Paying the Price - New York Times

Paying the Price - New York Times

April 12, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Paying the Price

By BOB HERBERT

You knew something was up early in the day. As soon as I told executives at MSNBC that I was going to write about the “60 Minutes” piece, which was already in pretty wide circulation, they began acting very weird. We’ll get back to you, they said.

In a “60 Minutes” interview with Don Imus broadcast in July 1998, Mike Wallace said of the “Imus in the Morning” program, “It’s dirty and sometimes racist.”

Mr. Imus then said: “Give me an example. Give me one example of one racist incident.” To which Mr. Wallace replied, “You told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car, coming home, that Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes.”

Mr. Imus said, “Well, I’ve nev — I never use that word.”

Mr. Wallace then turned to Mr. Anderson, his producer. “Tom,” he said.

“I’m right here,” said Mr. Anderson.

Mr. Imus then said to Mr. Anderson, “Did I use that word?”

Mr. Anderson said, “I recall you using that word.”

“Oh, O.K.,” said Mr. Imus. “Well, then I used that word. But I mean — of course, that was an off-the-record conversation. But ——”

“The hell it was,” said Mr. Wallace.

The transcript was pure poison. A source very close to Don Imus told me last night, “They did not want to wait for your piece to come out.”

For MSNBC, Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was bad enough. Putting the word “nigger” into the so-called I-man’s mouth was beyond the pale.

The roof was caving in on Mr. Imus. More advertisers were pulling the plug. And Bruce Gordon, a member of the CBS Corp. board of directors and former head of the N.A.A.C.P., said publicly that Mr. Imus should be fired.

But some of the most telling and persuasive criticism came from an unlikely source — internally at the network that televised Mr. Imus’s program. Women, especially, were angry and upset. Powerful statements were made during in-house meetings by women at NBC and MSNBC — about how black women are devalued in this country, how they are demeaned by white men and black men.

White and black women spoke emotionally about the way black women are frequently trashed in the popular culture, especially in music, and about the way news outlets give far more attention to stories about white women in trouble.

Phil Griffin, a senior vice president at NBC News who oversaw the Imus show for MSNBC, told me yesterday, “It touched a huge nerve.”

Whether or not Mr. McGuirk was hired for the specific noxious purpose referred to in the “60 Minutes” interview, he has pretty much lived up to that job description. He’s a minstrel, a white man who has gleefully led the Imus pack into some of the most disgusting, degrading attempts at racial (not to mention sexist) humor that it’s possible to imagine.

Blacks were jigaboos, Sambos and Brilloheads. Women were bitches and, above all else, an endless variety of ever-ready sexual vessels, born to be degraded.

The question now is how long the “Imus in the Morning” radio show will last. Just last month, in a reference to a speech by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Selma, Ala., Mr. McGuirk called Mrs. Clinton a bitch and predicted she would “have cornrows and gold teeth” by the time her presidential primary campaign against Senator Barack Obama is over.

Way back in 1994, a friend of mine, the late Lars-Erik Nelson, a terrific reporter and columnist at The Daily News and Newsday, mentioned an Imus segment that offered a “satirical” rap song that gave advice to President Clinton on what to do about Paula Jones: “Pimp-slap the ho.” Mr. Nelson also wrote that there was a song on the program dealing with Hillary Clinton’s menstrual cycle.

So this hateful garbage has been going on for a long, long time. There was nothing new about the tone or the intent of Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment. As Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, told me the other night, “It’s a long pattern of behavior, and at some point somebody has to say enough is enough.”

The crucial issue goes well beyond Don Imus’s pathetically infantile behavior. The real question is whether this controversy is loud enough to shock Americans at long last into the realization of just how profoundly racist and sexist the culture is.

It appears that on this issue the general public, and the women at Mr. Imus’s former network, are far ahead of the establishment figures, the politicians and the media biggies, who were always so anxious to appear on the show and to defend Mr. Imus.

That is a very good sign.

Many Plans, No News - New York Times

Many Plans, No News - New York Times

March 30, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Many Plans, No News

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In the Middle East today, home of the invention of algebra, a new math seems to have taken over. It is subtraction by addition. It goes like this: Add more trips to the region by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — who doesn’t seem to have any coherent strategy — to an emotionally stale, restated Saudi peace overture to Israel, and combine it with a cynical Hamas-Fatah cease-fire accord and an Israeli prime minister so unpopular his poll ratings are now lower than the margin of error, and you’ll find that we’re actually going backward — way back, back to the pre-Oslo era.

Only the bad guys make history in the Middle East today. Only the bad guys have imagination and resolve. Arab, Palestinian and Israeli “moderates” are just watching. Their leaders have never been weaker, and America has never been more feckless in framing clear choices to spur them to action.

We could be and should be doing better. Nearly seven years ago, President Bill Clinton put forward something called the “Clinton plan” for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. For the first time, the U.S. laid out its own detailed design of a fair deal between the parties. That plan called for Israel to give up 95 percent of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem; for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to Palestinian areas but not to Israel; for the most populated Jewish settlements around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to remain in place and the others to be removed; and for Palestinians to be compensated for those settlements with land swaps and other arrangements from Israel.

Yes, Yasir Arafat rejected it at the time, and even the Israelis never fully embraced the plan as it was, but everyone knew then and knows now that the Clinton plan is the only realistic framework for peace. The Bush team took the view that since Arafat wouldn’t accept it, the Clinton plan was a dead letter and therefore could be and should be forever sidelined. They also put themselves on the sidelines of Arab-Israeli diplomacy for six years, rather than sell anything with the name “Clinton” on it.

So instead of constantly telling the parties that the Clinton plan was the only viable basis for peace, and that U.S. diplomacy would be devoted to building a context for Palestinians and Israelis to act on that plan and a U.S. team to execute it, President Bush gave us scattershot visits by his secretaries of state and minimalist, stopgap measures to engineer cease-fires or talks about talks. Who can name them? “The Mitchell plan,” “the quartet,” “the Zinni mission,” “the Tenet plan,” “the road map,” the “two plus four plus four framework” and soon the “six plus two” framework.

You can make fun all you want of Bill Clinton’s “naïve” Middle East peace passion, notes Mr. Clinton’s top negotiator, Dennis Ross, but the fact is four times more Israelis and Palestinians died fighting each other during the “realistic,” “pro-Israel,” sideline-sitting Bush years of 2001 to 2005 than in the “naïve” decade of intense U.S. peacemaking — dominated by President Clinton — from Madrid to Oslo, 1991 to 2000.

Had the Bush-Rice team stuck with the Clinton plan, today, at a minimum, it would have been locked in as the only acceptable formula for peace, and at a maximum we might have gotten there. But the Bush philosophy seems to have been: “A.B.C. — anything but Clinton,” said Gidi Grinstein, who heads Reut Institute, Israel’s premier strategy policy group. “But by not endorsing the Clinton parameters, we are back with plans that are much worse.”

Indeed, all that is on the table now is the restated Saudi peace initiative, calling for full peace with Israel after full withdrawal and justice for Palestinian refugees — with no maps, details or Arab plan for how to pursue it with Israel. And we have the Saudi-brokered Mecca peace accord between Hamas and Fatah, which doesn’t even acknowledge Israel.

If you read the Mecca agreement, said Mr. Ross, “Israel appears only as an adjective, not as a noun. Israel only appears in the agreement modifying words like ‘aggression’ and ‘occupation,’ but never appears as a noun — much less as a state to be recognized.”

That is what happens when America leaves a vacuum. Others fill it with peace plans that fit their needs first and the needs of a real peace second.

The Bush team reminds me of someone who buys a rundown house that comes with remodeling plans by Frank Lloyd Wright, but insists instead on using drawings submitted by the next-door neighbors. You get what you pay for. Or what you don’t pay for.

The Troika and the Surge - New York Times

The Troika and the Surge - New York Times

March 21, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

The Troika and the Surge

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

President Bush’s Iraq surge policy is about a month old now, and there is only one thing you can say about it for certain: no matter what anyone in Congress, the military or the public has to say, it’s going ahead. The president has the authority to do it and the veto power to prevent anyone from stopping him. Therefore, there’s only one position to have on the surge anymore: hope that it works.

Does this mean that Democrats in Congress who are trying to shut down the war and force a deadline should take the advice of critics and shut up and let the surge play out?

No, just the opposite. I would argue that for the first time we have — by accident — the sort of balanced policy trio that had we had it in place four years go might have spared us the mess of today. It’s the Pelosi-Petraeus-Bush troika.

I hope the Democrats, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, keep pushing to set a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, because they are providing two patriotic services that the Republicans failed to offer in the previous four years: The first is policy discipline. Had Republicans spent the previous four years regularly questioning Don Rumsfeld’s ignorant bromides and demanding that the White House account for failures in Iraq, we might have had the surge in 2003 — when it was obvious we did not have enough troops on the ground — rather than in 2007, when the chances of success are much diminished.

Because the Republicans controlled the House and Senate, and because many conservatives sat in mute silence the last four years, the administration could too easily ignore its critics and drag out policies in Iraq that were not working. With the Democrats back in Congressional control, that is no longer possible.

The other useful function Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues are performing is to give the president and Gen. David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, the leverage of a deadline without a formal deadline. How so? The surge can’t work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, which means Sunni-Shiite negotiations — and such negotiations are unlikely to work without America having the “leverage” of telling the parties that if they don’t compromise, we will leave. (Deadlines matter. At some point, Iraqis have to figure this out themselves.)

Since Mr. Bush refuses to set a deadline, Speaker Pelosi is the next best thing. Do not underestimate how useful it is for General Petraeus to be able to say to Iraqi politicians: “Look guys, Pelosi’s mad as hell — and she has a big following! I don’t want to quit, but Americans won’t stick with this forever. I only have a few months.”

Speaker Pelosi: Keep the heat on.

As for General Petraeus, I have no idea whether his military strategy is right, but at least he has one — and he has stated that by “late summer” we should know if it’s working. As General Petraeus told the BBC last week, “I have an obligation to the young men and women in uniform out here, that if I think it’s not going to happen, to tell them that it’s not going to happen, and there needs to be a change.”

We need to root for General Petraeus to succeed, and hold him to those words if he doesn’t — not only for the sake of the soldiers on the ground, but also so that Mr. Bush is not allowed to drag the war out until the end of his term, and then leave it for his successor to unwind.

But how will General Petraeus or Congress judge if the surge is working? It may be obvious, but it may not be. It will likely require looking beneath the surface calm of any Iraqi neighborhood — where violence has been smothered by the surge of U.S. troops — and trying to figure out: what will happen here when those U.S. troops leave? Remember, enough U.S. troops can quiet any neighborhood for a while. The real test is whether a self-sustaining Iraqi army and political consensus are being put in place that can hold after we leave.

It will also likely require asking: Are the Shiite neighborhoods quieting down as a result of reconciliation or because their forces are just lying low so the U.S. will focus on whacking the Sunnis — in effect, carrying out the civil war on the Shiites’ behalf, so that when we leave they can dominate more easily?

When you’re sitting on a volcano, it is never easy to tell exactly what is happening underneath — or what will happen if you move. But those are the judgments we may soon have to make. In the meantime, since Bush is going to be Bush, let Pelosi be Pelosi and Petraeus be Petraeus — and hope for the best. For now, we don’t have much choice.

Marching With a Mouse - New York Times

Marching With a Mouse - New York Times

March 16, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Marching With a Mouse

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There aren’t a lot of environmental groups with their own investment bank consultants, so when you hear that Environmental Defense has just hired the boutique Wall Street firm Perella Weinberg Partners, you know that we’re in a new world. Every college activist should study this story, because it is the future. In the old days, when activists wanted something done, they held a sit-in or organized a protest march. Now they hire an investment bank.

O.K., maybe every activist group can’t afford Goldman Sachs, but such groups should nevertheless analyze how Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council used the Internet and the market to save the planet from tons of CO2. The story started last year when a giant Texas power company, TXU, announced plans to build 11 coal-fired, CO2-belching power plants, raising the ire of environmentalists worried about climate change. Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, which has an office in Texas, wrote to John Wilder, TXU’s chairman, and asked for a meeting, but was brushed off. TXU made it clear that it was on a fast track to build its plants and had the governor of Texas on its side.

Talk about not knowing what world you’re living in.

So Environmental Defense and its allies turned to the Web and created the Stoptxu.com Web site, which put out regular electronic newsletters on the TXU plans and built a national constituency opposed to the deal. They also took TXU to court.

None of that might have been enough, though, had the big buyout firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Texas Pacific Group not teamed up to offer to buy TXU in February — a deal valued at $45 billion that would be the biggest leveraged buyout ever. But there was a catch: “The buyers did not want to take over a company enmeshed in a war with environmentalists,” Mr. Krupp said, “so they came to us and said, ‘We only want to go forward if you and NRDC will praise what we are trying to do here.’ ” Mr. Krupp and NRDC were ready to engage, but only if the deal could be made more climate-friendly.

“The negotiations involved talks over 10 days,” Mr. Krupp said, “and the key session was compressed into 17 hours in the Oriental hotel in San Francisco from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. the next morning.”

Eventually, the private equity group agreed to cut the number of new TXU coal plants from 11 to 3, to support a U.S. cap on greenhouse gas emissions and to commit TXU to plowing $400 million into energy-efficiency programs and doubling its purchase of wind power. In return, the environmentalists blessed the deal, but Mr. Krupp also hired Perella Weinberg to negotiate the fine print.

That is a pretty good day’s work for people who had no money on the table. There are a lot of lessons here.

First, Mr. Krupp said, “what is the message when the largest buyout in history is made contingent [by the buyers] on winning praise for its greenhouse gas plan? ... The markets are ahead of the politicians. The world has changed, and these guys see it.”

TXU not only didn’t understand that the world was getting green; it didn’t understand that the world was getting flat. “Going online,” Mr. Krupp said, “we shifted this from a local debate over generating electricity to a national debate over capping and reducing carbon emissions.” So, what TXU had hoped would be just a local skirmish was instead watched on computer screens in every global market.

The Internet age is an age of transparency, when more people than ever can see right into your business and judge you by your deeds, not words. TXU could not manage its reputation by just hiring a P.R. firm and issuing a statement — because, thanks to the Internet, too many little people could talk back or shape TXU’s image on a global basis through the Web, for free.

“The reputations of companies are going to be less determined by the quality of their P.R. people and more by their actual actions — and that empowers more of an honest debate on the merits,” said Mr. Krupp, adding, “It’s just harder to keep bad environmental news secret and expect the public to sit on its hands in the Internet era.”

Message to young activists: If you do your homework, have your facts right and the merits on your side, and then build a constituency for your ideals through the Internet, you, too, can be at the table of the biggest deal in history. Or as Mr. Krupp puts it: the TXU example shows that truth plus passion plus the Internet “can create an irresistible tide for change.”

Paul Krugman is off today.

Indentured Servants in America - New York Times

Indentured Servants in America - New York Times

March 12, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Indentured Servants in America

By BOB HERBERT

A must-read for anyone who favors an expansion of guest worker programs in the U.S. is a stunning new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that details the widespread abuse of highly vulnerable, poverty-stricken workers in programs that already exist.

The report is titled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.” It will be formally released today at a press conference in Washington.

Workers recruited from Mexico, South America, Asia and elsewhere to work in American hotels and in such labor-intensive industries as forestry, seafood processing and construction are often ruthlessly exploited.

They are routinely cheated out of their wages, which are low to begin with. They are bound like indentured servants to the middlemen and employers who arrange their work tours in the U.S. And they are virtual hostages of the American companies that employ them.

The law does not allow these “guests” to change jobs while they’re here. If a particular employer is unscrupulous, as is very often the case, the worker has little or no recourse.

One of the guest workers profiled in the report was a psychology student recruited in the Dominican Republic to work at a hotel in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The woman had taken on $4,000 in debt to cover “fees” and other expenses that were required for her to get a desk job that paid $6 an hour.

But after a month, her hours were steadily reduced until she was working only 15 or 20 hours a week. That left her with barely enough money to survive, and with no way of paying off her crushing debt.

The woman and her fellow guest workers had hardly enough money for food. “We would just buy Chinese food because it was the cheapest,” she said. “We would buy one plate a day and share it between two or three people.” She told the authors of the report: “I felt like an animal without claws — defenseless. It is the same as slavery.”

Steven Greenhouse of The Times recently reported on a waiter from Indonesia who took on $6,000 in debt to become a guest worker. He arrived in North Carolina expecting to do farm work but found that there was no job for him at all.

The report focused primarily on the 120,000 foreign workers who are allowed into the U.S. each year to work on farms or at other low-skilled jobs. In most cases the guest workers take on a heavy debt load to participate in the program, anywhere from $500 to more than $10,000. Worried about the welfare of their families back home, and with the huge debt hanging over their heads, the workers are most often docile, even in the face of the most egregious treatment.

The result, said the report, is that they are “systematically exploited and abused.”

Some of the worst abuses occur in the forestry industry. The report said, “Virtually every forestry company that the Southern Poverty Law Center has encountered provides workers with pay stubs showing that they have worked substantially fewer hours than they actually worked.”

A favorite (and extremely cruel) tactic of employers is the seizure of guest workers’ identity documents, such as passports and Social Security cards. That leaves the workers incredibly vulnerable.

“Numerous employers have refused to return these documents even when the worker simply wanted to return to his home country,” the report said. “The Southern Poverty Law Center also has encountered numerous incidents where employers destroyed passports or visas in order to convert workers into undocumented status.”

Without their papers the workers live in abject fear of encountering the authorities, who will treat them as illegals. They are completely at the mercy of the employers.

President Bush has been relentless in his push to greatly expand guest worker programs as part of his effort to revise the nation’s immigration laws. To expand these programs without looking closely at the gruesome abuses already taking place would be both tragic and ridiculous.

“This is not a situation where there are just a few bad-apple employers,” said Mary Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has initiated a number of lawsuits on behalf of abused workers. “Our experience is that it’s the very structure of the program that lends itself to abuse.”

Early Primary Rush Upends ’08 Campaign Plans - New York Times

Early Primary Rush Upends ’08 Campaign Plans - New York Times

March 12, 2007

Early Primary Rush Upends ’08 Campaign Plans

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, March 9 — The trickle of states moving their 2008 presidential primaries to Feb. 5 has turned into an avalanche, forcing all the presidential campaigns to reconsider every aspect of their nominating strategy — where to compete, how to spend money, when to start television advertising — as they gird for the prospect of a 20-state national Primary Day.

In the last two weeks, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, dispatched the director of his political action committee to run his primary campaign in California, where a bill to move the primary to Feb. 5 is on the desk of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat, announced that he had won the endorsement of Richard J. Codey, a former acting governor of New Jersey, testimony to the state’s new status as it readies to shift its primary to Feb. 5 from June.

Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, held a rally the other day in Texas, and aides to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the New York Republican, said staff members would be sent to California, Florida and Missouri, as both candidates prepare for expected Feb. 5 primaries in those states.

“It’s becoming a brush fire out there,” Mr. Obama said in an interview.

Mr. McCain, remarking on the difference from the last time he ran for president, suggested that the front-loaded primary day was not a good development. “I don’t think there’s enough exposure of the candidates the way that there used to be, having to go state by state by state over a long period of time,” he said.

For the most part, the candidates and their aides cannot quite figure out what all this turmoil means for them. The changes, which are shaping up to be the most substantial alteration ever to a campaign calendar in a single election cycle, have heightened the volatility of the most wide-open presidential race in 50 years, one with large and well-financed fields of contenders.

Aides to the candidates said they were debating whether the changes would mean that the nominations would effectively be settled on Feb. 5, by which point easily 50 percent of the delegates are likely to have been chosen, or whether a few strong candidates would divide the Feb. 5 take, forcing the campaign to stretch on for months. That could, oddly enough, make those fewer states sticking to later primaries vital players in the election cycle.

The changes are forcing candidates to decide whether Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with contests before Feb. 5, will become more influential as contenders look for early victories to give them momentum. And with as many as 23 states voting on a single day — more states than are typically considered competitive in a general election — candidates must decide which ones to ignore, given the demands on their time and bank accounts.

“This primary season is turning into the most challenging Rubik’s Cube that we’ve faced in our lifetime,” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, the counsel to Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who is seeking the Republican nomination, and one of his party’s leading experts on election law, pointing to the calendar, the fund-raising demands and the absence of a front-runner in either party.

For Democrats, the prospect of a mega-primary has created a new calculation about the importance of black voters, already a constituency being fiercely courted by Mr. Obama, who is seeking to become the nation’s first black president, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. There are hardly any black voters in Iowa and New Hampshire; by contrast, they could play an important role in California, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey and New York.

The early primary drive is the latest evidence of the national parties’ continuing decline in influence over the nominating process. A Democratic Party effort to force states and candidates to abide by the calendar, with threats of refusing to seat delegates chosen by states that defy its rules, seems doomed to fail, with candidates and states saying they will ignore it.

The developments have stirred despair among some Democratic National Committee officials, who pushed through a new calendar this year that sought to dilute the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire by letting Nevada and South Carolina hold nominating contests before Feb. 5. Nevada’s Democratic caucus will be five days after the Jan. 14 Iowa caucus, and South Carolina’s primary will be at least a week after the Jan. 22 New Hampshire primary.

Donna Brazile, one of the Democratic Party leaders involved in pushing through those changes, said she believed that Iowa and New Hampshire were now more powerful than ever because of the move toward Feb. 5. “I am very alarmed,” Ms. Brazile said. “This is the opposite of what we are trying to do.”

But Tom McMahon, the executive director of the Democratic Party, said in an interview that having Nevada and South Carolina go earlier had allowed the party to achieve its main goal. “We’ve been able to insert diversity where diversity didn’t occur before,” Mr. McMahon said, “and we are able to preserve more small states to allow more candidates to get into this.”

With 11 months before the Iowa caucuses, what is most striking, campaign officials said, is just how much uncertainty there is about this most fundamental part of a campaign: when people are going to vote. The National Association of Secretaries of State reported that 23 states were either considering moving to Feb. 5 or certain to do so. But that number changes daily as bills move between legislative committees and to governors’ desks.

The importance of Iowa and New Hampshire has emerged as one of the critical questions for the campaigns.

Some analysts said the winners in the early states would emerge with so much momentum and favorable news media attention that they would dominate the national primary to follow and lay claim to their party’s nomination, much the way Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts captured the Democratic nomination in 2004 after his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But others said having a 20-state primary a week later would allow candidates who performed weakly in the early states to rebound, particularly if they had the advantage of money or name recognition.

Mr. Giuliani’s aides suggested they might not spend as much time and money in Iowa and New Hampshire as other candidates, given his potential strength on Feb. 5 in places like California and New Jersey, two states with a more moderate electorate than Iowa and South Carolina.

“We have the ability to play the game a little differently,” said Mike DuHaime, who is running Mr. Giuliani’s campaign. “It’s not a matter of saying the early states aren’t important, because they are. It is just a matter of realizing that, unlike past primaries, there are many more states this year that will help decide the nominee.”

Terry Nelson, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, said Mr. Giuliani’s campaign appeared to have adopted what he called a Feb. 5 strategy, which he said could be a dangerous miscalculation by ignoring the states deciding before then. “It doesn’t diminish the influence and impact of the earlier states,” Mr. Nelson said of the shift to Feb. 5, “because it’s going to be very difficult for any campaign to build the resources you need to compete in all of these states.”

On the Democratic side, aides to Mr. Edwards are hoping for big victories in Iowa and South Carolina to make up for any advantage Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have because they are so much better known and may prove to be more effective at raising money.

There is near-universal agreement among officials of both parties that the new calendar will give a huge advantage to well-known candidates, in particular Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama. Beyond that, California and New Jersey are likely to be more receptive to Mr. Giuliani than are Iowa and South Carolina, with their many conservative voters.

The uncertainty goes beyond how many states will move their primaries to Feb. 5, and it seems to be starting a war between the states.

“California wants a piece of the presidential primary action, and it is willing to harm the country to get it,” The New Hampshire Union Leader said in a blistering editorial attacking California for encroaching on what had been New Hampshire’s early-primary turf.

New Hampshire officials are threatening to move their primary to before Jan. 22, asserting that the shift by Nevada violated a New Hampshire law requiring that it be first in the country. Iowa officials have responded by saying that if New Hampshire moves its primary, it will move its caucus to eight days before the primary.

That has set off a reaction in Michigan, the state that started pushing for others to go early in the first place. “It’s a terrible thing, it’s a real problem,” said Mark Brewer, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party. “We’re going on the 9th unless some state, such as New Hampshire, breaks the scheduling rules, and then we’re going to move it up.”

Cassi Feldman contributed reporting from New York.

NY Times- Early Primary Rush Upends ’08 Campaign Plans

March 12, 2007

Early Primary Rush Upends ’08 Campaign Plans

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, March 9 — The trickle of states moving their 2008 presidential primaries to Feb. 5 has turned into an avalanche, forcing all the presidential campaigns to reconsider every aspect of their nominating strategy — where to compete, how to spend money, when to start television advertising — as they gird for the prospect of a 20-state national Primary Day.

In the last two weeks, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, dispatched the director of his political action committee to run his primary campaign in California, where a bill to move the primary to Feb. 5 is on the desk of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat, announced that he had won the endorsement of Richard J. Codey, a former acting governor of New Jersey, testimony to the state’s new status as it readies to shift its primary to Feb. 5 from June.

Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, held a rally the other day in Texas, and aides to Rudolph W. Giuliani, the New York Republican, said staff members would be sent to California, Florida and Missouri, as both candidates prepare for expected Feb. 5 primaries in those states.

“It’s becoming a brush fire out there,” Mr. Obama said in an interview.

Mr. McCain, remarking on the difference from the last time he ran for president, suggested that the front-loaded primary day was not a good development. “I don’t think there’s enough exposure of the candidates the way that there used to be, having to go state by state by state over a long period of time,” he said.

For the most part, the candidates and their aides cannot quite figure out what all this turmoil means for them. The changes, which are shaping up to be the most substantial alteration ever to a campaign calendar in a single election cycle, have heightened the volatility of the most wide-open presidential race in 50 years, one with large and well-financed fields of contenders.

Aides to the candidates said they were debating whether the changes would mean that the nominations would effectively be settled on Feb. 5, by which point easily 50 percent of the delegates are likely to have been chosen, or whether a few strong candidates would divide the Feb. 5 take, forcing the campaign to stretch on for months. That could, oddly enough, make those fewer states sticking to later primaries vital players in the election cycle.

The changes are forcing candidates to decide whether Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with contests before Feb. 5, will become more influential as contenders look for early victories to give them momentum. And with as many as 23 states voting on a single day — more states than are typically considered competitive in a general election — candidates must decide which ones to ignore, given the demands on their time and bank accounts.

“This primary season is turning into the most challenging Rubik’s Cube that we’ve faced in our lifetime,” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, the counsel to Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who is seeking the Republican nomination, and one of his party’s leading experts on election law, pointing to the calendar, the fund-raising demands and the absence of a front-runner in either party.

For Democrats, the prospect of a mega-primary has created a new calculation about the importance of black voters, already a constituency being fiercely courted by Mr. Obama, who is seeking to become the nation’s first black president, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. There are hardly any black voters in Iowa and New Hampshire; by contrast, they could play an important role in California, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey and New York.

The early primary drive is the latest evidence of the national parties’ continuing decline in influence over the nominating process. A Democratic Party effort to force states and candidates to abide by the calendar, with threats of refusing to seat delegates chosen by states that defy its rules, seems doomed to fail, with candidates and states saying they will ignore it.

The developments have stirred despair among some Democratic National Committee officials, who pushed through a new calendar this year that sought to dilute the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire by letting Nevada and South Carolina hold nominating contests before Feb. 5. Nevada’s Democratic caucus will be five days after the Jan. 14 Iowa caucus, and South Carolina’s primary will be at least a week after the Jan. 22 New Hampshire primary.

Donna Brazile, one of the Democratic Party leaders involved in pushing through those changes, said she believed that Iowa and New Hampshire were now more powerful than ever because of the move toward Feb. 5. “I am very alarmed,” Ms. Brazile said. “This is the opposite of what we are trying to do.”

But Tom McMahon, the executive director of the Democratic Party, said in an interview that having Nevada and South Carolina go earlier had allowed the party to achieve its main goal. “We’ve been able to insert diversity where diversity didn’t occur before,” Mr. McMahon said, “and we are able to preserve more small states to allow more candidates to get into this.”

With 11 months before the Iowa caucuses, what is most striking, campaign officials said, is just how much uncertainty there is about this most fundamental part of a campaign: when people are going to vote. The National Association of Secretaries of State reported that 23 states were either considering moving to Feb. 5 or certain to do so. But that number changes daily as bills move between legislative committees and to governors’ desks.

The importance of Iowa and New Hampshire has emerged as one of the critical questions for the campaigns.

Some analysts said the winners in the early states would emerge with so much momentum and favorable news media attention that they would dominate the national primary to follow and lay claim to their party’s nomination, much the way Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts captured the Democratic nomination in 2004 after his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But others said having a 20-state primary a week later would allow candidates who performed weakly in the early states to rebound, particularly if they had the advantage of money or name recognition.

Mr. Giuliani’s aides suggested they might not spend as much time and money in Iowa and New Hampshire as other candidates, given his potential strength on Feb. 5 in places like California and New Jersey, two states with a more moderate electorate than Iowa and South Carolina.

“We have the ability to play the game a little differently,” said Mike DuHaime, who is running Mr. Giuliani’s campaign. “It’s not a matter of saying the early states aren’t important, because they are. It is just a matter of realizing that, unlike past primaries, there are many more states this year that will help decide the nominee.”

Terry Nelson, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, said Mr. Giuliani’s campaign appeared to have adopted what he called a Feb. 5 strategy, which he said could be a dangerous miscalculation by ignoring the states deciding before then. “It doesn’t diminish the influence and impact of the earlier states,” Mr. Nelson said of the shift to Feb. 5, “because it’s going to be very difficult for any campaign to build the resources you need to compete in all of these states.”

On the Democratic side, aides to Mr. Edwards are hoping for big victories in Iowa and South Carolina to make up for any advantage Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have because they are so much better known and may prove to be more effective at raising money.

There is near-universal agreement among officials of both parties that the new calendar will give a huge advantage to well-known candidates, in particular Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama. Beyond that, California and New Jersey are likely to be more receptive to Mr. Giuliani than are Iowa and South Carolina, with their many conservative voters.

The uncertainty goes beyond how many states will move their primaries to Feb. 5, and it seems to be starting a war between the states.

“California wants a piece of the presidential primary action, and it is willing to harm the country to get it,” The New Hampshire Union Leader said in a blistering editorial attacking California for encroaching on what had been New Hampshire’s early-primary turf.

New Hampshire officials are threatening to move their primary to before Jan. 22, asserting that the shift by Nevada violated a New Hampshire law requiring that it be first in the country. Iowa officials have responded by saying that if New Hampshire moves its primary, it will move its caucus to eight days before the primary.

That has set off a reaction in Michigan, the state that started pushing for others to go early in the first place. “It’s a terrible thing, it’s a real problem,” said Mark Brewer, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party. “We’re going on the 9th unless some state, such as New Hampshire, breaks the scheduling rules, and then we’re going to move it up.”

Cassi Feldman contributed reporting from New York.

N.Y. Times- A Libby Verdict

March 7, 2007

Editorial

A Libby Verdict

There will be a great deal written and said in coming days about the frustrations of the Scooter Libby verdict — that it did not tell us whether someone deliberately blew Valerie Plame Wilson’s cover or erase serious concerns about the prosecutor’s abuse of the First Amendment. Let’s focus first on what the verdict does say.

One of the most senior officials in the White House, Lewis Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was caught lying to the F.B.I. He appears to have been trying to cover up a smear campaign that was orchestrated by his boss against the first person to unmask one of the many untruths that President Bush used to justify invading Iraq. He was charged with those crimes, defended by the best lawyers he could get, tried in an open courtroom and convicted of serious felonies. Mr. Libby walked freely out of the court, had his say in public and will be allowed to appeal.

It was another reminder of how precious the American judicial system is, at a time when it is under serious attack from the same administration Mr. Libby served. That administration is systematically denying the right of counsel, the right to evidence and even the right to be tried to scores of prisoners who may have committed no crimes at all.

And although we still do not know the answer to the original mystery, the case provided a look at the methodical way that Mr. Cheney, Mr. Libby, Karl Rove and others in the Bush inner circle set out to discredit Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph Wilson IV. Mr. Wilson, a career diplomat, was sent by the State Department in 2002 to check out a British intelligence report that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the government of Niger for a secret nuclear weapons program. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Mr. Bush said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

In July 2003, Mr. Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in The Times that what he had found did not support that claim. The specter of a nuclear-armed Iraq was central to Mr. Bush’s case for rushing to war. So, the trial testimony showed, Mr. Cheney orchestrated an assault on Mr. Wilson’s credibility with the help of Mr. Libby and others. They whispered to journalists that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked at the C.I.A. and that nepotism was the reason he had been chosen for the trip.

That is what we know from the Libby trial, and it is some of the clearest evidence yet that this administration did not get duped by faulty intelligence; at the very least, it cherry-picked and hyped intelligence to justify the war. What Mr. Wilson found, and subsequent investigations confirmed, was that there was one trip in 1999 — not “recently,” but four years before Mr. Bush’s statement — by an Iraqi official to Niger and that during that trip, uranium was never discussed.

What we still do not know is whether a government official used Ms. Wilson’s name despite knowing that she worked undercover. That is a serious offense, which could have put her and all those who had worked with her in danger. We also do not understand why the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, chose to wage war with the news media in assembling his case, going so far as to jail a Times reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source.

The potential damage from that decision remains of real concern. But it was still a breath of fresh air to see someone in this administration, which specializes in secrecy, prevarication and evading blame, finally called to account.

N.Y. Times - An Unjust Expulsion

March 8, 2007

Editorial

An Unjust Expulsion

The Cherokee Nation’s decision to revoke the tribal citizenship of about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by the tribe is a moral low point in modern Cherokee history and places the tribe in violation of a 140-year-old federal treaty and several court decisions. The federal government must now step in to protect the rights of the freedmen, who could lose their tribal identities as well as access to medical, housing and other tribal benefits.

This bitter dispute dates to the treaties of 1866, when the Cherokee, Seminole and Creek agreed to admit their former slaves as tribal members in return for recognition as sovereign nations. The tribes fought black membership from the start — even though many of the former slaves were products of mixed black and Indian marriages.

The federal courts repeatedly upheld the treaties. But the federal government fanned the flames when a government commission set out in the 1890s to create an authoritative roll of tribal membership. Instead of placing everyone on a single roll, it made two lists. The so-called blood list contained nonblack Cherokees, listed with their percentage of Indian ancestry. The freedmen’s list included the names of any black members, even those with significant Cherokee ancestry.

The issue exploded in the 1980s when tribal authorities excluded the freedmen from voting on the grounds that they weren’t Cherokee by blood. The Cherokee version of the Supreme Court ruled last year that the law was unconstitutional. The expulsion vote was a response to that ruling and to a pending federal lawsuit by the freedmen, which charges both the tribe and the federal government with violating the treaty and the Constitution.

Advocates for the expulsion say it is about self-determination. But the tribal history makes clear that it is about discrimination — and that it is illegal. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has been curiously silent, should bring the Cherokee government into compliance with the law and require it to restore the tribal rights of the expelled members.