blame when the plan collapsed. (She jokes now about still bearing the “scars” from that experience, and she has favored incremental policy ideas to expand health care.)

Mrs. Clinton has said that she is a far better lawmaker and politician today because of her experiences and lessons during the White House years. Yet it is unclear how difficult it will be to persuade Americans to see her in a fresh light and give her a full hearing, given that she is so well known and that voters’ attitudes about her are so firmly shaped at this point.

    Clinton Says ‘I’m In to Win’ 2008 Race, NYT, 20.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/us/politics/20cnd-clinton.html?hp&ex=1169355600&en=cd10e97a2c66212e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Transcript

Senator Clinton’s Statement

About Her Candidacy for President

January 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

The statement issued Saturday by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, on her Web site, www.hillaryclinton.com , about her candidacy for president in 2008:

I'm in. And I'm in to win.

Today I am announcing that I will form an exploratory committee to run for president.

And I want you to join me not just for the campaign but for a conversation about the future of our country -- about the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures.

I am going to take this conversation directly to the people of America, and I'm starting by inviting all of you to join me in a series of Web chats over the next few days.

The stakes will be high when America chooses a new president in 2008.

As a senator, I will spend two years doing everything in my power to limit the damage George W. Bush can do. But only a new president will be able to undo Bush's mistakes and restore our hope and optimism.

Only a new president can renew the promise of America -- the idea that if you work hard you can count on the health care, education and retirement security that you need to raise your family. These are the basic values of America that are under attack from this administration every day.

And only a new president can regain America's position as a respected leader in the world.

I believe that change is coming November 4, 2008. And I am forming my exploratory committee because I believe that together we can bring the leadership that this country needs. I'm going to start this campaign with a national conversation about how we can work to get our country back on track.

This is a big election with some very big questions. How do we bring the war in Iraq to the right end? How can we make sure every American has access to adequate health care? How will we ensure our children inherit a clean environment and energy independence? How can we reduce the deficits that threaten Social Security and Medicare?

No matter where you live, no matter what your political views, I want you to be a part of this important conversation right at the start. So to begin, I'm going to spend the next several days answering your questions in a series of live video Web discussions.

Starting Monday, January 22, at 7 p.m. EST for three nights in a row, I'll sit down to answer your questions about how we can work together for a better future. And you can participate live at my Web site. Sign up to join the conversation here.

I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America, where I learned that we could overcome every obstacle we face if we work together and stay true to our values.

I have worked on issues critical to our country almost all my life. I've fought for children for more than 30 years. In Arkansas, I pushed for education reform. As first lady, I helped to expand health care coverage to millions of children and to pass legislation that dramatically increased adoptions. I also traveled to China to affirm that women's rights are human rights.

And in the Senate, I have worked across party lines to get billions more for children's health care, to stop the president's plan to privatize Social Security, and to make sure the victims and heroes of 9/11 and our men and women in uniform receive the fair treatment they deserve. In 2006, I led the successful fight to make Plan B contraception available to women without a prescription.

I have spent a lifetime opening opportunities for tens of millions who are working hard to raise a family: new immigrants, families living in poverty, people who have no health care or face an uncertain retirement.

The promise of America is that all of us will have access to opportunity, and I want to run a 2008 campaign that renews that promise, a campaign built on a lifetime record of results.

I have never been afraid to stand up for what I believe in or to face down the Republican machine. After nearly $70 million spent against my campaigns in New York and two landslide wins, I can say I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate, and how to beat them.

I need you to be a part of this campaign, and I hope you'll start by joining me in this national conversation.

As we campaign to win the White House, we will make history and remake our future. We can only break barriers if we dare to confront them, and if we have the determined and committed support of others.

This campaign is our moment, our chance to stand up for the principles and values that we cherish; to bring new ideas, energy, and leadership to a uniquely challenging time. It's our chance to say 'we can' and 'we will.'

Let's go to work. America's future is calling us.

    Senator Clinton’s Statement About Her Candidacy for President, NYT, 20.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/us/politics/20clinton-text.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Hillary Clinton Snapshot

January 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:42 a.m. ET
The New York Times

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is among a dozen or more Democrats who have set their sights on the White House:

------

INTERESTING NOTE: After graduating from Wellesley College in 1969, Clinton spent the summer gutting salmon at a fishery in Valdez, Alaska. ''Of all the jobs I've had, sliming fish was pretty good preparation for life in Washington,'' she wrote in her autobiography, ''Living History.''

DETAIL YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW: Clinton's 87-year-old mother, Dorothy Rodham, lives with the Clintons at their home in Washington.

CHALLENGE: No woman has ever been elected president. Because she is such a polarizing figure who carries considerable baggage from her years as first lady, Clinton must convince skeptical Democrats that she can win a general election.

CAREER NOTE: During Bill Clinton's years as Arkansas governor -- a job that paid him about $35,000 annually -- Hillary Clinton was the family's primary breadwinner. She was a partner at Little Rock's prestigious Rose Law Firm and served on several corporate boards, including Wal-Mart's.

PERSONAL: Married for 31 years to the former president. One daughter, Chelsea, 26.

TOUGH ISSUES: The Iraq war. Clinton supported the 2002 resolution authorizing military intervention in Iraq and has refused to repudiate her vote despite strong pressure from liberal activists who tend to dominate Democratic primaries. Recently, she has proposed capping troop levels in Iraq and has criticized the leadership of Iraq's U.S.-backed prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

    Hillary Clinton Snapshot, NYT, 20.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Clinton-Snapshot.html

Mourners Bid Final Farewell to Ford

January 3, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) -- Tens of thousands of mourners with their winter caps in their hands and bundled-up children in tow quietly prayed and offered military salutes Wednesday as they filed past the casket of their state's only president, Gerald R. Ford, on the final official day of national mourning.

Following an afternoon church service, the late president was to be interred in a private ceremony just a few steps from where the lines of mourners stood, on the grounds of his presidential museum.

Grand Rapids was Ford's boyhood home, and he played football for the University of Michigan's national championship teams in 1932 and 1933.

Many people in the crowds that lined up through the chilly night and into Wednesday to say a final goodbye paid tribute by wearing Michigan sweat shirts and hats. About 3,000 people were passing the casket each hour -- a total of about 57,000 by the time the viewing ended, the Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region said.

Some of those who passed by Ford's casket blessed themselves or ignored a no-cameras rule and snapped photos with camera phones. Troops of young Boy Scouts, born well after Ford's time as president, saluted the flag-draped casket. Ford had earned scouting's highest rank, becoming an Eagle Scout in 1927.

Outside the museum, Julie Setlock stood by a makeshift memorial of flowers and candles and adjusted a football carrying the words ''A true American and hometown hero.''

The 37-year-old from nearby Rockford had arrived Tuesday night with her three children to view the late president's casket, but the lines were so long, she decided to try again Wednesday morning. Even at 7 a.m., she faced a 30-minute wait.

''It's not very often you have an opportunity to pay respect to a president, so I couldn't pass it up,'' said Bill Kleinhans, a Grand Rapids business owner who was also in line early Wednesday.

Donald Rumsfeld, who served in Ford's cabinet as his chief of staff and as his defense secretary, was to deliver a eulogy during the afternoon service at Grace Episcopal Church. Former President Jimmy Carter, who defeated Ford in 1976 but later became a close friend of his former opponent, and Richard Norton Smith, who used to be the director of the Ford museum and presidential library, also were scheduled to speak.

Ford, who became the nation's 38th president after Richard Nixon resigned, died Dec. 26 at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 93.

On Tuesday, people jammed streets and waved as Ford's casket was carried from the Grand Rapids airport, where it arrived following services at Washington National Cathedral.

''You were a paradoxical gift of remarkable intellect and achievement wrapped in a plain brown wrapper,'' Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said of Ford. ''Welcome home to the people that you reflected so well when you were in Washington.''

Tuesday's elaborate national funeral service in Washington drew 3,000 people. President Bush spoke Tuesday, as did NBC newsman Tom Brokaw and Ford's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, among others.

''In President Ford, the world saw the best of America, and America found a man whose character and leadership would bring calm and healing to one of the most divisive moments in our nation's history,'' President Bush said in his eulogy.

Bush's father, the first President Bush, called Ford a ''Norman Rockwell painting come to life'' and cracked gentle jokes about Ford's reputation as an errant golfer.

Kissinger paid tribute to Ford's leadership in achieving nuclear arms control with the Soviets, pushing for the first political agreement between Israel and Egypt and helping to bring majority rule to southern Africa.

''In his understated way he did his duty as a leader, not as a performer playing to the gallery,'' Kissinger said. ''Gerald Ford had the virtues of small town America.''

Brokaw said Ford brought to office ''no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance,'' an oblique reference to the air of subterfuge that surrounded Nixon in his final days.

Associated Press writers Calvin Woodward in Washington and Tim Martin, James Prichard and Ken Thomas in Grand Rapids contributed to this report.

    Mourners Bid Final Farewell to Ford, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gerald-Ford.html?hp&ex=1167886800&en=163bd56b359bb229&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ford Is Remembered as Bringing

‘Grace to a Moment of Great Doubt’

January 3, 2007
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — In a soaring tribute to a modest man, Gerald R. Ford was remembered on Tuesday as bringing the ordinary virtues of decency, integrity and humility to mend a broken government after the pain of war and scandal.

“Amid all the turmoil, Gerald Ford was a rock of stability,” President Bush told the gathering of generations of Washington’s powerful at Washington National Cathedral. “And when he put his hand on his family Bible to take the presidential oath of office, he brought grace to a moment of great doubt.”

The cathedral’s grand setting and the pomp of a state funeral provided a counterpoint for the unassuming character praised by the eulogists.

President Bush’s father called Mr. Ford “a Norman Rockwell painting come to life”; Tom Brokaw, the former television anchor, described “Citizen Ford” as a “champion of Main Street values”; and Henry A. Kissinger said the man he served as secretary of state “had the virtues of small-town America.”

When the cathedral’s limestone arches echoed, it was with the drums and brass of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and the ushers directing the capacity crowd of 3,700 to their seats were uniformed Boy Scouts, a tribute to Mr. Ford’s youthful achievement of the rank of Eagle Scout. Among the hymns was “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” known as the Navy Hymn, a particular favorite of Mr. Ford, who served in the Pacific during World War II.

President Bush, overseeing a deeply unpopular war in Iraq and perhaps pondering his own legacy, lauded Mr. Ford’s “firm resolve” in sending the Marines to rescue the crew of the American merchant ship Mayagüez when it was seized by Cambodia. He suggested that some acts widely condemned during Mr. Ford’s administration in the 1970s had come to look wiser in historical perspective, including his pardon for his immediate predecessor, Richard M. Nixon.

In addition, Mr. Bush noted that Mr. Ford was criticized for signing the Helsinki Accords, the 1975 agreement that ratified borders in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe while also setting new standards for human rights.

“History has shown that document helped bring down the Soviet Union as courageous men and women behind the Iron Curtain used it to demand their God-given liberties,” Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Ford’s coffin arrived at the cathedral by motorcade from the Capitol, a final journey through the city where he served as 13-term congressman, vice president and finally president, the only person to hold the nation’s top two offices without being elected to either.

After the 90-minute Episcopal funeral service, Mr. Ford’s body was flown from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to his hometown, Grand Rapids, Mich., for a burial service on Wednesday in a plot beside the museum that bears his name.

In Washington, the Gothic cathedral where Mr. Ford helped dedicate the nave in 1976, became for the morning a crossroads of the capital’s past and present, with Supreme Court justices and members of Congress in the south transept facing scores of foreign ambassadors and former foreign leaders in the north transept.

Across an aisle from the diplomats sat Mr. Ford’s honorary pallbearers, including in the front row Mr. Kissinger; Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as defense secretary to both Mr. Ford and the current President Bush; Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chief who was Mr. Ford’s top economic adviser; James A. Baker III, who ran Mr. Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 campaign for president; and Brent Scowcroft, Mr. Ford’s national security adviser.

Facing the altar, where Mr. Ford’s coffin, draped by a flag, sat, were Mr. Ford’s widow, Betty, who was escorted in and out of the cathedral by President Bush, and the Ford children, Steve, Jack, Mike and Susan.

Across the nave from the Ford family sat President Bush and Laura Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who served Mr. Ford as chief of staff, with his wife, Lynne; several current cabinet members and three former presidents — the elder Mr. Bush with his wife, Barbara; Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn; and Bill Clinton and his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea. With them was Nancy Reagan, the former first lady.

Like much of the outpouring of affection for Mr. Ford since he died at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., on Dec. 26 at the age of 93, the service focused on what President Bush called the “calm and healing” the former president brought to “one of the most divisive moments in our nation’s history.” Mr. Ford, the House minority leader, succeeded first Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and then President Nixon after both men were forced from office by scandal.

“Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance,” said Mr. Brokaw, who explained that Mr. Ford had asked him to address the funeral as a representative of the press corps. “He knew who he was, and he didn’t require consultants or gurus to change him.”

Mr. Kissinger in particular emphasized the substantive achievements of Mr. Ford in foreign policy, saying the “deserved commentary” on Mr. Ford’s character “has sometimes obscured how sweeping and lasting were his achievements.” In remarks perhaps intended to reflect on his own record as well as Mr. Ford’s, he credited the former president with keeping ethnic conflicts in Cyprus and Lebanon from spiraling out of control, producing the first peace agreement between Israel and Egypt and presiding over “the final agony of Indochina with dignity and wisdom.”

Historians, Mr. Kissinger added, will find “that the cold war could not have been won had not Gerald Ford emerged at a tragic period to restore equilibrium to America and confidence in its international role.”

A few hours after the service, the plane carrying Mr. Ford’s body circled over the University of Michigan football stadium, where he had been a standout center and linebacker, then landed at the airport named for him in Grand Rapids. The university’s marching band, which arrived on a red-eye flight from California after the Rose Bowl game on Monday, solemnly played its fight song, “The Victors.”

About 200 friends and local dignitaries invited by Mr. Ford’s family attended the brief ceremony before the 13-mile motorcade to his presidential museum in downtown Grand Rapids, passing thousands of residents who lined the streets, some holding signs that said “Welcome home.” Billboards around the city declared “Gerald ‘Our’ Ford: 1913-2006.”

Despite a fierce, bitter wind blowing off the Grand River, Tim Micho waited with his video camera and 7-year-old daughter, Tessa, for two and a half hours to watch the motorcade pass by.

“She’ll probably never get to see something like this again,” Mr. Micho, 43, said. “It’s so moving to see this many people out here to support him.”

A single bagpiper played “Amazing Grace” as Betty Ford and the rest of the family made their way slowly behind the coffin into the museum, a geometric, glassy structure along the water. Inside, they held a brief service for family and honored guests, including former President Carter.

Like many along the streets in Grand Rapids, Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm spoke of Mr. Ford’s deep roots in the region.

Here, Ms. Granholm said, Mr. Ford had learned from his family “some good Midwestern values like hard work and sportsmanship and integrity and honesty.” Here, he had played high school football (with a few men, now frail, in attendance on Tuesday), had married and had been elected to Congress.

“Welcome home,” Ms. Granholm said, “to the people that you reflected so well when you were in Washington.”

Monica Davey and Nick Bunkley contributed reporting from Grand Rapids, Mich.

    Ford Is Remembered as Bringing ‘Grace to a Moment of Great Doubt’ , NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/us/03ford.html?hp&ex=1167886800&en=2c436f33391da80e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Ford’s Funeral Draws Array

of Politicians and Dignitaries

January 3, 2007
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — Scores of politicians and dignitaries from across the political spectrum poured into Washington National Cathedral on a clear and blustery Tuesday to mourn President Gerald R. Ford at his funeral service here.

President Bush, who escorted Mr. Ford’s widow, Betty, into the church, addressed the invited guests. Three former presidents — Bill Clinton, George Bush and Jimmy Carter — also came to pay their final respects, accompanied by their wives, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York; Barbara Bush; and Rosalynn Carter. Nancy Reagan, the widow of President Ronald Reagan, whose funeral was held in the cathedral in 2004, also attended the service.

The mourners included Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister, and several members of Congress, including Representatives Nancy Pelosi of California, the incoming House speaker, and J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the outgoing speaker. John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, took his seat in the cavernous cathedral as did Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City. Adrian M. Fenty, who was sworn in as mayor of Washington on Tuesday morning, also attended.

For many former Ford administration officials, the service was a somber reunion. The honorary pallbearers included Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, former defense secretary, who both served as chief of staff to Mr. Ford; Henry A. Kissinger, former secretary of state; Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser; and Alan Greenspan, who led Mr. Ford’s council of economic advisers years before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The prominent guests included:

BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates; Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson Jr.; Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; and Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

SUPREME COURT JUSTICES Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy, John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas.

MEMBERS OF CONGRESS Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts; Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona; Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan; Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana; Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania; and Representatives Steny H. Hoyer, incoming House majority leader and Democrat of Maryland; and John A. Boehner, incoming House minority leader and Republican of Ohio.

EX-LAWMAKERS George Allen, former senator, Republican of Virginia; Newt Gingrich, former Republican House speaker; Alan K. Simpson, former senator, Republican of Wyoming; and Fred Thompson, former senator, Republican of Tennessee.

EX-WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state; John R. Bolton, former United States ambassador to the United Nations; Madeleine K. Albright, former secretary of state; and Dan Quayle, former vice president.

OTHER DIGNITARIES Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor of New York; Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Washington lawyer and prominent Democrat; and Anthony A. Williams, former mayor of Washington.

    Ford’s Funeral Draws Array of Politicians and Dignitaries, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/washington/03dignitaries.html

The Ex-Presidents’ Club

Bids a Member Goodbye

January 3, 2007
The New York Times
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT and JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — In a moment of presidential empathy, former President George Bush recalled a skill he had learned from Gerald R. Ford: how to handle being ridiculed on “Saturday Night Live.”

“I remember that lesson well, since being able to laugh at yourself is essential in public life,” Mr. Bush said in his eulogy for Mr. Ford on Tuesday. “I’d tell you more about that, but as Dana Carvey would say: ‘Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.’ ”

As the 82-year-old former president imitated his own impersonator, there were only three people in the audience who knew exactly how it felt to be ridiculed, as a sitting president, on late-night television. Former President Bill Clinton responded with a hearty laugh from his seat in the Washington National Cathedral, while former President Jimmy Carter, in a neighboring pew, looked on with a smile. Seated nearby was President Bush, who has been relentlessly skewered by TV comics as well.

With Mr. Ford’s death last week, the group of living former presidents has shrunk to three, down from five in the early 1990s. Since 1994, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and, now, Mr. Ford have left the stage, while Mr. Clinton has joined the ranks of former chief executives.

The dynamic among the former presidents is perpetually evolving, as people age, rivalries fade and former political opponents discover they share more similarities than differences.

The current club has at its core two presidents in different parties — Mr. Clinton, 60, and the elder Mr. Bush — who have become companions in traveling and fund-raising for causes around the world. The two at times appear more friendly than Mr. Bush is with his son, or than Mr. Clinton is with Mr. Carter, 82, a fellow Democrat. And on Tuesday it was Mr. Carter, not either of the Bushes, who accompanied Mr. Ford’s coffin back to Grand Rapids, Mich., for burial.

Though Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter squared off in the 1976 election, they became friends after both were out of office. On a flight home from Cairo in 1981, after the funeral of the Egyptian leader Anwar el-Sadat, they found common ground discussing their presidential libraries.

Similar kinship has grown between Mr. Clinton and the first President Bush, in contrast to the rocky relationship between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Carter. Though the two Southern Democrats are from similarly humble backgrounds, they have been at odds repeatedly over the years.

In 1993, Mr. Carter said he was “very disappointed” in the Clintons for sending their daughter, Chelsea, to private school rather than public school, as the Carters had done with their daughter, Amy. After the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Mr. Carter said he had been “deeply embarrassed by what occurred.” In more recent years, the Clinton-Carter relationship has had a tinge of rivalry, as both men have sought to become global statesmen.

The funeral also provided a stage for those thinking about the politics of tomorrow, as well as those of yesterday. Along with the three former presidents sat several of those who may aspire to the job, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio.

And it was a reminder that while the nation elects only the president, the White House becomes home to a whole family whose members have to cope with the spotlight. At the cathedral on Tuesday, Rosalynn Carter was seen talking intently with Nancy Reagan. One row behind them, Chelsea Clinton spoke animatedly with a fellow Stanford University alumna, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC News anchor, said in his eulogy that when Mr. Ford brought his family to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “he brought the humanity that comes with a family that seemed to be living right next door.”

For neighbors of the Fords in Alexandria, Va., from the 1950s until they moved into the White House in 1974, they were in fact the family next door, with four independent-minded children whose public indiscretions Mr. Ford sometimes had to confront.

His son Jack admitted in a newspaper interview in 1975 that he smoked marijuana and lived a rowdy bachelor’s life. His daughter, Susan Ford Bales, was a headstrong teenager when her father became president and was married for a time to a Secret Service agent who had been assigned to guard the family.

Mr. Ford and Ms. Bales, now middle-aged, walked hand in hand down the center aisle of the cathedral before the service, and each read a passage from the Bible.

Ms. Bales’s reading came from James 1:19-25, chosen by the family to help illuminate the former president’s humble approach to the bitter times in which he served.

“Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls,” Ms. Bales read. “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

    The Ex-Presidents’ Club Bids a Member Goodbye, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/washington/03scene.html

Transcript

President Bush’s Eulogy

for Gerald R. Ford

January 2, 2007
The New York Times
 

Following is the transcript of the eulogy for former President Gerald R. Ford delivered today by President Bush in Washington, as recorded by The New York Times.

Mrs. Ford, Ford family, distinguished guests, including our presidents and first ladies, and our fellow citizens.

We are here today to say goodbye to a great man. Gerald Ford was born and reared in the American heartland. He belonged to a generation that measured men by their honesty and their courage. He grew to manhood under the roof of a loving mother and father. And when times were tough he took part-time jobs to help them out.

In President Ford, the world saw the best of America. And America found a man whose character and leadership would bring calm and healing to one of the most divisive moments in our nation’s history.

Long before he was known in Washington, Gerald Ford showed his character and his leadership. As a star football player for the University of Michigan, he came face to face with racial prejudice. When Georgia Tech came to Ann Arbor for a football game, one of Michigan’s best players was an African-American student named Willis Ward. Georgia Tech said they would not take the field if a black man were allowed to play. Gerald Ford was furious at Georgia Tech for making the demand and at the University of Michigan for caving in. He agreed to play only after Willis Ward personally asked him to. The stand Gerald Ford took that day was never forgotten by his friend.

And Gerald Ford never forgot that day either. And three decades later he proudly supported the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the United States Congress.

Gerald Ford showed his character in the devotion to his family. On the day he became president, he told the nation, “I am indebted to no man and only one woman, my dear wife.”

By then Betty Ford had a pretty good idea of what marriage to Gerald Ford involved. After all, their wedding had taken place less than three weeks before his first election to the United States Congress. And his idea of a honeymoon was driving to Ann Arbor with his bride so they could attend a brunch before the Michigan-Northwestern game the next day. And that was the beginning of a great marriage.

The Fords would have four fine children. And Steve, Jack, Mike and Susan know that as proud as their dad was of being president, Gerald Ford was even prouder of the other titles he held — father, and grandfather and great-grandfather.

Gerald Ford showed his character in the uniform of our country. When Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, Gerald Ford was an attorney fresh out of Yale Law School. But when his nation called, he did not hesitate. In early 1942, he volunteered for the Navy, and after getting his commission worked hard to get assigned to a ship headed into combat. Eventually, his wish was granted, and Lieutenant Ford was assigned to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Monterey, which saw action in some of the biggest battles of the Pacific.

Gerald Ford showed his character in public office. As a young congressman he earned a reputation for an ability to get along with others without compromising his principles. He was greatly admired by his colleagues, and they trusted him a lot. And so when President Nixon needed to replace a vice president who had resigned in scandal, he naturally turned to a man whose name was a synonym for integrity: Gerald R. Ford.

And eight months later when he was elevated to the presidency, it was because America needed him, not because he needed the office. President Ford assumed office at a terrible time in our nation’s history. At home, America was divided by political turmoil and racked by inflation. In Southeast Asia, Saigon fell just nine months into his presidency. Amid all the turmoil, Gerald Ford was a rock of stability.

And when he put his hand on his family Bible to take a presidential oath of office, he brought grace to a moment of great doubt. In a short time the gentleman from Grand Rapids proved that behind the affability was firm resolve.

When a U.S. ship called the Mayagüez was seized by Cambodia, President Ford made the tough decision to send in the Marines and all the crew members were rescued.

He was criticized for signing the Helsinki accords, yet history has shown that document helped bring down the Soviet Union as courageous men and women used it to demand their God-given liberties.

Twice assassins attempted to take the life of this good and decent man. Yet he refused to curtail his public appearances.

And when he thought that the nation needed to put Watergate behind us, he made the tough and decent decision to pardon President Nixon, even though that decision probably cost him the presidential election.

Gerald Ford assumed the presidency when the nation needed a leader of character and humility. And we found it in the man from Grand Rapids.

President Ford’s time in office was brief, but history will long remember the courage and common sense that helped restore trust in the workings of our democracy.

Laura and I had the honor of hosting the Ford family for Gerald Ford’s 90th birthday. It’s one of the highlights of our time in the White House.

I will always cherish the memory of the last time I saw him this past year in California. He was still smiling, still counting himself lucky to have Betty at his side and still displaying the optimism and generosity that made him one of America’s most beloved leaders.

And so on behalf of a grateful nation, we bid farewell to our 38th president. We thank the Almighty for Gerald Ford’s life and we ask for God’s blessings on Gerald Ford and his family.

    President Bush’s Eulogy for Gerald R. Ford, NYT, 2.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02cnd-ford-bush.html

Transcript

George H.W. Bush’s Eulogy

for Gerald R. Ford

January 2, 2007
The New York Times
 

Following is the transcript of the eulogy for former President Gerald R. Ford delivered today by former President George H.W. Bush in Washington, as recorded by The New York Times.

Well, as the story goes, Gerald Ford was a newly minted candidate for the United States House of Representatives in June of 1948 when he made plans with a reporter to visit the dairy farmers in western Michigan’s Fifth Congressional District. It was pouring rain that particular day and neither the journalist nor the farmers had expected the upstart candidate to keep his appointment. And yet he showed up on time because, as he explained to the journalist, “they milk cows every day and, besides that, I promised.”

Long before he arrived in Washington, Gerald Ford’s word was good. During the three decades of public service that followed his arrival in our nation’s capital, time and again he would step forward and keep his promise even when the dark clouds of political crisis gathered over America.

After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And the conspiracy theorists can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Jerry Ford put his name on it and Jerry Ford’s word was always good.

A decade later, when scandal forced a vice president from office, President Nixon turned to the minority leader in the House to stabilize his administration because of Jerry Ford’s sterling reputation for integrity within the Congress. To political ally and adversary alike, Jerry Ford’s word was always good.

And, of course, when the lie that was Watergate was finally laid bare, once again we entrusted our future and our hopes to this good man. The very sight of Chief Justice Berger administering the oath of office to our 38th president instantly restored the honor of the Oval Office and helped America begin to turn the page on one of our saddest chapters.

As Americans we generally eschew notions of the indispensable man, and yet during those traumatic times, few if any of our public leaders could have stepped into the breach and rekindled our national faith as did President Gerald R. Ford.

History has a way of matching man and moment. And just as President Lincoln’s stubborn devotion to our Constitution kept the Union together during the Civil War, and just as F.D.R.’s optimism was the perfect antidote to the despair of the Great Depression, so too can we say that Jerry Ford’s decency was the ideal remedy for the deception of Watergate.

For this and for so much more, his presidency will be remembered as a time of healing in our land. In fact, when President Ford was choosing a title for his memoirs, he chose words from the book of Ecclesiastes.

Here was the verse:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

“A time to be born, a time to die.

“A time to kill, and a time to heal.

“A time to weep, and a time to laugh.

“A time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

He acknowledged that he was no saint. To know Jerry was to know a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. An avuncular figure, quick to smile, frequently with his pipe in his mouth. He could be tough. He could be tough as nails when the situation warranted. But he also had a heart as big and as open as the Midwest plains on which he was born. And he imbued every life he touched with his understated gentility.

When we served together in the House of Representatives years ago, I watched from the back bench — I watched this good man — and even from way back there I could see the sterling leadership qualities of Jerry Ford. And later, after I followed his footsteps into the Oval Office, he was always supportive.

On the lighter side, Jerry and I shared a common love of golf and also a reputation for suspect play before large crowds.

“I know I’m playing better golf,” President Ford once reported to friends, “because I’m hitting fewer spectators.”

He had a wonderful sense of humor and even took it in stride when Chevy Chase had to make the entire world think that this terrific, beautifully coordinated athlete was actually a stumbler. Ford said it was funny. He wrote it in his memoir.

I remember that lesson well, since being able to laugh at yourself is essential in public life. I’d tell you more about that, but as Dana Carvey would say: “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.”

In the end, we are all God’s children. And on this bittersweet day we can take solace that the Lord has come and taken this good man by the hand and led him home to heaven.

It is plain to see how the hand of providence spared Jerry in World War II and later against two assassination attempts. And for that we give thanks. It is just as plain to see how the same hand directed this good man to lead a life of noble purpose, a life filled with challenge and accomplishment, a life indelibly marked by honor and integrity. And today we give thanks for that, too.

May Almighty God bless the memory of Gerald R. Ford, keep him firm in the hearts of his countrymen. And may God bless his wonderful family.

    George H.W. Bush’s Eulogy for Gerald R. Ford, NYT, 2.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02cnd-ford-ghwb.html

Transcript

Henry A. Kissinger’s

Eulogy for President Ford

January 2, 2007
The New York Times
 

Following is the transcript of the eulogy for former President Gerald R. Ford delivered today by Henry A. Kissinger in Washington, as recorded by The New York Times.

According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because at any one period there exist 10 just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind.

Gerald Ford was such a man. Propelled into the presidency by a sequence of unpredictable events, he had an impact so profound it’s rightly to be considered providential.

Unassuming and without guile, Gerald Ford undertook to restore the confidence of Americans in their political institutions and purposes. Never having aspired to national office, he was not consumed by driving ambition. In his understated way, he did his duty as a leader, not as a performer playing to the gallery.

Gerald Ford had the virtues of small-town America: sincerity, serenity and integrity. As it turned out, the absence of glibness and his artless decency became a political asset, fostering an unusual closeness to leaders around the world, which continued long after he left office.

In recent days, the deserved commentary on Gerald Ford’s character has sometimes obscured how sweeping and lasting were his achievements.

Gerald Ford’s prudence and common sense kept ethnic conflicts in Cyprus and Lebanon from spiraling into regional war.

He presided over the final agony of Indochina with dignity and wisdom.

In the Middle East, his persistence produced the first political agreement between Israel and Egypt.

He helped shape the act of the Helsinki European Security Conference, which established an internationally recognized standard for human rights, now generally accepted as having hastened the collapse of the former Soviet empire.

He sparked the initiative to bring majority rule to southern Africa, a policy that was a major factor in ending colonialism there.

In his presidency, the International Energy Agency was established, which still forces cooperation among oil-consuming nations.

Gerald Ford was one of the founders of the continuing annual economic summit among the industrial democracies.

Throughout his 29 months in office, he persisted in conducting negotiations with our principal adversary over the reduction and control of nuclear arms.

Gerald Ford was always driven by his concern for humane values. He stumped me in his fifth day in office when he used the first call made by the Soviet ambassador to intervene on behalf of a Lithuanian seaman who four years earlier had in a horrible bungle been turned over to Soviet authorities after seeking asylum in America. Against all diplomatic precedent and, I must say, against the advice of all experts, Gerald Ford requested that the seaman, a Soviet citizen in a Soviet jail, not only be released but be turned over to American custody. Even more amazingly, his request was granted.

Throughout the final ordeal of Indochina, Gerald Ford focused on America’s duty to rescue the maximum number of those who had relied on us. The extraction of 150,000 refugees was the consequence. And typically Gerald Ford saw it as his duty to visit one of the refugee camps long after public attention had moved elsewhere.

Gerald Ford summed up his concern for human values at the European Security Conference, when looking directly at Brezhnev he proclaimed America’s deep devotion to human rights and individual freedoms. “To my country,” he said, “they’re not clichés or empty phrases.”

Historians will debate for a long time over which president contributed most to victory in the cold war. Few will dispute that the cold war could not have been won had not Gerald Ford emerged at a tragic period to restore equilibrium to America and confidence in its international role.

Sustained by his beloved wife, Betty, and with the children to whom he was devoted, Gerald Ford left the presidency with no regrets, no second-guessing, no obsessive pursuit of his place in history.

For his friends, he leaves an aching void. Having known Jerry Ford and having worked with him will be our badge of honor for the rest of our lives.

Early in his administration, Gerald Ford said to me: “I get mad as hell, but I don’t show it, when I don’t do as well as I should. If you don’t strive for the best, you will never make it.”

We are here to bear witness that Jerry Ford always did his best, and that his best proved essential to renew our society and restore hope to the world.

    Henry A. Kissinger’s Eulogy for President Ford, NYT, 2.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02cnd-ford-kissinger.html

Transcript

Tom Brokaw’s

Eulogy for Gerald R. Ford

January 2, 2007
The New York Times
 

Following is the transcript of the eulogy for former President Gerald R. Ford delivered today by Tom Brokaw in Washington, as recorded by The New York Times.

Mrs. Ford, members of the Ford family, President and Mrs. Bush, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, President and Mrs. Bush, President and Mrs. Carter, President and Mrs. Clinton, distinguished guests, my fellow Americans, it’s a great privilege and an honor for me to be here.

For the past week, we have been hearing the familiar lyrics of the hymns to the passing of a famous man, the hosannas to his decency, his honesty, his modesty and his steady-as-she-goes qualities. It’s what we’ve come to expect on these occasions.

But this time there was extra value, for in the case of Gerald Ford, these lyrics have the added virtue of being true.

Sometimes there are two versions to these hymns — one public and one private, separate and discordant. But in Gerald Ford, the man he was in public, he was also that man in private.

Gerald Ford brought to the political arena no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit list or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was and he didn’t require consultants or gurus to change him. Moreover, the country knew who he was and despite occasional differences, large and small, it never lost its affection for this man from Michigan, the football player, the lawyer and the veteran, the Congressman and suburban husband, the champion of Main Street values who brought all of those qualities to the White House.

Once there, he stayed true to form, never believing that he was suddenly wiser and infallible because he drank his morning coffee from a cup with a presidential seal.

He didn’t seek the office. And yet, as he told his friend, the late, great journalist Hugh Sidey, he was not frightened of the task before him.

We could identify with him — all of us — for so many reasons. Among them, we were all trapped in what passed for style in the 70’s with a wardrobe with lapels out to here, white belts, plaid jackets and trousers so patterned that they would give you a migraine. The rest of us have been able to destroy most of the evidence of our fashion meltdown, but presidents are not so lucky. Those David Kennerly photographs are reminders of his endearing qualities, but some of those jackets — I think that they’re eligible for a presidential pardon or at least a digital touchup.

As a journalist, I was especially grateful for his appreciation of our role, even when we challenged his policies and taxed his patience with our constant presence and persistence. We could be adversaries but we were never his enemy, and that was a welcome change in status from his predecessor’s time.

To be a member of the Gerald Ford White House press corps brought other benefits as well as we documented a nation and a world in transition, in turmoil. We accompanied him to audiences with the notorious and the merely powerful. We saw Tito, Franco, Sadat, Marcos, Suharto, the shah of Iran, the emperor of Japan, China with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping all at once, what was then the Soviet Union and Vladivostock with Leonid Brezhnev, and Helsinki at one of the most remarkable gatherings of leaders in the 20th century.

There were other advantages to being a member of his press corps that we didn’t advertise quite as widely. We went to Vail at Christmas and Palm Springs at Easter time with our families. Now cynics might argue that contributed to our affection for him. That is not a premise that I wish to challenge.

One of our colleagues, Jim Naughton of The New York Times, personified the spirit that existed in the relationship. He bought from a San Diego radio station promoter a large mock chicken head that had attracted the president’s attention at a G.O.P. rally. And then, giddy from 20-hour days and an endless repetition of the same campaign speech, Naughton decided to wear that chicken head to a Ford news conference in Oregon with the enthusiastic encouragement of the president and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney.

In the next news cycle, the chicken head was a bigger story than the president. And no one was more pleased than the man that we honor here today in this august ceremony.

When the president called me last year and asked me if I would participate in these services, I think he wanted to be sure that the White House press corps was represented. The writers, correspondents and producers, the cameramen, photographers, the technicians and the chicken.

He also brought something else to the White House, of course. He brought the humanity that comes with a family that seemed to be living right next door. He was every parent when he said my children have spoken for themselves since they were old enough to speak — and not always with my approval. I expect that to continue in the future.

And was there a more supportive husband in America than when his beloved Betty began to speak out on issues that were not politically correct at the time. Together, they put on the front pages and in the leads of the evening newscasts the issues that had been underplayed in America for far too long.

My colleague Bob Schieffer called him the nicest man he ever met in politics. To that I would only add the most underestimated.

In many ways I believe football was a metaphor for his life in politics and after. He played in the middle of the line. He was a center, a position that seldom receives much praise. But he had his hands on the ball for every play and no play could start without him. And when the game was over and others received the credit, he didn’t whine or whimper.

But then he came from a generation accustomed to difficult missions, shaped by the sacrifices and the depravations of the Great Depression, a generation that gave up its innocence and youth to then win a great war and save the world. And when that generation came home from war, they were mature beyond their years and eager to make the world they had saved a better place. They re-enlisted as citizens and set out to serve their country in new ways, with political differences but always with the common goal of doing what’s best for the nation and all the people.

When he entered the Oval Office, by fate not by design, Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?

But he was prepared because he had served his country every day of his adult life and he left the Oval Office a much better place. The personal rewards of his citizenship and his presidency were far richer than he had anticipated in every sense of the phrase.

But the greatest rewards of Jerry Ford’s time were reserved for his fellow Americans and the nation he loved.

Farewell, Mr. President. Thank you, Citizen Ford.

    Tom Brokaw’s Eulogy for Gerald R. Ford, NYT, 3.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02cnd-ford-brokaw.html

Leaked Document

Reveals Giuliani’s '08 Strategy

January 2, 2007
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY

As former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was campaigning for Republican candidates last fall, his aides were secretly planning a Giuliani presidential campaign despite his statements to the contrary, targeting potential donors and assessing possible liabilities, including his controversial former aide, Bernard B. Kerik, and his ex-wife Donna Hanover, according to a 140-page strategy document apparently prepared by Giuliani advisers.

The public disclosure of the document, which was leaked by a Giuliani adversary to The Daily News, is potentially damaging for Mr. Giuliani, given that he has portrayed himself as a leader on security issues and strategic planning.

Indeed, for better or worse, he gained a reputation as mayor for tightly controlling and shaping public information; such a security breach in any presidential operation, but especially his, stands as an unusual embarrassment, as well as a boon to his potential opponents who want to know his thinking.

The document, according to The News, outlines a fund-raising effort to bring in at least $100 million in 2007, including at least $25 million in the first three months of the year. The plan also calls for spending more than $21 million in 2007, The News reported.

This plan reflects private strategy discussions in the Giuliani camp, according to Republican Party figures who are familiar with the discussions and who spoke to The New York Times recently on the condition of anonymity. Specifically, the advisers believe that Mr. Giuliani is well known and popular enough that he could quickly raise money for a presidential bid, and that he would need more than $100 million by the end of 2007.

Assessing the 140-page document of printed text, handwriting and spreadsheets, The News draws the conclusion that Mr. Giuliani appears torn between pursuing a presidential bid or continuing his private business endeavors, which include consulting on leadership and security issues, a law practice and an investment concern.

One page in the document, according to The News, notes that he might “drop out of [the] race” as a result of “insurmountable” personal and political concerns. On this page, The News says, is a list of bullet points that seem to highlight those concerns: His consulting practice; Mr. Kerik; Ms. Hanover; his third and current wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; and “social issues,” apparently a reference to his support for abortion rights, gay civil unions and gun control, all of which are opposed by some Republicans.

“All will come out — in worst light,” the document stated. “$100 million against us on this stuff,” it continued, apparently a reference to likely efforts by Giuliani opponents to draw public attention to those issues.

The News said that notations throughout the document indicated that it had been prepared and used by Giuliani’s fund-raiser, Anne Dickerson, and political aide Anthony Carbonetti, among others.

It was not clear how the document was originally obtained by the person who gave it to The News, nor who that person was. The News said it had been obtained by a source “sympathetic to one of Giuliani’s rivals for the White House,” and that the document had been left behind in one of the cities where Mr. Giuliani campaigned this fall.

The News said that several potential donors are named in the document, among them New Jersey fund-raisers Lew Eisenberg and Larry Bathgate, FedEx executive Fred Smith and the financier Henry Kravis.

The inclusion of these names indicates, among other things, that the strategy document is somewhat outdated. Senator John McCain, who is also preparing a presidential bid, has already received commitments of support or money from those four men, suggesting that the document was drawn up before they had moved into the McCain column.

Sunny Mindel, a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani, declined to comment this morning while President Gerald R. Ford’s funeral was in progress. But in a brief conversation, she referred to the document as “very outdated, way outdated.”

Ms. Mindel suggested to The News, for its article today, that the timing of the document leak was suspicious.

“I wonder why such suspicious activity is occurring and can only guess it is because of Rudy’s poll numbers in New Hampshire and Iowa,” Ms. Mindel said.

The document also suggests that Mr. Giuliani would categorize and honor his fund-raisers with terms from baseball. While President Bush referred to his top donors as “Rangers” and “Pioneers,” Mr. Giuliani would call them “Team Captains,” “M.V.P.’s,” “All-Stars” and “Sluggers.” He would center his fund-raising operations in New York, Washington and California, the document indicates.

    Leaked Document Reveals Giuliani’s '08 Strategy, NYT, 2.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/nyregion/02cnd-rudy.html?hp&ex=1167800400&en=d65a9b9354d09310&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Thousands say farewell to Ford

Updated 1/2/2007 1:09 PM ET
USA Today
By Bill Nichols

WASHINGTON — The nation's capital said a final and affectionate goodbye to the 38th president of the United States Tuesday with a stately funeral for Gerald Ford, a man President Bush called "one of America's most beloved leaders."

Ford, who died Dec. 26 at the age of 93, was remembered by Bush and a host of other dignitaries as a plain-spoken son of the Midwest who calmed a divided nation in the wake of Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 at the height of the Watergate scandal.

"We are here today to say goodbye to a great man," Bush said in his eulogy, under the soaring arches of the Washington National Cathedral. "In President Ford, the world saw the best of America and America found a man whose character and leadership would bring calm and healing to one of the most divisive moments in our nation's history."

After the service, Ford's remains were flown to Grand Rapids, Mich., where a private funeral is to take place Wednesday followed by burial at his presidential museum.

More than 3,000 invited guests filled the majestic cathedral, including former presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, as well as Cabinet members, members of Congress and justices of the Supreme Court.

Vice President Cheney, Ford's White House chief of staff, was one of the honorary pallbearers. Ford's widow, Betty, 88, sat stoically with the couple's four children, holding hands with daughter Susan Ford Bales. At one point, Betty Ford whispered to her daughter: "Beautiful."

Speaker after speaker focused on a central theme — the innate decency and impeccable character cherished by Ford's political allies and opponents alike. Ford "was a Norman Rockwell painting come to life," said the elder Bush, a man with "a heart as big and open as the Midwest plains on which he was born."

The former president also provoked smiles and soft laughter with references to Ford's unique approach to golf, which often led to more injuries among spectators than spectacular scores.

"In his understated way, he did his duty as a leader, not as a performer playing to the gallery," said former secretary of State Henry Kissinger. "Gerald Ford had the virtues of small-town America — sincerity, serenity and integrity."

Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, who covered Ford's presidency, said Ford was in many ways the antithesis of today's politics, a man with "no demons, no hidden agenda, no hit lists or acts of vengeance. He knew who he was and he didn't require consultants or gurus to change him."

Prior to the funeral, Ford's remains lay briefly outside the Senate chamber, in which he had served as president during his tenure as Nixon's vice president. Ford was chosen by Nixon to replace disgraced vice president Spiro Agnew in 1973. Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to Carter.

Thousands had filled the Capitol Rotunda over two days and a night to pay respects to Ford, the only person in U.S. history to serve as president without having been elected president or vice president.

Federal offices were closed Tuesday as part of a national day of mourning.

After a thunderous 21-gun salute marked Ford's final departure from the Capitol where he served as House Minority Leader from 1965 to 1973, the U.S. Navy band played the hymn Abide With Me, as Ford's casket was brought down the Capitol steps.

Servicemen and women in dress uniforms and holding rifles lined the corridor leading from the Senate chamber to the steps where the coffin was carried out of the building. Even stands erected for TV lights were draped in black velvet.

Outside, hundreds of people spilled down the steps of the Russell Senate office building and lined Constitution Avenue to watch the funeral cortege. Some were Capitol Hill staffers, such as Chris Lu, the legislative director for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. Others were local residents.

Some were too young to remember much of the Ford administration. Julie Mahoney's most vivid memory was the Saturday morning cartoons being interrupted to show Ford's swearing in. The 40-year-old mother of two, from Alexandria, Va., brought her two sons for another glimpse of history.

Alan Gibby of California, in town for a son's wedding, watched the hearse pass by from a curb. He remembered shaking Gerald Ford's hand when he was 18 years old. "It was one of the greatest days of my life," Gibby said. "So I just had to come and pay my respects."

Contributing: Kathy Kiely, Fredreka Schouten and Richard Wolf.

    Thousands say farewell to Ford, UT, 2.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-02-ford_x.htm

Ford Honored at Elaborate Funeral

January 2, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 — Gerald R. Ford was eulogized today as a president and a man who embodied the best of small-town American values whose decency made him a player on the world stage.

“To know Jerry Ford was to know a Norman Rockwell painting come to life,” former President George H. W. Bush told a gathering at the National Cathedral. Mr. Ford was a man of uncommon toughness when necessary but possessed of a heart “as big and open as the Midwest plains on which he was born,” Mr. Bush said.

The current President Bush agreed, calling the 38th president a man who stood for, and was, “the best of America,” a man who made “the tough, and decent, decision” to pardon his disgraced predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, even though he knew it might cost him the White House.

And Henry A. Kissinger, Mr. Ford’s secretary of state, said the late president was a man “unassuming and without guile,” perfectly equipped to restore Americans’ confidence in their values and institutions.

“Gerald Ford had the virtues of small-town America,” Mr. Kissinger said, citing Mr. Ford’s “absence of glibness and his artless decency.” Nor were those qualities confined to restoring a collective feeling of content at home, Mr. Kissinger went on, declaring that Mr. Ford had done his best to see that the United States rescued as many people as possible “from the final agony of Indochina” after the Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975.

Mr. Kissinger said Mr. Ford was a man of such personal qualities that those who worked with him cherish that time as “our badge of honor for the rest of our lives.”

Tom Brokaw, the retired NBC anchor and a White House correspondent in the 1970’s, said that Mr. Ford came to the White House with “no hidden agendas, no hit list of enemies,” an unmistakable allusion to Richard Nixon, although Mr. Brokaw did not name him.

Mr. Brokaw recalled that his colleague Bob Schieffer once called Mr. Ford “the nicest man I ever met in politics.”

“I would add, the most underestimated,” Mr. Brokaw said.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter attended the service. Also present were former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, former United Nations Ambassador John R. Bolton and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

President Bush accompanied Mr. Ford’s widow, Betty, into the cathedral and down the aisle, under the flags of the states that the late president helped to unite three decades ago.

Rachel L. Swarns contributed reporting.

    Ford Honored at Elaborate Funeral, NYT, 2.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/business/02cnd-ford.html

At Ford Funeral,

Echo of Reunions Past

January 2, 2007
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 — On the morning of President Gerald R. Ford’s funeral, his former cabinet secretaries and administration staff members will come together here once more, taking their seats in the black cars accompanying the funeral motorcade and in the pews of Washington National Cathedral.

For more than two decades, they had gathered at Mr. Ford’s annual White House reunions, most of which were held in the nation’s capital, where they chuckled over half-forgotten policy disputes and shook their heads sadly as their numbers dwindled and their host grew increasingly frail.

Even as their career paths and personal lives diverged, they kept in touch with Mr. Ford and with one another, reminiscing at dinner parties and lunches, and in long-distance phone calls. In mourning their president on Tuesday, the alumni of his administration will also be celebrating his life and the intimate circle he created.

“We’ve stayed together,” said Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to Mr. Ford. “There is a sense of community.”

In many ways, Tuesday’s funeral will highlight those ties. Henry A. Kissinger, Mr. Ford’s secretary of state, cut short his vacation to the Dominican Republic to attend the Washington solemnities, which began Saturday. Robert E. Barrett, Mr. Ford’s military attaché, flew in from his home in Florida. Carla A. Hills, his housing secretary, and William T. Coleman Jr., his transportation secretary, who both still work in Washington, will join them as honorary pallbearers.

The funeral will also reunite several officials who gained prominence in Washington after Mr. Ford left office, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Mr. Ford’s chief of staff; Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of Mr. Ford’s council of economic advisers years before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve; and Mr. Scowcroft, who also served as national security adviser to President George Bush. They, too, will be pallbearers.

Ron Nessen, who was Mr. Ford’s press secretary and who will attend the ceremony at the cathedral, said Mr. Ford’s White House team had bonded so deeply because members had served during “an extraordinary time in American history.”

It was the mid-1970s, and Mr. Ford, unexpectedly thrust into the presidency, had scrambled to assemble a team that would guide a nation reeling from Watergate, from President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation and pardon, from the winding down of the Vietnam War, and from gas lines and soaring inflation.

“It was a shared experience, an amazing shared experience,” Mr. Nessen said, “and that’s what keeps people in touch with each other.”

“People are going to share a lot of their memories,” Mr. Nessen said of the Tuesday reunion. “And we’ll be thinking of the more personal moments, the more personal conversations, the thoughtful things he did as a man, not just as president.”

Mr. Nessen and others said they particularly enjoyed swapping memories of how Mr. Ford had treated people, regardless of their station in life, with dignity and respect, and how he had never taken on airs.

He described the day when Mr. Ford’s dog, Liberty, made a mess on the carpet in the Oval Office and a Navy steward had scrambled to clean it. The president stopped him.

“ ‘I’ll do that,’ ” Mr. Nessen recalled Mr. Ford saying. “ ‘No man should have to clean up after another man’s dog.’ ”

Mr. Ford’s energy secretary, Frank G. Zarb, remembered the time when Mr. Ford had been ready to make an announcement to the White House press corps but then realized he did not have any cufflinks handy.

“He got two paperclips,” Mr. Zarb recalled. “And he said, ‘Let’s go. We have more important things to do.’ ”

Mr. Coleman, the former transportation secretary, who said he had seen Mr. Ford four or five times a year, said he had relished the former president’s warmth and humor, and his love of family and sports. The last time they spoke, about three months ago, they had talked football, he said.

“Michigan had just defeated Michigan State,” Mr. Coleman said. “We had a good time.” (As a young man, Mr. Ford played football for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.)

Of course, some of Mr. Ford’s officials also clashed, and memories of those battles sometimes rankled. But for the most part, those rivalries faded over time, said Robert Orben, a speechwriter for Mr. Ford.

“We’re old now, and life has mellowed us,” Mr. Orben said. “Some old tensions get put away. There’s a sense of camaraderie that continues.”

Many officials held fast to that sense of closeness, particularly as Mr. Ford began to age and weaken.

At one recent reunion, Mr. Ford and his wife, Betty, sat on stools because they no longer had the energy to stand and shake hands with the scores of well-wishers. And at last year’s gathering, Mr. Ford did not show up at all. Instead, he sent his regards via videotape. It was the first time he had missed a reunion.

Mr. Ford had been in and out of the hospital since January 2006, most recently in October for tests at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Mr. Scowcroft, who said he had spoken to Mr. Ford several times a year, said he could hear the difference in Mr. Ford’s voice when they chatted last summer.

“He sounded tired,” Mr. Scowcroft said. “There wasn’t the same kind of vibrancy in his voice.”

Mr. Ford was 93 when he died last week. It is unclear whether the annual reunions will continue without him. But his administration officials said he would continue to inspire them.

“There will be sadness, but there will also be gladness that will relate to his legacy, to his service to the country,” said John O. Marsh Jr., an honorary pallbearer who served as a Virginia congressman before becoming a top aide to Mr. Ford.

“Hopefully,” Mr. Marsh said, “it will renew our own spirit of commitment to public service.”

At Ford Funeral, Echo of Reunions Past, NYT, 2.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02reunion.html