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 PATRICK HEALY, January 4, 2008

DES MOINES - The Democratic and Republican establishments and their presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Governor Mitt Romney, were brought low in Iowa on Thursday night, shaken seriously by two national newcomers who won decisively on messages of insurgency and change.

The victors in Iowa, Senator Barack Obama for the Democrats and former Governor Mike Huckabee for the Republicans, are as far from the status quo as possible. One is the son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother who entered the United States Senate just three years ago. The other is a former Baptist minister who was best known until recently for losing over 100 pounds and taking on the issue of childhood obesity.

The two winners burst the aura of strength and confidence that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Romney had tried to cultivate for months, and left both parties suddenly without a clear path to their nominating conventions, let alone November.

Mrs. Clinton's loss was especially glaring. Her central strategy for much of 2007 was to appear as the inevitable nominee, but Iowans shredded that notion. She tried in recent weeks to convince voters that another Clinton administration could be an agent of change, but Iowans clearly did not buy it.

Without question, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Romney have the money, the campaign apparatus and the legions of supporters to stay in the hunt for the nomination and to right their campaigns. But Mrs. Clinton's lackluster finish raises anew questions about her electability, and whether independent voters - twice as many of whom backed Mr. Obama over her - will ever come around to Mrs. Clinton.

And Mr. Romney, who outspent Mr. Huckabee 6 to 1 in television advertising in Iowa, now faces a far more crowded field of rivals in the New Hampshire primary who are eager to tear into his wounded candidacy

All the candidates now move to that primary on Tuesday, which Mrs. Clinton had tried to make a fire wall for her campaign, as it was for her husband's presidential candidacy in 1992, when he finished strongly in second place.

"If Hillary doesn't stop Obama in New Hampshire, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee," said Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant who was John Kerry's senior strategist in 2004.

Clinton advisers declined to say Thursday night if she would now pursue a different strategy against Mr. Obama. But a shift seems likely now that Mrs. Clinton's multilayered, sometimes contradictory message - offering an experienced hand, for example, but also running as a candidate who could bring change - fell flat in this first contest.

"We built a campaign for the long haul - we feel very good about our operation in New Hampshire, and polling has us up," said Howard Wolfson, a Clinton spokesman. The danger for Mrs. Clinton, of course, is that those polls may not hold after the outcome in Iowa.

Further undercutting Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama peeled away broad swaths of women from her base of support, and the political potency of baby boomers fell apart in Iowa. Half of the Democrats under 45 said their first choice was Mr. Obama, according to a poll by Edison/Mitofsky of voters entering caucus sites.

At the same time, it was also historic that so many Iowa Democrats voted for an African-American man and a woman. For Mr. Obama, especially, the ratification of his candidacy by Democrats and independents in a predominantly white and rural state suggests that he may be able to build a broad and multiracial coalition in his bid for the White House.

The nomination fights will only intensify from now, though the steel that Mr. Huckabee will deploy in the battle is unclear. He seemed to come out of nowhere - a former governor who was so little known among Republicans that many of them could not even name the state he once led (Arkansas) - and turned from asterisk-status to giant-slayer in spite of a paltry political organization, slim dollars and a final week marked by gaffes.

As when Pat Robertson made a surprise second-place showing in the Iowa caucuses in 1988, Mr. Huckabee enjoyed substantial political support from evangelical Christians and took advantage of a muddled Republican presidential field to gain his 11th-hour victory.

For Mr. Romney, of Massachusetts, his loss will register as a deep blow to his candidacy - a failure bound to worry establishment Republicans and wealthy donors who have viewed him as their man. It will also energize and inspire Republicans who are backing Senator John McCain in the New Hampshire primary.

Mr. Romney's drive to the Republican nomination was supposed to begin with him looking formidable and confident coming out of Iowa. Mr. Romney, his wife and his sons planted themselves here for months and poured in money, including millions of his own; he now heads to New Hampshire clearly wounded and a target for even more rivals, like Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Senator Fred Thompson, and Mr. McCain, of Arizona.

Mr. Huckabee, a folksy and fairly plain-speaking politician with a sense of humor that many Iowans enjoyed, appealed to Republican caucusgoers who put a premium on a candidate's Christian faith, and who were deeply wary about seeing a Mormon, Mr. Romney, become president.

But Mr. Huckabee also struck many populist themes that have deep appeal to middle-class Iowans and farmers, promising to tailor his economic priorities to their needs and taking tough stands on a key issue here, immigration.

But Iowa voters are not New Hampshire voters, as Mr. Huckabee and his advisers are well aware. Devoutly religious voters do not exist in nearly the same numbers in the Granite State. And the fervent anti-tax sentiment among Republicans there is likely to clash with Mr. Huckabee's record of raising taxes in Arkansas.

"If Huckabee scares the Republican establishment and makes the party fear losing, you could see a rapid rallying around a second candidate," said Nelson Warfield, a Republican consultant not working for any candidate. Still, he said, "Nothing makes a man look like a leader more than a winner."

Mr. Robertson's Iowa victory in 1988 - when he came in second to Bob Dole and edged out the ultimate nominee, George H. W. Bush - gave him little bounce in New Hampshire, given the lack of a fervent evangelical base. "I'm going to be the nominee," Mr. Robertson said right after his victory, crediting God in particular with his success. But his fortunes faded after a drubbing soon after in New Hampshire.

Mr. Huckabee talked about God on the Iowa campaign trail, as well, but on Thursday night there was one other word that he - as well as Mr. Obama, Mr. Romney, Mrs. Clinton, former Senator John Edwards - discussed especially and emphatically: "change."

As Mr. Edwards put it, "the status quo lost and change won" in the caucuses. Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee repeated the words incessantly in their victory speeches, brandishing the word as a talisman that overcame Mrs. Clinton's decades of experience and Mr. Romney's leadership bona fides. Yet change was not only the political message; change was the two men themselves.

Marjorie Connelly contributed reporting.

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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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October 12, 2007
New York Times
Editorial

What, Me Worry?

If anybody had a doubt about Republicans' detachment from the economic reality of most Americans, Fred Thompson, the former United States senator, set them straight as he opened Tuesday's Republican presidential debate: the economy, he declared, "is rosy."

He wasn't the only one in rose-colored denial or out of touch. Despite entreaties from their hosts, all the leading Republican candidates neatly overlooked Americans' fear of recession and the fallout from the meltdown in the housing market.

Watching the debate, it felt as if these candidates, or at least the front-runners, were living in an alternate universe. It's one where nothing but taxes can stop the ever upward growth of the American economy and where a problem hasn't been invented - millions of uninsured, America's dependency on Middle Eastern oil - that can't be dealt with through tax cuts, slashing government spending and regular, stiff doses of deregulation.

Forget a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade regime for carbon emissions - not that anybody mentioned global warming as a big problem. Forget expensive incentives to develop alternative energy sources. With everybody calling for lower taxes, Republicans were left with no way to address any problem except exhorting the private industry to show its resourcefulness.

The best brawl was over who had done more harm to his constituents: Rudolph Giuliani, who according to Mitt Romney increased spending by 2.8 percent a year when he was mayor of New York City, or Mr. Romney, who according to Mr. Giuliani raised taxes by 11 percent per capita when he was governor of Massachusetts.

All this bowing before the tax-slashing idol could be understood as a matter of political survival. But the economic arguments are nonsense, none more so than the claim - trumpeted by Mr. Giuliani and a revered tenet of his party - that lower tax rates will inevitably generate more tax revenues. That theory has been tested and failed, leading to enormous deficits during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Two years ago, the Congressional Budget Office published an analysis of the effect of a tax cut on economic growth and tax revenues. It found that even under the rosiest of assumptions, cutting taxes led, inevitably, to lower revenues and a bigger deficit. But perhaps those assumptions were not rosy enough for the Republican presidential candidates.

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August 13, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
PAUL KRUGMAN

Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your father's political campaign.

Last week, at one of Mitt Romney's "Ask Mitt" forums, a woman in the audience asked Mr. Romney whether any of his five sons are serving in the military and, if not, when they plan to enlist.

The candidate replied with a rambling attempt to change the subject, but near the end he let his real feelings slip. "It's remarkable how we can show our support for our nation," he said, "and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I'd be a great president."

Wow. The important point isn't the fact that Mr. Romney's sons aren't in uniform — although it is striking just how few of those who claim to believe that we're engaged in a struggle for our very existence think that they themselves should be called on to make any sacrifices. The point is, instead, that Mr. Romney apparently considers helping him get elected an act of service comparable to putting your life on the line in Iraq.

Yet the week's prize for most self-centered remark by a serious presidential contender goes not to Mr. Romney, but to his principal rival for the G.O.P. nomination.

Rudy Giuliani has lately been getting some long-overdue criticism for his missteps both before and after 9/11. For example, The Village Voice reports that he insisted that the city's emergency command center — which included a personal suite with its own elevator that he visited "often, even on weekends, bringing his girlfriend Judi Nathan there long before the relationship surfaced" — be within walking distance of City Hall. This led to the disastrous decision to locate the center in the World Trade Center, an obvious potential terrorist target.

At the same time, Mr. Giuliani is being attacked for his failure to take adequate precautions to protect those who worked on the cleanup at ground zero from the hazards at the site. Many workers have since been sickened by the dust and toxic materials.

For a politician whose entire campaign is based on the myth of his leadership that fateful day — as The Onion put it, Mr. Giuliani is running for "president of 9/11" — anything that challenges his personal legend is a big problem. So here's what Mr. Giuliani said last week in response: "I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them."

Real ground zero workers, who were digging through the toxic rubble while Mr. Giuliani held photo ops, were understandably outraged. So the next day Mr. Giuliani tried to recover, claiming that "what I was trying to say yesterday is that I empathize with them because I feel like I have that same risk." But thanks to the wonders of YouTube, we can all watch Mr. Giuliani's actual demeanor as he delivered the original remarks. Empathy had nothing to do with it.

What's striking about these unintentional moments of self-revelation is how much Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani sound like the current occupant of the White House.

It has long been clear that President Bush doesn't feel other people's pain. His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San Antonio when visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the severely wounded: "As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch."

What's now clear is that the two men most likely to end up as the G.O.P. presidential nominee are cut from the same cloth.

This probably isn't a coincidence. Arguably, the current state of the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of getting nominated.

To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy — and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the G.O.P. base, however, you have to say very stupid things, like Mr. Romney's declaration that we should "double Guantanamo," or Mr. Giuliani's dismissal of the idea that raising taxes is sometimes necessary to pay for things like repairing bridges as a "Democratic, liberal assumption."

So the G.O.P. field is dominated by smart men willing to play dumb to further their personal ambitions. We shouldn't be surprised, then, to learn that these men are monstrously self-centered.

All of which leaves us with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?

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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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