First appeared September 25, 2008

Forty years ago, in September 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive — which changed mainstream America’s view of the Vietnam War. In living rooms across the nation, Americans saw a gruesome display of how powerless the United States forces looked as they struggled to gain control over a millitary conflict they would not win.

It was then that Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor who narrated the daily events for millions of people each night, called Vietnam “unwinnable.” In the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Now, we are in a different kind of war, one where U.S. financial insolvency seems at risk. Looking at this crisis, Sen. John McCain has said he would suspend his campaign. This included canceling an interview with CBS “Late Show” host David Letterman last night. Letterman said McCain was preparing to head to Washington in an effort to save the country.

The reaction was something the likes of which we’ve never seen.

A furious Letterman called out McCain and, without using the word “liar,” ran live feed of McCain preparing to do an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric at the precise moment he was taping.

In addition, Letterman lashed out at McCain’s decision not to have his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, take up the campaign slack while McCain was in Washington.

Letterman even suggested this was all linked to McCain’s recent fall in national polls. “When you call up at the last minute and cancel, that’s not the John McCain I know,” Letterman said. More than once he suggested that “something smells right now.”

Now, Letterman is no Cronkite. He’s not even Ed Sullivan.

But he is the face that millions of Americans see before turning in for the night. For years, McCain has appeared on his show, even announcing his intention to run for president on the program. And to have the affable Letterman visibly boil and go on the offensive showed that, perhaps, McCain, whose campaign has stumbled since the beginning of this economic crisis, is in bigger trouble than one would think.

Perhaps McCain won’t say, “If I’ve lost Letterman, I’ve lost middle America.” Does Letterman even say his audience is “middle America?”

But one wouldn’t be surprised if the Republican candidate began to smell a strong odor seeping into the vents of the Straight Talk Express.

Sen. John McCain's defeat opens the door to new GOP leaders. (wdcpix)

In the aftermath of defeat, with the arc lamps having dimmed on the presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain, one thing is clear: the Republican Party as we have known it — strong, disciplined and precise in its execution since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 — will cease to exist beginning today.

During the course of this long campaign, even some of the most fervent GOP boosters found themselves running for cover, bracing for losses of a kind that haven’t been seen in a generation. With big gains in the House and Senate, Democrats have something approaching effective control on Capitol Hill. After most of the final tallies late Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has a stronger majority, while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has 56 of the 60 votes needed to assure passage of Democratic bills.

What the Republicans now face is something akin to an all-out blame-brawl, with finger-pointing, nail-gouging and yelling in closed rooms and in the most public of squares. All in the pursuit of answers to two basic questions: How on Earth did Sen. Barack Obama achieve the greatest Democratic victory since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964? And, more important, what do we do next?

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“I don’t hold McCain responsible,” said Republican strategist Tony Marsh, when we spoke on the phone late last week. “I think McCain ran a reasonably good campaign, given the environment. It’s a perfect storm.”

Marsh, usually optimistic about his party, says the Republican collapse has been several years in the making. The party’s brand, forged in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a coalition of social conservatives, small-government devotees and national-security hawks, was tied to a single goal: the destruction of communism. With the fall of the red menace, the foundation of the coalition began to weaken, ultimately buckling in the 2006 congressional elections.

“What we should have done then is to invest a great deal of money, to talk to these groups about the new challenges in the new era, this post-Cold War era, and what’s the agenda Republicans should stand for,” Marsh said. “Instead we became a party obsessed with winning elections and maintaining power. We became a party concerned more about tactics. And in the process, we got fat, dumb and lazy.

“Rather than articulate a positive vision for the future,” Marsh continued, “we started defining ourselves by what we’re not. What we’re not is big-spending, big-taxing Democrats who want to grow the federal government. That might work for a while. But at some point, you have to give some reason for people to love you — other than the fact that you’re not the other guys.”

But despite the fall of its enemy, the GOP did hold together. It controlled the House and Senate for 12 years more years, even took the White House. But what one saw in the waning years of the Bush administration was poor leadership, from the top down.

With an economy in smoldering ashes, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have no clear end, the federal government expanding its powers in ways not seen since the Great Depression, Republicans across the country have been left searching for the soul of its own machine.

Now, the Republicans will have to become the opposition party, led by people whose names we’ve yet to learn, as it searches to redefine itself for Americans.

“It’s not like there are 10 guys at a dinner table — smoking cigars, drinking brandy, deciding what to do,” said Ed Rollins, the Republican strategist who served as political director in the Reagan White House and national campaign director for Reagan’s 1984 reelection run.

“What we have to do is rethink our whole party,” continued Rollins. “Look at what the other party has done in exploring new technologies and exciting young people. The one thing Reagan did was to build a base of real enthusiasm among young people, so you had a whole age of Reaganites. The one thing you learn is: with a sports team, you can’t maintain success without building a farm team.

“Unlike the Democrats, where you had people like John Dingell and Henry Waxman willing to stay on because they cared so much about the issues and were willing to let their party battle it out,” Rollins added, “there are some more senior [Republicans] who won’t be willing to stay around. The fact is, we don’t control our own destiny. We are now the opposition party and, as such, we can’t just throw rocks against the window. Right now, I don’t see anyone new in the House or the Senate or on the governor level — with perhaps the exception of Sarah Palin — who can lead in this rebuilding.

But Rollins has been through this sort of thing before. “I went through Watergate” he said, “and I thought we’d never win another election — and then came 1980. When Bill Clinton won, I thought we’d be totally locked out. And then [the Democrats] overstepped their bounds, and in 1994 we took control of the House and the Senate.”

But the times alone pose a problem for the reinvention of the GOP. A majority of Americans could see President-elect Obama as a man who, like Franklin D. Roosevelt before him, could lead the country out of a desperate hour. Obama could have the power to affect the domestic landscape like no one since LBJ.

As the opposition party, what can the GOP hope to represent? Does the party risk looking like the stone gargoyles of Gotham City, ready to come to life at the first misstep by Democrats? The party whose driving philosophy is to step in when something goes wrong and say, “I told you so?”

What will be the true Republican self? Will it turn more conservative and look to rebuild the coalition of foot soldiers that spawned the Reagan revolution? Or will it, at long last, reach out to the center and attract new allies and new partners in a spirit of cooperation, to make it the forward-looking party that Republicans have called for since the end of the Cold War?

“I always thought the Democrats were done in by the fact they made modest gains in 1982,” said Lou Cannon, the Reagan biographer, “because it encouraged them to run the way more of the working-class party, to turn more left. In part, the Republicans’ next move is going to be determined by which Republicans survive. If the sweep is so extensive, or deep, it’s harder to argue that you have to go more to the right in order to recover the majority. I think it’s going to take time to play out. And I have a feeling we’re going to be talking about Republican candidates for president whose names we don’t even know yet.”

No one likes to lose. Just ask fans of the Cincinnati Bengals this season. But losing does present opportunities. It represents a chance to start again, to build something out of lessons learned and mistakes made. It provides the opportunity for new people to begin to mold the party in ways that senior leadership had resisted.

And it opens up the opportunity for rebirth. It was the Eisenhower era that gave way to John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and the great social programs and advancements that allowed Obama to win the presidency. The failures of the Carter administration allowed the GOP to rise from the shadows that had enveloped it after Watergate and restore “Morning in America.” For Republicans who’ve felt constrained by the hulking outer shell of the past, their time might well be now.

“There’s going to be a tremendous opportunity for new leadership,” said former Bush administration adviser Leslie Sanchez. “There will be new ideas and new leadership. It’s a healthy thing for our party. Believe me, especially for the younger folks, we’re definitely longing for it.”

Being out of power will also allow the Republicans to lick their wounds, to heal after the events of the past eight years. When you’re in power and things don’t go as planned, you get blamed. Being out of power means having the ability to marshal new forces while presenting a real alternative to those in control.

“We’re going to be a party with a real opportunity going into 2010,” said Sarah Taylor, the former Bush White House political director. “You’re not owning every mistake that occurs. I don’t buy the notion that the party lost its way and its core values. I think a series of things — including a tough war and bankrupt leaders — certainly hurt us.

“But not governing has its advantage. Because the state of Louisiana couldn’t handle a hurricane, the president and the party took the brunt of the blame. Now with the other side having total control, they’ll take the brunt. We have the chance to be tighter, more cohesive, and the chance to re-message ourselves.”

In the coming days and months, the neuroses of the GOP will be taxed as its most ardent boosters begin to question how things went so wrong. But in its wake, the struggle for the soul of the party will have begun.

It should not run from the opportunity to turn to new leaders and new coalitions. In a matter of months, we might not recognize the face of the GOP.

Whether the American public will look kindly on that new face remains to be seen.

Sen. Barack Obama (WDCpix)

At last, we have reached the beginning. Sen. Barack Obama has won the presidency. Now we stand at the beginning of a new era — based on a set of promises and ideals that have raised hopes for millions at a time of darkness and rekindled the optimistic beliefs and possibilities of much of America.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Obama has maybe a day to celebrate the end of what has been a caustic, difficult and, most especially, long campaign. At rallies, the Democratic nominee is fond of saying that since he announced nearly two years ago, children have been conceived, born and are walking and talking. But these children will grow up in the post-Bush era. They will know Obama as their first leader and scoff at the notion that anyone ever questioned whether an African-American could win the presidency.

But how these children remember these years is what comes next. Because while an Obama win signals a new era of politics, it is one fraught with peril because so much is expected of him. The new president is being presented with two wars, an economic system in crisis and a public that has invested a great deal of faith in perhaps the least experienced man to move into the Oval Office.

John F. Kennedy, announcing the New Frontier, defined it not as a set of promises but as a set of challenges for the American people. However, what has drawn people to Obama is precisely the promises he’s made — large and small — as he stormed past Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and then Sen. John McCain in what looks to be an historic win.

Health-care reorganization. A progressive energy policy. A retooling of the infrastructure of a broken economy. High-speed rail. Tax reform. An end to a war in Iraq. The question now is, beginning today, can he do it? Can Obama make good on this litany of promises?

This nation, as Nelson Algren once wrote of Obama’s adopted hometown, “no longer laughs easily or well, out of spiritual good health. We seem to have no way of judging either the laughing of the living or the fixed smirk of the dead.” We are no longer a country that can afford to take things lightly because everywhere we look, we can find only anguish and angst. As such, Obama’s mission is no less a task than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s: Help put real, systemic change into place while being the man whose reassurance and steady hand can lift the spirits of a nation.

“Every candidate makes promises and one shouldn’t be too cynical,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and as an adviser to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. “The first thing he has to do is prioritize them. He’s spoken a lot about health care, and clearly that’s going to be a priority. But that’s certainly going to take time to develop. And given the current state of the economy, he’s not not going to have much to work with

“But there are things he can do quickly ,” said Hess, author of “What Do We Do Now? A Workbook for the President Elect.” “Stem Cell research is something he can accomplish quickly. He has support for it. And by passing it quickly, it shows he has momentum, that he can start out of the block fast.”

But there are things Obama may not be able to accomplish quickly, like health care, which — despite the meltdown of the international banking system and the 401(K) of a certain chief national politics reporter for a website that puts national news in context — has remained an integral part of Obama’s stump speech and was given heavy focus during his 30-minute infomercial.

Here is where the promises get more daunting. As with stem-cell research, Obama’s first step would be to use the existing S-Chip legislation, vetoed by President George W. Bush, but which had large bi-partisan support in both houses of Congress.

Going forward, his best ally would be Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). The critically ill senator is currently at work on a comprehensive heath-care reform package, which Obama could simply stand behind, using whatever influence he has over the new Democratic majority. Even with the old Lion at Obama’s side, it will could still prove the toughest of his early fights.

“Health care is really big,” said Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future. “That’s a bear. When you talk about ‘pitched fights,’ that’ll be a pitched fight.”

Even as he and his surrogates fight on the Hill, Obama must follow up on the pledge he made to end the war and occupation in Iraq. After all, this is what built his early momentum.

But wth his win last night, the American people have ceded the idea of “victory” in Iraq that McCain spoke about so often. It will be a matter of ending it by reaching out to shunned allies abroad, setting certain benchmarks for the Iraqi government and gaining enough support among the military elite — many of whom shared Obama’s reservations about invasion — to not repeat the chaotic pullout that marked the end the Vietnam War.

But we all know that Iraq is not what brought Obama to this moment. It’s not what helped build a new, vast coalition in both the House and the Senate that, in all likelihood, could give him the votes he needs to pass legislation in a way no Democratic president has since Lyndon B. Johnson stormed into office in 1964.

Rather it is the economy — the singular issue that pushed Obama ahead of his ill-prepared opponent, a man who was ready to run on national security and proved ill-equipped when it came to running as a candidate who could solve an economic crisis.

This is why many longtime Washington observers talk about addressing the energy problem as the surest first step of a new President Obama.

“He has an enormous opportunity with the new majority in the House and the Senate to take bold action,” said Borosage. “That sets the stage for what the first part of his administration could be. He could do a good part of his energy plans right off the bat — because you’re dealing with both the issues of the economy and energy independence going at once. Energy is easy and popular. And in a time of recession, to make that kind of investment you’re going to be creating new jobs, with corporations building windfarms, and there’s going to be no lobby against it.

“But he’s got to to very quickly turn his attention to his real economic plan — which is a lot more than a $300-billion stimulus plan,” Borosage continued. “That takes on banking regulation, mortgage relief and an expansion of supervision over the markets. It builds a different strategy, in terms of what this country’s role is in the global economy.”

Bill Carrick, the Democratic strategist who worked on the presidential campaigns of Edward M. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Dick Gephardt, says that the key is to start small. Begin by using the qualities that put you into office — the cool demeanor of a man with a firm understanding of the fundamentals — to simply calm the situation down. The rest will take time, mandate or no.

“The first thing ought to be is to try and calm the markets down,” Carrick said. “That is the best thing for him to do to install a sense of stability in a period of great instability. I don’t think anyone expects radical change within the first 100 days. We have an international economy with lots of structural problems that have to be dealt with. This includes our international trade system, our relationship with countries across the globe.

“These are going to be challenging times,” Carrick said. “No question about it. We’ve seen an economic meltdown in concert with serious national-security questions. You’re not walking into a good-times presidency. I mean things are really tough.

“There’s this idea of a care-taker policy,” Carrick continued, “Well, we’re in the opposite situation. We need a creative presidency.”

But the most imaginative presidency cannot succeed if it looks like Obama is willing to come up short on the great expectations he’s set over the two years of this campaign. This includes owning up to promises made to constituencies, like labor, that turned out members en masse.

“The most important thing is short-run and long-run economic change,” said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, the nation’s largest union. “That’s what our members want from this presidency. In the short run, solve the health-care crisis. Most of our members feel like they’re one illness away from economic disaster.

In the long run, have workers share in the success of their companies by passing things like the employees’ Free Choice Act. All we’ve asked for is to make this an America where you reward hard work.

“I would say,” Stern continued, “we are on the verge of deciding how Barack Obama is going to lead and what kind of country we will be. There’s two models — transactional, where you elect a president and within the established framework in place you negotiate progress. The second is the kind of potential presidency which comes along very rarely, where you recreate the rules. … I don’t look at Obama’s presidency in terms of labor wants or what the Democrats want. I believe he understands what America wants.”

Stern will be only one of the clamor of voices that will echo through the West Wing once Obama takes the oath. But he has little time to wait to start paying back the trust and goodwill with which he’s been charged.

Today he must get down to work.

While my colleague Ari Melber marvels at the “coolness” of the candidate, the fact remains that he hasn’t made many friends in the traveling press corps.  Obama seldom comes to the back of the plane, and his general press availability has been scant.

Obama still receives good press — particularly from me. But that’s been in lieu of his access not because of it.

Should candidate Obama become President Obama, he may have to shed some of his coolness and speak more frankly and often to the members of the “media filter” if he’s to govern effectively. While often maligned, especially by Republicans, as ideologically biased, most journalists are just trying to do their jobs.

And while the “media filter” can put up with much, an Obama administration should be wary of what can happen if the press is continually kept at arms’ length. Throughout the Bush administration’s first term, reporters frequently grumbled about their treatment at the hands of the White House. But they were essentially ignored as the president’s approval ratings soared in the wake of 9/11.

But the moment things began to go awry, those same journalists struck back, which was not helpful to an administration struggling to get its message to the public.

By opening himself up more to the press, Obama can avoid a smiliar fate should his administration encounter political turbulence.

(wdcpix)

It is a narrative two years in the making. The story of an eloquent, young man going up against one of the strongest political forces the Democratic Party has ever fielded — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the link to the party’s heyday in the 1990s — and beating her. In doing so, he attracted millions of people to his cause.

It is also the story of a young man confronting another popular, experienced politician — a war hero who promised to unite the country but whose rhetoric and tactics often seemed designed to divide it.

And it is the improbable story of the rise of a young man whose message of hope and change resonated with the yearnings of a country reeling from collapse of the housing bubble. And now it is time for the narrative to draw to a close.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

With Sen. Barack Obama’s 30-minute commercial last night, the junior senator from Illinois began his closing moment — up to this point, the most crucial of his political life. What we heard was a reflection of how he has run his campaign — showing the American people through personal stories; the problems they face, and then offering up reasonable solutions. What he did on television — sure to be mocked by the McCain campaign — was to assure the American people that they could believe not only his individual story but in the future of their national story.

This should come as no surprise. As he did during the long, drawn-out Democratic primary — methodically, steadily gaining delegates while deflecting attacks — Obama has moved with deliberation in the closing days of the campaign.

As dynamic as Obama is regarded in the popular imagination, what has gotten him here today — 15 points ahead of Sen. John McCain in the latest Pew Research Center poll — is an ability to see, with almost academic precision, how to achieve one goal, and then another.

“You can’t wake up this week and say, ‘Oh my, the election’s close,’” said David Willhelm, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager. “What goes into this week has been a year in the making. Nothing happens by magic.”

Wilhelm, who is an informal adviser to the Obama campaign, continued, “Change has been the mantra from Day One, and it will be the mantra this week. The basic narrative has been consistent since he entered this race.”

Despite Obama’s lead in national polls, as high as six percentage points in an average of 10 surveys, the outcome of the election could change. If we have learned anything from history, what a candidate does during the last days of a campaign can carry incalculable weight. Ask President Jimmy Carter about 1980.

To close the deal, Obama and his campaign must, in some ways, work opposite of one another.

The campaign’s ground forces, the likes of which this country has never seen, must make sure that the millions they helped register actually get to the polls. They have to continue knocking on doors to ensure that complacency doesn’t set in. Obama’s workers, paid and voluntary, have not traveled all this way to come up short.

As for Obama himself, he must maintain his steady, cool demeanor, which, ironically, was once viewed as a political liability. But now it has come to symbolize the candidate’s sure hand in the middle of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former Clinton White House press secretary and now a political analyst for CBS. “If you look back, there have been so few incidents where he’s been drawn off message, or resorts to getting involved with the attack of the day. He responds — but he does so in a rational, not emotional, way.

“He’s almost boring,” Myers continued. “He never takes the bait. He never gets into a good side fight for a couple of days. Think how many times Clinton got off course. Think how many times McCain makes news because he has to get something off his chest. Obama never does that.”

Obama’s self-discipline has percolated to the lowest levels of his campaign. Save for the occasional wacky comment from running mate Sen. Joe Biden, the Obama campaign has been almost uncanny in its ability to stay on target and never lose sight of the goal. To those in the media, myself included, such control has been maddening.

But it has worked — and it needs to keep working in the final days. It isn’t that the media adore Obama. It just happens that we’ve covered perhaps the most well-run Democratic campaign perhaps since Lyndon B. Johnson swept into office in 1964.

To be sure, the tactical mistakes of his primary and general-election opponents have greatly served his political march to the White House. Running against Hillary Clinton, Obama and his strategists went about their separate businesses, while Clinton, who did not find her true voice and oomph until late in the season, oversaw a disorganized campaign and a strategy that paid little-to-no attention to caucus states, all of which Obama won.

McCain’s mistakes have been no less costly. Since he became the GOP nominee in September, the Arizona senator has relied on what’s amounted to parlor tricks and snarky quotes to demonize his opponent as an “elitist-terrorist buddy-socialist-redistributor” — none of which has seemed to stick, if the polls are to be believed.

More to the point, McCain began his campaign without a coherent economic vision, which has hurt him in the midst of the financial crisis. Despite months of campaigning, he will, in all probability, end the campaign without one as well.

The outlines of the campaign’s concluding week were evident in the final presidential debate. McCain flailed and ranted about Joe the Plumber. Obama came off as near-presidential. Now the young senator from Illinois has to maintain that stance while the Republican Party throws whatever it has left against the very idea of him taking the White House.

“He needs to keep reassuring people he can do the job,” said Tony Coelho, the former House majority whip, who served as general manager of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign. “He does this with his demeanor, his calmness, by providing a contrast with McCain — who’s changing what he’s talking about every other day, who doesn’t seem to have a focus or message. He needs to keep pressing on home and focus on the need for change.

“If he does this, he’ll win this thing by a very big margin,” said Coelho. “But he’s also got to be very careful that he doesn’t have people saying he’s measuring drapes in the Oval Office, or isn’t working as hard. That could cause him problems at the end. But he’s been so steady. He’s been such a real workhorse this whole race. I don’t expect him to make a mistake. He doesn’t get rattled, and he simply works hard.”

The Obama campaign has been planning for the final week — as it seems to have planned for everything — for a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the campaign, from the beginning, had laid out a strategy that took into account any hiccup, any change in the climate here and abroad. When suddenly pressed by the financial meltdown and the economic downturn, for example, Obama acted as if he had a folder marked “economic reckoning” in his file, and had been studying it for months. That would be the folder coming before the one reading, “If they compare you to Lenin,” a reference to former Rep. Tom DeLay’s smear on”Hardball with Chris Matthews” this week.

“Here’s the thing,” said Democratic Party strategist Liz Chadderon. “Don’t take the foot off the pedal. You don’t need a knock-out punch, you don’t need to run-up the score. But you do have to finish strong.”

Obama — as even some Republicans admit — is an exceptional politician with an incredible personal story. But now he has a chance to elevate his story, to make it worthy of history.

Throughout this presidential campaign, seasoned political analysts have marveled to me at the depth and reach of the Obama organization, conceived and orchestrated by David Axelrod and David Plouffe. A win Tuesday might well redefine America’s political landscape.

Obama began this narrative with an incredible beginning, which was surpassed by an unthinkable middle. All the young man has left to do is finish.

Not shame in electing a president. But shame that we as a nation allowed certain members of the Republican Party to try to resurrect one of this country’s darkest hours — the reign of  Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Between the end of World War II and through the mid-1950s, this country shriveled in the fear of an internal communist invasion. It was fueled by the misguided work of McCarthy, who summoned scores of people to appear before his subcommittee in his pursuit of reputed communists and Soviet spies in the federal government.

I bring this up now, having just watched the disgraced Tom DeLay on “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” The former House GOP leader described the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. Barack Obama, as “Marxist,” even suggesting that Obama was prepared to remake America in a Communist mold.

When we talk about the end of the McCarthy era in America, we most often mean the damning news reports narrated by Edward R. Morrow on his “See It Now” program in March 1954.

But the more damning blow came during the Army-McCarthy hearings, which began in April that year. On June 9, the Army’s chief attorney Joseph Welch asked that McCarthy’s list of communists or subversives in defense plants be turned over to the U.S. Atty. Gen. McCarthy responded by saying he should check on his legal colleague Fred Fisher. Welch lashed out: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness….Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The answer was no. But the tide against McCarthy had already turned. His reign would soon be over, and a nation would ask itself how it had allowed fear to triumph over reason, how it had lost its collective head when intelligence, not passion, was most needed.

As Election Day draws closer,  one would hope that the leadership of the Republican Party and the campaign of Sen. John McCain would understand that attacks such as DeLay’s had no place then and certainly have no place now. Let us assassinate Obama no further. We’ve done enough.

From the very start, the McCain organization was flawed in its dealings with the traveling press corps. That may sound self-serving, but it’s an important indicator of how the campaign has handled other matters — like picking a running mate.

The Obama campaign has had a central and accessible message keeper in Bill Burton. For the vast majority of reporters dealing with the McCain press shop, it has been akin  to watching amateur hour at the Apollo.

This has been particularly true on the campaign plane, where the central message keepers have been Mark Salter, longtime McCain friend and speechwriter, and senior aide Nicole Wallace. Both have been helpful, particularly in waving off stories that weren’t true. But neither — nor anyone else, for that matter — could direct you to surrogates or connect you to people involved in the campaign. That’s what press secretaries are supposed to do — help you do your job.

This is not to say that the Obama campaign has been perfect in this regard. The organization’s discipline has too often meant a lack of access to the candidate, which has infuriated many reporters. For those who say the “media” are in love with Sen. Barack Obama, spend some time with reporters in a bar after a day on the trail. Half a beer in, you’ll realize the supposed gushing is largely a myth propagated by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity and other conservatives.

While the Obama campaign is certainly not overly forthcoming, it provided a level of secondary access that a reporter could count on. Senior adviser Robert Gibbs, for instance, was always willing to spend a few minutes to talk with you, and press secretary Jennifer Psaki proved invaluable in helping you get what you needed when you needed it. At the very least, the Obama folks always knew where your bags were and made every effort to get you on and off the trail with as little hassle as possible.  While a small matter, it showed the campaign’s superb attention to detail and efficiency.

The race is certainly not over. But should McCain be able to pull out out one last comeback, it won’t be because his organization made it possible. If anything,  he would win in spite of it.

A Barack Obama barn painting in Ottawa County, Ohio. (flickr)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A few days back, I was in the basement of the statehouse standing on a large map of Ohio, complete with its 88 counties, etched in the floor’s marble. I walked southwest and stood on Butler, a conservative red-meat county where I was born and my parents still live. It was home, or at least a representation of it. But looking over the remainder of Ohio seemed like staring at a foreign land, whose terrain, interests, habits and ways of life could be as far removed from life in Butler County as Zaire.

To really understand Ohio, you need a far-reaching anthropological knowledge that few possess. Sometimes, people “get it.” This would most certainly include the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, now engaged in an all-out assault to win the state’s 20 electoral votes.

Obama’s forces have hunkered down in every part of Ohio, including the more conservative southwest and southeast regions. That’s not what Sen. John Kerry’s team did four years ago when it focused on only the state’s three largest cities — Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus. Today, in areas where Democratic volunteers haven’t been seen by voters in a generation, the party has field offices with paid staffers numbering in the hundreds. Two weekends ago, Obama volunteers knocked on the doors of 340,846 homes. The farthest distance separating Obama field offices is 38 miles. It is an unprecedented effort to win over a highly unconventional state.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

To some, this Ohio campaign looks like a microcosm of Obama’s 50-state strategy. In truth, though, it is a strategy taken from the playbook of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, whose 2006 victory ended 15 years of Republican rule. Strickland, whose campaign manager Aaron Pickrell now heads the Obama effort here, deployed an all-inclusive 88-county strategy, as did Democrat Sherrod Brown, who won a U.S. Senate seat that year.

A series of state scandals involving GOP officials helped the Democrats — including “coingate,” in which millions of dollars from the state workers’ compensation fund were invested in rare coins. Of the $50 million invested by GOP officials, only $12 million was ever accounted for. Meanwhile, Gov. Bob Taft, scion of a celebrated Republican dynasty, was convicted while in office of not disclosing gifts from lobbyists. By the end of his term, Taft was the most unpopular governor in Ohio history, according to polls.

“Brown and Strickland ran a true statewide campaign and won, and we’re following that plan,” said Obama’s Ohio deputy communications director Tom Reynolds, who was sitting in a former church in Columbus that has been converted into the Democratic Party headquarters.

Yet Brown’s and Strickland’s statewide approach most likely will not translate into a landslide win for Obama in Ohio. While Obama leads Sen. John McCain by a slim margin, all indications are that this election will be as close as the previous two presidential contests. That’s because there are districts that will not elect a Democrat. Trust me on this. If Obama can get even a toehold in a Republican district or, at the very least, contain his margin of defeat in it, he simply has a better chance in a race that promises to be tight.

“We’ve got people running the campaign … who helped Strickland crack the code in this state,” said David Wilhelm, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “They understood you’ve got to campaign everywhere. … Strickland ran a campaign that talked about bread-and-butter issues where he spoke plainly to everyone. Sherrod ran on this idea of economic populism that is central to his image as a public servant.”

The Obama team has also adopted some of the tactics used by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton,  who crushed him in the primary here.

“They’ve learned a lot from Hillary’s campaign,” Wilhelm, an informal adviser to the Obama campaign, acknowledged. “In order to win Ohio, you have to campaign in little patches and be willing to do tours of the Ohio River Valley. You can’t skip that. They’ve learned those lessons well.”

Both Al Gore and Kerry had sought to increase turnout in such traditional Democratic strongholds as Cleveland. What was missing — particularly by Kerry — was any effort to campaign in culturally conservative areas, where George W. Bush won by margins of 2 to 1.

“The biggest mistake that national Democrats make when they look at Ohio … is that Hamilton, Cuyahoga and Franklin counties account for less than 30 percent of the general election voters,” Wilhelm said. “You tell that to somebody in Washington, and they say, ‘What are you talking about? Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland –  that’s the state.’ Well, it’s not the state, and it’s not even close to being the state.”

As state Rep. Ted Celeste, brother of the former Democratic governor, told me recently: “If you look at the map, one of the things you see are the number of medium- and small-sized towns. Kerry just simply did not do a good job in counties where Bush absolutely destroyed us — the smaller counties.”

It’s one thing to use someone else’s playbook. It’s another thing to execute it. Last Thursday when I sat down with Ohio Democratic consultant Greg Haas, who ran the state campaign for Clinton in 1992, he disputed the similarities between Obama’s and Strickland’s campaigns.

Haas pointed out — correctly — the effect, or lack thereof, of having a Democratic governor in office while running for president in Ohio. While Republican George Voinovich was governor in the 1990s, Clinton won Ohio twice.  With the Democrat Celeste in office in 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won, respectively.

“The way Ted Strickland won is not the way Barack Obama will win,” Haas told me, recalling Strickland’s race against the African-American Ken Blackwell, who had become the state GOP’s darling.

“First of all,” Haas said, “race is the opposite factor here. In the small town where I grew up, where I’m from, I was stunned about how many people would say to me when I was back there, ‘I’m voting for one of your guys for the first time ever. I’m not voting for that black guy.’ And these were fundamentalist Christians, and as far as they were concerned, Ted Strickland was a baby killer.”

But Haas went on to say,”You cannot win Ohio by turnout alone. You have to run a battle on two fronts. You have to make sure you get your vote out — but you also have to convert.

“And conversion is not necessarily getting a Republican to turn over, or getting independents,” Haas continued. “It’s also running strong enough in Republican areas that you don’t motivate them to turn out. We make the assumption that every Republican votes, because so many of them do. But we’re talking about the difference between 78 percent turnout and 81 percent of the Republicans. Take that three percent away — obviously you have a significant factor in the race. For the average Republican who votes almost every single time … the day [may get] crowded, and all sorts of things are going on on Election Day. Do you feel like you just got to get out there and vote? Or, well, do you say, ‘It’s not so bad. I’ve got to go to the grocery store. My one vote’s not going to matter.’”

Gov. Ted Strickland (flickr)

While Haas takes issue with drawing parallels between Strickland and Obama, he marvels at the tactical approach the Obama campaign has taken. This includes correcting the big tactical flaw in Kerry’s Ohio campaign: He did not advertise on general broadcast radio, while Bush paid for a mighty presence on the AM dial.

This might seem trivial. But the fact is that a large chunk of voters get most of their news over the radio. These are the men and women living in the exurbs and outer rings of Ohio cities, people who travel 45 minutes to get to the office, then make the same long trek home at night. Like not putting people on the ground in GOP counties and towns, what Kerry essentially did was cede the airwaves and news cycle to Bush. In 2008, try driving in Ohio for 10 minutes without hearing an Obama ad.

“The Kerry campaign in 2004 on the ground did one of the best jobs to date,” Haas said. “It did a much better job than we did in ‘92. But their problem was the Republicans did a fantastic job, and the air strike, air campaign from the national folks was flawed. What the Obama folks are doing is second to none. It is exponentially greater than any Democrat or Republican campaign has done before. They have over 500 employees, and they’ve been on the ground since June. They’ve got paid organizers in Zanesville, Ohio…”

When I interrupted by pointing out the field office in my hometown, Haas continued, “Yeah, exactly. I was a field director for Celeste in ‘82. We sent in a volunteer organizer into Butler County for the final three weeks of the campaign. And no one had done that before. And we won the county — by the way. The fact is, we’ve got  level of activity on the Obama campaign that the McCain campaign cannot match.”

Should Obama win the election, it will be because his campaign sees Ohio as I did in the statehouse basement. Rather than see it as the monolithic land mass that changes color every time CNN national correspondent John King touches it, Obama’s team knows the state is more of a quilt — with each patch requiring careful tending.

Strickland and Brown knew this, and they might have shown Obama the tactics. They might have given him the path. Now he must make their terrain his own.

Old Bag of Nails, Columbus, OH (Flickr: Ubi Desperare Nescio)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Dusk was falling in Upper Arlington, an affluent Columbus suburb, as members of the Wicked Investment Club gathered in the back dining room of Old Bag of Nails, a bar tucked into a stone strip mall. It looked like the kind of place that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin talks about when she speaks of the real America. Posters of the local high school sports teams decorate the entrance — football players with their arms fiercely crossed, field hockey leaders posing without their shoes — and the air is thick with the smell of beer and fried fish. On TV screens, ESPN and CNBC compete for patrons’ attention.

For 19 years, the Wicked Investment Club, whose members are, for the most part, retired, have met each month through bear and bull markets. They have seen the dot-com bubble come and go. More recently, the women’s group watched their portfolio — to which they each give $35 a month — drop with the failing fortunes of the rest of the nation.

Members were having dinner at the bar before their official meeting at the library across the street They were talking about what everyone talks about these days — presidential politics.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“I’ve been over-surveyed to death,” Wicked president Cay Friedman said. “But this most recent one was just awful. I pick up the phone, and this woman, chomping on gum, asks, ‘So, Cathy, are you going to vote for Obama?’ She didn’t identify herself, and she’s calling me Cathy, not Cay or Catherine. I said, ‘Well, that’s pretty personal, why do I have to go behind the sheet and vote?’”

“Do you answer truthfully?” asked fellow Wicked member Carolyn Focht. “I just lie to send them astray.”

Later in the dinner, Molly Schmied, by far the youngest club member, asked no one in particular, “If a recession is two quarters of economic decline, then what’s a depression?”

“It’s when it’s time to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge,” Focht replied.

Similar conversations are probably taking place in similar bars, as well as at wine tastings and regular group dinners at restaurants, all over Ohio — which is the point. If ever there was a state that had earned the name battleground, it’s Ohio.

It is a state with three major markets and many mid-size ones; with a Rustbelt economy in the northeast collapsing and a nervous white-collar workforce in the southwest. It is a state where the concerns of Appalachia weigh heavy in the southeast regions and here in increasingly cold Columbus, which is a microcosm of America. Candidates find it difficult to compete in the state, for distrust of the other side reigns supreme.

The last two presidential elections were decided by close margins, and conflict is always just below the surface. When it came time to reward land to those who fought in the Revolutionary War, it was New Englanders who were given their share in north Ohio, while the south went to Virginians. During the Civil War, the north stood as a Union stronghold, while the southwest, where I spent my youth, had more than its share of Confederate sympathizers.

Here is where “Iowa meets New Jersey,” as Democratic strategist Greg Haas told me.

“Ohio is a great representation of the entire nation,” said Deidra Reese, executive director of the League of Women Voters here. “We’ve got urban areas and rural areas, very poor ones close to very affluent ones. We literally run from one end of the spectrum when it comes to the diversity of lifestyles and interests. You can’t judge and say, ‘Ohio’s going to do this. You just can’t.”

And yet both candidates must make Ohio work for them. We are less than two weeks away from perhaps the most important general election in decades, and the state remains one that either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain could take on his road to the White House.

Four years ago, when Iraq was the No. 1 issue in the rest of the country had, polls said Ohioans put economic fears ahead of national security. While campaigning with Obama this summer, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland remarked something like, “As goes Ohio, so goes the country.” As the rest of the country stares down economic collapse, people here may have found the one issue that can unite them — economic distress.

Obama has opened up a small lead in the state, has motivated millions to register to vote and has made inroads in traditionally Republican district. But people in this state have seen fortunes change before.

“I remember four years ago, in Upper Arlington, seeing [John] Kerry signs on lawns where I’d never seen Democratic signs before,” said homemaker Beth Taggart, as we spoke not far from the statehouse on Tuesday afternoon. “The next morning, when I heard Kerry had conceded Ohio, I was with my sister eating breakfast at Bob Evans. And I looked around and asked, ‘Who are all these people who voted for Bush?’ I felt like a stranger in a strange land, like it wasn’t even my country anymore.”

“The state is still up for grabs,” said Herb Asher, an emeritus professor of political science at Ohio State University. “Both candidates have a reasonably good organization in place. Obviously, they both have to make sure to mobilize their base. But the other thing they have to do is connect to that middle ground. They have to connect with them on what is the major issue of the day — and that is the economy. How do you tap into voter fear? Voter anger?”

These are questions that candidates must deal with in other states, of course. But Ohio, perhaps more than any other state, represents the aspirations and fears of the country; it also is a place where mistrust finds a deeper resonance.

Because of the closeness of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, many — particularly African-Americans — accuse Republicans of conspiring to throw out, or simply ignore, votes that would have give the state to Al Gore and, four years later, to Kerry. This time around, one cannot watch local TV news more than a few minutes without seeing one of two stories: how Ohio State can beat No. 3-ranked Penn State Saturday, and how Republicans are poised to challenge the validity of ballots cast in early voting through Nov. 4.

Early Tuesday afternoon, I sat with Peg Rosenfield, the elections specialist for the League of Women Voters of Ohio, in the basement cafe of the state capitol. Rosenfield tended to shrug them off the most recent charges of voter fraud by state Republicans, instead blaming registration irregularities or stupidity — not dark complicity.

Misspellings, clerical errors, the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, hiring workers who simply didn’t care about the integrity of the voting process — those were the real issues behind supposed registration fraud, according to Rosenfield. She and others in the league spoke about the better preparedness of poll workers — which, as a matter of full disclosure, includes my mother — and other protections.

What most concerned Rosenfield was the potential for voter suppression and intimidation — tactics used in the Jim Crow South to keep African-Americans from exercising their right to vote at the dawn of the civil-rights movement. It was supposed to be a thing of the past, viewed in black-and-white when scrolling through grainy microfiche. Instead, Rosenfield said, it is something real — beginning with lawsuits she believed were filed in part to make first-time voters uncomfortable.

That made her scared of what might possibly happen should the race narrow, as one might expect.

“What really worries me is if it’s really close in Ohio, and if the state is going to make a difference,” Rosenfield said. “If it’s close in Ohio, and neither candidate has enough votes to win in the Electoral College, it’s going to make Florida in 2000 look like a family picnic. They’re just going to descend on us. That worries me. And nobody seems to worry about it. And it’s a very real possibility.

“There’s a prayer that election board members have,” Rosenfield said. “It goes something along the lines of, ‘Dear Lord, I don’t care who wins, but let it be a landslide.’ Because if you lose a close election, the losing party always thinks they have votes taken away from them. They can’t accept that their candidate didn’t get as many votes as the other one.

“The truth is,” Rosenfield said, “there are enough checks and balances to make sure the system goes right. And because we have close elections in Ohio — from school board seats to county commissioner — we really do know how to do recounts.”

That is the last thing anyone in this state wants.

A sense of weariness hangs over Ohio, like a night that will not end. The Obama and the McCain campaigns have poured millions into the state, and the effects of all that money have begun to show up in the minds of even the young. After dinner, before the members of the Wicked Investment Club could get down to business, Molly Schmied told a story about her young son picking up a magazine with Obama’s picture on it and blurting out, “I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.”

Following the chuckles, the group settled down to business. They looked over their portfolio, spoke about potential buys. Of all the stocks listed, only one had increased over the past month. This was not a terribly nervous bunch — one got the sense they were in it as a kind of sport — but they were concerned enough. The market had failed them, as it had millions of others like them.

Toward the end of the evening, they chose to buy shares in one company. Choosing the man to lead them from this crisis will come soon enough.

Well, the campaign that is so fond of releasing information late on Friday evening, driving my colleagues from the television networks berserk, has released her returns from 2006 and 2007, with 18 days left in the race.

As expected, what one sees in the returns, which you can access here, is a woman who carries the brunt of the household earnings. In 2007, she had income of $4,197,028 and paid $2,092,301 in taxes. She received a $954,112 refund.

All this leaves us with one question: How will she spend her $5,000 health care credit?