The Long Run Up

An interesting insight on a different angle of the NY Times Article

Last night, around dinnertime, The New York Times posted on its website a 3,000-word investigation detailing Senator John McCain's connections to a telecommunications lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. The controversial piece, written by Washington bureau reporters Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn Thompson, Stephen Labaton, and David Kirkpatrick, and published in this morning's paper, explores the possibility that the Republican presidential candidate may have had an affair with the 40-year-old blond-haired lobbyist for the telecommunications industry while he chaired the Senate Commerce Committee in the late-1990s.

Beyond its revelations, however, what's most remarkable about the article is that it appeared in the paper at all: The new information it reveals focuses on the private matters of the candidate, and relies entirely on the anecdotal evidence of McCain's former staffers to justify the piece--both personal and anecdotal elements unusual in the Gray Lady. The story is filled with awkward journalistic moves--the piece contains a collection of decade-old stories about McCain and Iseman appearing at functions together and concerns voiced by McCain's aides that the Senator shouldn't be seen in public with Iseman--and departs from the Times' usual authoritative voice. At one point, the piece suggestively states: "In 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, 'Why is she always around?'" In the absence of concrete, printable proof that McCain and Iseman were an item, the piece delicately steps around purported romance and instead reports on the debate within the McCain campaign about the alleged affair.

What happened? The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.

The McCain investigation began in November, after Rutenberg, who covers the political media and advertising beat, got a tip. Within a few days, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet assigned Thompson and Labaton to join the project and, later, conservative beat reporter David Kirkpatrick to chip in as well. Labaton brought his expertise with regulatory issues to the team, and Thompson had done investigative work: At The Washington Post in the 1990s she had edited Michael Isikoff's reporting on the Paula Jones scandal, and in 2003 she broke the story that Strom Thurmond had secretly fathered a child with his family's black maid. Having four reporters thrown on the story showed just what a potential blockbuster the paper believed it might have.

From the outset, the Times reporters encountered stiff resistance from the McCain camp. After working on the story for several weeks, Thompson learned that McCain had personally retained Bill Clinton's former attorney Bob Bennett to defend himself against the Times' questioning. At the same time, two McCain campaign advisers, Mark Salter and Charlie Black, vigorously pressed the Times reporters to drop the matter. And in early December, McCain himself called Keller to deny the allegations on the record.

In early December, according to sources with knowledge of the events, Thompson requested a meeting with Bennett to arrange access to the senator and to discuss why the Republican presidential candidate had sought out a criminal lawyer in the first place. Bennett agreed to meet, and on the afternoon of December 18, Labaton, Rutenberg, and Thompson arrived at his Washington office. During a one-hour meeting, according to sources, Bennett admonished the Times reporters to be fair to McCain, especially in light of the whisper campaign that had sundered his 2000 presidential bid in South Carolina. He told them that he would field any questions they had, and promised to provide answers to their queries. Of the reporters in the room, Bennett knew Labaton the best. In the 1990s, Labaton had covered the Whitewater investigation, and Bennett viewed him as a straight-shooting, accurate reporter who could be reasoned with. Rutenberg he knew less well, and Bennett was miffed that Rutenberg had been calling all over Washington asking probing questions about McCain and his dealings with Iseman. The rumors were bound to get out.

Two days after that meeting, on December 20, news of the Times' unpublished investigation burst into public view when Matt Drudge posted an anonymously sourced item on the Drudge Report. "MEDIA FIREWORKS: MCCAIN PLEADS WITH NY TIMES TO SPIKE STORY," the headline proclaimed; the story hinted around the core of the allegations and focused on Keller's decision to hold the piece. "Rutenberg had hoped to break the story before the Christmas holiday," the item said, quoting unnamed sources, "but editor Keller expressed serious reservations about journalism ethics and issuing a damaging story so close to an election."
Immediately, the media pounced on the budding scandal. "If John McCain has hired Bob Bennett as his lawyer," one commentator said on Fox News, "that's a big--you don't hire Bob Bennett to knock down a press story. You hire Bob Bennett because you have serious legal issues somehow." On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan speculated that the Times newsroom was the source of the leak. "They've been rebuffed and rebuffed on this story, and they say we've had it, and they go around then and Drudge pops it just like he popped the Monica Lewinsky story first."
Initially, the McCain campaign refused to acknowledge the Drudge post. But by the afternoon of December 20, McCain denied the allegations at a press conference in Detroit, and his campaign released a statement deriding the Drudge item as "gutter politics."

Rumors of the unpublished Times piece swirled through the Romney campaign, then still locked in a tight dogfight for the Republican nomination. After the Drudge item flashed, Romney's traveling press secretary Eric Fehrnstrom went to the back of the campaign plane to ask New York Times reporter Michael Luo, who was covering Romney, if he had heard when the piece was running.

Inside the Times newsroom, the Drudge item sent the McCain piece into hiding, making it both tightly guarded and "a topic of conversation," as one staffer put it. "The fact that it ended up on Drudge pushed it into secrecy," added another staffer. "The paper gets constipated on these things," a veteran former Times staffer said, describing the editors' deliberations over whether to run the piece.

In late December, according to Times sources, Keller told the reporters and the story's editor, Rebecca Corbett, that he was holding the piece in part because they could not secure documentary proof of the alleged affair beyond anecdotal evidence. Keller felt that given the on-the-record-denials by McCain and Iseman, the reporters needed more than the circumstantial evidence they had assembled to prove the case. The reporters felt they had the goods.
The Drudge item didn't derail the investigation, however. By late December, the reporters had submitted several pages of written questions to Bennett for comment, and completed a draft of the piece before the New Year. But to their growing frustration, Keller ordered rounds of changes and additional reporting. According to Times sources, Baquet remained an advocate for his reporters and pushed the piece to be published, but sources say Keller wanted a more nuanced story looking less at personal matters and more at questions of Iseman's lobbying and McCain's legislative record. (The Washington-New York divide is an eternal rift at the Paper of Record: Baquet had successfully brought stability and investigative acumen to the Washington bureau; with the McCain piece, he was being sucked into his first major struggle with New York.)
In mid-January, Keller told the reporters to significantly recast the piece after several drafts had circulated among editors in Washington and New York. After three different versions, the piece ended up not as a stand-alone investigation but as an entry in the paper's "The Long Run" series looking at presidential candidates' career histories.

It was at about that time, amidst flurries of rumors swirling about the looming Times investigation, that the Times' McCain beat reporter, Marc Santora, abruptly left the campaign trail after covering the senator for four and a half months, frustrated by the McCain rumors. A rising star at the paper, Santora had been working grueling hours, joining the 2008 election coverage straight from a reporting assignment in Baghdad. As the campaign headed to South Carolina, the site of McCain's defeat in 2000, Santora emailed the Times' deputy Washington editor, Richard Stevenson, to vent about how the rumors were dogging him on the campaign trail, and left the McCain beat on January 10. "The last thing I wanted was to be a pawn in this thing," Santora told me. "I was exhausted, there were a lot of rumors flying around. I thought the best thing for me to do was take a break."

Santora wasn't the last casualty of the process. Two weeks ago, in early February, Marilyn Thompson, one of the four reporters working on the McCain investigation quit the Times. Thompson had been a staffer at The Washington Post for 14 years, until 2004. She had spent just six months at the Times and recorded only four bylines before accepting an offer to return to her former employer as an editor overseeing the Post's accountability coverage of money and politics. According to sources, Thompson became increasingly dispirited with the delays, and worked around the clock through the Christmas vacation on the piece, only to see the investigation sputter. Declining to comment on the investigation itself, Thompson told me her decision to return to the Post "was an opportunity to go back to the place that has been a home to me." (Thompson celebrated her byline during her last week at the Times. Her final day at the paper is tomorrow.)

Some observers say that the piece, published today, was not ready to roll. On Wednesday evening, much of the cable news commentary focused on the Times' heavy use of innuendo and circumstantial evidence. This morning, Time magazine managing editor Rick Stengel told MSNBC that he wouldn't have published such a piece. Since the story broke, the McCain campaign has been doing its best to pin the story on the Times and make the media angle the focus.

Indeed, when TNR started reporting on the whereabouts of the story on February 4th, all parties seemed intent on denying its viability. "There's absolutely no story there. And it'd be a mistake for you to write about a non-story that didn't run," McCain adviser Charlie Black told me last week. "Drudge shouldn't have put that up. He didn't know what the hell he was doing."
McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker told me last week the campaign had no further comment beyond the December 20 statement assailing the allegations. According to McCain advisers, the Times reporters hadn't contacted the campaign about the investigation for several weeks before the piece ran, and only a few reporters from competing news organizations have put in calls on the matter. Two members of the McCain team had contacted TNR's editor to pressure him not to investigate the story.

Of course, each of these sources had reason to keep the story from breaking. But what actually pushed it into publication? The reporters working on the investigation declined to comment. In an email to me on February 19, Keller wrote: "This sounds like a pointless exercise to me--speculating about reporting that may or may not result in an article. But if that's what Special Correspondents of The New Republic do, speculate away. When we have something to say, we'll say it in the paper."

Late in the day on February 19, Baquet sent a final draft of the Times piece to Keller and Times managing editor Jill Abramson in New York. After a series of discussions, the three editors decided to publish the investigation. "We published the story when it was ready which is what we always do," Baquet told TNR this morning. He added: "Nothing forced our hand. Nothing pushed us to move faster other than our own natural desire that we wanted to get a story in the paper that met all of our standards."

When the Times did finally publish the long-gestating investigation last night, the McCain camp immediately tried to train the glare back on the Gray Lady. In fact, McCain advisers stated that TNR's inquiries pressured the Times to publish its story before it was ready so this magazine wouldn't scoop the Times' piece. "They did this because The New Republic was going to run a story that looked back at the infighting there, the Judy Miller-type power struggles -- they decided that they would rather smear McCain than suffer a story that made The New York Times newsroom look bad," Salter told reporters last night in Toledo, Ohio.

This morning, after the piece ran, and as TNR's article was about to be posted, Keller finally responded to repeated requests for interviews. In an e-mail, he defended the substance, and the timing, of the story. "Our policy is, we publish stories when they are ready. 'Ready' means the facts have been nailed down to our satisfaction, the subjects have all been given a full and fair chance to respond, and the reporting has been written up with all the proper context and caveats." Important as the story may indeed turn out to be, it may have provided the Times' critics with a few caveats too many.

Gabriel Sherman is a Special Correspondent to The New Republic.

Media at its Worst?

After reading the following "bombshell" article, what are your thoughts on the purpose of this article. Do you believe there is anything to this article? Do you believe this is responsible journalism? What will the effect be for Sen. McCain now that this article is out?

WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.
But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.
Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)
Mr. McCain helped found a nonprofit group to promote his personal battle for tighter campaign finance rules. But he later resigned as its chairman after news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his Senate office.
“He is essentially an honorable person,” said William P. Cheshire, a friend of Mr. McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended him during the Keating Five scandal. “But he can be imprudent.”
Mr. Cheshire added, “That imprudence or recklessness may be part of why he was not more astute about the risks he was running with this shady operator,” Charles Keating, whose ties to Mr. McCain and four other lawmakers tainted their reputations in the savings and loan debacle.
During his current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain has played down his attacks on the corrupting power of money in politics, aware that the stricter regulations he championed are unpopular in his party. When the Senate overhauled lobbying and ethics rules last year, Mr. McCain stayed in the background.
With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding voters again of his record of reform. His campaign has already begun comparing his credentials with those of Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own pitch to voters.
“I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor can be bought,” Mr. McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For.” “From my earliest youth, I would have considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable. Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life.”
A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to cleanse Washington as well. The episode taught him that “questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics,” he wrote, “and because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption.”
A Formative Scandal
Mr. McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for a Congressional district where he could run.
Mr. Keating, a Phoenix financier and real estate developer, became an early sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring, Mr. McCain recalled in his memoir. “People like that appeal to me,” he continued. “I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of public responsibility are much more admirable qualities.”
During Mr. McCain’s four years in the House, Mr. Keating, his family and his business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The banker gave Mr. McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of Congressional ethics rules (he later said it was an oversight and paid for the trips). They vacationed together in the Bahamas. And in 1986, the year Mr. McCain was elected to the Senate, his wife joined Mr. Keating in investing in an Arizona shopping mall.
Mr. Keating had taken over the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and used its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other investments. He pressed Mr. McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back federal banking regulators.
For years, Mr. McCain complied. At Mr. Keating’s request, he wrote several letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board.
By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr. McCain agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” Mr. McCain later lamented in his memoir.
When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 — one of the biggest collapses of the savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion — the Keating Five became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr. McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the others, was reprimanded only for “poor judgment” and was re-elected the next year.
Some people involved think Mr. McCain got off too lightly. William Black, one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs. McCain’s investment with Mr. Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her husband. (Mr. McCain had said a prenuptial agreement divided the couple’s assets.) He should not be able to “put this behind him,” Mr. Black said. “It sullied his integrity.”
Mr. McCain has since described the episode as a unique humiliation. “If I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important,” he wrote in his memoir. “I still wince thinking about it.”
A New Chosen Cause
After the Republican takeover of the Senate in 1994, Mr. McCain decided to try to put some of the lessons he had learned into law. He started by attacking earmarks, the pet projects that individual lawmakers could insert anonymously into the fine print of giant spending bills, a recipe for corruption. But he quickly moved on to other targets, most notably political fund-raising.
Mr. McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he was preaching to them so soon after his own repentance. In debates, his party’s leaders challenged him to name a single senator he considered corrupt (he refused).
“We used to joke that each of us was the only one eating alone in our caucus,” said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who became Mr. McCain’s partner on campaign finance efforts.
Mr. McCain appeared motivated less by the usual ideas about good governance than by a more visceral disapproval of the gifts, meals and money that influence seekers shower on lawmakers, Mr. Feingold said. “It had to do with his sense of honor,” he said. “He saw this stuff as cheating.”
Mr. McCain made loosening the grip of special interests the central cause of his 2000 presidential campaign, inviting scrutiny of his own ethics. His Republican rival, George W. Bush, accused him of “double talk” for soliciting campaign contributions from companies with interests that came before the powerful Senate commerce committee, of which Mr. McCain was chairman. Mr. Bush’s allies called Mr. McCain “sanctimonious.”
At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the lobbyists buttons reading “McCain voted against my bill.” Mr. McCain himself skipped the event, an act he later called “cowardly.”
By 2002, he had succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which transformed American politics by banning “soft money,” the unlimited donations from corporations, unions and the rich that were funneled through the two political parties to get around previous laws.
One of his efforts, though, seemed self-contradictory. In 2001, he helped found the nonprofit Reform Institute to promote his cause and, in the process, his career. It collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlimited donations from companies that lobbied the Senate commerce committee. Mr. McCain initially said he saw no problems with the financing, but he severed his ties to the institute in 2005, complaining of “bad publicity” after news reports of the arrangement.
Like other presidential candidates, he has relied on lobbyists to run his campaigns. Since a cash crunch last summer, several of them — including his campaign manager, Rick Davis, who represented companies before Mr. McCain’s Senate panel — have been working without pay, a gift that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain’s committee staff for seven years before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.
Mr. McCain’s friends dismiss questions about his ties to lobbyists, arguing that he has too much integrity to let such personal connections influence him.
“Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against his own views, I don’t think his personal and social relationships matter,” said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.
Concerns in a Campaign
Mr. McCain’s confidence in his ability to distinguish personal friendships from compromising connections was at the center of questions advisers raised about Ms. Iseman.
The lobbyist, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay, represented telecommunications companies for whom Mr. McCain’s commerce committee was pivotal. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.
Mr. Black said Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman were friends and nothing more. But in 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, “Why is she always around?”
That February, Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene.
A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman’s access to his offices.
In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.
Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about her.
“Our political messaging during that time period centered around taking on the special interests and placing the nation’s interests before either personal or special interest,” Mr. Weaver continued. “Ms. Iseman’s involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that effort.”
Mr. Weaver added that the brief conversation was only about “her conduct and what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us.” He declined to elaborate.
It is not clear what effect the warnings had; the associates said their concerns receded in the heat of the campaign.
Ms. Iseman acknowledged meeting with Mr. Weaver, but disputed his account.
“I never discussed with him alleged things I had ‘told people,’ that had made their way ‘back to’ him,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said she never received special treatment from Mr. McCain’s office.
Mr. McCain said that the relationship was not romantic and that he never showed favoritism to Ms. Iseman or her clients. “I have never betrayed the public trust by doing anything like that,” he said. He made the statements in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to complain about the paper’s inquiries.
The senator declined repeated interview requests, beginning in December. He also would not comment about the assertions that he had been confronted about Ms. Iseman, Mr. Black said Wednesday.
Mr. Davis and Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s top strategists in both of his presidential campaigns, disputed accounts from the former associates and aides and said they did not discuss Ms. Iseman with the senator or colleagues.
“I never had any good reason to think that the relationship was anything other than professional, a friendly professional relationship,” Mr. Salter said in an interview.
He and Mr. Davis also said Mr. McCain had frequently denied requests from Ms. Iseman and the companies she represented. In 2006, Mr. McCain sought to break up cable subscription packages, which some of her clients opposed. And his proposals for satellite distribution of local television programs fell short of her clients’ hopes.
The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients only when their positions hewed to his principles.
A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman’s clients. He introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms. Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.
In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain’s staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain’s staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.
Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising questions about intervening for a patron.
Mr. McCain’s aides released all of his letters to the F.C.C. to dispel accusations of favoritism, and aides said the campaign had properly accounted for four trips on the Paxson plane. But the campaign did not report the flight with Ms. Iseman. Mr. McCain’s advisers say he was not required to disclose the flight, but ethics lawyers dispute that.
Recalling the Paxson episode in his memoir, Mr. McCain said he was merely trying to push along a slow-moving bureaucracy, but added that he was not surprised by the criticism given his history.
“Any hint that I might have acted to reward a supporter,” he wrote, “would be taken as an egregious act of hypocrisy.”
Statement by McCain
Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign issued the following statement Wednesday night:
“It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.
“Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.”
Barclay Walsh and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Introduction to How the Electoral College Works

There was a request to post something about the Electoral College. Let me know if you have any questions. We will cover all of this in class later in the semester.

After the 2000 U.S. presidential election, just about everybody in the United States was talking about the Electoral College. In the end, of course, Gore won the popular vote (more Americans voted for him), but Bush actually won the presidency, because he was awarded the majority of the votes in the Electoral College.

In this article, we'll explain how this interesting system works. How is it that a candidate could win more votes overall and yet not be elected? What would happen if there were a tie in the Electoral College? Who then would elect the president? You will find out about the past elections that weren't decided on Election Day but weeks later, when the Electoral College met, and some that weren't decided until months later. You'll also learn about the strange election of the first son of a former president to win the presidency.

History of the Electoral CollegeEvery four years, on the Tuesday following the first Monday of November, millions of U.S. citizens go to local voting booths to elect, among other officials, the next president and vice president of their country. Their votes will be recorded and counted, and winners will be declared. But the results of the popular vote are not guaranteed to stand because the Electoral College has not cast its vote.

The Electoral College is a controversial mechanism of presidential elections that was created by the framers of the U.S. Constitution as a compromise for the presidential election process. At the time, some politicians believed a purely popular election was too reckless, while others objected to giving Congress the power to select the president. The compromise was to set up an Electoral College system that allowed voters to vote for electors, who would then cast their votes for candidates, a system described in Article II, section 1 of the Constitution.

Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of its U.S. senators (2 in each state) plus the number of its U.S. representatives, which varies according to the state's population. Currently, the Electoral College includes 538 electors, 535 for the total number of congressional members, and three who represent Washington, D.C., as allowed by the 23rd Amendment. On the Monday following the second Wednesday in December, the electors of each state meet in their respective state capitals to officially cast their votes for president and vice president. These votes are then sealed and sent to the president of the Senate, who on Jan. 6 opens and reads the votes in the presence of both houses of Congress. The winner is sworn into office at noon Jan. 20. Most of the time, electors cast their votes for the candidate who has received the most votes in that particular state. However, there have been times when electors have voted contrary to the people's decision, which is entirely legal.

Selecting Electors

If you're wondering how someone becomes an elector, it turns out it's not the exact same process across the board. It can actually differ from state to state. In general, though, the two most common ways are:

The elector is nominated by his or her state party committee (perhaps to reward many years of service to the party).

The elector "campaigns" for a spot and the decision is made during a vote held at the state's party convention. There's the how, but what about the "what" -- as in, "What are the required qualifications of an elector?" There really aren't any. According to the National Archives and Records (NARA) Web site, "the U.S. Constitution contains very few provisions relating to the qualifications of electors." While the constitution doesn't dictate what an elector should know or be able to do, it does suggest who or what an elector cannot be:

He or she cannot be a Representative or Senator
He or she cannot be a high-ranking U.S. official in a position of "trust or profit"
He or she cannot be someone who has "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the U.S. Now, what about the "who?" Who is it that gets nominated or voted in and assigned to the post?

Usually, electors are people who are highly politically active in their party (be it Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Republican ...) or connected somehow to the political arena, such as: activists, party leaders, elected officials of the state and even people who have ties (political and/or personal) to the Presidential candidates, themselves.

So, we've covered the how, what and who -- but that's not all! There's still faithless electors, winner-takes-all and the district system to consider...

Electoral College Voting

The final electors for each state are voted on by the state's residents on voting day. In many states, the electors' names are printed on the ballots -- where those names "sit" depends on the state. For example, the electors could be listed directly under the presidential candidates' names (Democrats with the Democratic nominee, Libertarians with the Libertarian nominee, Republicans with the Republican nominee and so on) or simply grouped by party somewhere else on the ballot. And, of course, the names might not even be listed at all. Essentially, it is the electors who get voted "in" who end up casting the "real" vote.

Hold on, it seems like the last two sentences don't go together, "How can someone be voted "in" if they're not even on a ballot?" Consider this information from the Department of the Secretary of State for North Carolina:

Under North Carolina General Statute § 163-209, the names of candidates for electors of President and Vice-President nominated by any political party recognized in this State under North Carolina General Statute § 163-96 or by any unaffiliated candidate for President of the United States who has qualified to have his name printed on the general election ballot under North Carolina General Statute § 163-122 must be filed with the Secretary of State. A vote for the candidates for President and Vice-President named on the ballot is a vote for the electors of the party or unaffiliated candidate by which those candidates for elector were nominated and whose names have been filed with the Secretary of State. The key is this part, "A vote for the candidates for President and Vice-President named on the ballot is a vote for the electors..." This is the case for 48 states -- it's known as the "winner-take-all system." The other system, known as the "district system," is observed in both Maine and Nebraska. In these states, two electors' votes are made based on the candidate who received the most votes statewide. The remaining electoral votes go by congressional districts, awarding the vote to the candidate who received the most votes in each district.

Now, in regard to "winner-take-all" states, keep in mind what we said in the last section: Most of the time, electors cast their votes for the candidate who has received the most votes in that particular state. However, there have been times when electors have voted contrary to the people's decision, which is entirely legal. Although if you do vote against your party, you'll most likely be simultaneously forfeiting your post as elector and you may even incur a hefty fine --

"Faithless Electors"It turns out there is no federal law that requires an elector to vote according to their pledge (to their respective party). And so, more than a few electors have cast their votes without following the popular vote or their party. These electors are called "faithless electors."

In response to these faithless electors' actions, several states have created laws to enforce an elector's pledge to his or her party vote or the popular vote. Some states even go the extra step to assess a misdemeanor charge and a fine to such actions. For example, the state of North Carolina charges a fine of $10,000 to faithless electors.

It's important to note, that although these states have created these laws, a large number of scholars believe that such state-level laws hold no true bearing and would not survive constitutional challenge.

Electoral College Results

In most presidential elections, a candidate who wins the popular vote will also receive the majority of the electoral votes, but this is not always the case. There have been four presidents who have won an election with fewer popular votes than their opponent but more electoral votes.

Here are the four elections when the candidate who led the popular vote did not win the office:

1824: John Quincy Adams, the son of former President John Adams, received more than 38,000 fewer votes than Andrew Jackson, but neither candidate won a majority of the Electoral College. Adams was awarded the presidency when the election was thrown to the House of Representatives.

1876: Nearly unanimous support from small states gave Rutherford B. Hayes a one-vote margin in the Electoral College, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden by 264,000 votes. Hayes carried five out of the six smallest states (excluding Delaware). These five states plus Colorado gave Hayes 22 electoral votes with only 109,000 popular votes. At the time, Colorado had been just been admitted to the Union and decided to appoint electors instead of holding elections. So, Hayes won Colorado's three electoral votes with zero popular votes. It was the only time in U.S. history that small state support has decided an election.

1888: Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote by 95,713 votes to Grover Cleveland, but won the electoral vote by 65. In this instance, some say the Electoral College worked the way it is designed to work by preventing a candidate from winning an election based on support from one region of the country. The South overwhelmingly supported Cleveland, and he won by more than 425,000 votes in six southern states. However, in the rest of the country he lost by more than 300,000 votes.

In 2000, Al Gore received 50,992,335 votes nationwide and George W. Bush received 50,455,156 votes. After Bush was awarded the state of Florida, he had a total of 271 electoral votes, which beat Gore's 266 electoral votes.

Today, a candidate must receive 270 of the 538 votes to win the election. In cases where no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes, the decision is thrown to the House of Representatives by virtue of the 12th Amendment. The House then selects the president by majority vote with each state delegation receiving one vote to cast for the three candidates who received the most electoral votes.

Here are the two elections that were decided by the House of Representatives:

1801: Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, both Democrat-Republicans, received the same number of electoral votes, despite the fact that Burr was running as a vice presidential candidate, not for the presidency. Following 36 successive votes in the House, Jefferson was finally elected president.

1825: As mentioned above, Andrew Jackson received a majority of the popular vote over John Quincy Adams, but neither man received a 131-vote majority of electoral votes needed at the time to claim the presidency. Adams won the House vote on the first ballot.

The Electoral College Debate

Proponents of the Electoral College say that the system served its purpose in the elections we talked about, despite the fact that the candidate who won the popular vote didn't always win the election. The Electoral College is a block, or weighed, voting system that is designed to give more power to the states with more votes, but allows for small states to swing an election, as happened in 1876. Under this system, each state is assigned a specific number of votes that is proportional to its population, so that each state's power is representative of its population. So, while winning the popular vote may not ensure a candidate's victory, a candidate must gain popular support of a particular state to win the votes in that state. The goal of any candidate is to put together the right combination of states that will give him or her 270 electoral votes.

In 2000, as the election approached, some observers thought that Bush, interestingly also the son of a former president, could win the popular vote, but that his opponent, Gore, could win the Electoral College vote because Gore was leading in certain big states, such as California, New York and Pennsylvania.

LHS Young Democrats

Disclaimer: This is not in any way manditory or required to be a part of my class

A few years ago, we had a very politically active group of students at LHS on both sides of the political spectrum. There is no doubt that this also describes many of you right now. Due to some outside issues, these clubs are no longer allowed to function as "official" organizations but they can still organize and be active in other ways.

With the current political climate in the Lubbock, Texas and the United State as a whole, there is no better time to revive these organizations. I think with the event in our own gym this past weekend is proof that many young people are very interested in getting more active in the process.

So with that said, I am more than willing to be the "unofficial" sponsor of the "unofficial" LHS Young Democrats. It is my hope that those out there that may not align with the Democratic agenda to seek out a teacher that would be willing to do the same for the Young Republicans.

Here are some ideas that I have been tossing around:

1) Volunteering Opprotunities

2) Phone banking

3) Block Walking

4) Socials

5) Meeting Candidates

6) Working at Local HQ

7) Working on State and National Campaigns

8) Debating the Issues

The last point I think is especially important. This is another reason why I believe it is SOOOO important to have a Young Republicans group as well on campus. I think it would be great to have some sort of debate schedule between the groups over their candidates issues.

So, if you are interested in being a part of the "Unofficial" LHS Young Democrats, please respond to me via this blog. If you know students outside of this class, especially underclassmen, please let them know and have them come see me. I've already had several calls from both national campaigns looking for volunteers!

On Wisconsin

By Dick Polman

Ah Wisconsin, birthplace of the presidential primary (yes, nearly a century ago) and a state where so many candidacies have come to ruin (Hubert Humphrey in 1960, Mo Udall in 1976, John Edwards and Howard Dean in 2004, among many others). For the 2008 Democratic finalists, Wisconsin might ultimately prove to be a mere pit stop, but at the moment it looks like a potential fork in the long and winding road.

If Hillary Clinton wins tonight (defying most of the polls, as in New Hampshire), she would slow Barack Obama's momentum ahead of the Texas and Ohio showdowns on March 4, and calm the nerves of fans who have been laboring to come up with rationales for why she should be awarded the nomination in the absence of voter approval. If she loses narrowly and essentially splits the 74 Wisconsin delegates with Obama, she can always try to spin it as a comeback and insist that she always knew Wisconsin would be a tough state, that she nearly won even though Obama vastly outspent her, and that she is pleased with where she is in the race.

If Obama wins tonight in cheesehead territory (along with a victory in his native Hawaii), he heads toward Texas and Ohio with a 10-game victory streak and the aura of a winner - which matters in politics, because voters torn between two candidates often are tempted to go with a perceived winner. And if he wins big tonight - in a state, after all, where the demographics would seem to be friendly to Hillary - then he can spin it as further evidence (coupled with Virginia and Maryland last week) that he is steadily broadening his appeal to the greater Democratic electorate.

To gauge his appeal, I plan to check out these demographics, some of which overlap:

White working-class Democrats. They have been loyal to Hillary in most contests thus far, and they're numerous in Wisconsin (in the 2004 Democratic primary, 50 percent of the voters earned less than $50,000 a year), particularly in the old manufacturing towns on the east side of the state. The potential problem for Hillary, however, is that they've suffered heavy job losses and they blame NAFTA for accelerating the exodus of jobs overseas...the same NAFTA that Hillary's husband signed into law. One of the strongest NAFTA critics is Wisconsin Congressman David Obey, who represents a heavily blue-collar district and is stumping his turf heavily for Obama.(In February 2004, during the Wisconsin primary campaign, I was visiting a laid-off union worker named Gary Miller, in the town of Manitowoc, when his phone rang. Miller's side of the conversation went like this: "Hello?...OK, you should know that our local went out of existence...Yup, a few months ago...The company we worked at is gone, took all the jobs to China and Mexico, we have no members now. We do nothing...Wish I could help you more, sorry." Then Miller hung up. The caller was a John Kerry organizer, looking for labor help.)

Voters who didn't go to, or finish, college. Despite Wisconsin's general reputation as a liberal academic bastion - thanks largely to its university in Madison - it's worth noting that, in the 2004 Democratic primary, 55 percent of the voters did not have a college degree. Hillary has generally outdueled Obama for these voters (although not in Virginia and Maryland), and if she can't hold them in Wisconsin, it will be evidence of further base erosion.

The golden-age voters. Hillary has generally fared better than Obama among seniors (although, again, not last week), and voters over age 65 are expected to comprise roughly 20 percent of the Wisconsin electorate. Supposedly, they would be strongly attracted to Hillary's detailed policy prescriptives for health care and other kitchen-table staples, as practical correctives to Obamamania.

Catholics. Close to 4 in 10 Wisconsin voters are expected to be members of the faith, and Hillary was routinely beating Obama among Catholics until last week. If they tilt to Obama in Wisconsin (or not), it probably wouldn't be attributable to anything he has said (or hasn't said) about religion, because there has been very little faith talk lately on the Democratic side. Catholics will likely be voting on the same grounds as everybody else - with respect to their wallets/pocketbooks, their impressions of the two candidates, and their thoughts about candidate electability.

Then there are the reliable Obama demographics. We all know that young voters will favor Obama; the question is whether they will turn out in greater numbers than before, particularly in the university towns (in the Wisconsin primary four years ago, voters aged 18 to 29 were 11 percent of the elecrorate). We all know that blacks will vote overwhelmingly for Obama in Milwaukee; the question is by how much they will exceed their '04 turnout (six percent of the electorate).And since Wisconsin's primary is open to all voters, I plan to track the size of the independent turnout, and its share of the total electorate. This too is reliable Obama turf - many of the Wisconsin independents are downstate affluent professionals who commute to Chicago - and they are one big reason why Obama is favored to win. Wisconsin has been a tough state for the Democrats in the last two general elections - Al Gore and John Kerry barely won it in 2000 and 2004 - and a huge independent turnout tonight might provide clues about a candidate's autumn viability.

The Clinton campaign has been working hard to lower expectations in Wisconsin, but I think that Jeff Greenfield, the seasoned CBS political commentator, put it best the other day: "If Clinton cannot rally the beer-drinking Democrats in the state that gave us Pabst, Schlitz, and Miller, where can she?"-------As I noted yesterday, the Clinton people apparently assumed they'd wrap up the nomination on Tsunami Tuesday, thereby obviating the need for a Plan B if the race went longer. They never bothered to learn about the complex Texas delegate rules that could work against them on March 4. And now, as we see from this report (hat tip, John Baer), they couldn't even get their act together last week to file a complete slate of delegates for the Pennsylvania primary on April 22.Even though the state filing deadline was helpfully extended for a day and a half by their ally-in-chief, Gov. Ed Rendell (official reason for the extension: bad weather), the campaign still came up short by around 10 delegates. By contrast, Obama's camp had no such problems.For their own sake, while there is still time, the Clinton people might want to shake off the last vestiges of their coronation mentality and focus on nuts and bolts.

And Then There Were Two

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Mitt Romney ended his presidential run Thursday, telling a conservative audience that continuing the race against rival John McCain would make it more likely Democrats would win the White House — and “in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Boos rose from the audience at the mention of McCain’s name – and shocked calls of “no!” as he made his announcement. One young man in a blue sports coat grasped his head in his hands, his mouth wide open as he watched Romney on-stage.

“Barack and Hillary have made their intentions clear regarding Iraq and the war on terror. They would retreat and declare defeat,” said Romney.

“And the consequence of that would be devastating. It would mean attacks on America, launched from safe havens that make Afghanistan under the Taliban look like child’s play. About this, I have no doubt.”

The former Massachusetts governor, who conceded the mathematical odds standing between him and the nomination, told activists gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington that “I must now stand aside, for our party and our country."

As his supporters filed out of the ballroom where Romney made the announcement, many carrying his campaign signs and merchandise, a moderator mentioned McCain’s upcoming CPAC speech – drawing an immediate and sustained chorus of boos from the crowd.

“I didn’t see this coming at all,” said Pennsylvania college student Andrew Coons, holding a Romney sign under his arm. “I was completely surprised. But this was an honorable thing for him to do.”

His friend Andrew Trout added that, despite hostility from many of conservative activists at CPAC this week, John McCain had a shot at winning their support – a great deal depended, he said, on the senator’s speech later Thursday afternoon. Romney represented conservative values better than anyone else in the race, he said, but ultimately “I vote the party, not the person.”

Youth and '08 Election

By: Ben Adler February 10, 2008 03:28 PM EST

Amid all the hubbub over the youth vote — Time’s cover story last week was “Why Young Voters Care Again” — it is worth asking whether this year has really seen strong youth turnout. Are young people really coming out in impressive numbers in the primaries so far?

The answer depends on how easily impressed you are. By recent historical standards, youth turnout is having a banner year. In every primary or caucus so far the youth turnout percentage has been the same or — almost always — greater than it was four or eight years ago. Older voters are coming out in greater numbers, too, thanks to the competitive races in both parties.

But young people are increasing their turnout more, and as a result their share of the electorate has risen in every state. Youth turnout rose in every Super Tuesday state for which comparative data was available, except in New York, where it stayed the same. In some states, it increased dramatically over 2000 levels. In Oklahoma, it rose from 4 percent to 14 percent, and it tripled from 7 to 21 percent in Missouri. “If you look at the sheer number of young people who voted in 2000 and 2004, if you look at how much the percentages rose, [the increase is] huge,” said Chrissy Faessen, a spokesperson for Rock the Vote.

But, a cynic might note, young people still come out at a far lower rate than older voters. For example, while youth turnout may have gone way up in Oklahoma, it lags far behind voters older than 30, 33 percent of whom came out on Super Tuesday. Experts on voting behavior said this is well within historical norms.

“Young people do in every democracy turn out at lower rates than other older adults,” said Thomas Patterson, a professor of government at Harvard University and author of “The Vanishing Voter.” “Historically, that gap has been bigger in the U.S.”Patterson said that is because young people move frequently and registration deadlines vary by state. So young people are much less likely to be registered than older voters.

“The culprit has been registration laws,” he said. “In Europe, the government makes the effort to put you on voter registration roles. Here you have to make the effort.” When viewed in that light, experts such as Patterson agree, youth turnout is having a good year. But the effect is greater on the Democratic side.

So far this primary season voters younger than 30 have constituted 14 percent of the Democratic electorate. In 2004 they were 9 percent, and in 2000 they were 8 percent. Young voters have been 11 percent of Republican participants so far, which is better than the 8 percent they were in 2000 (the last time Republicans had a seriously contested primary).

Some strategists suggest that Republican campaigns put less emphasis on appealing to young voters because they are a smaller component of the primary electorate. Faessen says that campaigns in both parties recognize the increasing value of appealing to young voters, as evidenced by their holding many campus events and being active on social networking sites, such as Facebook.

But while both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have full-time national youth vote directors, John McCain has no full-time youth-focused staff. (To be fair, McCain does not even pay for a full-time pollster, so that decision may be as much one of financial necessity as political strategy.) In the general election, where the large number of unaffiliated young voters may be up for grabs, there will likely be a greater Republican push for their votes.

For example, in Virginia, the chairman of the state Young Republican Federation, Lori-Ann Miller, was reluctant to predict strong turnout, at least not compared with Democrats, when that state votes on Tuesday. “It’s just a trend that Democrats are coming out more than Republicans,” Miller said. Miller added that many young campaign volunteers were associated with candidates who have dropped out, and their enthusiasm has since waned.

“A lot of volunteers in Virginia were [Fred] Thompson or [Rudy] Giuliani supporters,” Miller said. Miller herself is one of the disappointed former Thompson supporters.

She has not gotten involved in another campaign in the primary but plans on enthusiastically supporting the Republican ticket in November. Mike Huckabee's campaign would likely benefit from higher youth turnout in the upcoming primaries, because the former Arkansas governor's support skews young.

On the Democratic side, young voters’ increased turnout has been essential to catapulting Obama to many of his wins. The Obama campaign said it is pleased with the turnout rate among its young supporters, even if it has not equaled that of older voters.

“I like to think that we are undergoing a cultural change,” said Hans Riemer, Obama’s national youth vote director. “If this group is tripling its turnout, they’re going to be more engaged for the rest of their lives. The appropriate perspective on this is that it's progress — and we still have work to do.”

Can McCain Hold It Together?

If John McCain wins big on Super Tuesday, his nomination will be all but assured, and he'll get to go on vacation for a little while. That means two days at a Munich security conference the GOP front-runner has attended since before he started running for president. (Last year, he was there watching Putin try to restart the Cold War on the day Barack Obama announced his candidacy.) It's an odd way to rest. McCain will sit in a windowless room with the foreign and defense ministers of the world's nations (almost all of them men), testing his backside through days of speeches and his lungs against the unceasing chain-smoking of foreign dignitaries. McCain is treated like a star at these events, though, and if he goes as the GOP nominee, men who spend their time discussing joint security agreements and threats from stateless actors will get a little giggly.

But before McCain can join the testosterone caucus in Bavaria, he must deal with his own party's chest-thumpers. On Monday, Rush Limbaugh devoted an entire show to bashing McCain in an attempt to rally conservatives around Mitt Romney. McCain campaigned Monday in New Jersey and New York, ending the day with a press conference in Grand Central Station. Joining him under the enormous chandeliers was an odd coalition of current and retired New York Republican officials, including former Gov. George Pataki and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Both men have publicly and loudly feuded for years. (In 1994, Giuliani endorsed Pataki's Democratic opponent, Mario Cuomo, among other things.) Pataki, who supported George Bush in 2000, also tried unsuccessfully to keep McCain off the primary ballot in that year. So it rang a little hollow when McCain yesterday called him "friend."

The message of the day was that if McCain could bring the old enemies together, he could unite the Republican Party. But the Republicans McCain is uniting in New York—fiscally conservative but socially moderate—aren't exactly the ones that dislike him so much. What he can't do with ideology, McCain is trying to do by tonnage. Pataki's endorsement was just the latest in a flood that campaign aides hope will prove that Republicans are uniting under the McCain tent.

While McCain was preaching unity, though, he was taking one last tough shot at Romney. An ad he aired the day before the voting began shows Romney distancing himself from Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of all Republicans. An announcer then intones, "If we can't trust Mitt Romney on Ronald Reagan, how can we trust him to lead America?"

The McCain team is worried about Romney's rise over the last several days in California. They are confident they'll win the delegate battle with Romney across the other states at play, like New York, New Jersey, Missouri, and Connecticut, but they worry that in California they'll split the delegate count and maybe lose the popular vote. That will delay the coronation. It's unlikely to upset it, they claim, given the next rounds of contests, many of which are open primaries in which independents and Democrats, with whom McCain does well, can vote. But a Romney win in California will prolong the fight. McCain will have to scrap Munich and head to Virginia to prepare for the primary there in a week.

Giuliani told the Grand Central crowd that McCain would stay on the offensive in the war against radical Islamic terrorists and then reminded us that the space in which we stood had been the target of numerous bomb threats. The fully armored policemen with their index fingers poised over the triggers of their machine guns and dressed in navy blue anti-terrorism gear added to the post-9/11 feel. It was enough to make you want to pat down your neighbor.

McCain never looks comfortable while others are praising him. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. This is a problem he'll have to get over if he's the nominee. As his fortunes improve, so do the length of the introductions and the number of people introducing him. Pataki and Giuliani stressed to New Yorkers that among Republicans, only McCain could compete in the state during the general election. "No one can bring together intelligent independents and enlightened Democrats like John McCain," Pataki said.

When McCain took to the microphone, he was quick and to the point. "We're confident we're going to do very well," he said of Super Tuesday, an extraordinary admission for the hypersuperstitious candidate. He reiterated the message that he is the only Republican who could cross over and win the Northeast based on his "call to all Americans to [rally for] a cause greater than ourselves." It's not catchy, like Obama's "Yes we can," but the phrase aims at the same kind of national sweep and dates back to McCain's 2000 campaign.

With all the talk of unifying the country, it almost seemed as if McCain had forgotten he was in a battle to woo conservatives, but then he got back on track. When asked about how he would compete with Democrats on the issue of the economy, he said, "The worst thing that could happen to the economy is what Democrats want to do. It's my conservative philosophy versus big government Democratic philosophy."

The press conference ended after only three questions, perhaps a record for brevity in the McCain campaign. The freewheeling schedule of the New Hampshire primary is a thing of the past as McCain crosses the country, races to fund-raisers, and squeezes in media appearances. He's always late to events now, which he hates, but happens as his skeleton staff tries to handle the rush of his new status. After the summer implosion, the McCain team has been running on loyalty with all senior staff working for free, and only the bare minimum of support staff. They have had to cobble together a logistics teams on the fly, which leaves staffers wondering why they can't find their bags and makes events like the one at Grand Central a little disorganized. If McCain wins, the ragged band that travels with him will be able to bring on more help so they can get some sleep and a chance to see their families. And there's another reason they want McCain to do well Tuesday. No one wants to tell him he can't go to Munich.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Yes We Can

This video has been picking up a lot of traction over the last week. There was a story on NPR this morning about this.

I think regardless of party affilitation, this clip shows you what charisma is all about.

Plus, it doesn't hurt to have Will.I.Am with you either!

Pick Flick?

A collegue showed me this tonight.

A must see film for all those who love school politics!

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Super Doppler Tuesday

By Rhodes Cook

Ready or not, here it comes... Super-Duper Tuesday, Tsunami Tuesday, Monster Tuesday, or whatever name one chooses to call it. The huge, historic nationwide vote Feb. 5 is at last at hand. Two dozen states from Massachusetts to California will vote next Tuesday, electing more than 40 percent of all Democratic and Republican delegates in 2008.

The only other single-day event that has ever come close to this size during the presidential nominating process came on March 8, 1988, when the first full-blown Super Tuesday featured 16 primaries, actually one more than is scheduled next Tuesday. But that one-day votefest 20 years ago was a Southern-oriented event, rounded out by a handful of primaries in the Northeast and a smattering of low-visibility caucuses in the West.

This year's Super Tuesday, by contrast, is truly a nationwide event, the largest in scope ever held outside the November general election. It is vast and varied in virtually every way. Each region of the country is well represented. Red and blue states abound. Racial diversity is accented. Voter enthusiasm has rarely been higher, and turnout should be huge.
The half of the country that will vote Feb. 5 includes nearly 80 million registered voters. Most will have the opportunity to participate in primary elections, where turnout records have already been broken this year in a number of states. Lower-turnout caucuses will be held in a few small to medium-sized states west of the Mississippi River.

Figure 1. Super Tuesday: One Huge Delegate Harvest
More than 40 percent of all Democratic and Republican delegates will be elected to reflect the results of primaries and caucuses held on Super Tuesday (Feb. 5)--more to be selected in one day than the total elected in either the weeks before or the months afterward. Altogether, Democrats require 2,025 delegates to nominate; the Republicans, 1,191.
Delegates at Stake

ELECTED DELEGATES
Pre-Super Tuesday
Dems 137 3%
Reps 238 10%

Super Tuesday (Feb. 5)
Dems 1,681 42%
Reps 1,009 42%

Post-Super Tuesday
Dems 1,435 35%
Reps 980 41%

UNELECTED DELEGATES
Superdelegates
Dems 796 20%
Reps 153 6%

TOTAL DELEGATES
Dems 4,049
Reps 2,380

Source: Democratic National Committee's Office of Party Affairs and Delegate Selection (Jan. 5, 2008); Call for the 2008 Republican National Convention (Nov. 9, 2007).

Unlike 1988, no one part of the country will dominate next week's vote. Each region will have a say, with the West (with one-third of the Democratic and Republican delegates) and the Northeast (with roughly one-quarter) leading the way. Altogether, Super Tuesday will include at least five states from each region, anchored by the nation's first, third and fifth most populous states--California, New York, and Illinois, respectively.

The monster vote will require candidates to dip into both Red and Blue America in their hunt for delegates. The quintet of Southern primary states all voted decisively for President Bush in 2004. The five primary states in the Northeast were clear-cut in their support for John Kerry.
In the heartland, candidates will be tested in a collection of battleground states which nowadays are being described as purple, rather than red or blue. It is a group that on Super Tuesday will include Minnesota and Missouri in the Midwest and Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico in the Mountain West.

In the process, candidates will come face to face with the rich mosaic of racial and ethnic diversity that comprises the American electorate. Seven states voting Feb. 5 have populations at least 15 percent African American--four in the South, three in the industrial Frost Belt (including Hillary Clinton's home base of New York and Barack Obama's Illinois). Five states next Tuesday have populations 15 percent or more Hispanic--New York plus four Western states (California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico).

The sprawling nature of the Feb. 5 event will test the candidates' ability to draw votes under an array of different systems of voter participation, ranging from closed contests limited to party members only, to wide open primaries and caucuses where any registered voter of any political persuasion can participate. There are conspicuous examples of each that should show in stark form whether Obama and John McCain truly need the support of independents to successfully challenge Clinton and Mitt Romney, respectively, for their party's nominations.

In the South and Midwest, virtually all the primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday will feature open voting. On the two coasts, though, there will be a greater emphasis on closed contests, which will be the case in New York, Connecticut, Arizona and for the Republicans, California. Conspicuously, California Democrats will allow independents (roughly 3 million) to participate in their primary, as will both parties in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

In short, Super Tuesday will test the candidates' organizational ability, campaign skills, and most importantly, their vote-getting appeal, in far-flung settings unique in their scope and variety.

The one area where the Democrats and Republicans operate on quite different playing fields is in the realm of awarding delegates. Democrats require that delegates be elected to proportionally reflect the primary or caucus vote, with 15 percent statewide or in a congressional district needed to qualify for a share. Republicans allow for a variety of delegate allocation methods, from proportional representation to winner-take-all. And next Tuesday, most states on the Republican side will be using some variation of winner-take-all.

Yet ultimately, the big question is whether either party will have a decisive outcome on Feb. 5 as the Republicans did on Super Tuesday 1988? Then, Vice President George H.W. Bush swept every primary and all but one caucus state, essentially wrapping up the GOP nomination right there.

Or might one or both parties next Tuesday have a fragmented outcome like the Democrats did in early March two decades ago? Michael Dukakis, Jesse Jackson and Al Gore each won five primary states that day and divided the delegates--an inconclusive result that sent the Democratic contest hurdling on for weeks to come.

Results will trickle in next Tuesday night much like they will do in November. Polls in Georgia are scheduled to close at 7 p.m. An hour later every primary state east of the Mississippi River except New York will begin reporting their results. Polls in the Empire State will close at 9 p.m. Arizona will begin reporting its results the same hour. Utah will follow at 10 p.m. Eastern time, California at 11.

Yet it will be not be in a primary or caucus where the first delegates of the day are chosen. It will be at a convention of West Virginia Republicans in Charleston, where roughly 1,500 delegates from around the state will convene at 9 a.m. in a setting resembling a national convention. Much like their counterparts at the national level, delegates will sit under their county signs, with a roll call vote of the state's 55 counties taking place in alphabetical order. It could take one, two or three ballots for one of the presidential candidates to win the majority of the vote that is necessary to capture the 18 national convention delegates at stake. State GOP officials hope to have a result to announce by early afternoon.

At the least, the West Virginia Republican convention will be the "Dixville Notch" of Super Tuesday, reporting its tally of delegates several hours before the rest of the country. But just maybe, the event could be something more--the precursor of the first multi-ballot national convention in more than a half century. Does the chance still exist for the Republicans to have such a protracted convention this summer, or even the Democrats? The full results from this largest of all primary and caucus days Feb. 5 could tell the tale.

A Gift

For those that read this before Wednesday and Thursday, I am pushing the due date for the book assignment to next Monday and Tuesday. I will be out of class later this week and won't be able to pick up the assignment.

You're welcome.

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