History > 2008 > USA > Politics (VI)

Obama ups criticism

of McCain, Wall Street

29 September 2008
USA Today
By Kathy Kiely

GREENSBORO, N. C. — One day after a debate in which some of his supporters here thought he was too polite, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama on Saturday came out swinging against Wall Street and his Republican rival, John McCain.

Appearing with his running mate, Joe Biden, in front of a flag-decked train station, Obama tried to turn McCain's aggressive style to his own advantage, portraying his opponent as more interested in scoring points than in presenting a program.

"John McCain had a lot to say about me, but nothing to say about you," Obama told a crowd of 20,000 who waited for the Democratic candidates under drizzly skies.

In a response emailed to reporters, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said Obama's economic plan would amount to " $860 billion in lavish new government spending which is a crushing burden on middle class families and the Main Street economy."

McCain, who earlier this week rushed to Washington to help broker a deal on stabilizing U.S. financial markets, stayed away from Capitol Hill on Saturday as negotiators inched toward an agreement.

Senior adviser Mark Salter said the Arizona senator spent the morning at his campaign headquarters placing calls to congressional leaders and White House officials involved in finalizing a multibillion-dollar deal to bail out failing financial firms. Earlier in the week McCain suspended most campaign activities to help develop a bipartisan agreement.

Obama, meanwhile, stuck to his campaign schedule which will take him and Biden from here to two other swing states this weekend: Virginia and Michigan.

"He can effectively do what he needs to do by phone," Salter said Saturday. "He's calling members on both sides, talking to people in the administration, helping out as he can."

Though he has dismissed the presidential candidates' intervention in the bailout talks as counterproductive grandstanding, Obama expressed forceful opinions about what the deal should — and should not — include.

"I will not allow this plan to become a welfare program for Wall Street executives," he told the crowd here. And he suggested an additional $50 billion in aid for the unemployed and investments in infrastructure should be part of the deal.

"Washington has to feel the same sense of urgency about passing an economic stimulus plan" as it does about rescuing mega-investors, said Obama, who spoke by phone Saturday about the state of the negotiations with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass.

Obama accused McCain of backing the Republican free-market philosophy that allowed mortage and investment companies to run amok. "He's been against the common sense rules and regulations that could have stopped this mess," Obama said. Although Obama too has received support from the key executives of the troubled mortage firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he sharpened his attacks on McCain for having a number of heavy-hitting Washington lobbyists on his campaign staff.

"If you think those lobbyists are working day and night to elect my opponent just to put themselves out of business, well, I've got a bridge I want to sell you in Alaska," said Obama, drawing an appreciative laugh from the crowd with his reference to a controversy over an ill-fated federal project that has embarrassed McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Obama also accused McCain of stealing the "change" theme of his campaigns. "He's been grabbing our signs, using our slogans. C'mon John," Obama chuckled. "Pretty soon I'm going to have to start saying I'm a maverick. You gotta come up with your own stuff."

The Democrat's feisty performance delighted supporters who thought their candidate was bullied by McCain in the debate. "He started every sentence with an attack on Obama," said Sandie Dennis of Madison, N.C. Jane Gutsell of Greensboro said she has mixed feelings about whether Obama needs to be more aggressive in later debates.

"Fundamentally, he's such a gentleman," Gutsell said. "I think it's hard for him to go against his nature. I like him for that."

Obama's advisers insisted their candidate did what he needed to do. Campaign manager David Plouffe cited a CBS overnight poll showing Obama bettering his earlier score by 16 points when voters were asked if he's prepared to assume the presidency. "We did ourselves a lot of good last night," Plouffe told reporters on a conference call.

That's especially significant since much of the Friday debate focused on foreign policy, an area where McCain's military service and 26 years in the Senate has given him a wealth of experience, Obama's running mate told the audience here.

"This was supposed to be John McCain's turf and Barack Obama owned it," said Biden.

The celebratory mood infected even Obama's traveling staffers. While Obama and Biden were closeted doing television interviews here, Eric Lesser and Herbie Ziskend, the baggage handlers for the two candidates' traveling entourage held a mock debate over their respective abilities to deliver luggage to hotel rooms on time. The two used recycling bins for lecterns, giving a whole new meaning to the term "talking trash."

As bemused Secret Service agents stood by and a crowd of assembled reporters heckled encouragingly, the two "bag men" demonstrated they've been studying their bosses' lines well.

"At the end of the day, this is a question of judgment and experience but it's also about change," Lesser declared.
 

Contributing: Associated Press

Obama ups criticism of McCain, Wall Street, UT, 27.9.2008,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-09-27-obama-campaign_N.htm

McCain and Team

Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry

September 28, 2008
The New York Times
By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

“One of the founding fathers of Indian gaming” is what Steven Light, a University of North Dakota professor and a leading Indian gambling expert, called Mr. McCain.

As factions of the ferociously competitive gambling industry have vied for an edge, they have found it advantageous to cultivate a relationship with Mr. McCain or hire someone who has one, according to an examination based on more than 70 interviews and thousands of pages of documents.

Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests — including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

When rules being considered by Congress threatened a California tribe’s planned casino in 2005, Mr. McCain helped spare the tribe. Its lobbyist, who had no prior experience in the gambling industry, had a nearly 20-year friendship with Mr. McCain.

In Connecticut that year, when a tribe was looking to open the state’s third casino, staff members on the Indian Affairs Committee provided guidance to lobbyists representing those fighting the casino, e-mail messages and interviews show. The proposed casino, which would have cut into the Pequots’ market share, was opposed by Mr. McCain’s colleagues in Connecticut.

Mr. McCain declined to be interviewed. In written answers to questions, his campaign staff said he was “justifiably proud” of his record on regulating Indian gambling. “Senator McCain has taken positions on policy issues because he believed they are in the public interest,” the campaign said.

Mr. McCain’s spokesman, Tucker Bounds, would not discuss the senator’s night of gambling at Foxwoods, saying: “Your paper has repeatedly attempted to insinuate impropriety on the part of Senator McCain where none exists — and it reveals that your publication is desperately willing to gamble away what little credibility it still has.”

Over his career, Mr. McCain has taken on special interests, like big tobacco, and angered the capital’s powerbrokers by promoting campaign finance reform and pushing to limit gifts that lobbyists can shower on lawmakers. On occasion, he has crossed the gambling industry on issues like regulating slot machines.

Perhaps no episode burnished Mr. McCain’s image as a reformer more than his stewardship three years ago of the Congressional investigation into Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican Indian gambling lobbyist who became a national symbol of the pay-to-play culture in Washington. The senator’s leadership during the scandal set the stage for the most sweeping overhaul of lobbying laws since Watergate.

“I’ve fought lobbyists who stole from Indian tribes,” the senator said in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination this month.

But interviews and records show that lobbyists and political operatives in Mr. McCain’s inner circle played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing Mr. Abramoff’s misdeeds to Mr. McCain’s attention — and then cashed in on the resulting investigation. The senator’s longtime chief political strategist, for example, was paid $100,000 over four months as a consultant to one tribe caught up in the inquiry, records show.

Mr. McCain’s campaign said the senator acted solely to protect American Indians, even though the inquiry posed “grave risk to his political interests.”

As public opposition to tribal casinos has grown in recent years, Mr. McCain has distanced himself from Indian gambling, Congressional and American Indian officials said.

But he has rarely wavered in his loyalty to Las Vegas, where he counts casino executives among his close friends and most prolific fund-raisers. “Beyond just his support for gaming, Nevada supports John McCain because he’s one of us, a Westerner at heart,” said Sig Rogich, a Nevada Republican kingmaker who raised nearly $2 million for Mr. McCain at an event at his home in June.

Only six members of Congress have received more money from the gambling industry than Mr. McCain, and five hail from the casino hubs of Nevada and New Jersey, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics dating back to 1989. In the presidential race, Senator Barack Obama has also received money from the industry; Mr. McCain has raised almost twice as much.

In May 2007, as Mr. McCain’s presidential bid was floundering, he spent a weekend at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. A fund-raiser hosted by J. Terrence Lanni, the casino’s top executive and a longtime friend of the senator, raised $400,000 for his campaign. Afterward, Mr. McCain attended a boxing match and hit the craps tables.

For much of his adult life, Mr. McCain has gambled as often as once a month, friends and associates said, traveling to Las Vegas for weekend betting marathons. Former senior campaign officials said they worried about Mr. McCain’s patronage of casinos, given the power he wields over the industry. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We were always concerned about appearances,” one former official said. “If you go around saying that appearances matter, then they matter.”

The former official said he would tell Mr. McCain: “Do we really have to go to a casino? I don’t think it’s a good idea. The base doesn’t like it. It doesn’t look good. And good things don’t happen in casinos at midnight.”

“You worry too much,” Mr. McCain would respond, the official said.

A Record of Support

In one of their last conversations, Representative Morris K. Udall, Arizona’s powerful Democrat, whose devotion to American Indian causes was legendary, implored his friend Mr. McCain to carry on his legacy.

“Don’t forget the Indians,” Mr. Udall, who died in 1998, told Mr. McCain in a directive that the senator has recounted to others.

More than a decade earlier, Mr. Udall had persuaded Mr. McCain to join the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Mr. McCain, whose home state has the third-highest Indian population, eloquently decried the “grinding poverty” that gripped many reservations.

The two men helped write the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 after the Supreme Court found that states had virtually no right to control wagering on reservations. The legislation provided a framework for the oversight and growth of Indian casinos: In 1988, Indian gambling represented less than 1 percent of the nation’s gambling revenues; today it captures more than one third.

On the Senate floor after the bill’s passage, Mr. McCain said he personally opposed Indian gambling, but when impoverished communities “are faced with only one option for economic development, and that is to set up gambling on their reservations, then I cannot disapprove.”

In 1994, Mr. McCain pushed an amendment that enabled dozens of additional tribes to win federal recognition and open casinos. And in 1998, Mr. McCain fought a Senate effort to rein in the boom.

He also voted twice in the last decade to give casinos tax breaks estimated to cost the government more than $326 million over a dozen years.

The first tax break benefited the industry in Las Vegas, one of a number of ways Mr. McCain has helped nontribal casinos. Mr. Lanni, the MGM Mirage chief executive, said that an unsuccessful bid by the senator to ban wagering on college sports in Nevada was the only time he could recall Mr. McCain opposing Las Vegas. “I can’t think of any other issue,” Mr. Lanni said.

The second tax break helped tribal casinos like Foxwoods and was pushed by Scott Reed, the Pequots’ lobbyist.

Mr. McCain had gotten to know Mr. Reed during Senator Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, which Mr. Reed managed. Four years later, when Mr. McCain ran for president, Mr. Reed recommended he hire his close friend and protégé, Rick Davis, to manage that campaign.

During his 2000 primary race against George W. Bush, Mr. McCain promoted his record of helping Indian Country, telling reporters on a campaign swing that he had provided critical support to “the Pequot, now the proud owners of the largest casino in the world.”

But Mr. McCain’s record on Indian gambling was fast becoming a difficult issue for him in the primary. Bush supporters like Gov. John Engler of Michigan lambasted Mr. McCain for his “close ties to Indian gambling.”

A decade after Mr. McCain co-authored the Indian gambling act, the political tides had turned. Tribal casinos, which were growing at a blazing pace, had become increasingly unpopular around the country for reasons as varied as morality and traffic.

Then came the biggest lobbying scandal to shake Washington.

Behind an Inquiry

At a September 2004 hearing of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain described Jack Abramoff as one of the most brazen in a long line of crooks to cheat American Indians. “It began with the sale of Manhattan, and has continued ever since,” he said. “What sets this tale apart, what makes it truly extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit.”

Over the next two years, Mr. McCain helped uncover a breathtaking lobbying scandal — Mr. Abramoff and a partner bilked six tribes of $66 million — that showcased the senator’s willingness to risk the wrath of his own party to expose wrongdoing. But interviews and documents show that Mr. McCain and a circle of allies — lobbyists, lawyers and senior strategists — also seized on the case for its opportunities.

For McCain-connected lobbyists who were rivals of Mr. Abramoff, the scandal presented a chance to crush a competitor. For senior McCain advisers, the inquiry allowed them to collect fees from the very Indians that Mr. Abramoff had ripped off. And the investigation enabled Mr. McCain to confront political enemies who helped defeat him in his 2000 presidential run while polishing his maverick image.

The Abramoff saga started in early 2003 when members of two tribes began questioning Mr. Abramoff’s astronomical fees. Over the next year, they leaked information to local newspapers, but it took the hiring of lobbyists who were competitors of Mr. Abramoff to get the attention of Mr. McCain’s committee.

Bernie Sprague, who led the effort by one of the tribes, the Saginaw Chippewas in Michigan, hired a Democratic lobbyist who recommended that the tribe retain Scott Reed, the Republican lobbyist, to push for an investigation.

Mr. Reed had boasted to other lobbyists of his access to Mr. McCain, three close associates said. Mr. Reed “pretty much had open access to John from 2000 to at least the end of 2006,” one aide said.

Lobbyist disclosure forms show that Mr. Reed went to work for the Saginaw Chippewa on Feb. 15, 2004, charging the tribe $56,000 over a year. Mr. Abramoff had tried to steal the Pequots and another tribal client from Mr. Reed, and taking down Mr. Abramoff would eliminate a competitor.

Mr. Reed became the chief conduit to Mr. McCain’s committee for billing documents and other information Mr. Sprague was digging up on Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Sprague said, who said Mr. Reed “did a great to service to me.”

“He had contacts I did not,” Mr. Sprague said. “Initially, I think that the senator’s office was doing Reed a favor by listening to me.”

A few weeks after hiring Mr. Reed, Mr. Sprague received a letter from the senator. “We have met with Scott Reed, who was very helpful on the issue,” Mr. McCain wrote.

Information about Mr. Abramoff was also flowing to Mr. McCain’s committee from another tribe, the Coushatta of Louisiana. The source was a consultant named Roy Fletcher, who had been Mr. McCain’s deputy campaign manager in 2000, running his war room in South Carolina.

It was in that primary race that two of Mr. Abramoff’s closest associates, Grover Norquist, who runs the nonprofit Americans for Tax Reform, and Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, ran a blistering campaign questioning Mr. McCain’s conservative credentials. The senator and his advisers blamed that attack for Mr. McCain’s loss to Mr. Bush in South Carolina, creating tensions that would resurface in the Abramoff matter.

“I was interested in busting” Mr. Abramoff, said Mr. Fletcher, who was eventually hired to represent the tribe. “That was my job. But I was also filled with righteous indignation, I got to tell you.”

Mr. Fletcher said he began passing information to John Weaver, Mr. McCain’s chief political strategist, and other staff members in late 2003 or January 2004. Mr. Weaver confirmed the timing.

Mr. McCain announced his investigation on Feb. 26, 2004, citing an article on Mr. Abramoff in The Washington Post. He did not mention the action by lobbyists and tribes in the preceding weeks. His campaign said no one in his “innermost circle” brought information to Mr. McCain that prompted the investigation.

The senator declared he would not investigate members of Congress, whom Mr. Abramoff had lavished with tribal donations and golf outings to Scotland. But in the course of the investigation, the committee exposed Mr. Abramoff’s dealings with the two men who had helped defeat Mr. McCain in the 2000 primary.

The investigation showed that Mr. Norquist’s foundation was used by Mr. Abramoff to launder lobbying fees from tribes. Ralph Reed was found to have accepted $4 million to run bogus antigambling campaigns. And the investigation also highlighted Mr. Abramoff’s efforts to curry favor with the House majority leader at the time, Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, a longtime political foe who had opposed many of Mr. McCain’s legislative priorities.

Mr. McCain’s campaign said the senator did not “single out” Ralph Reed or Mr. Norquist, neither of whom were ever charged, and that both men fell within the “scope of the investigation.” The inquiry, which led to guilty pleas by over a dozen individuals, was motivated by a desire to help aggrieved tribes, the campaign said.

Inside the investigation, the sense of schadenfreude was palpable, according to several people close to the senator. “It was like hitting pay dirt,” said one associate of Mr. McCain’s who had consulted with the senator’s office on the investigation. “And face it — McCain and Weaver were maniacal about Ralph Reed and Norquist. They were sticking little pins in dolls because those guys had cost him South Carolina.”

Down on the Coushattas reservation, bills related to the investigation kept coming. After firing Mr. Abramoff, the tribe hired Kent Hance, a lawyer and former Texas congressman who said he had been friends with Mr. McCain since the 1980s.

David Sickey, the tribe’s vice chairman, said he was “dumbfounded” over the bills submitted by Mr. Hance’s firm, Hance Scarborough, which had been hired by Mr. Sickey’s predecessors.

“The very thing we were fighting seemed to be happening all over again — these absurd amounts of money being paid,” Mr. Sickey said.

Mr. Hance’s firm billed the tribe nearly $1.3 million over 11 months in legal and political consulting fees, records show. But Mr. Sickey said that the billing statements offered only vague explanations for services and that he could not point to any tangible results. Two consultants, for instance, were paid to fight the expansion of gambling in Texas — even though it was unlikely given that the governor there opposed any such prospect, Mr. Sickey said.

Mr. Hance and Jay B. Stewart, the firm’s managing partner, defended their team’s work, saying they successfully steered the tribe through a difficult period. “We did an outstanding job for them,” Mr. Hance said. “When we told them our bill was going to be $100,000 a month, they thought we were cheap. Mr. Abramoff had charged them $1 million a month.”

The firm’s fees covered the services of Mr. Fletcher, who served as the tribe’s spokesman. Records also show that Mr. Hance had Mr. Weaver — who was serving as Mr. McCain’s chief strategist — put on the tribe’s payroll from February to May 2005.

It is not precisely clear what role Mr. Weaver played for his $100,000 fee.

Mr. Stewart said Mr. Weaver was hired because “he had a lot of experience with the Senate, especially the new chairman, John McCain.” The Hance firm told the tribe in a letter that Mr. Weaver was hired to provide “representation for the tribe before the U.S. Senate.”

But Mr. Weaver never registered to lobby on the issue, and he has another explanation for his work.

“The Hance law firm retained me to assist them and their client in developing an aggressive crisis management and communications strategy,” Mr. Weaver said. “At no point was I asked by Kent Hance or anyone associated with him to set up meetings with anyone in or outside of government to discuss this, and if asked I would have summarily declined to do so.”

In June 2005, the tribe informed Mr. Hance that his services were no longer needed.
 

Change in Tone

After the Abramoff scandal, Mr. McCain stopped taking campaign donations from tribes. Some American Indians were offended, especially since Mr. McCain continued to accept money from the tribes’ lobbyists.

Resentment in Indian Country mounted as Mr. McCain, who was preparing for another White House run, singled out the growth in tribal gambling as one of three national issues that were “out of control.” (The others were federal spending and illegal immigration.)

Franklin Ducheneaux, an aide to Morris Udall who helped draft the 1988 Indian gambling law, said that position ran contrary to Mr. McCain’s record. “What did he think? That Congress intended for the tribes to be only somewhat successful?” Mr. Ducheneaux said.

Mr. McCain began taking a broad look at whether the laws were sufficient to oversee the growing industry. His campaign said that the growth had put “considerable stress” on regulators and Mr. McCain held hearings on whether the federal government needed more oversight power.

An opportunity to restrain the industry came in the spring of 2005, when a small tribe in Connecticut set off a political battle. The group, the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, had won federal recognition in 2004 after producing voluminous documentation tracing its roots.

The tribe wanted to build Connecticut’s third casino, which would compete with Foxwoods and another, the Mohegan Sun. Facing public opposition on the proposed casino, members of the Connecticut political establishment — many of whom had received large Pequot and Mohegan campaign donations — swung into action.

Connecticut officials claimed that a genealogical review by the Bureau of Indian Affairs was flawed, and that the Schaghticoke was not a tribe.

The tribe’s opponents, led by the Washington lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers, turned to Mr. McCain’s committee. It was a full-circle moment for the senator, who had helped the Pequots gain tribal recognition in the 1980s despite concerns about their legitimacy.

Now, Mr. McCain was doing a favor for allies in the Connecticut delegation, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a close friend, according to two former Congressional aides. “It was one of those collegial deals,” said one of the aides, who worked for Mr. McCain.

Barbour Griffith & Rogers wanted Mr. McCain to hold a hearing that would show that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was “broken,” said Bradley A. Blakeman, who was a lobbyist for the firm at the time.

“It was our hope that the hearing would shed light on the fact that the bureau had not followed their rules and had improperly granted recognition to the Schaghticoke,” Mr. Blakeman said. “And that the bureau would revisit the issue and follow their rules.”

Mr. McCain’s staff helped that effort by offering strategic advice.

His staff told a lobbyist for the firm that the Indian Affairs Committee “would love to receive a letter” from the Connecticut governor requesting a hearing, according to an e-mail exchange, and offered “guidance on what the most effective tone and approach” would be in the letter.

On May 11, 2005, Mr. McCain held a hearing billed as a general “oversight hearing on federal recognition of Indian tribes.” But nearly all the witnesses were Schaghticoke opponents who portrayed the tribe as imposters.

Mr. McCain set the tone: “The role that gaming and its nontribal backers have played in the recognition process has increased perceptions that it is unfair, if not corrupt.”

Chief Richard F. Velky of the Schaghticokes found himself facing off against the governor and most of the state’s congressional delegation. “The deck was stacked against us,” Mr. Velky said. “They were given lots of time. I was given five minutes.”

He had always believed Mr. McCain “to be an honest and fair man,” Mr. Velky said, “but this didn’t make me feel that good.”

Mr. Velky said he felt worse when the e-mail messages between the tribe’s opponents and Mr. McCain’s staff surfaced in a federal lawsuit. “Is there a letter telling me how to address the senator to give me the best shot?” Mr. Velky asked. “No, there is not.”

After the hearing, Pablo E. Carrillo, who was Mr. McCain’s chief Abramoff investigator at the time, wrote to a Barbour Griffith & Rogers lobbyist, Brant Imperatore. “Your client’s side definitely got a good hearing record,” Mr. Carillo wrote, adding “you probably have a good sense” on where Mr. McCain “is headed on this.”

“Well done!” he added.

Cynthia Shaw, a Republican counsel to the committee from 2005 to 2007, said Mr. McCain made decisions based on merit, not special interests. “Everybody got a meeting who asked for one,” Ms. Shaw said, “whether you were represented by counsel or by a lobbyist — or regardless of which lobbyist.”

Mr. McCain’s campaign defended the senator’s handling of the Schaghticoke case, saying no staff member acted improperly. The campaign said the session was part of normal committee business and the notion that Mr. McCain was intending to help Congressional colleagues defeat the tribe was “absolutely false.”

It added that the senator’s commitment to Indian sovereignty “remains as strong as ever.”

Within months of the May 2005 hearing, the Bureau of Indian Affairs took the rare step of rescinding the Schaghticokes’ recognition. A federal court recently rejected the tribe’s claim that the reversal was politically motivated.
 

Making an Exception

That spring of 2005, as the Schaghticokes went down to defeat in the East, another tribe in the West squared off against Mr. McCain with its bid to construct a gambling emporium in California. The stakes were similar, but the outcome would be far different.

The tribe’s plan to build a casino on a former Navy base just outside San Francisco represented a trend rippling across the country: American Indians seeking to build casinos near population centers, far from their reservations.

The practice, known as “off-reservation shopping,” stemmed from the 1988 Indian gambling law, which included exceptions allowing some casinos to be built outside tribal lands. When Mr. McCain began his second stint as chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee three years ago, Las Vegas pressed him to revisit the exceptions he had helped create, according to Sig Rogich, the Republican fund-raiser from Nevada.

“We told him this off-reservation shopping had to stop,” Mr. Rogich said. “It was no secret that the gaming industry, as well as many potentially affected communities in other states, voiced opposition to the practice.”

In the spring of 2005, Mr. McCain announced he was planning a sweeping overhaul of Indian gambling laws, including limiting off-reservation casinos. His campaign said Las Vegas had nothing to do with it. In a 2005 interview with The Oregonian, Mr. McCain said that if Congress did not act, “soon every Indian tribe is going to have a casino in downtown, metropolitan areas.”

Prospects for the proposed California project did not look promising. Then the tribe, the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians, hired a lobbyist based in Phoenix named Wes Gullett.

Mr. Gullett, who had never represented tribes before Congress, had known Mr. McCain since the early 1980s. Mr. Gullett met his wife while they were working in Mr. McCain’s Washington office. He subsequently managed Mr. McCain’s 1992 Senate campaign and served as a top aide to his 2000 presidential campaign. Their friendship went beyond politics. When Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, brought two infants in need of medical treatment back to Arizona from Bangladesh, the Gulletts adopted one baby and the McCains the other. The two men also liked to take weekend trips to Las Vegas.

Another of Mr. McCain’s close friends, former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, was a major investor in the Guidivilles’ proposed casino. Mr. Cohen, who did not return calls, was best man at Mr. McCain’s 1980 wedding.

Scott Crowell, lawyer for the Guidivilles, said Mr. Gullett was hired to ensure that Mr. McCain’s overhaul of the Indian gambling laws did not harm the tribe.

Mr. Gullett said he never talked to Mr. McCain about the legislation. “If you are hired directly to lobby John McCain, you are not going to be effective,” he said. Mr. Gullett said he only helped prepare the testimony of the tribe’s administrator, Walter Gray, who was invited to plead his case before Mr. McCain’s committee in July 2005. Mr. Gullett said he advised Mr. Gray in a series of conference calls.

On disclosure forms filed with the Senate, however, Mr. Gullett stated that he was not hired until November, long after Mr. Gray’s testimony. Mr. Gullett said the late filing might have been “a mistake, but it was inadvertent.” Steve Hart, a former lawyer for the Guidivilles, backed up Mr. Gullett’s contention that he had guided Mr. Gray on his July testimony.

When asked whether Mr. Gullett had helped him, Mr. Gray responded, “I’ve never met the man and couldn’t tell you anything about him.”

On Nov. 18, 2005, when Mr. McCain introduced his promised legislation overhauling the Indian gambling law, he left largely intact a provision that the Guidivilles needed for their casino. Mr. McCain’s campaign declined to answer whether the senator spoke with Mr. Gullett or Mr. Cohen about the project. In the end, Mr. McCain’s bill died, largely because Indian gambling interests fought back. But the Department of Interior picked up where Mr. McCain left off, effectively doing through regulations what he had hoped to accomplish legislatively. Carl Artman, who served as the Interior Department’s assistant secretary of Indian Affairs until May, said Mr. McCain pushed him to rewrite the off-reservation rules. “It became one of my top priorities because Senator McCain made it clear it was one of his top priorities,” he said.

The new guidelines were issued on Jan. 4. As a result, the casino applications of 11 tribes were rejected. The Guidivilles were not among them.
 

Kitty Bennett and Griff Palmer contributed to reporting.

    McCain and Team Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry, NYT, 28.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/us/politics/28gambling-web.html

Candidates Clash on Economy and Iraq

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

From the economy to foreign affairs to the way they carried themselves on stage, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama offered a dramatic contrast to the nation in their first presidential debate on Friday night, mixing disdain and often caustic remarks as they set out sharply different views of how they would manage the country and confront America’s adversaries abroad.

The two men met for 90 minutes against the backdrop of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and intensive negotiations in Congress over a $700 billion bailout plan for Wall Street.

Despite repeated prodding, Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama refused to point to any major adjustments they would need to make to their governing agendas — like scaling back promised tax reductions or spending programs — to accommodate what both men said could be very tough economic times for the next president.

For the first 40 minutes, Mr. Obama repeatedly sought to link Mr. McCain to President Bush, and suggested that it was policies of excessive deregulation that led to the financial crisis and mounting economic problems the nation faces now.

“We also have to recognize that this is a final verdict on eight years of failed economic policies promoted by George Bush, supported by Senator McCain — the theory that basically says that we can shred regulations and consumer protections and give more and more to the most and somehow prosperity will trickle down,” Mr. Obama said. “It hasn’t worked, and I think that the fundamentals of the economy have to be measured by whether or not the middle class is getting a fair shake.”

Mr. McCain became more animated during the second part of the debate, when it shifted to the advertised topic: foreign policy and national security. The two men offered strong and fundamentally different arguments about the wisdom of going to war against Iraq — which Mr. McCain supported and Mr. Obama opposed — as well as how to deal with Iran.

More than anything, Mr. McCain seemed intent on presenting Mr. Obama as green and inexperienced, a risky choice during a difficult time. Again and again, sounding almost like a professor talking down to a new student, he talked about having to explain foreign policy to Mr. Obama and repeatedly invoked his 30 years of history on national security (even though Mr. McCain, in the kind of misstep that no doubt would have been used by Republicans against Mr. Obama, mangled the name of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he stumbled over the name of Pakistan’s newly inaugurated president, calling him “Qadari.” His name is actually Asif Ali Zardari.).

“I don’t think I need any on-the-job training,” Mr. McCain said in the closing moments of the debate. “I’m ready to go at it right now.”

But Mr. Obama seemed calm and in control and seemed to hold his own on foreign policy, the subject on which Mr. McCain was assumed to hold a natural advantage. Mr. Obama talked in detail about foreign countries and their leaders, as if trying to assure the audience that he could hold his own on the world stage. He raised his own questions about Mr. McCain’s judgment in supporting the Iraq war.

“You like to pretend like the war started in 2007 — you talk about the surge. The war started in 2003,” Mr. Obama said. “At the time, when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong.”

There were no obvious game-changing moments — big mistakes, or the kind of sound bites that dominate the news for days — in the course of the 90-minute debate, held at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Still, the debate served as a reminder of just how different these two men would be as president as they appeared for their first extended session together before a huge audience, including many Americans who are just beginning to focus on this long-lasting race.

The differences were in no small part stylistic and visible with a glance to the stage: a 47-year-old black man who has been in the Senate for nearly four years standing at one lectern, facing a 72-year-old white-haired fixture of the Senate standing across from him. In many ways, Mr. Obama was a very different candidate than he was during the primary battles. He answered questions directly and affirmatively, typically looking right into the camera as he spoke.

Throughout the debate, Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain by his first name; Mr. McCain did not. The direct engagement was encouraged by the moderator, Jim Lehrer of PBS, who declared, “I’m just determined to get you all to talk to each other,” though it was an invitation that the two men repeatedly ignored.

Mr. McCain was feisty and aggressive but, particularly during the start of the debate, his language and demeanor offered a reminder of just how much he was a creature of the Senate, as he used phrases that were no doubt understandable in Washington but might have been lost to the audience at home. He spent much of the first 20 minutes of the debate criticizing Mr. Obama for supporting earmarks, special projects sought by members for their district.

“The United States Senate will take up a continuing resolution tomorrow or the next day — sometime next week — with 2,000 — 2,000 — look at them, my friends,” he said. “Look at ’em. You’ll be appalled. And Senator Obama is a recent convert, after requesting $932 million worth of pork-barrel spending projects.”

On Iraq, both candidates used the stories of fallen soldiers to support their own positions on the war. Mr. McCain told the audience about a New Hampshire woman who presented him with a bracelet of her 22-year-old son who was killed in combat. She asked him to keep alive the mission so his death was not in vain.

“I will wear his bracelet with honor,” Mr. McCain recalled, raising his right hand to show the bracelet that still remains on his arm.

The moment he finished, Mr. Obama said, “I’ve got a bracelet, too.” He told the story of a Wisconsin woman who presented him with a token from her son who was killed in the war. She asked Mr. Obama to end the war so other mothers do not share her anguish.

If Mr. Obama came into the debate seeking to link the economic crisis to Mr. McCain and to Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain sought to portray his rival as a naïve interloper; he barely looked at him all night, and seven times used a variation of the phrase that Mr. Obama “doesn’t understand.”

“I’m afraid Senator Obama doesn’t understand” and “What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand” and “Senator Obama still doesn’t understand” were Mr. McCain’s constant refrains, delivered with a frozen smile and a hint of condescension.

“A little bit of naïvete there,” Mr. McCain said after Mr. Obama’s remarks on a question about the American-Russian relationship.

The two men were somewhat wary of the debate’s unusual format — each had two minutes to answer a question, and then five minutes for free-flowing and perhaps unpredictable debate. During the first question, they generally kept outlining their policy views rather than engaging directly.

“Ten days ago, John said the fundamentals of the economy are strong —” Mr. Obama started.

“Say it directly to him,” said Mr. Lehrer, the moderator.

“John, you said 10 days ago the fundamentals of the economy are strong —” Mr. Obama said to laughter.

“Are you afraid I couldn’t hear him?” Mr. McCain said to Mr. Lehrer, to more laughter.

The differences between the two men included taxes, Iraq and Iran. When Mr. McCain was asked how he would deal with the economic crisis, he talked about curbing government spending, especially what he said was $18 billion in spending on pet projects.

“The first thing we have to do is get spending under control in Washington. It’s completely out of control,” he said, and assailed Mr. Obama for requesting $932 million in earmark spending as a senator.

“That kind of thing is not the way to rein in runaway spending in Washington, D.C.,” he said “That’s one of the fundamental differences that Senator Obama and I have.”

Mr. Obama responded by assailing Mr. McCain’s call for tax cuts for the wealthy. “Let’s be clear: earmarks account for $18 billion in last year’s budget. Senator McCain is proposing — and this is a fundamental difference between us — $300 billion in tax cuts to some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country, $300 billion. Now, $18 billion is important; $300 billion is really important.”

Turning to Mr. McCain, he said: “John, it’s been your president who you said you agreed with 90 percent of the time who presided over this increase in spending, this orgy of spending and enormous deficits and you voted for almost all of his budgets.”

Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of having “the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate.” He chuckled aloud, adding: “It’s hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left.”

A few moments later, Mr. Obama responded: “John mentioned me being wildly liberal. Mostly, that’s just me opposing George Bush’s wrongheaded policies since I’ve been in Congress.”

Peter Baker, Michael Cooper and Patrick Healy contributed reporting.

    Candidates Clash on Economy and Iraq, NYT, 27.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/us/politics/27debate.html?hp

As Homes Are Lost, Fears That Votes Will Be, Too

September 25, 2008
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

More than a million people have lost their homes through foreclosure in the last two years, and many of them are still registered to vote at the address of the home they lost. Now election officials and voting rights groups are struggling to prevent thousands of them from losing their vote when they go to the polls in November.

Many of these voters will be disqualified at the polls because, in the tumult of their foreclosure, they neglected to tell their election board of their new address. Some could be forced to vote with a provisional ballot or challenged by partisan poll watchers, a particular concern among Democrats who fear that poor voters will be singled out. That could add confusion and stretch out lines that are already expected to be long because of unprecedented turnout.

Federal election officials say they are concerned that voters are not being properly informed of how to update their addresses.

“Our biggest concern is that many of these voters will stay home or that poll workers will give misinformation,” said Rosemary E. Rodriguez, the chairwoman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which oversees voting.

Todd Haupt, a home builder, lost his home in Josephville, Mo., to foreclosure last year, and said he had since become much more interested in politics. But asked whether he had remembered to update his voter registration information when he moved into his parents’ home in St. Charles, Mo., Mr. Haupt, 33, paused silently. “Is that required?” he said. “I had no idea.”

“I’ve moved three times in the past two years,” he added. “Keeping my voter registration information was not top on my mind because I figured it was all set already.”

Ms. Rodriguez said the commission issued a notice this month encouraging voters to update their registration information before the Oct. 6 cutoff date imposed by many states for new voter registrations. She added that the commission considered issuing a notice this month informing local officials how to handle these voters, but in the end decided not to give poll chal-lengers any ideas on new tactics for singling out voters.

Many of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates are also in crucial swing states like Colorado, Florida, Michigan and Ohio. Because many homeowners in foreclosure are black or poor, and are considered probable Democratic voters in many areas, the issue has begun to have political ramifications. Political parties have long challenged voters with expired registrations, but the possible use of foreclosure lists to remove people from the rolls — though entirely legal — has become a new partisan flashpoint.

Last week, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign filed a lawsuit in federal court, seeking to prohibit the Michigan Republican Party from using foreclosure lists to single out and challenge voters. The state Republican Party has denied having any such plans.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, sent a letter last week along with a dozen other Democratic senators to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey asking him to ensure that voters facing foreclosure are not harassed or intimidated at polling places.

In Ohio, liberal-leaning groups are planning to help people in foreclosure and families who are homeless to vote by using a five- to seven-day window starting Sept. 30 when state residents are permitted to register and cast an early ballot simultaneously. The Republican Party has filed a lawsuit in state court to block registering and voting on the same day, arguing that state law forbids it.

Asked whether his party planned to use foreclosure information to compile challenge lists, Robert Bennett, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party, said the party did not discuss its election strategies in public.

[After this article was published, Mr. Bennett sent an e-mail message adding that the Ohio Republican Party condemns "any effort to challenge the eligibility of voters based on home foreclosures."]

Similar questions were raised two years ago over how to deal with more than a million people who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Some of these voters were never found, while others were able to vote with absentee ballots or at satellite locations outside New Orleans.

“Foreclosure victims are distinctly vulnerable because they are not officially recognized as a group needing voting help,” said Robert M. Brandon, president of the Fair Elections Legal Network, a liberal-leaning voting rights group.

Last month, his organization sent letters to the secretaries of state in Arizona, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, asking them to better educate foreclosure victims on their rights. The letters argued that the laws in these states do not bar such voters from voting in their former jurisdictions if their intent is to move back as soon as circumstances allow.

On Wednesday, Jennifer L. Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state who is a Democrat, sent out an advisory to all local officials instructing them what to do if anyone who has lost a home to foreclosure shows up at the polls. If the address listed for such voters is no longer valid, and they moved outside the precinct, Ms. Brunner said, poll workers are instructed to send the voter to the polling place that corresponds to the voter’s new address. The voter will then be given a provisional ballot — special ballots that can be counted only after the voter’s eligibility is verified — at the proper polling place, the directive said.

The state requires that election officials send a notice to all registered voters verifying their address 60 days before an election to check the accuracy of the voter rolls. This month, Ms. Brunner ruled that an undeliverable notice will not be grounds enough on its own for a voter to be removed from the registration lists.

So far, election officials in Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Ohio have sent out notices to residents in select counties who have filed for a change of address but who have not updated their voter registration.

But the number of people who have moved, through foreclosure or for any other reason, far exceeds the number of people who have notified their election boards. In Ohio, 375,000 people filed change-of-address forms with the Postal Service, but when state officials sent them cards asking for updated registration information, only 24,000 responded. In Missouri, where 250,000 people notified the Postal Service of their move, only 22,000 told the election board.

Robin Carnahan, the Missouri secretary of state, and a Democrat, said that she is trying to get local election officials to increase the number of poll workers to deal with any confusion or challenges of voters.

In 2004, a Republican Party official challenged a large number of voters at a largely black precinct in Boone County, Mo., causing a backup. Such challenges can cause long lines at polling places if there are not enough poll workers to pull challenged voters out of line, or if the workers have to consult with higher-level election officials for each challenge.

State political parties have traditionally used the mail to determine which voters to challenge. By sending out mailings to voters likely to be of the opposite party, and then seeing which mailings are returned as undeliverable, they know whom to challenge at the polls for not living at their registered address. Using public lists of foreclosed homes, however, can save money by allowing a party to avoid sending out mailings.

William Nowling, a spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, said that Democratic complaints about foreclosure victims being singled out were baseless.

“We are not using foreclosure lists in any way,” Mr. Nowling said, accusing Democratic groups of engaging in fear-mongering by spreading rumors of such plans. “Our voter integrity efforts are solely designed to fight voter fraud perpetrated by the Democrats, of which there is ample proof and examples, including previous elections where the F.B.I. had to seize and secure ballots in Detroit because ballot boxes were being stuffed.”

    As Homes Are Lost, Fears That Votes Will Be, Too, NYT, 25.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/us/politics/25voting.html

Financial Crisis Upends Campaign

Obama Rebuffs McCain's Request to Postpone Debate; Voters Divided Over Bailout

SEPTEMBER 25, 2008
The Wall Street Journal
By LAURA MECKLER, ELIZABETH HOLMES and CHRISTOPHER COOPER

Republican Sen. John McCain said he would suspend campaigning to help tackle a $700 billion bailout proposal and called on Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama to postpone their debate Friday, as the roiling U.S. financial crisis took center stage in the presidential campaign.

Democrats dismissed the moves as political gimmickry, and Sen. Obama replied that the debate should go forward as planned. "Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time...It's not necessary for us to think we can only do one thing and suspend everything else," Sen. Obama said.

But by day's end, the two men had agreed to issue a joint statement calling for bipartisan cooperation for swift action, and both agreed to come to the White House Thursday for a summit meeting with President George W. Bush and congressional leaders to try to achieve that goal. In recent days, both candidates have converged in their positions on the bailout, pushing for similar provisions, such as limits on executive pay at firms that take the help.

The latest twists in the neck-and-neck campaign landed in the middle of a week when troubles on Wall Street and Washington's reaction came to dominate the contest, leaving both Sens. McCain and Obama scrambling to figure out how best to respond.

Sen. McCain cast his actions Wednesday as bold moves that rise above partisanship. Barely a week ago, both men had suspended activities to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Sen. McCain evoked the event again. "Our national leaders came together in a time of crisis," he said in a statement. "We must show that kind of patriotism now."

It was unclear whether the return of Sens. McCain and Obama to the capital would provide the jolt needed to reach a bipartisan deal that gives cover to politicians of both parties. And it was unclear who would benefit most from the new jockeying between the presidential contenders.

Question of the Day
Vote: Should candidates debate Friday?Wash Wire: Obama's Case for DebatingWash Wire: McCain's Call Meets ResistanceStatement: McCain Seeks Debate DelayJournal Topics: Obama | McCainThe Arizona lawmaker also moved to take down his advertising Wednesday, and the dramatic gestures were in keeping with a career with many such moments. As in the past, it was both high risk and high reward. It draws attention to him at a time when Democrats stand to benefit from economic turmoil and helps him recast the question as one of leadership, where he is viewed positively. But he risks coming off as exploiting a very real problem for political gain.

With just 41 days remaining before the Nov. 4 vote, the issue is a challenging one for Sen. McCain, given that polls show he and his party are less trusted by voters to solve economic issues.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday gave Sen. Obama the edge on a range of economic questions, including dealing with the Wall Street financial crisis, with 35% saying he'd handle it better, compared with 30% for Sen. McCain. It found voters generally angry about the economy and the conditions that led to the current mess.

But the poll showed that neither candidate had yet turned the crisis to their advantage: 48% said they'd vote for Sen. Obama if the election were held now, compared with 46% for Sen. McCain. A Journal poll earlier in the month, before the latest market meltdown, had virtually the same results.

As for the bailout, the survey found that voters aren't sure what to think, with a third in favor, a third against, a third uncertain.

It remained unclear Wednesday night whether or not Friday evening's debate would really go forward. Sen. McCain said he will attend the Oxford, Miss., event only if Congress reaches accord on a financial bailout package before then. Aides floated the idea of postponing until Oct. 2, which would bump the vice presidential debate, currently scheduled for that night. Sen. Obama said he plans to be at the debate Friday, declining to take up the challenge. "Sen. McCain is running his campaign, I'm running mine," he said.

Wednesday's campaign drama began at 8:30 a.m., when Sen. Obama called Sen. McCain to suggest the two men issue a joint statement laying out the principles they would like reflected in the $700 billion rescue package. Sen. McCain called back at about 2:30 p.m. and agreed -- but quickly upped the ante, calling for Sen. Obama also to follow him back to Washington, suspend campaigning and postpone the debate. Sen. Obama said he would consider the offer.

Moments later, Sen. McCain went before TV cameras in New York. He was there to meet with visiting heads of state gathered for the United Nations General Assembly and had planned to spend some of the afternoon preparing for Friday's debate. Instead, Sen. McCain disrupted that plan to issue a carefully prepared statement calling for the White House to convene a meeting of congressional leaders including himself and Sen. Obama, aimed at finding a solution before markets open on Monday.

I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time," Sen. McCain said. "We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved.

Sen. Obama held a brief news conference to respond about an hour later in Clearwater, Fla., where he was holed up preparing for the debate. As he recounted what happened, the two men spoke Wednesday afternoon about issuing the joint statement during a "cordial" conversation in which Sen. McCain also broached the possibility of suspending the campaigns and shelving the debate. Sen. Obama said he ended the conversation by saying, "Why don't we get the initial statement out first?"

Sen. Obama said that when Sen. McCain suggested delaying the debate, "I thought this was something he was mulling over," adding that perhaps Sen. McCain was more decisive "in his own mind."

"When I got back to the hotel he had gone on television," said Sen. Obama.

Sen. Obama also seemed at first to express skepticism about the need to return swiftly to Washington to work on the package, saying he didn't want to "suddenly infuse Capitol Hill with presidential politics at a time when we're in the middle of some very delicate and difficult negotiations."

McCain aides said they began deliberating Tuesday evening, and they rejected a suggestion from the Obama camp that Sen. McCain was simply trying to one-up his opponent with a bolder proposal. "It was just a time for leadership," said one senior McCain adviser.

The pair did issue the joint statement Wednesday evening, but it was simply a generic call for the parties to work together, not the specific listing of the many areas where the two candidates agreed, as Sen. Obama had suggested. A McCain adviser said it was not necessary to detail principles since Sen. McCain had already clearly laid out his own.

Sen. McCain's moves were coordinated with the White House and congressional Republicans, who quickly issued encouraging statements. "Bipartisan support from Sens. McCain and Obama would be helpful in driving to a conclusion," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement.

Another key event that aides said prompted Sen. McCain's actions: a roundtable Wednesday morning with some of Wall Street's biggest names, financial titans who told him that the rescue legislation must be passed soon. "We urged John to get all over it, that this is a national-security crisis," one financial executive said.

The financial executives, who were told on Tuesday that Sen. McCain wanted to meet with them the next day, included Merrill Lynch & Co. CEO John Thain, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Vice Chairman James Lee and private-equity fund owner Henry Kravis.

For Sen. McCain, figuring out how to handle the bailout bill presented a particular challenge because much of the resistance to the plan has come from conservatives alarmed at the cost of bailout and the scope of powers that would be granted to the Treasury secretary.

Sen. McCain, who has never been close to conservatives, has worked hard during the election season to earn their trust. But that could be at risk if he were to support a package that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called "a dead loser on Election Day."

In recent days, Sen. McCain has spoken of the need to act but also insisted in strong terms on various changes that must be included. Democrats on Capitol Hill were praising many of the same goals, but no deal was at hand.

By Wednesday, pressure to act had built. Senior McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said the campaign concluded that world markets would collapse if Washington didn't agree on a bailout solution by the open of the U.S. stock exchanges Monday morning.

"America this week faces an historic crisis in our financial system," Sen. McCain said. "We must pass legislation to address this crisis. If we do not, credit will dry up, with devastating consequences for our economy."

Sen. McCain's decision to return to Capitol Hill came after the Bush administration's proposal "had lost all momentum," Mr. Schmidt said. "It did not have enough support to pass."

Sen. McCain wants to gather with Sen. Obama and other high-ranking lawmakers "for the next 100 hours or however long it is between now and Monday morning," senior adviser Mark Salter said, suggesting they lock themselves in a room "metaphorically."
 

—Greg Hitt, Monica Langley, and Corey Dade contributed to this article.

    Financial Crisis Upends Campaign, WSJ, 25.9.2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122228304121472135.html

Obama, McCain Combine for Record Spending

SEPTEMBER 20, 2008
11:31 P.M. ET
Associated Press
The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain together spent $94 million in August, a record spree mostly aimed at about a dozen states that will probably decide their historic presidential contest.

Their campaign finance reports, filed before Saturday's midnight deadline, shows that more than half of their $3-million-a-day spending rate was devoted to advertising that became increasingly negative during the month.

Both had their personal best fundraising months. Sen. Obama raised $65 million and Sen. McCain raised $47.5 million, their reports show. Sen. Obama ended the month with more than $77 million in the bank; Sen. McCain ended with $27 million.

Unlike Sen. Obama, Sen. McCain is accepting $84 million in public money for the remaining two months of the campaign. That means he can't keep his surplus cash and has turned it over to national and state Republican party committees that can assist him in the fall.

Sen. McCain's fundraising included more than $9 million raised in the three days after he announced his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate on Aug. 29.

Sen. McCain spent about $23 million on advertising, his highest as he jockeyed for position against Sen. Obama in battleground states. Sen. Obama vastly outspent him -- about $33 million -- as he practically matched Sen. McCain's advertising in several key states and tried to expand his field to typically Republican-voting states such as Alaska and Georgia.

Sen. Obama has since pulled out of those two states, but has continued to have an ad presence in GOP-leaning states such as Montana and North Dakota. He and Sen. McCain are also competing in the previously Republican territory of Virginia and North Carolina.

Sen. McCain increased his staff spending, building up a payroll of nearly $1.2 million. He also spent more than $3 million on travel, at least twice as much as what he spent in July.

Sen. Obama, however, was ahead of him in those categories as well. Sen. Obama spent about $2.8 million on payroll, an increase over his July spending. He also spent nearly $4.9 million on travel.

In a report filed Saturday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton showed only $1.8 million in donations in August, despite Sen. Obama's appeal to his top donors to help his Democratic primary rival retire her debt. She still owed about $9 million to her campaign vendors. Sen. Clinton loaned her campaign nearly $13.2 million. Under campaign finance laws, now that Sen. Obama is officially the party nominee, she can only raise money to recoup $250,000 of that loan.

Sen. Clinton refunded donors $16.7 million in contributions she received for the general election -- money she could not use to pay her primary debts. She also transferred $6.5 million in general election funds to her Senate re-election committee.

The Obama-McCain money race is an important element at this stage of the contest, as both campaigns are seeking to influence voters with ads and build sizable ground organizations to register and mobilize voters in more than a dozen contested states. The campaigns are especially aware of mail-in or absentee voting schedules in some of those states and are spending money to get as many early votes as they can.

Sen. McCain also filed a report for the general election -- McCain-Palin 2008. He also raised money for a general election compliance fund -- an account he can only use to pay for legal and accounting expenses.

Sen. McCain used the compliance fund to lend McCain-Palin 2008 a net $4.7 million for the general election. Such a loan is permissible because the campaign could not raise private money after Sept. 1, but was not entitled to receive the public funds until Sept. 5, after Sen. McCain had accepted the nomination. That money was used to prepay for advertising that aired the first week of September and must be repaid from the $84 million in public funds.

Both candidates are also helping their respective national parties raise money. The parties can spend money on behalf of their presidential candidates -- up to $19 million can be coordinated with the campaigns, other funds can be used to pay for get out the vote efforts, for hybrid ads that mention the presidential candidate, or independent expenditures that help the candidates but cannot be coordinated with the presidential campaigns.

The McCain campaign transferred about $18 million to the Republican National Committee and about $9 million to various state Republican committees, party and campaign officials said.

The RNC reported $76.5 million in the bank at the beginning of September before obtaining the McCain camp's leftover cash. The Democratic National Committee reported $17.7 million cash on hand at the end of August.

That means both campaigns were roughly on even footing, putting a burden on Sen. Obama and the DNC to surpass Sen. McCain's $84 million in public funds and any major contributions raised by the RNC.

    Obama, McCain Combine for Record Spending, WSJ, 20.9.2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122191986181760063.html

McCain Laboring to Hit Right Note on the Economy

September 17, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

VIENNA, Ohio — On Monday morning, as the financial system absorbed one of its biggest shocks in generations, Senator John McCain said, as he had many times before, that he believed the fundamentals of the economy were “strong.”

Hours later he backpedaled, explaining that he had meant that American workers, whom he described as the backbone of the economy, were productive and resilient. By Tuesday he was calling the economic situation “a total crisis” and denouncing “greed” on Wall Street and in Washington.

The sharp turnabout in tone and substance reflected a recognition not only that Mr. McCain had struck a discordant note at a sensitive moment but also that he had done so with regard to the very issue on which he can least afford to stumble.

With economic conditions worsening over the course of this year and voter anxiety on the rise, Mr. McCain has had to labor to get past the impression — fostered by his own admissions as recently as last year that the subject is not his strongest suit — that he lacks the experience and understanding to address the nation’s economic woes.

In the most recent case, he first sought to explain away his remarks about the economy’s fundamental soundness by saying he had been referring to the American people, almost daring his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, to contradict him on that score. But within hours his aides were scheduling appearances for him Tuesday on all the morning television news shows so that he could try to erase the notion, being promoted aggressively by Democrats, that he was out of touch.

His campaign also sent to reporters the text of a speech he was delivering later Monday that included much starker language about the nation’s financial troubles, and by Tuesday had produced a new advertisement asserting that his experience and leadership were necessary in a “time of crisis.” Aides and advisers repeated to anyone who would listen the words that Mr. McCain has frequently spoken following his comments about the economy’s fundamental strengths: that “these are very, very difficult times.”

Beyond striking a more populist tone and more explicitly acknowledging the nation’s economic problems, his campaign also began an effort Tuesday to cast him as a strong leader with profound experience on economic issues, given his service on the Senate Commerce Committee, where he was chairman for six years. That effort quickly hit a pothole when one of his economic advisers suggested that he had helped to create the BlackBerry, by virtue of his role in brokering telecommunications legislation; the McCain campaign later disavowed that, calling the suggestion “boneheaded.”

For much of this year, Mr. McCain has seemed to struggle to strike a balance between conveying the optimism that many voters want in their leaders, and the I-feel-your-pain empathy that they crave during hard times. His task is complicated by the tension between his plans to continue many of the economic policies of the unpopular incumbent Republican president he hopes to succeed, and his pledges to improve the American economy and shake up Washington.

As recently as January, Mr. McCain argued at a Republican debate that Americans were better off than they were eight years ago; by this summer he had released an advertisement that said “we’re worse off than we were four years ago.”

His first big speech on the mortgage crisis warned against excessive government intervention; a month later he released his plan for government action to help people keep their homes.

And a tour on which he embarked in July to emphasize his understanding of Americans’ economic pain was overshadowed when one of his top economic advisers, former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, was quoted as saying that the United States was only in a “mental recession” and had become “a nation of whiners.”

The most recent episode began Monday morning at a rally in Jacksonville, Fla., where Mr. McCain spoke of the troubles in the financial sector.

“There’s tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and on Wall Street,” he said. “People are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times. And I promise you we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. We will reform government. And this is a failure.”

His statement about the strength of the economy’s fundamentals was one he has made for nearly a year now, usually adding that times are tough or people are hurting. And in some ways, given that the recession that many have feared all that time has yet to be officially proclaimed, he has been borne out.

But his repeating the remark on Monday, even as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was helping send the stock market plunging to its steepest loss since the terrorist attacks of 2001, quickly became a political problem.

His campaign swung into action then, to try to put the remark “in context,” as one top aide said, and to push back against what the McCain organization deemed unfair attacks coming from the Obama camp. In short order Mr. McCain’s campaign sent reporters the advance text — a step usually reserved for major speeches or pronouncements — of remarks he planned to deliver in Orlando, Fla., on Monday afternoon proclaiming that “the American economy is in crisis” and redefining what he had meant when he spoke about the “fundamentals.”

On Tuesday morning, Mr. McCain was interviewed for CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and CNBC. Again and again, he explained that he understood the “crisis” and called for a new commission to study it, modeled on the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.

On the NBC News television program “Today,” Matt Lauer asked Mr. McCain how he could say that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” while his campaign was releasing an advertisement that said the economy was in crisis.

“Well, it’s obviously true that the workers of America are the fundamentals of our economy, and our strength and our future,” Mr. McCain replied. “And I believe in the American worker, and someone who disagrees with that — it’s fine. We are in crisis. We all know that. The excess, the greed and the corruption of Wall Street have caused us to have a situation which is going to affect every American. We are in a total crisis.”

Mr. McCain’s economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, told reporters Tuesday that the senator, who has often favored deregulation, would push for new regulations as president.

“This story line that people want to write that somehow McCain himself or the McCain campaign doesn’t understand what’s going on with the economy is wrong,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. “You shouldn’t run for president by denigrating everything in sight and trying to scare people. Let’s be accurate. This is an economy that has serious problems.”

By the end of the day, the campaign had gone back on offense. Here in Vienna, outside Youngstown, Mr. McCain noted at a joint rally with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, that Mr. Obama had originally chosen a former head of the recently bailed-out Fannie Mae to lead his vice-presidential search (though the head of Mr. McCain’s search committee was himself a past lobbyist for Fannie Mae).

And Ms. Palin said that Mr. Obama’s “tax plans really would kill jobs and hurt small businesses and make even today’s bad economy look like the good old days.”

Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington, Adam Nagourney and Larry Rohter from Florida, and Brian Stelter from New York.

    McCain Laboring to Hit Right Note on the Economy, NYT, 17.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/us/politics/17mccain.html?hp

States Restore Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts,
but Issue Remains Politically Sensitive

September 14, 2008
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    States Restore Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts, but Issue Remains Politically Sensitive, NYT, 14.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14felony.html

Obama, Trying to Rally Jittery Backers, Attacks McCain as Out of Touch

September 13, 2008
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY and LARRY ROHTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. McCain said they “are not lies” and defended them.

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

“He chooses his words very carefully,” Mr. McCain said. “He shouldn’t have said it.”

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

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

Jeff Zeleny reported from New Hampshire, and Larry Rohter from New York.

    Obama, Trying to Rally Jittery Backers, Attacks McCain as Out of Touch, NYT, 13.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13campaign.html

McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions

September 13, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER and JIM RUTENBERG

Harsh advertisements and negative attacks are a staple of presidential campaigns, but Senator John McCain has drawn an avalanche of criticism this week from Democrats, independent groups and even some Republicans for regularly stretching the truth in attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record and positions.

Mr. Obama has also been accused of distortions, but this week Mr. McCain has found himself under particularly heavy fire for a pair of headline-grabbing attacks. First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama’s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain’s claim to be the change agent in the race, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health plan.)

Then he falsely claimed that Mr. Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners (he supported teaching them to be alert for inappropriate advances from adults).

Those attacks followed weeks in which Mr. McCain repeatedly, and incorrectly, asserted that Mr. Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, even though analysts say he would cut taxes on the middle class more than Mr. McCain would, and misrepresented Mr. Obama’s positions on energy and health care.

A McCain advertisement called “Fact Check” was itself found to be “less than honest” by FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan group. The group complained that the McCain campaign had cited its work debunking various Internet rumors about Ms. Palin and implied in the advertisement that the rumors had originated with Mr. Obama.

In an interview Friday on the NY1 cable news channel, a McCain supporter, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, called “ridiculous” the implication that Mr. Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment was a reference to Ms. Palin, whom he also defended as coming under unfair attack.

“The last month, for sure,” said Don Sipple, a Republican advertising strategist, “I think the predominance of liberty taken with truth and the facts has been more McCain than Obama.”

Indeed, in recent days, Mr. McCain has been increasingly called out by news organizations, editorial boards and independent analysts like FactCheck.org. The group, which does not judge whether one candidate is more misleading than another, has cried foul on Mr. McCain more than twice as often since the start of the political conventions as it has on Mr. Obama.

A McCain spokesman, Brian Rogers, said the campaign had evidence for all its claims. “We stand fully by everything that’s in our ads,” Mr. Rogers said, “and everything that we’ve been saying we provide detailed backup for — everything. And if you and the Obama campaign want to disagree, that’s your call.”

Mr. McCain came into the race promoting himself as a truth teller and has long publicly deplored the kinds of negative tactics that helped sink his candidacy in the Republican primaries in 2000. But his strategy now reflects a calculation advisers made this summer — over the strenuous objections of some longtime hands who helped him build his “Straight Talk” image — to shift the campaign more toward disqualifying Mr. Obama in the eyes of voters.

“I think the McCain folks realize if they can get this thing down in the mud, drag Obama into the mud, that’s where they have the best advantage to win,” said Matthew Dowd, who worked with many top McCain campaign advisers when he was President Bush’s chief strategist in the 2004 campaign, but who has since had a falling out with the White House. “If they stay up at 10,000 feet, they don’t.”

For all the criticism, the offensive seems to be having an impact. It has been widely credited by strategists in both parties with rejuvenating Mr. McCain’s campaign and putting Mr. Obama on the defensive since it began early this summer.

Some who have criticized Mr. McCain have accused him of blatant untruths and of failing to correct himself when errors were pointed out.

On Friday on “The View,” generally friendly territory for politicians, one co-host, Joy Behar, criticized his new advertisements. “We know that those two ads are untrue,” Ms. Behar said. “They are lies. And yet you, at the end of it, say, ‘I approve these messages.’ Do you really approve them?”

“Actually they are not lies,” Mr. McCain said crisply, “and have you seen some of the ads that are running against me?”

Mr. Obama’s hands have not always been clean in this regard. He was called out earlier for saying, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain supported a “hundred-year war” in Iraq after Mr. McCain said in January that he would be fine with a hypothetical 100-year American presence in Iraq, as long as Americans were not being injured or killed there.

More recently, Mr. Obama has been criticized for advertisements that have distorted Mr. McCain’s record on schools financing and incorrectly accused him of not supporting loan guarantees for the auto industry — a hot topic in Michigan. He has also taken Mr. McCain’s repeated comments that American economy is “fundamentally sound” out of context, leaving out the fact that Mr. McCain almost always adds at the same time that he understands that times are tough and “people are hurting.”

But sensing an opening in the mounting criticism of Mr. McCain, the Obama campaign released a withering statement after Mr. McCain’s appearance on “The View.”

“In running the sleaziest campaign since South Carolina in 2000 and standing by completely debunked lies on national television, it’s clear that John McCain would rather lose his integrity than lose an election,” Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said in a statement.

At an event in Dover, N.H., a voter asked Mr. Obama when he would start “fighting back.” Mr. Obama, who began his own confrontational advertising campaign Friday, said, “Our ads have been pretty tough, but I just have a different philosophy that I’m going to respond with the truth.”

“I’m not going to start making up lies about John McCain,” Mr. Obama said.

The McCain advertisements are devised to draw the interest of bloggers and cable news producers — but not necessarily always intended for wide, actual use on television stations — to shift the terms of the debate by questioning Mr. Obama’s character and qualifications.

Mr. Sipple, the Republican strategist, voiced concern that Mr. McCain’s approach could backfire. “Any campaign that is taking liberty with the truth and does it in a serial manner will end up paying for it in the end,” he said. “But it’s very unbecoming to a political figure like John McCain whose flag was planted long ago in ground that was about ‘straight talk’ and integrity.”

The campaign has also been selective in its portrayal of Mr. McCain’s running mate, Ms. Palin. The campaign’s efforts to portray her as the bane of federal earmark spending was complicated by evidence that she had sought a great deal of federal money both as governor of Alaska and as mayor of Wasilla.

Ms. Palin has often told audiences about pulling the plug on the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, an expensive federal project to build a bridge to a sparsely populated Alaskan island that became a symbol of wasteful federal spending. “I told Congress, ‘Thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska,” she said this week in Virginia.

But her position was more like “please” before it became “no thanks.” Ms. Palin supported the bridge project while running for governor, and abandoned it after it became a national scandal and Congress said the state could keep the money for other projects. As a mayor and governor, she hired lobbyists to request millions in federal spending for Alaska. In an ABC News interview on Friday with Charles Gibson, Ms. Palin largely stuck to her version of the events.

Disputed characterizations are not uncommon on the trail. At a campaign stop this week in Missouri, Mr. McCain said that Mr. Obama’s plan would “force small businesses to cut jobs and reduce wages and force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.”

Jonathan B. Oberlander, who teaches health policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that Mr. Obama’s plan would not force families into a government-run system. “I would say this is an inaccurate and false characterization of the Obama plan,” he said. “I don’t use those words lightly.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Dover, N.H.

    McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions, NYT, 13.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13mccain.html?hp

The Ad Campaign

A Sharp Attack on Obama

September 13, 2008
The New York Times
By LARRY ROHTER

This advertisement for the Republican ticket of Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin is scheduled to be broadcast in what the McCain campaign describes as key states, though as of late Friday it had run only once, in Denver on Sept. 10. Called “Disrespectful,” it is 30 seconds long.

PRODUCER Foxhole Productions

SCRIPT “He was the world’s biggest celebrity, but his star is fading. So they lashed out at Sarah Palin. Dismissed her as ‘good looking.’ That backfired, so they said she was doing ‘what she was told.’ Then desperately called Sarah Palin a liar. How disrespectful. And how Gov. Sarah Palin proves them wrong, every day.”

THE SCREEN Senator Barack Obama is shown at a lectern, gesticulating, with crowd noises in the background and cameras flashing as a female voice speaks. Next, head shots of Mr. Obama and his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fill the screen. As the accusations against Mr. Obama roll across the screen, his face alone appears, intermittently smiling, fretful or frowning. The final image is that of a smiling Mr. McCain standing at Ms. Palin’s side as she speaks at a public event.

ACCURACY Mr. Obama is pictured when the phrase “good looking” appears on the screen, but it was actually Mr. Biden who made the remark, and clearly in a self-deprecating context. The Obama adviser accused of saying Ms. Palin was doing what she was told merely said that she might have been fed misinformation about Mr. Obama and repeated it. An Obama advertisement does accuse both Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin of “lying” about their records, in her case as regards her claimed opposition to the so-called bridge to nowhere, which she opposed only once it became a symbol of wasteful spending. And this is the second McCain advertisement to call Mr. Obama “the world’s biggest celebrity,” a contention that will no doubt come as a surprise to several actors and athletes, and seems odd at a moment when Ms. Palin is omnipresent on television and in newspapers and magazines.

SCORECARD The advertisement is the latest in a number that resort to a dubious disregard for the facts. The nonpartisan political analysis group Factcheck.org has already criticized “Disrespectful” as “particularly egregious,” saying that it “goes down new paths of deception,” and is “peddling false quotes.” Even the title is troublesome. “Disrespectful” is one of those words that is loaded with racial and class connotations that many people consider offensive.

    A Sharp Attack on Obama, NYT, 13.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13madbox.html

The Ad Campaign

Portraying McCain as a Man of the Past

September 13, 2008
By JEFF ZELENY

This 30-second advertisement for Senator Barack Obama was introduced Friday and is to run on national cable networks and on television stations in some swing states.

PRODUCER The Obama Media Team

THE SCRIPT An announcer says: “1982. John McCain goes to Washington. Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn’t. He admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, can’t send an e-mail. Still doesn’t understand the economy. And favors 200 billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class. After one president who was out of touch, we just can’t afford more of the same.”

ON SCREEN The commercial opens with an image of a disco ball and 1982 flashes on the screen. A younger Mr. McCain, a new congressman, is shown at a hearing. His hair, longer than it is today, is rumpled and his large glasses offer a retro look. An old cellphone, a record player, an early-model computer and a Rubik’s Cube flash on the screen. Fast-forward to present day, a Macintosh computer is shown. A video clip shows Mr. McCain stepping from a golf cart with former President George Bush, with the words “Doesn’t understand the economy.” Champagne flutes clink and a family shopping at a supermarket appears as the message turns to tax cuts. The advertisement closes with Mr. McCain grinning as he stands by the current President Bush.

ACCURACY Mr. McCain has told reporters that he does not regularly use a computer and was trying to learn how to send e-mail messages. A quotation from last year about Mr. McCain not understanding the economy can be misleading because it omits statements he has since made. The tax argument accurately states that Mr. McCain favors reducing the corporate income tax rate. The bulk of his tax-cutting proposals would benefit those with higher incomes, while Mr. Obama says he wants much larger tax breaks for low- and middle-income Americans.

SCORECARD The overriding message of this advertisement is that Mr. McCain — who is 72, though the commercial never mentions that — is out of touch and out of date. The Obama campaign says the intention is to show how long Mr. McCain has served in Washington, but it also suggests that he may not be equipped to handle today’s fast-moving problems. By linking him to two Bush presidents, the advertisement tries to deflate the message that McCain would be a candidate of change. But will Mr. Obama attract older voters with this message?

    Portraying McCain as a Man of the Past, NYT, 13.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/politics/13oadbox.html

Forgoing Subsidy, Obama Team Presses Donors

September 9, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and JEFF ZELENY

After months of record-breaking fund-raising, a new sense of urgency in Senator Barack Obama’s fund-raising team is palpable as the full weight of the campaign’s decision to bypass public financing for the general election is suddenly upon it.

Pushing a fund-raiser later this month, a finance staff member sent a sharply worded note last week to Illinois members of its national finance committee, calling their recent efforts “extremely anemic.”

At a convention-week meeting in Denver of the campaign’s top fund-raisers, buttons with the image of a money tree were distributed to those who had already contributed the maximum $2,300 to the general election, a subtle reminder to those who had failed to ante up.

The signs of concern have become evident in recent weeks as early fund-raising totals have suggested that Mr. Obama’s decision to bypass public financing may not necessarily afford him the commanding financing advantage over Senator John McCain that many had originally predicted.

Presidential candidates in a general election have typically relied on two main sources of money: public financing, along with additional money their parties raise. In choosing to accept the public money, the McCain campaign now gets an $84 million cash infusion from the United States Treasury. Mr. McCain is barred from raising any more money for his own campaign coffers but can lean on money raised by the Republican National Committee, which has continued to exceed expectations.

Meanwhile, Obama campaign officials had calculated that with its vaunted fund-raising machine, driven by both small contributors over the Internet and a powerful high-dollar donor network, it made more sense to forgo public financing so they could raise and spend unlimited sums.

But the campaign is struggling to meet ambitious fund-raising goals it set for the campaign and the party. It collected in June and July far less from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s donors than originally projected. Moreover, Mr. McCain, unlike Mr. Obama, will have the luxury of concentrating almost entirely on campaigning instead of raising money, as Mr. Obama must do.

The Obama campaign does not have to report its August fund-raising totals until next week, so it is difficult to tally what it has in the bank at this point. A spokesman said that August was its best fund-raising month yet and that the campaign’s fund-raising was on track. But the campaign finished July with slightly less cash on hand with the Democratic National Committee compared with Mr. McCain and the R.N.C. The Obama campaign has also been spending heavily, including several million more than the McCain campaign in advertising in August.

A California fund-raiser familiar with the party’s August performance estimated that it raised roughly $17 million last month, a drop-off from the previous month, and finished with just $13 million in the bank.

Still, the Obama campaign said last Thursday that it had raised $10 million over the Internet in the 24 hours after the speech by Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, at the Republican convention on Wednesday, a one-day record for the campaign.

David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, said the majority of the Obama campaign’s donors during the primary had yet to write checks for the general election. When they do, he said, it will be the equivalent of the large injection of cash the McCain campaign is receiving from the government — about $70 million or $80 million.

“We’re confident that we will meet our financial goals, but it’s hard work,” Mr. Plouffe said. “We have a long way to go in the next six weeks.”

Members of Mr. Obama’s national finance committee were briefed during the convention in Denver by Mr. Plouffe. Penny Pritzker, the Obama finance chairwoman, announced new state-by-state fund-raising goals. The decidedly business-oriented nature of the meeting reflected the burden on the Obama campaign in the coming weeks.

“I think McCain made the right call,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist who managed Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. “The Republican National Committee is strong. They have the resources to make this race almost financially on par.”

Democratic strategists disagree, pointing out that campaign finance rules impose serious restrictions on Mr. McCain’s ability to fully make use of his party’s bank account.

“It’s not just the limitation of dollars when you accept public financing, it’s the limitations that go with that spending,” said Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004. Mr. Devine added that choosing to accept public financing was the Kerry campaign’s single biggest mistake because it limited the campaign’s resources.

The McCain campaign had by far its best fund-raising month ever in August, when it collected $47 million for its coffers and $22 million for the party, finishing the month with more than $100 million in the bank that will now be at the disposal of the R.N.C., according to several finance officials.

McCain fund-raisers said they also hope to raise an additional $100 million for the party in September and in October, taking advantage of the sizable contribution limits for the party. The party’s Internet fund-raising has also picked up significantly since the announcement that Ms. Palin would join the Republican ticket. Combined with the $84 million from public financing, that would leave the McCain campaign with about $300 million at its disposal.

A recent e-mail message to McCain fund-raisers unveiled new incentives to spur them in their final push. For the primary, anyone who raised $100,000 or more earned the title of Trailblazer, while those who raised $250,000 or more became Innovators. Now Trailblazers who raise another $100,000 for the party for the general election can become Super-Trailblazers, and Innovators who raise another $250,000 earn the title of Super-Innovators.

Officials have also sketched out plans for Ms. Palin to do some 35 fund-raisers over the next two months. Mr. McCain will be dispatched for only four major fund-raisers: one on Monday night in Chicago, in which the party raised about $4 million; another next week in Miami, then Los Angeles and New York in October, finance officials said.

But even if the McCain finance team, led by Lewis M. Eisenberg, a former Goldman Sachs executive, and Wayne L. Berman, a Washington lobbyist, meets its goals, the campaign will have complete control over only the $84 million from the federal government, as well as $19 million in party money that is permitted to be used in coordination with the campaign.

The Republican Party can spend unlimited amounts of its money independent of the McCain campaign. It can also split the costs of so-called hybrid advertisements with the campaign, commercials that must promote not only Mr. McCain but also other Republicans down the ticket, something media strategists said could be ineffective when trying to create a cohesive message. Nevertheless, McCain fund-raisers pointed out the pressure is now on the Obama campaign to raise far more than it ever has before.

The Obama campaign set a goal in mid-June of raising $300 million for the campaign and about $150 million for the Democratic Party over four-and-a-half months, fund-raisers said. As of the end of July, however, the Obama campaign was well short of the $100 million a month pace it had set, taking in about $77 million between the campaign and the party that month.

It is not yet clear whether the Obama campaign will be able to ratchet up its fund-raising enough in the final two months of the campaign to make up the difference.

Even Mr. Obama’s fund-raisers in Illinois were admonished in an e-mail message last Thursday to step up their efforts to “show the other regions that his home state still has it.” The donors, who were also reminded they had each promised to collect $300,000 for the campaign, were asked to raise $25,000 each for an event on Sept. 22 at a Chicago museum.

The new state-by-state goals unveiled by campaign officials in Denver stunned at least some in the room and included sizable increases for at least some states, according to interviews with several Obama fund-raisers.

The campaign has created a fund-raising committee, the Campaign for Change, which allows fund-raisers to harvest additional checks of more than $30,000 that will then be divvied up among state Democratic Parties in 18 battleground states, with Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan receiving the most.

In a campaign swing through South Florida over Labor Day weekend, Mr. Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., met with several small groups of major donors and sent out an e-mail appeal to supporters of his own unsuccessful presidential campaign, as well as to Jewish supporters. The effort brought in more than $1 million in four days.

Campaign officials expect their Internet fund-raising engine to ramp up as the election approaches. And they hope that much of the high-dollar fund-raising can be done without Mr. Obama. In the New York area alone, there are some 18 events planned in September, all with surrogates, including Mrs. Clinton, Caroline Kennedy and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

But campaign officials conceded that Mr. Obama inevitably will have to make some appearances. On Friday night in New Jersey, Mr. Obama devoted five hours for two fund-raising events, including one at the home of the singer Jon Bon Jovi, in which the ticket was $30,800 a person. Mr. Obama is also scheduled to appear at back-to-back fund-raisers in Los Angeles on Sept. 16.

    Forgoing Subsidy, Obama Team Presses Donors, NYT, 9.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/us/politics/09donate.html?hp

Rival Tickets Are Redrawing Battlegrounds

September 7, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY and MICHAEL COOPER

Fresh from the Republican convention, Senator John McCain’s campaign sees evidence that his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate is energizing conservatives in the battleground of Ohio while improving its chances in Pennsylvania and some Western states that Senator Barack Obama has been counting on.

Mr. Obama’s campaign intends to focus heavily on the economy, especially in light of the mounting job losses, and to keep up the effort to tie the McCain-Palin ticket to the policies of President Bush. It is banking on holding all the states Senator John Kerry won in 2004 and picking up the additional electoral votes it needs by flipping some combination of Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio or Virginia into the Democratic column.

With just over eight weeks left until Election Day, the two sides are settling into a set of state-by-state face-offs, with an increased focus on turning out supporters and tough decisions looming about where to invest time and advertising money.

Aides to Mr. Obama said the campaign was preparing advertisements tailored to issues important in specific states, like ones about the auto industry in Michigan and nuclear waste in Nevada, even as the Democrats pulled back advertising in Georgia, a Republican state he had sought to put in play by registering new Democratic voters.

Strategists say that Mr. McCain can now count on a more motivated social conservative base to help him in areas like southern Ohio, where the 2004 race was settled.

While fortified turnout from this base is probably not enough to assure victory for Mr. McCain, strategists said, it would be very difficult for him to win without it. In that sense, Ms. Palin’s presence on the ticket — depending on how her candidacy fares under the scrutiny it is receiving — could be vital.

Mr. Obama has refrained from directly criticizing her, but on Saturday he shed the niceties. He said Ms. Palin embraced lawmakers’ pet projects known as earmarks back home in Alaska but criticized them in her new role.

“She’s a skillful politician, but when you’ve been taking all the earmarks when it’s convenient and then suddenly you’re the anti-earmark person, that’s not change,” Mr. Obama told a crowd in Indiana. “Come on! Words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.”

Some McCain campaign officials hoped that Ms. Palin, an Alaskan, can broaden the ticket’s appeal in the Northwest, possibly gaining traction in states like Oregon and Washington, as well as shore up Mr. McCain’s standing with social conservatives who had, up to now, been lukewarm at best about his candidacy.

“Thursday morning our phones started ringing about how do we get involved, where are the phone banks, where is the literature to distribute,” said Mike Gonidakis, executive director of Ohio Right to Life, explaining that many people had been motivated by Ms. Palin’s convention speech on Wednesday night. “It’s amazing to see the attitude and enthusiasm — especially compared with what it was about 10 days ago.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, said that his team was not concerned that independents and undecided women might be drawn to Ms. Palin, and that the Obama camp did not plan to run hard against her.

“As the post-convention dust settles, we believe a lot of the battleground states will be close, and that this will remain a race between John McCain and Barack Obama,” Mr. Plouffe said. “She’ll be out there promoting John McCain’s economic message, which is fine by us because it is so bad for middle-class voters.”

Yet several Republican leaders, both moderates and conservatives, said they were comfortable with the economic message of their ticket, which is asserting in its advertising and campaigning that Mr. Obama would enact higher taxes and policies too liberal for most voters.

“Even in the face of job losses and the mortgage crisis,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, “the core Republican message is still appealing: no higher taxes, get government off your back, cut regulations and make us more competitive.”

McCain aides once believed that his appeal to independents might help him win a traditional Democratic state like New Jersey, and Obama aides thought their candidate’s broad appeal could be a lift in traditionally Republican ones like Montana, but the emerging swing states picked by both campaigns so far resemble the Bush-Kerry map in 2004 and the Bush-Gore map in 2000.

But Democrats say that they will still have the advantage, thinking that Mr. Bush’s unpopularity, economic discontent and lingering anger over the Iraq war will make it hard for Republicans to carry all the Bush states.

Republicans are hoping that positioning Mr. McCain as a maverick now could help them hold the Bush states and win some like New Hampshire, which Mr. Bush lost in 2004 but where Mr. McCain is popular.

In one indication of how Mr. McCain defines the battleground and the message he will emphasize to counter the Democratic strategy, the Republican National Committee recently bought television time in 14 states for an advertisement calling Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats “ready to tax, ready to spend, but not ready to lead.”

That advertisement will be shown in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia (all Republican states in 2004 that Mr. Obama is contesting aggressively this time) and Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, (Democratic states four years ago that Mr. McCain is trying to win over).

A sign of the shifting battlegrounds can be found in the itineraries of both campaigns. Mr. Obama on Saturday warned voters in Indiana, a state where Democratic presidential candidates seldom plant their flag, to be wary of Republicans promising change. “Don’t be fooled,” he told several hundred people at the fairgrounds in Terre Haute. “These are the folks who have been in charge.”

For their part, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin chose to remain in solid Republican territory. Thousands of enthusiastic supporters greeted them at an airport rally in Colorado Springs, where the crowd waved a sea of flags and chanted “Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin.”

Ms. Palin took on Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Mr. Obama’s running mate and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as a personification of the status quo.

“When our opponent made his choice, he went for a fine man, a decent man,” she said at the rally. “Senator Biden can claim many chairmanships across many, many years in Washington, and certainly many friends in the Washington establishment. But even those admirers would not be able to call him an agent of change.”

Mr. Obama chose not to participate in the public financing system for presidential campaigns, freeing him to spend unlimited amounts on his political efforts in any state.

One indication of the Obama campaign’s priorities can be found in a breakdown of how it is distributing large donations to a special fund-raising account it has set up for state parties. The breakdown, provided by an Obama fund-raiser, shows the campaign funneling money to traditional swing states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, but also allocating substantial sums to normally solid Republican states like North Carolina.

Obama aides, while pulling back commercials in Georgia, are mulling new advertisements in other states that Mr. Bush carried, like Arizona and West Virginia, where the poor economy might help them somewhat.

Both sides are intensifying their efforts in a less visible but potentially more important aspect of presidential politics: identifying their likely supporters, household by household, and ensuring that they show up to vote on Election Day.

Mr. Obama has long been seen as having had a head start in that area, drawing on his campaign’s vast army of volunteers to make phone calls, knock on doors and distribute literature.

Mr. Plouffe said the Obama campaign had recruited thousands of neighborhood and precinct captains to concentrate on voter turnout: The campaign has seven offices in Allegheny County alone, around Pittsburgh, and has teams devoted to turning out the estimated 600,000 black residents of Florida who were registered in 2004 but did not vote.

“You have a lot of sporadic Democratic voting in Florida and other states in different years,” Mr. Plouffe said, “but we believe the clear contrast between the candidates will drive Democrats out in record numbers this year.”

But the McCain campaign, after a slow start, is increasing its efforts as well, building on the sophisticated voter-targeting operation built for President Bush.

Mike DuHaime, the McCain campaign’s political director, said that right after Ms. Palin was chosen, more than four times as many volunteers as usual showed up, even though it was Labor Day weekend.

Even before the pick, he said, the campaign had stepped up its efforts: Although it made only 20,000 volunteer phone calls and knocks on doors a week two months ago, the McCain campaign made 800,000 the week before Ms. Palin was selected.

The campaign is using technology to help identify likely voters, including having volunteers call supporters using Internet phones that can help collect data for the Republican National Committee.

“If the person you’re calling says, ‘Yes, I’m voting for Senator McCain,’ you push a button on the phone and it automatically goes back to the R.N.C. database,” Mr. DuHaime said. “If the person says it’s a wrong number, there’s another button and it wipes that number out, so that nobody ever calls that again.”

“You can take all that data,” he added, “and analyze it, figure out things that are working and things that are not and how to allocate resources.”

Elisabeth Bumiller, Michael Luo and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

    Rival Tickets Are Redrawing Battlegrounds, NYT, 7.9.2008,  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/us/politics/07strategy.html?hp

McCain Vows to End ‘Partisan Rancor’

September 5, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MICHAEL COOPER

ST. PAUL — Senator John McCain accepted the Republican presidential nomination Thursday with a pledge to move the nation beyond “partisan rancor” and narrow self-interest in a speech in which he markedly toned down the blistering attacks on Senator Barack Obama that had filled the first nights of his convention.

Standing in the center of an arena here, surrounded by thousands of Republican delegates, Mr. McCain firmly signaled that he intended to seize the mantle of change Mr. Obama claimed in his own unlikely bid for his party’s nomination.

Mr. McCain suggested that his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate gave him the license to run as an outsider against Washington, even though he has served in Congress for more than 25 years.

“Let me just offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first-country-second crowd: Change is coming,” Mr. McCain said.

With his speech, Mr. McCain laid out the broad outlines of his general election campaign. He sought to move from a convention marked by an intense effort to reassure the party base to an appeal to a broader general election audience that polling suggests has turned sharply on Republicans and President Bush. He invoked, in one of the most emotional moments of the night, his struggles as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Mr. McCain also returned to what has been his signature theme as a candidate, including in his unsuccessful 2000 campaign: that he is a politician prepared to defy his own party. He used the word “fight” 43 times in the course of the speech, as he sought to present himself as the insurgent he was known as before the primaries, when he veered to the right.

“Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight,” he said at the end of his speech. “Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.”

Much of the address, though delivered at one of the most prominent moments of a presidential campaign, was little different from the stump speech he has been delivering across the country. And it was often offered in a monotone as he stood before a solid-color backdrop that flicked from green to blue. The reaction was far more subdued than it was the night before for his running mate, Ms. Palin. There were stretches in which he drew only a smattering of applause.

“I liked the conservative tone and that he talking about being prolife, self-sufficient — let’s keep the money from countries that don’t like us,” said Peggy Lambert, a delegate from Maryville, Tenn.. “But man, Sarah Palin! John is gonna have trouble keeping up with her.”

One of the livelier moments of the evening came when Mr. McCain was interrupted by several antiwar protestors who had infiltrated the hall. Their signs were quickly ripped from their hands, and they were carried out of the arena as the crowd shouted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Mr. McCain, who by now has become accustomed to these kinds of interruptions, responded with a smile. “Please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static,” Mr. McCain said, before adding “Americans want us to stop yelling at each other.”

Mr. McCain faced the challenge on Thursday of pivoting from making an appeal to Republican base voters to reaching out to the larger general election audience watching him. Accordingly, there were relatively few mentions of divisive social issues as he returned to the way he has historically presented himself: as an iconoclast willing to challenge his own party. That image was shaken this year as he as appeared to adjust some positions in navigating the primaries.

“You know, I’ve been called a maverick, someone who marches to the beat of his own drum,” he said. “ Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment and sometimes it’s not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.”

At a convention in which President Bush was barely mentioned, Mr. McCain paid only the most fleeting tribute to him, not even using his name. “I’m grateful to the president for leading us in those dark days following the worst attack on American soil in our history, and keeping us safe from another attack many thought was inevitable,” he said at the opening of his speech.

Mr. McCain defined bipartisanship as not only working with the opposite party but being prepared to work against his own, even though he is aligned with Mr. Bush on two of the biggest issues facing the country: the Iraq war and the economy.

That pledge of political independence and bipartisanship could prove especially valuable at a time when Republican Party is so unpopular.

“I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party,” he said. “We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us.”

But he also pledged to work across the aisle.

“The constant partisan rancor that stops us from solving these problems isn’t a cause, it’s a symptom,” he said. “It’s what happens when people go to Washington to work for themselves and not you. Again and again, I’ve worked with members of both parties to fix problems that need to be fixed. That’s how I will govern as president.”

That approach also permitted him to reprise what has been a central line of attack against Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, at a convention whose motto is “country first”: that his opponent has put his political interests ahead of those of the country.

“I will reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again,” Mr. McCain said. “I have that record and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not.”

That was one of the few moments in which Mr. McCain directly engaged Mr. Obama. But every time he did — contrasting, say, the two men’s records on trade or taxes — the crowd broke into loud applause, a clear signal of what they were looking for.

“I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need,” he said. “My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.”

The McCain campaign not only tried to seize the “change” mantle from Mr. Obama but the “peace” one as well. Scores of signs saying “Peace” in capital letters were passed out among the delegates on the floor of the convention — despite the fact that Mr. Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start, while Mr. McCain was an early proponent of it.

Mr. McCain pointed to his support for increasing the number of troops in Iraq, which Mr. Obama opposed, as evidence of his judgment. “I fought for the right strategy and more troops in Iraq, when it wasn’t a popular thing to do,” he said. “And when the pundits said my campaign was finished, I said I’d rather lose an election than see my country lose a war.

The speech at times seemed low on energy, and the crowd responded less enthusiastically than it did the night before for Ms. Palin. But towards the end Mr. McCain recounted, in detail, his captivity in Vietnam, drawing repeated ovations.

“I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s,” he said. “I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.”

When it was over, he was greeted by his wife, Cindy, his running mate, Ms. Palin, and their families to the song “Raisin’ McCain,” by John Rich, a country star who is supporting him. Then the theme song of the film “Rudy” — which was the theme song of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign — and the song “Barracuda,” in what seemed to be a nod to Ms. Palin’s nickname, “Sarah Barracuda.”

Across the hall, delegates drew contrasts between the two speeches they heard to close out the convention.

“He doesn’t have the sizzle that Sarah has,” said Rick Lacey, 51, a delegate from Springfield, Ill. “That’s probably why he picked her.”

But David Kramer, a delegate from Omaha, said he was not bothered by that.

“Sarah really energized the crowd — energetic, emotional, and really uplifting,” Mr. Kramer said. Her speech was more about the people in this room, the base. His speech was more serious — why is he fit to be commander in chief? What does he want to do for America. Sober stuff.”

    McCain Vows to End ‘Partisan Rancor’, NYT, 5.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/us/politics/05repubs.html?hp

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/pageone/pdfs/2008/20080829_A1_no.pdf

Op-Ed Contributor

Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech

August 28, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBERT A. CARO

AS I watch Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama’s speech — and in a way his whole candidacy — might not have been possible had that other speech not been given.

That speech was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act, and in some respects Mr. Obama’s candidacy is the climax — at least thus far — of a movement based not only on the sacrifices and heroism of the Rev. Dr. King and generations of black fighters for civil rights but also on the political genius of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as it happens was born 100 years ago yesterday.

When, on the night of March 15, 1965, the long motorcade drove away from the White House, heading for Capitol Hill, where President Johnson would give his speech to a joint session of Congress, pickets were standing outside the gates, as they had been for weeks, and as the presidential limousine passed, they were singing the same song that was being sung that week in Selma, Ala.: “We Shall Overcome.” They were singing it in defiance of Johnson, because they didn’t trust him.

They had reasons not to trust him.

In March 1965, black Americans in the 11 Southern states were still largely unable to vote. When they tried to register, they faced not only questions impossible to answer — like the infamous “how many bubbles in a bar of soap?” — but also the humiliation of trying to answer them in front of registrars who didn’t bother to conceal their scorn. Out of six million blacks old enough to vote in those 11 states in 1965, only a small percentage — 27 percent in Georgia, 19 percent in Alabama, 6 percent in Mississippi — were registered.

What’s more, those who were registered faced not only beatings and worse but economic retaliation as well if they tried to actually cast a ballot. Black men who registered might be told by their employer that they no longer had a job; black farmers who went to the bank to renew their annual “crop loan” were turned down, and lost their farms. Some, as I have written, “had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go.” So the number of black men and women in the South who actually cast a vote was far smaller than the number registered; in no way were black Americans realizing their political potential.

More important, many civil rights leaders felt that President Johnson wasn’t helping them nearly as much as he could have — and that in fact he never had. He had passed a civil rights bill in 1964, but it hadn’t been a voting rights bill.

And they remembered his record, a long record. It was not merely that during his first 20 years, 1937 through 1956, in the House and Senate, he had voted against every civil rights bill — even bills aimed at ending lynching.

Leaders of the civil rights movement who had watched their bills die, year after year, in Congress — not a single civil rights bill had been enacted since 1870 — knew that Johnson had been not merely a voter but a strategist against civil rights, a tactician so successful that Richard Russell of Georgia, the leader of the Senate’s mighty “Southern caucus,” had raised him to power in the Senate, had, in fact, made him his anointed successor as the South’s legislative leader, the young hope of the elderly Southern senators in their desperate battle to maintain racial segregation.

In 1956, by which time Lyndon Johnson was majority leader, he devised and carried out the strategy that had not only crushed a civil rights bill in the Senate by a majority greater than ever before, but had done so in a way that humiliated, in a particularly vicious manner, the liberal senator who refused to bow to his wishes, Paul Douglas of Illinois.

In 1957 he had engineered the passage of a civil rights bill. The mere fact of its passage in the face of Southern senatorial power — it was the first civil rights bill to be enacted in 87 years — made it a significant benchmark in the history of American government, and the guile and determination with which Johnson drove it to passage made it a landmark of legislative mastery as well. But he was forced to weaken it to get it through, and liberals, not understanding the obstacles he had surmounted, blamed him for not making it stronger.

Some civil rights leaders who had been talking to Lyndon Johnson since he became president were now, by the spring of 1965, convinced of his good faith, but most were not, and the mass of the movement, symbolized by those protesters outside the White House gates, still distrusted him.

•

Men and women who knew Lyndon Johnson, however, felt there was another element to the story. They included the Mexican-American children of impoverished migrant workers he had taught as a 21-year-old schoolteacher in the little town of Cotulla, Tex.; to the ends of their lives they would talk about how hard he had worked to teach and inspire them. “He used to tell us this country was so free that anyone could become president who was willing to work hard enough,” one student said.

Others remember what one calls the story about the “little baby in the cradle.” As one student recalled, “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby — any baby — might grow up to be president of the United States.”

His former students weren’t alone. Men and women at Georgetown dinner tables were also convinced of the sincerity of Johnson’s intentions. “I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,” recalls Bethine Church, the wife of Senator Frank Church of Idaho. “I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I’ve ever spent.”

These men and women felt Johnson truly wanted to help poor people and particularly people of color, and that he was held back only by his ambition: his desire to be president, and because he was a senator from a Southern state. But when, in 1957, ambition and compassion were finally pointing in the same direction — when he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the “magnolia scent” of the South — he set out to pass a civil rights bill, he did it with a passion that showed how deeply he believed in what he was doing.

The bill he got was the weak one, and civil rights leaders blamed him because the advances it made were meager. Only a week before the March 1965 speech, Dr. King had said that at the rate voter registration was going, it would take 135 years before even half the blacks in Mississippi were registered. And as the limousines were pulling through the gates that night in March, the protesters were singing “We Shall Overcome,” as if to tell Lyndon Johnson, we’ll do it without you.

But they didn’t have to.

When Johnson stepped to the lectern on Capitol Hill that night, he adopted the great anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.

“Even if we pass this bill,” he said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”

And, Lyndon Johnson said, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

He paused, and then he said, “And we shall overcome.”

Martin Luther King was watching the speech at the home of a family in Selma with some of his aides, none of whom had ever, during all the hard years, seen Dr. King cry. But Lyndon Johnson said, “We shall overcome” — and they saw him cry then.

And there was another indication of the power of that speech. When the motorcade returned to the White House, the protesters were gone.

•

Another significant moment had occurred in the Capitol after the speech, as Johnson was coming down the aisle accepting congratulations.

It wasn’t just congratulations he wanted. One of the congressmen on the aisle was Emanuel Celler, the 76-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which handled civil rights legislation. Long a rights champion but now an elderly man, Celler said he would start hearings on the bill the following week, but “I can’t push that committee or it might get out of hand.”

Suddenly, Johnson wasn’t smiling. His eyes narrowed and his face turned cold. He was still shaking Celler’s hand, but with his other hand he was jabbing at the old man. “Start them this week, Manny,” he said. “And hold night sessions, too.”

Celler did. The heroism of the march at Selma, the heroism all across the South, the almost unbelievable bravery of black men and women — and children, so many children — who marched, and were beaten, and marched again, for the right to vote, created the rising tide of national feeling behind the passage of civil rights legislation, the legislation not only of 1965 but of 1964 and 1957. That feeling did so much to make the legislation possible. It has taken me scores of pages in my books to try to describe that heroism, and all of them inadequate. But it also took Lyndon Johnson, whom the black leader James Farmer, sitting in the Oval Office, heard “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary” to get the 1965 bill passed and who, with his legislative genius and savage will, broke, piece by piece, in 1957 and 1964 and 1965, the long unbreakable power of the Southern bloc.

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

LOOK what has been wrought! Forty-three years ago, a mere blink in history’s eye, many black Americans were unable to vote. Tonight, a black American ascends a stage as nominee for president. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Just give them the vote,” and they can do the rest for themselves.

All during this long primary campaign, after reading, first thing every morning, newspaper articles about Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, I would turn, as part of the research for my next book, to newspaper articles from 1965 about Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to win for black people the right to vote.

And I would think about Johnson’s great speech, when he adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, when he joined his voice to the voices of all the men and women who had sung the mighty hymn of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King cried when he heard that speech. Since I am not black, I cannot know — cannot even imagine — Dr. King’s feelings. I know mine, however. To me, Barack Obama is the inheritor of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legacy. As I sit listening to Mr. Obama tonight, I will be hearing other words as well. I will be hearing Lyndon Johnson saying, “We shall overcome.”

Robert A. Caro, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, is at work on the fourth and final volume of his Johnson biography.

    Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech, NYT, 28.8.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/opinion/28caro.html?ref=opinion

Obama Wins Nomination; Biden and Bill Clinton Rally Party

August 28, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

DENVER — Barack Hussein Obama, a freshman senator who defeated the first family of Democratic Party politics with a call for a fundamentally new course in politics, was nominated by his party on Wednesday to be the 44th president of the United States.

The unanimous vote made Mr. Obama the first African-American to become a major party nominee for president. It brought to an end an often-bitter two-year political struggle for the nomination with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who, standing on a packed convention floor electric with anticipation, moved to halt the roll call in progress so that the convention could nominate Mr. Obama by acclamation. That it did with a succession of loud roars, followed by a swirl of dancing, embracing, high-fiving and chants of “Yes, we can.”

In an effort to fully ease the lingering animosity from the primary season, former President Bill Clinton, in a speech that had been anxiously awaited by Mr. Obama’s aides given the uncomfortable relations between the two men, offered an enthusiastic and unstinting endorsement of Mr. Obama’s credentials to be president. Mr. Clinton’s message, like the messenger, was greeted rapturously in the hall.

“Last night Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama,” Mr. Clinton said. “That makes two of us.”

Mr. Clinton proceeded to do precisely what Mr. Obama’s campaign was looking for him to do: attest to Mr. Obama’s readiness to be president, after a campaign largely based on Mrs. Clinton’s contention that he was not.

“I say to you: Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world,” Mr. Clinton said. “Barack Obama is ready to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.”

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Mr. Obama’s choice for vice president, accepted the nomination with a speech in which he spoke frequently, and earnestly, of his blue-collar background, in effect offering himself as a validator for Mr. Obama among some voters who have been reluctant to embrace the Democratic presidential nominee.

He then turned to Senator John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, signaling how he would go after him in the campaign ahead. He referred to Mr. McCain as a friend — “I know you hear that phrase a lot in politics; I mean it,” he said — and then proceeded to offer a long and systematic case about why Mr. McCain should not be president.

“The choice in this election is clear,” Mr. Biden said. “These times require more than a good soldier. They require a wise leader,” he said, a leader who can deliver “the change that everybody knows we need.”

His 21-minute address completed, Mr. Biden was joined on stage by his wife, Jill, who told the crowd they were about to be joined by an unscheduled guest. The crowd exploded as Mr. Obama walked around the corner.

“If I’m not mistaken, Hillary Clinton rocked the house last night,” he said, gazing up at where Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were watching the proceedings and leading the crowd in applause. “And President Clinton reminded us of what it’s like when you have a president who actually puts people first. Thank you.”

The historic nature of the moment quickly gave way to the political imperatives confronting Mr. Obama, who arrived here on Wednesday afternoon and is to accept the nomination Thursday night before a crowd of 75,000 people in a football stadium. After days in which the convention often seemed less about Mr. Obama than about the two families that have dominated Democratic politics for nearly a half-century, the Kennedys and the Clintons, he needed to convince voters that he has solutions to their economic anxieties and to rally his party against the reinvigorated candidacy of Mr. McCain.

The roll-call vote took place in the late afternoon Wednesday — the first time in at least 50 years that Democrats have not scheduled their roll call on prime-time television — as Democrats sought to avoid drawing attention to the lingering resentments between Clinton and Obama delegates. Yet the significance of the vote escaped no one, and sent a charge through the Pepsi Center as a procession of state delegations cast their votes and the hall, slightly empty at the beginning of the vote, became shoulder-to-shoulder with Democrats eager to witness this moment.

As planned, it fell to Mrs. Clinton to put Mr. Obama over the top. He was declared the party’s nominee at 4:47 p.m. Mountain time after Mrs. Clinton, in a light blue suit standing out in a crowd that included almost every elected New York official, moved that the roll call be suspended and that Mr. Obama be declared the party’s nominee by acclamation. The vote was timed to conclude during the network evening news broadcasts.

“With eyes firmly fixed on the future in the spirit of unity, with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and country, let’s declare together in one voice, right here and right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president,” Mrs. Clinton said.

“I move that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by this convention by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States,” she said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, standing at the lectern, asked for a second and was greeted by a roar of voices. A louder roar came from the crowd when she asked for support of the motion.

When the voting was cut off, Mr. Obama had received 1,549 votes, compared with 231 for Mrs. Clinton.

The hall pulsed when Mr. Clinton strode onto the stage for a performance that became a reminder of why Democrats had considered him a politician with once-in-a-generation skills — and suggested that for Democrats in this hall at least, Mr. Clinton may have survived a primary in which he was repeatedly criticized for the sharp tone he often used against Mr. Obama. Again and again, Mr. Clinton tried to quiet the crowd. Again and again, they ignored him.

“You all sit down, we have to get on with the show,” he said.

Mr. Clinton arguably did a better job than Mrs. Clinton the night before in making the case for Mr. Obama, and pumped up a crowd at a convention that has often seemed listless. He even managed, amid all his praise, to slip in a reference to the reservations he voiced about Mr. Obama back when he was campaigning against him, suggesting that Mr. Biden was just what Mr. Obama needed.

“With Joe Biden’s experience and wisdom, supporting Barack Obama’s proven understanding, instincts and insight, America will have the national security leadership we need,” he said.

And without mentioning Mr. McCain by name, he offered a sharp denunciation of him and the Republicans.

“The Republicans will nominate a good man who served our country heroically and suffered terribly in Vietnam,” he said. “He loves our country every bit as much as we all do. As a senator, he has shown his independence on several issues. But on the two great questions of this election, how to rebuild the American Dream and how to restore America’s leadership in the world, he still embraces the extreme philosophy which has defined his party for more than 25 years.”

“They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more,” he said. “Let’s send them a message that will echo from the Rockies all across America: Thanks, but no thanks.”

For all the good Mr. Clinton might have done for Mr. Obama on Wednesday night it marked the second night in a row that the Clintons had been the face of what was supposed to be Mr. Obama’s convention. But when Mr. Obama walked out from backstage at the end of the night — “Hello, Democrats!” — he left little doubt about who was now the face of the Democratic party.

For Mr. Obama, the nomination — seized from Mrs. Clinton, who just one year ago was viewed as the obvious favorite to win the nomination especially against an opponent with a scant political résumé — was a remarkable achievement in what has been a remarkable ascendance. It was less than four years ago that Mr. Obama, coming off of serving seven years as an Illinois state senator, became a member of the United States Senate. He is 47 years old, the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya.

Mr. Obama’s nomination came 120 years after Frederick Douglass became the first African-American to have his name entered in nomination at a major party convention. Douglass received one vote at the Republican convention in Chicago in 1888.

Making the moment even more striking was the historical nature of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. She was the third woman whose name has been entered as a candidate for president at a major party convention. As she moved to end the roll-call vote, some women in the hall could be seen wiping tears from their eyes.

Kitty Bennett, John M. Broder and Janet Elder contributed reporting.

    Obama Wins Nomination; Biden and Bill Clinton Rally Party, NYT, 28.8.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/politics/28DEMSDAY.html?ref=opinion

Transcript

Bill Clinton's Convention Speech

August 27, 2008
The New York Times

The following is a transcript of former President Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, as provided by CQ Transcriptions.

CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen...

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. You all sit down. We've got to get on with the show here. Come on.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here tonight.

(APPLAUSE)

Sit down.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

I am honored to be here tonight. Please, stop.

AUDIENCE: Bill! Bill! Bill!

CLINTON: Please stop. Sit down. Sit down. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Bill! Bill! Bill!

CLINTON: Please sit. Please sit.

You know, I -- I love this, and I thank you, but we have important work to do tonight. I am here first to support Barack Obama.

(APPLAUSE)

And, second -- and, second, I'm here to warm up the crowd for Joe Biden...

(APPLAUSE)

... though, as you will soon see, he doesn't need any help from me.

(LAUGHTER)

I love Joe Biden, and America will, too.

What a year we Democrats have had. The primary began with an all-star line up. And it came down to two remarkable Americans locked in a hard-fought contest right to the very end. That campaign generated so much heat, it increased global warming.

(LAUGHTER)

Now, in the end, my candidate didn't win. But I'm really proud of the campaign she ran.

(APPLAUSE)

I am proud that she never quit on the people she stood up for, on the changes she pushed for, on the future she wanted for all our children. And I'm grateful for the chance Chelsea and I had to go all over America to tell people about the person we know and love.

Now, I am not so grateful for the chance to speak in the wake of Hillary's magnificent speech last night.

(LAUGHTER)

But I'll do the best I can.

(APPLAUSE)

Last night, Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama.

(APPLAUSE)

That makes two of us.

(APPLAUSE)

Actually, that makes 18 million of us...

(APPLAUSE)

... because, like Hillary, I want all of you who supported her to vote for Barack Obama in November.

(APPLAUSE)

And here's why. And I have the privilege of speaking here, thanks to you, from a perspective that no other American Democrat, except President Carter, can offer.

Our -- our nation is in trouble on two fronts. The American dream is under siege at home, and America's leadership in the world has been weakened. Middle-class and low-income Americans are hurting, with incomes declining, job losses, poverty, and inequality rising, mortgage foreclosures and credit card debt increasing, health care coverage disappearing, and a very big spike in the cost of food, utilities, and gasoline.

And our position in the world has been weakened by too much unilateralism and too little cooperation...

(APPLAUSE)

... by a perilous dependence on imported oil, by a refusal to lead on global warming, by a growing indebtedness and a dependence on foreign lenders, by a severely burdened military, by a backsliding on global nonproliferation and arms control agreements, and by a failure to consistently use the power of diplomacy, from the Middle East to Africa to Latin America to Central and Eastern Europe.

(APPLAUSE)

Clearly, the job of the next president is to rebuild the American dream and to restore American leadership in the world.

(APPLAUSE)

And here's what I have to say about that. Everything I learned in my eight years as president, and in the work I have done since in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, he has a remarkable ability to inspire people, to raise our hopes and rally us to high purpose. He has the intelligence and curiosity every successful president needs. His policies on the economy, on taxes, on health care, on energy are far superior to the Republican alternatives.

(APPLAUSE)

He has shown -- he has shown a clear grasp of foreign policy and national security challenges and a firm commitment to rebuild our badly strained military.

His family heritage and his life experiences have given him a unique capacity to lead our increasingly diverse nation in an ever more interdependent world.

(APPLAUSE)

The long, hard primary tested and strengthened him. And in his first presidential decision, the selection of a running mate, he hit it out of the park.

(APPLAUSE)

With Joe Biden's experience and wisdom, supporting Barack Obama's proven understanding, instincts, and insight, America will have the national security leadership we need.

And so, my fellow Democrats, I say to you: Barack Obama is ready to lead America and to restore American leadership in the world.

(APPLAUSE)

Barack Obama is ready to honor the oath, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.

(APPLAUSE) As president, he will work for an America with more partners and fewer adversaries. He will rebuild our frayed alliances and revitalize the international institutions which helped to share the cost of the world's problems and to leverage the power of our influence.

He will put us back in the forefront of the world's fight against global warming and the fight to reduce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

(APPLAUSE)

He will continue and enhance our nation's commendable global leadership in an area in which I am deeply involved: the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, including -- including -- and this is very important -- a renewal of the battle against HIV and AIDS here at home.

(APPLAUSE)

A President Obama will choose diplomacy first and military force as a last resort.

(APPLAUSE)

But, in a world troubled by terror, by trafficking in weapons, drugs and people, by human rights abuses of the most awful kind, by other threats to our security, our interests, and our values, when he cannot convert adversaries into partners, he will stand up to them.

(APPLAUSE)

Barack Obama also will not allow the world's problems to obscure its opportunities.

CLINTON: Everywhere, in rich and poor countries alike, hard- working people need good jobs, secure, affordable health care, food and energy, quality education for their children and economically beneficial ways to fight global warming.

These challenges cry out for American ideas and American innovation. When Barack Obama unleashes them, America will save lives, win new allies, open new markets, and create wonderful new jobs for our own people.

(APPLAUSE)

Most important of all, Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home.

(APPLAUSE)

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

(APPLAUSE)

Look...

(APPLAUSE)

Look at the example the Republicans have set.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

In this decade, American workers have consistently given us rising productivity. That means, year after year, they work harder and produce more.

Now, what did they get in return? Declining wages, less than one-fourth as many new jobs as in the previous eight years, smaller health care and pension benefits, rising poverty, and the biggest increase in income inequality since the 1920s.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

American families by the millions are struggling with soaring health care costs and declining coverage.

I will never forget the parents of children with autism and other serious conditions who told me on the campaign trail that they couldn't afford health care and couldn't qualify their children for Medicaid unless they quit work and starved or got a divorce.

Are these the family values the Republicans are so proud of?

What about the military families pushed to the breaking point by multiple, multiple deployments? What about the assault on science and the defense of torture? What about the war on unions and the unlimited favors for the well-connected?

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

And what about Katrina and cronyism?

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

My fellow Democrats, America can do better than that.

(APPLAUSE)

And Barack Obama will do better than that.

(APPLAUSE)

Wait a minute. But first...

AUDIENCE: Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!

CLINTON: Yes, he can, but, first, we have to elect him.

(APPLAUSE)

The choice is clear. The Republicans in a few days will nominate a good man who has served our country heroically and who suffered terribly in a Vietnamese prison camp. He loves his country every bit as much as we do. As a senator, he has shown his independence of right-wing orthodoxy on some very important issues.

But on the two great questions of this election -- how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America's leadership in the world -- he still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.

(APPLAUSE)

And it is, to be fair to all the Americans who aren't as hard- core Democrats as we, it's a philosophy the American people never actually had a chance to see in action fully until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and the Congress.

Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades actually were implemented. And look what happened.

They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt; from over 22 million new jobs to just 5 million; from increasing working families' incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year; from almost 8 million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty; and millions more losing their health insurance.

Now, in spite of all this evidence, their candidate is actually promising more of the same.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

Think about it: more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that will swell the deficit, increase inequality, and weaken the economy; more Band-Aids for health care that will enrich insurance companies, impoverish families, and increase the number of uninsured; more going it alone in the world, instead of building the shared responsibilities and shared opportunities necessary to advance our security and restore our influence.

They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more.

AUDIENCE: No!

CLINTON: Now, let's send them a message that will echo from the Rockies all across America, a simple message: Thanks, but no thanks.

In this case...

(APPLAUSE)

In this case, the third time is not the charm.

(APPLAUSE)

My fellow Democrats, 16 years ago, you gave me the profound honor to lead our party to victory and to lead our nation to a new era of peace and broadly shared prosperity.

Together, we prevailed in a hard campaign in which Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief.

(APPLAUSE)

Sound familiar?

AUDIENCE: Yes!

CLINTON: It didn't work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history. And it will not work in 2008, because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, Senator Obama's life is a 21st-century incarnation of the old-fashioned American dream. His achievements are proof of our continuing progress toward the more perfect union of our founders' dreams. The values of freedom and equal opportunity, which have given him his historic chance, will drive him as president to give all Americans -- regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability -- their chance to build a decent life and to show our humanity, as well as our strengths, to the world.

We see that humanity, that strength, and our nation's future in Barack and Michelle Obama and their beautiful children.

We see them reinforced by the partnership with Joe Biden, his fabulous wife, Jill, a wonderful teacher, and their family.

Barack Obama will lead us away from the division and fear of the last eight years back to unity and hope.

So if, like me, you believe America must always be a place called Hope, then join Hillary and Chelsea and me in making Barack Obama the next president of the United States.

Thank you, and God bless you. Thank you.

    Bill Clinton's Convention Speech, NYT, 27.8.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/us/politics/27text-clinton.html

With Genie Out of Bottle, Obama Is Careful on Race

August 2, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POWELL


Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles, but this week a few of his words opened a racial door his campaign would prefer not to step through. When Senator John McCain’s camp replied by accusing him of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck, the Obama campaign seemed at least momentarily off balance.

The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates. So on Friday the Obama campaign, a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest. Mr. Obama made no mention of the issue, except for a brief reference in an interview with a local newspaper in Florida.

“I was in Union, Mo., which is 98 percent white, a rural conservative, and what I said was what I think everyone knows, which is that I don’t look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates,” he told The St. Petersburg Times. “There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this.”

The furor started on Thursday when Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, said, “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.” Mr. Davis was alluding to Mr. Obama’s remarks on Wednesday that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

As Mr. Obama carefully addressed the issue on Friday, his campaign’s formidable network of grass-roots activists, and the Web sites crafted to give them “talking points” to carry into battle against Republicans, remained uncharacteristically quiet on the matter, even though the issue dominated political blogs for a second straight day.

David Plouffe, the campaign manager, talked briefly, and not too eagerly, about it. And the campaign’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, blamed the Republicans for misconstruing Mr. Obama’s words as an attack, and quickly moved on.

The muted response should not be taken, even campaign insiders acknowledged, to reflect high-mindedness; the Obama campaign can wield a rhetorical gutting knife. There simply was no percentage for the first black major-party presidential candidate in the nation’s history to draw too much attention to his race, much less get into a shooting war with the Republicans over the combustible issue.

“For our part, there is no stake in abetting that strategy,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The best we could do is call this and move on.”

By the day’s end, Mr. McCain proclaimed that he did not want to dwell on the issue either, although he repeated his campaign’s central charge that his probable opponent had injected race into their battle.

“He brought up the issue of race; I responded to it,” Mr. McCain told reporters in Panama City, Fla. “I don’t want that issue to be part of this campaign. I’m ready to move on. And I think we should move on.”

For Mr. Obama, the risks of fighting back are that anything that calls attention to the racial dynamics of the contest would potentially polarize voters and stir unease about his candidacy, particularly among white voters in swing states. He is, after all, a candidate who has sought to transcend his own racial heritage in appealing to the broad electorate.

“Ideally, you want to punch back right to the solar plexus,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist. “But when race gets injected, given the 200-year history of this country, it is really fraught with peril.”

More broadly, the battles this week over Mr. Obama’s comments and Mr. McCain’s efforts to link Mr. Obama’s celebrity to that of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears raised the question for some political types of both parties about whether Mr. Obama is aggressive enough to lunge for the Republican jugular.

Although his campaign has been known to fire volleys back at Mr. McCain, and Mr. Obama has often been critical of Mr. McCain’s policies in his speeches, opportunities to draw blood have come and gone. And he finds challenges on many fronts these days, including at one of his rallies on Friday, where seven self-styled African revolutionaries began shouting and pointing at him, accusing him of undermining revolutionary struggle.

This was perhaps one of Mr. Obama’s easier moments of the week, as the crowd was allied as one with him. He motioned the crowd to let the revolutionaries have their say, and then he responded.

“I may not have spoken out the way you want me to speak out,” he said. “But I am suggesting that I have spoken out, and spoken out forcefully.”

After two straight defeats in presidential elections, Democrats sometimes speak of hungering for a more aggressive standard-bearer to confront Republican attacks. Some wonder why, every time he speaks of the economy, Mr. Obama does not mention that Mr. McCain’s chief economic adviser referred to a “mental” recession rather than a real one.

“I am somewhat mystified that he isn’t attacking much harder on the policy front,” said Ronald Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland. “He needs to rev up his attacks, and his proposals.”

But this is to some extent Mr. Obama’s sleight of hand. He relies heavily on surrogates, and tends to back into his attacks. So he cues up Mr. McCain as “an honorable man” and a “war hero,” before skewering him as lacking in ideas.

He has, too, a Teflon quality that reminds Democratic strategists of Ronald Reagan. He can get himself in trouble with words, he can flip-flop on a position or three, and little sticks.

“Obama and Reagan are quite similar in this regard,” said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist who managed John Kerry’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004. “They deflect humor with a quip.”

So Mr. Obama spoke to a crowd of supporters in Orlando, Fla., on Friday, and poked fun at Mr. McCain. “We were expecting a more elevated debate,” he said. “They are running commercials about Hilton and Britney — I mean, that’s frivolous.”

Still, the candidate has the peculiar habit of rehearsing his faults for listeners, apparently in an effort to inoculate himself against attacks. And that could be how Mr. Obama got himself tangled up in race.

The candidate and Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, traveled this week around the Republican precincts of rural Missouri. Ms. McCaskill tried to set minds at ease by recalling an “old Ozark habit” of saying “they say,” as in, they say he’s too young, they say he’s not the right color.

So far, so politically artful; she never specified Republicans, much less Mr. McCain.

But when Mr. Obama traveled this rhetorical ground, he tripped. “So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Mr. Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.”

Even some Republicans are not convinced that Mr. Obama intended to accuse Mr. McCain of racism, as there’s no percentage for him. Mr. McCain talks of himself as experienced but never, ever, old; Mr. Obama talks of change but charily of his status as a historic first.

“He’s the candidate who happens to be African-American,” Mr. Lehane said. “He’s much more effective when he can just throw McCain’s words back at him.”
 

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from Panama City, Fla.

    With Genie Out of Bottle, Obama Is Careful on Race, NYT, 2.8.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/us/politics/02obama.html?hp