Wise Guys

As of this moment, this election is shaping up as a thorough beating for the G.O.P. at the presidential and Congressional levels.

The good news for the Republicans, if they are defeated comprehensively this year, is that it will lead to a much-needed overhaul of the party.

The bad news: They could be out in the wilderness for a while. When the G.O.P. lost the House in 1954, for example, it took 40 years for them to win back the chamber—and the basic question of which faces and which issues would define a post-Bush (and post-McCain) Republican Party figures to prompt protracted, and probably contentious, soul-searching within the party.  read more »

This is what can happen when you gamble in politics. Last Wednesday, John McCain “suspended” his campaign – an action that sounded a lot more substantial than it actually was – to return to Washington and insert himself into the Congressional debate over a financial rescue package.

The results, for Mr. McCain and (if most financial experts are to be believed) for the economy, have been ghastly, culminating in the House’s stunning rejection of a compromise plan on Monday, which sent the Dow plummeting and Mr. McCain scrambling to save face.

It’s not that Mr. McCain’s impulse to do something “dramatic” was necessarily wrong.  read more »

Especially in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, it’s easy to overstate the significance of any given event on the presidential campaign trail—except when it comes to televised debates.  read more »

The chaos on Wall Street that exploded over the weekend – and caused to Dow to drop by more than 500 points on Monday alone – is, obviously, bad news for just about everyone. But strictly in terms of the looming election, now fewer than 50 days away, the timing may be something of a gift to Barack Obama and the Democrats, who have watched in bafflement since late August as their once-dominant political position has eroded.

Long before this week, the economy had already emerged as the top issue – by far – on the minds of voters. Now, Americans will be inundated with stories about the potentially devastating fallout from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the perilous footing of A.  read more »

In theory, Charlie Gibson has the power to expose Sarah Palin as the fantastically uninformed foreign policy thinker that most Democrats—and, if primed with a healthy dose of truth serum, probably more than a few Republicans—believe her to be.

The ABC newsman, who scored the first of what will surely be scant few major media sit-downs with John McCain’s running mate, could very easily do what a mischievous Boston television reporter did to George W. Bush in 1999 and spring a pop quiz on the unseasoned politician, measuring her knowledge (or lack thereof) of some elementary facts about global hotspots.

There’s no shortage of possible questions that could be asked, and while the ethics and relevancy of playing gotcha would be debated endlessly after the fact, the sight of Mrs.  read more »

ST. PAUL—Word that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant was easily the biggest bit of non-Gustav-related news to emerge from the opening day of the Republican convention.

It’s doubtful that this revelation will end up hurting the G.O.P. ticket in the fall—Ms. Palin’s statement made it clear that her daughter plans to keep the child and marry the father, the least politically explosive denouement for such a dicey situation—but it nonetheless seems to confirm a widespread suspicion: Ms. Palin was not thoroughly vetted by John McCain’s team.

Otherwise, this news would not be leaking on the convention’s opening day.  read more »

Ideally, a political convention serves to introduce or reintroduce the public to a party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees in a way that produces a meaningful “bounce” in the polls. It doesn’t always work. Here’s a brief summary of the Democratic nominations of the modern era, ranked (from best to worst) in terms of how effective they were in positioning the party for victory in the fall.

 

1992: It’s unlikely that any future convention for either party will ever be as successful as the Democrats’ 1992 gathering. Bill Clinton came to New York a battered presumptive nominee, lucky to be running ahead of Ross Perot (but still well behind George H.  read more »

The satirist Ambrose Bierce memorably described war as God’s way of teaching geography. And so when Russian tanks rolled first into the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia over the weekend and then into Georgia proper, it marked the first time many Americans had heard anything at all about the people, places and politics of this particular corner of the Caucasus.

For now, the conflict between Russia and Georgia, a country with five million fewer residents than the U.S. state of the same name, isn’t likely to play a major, direct role in the race between Barack Obama and John McCain. Few Americans live in the area (and those who do are being evacuated as this is being written), no American troops are on the ground, and there are no significant ethnic or emotional bonds between most U.  read more »

It’s long been obvious that Bill Clinton believes he was wronged in this year’s Democratic primary campaign, his words and actions deliberately twisted and distorted by his enemies and their accomplices in the press to turn him into someone and something he is not.

Two months after his wife formally conceded to Barack Obama, the former president is still pouting in full public view. In an interview with ABC News last weekend, he was noticeably stinting in his praise of the presumptive Democratic nominee while making it clear that he has some primary-related grievances to air just as soon as this election is over.  read more »

Shortly after ten o’clock on the night of Thursday, August 28, tens of millions of Americans will be seated in front of their television screens, victims of the broadcast networks’ blanket coverage of the final hour of the final night of the Democratic National Convention.

And the Obama campaign, which has moved that evening’s proceedings from a cozy N.B.A. arena to a giant N.F.L. stadium, thinks it knows how every broadcast outlet will cover the ten o’clock hour: overhead shorts of the jam-packed, 80,000-seat venue, perhaps a clip or two of John F. Kennedy (who accepted his party’s 1960 nomination at the massive Los Angeles Coliseum), and numerous references to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which just so happens to have been delivered on another August 28, back in 1963.  read more »

Nuri al-Maliki was once dismissed as a powerless politician with a fleeting grip on his office. Now, though, the Iraqi prime minister is apparently strong enough to change the fundamental terms of the war debate in the U.S. presidential election in a way that dramatically improves Barack Obama’s standing on the issue.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Maliki began hinting publicly that he’d favor some kind of timeline for the departure of American troops in Iraq. Then last weekend he went further – much further – telling Der Spiegel that he wanted the Americans out “as soon as possible” and that Obama’s call for a 16-month phased redeployment of U.  read more »

Barack Obama is like any candidate for president in that he’s opted for the politically expedient at the expense of a higher principle – most notably when he thumbed his nose at the same public financing system that he’d long championed. Not surprisingly, his supporters shrugged that one off and echoed their candidate’s rationalizations. Better to implement real reform as president than to stand on principle and lose an election, he and they both reasoned.

That logic also explains why so many of his supporters on the left have remained silent, save for some grumbling among themselves that occasionally spills into the blogosphere, while Mr.  read more »

If Barack Obama does defeat John McCain this fall, Democrats – who are all but certain to bolster their narrow House and Senate majorities no matter who wins the presidential race – will experience a type of euphoria they haven’t felt in 16 years, when Bill Clinton’s election last gave their party simultaneous control of the White House and Congress.

And surely you remember how that worked out for them. Yes, Mr. Clinton won broad popularity and a second term in 1996, but his presidency brought his party to its weakest point in decades. Democrats were swept out of power in the Senate and House in 1994 and by the time Mr.  read more »

Many of the candidates most frequently linked to Barack Obama’s running-mate search are presumably interested in the vice presidency for the leg up it provides for a future White House campaign. But some of the other names making the rounds suggest something quite different: the Dick Cheney model.

Mr. Cheney is only the second elected vice president since the end of World War II to pass on waging a campaign of his own for the top spot. And he’s the first to do so voluntarily: Spiro T. Agnew fully intended to run in 1976, but a no-contest plea in late 1973 to tax evasion and money laundering charges – related to bribes he took while serving as Maryland’s governor in the late '60s – took him out of the picture.  read more »

On a Sunday afternoon 21 Junes ago, James Worthy dove for an impossible loose ball and somehow swatted it to a streaking Magic Johnson, whose early third quarter lay-up ignited the crowd and signaled a decisive shift in momentum. From there, the home-standing Lakers, who had trailed the Celtics by five at halftime, breezed to a 106-93 victory that sealed their 10th N.B.A. championship.

In Los Angeles, there was celebration, and three thousand miles east in Boston, where “Beat L.A.!” served in the 1980’s as the unofficial motto that “Yankees suck!” became earlier this decade, there was dejection.

But not in all of Boston. In the city’s black neighborhoods, whose children had been pelted by rocks just 12 years earlier when court-ordered busing had transported them to white South Boston, the Lakers tended to be treated like the home team. Boston, after all, was the town that Bill Russell once labeled “a flea market of racism.”  read more »

It was probably inevitable that the first national campaign featuring a black man and a white woman as its main combatants would produce this kind of fault line.

From one side come the impassioned contentions of Hillary Clinton’s supporters that their candidate has been thwarted by sexism, their ardor only intensifying as Mrs. Clinton’s hopes flicker out. On the other side, Barack Obama’s partisans sniff at this: The real scandal of this campaign, they insist, has been the Clinton forces’ sinister insinuation of race into the public discourse.  read more »

If anyone ought to be skeptical about the notion that Barack Obama’s fall prospects have been damaged by the primary process, it’s the Clintons.

With Mr. Obama in mathematical control of the Democratic race (despite West Virginia), Hillary Clinton’s supporters have fallen back on the argument that Mr. Obama’s chances have been harmed, especially among those much-discussed “white working-class voters,” for the coming contest against John McCain.

It’s worth noting, though, that Bill Clinton himself had to overcome a very similar assertion—that he had emerged from primary season as damaged goods—on his way to the White House in 1992.  read more »

With John McCain as their candidate, Republicans are making the best of a bad political situation. But even with his considerable personal appeal and maverick image, there are fresh signs that the country’s fatigue with the G.O.P. label will be too much even for Mr. McCain to overcome this fall.

The latest evidence is a special election last Saturday for a House seat in the Baton Rouge area in which, for the third time in as many months, a normally reliable Republican Congressional district has opted for the Democratic candidate in a special election.

In isolation, all three results could be explained away. In Louisiana’s 6th District, where conservative Democrat Don Cazayoux was elected last weekend by the same voters who handed George W. Bush 59 percent of the vote in 2004, the result could be chalked up to the considerable personal liabilities of the Republican nominee, a polarizing perennial candidate who has run multiple losing campaigns under both party banners since the late 1970s.

Similarly, Democrat Travis Childers, who led the field last month in the preliminary special election to fill Mississippi’s 1st District seat (finishing inches short of the simple majority that would have obviated a runoff), could be said to have benefited mainly from geography: He hails from the heart of the district, while his Republican foe is the mayor of a town that many Mississippians see as practically an extension of Memphis.

And the victory of Democrat Bill Foster in the 14th District of Illinois, where former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s resignation necessitated a March special election, could also be framed as a referendum on the lack of appeal of the G.O.P. nominee, who entered with three losing statewide campaigns under his belt.

But the pattern is hard to ignore. Each of these districts is staunchly Republican, and each voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Bush in ’04. (At 11 points, Mr. Bush’s margin in Illinois’ 14th District was the closest of the bunch.) That the Democrats have now claimed two of them—with a third pending in a runoff in Mississippi—in the same year is powerful evidence that association with the G.O.P. is as toxic to a candidate’s political health now as it was in 2006.

If there is any good news here for Mr. McCain, it is that he’s not running for the House or Senate this year. Because of the nature of the office they are seeking and the lack of media coverage (particularly in House contests), it is much tougher for candidates for these offices to break free of their party labels and to force voters to consider them as individuals. Personality counts for almost nothing in Congressional races, leaving candidates at the mercy of partisan trends and, perhaps, the coattails effect from the top of the ballot.

At the Congressional level, then, the recent special-election results portend disaster for the Republicans this year. Already, the party has been hit with a spate of retirements in marginal House districts, and G.O.P. Senate retirements have Democrats poised to pick up seats in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico. And strong recruitment by Democrats and a massive fund-raising advantage have darkened the prospects of numerous G.O.P. House and Senate incumbents. Add to this a powerful Democratic tide, and 2008 could yield Congressional majorities for the Democrats that can withstand several down cycles.

But unlike the average Republican House candidate, Mr. McCain will at least have an opportunity to make most Americans overlook the “R” after his name. Virtually none of the Republicans who vied with Mr. McCain in the primaries were suited for this task, but Mr. McCain, thanks to his enduring reputation for “straight talk,” is.

At a certain point, though, you wonder: How much is too much for him to overcome? These should be heady days for the McCain campaign. Their candidate wrapped up the G.O.P. nomination more easily than anyone could have predicted, and unity within the party has not been as elusive as many forecasted. Meanwhile, the Democrats are locked in a primary that just won’t end. The likely nominee, Barack Obama, has been bloodied, and supporters of the likely loser, Hillary Clinton, are loudly threatening to stay home—or even to vote for Mr. McCain—should Mr. Obama secure the nomination.

And what has this all been worth for Mr. McCain? Not much—and maybe even less. A New York Times/CBS News poll released this Monday has him running 11 points behind Mr. Obama.

Granted, polls are a dime a dozen this year. But even on his best days, Mr. McCain can’t seem to break out of a statistical tie with Mr. Obama—or Mrs. Clinton, for that matter. Just like those House elections, it’s a trend that can’t be ignored.

There is, obviously, no exact precedent at the presidential level for the nightmare Barack Obama is now living thanks to his former minister’s all-too-eager embrace of the spotlight.

At a basic level, Mr. Obama’s opponents can and will note that the inflammatory rhetoric that has come to define the Rev. Jeremiah Wright—a caricature that the preacher rather willingly reinforced during his smugly defiant National Press Club appearance on Monday—raises questions about Mr. Obama’s judgment and values. Why would he spend 20 years in such a man’s church, presumably listening to variations of what the rest of America heard on Monday?  read more »

It’s apparently a revelation to David Brooks, among other prominent pundits, that the dreaded Republican attack machine plans to reduce Barack Obama to an ugly caricature. It shouldn’t be, of course.

Certainly, Mr. Obama, in the past few weeks, has provided his probable autumn opponents with ample raw material to portray him as only the latest in a long line of culturally out-of-step Democratic presidential nominees. Since this tactic worked so smashingly against John Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, Mr. Obama is now helpless to avoid becoming its next victim—or so the analysis goes.

“When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them,” wrote Mr. Brooks, a onetime Obama enthusiast, in a column titled “How Obama Fell to Earth.”

Add to that indictment Mr. Obama’s status as the “most liberal” member of the Senate (as determined, using questionable criteria, by the National Journal) and—voilà—the G.O.P. has its caricature: Barack Obama, the arrogant liberal elitist.

“A few months ago,” Mr. Brooks concluded, “Mr. Obama was riding his talents. … Now, Democrats are deeply worried their nominee will lose in November.”

Eh, not really. That logic fixates on all of the ammunition that Republicans have at their disposal against Mr. Obama. But it ignores the more basic question of whether voters, upon being exposed to the caricature, will actually buy into it.

In the case of Messrs. Kerry, Gore and Dukakis, the general public largely accepted the gruesome portraits rendered by the Republican Party: Mr. Kerry as the vain flip-flopper; Mr. Gore the serial exaggerator and all-around phony; and Mr. Dukakis the robotic and bloodless technocrat. And why did voters buy into it? Because, however unfairly, the public personalities of each of these men inclined voters to believe the worst about them.

But Mr. Obama, in his life story, in his words and in his general bearing, inspires more voters than not to believe the best about him, a rare and potent trait that almost always separates the winners from the losers in presidential politics. It was the confidence, optimism and all-around sunny sentiment that Ronald Reagan conjured that accounted for his “Teflon” veneer. Was it superficial? Yes. But it insulated him from sharp political attacks that would have sunk 99 out of 100 candidates. Bill Clinton, caricatured by the G.O.P. as a slippery and amoral charlatan in 1992, similarly demonstrated the power of personal appeal.

It’s worth noting that well into the fall of 1980, conventional wisdom had it that Reagan was doomed to be the next George McGovern or Barry Goldwater. He was, it was said, an ideological extremist whose far-out positions would frighten critical chunks of the electorate, thereby clearing the way for the unpopular Jimmy Carter to win a second term.

“Mr. Carter could have been beaten this year had the G.O.P. put electability ahead of ideology,” political scientist Bill Lunch wrote in a September 1980 New York Times Op-Ed. “But having chosen the latter, I believe they are in for a dispiriting repetition of the extremism syndrome.” That assessment from Mr. Lunch, who is now a widely quoted expert on politics in the Pacific Northwest, was standard fare at the time.

It was dead wrong. Reagan, caricatured by Democrats as a trigger-happy dolt and barely concealed racist, won 44 states and nearly 500 electoral votes. He succeeded not because voters suddenly adopted his ideological vision (item by item, they rejected most of it), but because they decided that they liked him. And once they reached that conclusion, the Democrats’ attacks—no matter how valid or painstakingly wrought—bounced right off him. Next Page >

Hillary Clinton and her campaign clearly believe that they stemmed the mighty Obama tide on March 4 with a heaping dose of fear.

The fear that they stirred, best encapsulated in the sure-to-be-immortal “red phone” ad in Texas, supposedly worked on parallel tracks: Some voters simply bought into the notion that Mr. Obama is frighteningly ill-prepared to handle a crisis; others may not have agreed with that but grew fearful that their fellow citizens, in the face of a similar and concerted Republican assault in the fall, would.

And now that they believe they’ve got a hit on their hands, the Clinton forces are taking their strategy national, hoping to scare up some surprise wins in the late primary season and, ultimately, to make those pivotal superdelegates think long and hard before signing off on the nomination of someone as “risky” as Mr. Obama.

Mrs. Clinton proclaimed that she has passed the “commander in chief” threshold and that John McCain “certainly” has done so as well. “You’ll have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she added.

And early this week, her campaign arranged a conference call with a quartet of military and national security heavyweights, with an eye toward turning Mr. Obama’s apparent advantage on the issue of Iraq against him. Specifically, they played up the revelation that Samantha Power, Mr. Obama’s now-former national security adviser, had suggested in an interview that his plan to withdraw troops as president could be subject to change after consultation with military commanders.

“This is going to be a central test of presidential leadership,” Wesley Clark said during the call. “What I have heard from the Obama campaign is a matter of serious concern.”

Mrs. Clinton and her campaign realize that they won’t catch Mr. Obama in pledged delegates during the primary season, even with do-overs in Florida and Michigan. Surpassing him in the cumulative popular vote is a long shot, too.

But winning Pennsylvania and a handful of other states and finishing within a few inches of Mr. Obama in both categories? It’s certainly doable. Then, the challenge for Mrs. Clinton would be convincing a decisive majority of the uncommitted superdelegates to pick her over Mr. Obama.

Her game plan now is to spend the remaining months of the primary season inventing reasons and rationales for superdelegates to snub Mr. Obama and, by extension, the majority of primary voters and caucus-goers. Finishing the primary season on a winning streak and convincing the world that it’s the result of widespread panic at the prospect of an Obama nomination is key to this strategy.

But while the Clinton campaign thinks it has stumbled onto political gold with its attacks on Mr. Obama, history suggests a different phenomenon could be at play, and that we have simply entered the buyer’s-remorse phase of the primary cycle, which begins when a candidate who is new to the national scene first emerges as the likely Democratic nominee.

It’s something with which the Clintons themselves are intimately familiar. In 1992, Bill Clinton seemed to wrap up the Democratic nomination with a thorough rout of Paul Tsongas in the southern-dominated Super Tuesday, and then again a week later in Illinois and Michigan. Tsongas suspended his campaign, leaving the erratic Jerry Brown as Mr. Clinton’s sole remaining foe. Since Mr. Brown trailed by about 800 delegates, his candidacy was given up for dead by the press, which turned its focus to the impending Clinton-George H. W. Bush fall campaign.

And then, out of the blue, Mr. Brown won the Connecticut primary, still one of the most spectacular upsets in the modern primary era. The verdict was deemed a vote of no confidence in the scandal-scarred Mr. Clinton’s general-election viability, and the next primary, in New York, turned into a de facto referendum on whether Mr. Clinton was prepared to lead his party and to lead his country.

“So the question before the party as a whole,” Howell Raines wrote in The New York Times, “has less to do with arithmetic than with the more profound question of whether Democratic and independent voters are going to swallow Mr. Clinton as a viable candidate who can beat President Bush.”

When Mr. Clinton won New York, the issue was considered settled. The key for Mr. Clinton was simply keeping his cool and showing some toughness during the two-week New York campaign. His performance reassured Democrats, who had been inclined to back him all along but who had paused before fully committing themselves.

That’s about the spot Mr. Obama is now in, ahead in the delegate and popular-vote race but under intense assault from his opponent and the media. But as with Mr. Clinton 16 years ago, a majority of Democrats seem to like him more than his competition. Now he has to reassure them that their instincts aren’t wrong. Next Page >

Here we go again.

Four years ago, we were treated to countless news stories about the supposedly dramatic inroads that George W. Bush and the Republican Party were making among Jewish voters, long one of the most bankable constituencies in the Democratic coalition.

In the summer of 2004, MSNBC’s Tom Curry noted the “anxiety” of leading Democrats, who feared “that Bush, due to his removal of Saddam Hussein, his resolve in fighting Islamic terrorists, and his robust support for Israel’s government led by Ariel Sharon, is gaining ground among those Jewish voters who place their highest priority on Israel’s survival.”

Then the actual election was held, and Bush carried an estimated 22 percent of the Jewish vote—a gain of three points from his 2000 showing (entirely consistent with the growth of his overall support from ’00 to ’04).

Now, with Barack Obama positioned to win the fight for the Democratic nomination, we’re hearing the same doomsday prophecies again. Jewish voters, supposedly, will view Mr. Obama with alarm: He failed to “reject” instantly an unsolicited endorsement from Louis Farrakhan (after “repudiating” Farrakhan’s past statements); his church’s minister traveled to Libya with Mr. Farrakhan 24 years ago; and he once suggested that there might actually be some Palestinian people who are suffering. Oh, and don’t forget the Muslim rumors. And the picture.

Jewish voters, then, will then find comfort in the arms of John McCain, who enjoys the loud backing of Joe Lieberman and who will undoubtedly devote much time to reminding voters of all of the terrible things Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said about Israel—and how Mr. Obama has indicated a willingness to meet with the Iranian president. And just like that, Jewish voters will be in play at the presidential level.

“There is anxiety, there is concern,” a top New York Democratic activist told the New York Post’s Fredric Dicker this week.

Don’t count on it.

Only once in the modern era have Jewish voters wandered off the Democratic reservation in substantial numbers, when a majority of them sided against Jimmy Carter in his 1980 reelection effort. (Carter won 45 percent of the Jewish vote, to Ronald Reagan’s 39 percent and independent John Anderson’s 16 percent.)

Otherwise, Jews have been steadfastly loyal to the party, even when (as was the case in ’04) the Republican nominee had been certified as “pro-Israel” by influential Jewish leaders and groups. Even poor Walter Mondale racked up 66 percent of the Jewish vote while barely cracking 40 percent in the national popular vote in 1984.

This suggests that Jews, who make up about 2 percent of the electorate, will invariably give the benefit of the doubt to the Democratic nominee except in the most extraordinary and dramatic of circumstances.

Mr. Carter had become the subject of very exercised and very public condemnation from numerous Jewish leaders after he bluntly challenged Israel’s right to occupy the West Bank and was blamed (however unfairly) for letting Iran’s pro-Western government fall. Mr. Obama, by contrast, has done nothing to rile up such opposition. He has courted rank-and-file Jewish voters with calls to restore the Civil Rights-era ties between the black and Jewish communities and won countless endorsements from prominent Jews. And he has routinely prefaced remarks about Israel with an affirmation of the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

And the proof is in the pudding. The Clinton brand is a powerfully positive one for American Jews as a whole, and yet Mr. Obama actually beat Mrs. Clinton among Jewish voters in Massachusetts (52 to 48 percent) and Connecticut (by 23 points). And he ran practically even with her in California (48-44) and Arizona (51-44). He hasn’t fared this well in every state (He lost Jews by 20 points in Maryland, despite winning overall by 22 points), but the underground (and sometimes not-so-underground) fear-mongering has not prevented him from attracting substantial Jewish support.

In a general election, it is not implausible that Mr. McCain could eat slightly into the Democrats’ traditional share of the Jewish vote. Especially among older Jews, who are much more likely to vote on the basis of which candidate is more “pro-Israel” than the younger generation is, a McCain-led effort to portray Mr. Obama as soft on Iran could bear some fruit. Maybe instead of the 22 percent that Mr. Bush won four years ago, Mr. McCain will grab 28 percent of the Jewish vote.

But it takes an awful lot to prompt mass defections of Jews from the Democratic fold. And Mr. Obama has more than enough working in his favor to keep them there. Next Page >

As devastating as it was to her party, it was—in purely political terms—good news for Hillary Clinton when John Kerry finished inches short of George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

Ms. Clinton had opted to sit out the '04 race, a decision that placed the fate of whatever White House ambition she harbored in Mr. Kerry's hands. A Kerry victory in '04 would have taken the Democratic nomination out of play until 2012, by which time other Democrats—like Vice President John Edwards, for instance—would likely have emerged and eclipsed her.

But Mr. Kerry's defeat ensured an open nomination for 2008, and an enticing one at that, with no incumbent President or Vice President running on the Republican side.

What nobody in the Clinton universe—or the rest of the universe—foresaw was the emergence of Barack Obama as an '08 candidate. And with Mr. Obama now on the verge of besting her for the Democratic nomination, Ms. Clinton may soon find herself in the same spot she was in four years ago: with her Presidential hopes hanging on the demise of the Democratic nominee.

If Obama wins the primary and loses the general, it could enable Ms. Clinton to build a powerful case for a turn of her own at the top of the ticket the next time around. This is rooted in the assumption that an Obama defeat would be the result of the kind of political attacks and G.O.P. campaign tactics that Ms. Clinton has been warning Democrats about. In the wake of an Obama loss, she could say to her fellow Democrats, in effect: You let your emotions cloud your judgment in 2008 and look what it got you; now let me show you how it's done.

But this assumes that Democrats don't end up blaming Ms. Clinton for the defeat. This creates a difficult balancing act for her right now: weighing the value of amplified attacks on Mr. Obama in pursuit of this year's nomination against the damage that the memory of those attacks could do to her '12 hopes.

And her dilemma will be even more wrenching if she wins enough upcoming primaries to last through the entire primary season. Presumably, she would still trail Mr. Obama in pledged delegates and—very likely—the cumulative popular vote. That would mean that forcing an ugly, explosive, and protracted fight over the Michigan and Florida delegations (which would favor her lopsidedly if they were seated at the convention) would represent her only chance of victory. Theoretically, she could pull it off. But if she tried and failed, the hard feelings among Democrats could be permanent.

The last thing that Ms. Clinton needs is to be remembered as another Eugene McCarthy, who failed in his bid for the 1968 Democratic nomination (although he did succeed in knocking President Lyndon Johnson out of the race) and then, sluggishly and grudgingly, offered the most lukewarm of endorsements to Hubert Humphrey. When Richard Nixon beat Humphrey by one point and a few dozen electoral votes, some irate Democrats branded McCarthy a saboteur. He tried to run again in 1972, but was trounced in the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries and promptly dropped out.

If Ms. Clinton resists the temptation to go with scorched-earth tactics and acts as a team player in the fall, she would be well-positioned for a comeback if Mr. Obama fails. Her campaign has made its share of tactical mistakes, but she has demonstrated substantial support amid record-shattering Democratic turnout. If she does fall short this year, it will be more the result of an unforeseen tidal wave of support for her opponent than because Ms. Clinton's own support collapsed. And, in the wake of another G.O.P. victory, her boasts of possessing a unique ability to defeat Republicans would take on new resonance.

Of course, if Mr. Obama gets nominated, it's quite likely that he'll win. And that would probably do in Ms. Clinton's White House hopes. With Mr. Obama presumably seeking re-election in '12, the nomination wouldn't open until 2016, when Ms. Clinton would be pushing 70. And by then, there's a good chance the Democratic Party will have gotten over its fascination with the Clintons—a fixation that has been nursed this decade by the party's defeats in 2000 and 2004.

If next January brings an Obama presidency, Ms. Clinton's best option in the political arena would probably rest in the Senate. Harry Reid turns 70 this year. Ms. Clinton could set her sights on succeeding him and becoming the first female Senate Majority Leader.

But if it's a Republican who takes the oath of office next year, it should mean, among other things, another shot at the White House for Hillary Clinton. Next Page >

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both capable of defeating John McCain in the general election. And, given the depressed state of the Republican Party and the restless mood of the electorate after eight years of George W. Bush, they’d both be favored to do so—even Mrs. Clinton, long derided as the most polarizing politician in the country.

But that hardly makes the electability question moot.

Start with Mrs. Clinton’s status as every G.O.P. strategist’s dream opponent, a figure unmercifully reviled, often unfairly, by the otherwise listless and unmotivated conservative base. The mere presence of Mrs. Clinton’s name on this fall’s ballot would almost certainly serve as a call to action to countless conservatives who, it is becoming clearer each day, feel no other compulsion to work on Mr. McCain’s behalf.

There is also her demonstrated inability to secure significant independent support in this year’s primaries. In making her case within the Democratic Party, her campaign has spun this as a virtue, arguing that her reliance on her party’s core constituency groups proves that she is more of a true Democrat than Mr. Obama.

In reality, it wouldn’t be that tough for Mr. Obama to unite those core Democratic constituencies around him if he were to win the nomination. Crossing over to support Mr. McCain would be unthinkable to most of them, and the idea that they’d stay home en masse to protest Mr. Obama’s nomination is far-fetched. But it is much tougher to envision Mrs. Clinton making inroads with the independents who have rejected her in the primaries, mainly because supporting Mr. McCain—who owes his nomination more to independents than to conservative Republicans—would be a very viable option for many of them.

The simple conclusion from this is that, even though they’d both walk into the ring favored to defeat Mr. McCain, Mrs. Clinton is the riskier bet for Democrats because it’s much easier to concoct a formula—motivated Republican base plus independents breaking to Mr. McCain—that leaves her coming up short.

And the ramifications of a Clinton candidacy could be much deeper than this.

In Senate and House races, the raw ingredients are in place for another banner Democratic year. The party has raked in eye-bulging amounts of cash for its Senate and House campaign committees, while the G.O.P. has flirted with red ink. Republicans in the House are grappling with a devastating string of retirements from members in potentially competitive districts, while the Senate G.O.P. is scrambling to defend 10 more seats than Democrats are. And with Democrats resurgent in Washington, they’ve had little trouble recruiting top-shelf candidates for marquee races.

The prospect of a Democratic president working with a muscular Congressional majority in January 2009 is not at all far-fetched. And that makes the name at the top of the Democratic ticket critical.

One of Mrs. Clinton’s favorite pitches to Democrats is that, no matter how ugly it gets, she (and her husband) always seems to find a way to outsmart the Republicans. There is a lot of truth to this, but the kind of November victory she promises—a contentious, abuse-filled nail-biter in which she peels off those one or two red states that eluded Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004—does not suit her party’s broader imperative.

Consider Nebraska, a state that will almost certainly hand its five electoral votes to Mr. McCain no matter whom the Democrats nominate. It is home to a race for an open Senate seat, one in which Democrats face a very uphill—but not entirely insurmountable—battle.

With Mrs. Clinton as the nominee, it’s nearly impossible to envision the Democrats picking off the Nebraska seat. Conservative turnout would swell, Republican-leaning independents would stay with Mr. McCain and his statewide blowout would trickle down to the Senate race, dooming the Democratic nominee.

But Mr. Obama could yield a different result. The G.O.P. base—judging by everything we’ve seen so far—does not view him with Clinton-like animosity. And, as his success with independents in the primaries has shown, Mr. Obama could make the ticket more attractive to non-Democrats. Is it any wonder that—amid record turnout—he won nearly 70 percent in Nebraska’s caucuses two weeks ago?

Mr. Obama could have a similar effect in key races in South Dakota, Louisiana, Oregon, Colorado and Virginia, to name a few.

There are still Democrats who grumble that Bill Clinton’s presidency worked out well for him personally, but not nearly so well for their party. If the party nominates Hillary Clinton, they may end up saying the same thing. Next Page >

Imagine that you’ve somehow found yourself on trial, mistakenly accused of some criminal act that you would never even think about committing. A guilty verdict will destroy your good name and send you away to a very bad place.

When the trial opens, the eager prosecutor lays out the case, an avalanche of seemingly damning—but, in actuality, entirely circumstantial—evidence. You stew at the defense table, aching for a chance to respond.

But before your moment arrives, the 12 jurors decide they’ve heard enough. With the trial still ongoing, they each cast early “guilty” verdicts. When you finally take the stand and prove—like a scene out of Matlock—that you’ve been wrongly accused, the jurors are all far away from the courtroom, back at their jobs or maybe just lounging around at home. You lose.  read more » Next Page >

Never let it be said that Republican primaries aren’t orderly.

John McCain, after a spectacular rebound from the early near-collapse of his campaign, is now in a prime position to win the nomination. Yes, he’s succeeding in part by holding fast to his original course as his opponents, for various reasons, have foundered. But he’s also there, like every Republican nominee in the last three decades, because it’s his turn.

This is the way it has been since the first full-fledged G.O.P. primary campaign, when President Gerald Ford beat back a stiff challenge from Ronald Reagan in 1976. Then, when the nomination came open in 1980, it was Reagan’s turn, and he fended off the insurgency of a onetime C.I.A. boss named George H. W. Bush. Mr. Bush became the anointed one in 1988 when he knocked off Bob Dole—who finally, at the age of 73, got a turn of his own in 1996.

Republicans love their front-runners and abhor lengthy, untidy nomination fights. Even in the run-up to the 2000 campaign, when it seemed like it might be no one’s turn, the party establishment swiftly rallied behind George W. Bush, handing him all of the financial and institutional benefits enjoyed by previous heirs apparent. Mr. Bush then knocked off John McCain, who in the course of the primary campaign emerged from obscurity to become the most popular politician in the country—but not in his own party.

That near-miss turned Mr. McCain into the clear Republican front-runner for either 2004 or 2008, depending on Mr. Bush’s fortunes in the general election. When Mr. Bush edged out Al Gore (and selected a vice president who had no interest in succeeding him), Mr. McCain’s appointment with the G.O.P. nomination was set for 2008.

And here we are, with Mr. McCain on the brink of running his remaining foes out of contention. History, it seems, is repeating—and affirming—itself.

Yes, Mr. McCain’s road from insurgent to front-runner has been far rockier than Reagan’s, Mr. Dole’s and the first Mr. Bush’s.

The first detour came when he went through his Teddy Roosevelt phase. Infuriated by Mr. Bush’s dishonorable campaign in 2000, Mr. McCain began mimicking the 26th president—a quintessential maverick and one of his self-identified political heroes—who, fed up with the stodgy party establishment that refused to back him in 1912, bolted the G.O.P. and mounted an independent presidential campaign.

In the fall of 2000, Mr. McCain offered only lukewarm support for Mr. Bush, just enough to stay in the good graces of party regulars if Mr. Bush went down to defeat and left the nomination open for 2004. And when Mr. Bush became president, Mr. McCain embraced the role of conscientious objector, attacking the ambitious tax cuts that were the new president’s top priority. He also stepped up his level of cooperation with Senate Democrats—so much that, credible reports later revealed, he sent clear signals to the Senate’s Democratic leadership that he was open to leaving the G.O.P.

Mr. McCain happily stoked talk that he’d seek a rematch with Mr. Bush in 2004—maybe in a G.O.P. primary, maybe as an independent or perhaps even on the Democratic ticket. He was clearly not content to wait for 2008.

But 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ruled out an ’04 presidential bid, and when his old friend John Kerry asked him to join him on that year’s Democratic ticket, Mr. McCain refused. An open Republican nomination in 2008 suddenly wasn’t so far off.

After the ’04 election, Mr. McCain began mending fences with the right, making peace with Jerry Falwell and embracing the very Bush tax cuts he’d once opposed. He assembled an ’08 campaign team with many of the consultants and moneymen who’d battled him in 2000, while retaining most of his original political base. Mr. McCain began 2007 as the clear favorite to win the nomination, and his campaign talked of raising $100 million.

But then came the second detour: Iraq and immigration. Mr. McCain’s intimate attachment to a war that seemed hopeless and his failure to grasp the depth of anti-immigration sentiment in the G.O.P. base gave grass-roots Republicans and big-dollar donors pause. His poll numbers tanked and by June he was declared politically dead.

He has recovered—in part because the military success of the “surge” has made the G.O.P. less queasy about being closely associated with the war, and in part because the party’s base never rallied around any of Mr. McCain’s rivals, whose pasts are also riddled with ideological impurities.

It hasn’t been pretty, but it looks like the Republican establishment is ending up exactly where it was forecasted to be. Again. Next Page >

In late March 1992, Jerry Brown, the mercurial former California governor and sometime Linda Ronstadt companion who was then waging his third unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, stood at Castle Point in Hoboken with the Manhattan skyline behind him.

“This,” he declared, “is the Empire State!”

“It’s the Garden State!” the crowd shouted back.

“I’m looking across the river,” Mr. Brown replied. “Even though we are physically in New Jersey, we are spiritually in New York.”

Governor Moonbeam had a point. His campaign, freshly rejuvenated by his stunning upset of Bill Clinton in the Connecticut primary, was gunning for a follow-up win in New York on April 7. New Jersey, which wouldn’t vote until June 2, was a distant afterthought, to Mr. Brown and to everyone else.

Last in the nation and utterly irrelevant: Such was the Garden State’s fate for 20 long years.

In June 1984, New Jersey’s Democrats, miffed by Gary Hart’s ill-advised and highly unoriginal crack about their state’s reserves of toxic waste, turned on the Colorado senator and handed Walter Mondale a decisive win that sealed the Democratic nomination for him. But that was New Jersey’s last stand. From 1988 through 2004, both parties’ races were settled earlier and earlier. But New Jersey treated its June primary like its full-service gas stations and 24-hour diners: as sacred and untouchable.

This time, it was supposed to be different. After years of stubborn opposition from the state’s political leaders, then-Governor Richard J. Codey declared himself sick of presidential candidates who saw his state as nothing more than an A.T.M. and in 2005 pushed through a radical reform: In 2008, New Jersey would vote in February.

Originally, the date was set for the end of February, but soon enough it was bumped up further, to Feb. 5—the earliest allowed by the Democratic National Committee after the initial stand-alone contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Grass-roots activists, bit players in the national game for decades, salivated over their new king- (or queen-) maker role. Clifton would be like Council Bluffs, Metuchen the new Manchester.

And the early date has made a difference. Previously, the only time candidates showed up in New Jersey was for exclusive, walled-off fund-raising events. This year, they’ve actually tried to meet some voters. The day after his humbling setback in New Hampshire, Barack Obama fired up an overflowing rally at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. Two weeks later, Hillary Clinton was summoned to Hackensack by one of the state’s mightiest Democratic bosses—who had promised his backing only if she’d make a personal campaign appearance with him.

It’s a far cry from June 2004, when New Jersey staged its last Democratic primary. John Kerry had long since wrapped up the nomination and was deep into his running-mate search when the state gave him 92 percent of the vote (to Dennis Kucinich’s 4 percent) in what was one of the all-time least consequential election events.

But there’s a catch: Other states—lots of other states—had the same idea as New Jersey. Twenty-one others, along with Guam and Americans living abroad, will hold nominating contests next Tuesday—the most expansive single day of contests ever seen in either party. There will be 1,688 pledged Democratic delegates at stake—about 40 percent of the entire convention.

In other words, in their quest to maximize their relevance, New Jersey and her Feb. 5 sisters have all diluted their individual impact.

What’s more, 2008 is a throwback campaign, the first since the days of Hart and Mondale in which a Democratic nomination has not been settled early. After Mr. Obama’s energizing South Carolina landslide, which was followed by high-profile endorsements from Ted and Caroline Kennedy, the smart money is now on a Feb. 5 draw, with Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton splitting the national pot of gold. Each of them could emerge from the day with close to 1,000 delegates, far from the 2,026 needed to claim the nomination and enough for each of them to claim momentum going forward.

And that would make 2008—just like every campaign since 1984—another missed opportunity for New Jersey. Suddenly, the comparatively few states that didn’t join the rush to Feb. 5 would be empowered to settle the race. Between Feb. 9 and June 3, another 23 states (plus the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico) will hold caucuses and primaries. Two weeks, for instance, separate the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary and the March 4 Ohio primary. Conceivably, the entire political world will be based in Columbus for that time.

It figures: New Jersey’s leaders wasted two decades clinging to their late primary, and then they get rid of it the one year it could have been meaningful. Next Page >

So far, Rudy Giuliani is losing the Republican presidential race just as badly as skeptics predicted more than a year ago. But that doesn’t mean they were right about everything.

In the run-up to the 2008 campaign, pundits incessantly assured us that a Giuliani bid would be a nonstarter because of his social liberalism. The support for abortion rights, devotion to gun control and full-on embrace of gay rights that facilitated two election victories in New York City, supposedly, would repulse the right and render Rudy a toxic commodity in most G.O.P. primaries and caucuses.

But the story of Mr. Giuliani’s demise—which will be complete if he doesn’t somehow win in next week’s Florida primary—has little to do with social issues. In fact, there is considerable evidence that the bulk of the G.O.P. base, however reluctantly, was actually prepared to rally around the former mayor had he maintained the front-runner’s perch he held for most of 2007.

That he faltered says much more about the former mayor’s other shortcomings—personal and professional sloppiness dating back to his mayoral days, an ill-fitting campaign theme, an uninspiring and almost apologetic style in debates and a strategy that neutered his public personality for fear of letting voters see Angry Rudy—than his ideological differences with the Christian right.

For one thing, the initial skepticism about Mr. Giuliani’s campaign reflected a condescending oversimplification of who and what the religious right is and how its members vote, the result of a national political media that has allowed a handful of Christian conservative “leaders” to define their flock as a single-minded entity that regards abortion and homosexuality as the foremost issues in any election.

In truth, there is about as much variety of opinion among the millions of religious conservatives as there is among any group of voters.

The rise of Mike Huckabee, which has come about in the face of lukewarm support and even outright hostility from the Christian right’s traditional leadership, is powerful evidence of this diversity of opinion. So is the support that John McCain, who once branded Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance,” received from evangelical voters in South Carolina last Saturday: Nearly 30 percent in a six-way race, not too far off Mr. Huckabee’s pace.

In other words, the ’08 campaign, no matter how the obituaries might ultimately read, was not a hopeless undertaking for Rudy Giuliani.

Remember that he held a large lead in national and many individual state polls until just over a month ago—long after the Republican base learned of his apostasies on social issues. This reflected the heroic image of Rudy created by 9/11, his presumed electability against Hillary Clinton and the glaring deficiencies of his chief Republican rivals, all of whom were viewed with hesitation by the party’s base.

And when John McCain, whose independent streak appealed to many of the voters the Giuliani campaign was banking on, seemed to collapse over the summer, Rudy’s nomination chances looked rosy: He’d win (or fare well) in New Hampshire, boosted by Mr. McCain’s former base of independents, follow it up with wins in Florida and perhaps even South Carolina, and go into Feb. 5—with all of its winner-take-all primaries in massive, Rudy-friendly states—with a head of steam. All the while, he’d slowly reel in religious conservatives who may not have made him their first choice but who would find him acceptable—and electable—enough.

His road map to the nomination, in fact, looked much like the one that Mr. McCain is now following with considerable success. What ruined Mr. Giuliani was his failure to capitalize over the summer and early fall, when the party was essentially his for the taking. That allowed Mr. McCain to sneak back into contention and to supplant Rudy as the maverick who nonetheless corrals the base.

The Rudy that America saw on 9/11 was confident, decisive, resolute and even human. But the candidate Republicans met was subdued and docile, trying to coast on his reputation without saying anything that might offend a single Republican voter. He staked out no bold positions, assumed a largely defensive crouch in debates and sought to portray his campaign as a struggle to stay “on offense” against “Islamic terrorism,” a theme that hardly fit his mayoral background. The pesky Bernie Kerik and Judith Nathan issues also slowed his momentum, as did the lifeless, watered-down demeanor that he showed in public.

Mr. Giuliani’s undoing comes down to personality. John McCain wasn’t afraid to show some. Rudy was. And Republicans made their choice. Next Page >

Here we go again.

The last time a Clinton’s path to the Democratic presidential nomination was blocked, the campaign used a war in the Middle East to create an artificial—but politically devastating—caricature of its opponent.

The year was 1992, the opponent was Paul Tsongas, and the war in question was the Gulf War, a subject on which Tsongas and Bill Clinton had one thing in common: When the war had been debated in Congress in January 1991, they’d both agreed with its opponents.

But Bill Clinton added a hedge: After ducking reporters for months, he finally said, on the eve of the invasion, that he would probably have voted for it—even though he agreed with those who opposed it.  read more » Next Page >