First, I’d like to say something about the question — from someone named Sherry Lief (I’m unsure of the spelling.) None of my TWI colleagues have heard of her, and Google and Technorati searches yield nothing. I tried every spelling of her name I could think of, and tried searching in combination with Obama and Ayers. If anyone has any insight, I would be interested to learn more about her.

In any case, here is her question:

You had mentioned that Barack Obama has no experience when it comes to a budget. I would like to beg to differ. He was involved with Ayers as a chairman for the Annenberg Project, and apparently, from the research I’ve done, was able to help decide where $450 billion [!] went into spending, for educational projects. Every time math and science came up, he threw it out the window, and spent the money on educational programs that were socialistic in their genre. My research shows he failed. Isn’t that a huge point to be able to bring up?

That’s quite a question — by far the most partisan I’ve ever heard on any of the dozens of these conference calls I’ve sat in on. This is also noteworthy because Giuliani took only three questions, and another was similarly partisan — from a conservative blogger named Chuck Pardee, who asked a question critical of TV comedians who have mocked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s and “make a living embellishing facts.” The other question was not partisan, but came from the conservative Website Townhall.com’s Matt Lewis.

Usually, on these calls, the questioners are a mix of mainstream journalists, asking straight questions. That all three questions came from conservatives — and two were of a decidedly partisan nature — struck me as strange. Perhaps it was a coincidence. I certainly don’t have enough information to accuse the campaign of planting questions or cherry-picking questioners.

But this definitely did not “smell right,” as David Letterman would say.

Anyway, on to Giuliani’s comments:

That’s very interesting. That is an area of Sen. Obama’s background that seems to be very much hidden, and the media doesn’t seem to be spending very much time on it, and I really would like to know more about it. I don’t want to come to any conclusions about it until I know more about it. But, he was involved with [the Assn. of Community Organizers for Reform Now]. When he was a community organizer, I believe, it was a group, including ACORN, that recruited him. He did give out a lot of money, and I know Ayers was on the same board he was on. I also know, from the [unintelligible] that I’ve done, that a lot of the projects failed miserably.

This is an area that could be examined. You do know that he is often attacked for having never run a budget. He never mentions this as a budget that he ran — which is a telltale sign to me that he isn’t very proud of how he managed this budget. Unfortunately, I don’t have the details at my fingertips, but I’ll get them now that you’ve mentioned it, about how exactly he managed that budget, how large it was, what responsibility he had. I’ve just kind of exhausted my knowledge of it with what I’ve told you.

I have, in the past, said that I find his involvement with Ayers to be very troubling. Maybe this is, in part, my background as a U.S. attorney who had to deal with some of the aftermath of the Weather Underground, and as someone who has five uncles who are police officers. I find the involvement with a man who blew up public buildings, and still remains proud of it, I find that to be very troubling. And I don’t find that to be an unfair area to examine, if all we’ve got to go on with Barack Obama is his judgment.

Look, being honest, he doesn’t have the experience – and if you say he has experience, he doesn’t have much. But if he doesn’t have experience, what does he have? Judgment. Then we’ve got to examine his judgment, and being on a board with Ayers, who is a, still, proud member of the Weather Underground, having done the first fund-raiser for him, when he ran for public office — along with, I believe, Ayers wife, Bernadette Dohrn, who was another member of the Weather Underground.

These are troubling facts that have to be examined — if Barack Obama is running on judgment — and it’s not unfair to examine them. Considering what they’re examining Sarah Palin on, how does it become unfair to be digging in and trying to find out how close was his involvement with Ayers? How successful was their program together? If they gave money to housing, did the housing work? Did they give it to legitimate housing projects, or did they reward friends? Was it Chicago-style projects, or was it more independent-style politics. All of these are very fair questions. So I will look into some of them. Thank you, and thank you for alerting me to it.

For someone who said he didn’t know much about Ayers and Obama, he sure had a lot to say on the subject off the top of his head.

One point of fact-checking: Giuliani repeated the false claim that Ayers hosted Obama’s “first fund-raiser.” Ayers did host an early event at his home when Obama first announced his plans to run for the Illinois state senate. However, it was not a fund-raiser, and Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Ayers did not contribute financially to “Obama’s first campaign, according to Illinois state records.”

It is also worth noting that the last time Ayers came up was also on a McCain campaign conference call. A McCain campaign adviser made the claims about Obama and Ayers on the aforementioned call that Smith fact-checked last week. When the campaign raised the issue directly, along with a slew of other claims, it didn’t have the desired impact.

Considering the urgency created by McCain’s recent slide in the polls — and the short time left until November — the fact that it came up this time in such an unusual way seems suspicious.

UPDATE: Others who sat in the call report the mystery questioner’s name as Sherry Riggs. Maybe I need a better recorder. Nonetheless, I still can’t find anything about her.

President Bill Clinton (WDCpix)

All eyes were focused last week—or most of them anyway—on the bailout negotiations, more specifically on the shenanigans of Sen. John McCain as he sought to swoop in and be the white knight of the whole mess. Will he, won’t he, will he, won’t he go to the debates?

He got all the attention he wanted, but it certainly felt political to the max, no matter who spun it otherwise.

But there was another large presence making the rounds last week, seeking public attention — former President Bill Clinton. Yes, his Global Initiative Conference was in full swing in New York, providing the media with a reason to give him a whole lot of air time. And fill it up he did, with his smarts and reach, his talks of AIDS and education, and the need for all of us to care for the unlucky.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But deeply embedded in Clinton’s eloquent dissection of global problems was his still palpable bitterness over his wife’s loss to Sen. Barack Obama, whose name Clinton seemed to have a hard time uttering as he worked those mikes.

He was finally more gracious when introducing Obama at his own conference. But up until that point, as he talked to Larry King and the women at “The View” — now friskily empowered to be election-year players — he had a difficult time camouflaging the wounds from his wife’s loss. He mentioned Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton by name, over and over, her gifts, what she has spent her life working for, all while straining to give a full-hearted endorsement of the Democratic nominee.

The former president doesn’t seem to have any simpatico with the cool post-boomer now climbing in the polls. In fact, he has expressed far more natural sympathy with McCain. Clinton made a point of saying, over and over, how much he likes the GOP nominee — displaying not just sympathy but an almost respectful envy, from a Vietnam-era guy who didn’t serve to to a genuine war hero.

But Clinton went farther as he made his rounds, expressing his approbation for both Palins. He spoke warmly of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd. “I like the idea that this guy does those long-distance races,” Clinton said, “Stayed in the race for 500 miles with a broken arm. My kind of guy.”

These are real folks, just like me — and unlike that other guy whose name I am having some trouble with. That’s the theme.

Forget that their policies and politics are 180-degrees away from everything both Clintons have been about. Clinton is, without a doubt, as complex and flawed and gifted a man as ever to be at the helm. But the page is turning and he knows it. There is a sense of the limelight moving on.

Look, what Clinton is doing now is good, no question, and he has the stature and moxie — and need — to make it work, to galvanize other rich folk to try to help solve the world’s problems. Clearly he means to make a profound difference in his later years — and if part of that is a need for redemption after his public fall from grace, fine.

But there was evident these past days, as there often is, a visible fight within Clinton — between his bigger self and his smaller self, between his professed altruism and his narcissism.

I think he’ll win, he said of Obama, through clenched teeth, or a clenched heart, or both. But there was not much energy or enthusiasm in that prediction. He sounded impassioned and folksy and as smart as anyone who has ever occupied the White House. In his performance now, there is always the winking sense of: hey, America, look what you’re missing. You blew it; you could have had us back.

I thought about all this, about Clinton — and for that matter, about McCain — and how both men behaved last week, when I was reading the obituaries for Paul Newman, who died of cancer at 83.

Paul Newman (Flickr: Heather Lucille)

He was the other man to get some air time as the week ended. A class act, everyone agrees, a marvelous film actor, whose ego never showed — on screen or off. No entourages, no messy affairs.

He was a man, by all accounts, with a tenacious love for his spouse; a man unassuming about his gifts, though driven to be a really good actor; a man who kept acting, and didn’t get all hammy in his later roles like some other big stars like, say, Al Pacino.

Newman was also a man who did the philanthropy thing — with his salad dressings and spaghetti sauces — pouring the $250 million he made into camps for sick kids. All done with an easy hand. All done without saying: look at me, look at me.

He left the planet a better place. He left us the marvelous films and the legacy of giving back — rare for anyone, rarer still for someone in a profession like show business — and he did it without leaving ego fingerprints all over the place.

It was a lovely and sad note, Newman’s passing, in a week full of posturing and political gamesmanship.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

Following big crowds, the two will now split their forces and travel alone. Of course, this is not unexpected — but they risk risk facing the same downfall of other dynamic duos. Here are some examples that the McCain camp may want to consider before making this a situation permanent:

1) Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Giles — When Buffy’s watcher, Giles, left to return to Britain, the slayer was left not only to fight the forces of darkness alone, but to lead her friends and keep her little sister Dawn in line. She no longer had a guiding hand, and, without his battlefield avatar, Giles no longer had a sense of purpose. The show wandered into predictability without Giles’s dry humor and wit in beating back evil while putting out one-liners.

2) Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin — One can argue that neither recovered from the split. Martin became more and more part of the Vegas scene, tooling around with the Rat Pack, doing bad movies and ultimately hosting a series of terrible celebrity roasts. Lewis, meanwhile, never found his comedic timing again after he lost his straight-man. Lewis eventually made a film about the Holocaust called “The Day the Clown Died” considered so bad it never released and probably will never see the light of day. Now we know him best not for his physical comedy but for his ability to stay awake through Labor Day telethons.

3) Ricardo Mantalban (Mr. Rourke) and Herve’ Villechaize (Tattoo)–Ah boss, de plane, de plane. It’s hard to imagine the strange ABC weekly series “Fantasy Island” now without the accented island overseer and his little friend. However the might-sized sidekick was fired before the 1983 season in favor of Christopher Hewett, who would later find sitcom success as “Mr. Belvedere.” But he would not find it on the Island. The series quickly tanked, and the TV-viewing public was robbed of at least two more seasons where celebrities like future congressman Sonny Bono and Bill Bixby found peace and contentment in the magical place where they only asked you to come aboard because they were expecting you. Wait, that’s “The Love Boat.” Never mind.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)(WDCpix)

St. Paul, Minn.–Yesterday afternoon, when Sen. John McCain descended the stairs of his flying “Straight Talk Express” onto the tarmac in Minneapolis, greeted by members of his family as well as his running-mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, 44, and her family, he walked out onto what had become very rough ground.

Since the start of his current presidential bid, McCain has emphasized experience and presented national security as the overwhelming issue. The voting public responded to both points.

But with his surprise pick of relatively inexperienced Palin as vice president on Friday, the once sharp focus of McCain’s campaign has become fuzzy. His campaign is now stressing reform — Palin’s supposed strength — over issues that brought McCain the GOP nomination. More important, the opportunity that had once glimmered before him — to help rebuild the battered brand of the Republican Party — seems lost.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

As a result, the challenges facing the one-time maverick when he takes the stage at the Xcel Center tonight look even bigger. McCain must regain control of his campaign’s narrative and also assure the nation that whatever remains of the GOP brand forged by Ronald Reagan is applicable at a time of increasing economic despair at home and two seemingly never-ending wars abroad. In addition, many issues of national concern today — including health-care reform and the environment — have not been strong points for the GOP. In short, McCain faces a task as great as, if not greater than, his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, did when he stood before 75,000 people at Invesco Field in Denver.

“The party that was formed during the Reagan years was based on being hawkish on foreign policy and smaller government” said David R. Gergen, a former White House adviser to presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Reagan and Bill Clinton who is now director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “And he supports all of that philosophy. But I think the problem is that the issues facing the country are totally different. People are concerned about climate change, about affordable health care and the party hasn’t come to grips with these issues. In many ways, the public views the Democrats as being closer to those issues.

“He needs to regain control of his campaign,” Gergen said, talking about what this GOP almost-nominee should do in his acceptance speech. “The campaign is losing focus. He launched this campaign saying terrorism is the transcendent issue of our time and that he was the man with the experience to handle that issue.

“Now, because he picked Palin, the focus has shifted more towards reforming Washington,” Gergen said, “while moving away from the foreign-policy and experience argument. The strength of his campaign was foreign policy and the idea of grown-ups being in charge — and he can’t emphasize those because of her. Also, the concerns have shifted. It’s about the economy. Issues like Iraq and terrorism are still important — but what everyone cares about is economics.”

Like Reagan in 1980, McCain comes to the stage tonight wearing the mantle of an outsider — though the Arizona senator has sought to tie himself to the values of the conservative Republican brand over the last eight years. He is still considered the man who once took on the evangelical wing, calling its leaders “agents of intolerance” — though he has now opted for a running mate sure to please that wing of the party. He is constantly named as the man willing to reach across the aisle, the pragmatist who understands that our world cannot be perfected but, through compromise and hard work can certainly be improved. This reputation survives despite the fact that during this campaign, he has regularly turned right whenever that was required.

The Reagan historian Lou Cannon disagreed with my Gipper comparison, but echoed many of Gergen’s sentiments. “One of the oddities of this election,” Cannon noted, “is McCain is hurt by the issue he was most right about. The war has gone better by any definition — from those who supported it from the onset to those who were completely opposed to it. But, in an odd way, the war has gone just well enough to take it out of the public consciousness. It’s not the bleeding sore you have to deal with daily. It’s not in the headlines.”

Cannon explained that economic woes never help a party seeking to hold onto the White House. “Enough people are hurting or are anxious about the economy,” Cannon said, “and that issue doesn’t work for a party in power. It didn’t work for Herbert Hoover and it didn’t work for Jimmy Carter. The Democrats simply have been more coherent on the issue. When it comes to the economy, McCain’s a blank slate. The issues he’s banked his campaign on are not the issues that are working for him.”

Thus McCain, who is still, remarkably, in a dead-heat with Obama according to many polls, seems in a bind worthy of magician David Blaine. He had placed his whole campaign on the strength of a nation’s fears over national security and trust in his experience, both in combat and in the decades he’s spent in Washington.

But, by choosing Palin, he undermined those very strengths, which in the long view can no longer be viewed as strengths when applied to this chapter of American life. If he chooses to return to the points he launched his campaign on, he runs a double risk. Not only could he be called out for picking someone without the chops to take his place on day one; he could alienate a public whose primary concerns right now have simply not been his priority. Yes, his campaign needs to refind itself, to refocus. But he cannot return to the same playbook.

While the Xcel Center crowd might well be jammed with GOP delegates fired up by McCain’s choice for vice president, it’s not this crowd he has to win over. It’s the audience watching in Hamilton, Ohio, and Colorado Springs and Butte, Mont.

And campaign strategists and analysts from both the GOP and the Democrats say McCain can indeed pivot from his earlier issues to present a strong message for the general election. He could move forward from the theme of national security and use his already familiar personal story– laid out dramatically by the former actor and courtroom orator, Fred Thompson, on Tuesday — as the framework for how he could rebuild that nation. After all, he had to rebuild his body and his life after five years of torture by the North Vietnamese.

“People still think of him as more experienced and with more significant achievements,” said Ed Rollins, the national campaign director for Reagan’s 1984 triumphant campaign and the national campaign chairman for Gov. MikeHuckabee’s recent primary run. “He can’t compete with Barack Obama’s speech, he just can’t. He just has to be solid and articulate what he’s going to do for the next three-to-four-years in office.”

And while Rollins might seem an appropriate adviser for the GOP almost-nominee, perhaps equal counsel was offered by David Kusnet, Bill Clinton’s chief speech-writer for the 1992 campaign and for the first two years of the Clinton White House. Kusnet also said McCain has to move forward with his acceptance speech.

“Presumably every other speaker, in addition to the video, will refer to his personal biography and heroism,” Kunset said. “That’s much better than having him do it. He would be best served if he would borrow a successful technique from Obama; move the most emotionally moving points to the very end of his speech, and put it only in passing — as Obama did when he reflected in Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ last Thursday.

“By doing this, you create this compelling tension which will keep people listening,” Kusnet said. “It’s a tension that creates attention because people are expecting you to say that. I do expect him to relate the two great themes of his campaign — the need for the United States to defend itself against terrorism and the need to reform the political system. And he can find an emotional connection to these by talking about his experience at the end.

“If I was working for him, I’d have him stress not his life as POW, but his life afterwards,” Kusnet said. “He has an experience that very few native-born Americans have had: an opportunity to discover America all over again. He came back after great trauma to find an America that had changed in many good ways while he was gone. He had that chance for rediscovery and that’s what he should focus on.”

It is a truism that McCain cannot match Obama on the stage, cannot create the kind of spectacle seen last week in Denver. But he has to find “it.” He must find a speech that can, asObama did, identify the kind of president he will be, the kind of White House he will run.

Big speeches are the worst platform for McCain — far from the intimate town halls he loves. He cannot mimic the fierce and great rhetoric his counterpart has at his disposal. Instead, McCain must elevate the strong rapport he has with small audiences to the grand stage. Should he do that, he would help bridge the perceived gap he has with the “so-called” everyman when it comes to issues of day-to-day life. The bar is high. But he has met challenges before.

Mr. Rove, the architect of President Bush’s election victories, has been telling Republican benefactors across the country that giving to official Republican Party fund-raising committees will not be enough this year, according to people familiar with his pitch over the past few months.

“They said Mr. Rove has regularly expressed concern that Democrat-leaning organizations such as MoveOn.org and labor unions could swamp the Republican Party’s money machine and overwhelm the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican.

“To counter that wave, Mr. Rove has been asking elite Republican fund-raisers to pour their millions of dollars into non-party groups like Freedom’s Watch, which is gearing up to spend tens of millions of dollars to help elect conservatives — primarily Republicans — to Congress and the White House.

GOP contributors don’t seem to need much convincing. Donations to federally focused conservative “527” organizations — tax-exempt groups not permitted to advocate for individual candidates but allowed to attack their positions on specific issues — totaled more than $43 million through June, according the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit campaign-finance watchdog. That’s up from roughly $21 million by the same point in 2004.

The question remains: can one of these groups locate an issue — Swift-Boat-style — with the power to sway elections?