By JEFF ZELENY and PATRICK HEALY
New York Times
February 1, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met for debate here Thursday, sitting side by side and sharing a night of smiles, friendly eye-catching and gentle banter. Cordial as the encounter was, the candidates did not mask their own divisions, even as they previewed the attacks one of them will ultimately make against a Republican rival.

Still, it was almost as if the battle was to see which of them could outnice the other.

At the end of the nearly two-hour encounter, as the audience of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities rose to its feet at the Kodak Theater, Mr. Obama held Mrs. Clinton's chair as she rose. The two rivals, almost hugging, held each others' elbows and whispered in one another's ear, offering a striking image that captured the tenor of the debate.

"When we started off, we had eight candidates on this stage. We are now down to two," Mr. Obama said. "I think one of us two will end up being the next president of the United States."

Gone were the sharp and sometimes personal attacks that have characterized a year's worth of debates, particularly a combative session last week in South Carolina, which both sides conceded had tarnished their images.

Still, the candidates were at pains to lay out their differences on issues like national health care, the Iraq war and experience in their last appearance together before voters in more than 20 states weigh in Tuesday on the presidential nominating fight.

As she has through much of the campaign, Mrs. Clinton found herself defending her 2002 Senate vote to authorize war against Iraq — a position that has been enduringly unpopular with Democrats. The vote has forced her to discuss her shifting stands on Iraq instead of the antiwar principle she has sought to embrace in the campaign.

"I think now we have to look at how we go forward," she said. "There will be a great debate between us and the Republicans, because the Republicans are still committed to George Bush's policy."

Mr. Obama, given his opposition to the war from 2002 onward, argued that he would be in a strongest position to challenge the Republican nominee over Iraq.

"I think it is much easier for us to have the argument when we have a nominee who says, 'I always thought this was a bad idea, this was a bad strategy,' " Mr. Obama said to applause. "They screwed up the execution of it in all sorts of ways."

"The question," he said, "is, can we make an argument that this was a conceptually flawed mission from the start, and that we need better judgment when we decide to send our young men and women into war?"

Still, unlike when they last met for debate, when they attacked each other over personal conduct as well as issues, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama aimed their sharpest words at Republicans.

Mrs. Clinton criticized President Bush over his stewardship of the economy, while Mr. Obama chided Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the two Republicans leading in their race, for supporting Bush-backed tax cuts for wealthy Americans after initially opposing them.

"Somewhere along the line the Straight Talk Express lost some wheels," Mr. Obama said, referring to one of Mr. McCain's political slogans.

Both lavished praise on John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who dropped out of the race this week and whose endorsement they are actively seeking.

Mr. Obama said he and Mr. Edwards were determined to fight special interests and big business. Mrs. Clinton twice noted early on that her universal health care plan — which, unlike Mr. Obama's, includes a requirement that all Americans have health care — was very similar to that of Mr. Edwards.

Mr. Obama countered that about "95 percent" of his plan and Mrs. Clinton's were the same, but that he believed his proposal went further to reducing costs.

But their tone Thursday night was largely friendly. Each candidate laughed agreeably and nodded at the other's remarks, and they praised each other at different points and looked ahead to the battle with the other party.

"They are more of the same," Mrs. Clinton said of the Republican candidates. "Neither of us, by looking at us, is more of the same — we will change our country."

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton sidestepped a question about whether either would select the other as a running mate. Wolf Blitzer of CNN, the moderator, called it a "dream ticket" in the eyes of many Democrats. In fact, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have built up resentments toward each other over the campaign and seem unlikely to want to pair up for the general election.

"We've got a lot more road to travel," Mr. Obama said, "and so I think it's premature for either of us to start speculating about vice presidents." When pressed, he said, "I'm sure that Hillary would be on anybody's short list."

Mrs. Clinton responded in kind. "Well, I have to agree with everything Barack just said," she replied, to laughter from the audience.

Later, Mrs. Clinton was forced to fend off a question about her ability to "control" former President Bill Clinton from interfering in her administration should she become president in 2009, given his assertiveness on the campaign trail. (Mrs. Clinton has acknowledged that her husband has become "carried away" at times recently.)

"The fact is that I'm running for president, and this is my campaign," she said to applause. She added: "At the end of the day, it's a lonely job in the White House. And it is the president of the United States who has to make the decisions. And that is what I'm asking to be entrusted to do."

On one flash point — immigration — Mr. Obama cited his role in immigration reform legislation in Washington last year. He voiced his support for states giving driver's licenses to undocumented workers.

"People don't come here to drive, they come here to work," Mr. Obama said.

It was an issue that stirred controversy in a debate last year, which Mr. Obama sought to raise by pointing out that his rival gave "a number of different answers on this over the course of six weeks."

"Now she does have a clear position, but it took awhile," Mr. Obama said Thursday. "The only reason I bring that up is to underscore the fact that this is a difficult political issue."

It was the first dust-up of the evening between the candidates, occurring near the end of the first hour. Mrs. Clinton smiled and offered her reply.

"I just have to correct the record for one second," she said, explaining that she initially supported the concept of giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants so she could help Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York, who was being criticized over the issue. Turning to Mr. Obama directly, she said: "You were asked the same question and could not answer it. So this is a difficult issue."

Asked by Mr. Blitzer whether she was "missing in action" during the immigration debate, Mrs. Clinton was quick to reject the suggestion.

"I cosponsored comprehensive immigration reform in 2004, before Barack came to the Senate," she said.

In a week where Senator Edward M. Kennedy endorsed the candidacy of Mr. Obama, as did Caroline Kennedy, Mrs. Clinton was asked why they had chosen her rival and whether she would represent the kind of change that would inspire a nation.

"I have the greatest respect for Senator Kennedy and the Kennedy family," Mrs. Clinton said. "I'm proud to have three of Bobby's kids supporting me — Bobby, Kathleen and Kerry supporting me."

She added, "I think having the first woman president would be a huge change for America and the world."

The candidates could not question one another in the debate, but took questions from viewers. A 38-year-old woman in South Carolina, who sent her question in by e-mail, said she had never voted for someone not named Bush or Clinton. She wondered how Mrs. Clinton would represent change.

"You have to make the case for yourself," Mrs. Clinton said. "And I want to be judged on my own merits. I don't want to be advantaged — or disadvantaged."

The debate also featured questions about the strengths of Senator McCain and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts — the two leading Republican presidential candidates. Asked about Mr. Romney's experience as a chief executive officer, Mr. Obama drew laughs when he reminded the audience that Mr. Romney has significantly outspent his rivals, investing millions of his own money.

"Mitt Romney hasn't gotten a very good return on his investment during this presidential campaign," Mr. Obama said, adding that he would match his financial management skills with Mr. Romney's. (Hours before the debate, Mr. Obama's campaign announced that he had raised $32 million in January alone.)

Not only was the debate much less contentious than Wednesday night's debate among the remaining Republican candidates, but it was also far more muted than recent Democratic debates — an obvious calculation on the part of both candidates, who have been criticized for being overly harsh and personal. Democratic leaders feared that the negative tone would carry over to the general election, tamping down voters' enthusiasm.

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January 4, 2008

The candidates have spent a year and tens of millions of dollars in Iowa, and Thursday night the first actual voters offered their first assessments. Some candidates and their strategists were hoping the caucuses and the New Hampshire primary next week would settle the race, weeding out the contenders for the two major parties' presidential nominations. Watching the campaign in cold, snowy and mostly empty Iowa, we were hoping for something else - that this year's Iowa-New Hampshire rush to judgment will be the last.

For all of Thursday night's drama, the results in Iowa did not
preclude a race going into New Hampshire, and, we hope, beyond - to South Carolina, Florida and the cluster of primaries on February 5. Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton, but she's got plenty of money left, and John Edwards got a boost. Mike Huckabee's win was unlikely to deter Mitt Romney or the Republicans who did not contest Iowa: John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani.

Keeping this race alive so significant numbers of Americans in more populated states can participate would begin to make up for the ludicrous spectacle of the past year, which enriched the television networks and the political consultants (some $300 million already spent) far more than it enriched the political dialogue. We hope both parties will wake up and end the undemocratic system in which the choice of a new president rests far too heavily on nonbinding votes in January by voters that don't necessarily represent the rest of the country.

We don't question the enthusiasm or the commitment of the people of Iowa and New Hampshire. But Iowa, where a huge turnout amounts to less than 10 percent of the population, is about 92 percent white, more rural and older than the rest of the nation. New Hampshire has a non-Hispanic white population of about 95 percent. Iowa's Democrats are more liberal and more protectionist than the nation's Democrats. Its Republicans are more conservative, and religiously driven, than the nation's Republicans. And yet, The Boston Globe reported that Mr. Romney spent $7 million on ads in Iowa. That's nearly $4 per registered voter.

We do believe that the time has long passed for both parties to not only break the Iowa-New Hampshire habit but also end the damaging race to be third, with states pushing their primaries closer and closer to New Year's Day.

Instead, the country should adopt a more sensible and more representative system of regional primaries, in which states are divided into regional groups that vote on a designated day. The honor of going first would rotate year to year among the regions. That would give a far broader range of American voters a say in this vitally important choice.

Make no mistake, there are choices to be made in this first election in many, many years in which both parties' nominations are being contested. Most of the Republican contenders (with the exception, most of the time, of Senator John McCain) offer the same kind of politics of division that has so polarized this nation over the last seven years. It is a politics that thrives on religious and social intolerance and fear.

Mr. Huckabee, the Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor, cloaks himself in affability and Christianity. But he bullied Mr. Romney into pleading with religious conservatives to accept his Mormon faith as Christian enough for a Republican nominee and, after professing charity, has recently become a scourge of undocumented immigrants.

Fear often appears to be the only plank on which Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is standing, when you can tell where he is standing at all. Mr. Giuliani, who parlayed the 9/11 tragedy into a lucrative business and now speaks, bizarrely, of the "9/11 generation," has switched his views a dizzying number of times - on immigration, on abortion, on New York.

Almost as dizzying, in fact, as the pirouettes executed by Mr. Romney, who wants American voters to forget his record as governor of Massachusetts - where he endorsed gay marriage and reproductive choice - and believe what he says now that he wants to be president. Among Mr. Romney's tailored-for-the-campaign proposals is to double the size of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which even President Bush knows must be closed.

All of the Republicans want to continue President Bush's disaster of a war in Iraq, including Mr. McCain. He, however, has taken a courageous stand for immigration reform, which seemed to doom his candidacy last year, and is a strong advocate of the need to confront global warming and to stop the abuse of prisoners in Mr. Bush's system of secret prisons.

The Democrats are united in their opposition to the war, but none have spelled out a persuasive plan for getting American troops home without setting off a wider conflagration.

Senator Obama generates enormous excitement with his youth, and his promises of change - even if it's not entirely clear what he intends to change or how. Senator Clinton, meanwhile, wavers between wanting to be seen as ready to serve as president because of her eight years in the White House with her husband - and trying to satisfy voters' yearnings for new ideas and new ways.

Mr. Edwards has a strong populist message, but it sounds a bit odd coming from a former tort lawyer and hedge fund executive who ran as a completely different person in 2004. One of his ads features an out-of-work Maytag employee who said Mr. Edwards promised his 7-year-old son: "I'm going to keep fighting for your daddy's job." We're still waiting for Mr. Edwards to explain how he, or any politician, can turn back the tide of economics and globalization. We'd prefer if he explained how to make it work for all Americans.

None of this has led us to a choice in the nominating contests, never mind for the presidency. The majority of Americans are in the same position. That's why they should be allowed to see and hear more of these candidates, and not have to settle for the judgments of the people of Iowa and New Hampshire.

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By GAIL COLLINS, New York Times January 3, 2008

DES MOINES

As the presidential candidates tell them every single day, Iowans deserve to be the nation's kingmakers because they are exceptional citizens who take their responsibilities very, very seriously. So tonight, even though it's very cold - even though it's Hokies vs. Jayhawks in the Orange Bowl - the sturdy Iowa voters will pull on their parkas and go out to fulfill their historic destiny. Perhaps as many as 15 percent of them!

"Money will become irrelevant once somebody wins the Iowa caucus," said John (I Currently Have No Money) Edwards. "The winner of the Iowa caucus is going to have huge amounts of money pouring in." Edwards, the Democratic third-runner, has spent more time in Iowa than many Iowans, who have a tendency to flee to Florida in the winter.

People, ignore whatever happens here. The identity of the next leader of the most powerful nation in the world is not supposed to depend on the opinion of one small state. Let alone the sliver of that state with the leisure and physical capacity to make a personal appearance tonight at a local caucus that begins at precisely 7 o'clock. Let alone the tiny slice of the small sliver willing to take part in a process that involves standing up in public to show a political preference, while being lobbied and nagged by neighbors.

Ah yes, good work fighting for democracy around the globe, American troops, Pakistani lawyers, international election observers. The tiny slice of the sliver of the small state approves.

Tonight, the Iowa Deciders will divide into 1,781 local caucuses. Past history suggests that a few of these gatherings may not draw any attendees whatsoever and that several others will consist entirely of a guy named Carl. Attendance has no effect on the number of delegates involved, and we hardly need mention that the whole thing is weighted to give rural residents an advantage. Iowans in politically active neighborhoods where 100 people show up may find their vote is worth only 1 percent as much as, say, Carl's. This gives them the opportunity to experience what it is like to be a New Yorker or Californian all year round.

Iowa Republican caucuses, which involve writing a name on a piece of paper and going home, are like Athens in the Age of Pericles compared with the Democrats, who are closer to Turkmenistan in the age of Saparmurat Niyazov. Tonight the Democratic caucus-goers (We are expecting way more than 100,000!) will divide up into groups supporting each of the different candidates. (Secret ballots are for sissies.) Then some of the smaller groups will be dissolved under rules so complicated they are known only to the local insiders and experts hired by the candidates to decipher them. (Sometimes these turn out to be the exact same people!)

"What if the largest groups are not immediately apparent because more than one nonviable Presidential Preference group contains the same number of eligible attendees and will not realign?" the party guide asks rhetorically. This is the simplified version of the rules prepared for the benefit of the media, but the answer, obviously, is that you flip a coin. ("A game of chance is used to determine which groups may remain.")

On the Republican side, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are at a grave disadvantage because of a failure to campaign enough in Iowa. (You'd think Florida was a state or something.) Fred Thompson is so desperate to go home that he's practically begging people to vote for somebody else. Mitt Romney is by far the best organized. His victory in the important Iowa straw poll last summer demonstrated that he would really be a president who knows how to rent a bus. Meanwhile, the very enthusiastic evangelicals are going to try to prove that if a commander in chief has a heart like Mike Huckabee's, it won't matter whether he knows where Pakistan is.

Obama backers believe Barack will win on a record-breaking turnout of new participants, some of them being actual Iowa residents. (Checking is for babies.) Or everything could come down to the minor candidates' supporters - rule by the tiny piece of the slice of the sliver.

In the Democratic caucuses, if your group is the smallest in the room you might have to: A) Relive the moment in ninth grade when you were the last one chosen for volleyball and then B) Walk over and join a different team. Dennis Kucinich has told his followers that if - by some wild chance - they find that they are not one of the most popular groups, they should switch to Barack Obama. Kucinich's positions on most issues actually seem closer to John Edwards's, but last summer Edwards was caught on tape whispering to Hillary Clinton that Dennis was really not a serious contender. Petty, perhaps, but in a contest that begins with the presumption that nobody is qualified to lead the most powerful nation on earth without making at least two visits to Pottawattamie County, it resonates.

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By ADAM NAGOURNEY and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
New York Times
July 11, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 10 - After months of mounting problems in his presidential campaign, Senator John McCain sat down with his two top political aides on Monday for what turned out to be a loud and acrimonious discussion in his Senate office.

On Tuesday morning, as Mr. McCain stood on the Senate floor opposing a withdrawal from Iraq, his campaign announced that the two men were departing, a development that left his team gutted, transfixed both parties and raised new doubts about his ability to continue in the race.

The departure of the aides - John Weaver, Mr. McCain's senior adviser and a longtime friend, and Terry Nelson, who had been recruited to be campaign manager after playing a central role in President Bush's re-election - was the culmination of months of internal feuding, and was quickly followed by word that other staff members would leave as well.

It came after what aides said were critical political miscalculations and management shortfalls that have left Mr. McCain with less than $2 million in the bank and slipping in polls in critical states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Mr. McCain's friends described the senator, who returned last Friday from another trip to Iraq, as agitated and humiliated at finding himself the central figure in a political drama that has seen him fall from Republican Party front-runner to a candidate forced to insist Tuesday that he was not dropping out.

Although Mr. McCain's problems have been apparent for months - he shook up his staff and promised to run a leaner operation after a disappointing fund-raising performance in the first quarter - aides said the full scale of his difficulties only became clear to him toward the end of last month. Donations were drying up, in part because of Republican opposition to Mr. McCain's stances on issues like immigration, and the campaign was falling far short of its fund-raising goals.

And the campaign had burned through most of the $24 million it had raised in the first half of the year on hefty salaries for staff members and consultants, a heavy travel schedule and all manner of other expenses, leaving it with less cash at the end of June than even the bare-bones presidential campaign of Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas.

Aides said that the problems started to peak two weeks ago at a meeting with Mr. McCain and about 100 contributors in 100-degree weather at his home in Sedona, Ariz. It was just before that meeting, aides said, that Mr. McCain and his wife, Cindy, were told how bleak the campaign's financial situation was.

They said the McCains were startled and enraged.

Aides said Mr. McCain expressed concern that the image of his campaign overspending would invite mockery from opponents at a time when he is attacking excessive government spending. One McCain associate said the senator expressed astonishment at the Sedona meeting that he had spent so much money without putting a single advertisement on television.

It was that gathering that led to the shakeup announced on Tuesday.

Mr. McCain's campaign quickly moved to plug the holes caused by the departures of Mr. Weaver and Mr. Nelson. It announced that Rick Davis, who was serving as the chief executive officer in the campaign, would step in as manager, reprising the role he fulfilled for Mr. McCain in his 2000 presidential bid. Mr. Davis had battled furiously with Mr. Nelson and Mr. Weaver for influence over the past three months, aides said.

"No, no, no, no," Mr. McCain said when asked by reporters on Capitol Hill if his campaign was in trouble. "I'd describe the campaign as going well. I'm very happy with it."

When asked whether he intended to stay in the presidential race, he replied, "Of course."

But Mr. McCain finds himself in a situation that his own supporters said Tuesday was largely a function of what has been his uneven performance as a candidate and in overseeing his campaign.

They said Mr. McCain and his aides had made two fundamental strategic decisions that so far have proven flawed. One was that voters would reward Mr. McCain for taking principled decisions on issues - especially immigration, where he is out of step with much of the grass roots of the Republican Party, and the war in Iraq, where his steadfast support for fighting on has left him on the defensive. Instead, polls suggest that Mr. McCain has alienated much of the Republican base.

The other stemmed from a belief in Mr. McCain's inner circle last year that he would be anointed the Republican front-runner and would enjoy the political and financial advantages that go with it.

Last November, Mr. Davis, with the assent of Mr. Nelson and Mr. Weaver, argued that Mr. McCain would have no trouble supporting a political machine on the scale of the 2004 Bush campaign, presenting himself as the president's anointed heir.

From that perspective, Mr. Davis argued, the campaign should expect to raise $120 million this year, including $50 million in the first six months, about twice as much as what turned out to be true.

"We had false assumptions about how much money could be raised," said Mark Salter, a senior aide to Mr. McCain. "It's not fair to pin it on anybody. We all had this expectation that money was going to be very easy for us to raise."

Beyond that, Mr. McCain muddied up his image as a moderate independent in his second bid for his party's nomination. He embraced President Bush after their bitter fight in 2000, and sought to make amends with the religious conservative leaders after denouncing them. But by all appearances, he has not had great success in fortifying his stand with the party's conservative wing, even as he may have undercut his appeal as an independent candidate.

Mr. Nelson told Mr. McCain he was quitting Tuesday morning, after offering his resignation several times since the campaign's announcement last week that its fund-raising had been weak for the second quarter in a row, campaign officials said. Mr. McCain's advisers pointedly said he made no effort to dissuade Mr. Nelson.

Mr. Weaver quit after learning that Mr. Nelson, who was the political director of Mr. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004, was leaving and that Mr. Davis - with whom Mr. Weaver has feuded for years - was stepping in. Aides said some lower-level aides, most of whom Mr. Nelson had brought over from the Bush campaign, quit as well. Mr. Weaver's move was unexpected even by him; he gave up a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village three weeks ago to move to Washington.

Mr. McCain, after first insisting neither man had been fired, described the departures as "a consensus decision."

They came a week after campaign aides said they were laying off 80 members of its 120-member staff. Mr. McCain's advisers were trading blame throughout the day about what was at fault - lackluster fund-raisers overseen by Mr. Davis or exuberant spending under the purview of Mr. Nelson.

McCain aides said a third close friend and adviser, Mr. Salter, was now taking a relatively diminished, though still important, role in the campaign, serving as an unpaid senior adviser. Mr. Salter is perhaps Mr. McCain's closest staff member; they have co-written several books and Mr. Salter will travel with Mr. McCain to New Hampshire on Friday.

The campaign's financial expectations could be seen in its spending reports. In the first three months of the year, it paid $30,000 to Mr. Davis's firm, Davis Manafort; $42,600 to Mr. Nelson as well as $10,000 to his firm, Dawson McCarthy Nelson Media; and $71,000 to Mr. Weaver. It also paid Michael Dennehy, the campaign's former political director, $52,000, plus $15,000 to the Dennehy Group and $13,000 for Mr. Dennehy's travel.

The campaign paid rent not only in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, but also in states where most candidates do not bother at this stage, like Alabama and Michigan, its first quarter filings showed. Beyond that, the campaign spent $11,000 for photography, $27,000 for a parking lot operator in Washington, $24,723 to Carey International for limousines and $460,000 to Flight Options for charter planes.

There were also reports of Mr. McCain's aides benefiting by their association with the campaign, exacerbating long-standing tensions between Mr. Weaver and Mr. Davis. The campaign retained a company co-owned by Mr. Davis, 3eDC, to run its Web site, and Mr. Weaver went to Mr. Davis and tried to stop the arrangement, aides said. The campaign owed the company $175,802 at the end of the first quarter, according to its filings.

Mr. Weaver's fiancée, Angela Hession, was a strategist for Mr. McCain; at one point she was being paid $1,000 a month, but - like many other advisers since the financial problems overtook the campaign - began working without pay. She was among the staff members who left on Tuesday.

Jim Rutenberg, Jeff Zeleny and Michael Cooper contributed reporting.

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The Way We Live Now: The Right to Spend

By JEFFREY ROSEN
New York Times Magazine
July 8, 2007

American democracy has always been haunted by the specter of concentrated wealth. How can the principle of one man, one vote be honored when the accumulation of dollars translates so readily into the accumulation of political influence? If all citizens enjoy the equal right to participate in politics with their wallets, is it possible to hold a fair election? In today's proudly money-mad, winner-take-all economy, these questions are as urgent as ever. The spending patterns of the very rich help form our consumer habits and fill the pages of our magazines; it's little wonder that they shape our politics as well. The ongoing presidential campaign often seems to be a (somewhat) glorified competition for cash, and when a billionaire contemplates a candidacy, the entire process comes to a halt.

The McCain-Feingold act, passed in 2002, was meant to do something about this; it was meant to even the balance between democracy and money. By limiting the donation of unregulated "soft" money to political parties and banning "issue ads" in the buildup to an election, it made it harder for a small number of wealthy donors to dominate the political process. Now, however, the Supreme Court has used the First Amendment to throw out one part of the law and threatened to discard the rest. In this new gilded age, are we doomed to return to gilded-age politics?

Certainly, the end of McCain-Feingold would have consequences. The ban on soft money addressed a serious political problem about wealth and political access: more than half of the $500 million in soft money raised in 2000 came from only 800 donors, each contributing a minimum of $120,000. Fully 435 of them were corporations or unions, and the rest were among the wealthiest 1 percent of individual citizens. Under McCain-Feingold, the influence of those donors has been reduced. Despite the rise of so-called 527 organizations to exploit loopholes in the law, the ban on corporate soft-money contributions to political parties has had some success. Candidates are relieved that they do not have to help solicit corporate soft money, as they did during the fund-raising scandals of the go-go '90s, and corporations are relieved at not being shaken down to contribute to both parties to hedge their bets. More important, banning soft money has forced the parties and candidates to learn to raise money from individuals who are not among the super-rich, and the Internet has allowed them to do so in cost-effective ways. In the first half of 2007, Barack Obama received contributions from more than 250,000 individuals while raising millions over the Internet.

But the Roberts Court may not allow the ban on soft money to stand for long. Although four liberal justices, following the thinking of Stephen Breyer, have concluded that campaign-finance laws serve the purposes of the First Amendment by enhancing public confidence in democracy and equalizing political participation, four conservative justices have reached the opposite conclusion on the grounds that giving money is a form of speech. And Chief Justice Roberts may well join them in a future case. So let's imagine that the court votes before long to strike down the ban on soft money, gutting what remains of McCain-Feingold. What would American politics look like then?

In some ways, it would look a lot like American politics before the 1970s. Corporations would give freely to state and national parties. The effects of wealth would once more be magnified as the size of donations ballooned. But not all of the effects of radical deregulation would be negative. Mega-rich candidates would face better-financed rivals and thus inspire less fear. And, having discovered the virtues of Internet fund-raising, candidates are unlikely to ignore small donors, as they did in the '90s.

The most significant result of a decision to strike down virtually all campaign-finance regulations would be to dash reformers' hopes for more comprehensive reform - hope, that is, for the sort of policies that proponents of equal access in politics believe would actually work. In Belgium, for example, parties receive 85 percent of their revenue from the government, and spending is strictly restricted during the three months before an election. Such an approach, however, would be hard to reconcile with Americans' dislike of subsidizing politicians - or with our First Amendment tradition, whether interpreted by the Warren Court or the Roberts Court.

The larger question, of course, is whether it's useful for the country to have yet another polarized debate about whether giving money is free speech. The truth is that few people are absolutists on the question. No less an egalitarian than the political theorist Michael Walzer, who supports a "radical ban on private fund-raising," has suggested that candidates should at least be allowed to hold bake sales. And free-speech conservatives, who care more about liberty than equality in the political process, haven't yet questioned the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates, which dates back to the Progressive era. Since 1976, the Supreme Court has tried to finesse this debate. It has insisted that Congress can regulate contributions to candidates more extensively than expenditures by candidates, because contributions are more likely to lead to quid pro quo corruption and are less central to free expression. But now the court seems on the verge of throwing out this nuanced position and announcing that because money is almost always speech, it can almost never be regulated. That's a plausible vision of the First Amendment, but whether it will produce a political system that inspires confidence among the American people remains to be seen.

Jeffrey Rosen, a frequent contributor, is the author most recently of "The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America."

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By ROBIN TONER New York Times July 6, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 5 - There is no better measure of the power of the health care issue than this: Sixteen months before Election Day, presidential candidates in both parties are promising to overhaul the system and cover more -- if not all -- of the 44.8 million people without insurance.

Their approaches are very different, reflecting longstanding divisions between the parties on the role of government versus the private market in addressing the affordability and availability of health insurance. Republicans, by and large, promise to expand coverage by using a variety of tax incentives to empower consumers to buy it themselves, from private insurers. Conservatives warn, repeatedly, of Democrats edging toward the slippery slope of "government-controlled health insurance," as former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York puts it, and promote the innovation and choice offered by private insurers.

The major Democratic candidates propose strengthening the private-employer-based system, through which most working families get their coverage. But many Democrats also see a strong role for government, including, in some plans, new requirements that individuals obtain insurance and that employers provide it, along with substantial new government spending to subsidize coverage for people who cannot afford it.

Still, while they argue over solutions, both parties acknowledge the problems and their political urgency. Republicans, whose primaries usually turn on other issues, often wait until the general election to roll out detailed health plans; this time they are plunging into the debate far earlier. Democrats are competing furiously among themselves over who has the bigger, better plan to control costs and to approach universal coverage, a striking change from the party's wariness on the issue a decade ago after the collapse of the Clintons' health care initiative.

And both parties are closely watching the action in the states as potential blueprints for a centrist compromise, especially in Massachusetts, which just began a major plan intended to require that every individual have insurance.

In short, says Jonathan Gruber, an economist, health expert and Clinton administration veteran, the times are "radically different."

In fact, when Senator Barack Obama of Illinois unveiled a plan intended to cover tens of millions of uninsured Americans, but not requiring coverage for all, some Democrats in rival campaigns argued that he had not gone far enough. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, once vilified as overreaching on health care, is now more often faulted in her party as moving too slowly. Mrs. Clinton's 1994 plan, attacked at the time from the left, right and center, is presented in the new Michael Moore documentary, "Sicko," as a tragic missed opportunity.

This amount of attention, this early, comes in response to the growing anxiety among voters — and much of American business - about the cost of health care. Premiums for family coverage have risen by 87 percent since 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The number of Americans without insurance has grown steadily, to what the Census Bureau estimates as nearly 45 million, from 37 million when the Clintons first confronted the issue.

Businesses say that health costs are a huge liability in their struggles to compete in a global economy, most vividly in the auto industry. And health care is now rated the top domestic issue in some recent polls among Democrats, independents and voters over all. Among Republicans, it was surpassed only by immigration in June, according to the latest Kaiser survey. A Democratic pollster, Geoffrey Garin, says: "There are a bunch of issues that candidates can take a pass on. This is not one of them."

On the Republican side, few candidates have been better prepared to deal with the issue than former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who helped push through that state's health plan with bipartisan support. But Republican primary voters tend to be leery of new government requirements, and, arguably, of Massachusetts as a role model. Mr. Romney, on the campaign trail, talks generally about getting "everybody inside the health care system," through "market reforms" state by state to make private insurance cheaper and more available. But not, he says, "with a government takeover."

Sally Canfield, policy director for the Romney campaign, says that Mr. Romney is proud of his record, but "the Massachusetts plan was crafted for Massachusetts," and that a national plan would be different. For example, aides said he did not support a federal version of the Massachusetts requirement that individuals obtain insurance.

Mr. Romney's rivals are casting themselves as equally committed to improving the health care system, but even more determined to use free-market principles to do so, which they hope will prove them more attuned to the Republican base. Mr. Giuliani plans to produce a major proposal in the next month, aides say, that will elaborate on his commitment to "affordable and portable free-market solutions."

Mr. Giuliani says he wants to give individuals more control over, and responsibility for, health insurance, encouraging them to buy their own coverage on the private market and giving them "a very big tax deduction" to do it. Right now, most Americans under 65 get their coverage through their employers, who have the benefit of significant tax advantages, pooled risk and group rates.

Mr. Giuliani's approach echoes President Bush's call for an "ownership society," which was popular with economic conservatives but widely criticized as putting too much risk on individuals. "Every one of the Democrats wants government-mandated health insurance," Mr. Giuliani said recently. "We have to go in exactly the opposite direction."

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, will also outline a health care plan this summer, aides said. They said it would be intended to make coverage "affordable and available," using tax credits and the expansion of programs like the State Children's Health Insurance Program, but would include no new mandates on individuals.

Analysts say the Democrats are clearly drawing lessons from the health care battles of 1993-4, when a similar public groundswell for change collapsed in a matter of months. The 1,342-page Clinton plan at that time was bewilderingly bureaucratic and easy for opponents to characterize as something that would actually worsen the status quo for many insured Americans.

This year, the major Democratic proposals - including Mr. Obama's, one from former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and a plan expected from Mrs. Clinton - are arguably ambitious and costly, but do not try the wholesale reinvention of the system, or move explicitly toward the government takeover Republicans so often predict.

"There's not a lot of untested political ideas out there," said Robert Blendon, a professor in health policy at Harvard.

The major Democratic plans announced so far try to cover nearly everyone by shoring up the employer-based system, creating new public insurance options and establishing new health insurance purchasing pools that offer a variety of private and public plans to people who cannot get coverage through work. People who could not afford coverage would get subsidies. Given those supports, some Democrats (including Mr. Edwards and -- it is widely expected but not yet announced -- Mrs. Clinton) back the idea of requiring every individual to obtain insurance.

Mr. Edwards and Mr. Obama call for financing their plans with revenue from ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; those cuts are set to expire in 2010.

Diane Rowland, executive vice president of Kaiser, said candidates were responding not only to recent failures, but also to recent successes, notably in Massachusetts and potentially California.

"To get something enacted, you need a lot of people who think they will gain from it," Ms. Rowland said. "It's a new way of talking about health reform, because it shows people with health insurance what they could gain. These proposals are not just about the haves versus the have-nots."

Few have taken that advice more to heart than Mrs. Clinton, who is rolling out her proposals to control costs and improve quality before her ideas for covering the uninsured, which are expected in the next few months. She recently, for example, proposed a "Best Practices Institute" to assess the most effective treatments and procedures.

Another hallmark of this year's plans, in both parties, is a reliance on better health information technology and disease management to hold down costs -- not the more rigorous regulatory structures proposed in 1994, which critics asserted would soon lead to rationing.

By the time Election Day rolls around, polls indicate that the issue will be front and center, setting the stage for another great battle to overhaul the system under the next president. Veterans of the Clinton administration say it all feels familiar.

"If the Democrats win, it will be very hard not to take this issue on," said Mr. Gruber, who is helping to carry out the Massachusetts plan. "It will be as promising as it was in the early 1990s."

Edith. M. Prentiss

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Republicans Trail Democrats in Fund-Raising
By ADAM NAGOURNEY, New York Times
July 4, 2007

DES MOINES, July 3 - Two more Republican presidential candidates disclosed new fund-raising totals on Tuesday that underscored the tough political environment for their party and the big money advantage that the Democrats have built.

Former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who led the Republican field in money raised in the first three months of the year, said donations to his primary campaign had dropped by a third in the second quarter, to $14 million from $20.5 million. Mr. Romney lent his campaign another $6.5 million out of his personal fortune to soften the impact of the decline in donations.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, raised more in the second quarter than he did in the first: $17 million including $2 million that he can use only if he wins the Republican nomination, versus about $15 million. But unlike the first quarter, when his fund-raising operation was just getting up and running, his campaign was fully operational in the second quarter.

And while his performance from April through June put him in first place among Republicans, Mr. Giuliani trailed substantially behind the record sums raised by two Democrats, Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Mr. Obama raised a total of $32.5 million in the second quarter, and Mrs. Clinton about $27 million.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani released the figures a day after Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, reported that he raised less money in the second quarter than in the first, and said he would slash the size of his staff and focus his campaign on a few early voting states.

Put together, the results for the three leading Republicans amounted to a stark indication of a gap in enthusiasm and confidence between the two parties, driven in part by President Bush's low approval ratings, the war in Iraq and the failure of any of the Republican candidates to emerge as a clear front-runner, strategists in both parties said.

The top three Democrats, including former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, raised $68.5 million over the past three months, compared with $48.7 million for the top three Republicans, according to the reports. Since the start of the year, the Democrats raised nearly 50 percent more than the Republicans, $144.3 million compared with $101.7 million. That includes money that the candidates can use in the primary and in the general election.

Historically, the second-quarter receipts tend to grow for presidential candidates as donors get more involved and take sides in the race. Aides to the Republican candidates -- as well as Republicans not involved in the race -- said that this year might be an anomaly because the campaign had gotten so intense so early, but they nonetheless expressed deep concern at the reports and what it said about the health of their party.

"It's a combination of the president's historically low approval rating and the overall state of affairs in Washington that is demoralizing Republicans and energizing Democrats," said Scott Reed, who managed the 1996 Republican presidential campaign of Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. "It doesn't mean it'll make it all the way to 2008 Election Day, but that sure is the climate we are in now."

Charles Black, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain, suggested that part of what was happening was that some donors were holding back to see if another Republican -- in particular, former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee -- would enter the race, as Mr. Thompson is expected to do formally in the next few weeks.

"The general mood is bad throughout the party," Mr. Black said. "There are some donors that are used to giving money all the time, and there are a whole bunch of people who are more casual donors who need to be fired up. The Democrats on the other hand are totally fired up, intensely fired up against the president."

Beyond the symbolism, the divergence in the fund-raising performance of the two parties -- which also extends to the Congressional campaigns, where Democrats have also built a big cash advantage -- is likely to influence basic strategic decisions by Republicans on matters like when to begin television advertising and where to compete.

In an early example of this, several Republicans said it was now clear that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. McCain chose to skip the straw poll in Iowa -- a high-profile nonbinding vote by party activists in which Mr. Romney is investing heavily -- because it could easily cost each campaign $3 million to compete.

Aides to Mr. McCain, offering new details of his campaign's financial woes on Tuesday, said that the shortfall had forced them to dismiss 80 members of a staff of 120, putting him at a marked disadvantage in states like Iowa, where he had hoped for an early victory in the caucuses to propel him to the nomination.

Mr. McCain's staff in Iowa has been cut in half to eight, compared with a staff of 16 in the state for Mr. Romney. Mr. McCain's situation here has been aggravated by what his associates described as a clash between Mr. McCain's national and Iowa headquarters that resulted in his state director, Matt Strawn, leaving the campaign.

One McCain aide, requesting anonymity in exchange for discussing the dispute, said that some of the people who had left the Iowa headquarters had done so in support of Mr. Strawn, and that the campaign was hoping to expand the staff here should money start coming in. Mr. Strawn declined to comment.

Mr. McCain's aides said Tuesday that the senator was shutting down his Michigan state office. Given his financial difficulties, the aides said that Mr. McCain was almost certain to accept public money for his campaign, despite the sharp restrictions it would place on his spending in the primary and in the months leading up to the general election, as a way to be able to afford television advertising early this year. They said that would guarantee an infusion of about $6 million, based on what he has raised so far, and perhaps a total of $15 million by the time the caucuses start here in January.

Mr. McCain's advisers said they were hoping he would, over the next six months, be able to raise $25 million, matching what he raised in the first half of the year. They acknowledged, though, that that would be difficult because donors would be reluctant to write checks to a campaign that appears to be in crisis.

"I wouldn't be straight with you if I didn't say there would be a significant initial drop-off from this," said John Weaver, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain. "But our finance people are confident that if we show the kind of movement that we think we can, that we'll get back on track."

Some of the Democratic advantage appears to stem from the success the party's candidates have had in tapping into grass-roots enthusiasm for dislodging the Republicans from the White House. Mr. Obama's campaign has reported receiving donations from more than 258,000 contributors this year and raising $10 million online in the second quarter. More than 80,000 donors contributed to the Romney campaign in the second quarter, 50,000 of them for the first time; in the first quarter, 32,000 people contributed to his campaign.

For years, Republicans prided themselves on having a large base of individual donors while Democrats relied to a large degree on unregulated soft money donations that have now been banned. So far in this cycle, Democrats appear to be building vast databases of new individual donors who could be called on by the party for years to come.

Mr. McCain reported Tuesday that he had just $2 million in the bank to cover the operations of his campaign; Mr. Giuliani's campaign said he had nine times as much, or $18 million, and no debt. Mr. Romney has about $12 million in cash on hand for use in the primary.

Mr. McCain's aides declined to say what outstanding debt he would report. Mr. Romney's decision to again invest his own money into the campaign -- he lent it $2.35 million in the first quarter -- was clearly intended to signal he was prepared to use his wealth to offset the bad fund-raising environment his party finds itself in. Mr. Romney has been plowing through his money rapidly, pouring much of it into an expensive early advertising campaign focused on Iowa and New Hampshire that has helped him to leads in recent polls there.

David D. Kirkpatrick, Michael Luo and Marc Santora contributed reporting.

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June 27, 2007
New York Times Editorial
New York's Ultra-Open Primary

For far too long, New York's presidential primaries have been an insider's business, with political bosses from both parties deciding whose names went on the ballot. As recently as 2000, it took a lot of arm-wrestling and public outrage for Republicans to even include Senator John McCain, a strong contender that year.

This time, the Republicans in New York should be congratulated for planning a truly open primary. If Governor Eliot Spitzer signs a bill that sets the rules for both parties' primaries, a G.O.P. contender who wants to be considered by New York's voters would only need the state board of elections to determine that he or she is "recognized according to reports in the national or state news media."

That makes a lot of sense no contortions, no signatures, no expensive election lawyers. But the idea is revolutionary to some party insiders who are said to be worrying that any declared candidate who has spent a few minutes on Oprah's couch will be able to claim a place on the ballot. For voters, however, more choices are always better.

Democratic candidates for the White House will have to work somewhat harder to see their names on next year's presidential primary ballot in the delegate-rich state of New York. Each contender will need 5,000 valid signatures of party voters.

But if Democratic candidates have a little more trouble making it on to the ballot, they are compensated by having a better chance of getting a few delegates for their trouble. Democratic delegates are awarded proportionally according to the percentage of the vote each candidate receives. New York Republicans still assign their delegates a less-democratic way - winner take all.

Too bad the two parties could not share their better instincts. New York's presidential primary on February 5 could then be as open as the Republicans want it and as good about dividing up the delegates as the Democrats.

Edith. M. Prentiss

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