CHARLOTTE, N.C. – An odd couple of Republican senators have hit the road, arguing for a go-slow approach to President Barack Obama’s push to revamp health care.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain are headlining the GOP’s answer to the raucous town hall meetings of August in which congressional
Democrats had to shout over angry constituents about health care, growing deficits and the increasing role of the federal government.

Not known for working closely or particularly liking each other – the two waged a fierce fight for years over campaign finance – McConnell and McCain nonetheless have been united at three events in two days in which they’ve urged a more modest approach on Obama’s top domestic priority.

In North Carolina on Tuesday, they interacted with something close to deference, unity and self-deprecation. McConnell introduced McCain as the “famous GOP senator.” McCain answered, “You mean our most famous loser.”

Hardly an upbeat outlook, but on health care they have reasons to work together and try to frame Republican opposition to a comprehensive health care overhaul in thoughtful and credible terms.

Start with the GOP’s drive to recover in next year’s midterm elections after the drubbing Republicans took from Obama and the Democrats in 2008. To do that, they must bring the Democrats down a notch from an effective hold on 60 Senate votes, potentially enough to kill GOP filibusters and control policy.

Political recovery is an issue for McCain, too.

The decorated war veteran and recognized expert on national security and campaign finance reform has largely deferred to other Republicans on health care although the Arizona lawmaker is a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. But in recent weeks, McCain has been outspoken on health care overhaul and its pricetag of $1 trillion-plus over 10 years, making his argument based on his reputation as a deficit hawk.

Health care also offers McCain a chance to revise his image with millions of Americans and fill the elder statesman role embodied by his friend and former colleague, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Together, McConnell and McCain – joined by other Republican senators – held campaign-style events at tightly controlled events in Missouri, North Carolina and Florida on Monday and Tuesday with Congress set to return next week. Missouri Sen. Kit Bond, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Mel Martinez of Florida hosted the discussions. The National Republican Senatorial Committee paid for travel-related expenses.

On Monday, at a Kansas City, Mo., hospital, McCain and McConnell appeared before a group of about 100 health care professionals – half invited by the retiring Republican senator and half by the hospital.

“We wanted to hear about it with people who are on the front lines,” said Bond. “They are all concerned about who is going to pay for this grandiose expansion” of government services.

In Charlotte on Tuesday, McCain cited his credentials as a deficit hawk and faulted Obama for not offering his own health care plan – echoing a complaint from former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan.

“The president has not come forward with a proposal,” McCain said, sounding like he was still on the campaign trail. “He’s supposed to lead. Where is his proposal?”

Democratic leaders have said that health care must be revamped to make it more affordable and accessible.

McConnell called for Congress “to step back, start over and think about incremental changes” to the health care system and warned against Democrats using procedural maneuvers to ram through their version without Republican support.

That, McConnell said, “will make it even hard to sell to the Americans people.”

A study of North Carolina’s voter participation during the 2008 presidential election, showed that more voters didn’t just help Barack Obama, but also John McCain, the Herald-Sun reports.

WASHINGTON – The Senate has killed an alternative economic stimulus plan by Sen. John McCain that would have cut income and payroll taxes but spent far less than President Obama’s plan.

The party-line 57-40 vote against McCain’s $421 billion plan came Thursday as a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans struggled to cut up to $100 billion from Obama’s version.

McCain’s plan would have cut the bottom two income tax brackets and lowered corporate income taxes. It also would have extended unemployment benefits and provide money to repair and replace military equipment worn out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  
Obama defeated McCain for the presidency last fall.

WASHINGTON – Washington lobbyist Vicki Iseman filed a $27 million suit Tuesday against The New York Times in federal court in Richmond, claiming the newspaper damaged her reputation by falsely implying she had an illicit “romantic” relationship with Sen. John McCain.

A Feb. 21 article in the Times reported that aides to McCain had tried to distance the Arizona Republican from Iseman in 1999, fearing the two had become romantically involved after sharing a flight aboard a corporate jet.

“The Times article caused [Iseman] serious damage to her professional reputation and it was utterly false. She is taking advantage of what the law provides,” said Iseman’s attorney Rodney A. Smolla.

Smolla and W. Coleman Allen Jr. of Richmond filed the libel suit in U.S. District Court in Richmond.

The New York Times released a statement saying it stands behind its article.

“We continue to believe it to be true and accurate, and that we will prevail. As we said at the time, it was an important piece that raised questions about a presidential contender and the perception that he had been engaged in conflicts of interest,” the Times statement said.

The article reported that both McCain and Iseman denied having any “romantic relationship.”

The article said aides to McCain grew concerned about frequent visits between the senator and the lobbyist and that the relationship would become public after McCain, then chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, sent a letter to government regulators on behalf of an Iseman client, the Times reported.

Smolla, dean of the Washington and Lee University School of Law, specializes in libel, privacy and First Amendment law. He is a member of the board of directors of Media General, Inc.

Iseman lives and works in Virginia. The defendants include the Times’ executive editor in New York, its Washington bureau chief and four reporters in Washington.

Smolla said the suit was filed in federal court because all the defendants live outside Virginia.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, suggested the attorneys may have been seeking a more favorable judge by filing the suit in Richmond rather than Alexandria.

The suit contends the paper acted with “actual malice” – a “reckless disregard” for the truth.

But because Iseman was not a public figure in 1999, the period when she lobbied John McCain, to support her defamation claim she must prove only that the newspaper was negligent in its reporting.

The 36-page complaint says the plane trip McCain took with Iseman as a representative of her client was “entirely professional, ethical, and appropriate.”

Iseman is a partner at the Arlington-based lobbying firm Alcalde & Fay.

The Feb. 21 story “destroyed and permanently altered” Iseman’s hope of having “anything resembling a normal life,” the suit stated in seeking $27 million in damages.

“In legal terms this was an act of negligence and actual malice. In human terms, this was an act of callus indifference to human decency and human dignity,” the suit said.

WASHINGTON  – In the first week of 2008, Barack Obama rocked the political world with a win in the Iowa caucuses. But the question remained: Could this black man with a rich personal history and sparse elective resume make it all the way to the presidency?

Yes, he could.

Obama took us along on a wild ride, smashing political and racial barriers as he was elected the nation’s 44th president in an electoral landslide. His message of hope and change – and the viral YouTube mantra of “Yes, we can” – resonated with millions of voters after eight years of George W. Bush.

All election years are for the history books, but this one seemed especially historic: The racial angle. The high stakes. The fascinating personalities. The huge amount of money raised. The intense, sometimes over-the-top interest in this campaign.
 
“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America,” Obama told his supporters gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night, and multitudes more in a restive nation.

It was quite a year.
      —
 
Iowa is 95 percent white and 2.5 percent black, hardly hospitable numbers for a black candidate.

Yet, on Jan. 3, Obama glided to a win in the leadoff Iowa caucuses, a victory that signaled the strength of his campaign organization and the candidate’s appeal beyond racial lines. It was Obama’s oratory – delivered by memory – at the state’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner months earlier that got Democrats thinking about the Illinois senator as their nominee.

“I never expected to be here. I always knew this journey was improbable. I’ve never been on a journey that wasn’t,” Obama told the Iowa audience.
 
Less than four years before, Obama – then a little-known state lawmaker from Illinois – captured the nation’s attention with a stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention. He talked about worshipping “an awesome God in blue states” and having gay friends in red states.

Now, after Iowa, he was suddenly the frontrunner. But the race was far from done.

Tears in snowy New Hampshire had proven to be the undoing of one Democrat – Edmund Muskie in 1972 – but it worked for Obama’s chief Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The flash of emotion from the former first lady helped lift her to a win in the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 8.

The two battled for six more months, through every state and territory. Obama survived despite the incendiary comments of his former preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose angry words filled an endless loop for television. Clinton won over white, blue-collar voters from the hardscrabble corners of the country, and survived despite an unpredictable husband, former President Bill Clinton, who was frustrated with the political outlook for his spouse.

While New Hampshire prolonged the Democratic race, it largely settled the Republican one.

John McCain, a favorite of the state’s large bloc of independent voters, won the state where he had focused much of his retooled campaign. Nearly broke and with staff gone, McCain scrapped his tour bus and relied on supporters to drive him to events, even when the drive from a Rotary meeting was in a vehicle with a flat rear tire.

“In the words of Chairman Mao, it’s always darkest before it’s totally black,” McCain liked to joke.

Wins in South Carolina and Florida followed, and McCain’s rivals stepped aside – Mitt Romney, who spent $40 million; television star Fred Thompson, Baptist minister Mike Huckabee and former New York
Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose strategy was to wait until the end of January for a win in Florida that never came.

McCain locked up the nomination on March 4, and the faces behind him on the stage were notable – mostly white males, some around the same age as McCain, a few a decade or two younger.

Five months later as he sought a running mate, McCain was in need of something to shake up the race and eager to rally his conservative base. This 72-year-old man’s man – son and grandson of admirals, former POW who still bore the scars of the Vietnam War – looked to Alaska and to the former beauty pageant contestant who is that state’s first-term governor.

America, he said, I give you Sarah Palin.
      —

When things were especially bleak – when the experts said he should abandon his campaign for the GOP nomination – McCain refused to quit.
 
“I can out-campaign anyone,” he famously said.

He did in that crowded Republican field. He couldn’t against Obama, not as the Republican carried the albatross of the Bush presidency. Not even with the endorsement of “Joe the Plumber.”

In part, numbers proved to be McCain’s undoing.

Obama raised a record-shattering $745 million to swamp McCain in advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts in crucial swing states, including a strong push to win over early voters. McCain, who had fought for campaign finance reform, collected $358 million, including an $84 million check in public funds that Obama once indicated he would take too.

In October, McCain’s response to the financial crisis, a plummeting Dow Jones average and the government’s $700 billion bailout proved unnerving to voters looking for sure and steady. He temporarily suspended his campaign to return to Washington to deal with the crisis, signaled he would skip the first presidential debate and then debated anyway as Congress struggled with a monetary solution.
 
Obama consistently attracted tens of thousands of people at his speeches and rallies – 75,000 in Oregon, 100,000 in Missouri. The best buzz McCain could generate was some 20,000 at a northern Virginia event – a crowd size largely attributed to Palin’s presence.
 
Plucked from political obscurity, the 44-year-old Palin thrilled conservatives with her just-your-average-hockey-mom image and pitbull characteristics. Need a running mate to criticize the Democratic nominee on taxes, war and “palling around with terrorists”? Palin was it.

But the governor’s stumbles in prime-time interviews – fodder for comedy shows – and her high-priced designer clothes undermined her candidacy with the general electorate.

And when all was done, she wasn’t enough.

The final tally: 365 electoral votes for Obama, 173 for McCain.

Not that that was the end. Many of the major characters have moved on: Obama has chosen three of his former rivals for top spots – Joe Biden as his vice president, Bill Richardson as his commerce secretary and, most astonishingly, Clinton has his secretary of state. McCain has indicated he intends to stay in the Senate, and seek a fifth term in 2010.

And Palin? She’s signaled she just might challenge Obama in 2012.

Democrats in North Carolina have long controlled state politics, holding power in Raleigh with leaders whose social values matched those of the conservative South. But they struggled at the same time to win federal races, often weighed down by presidential candidates too liberal for the state’s voters.

But this past year’s sweep across the top of the ticket marked a striking shift in the types of candidates able to compete in North Carolina – if the circumstances are right.

Just six years after the departure of arch conservative GOP Sen. Jesse Helms, North Carolina voters – hundreds of thousands casting ballots for the first time – embraced Barack Obama. It turns out one of the party’s most liberal candidates ever managed to do what more than three decades of Democratic presidential hopefuls couldn’t: win the Old North State.

And in 2009, the state’s progressive Democrats plan to keep hard at work building the political coalition that moved North Carolina out of the GOP’s solid South.

“It really is a new era,” said Pete MacDowell, a Chapel Hill activist who served as president of the Progressive Democrats of North Carolina in the 2008 election cycle. “Increasingly, a progressive candidate can win in North Carolina.”

That new political trajectory faces its first test in 2009, when Democrats select a new party chairman and begin the process of picking a candidate to challenge Republican Sen. Richard Burr the following year. State Treasurer Richard Moore, Attorney General Roy Cooper and Rep. Heath Shuler have all been mentioned as possible challengers, although they’re all keeping mum for now about a possible run.

“I don’t have any definite plans,” Moore said in a recent interview. “I’m not worried about my ability to make a living going forward, and I’ll deal with that when I’m not the treasurer anymore.”

Republicans, meanwhile, believe things can’t get any worse.

However, one of the party’s most reliable leaders, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, has said he will not seek an eighth term leading the state’s largest city. His decision came a month after he narrowly lost the race for governor this year.

Ferrell Blount, an adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign and a former chairman of the state Republican Party, said the nation’s financial collapse and Republican departure from the party’s core values doomed GOP candidates in 2008. Democrats also successfully tied the party’s candidates to the unpopular President George W. Bush, he said, something they won’t have the luxury of doing now that Democrats are fully in charge in Washington.

“This year was absolutely an anomaly,” Blount said. “I was somewhat amazed the election was as close as it was. We were swimming against a 10 or 12 knot current.” Blount argues voters galvanized only by Obama’s candidacy aren’t certain to become a reliable Democrats, and it’s something party activists are worried about.

Morgan Jackson, a Democratic consultant in Raleigh, points to Georgia. Democratic Jim Martin forced a runoff in his race for the U.S. Senate with a strong showing on Election Day, but GOP incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss won handily in the second round. It raised questions about the reliability of newly courted Democrats that backed Obama – most notably, the black voters who rushed to the polls in record numbers.

“The key will be to cement the people Obama has brought to the table as Democrats – not just Democrats in name but as in activists,” Jackson said. “It means keeping them engaged with the candidates, the platform and the ideals of the party,” he said. “That’s the key challenge of the next years, to harness all of this momentum and energy.”

Democrats trying to pull their party to the left weren’t thrilled with the candidacy of Sen.-elect Kay Hagan or Gov.-elect Bev Perdue; MacDowell, for example, considered both to be pro-business moderates. But he said their wins provide a transition toward a new political era – Hagan is a pro-abortion former state senator and Perdue as the state’s first female chief executive.

When both appear on the ballot next, they’ll have a voting record to defend. Hagan was often shy about her views during her Senate campaign, and she’ll be voting in Washington under the leadership of Democrats more liberal than she. Perdue served for eight years in the comfortable but generally uncontroversial job of lieutenant governor, and she has already acknowledged she’ll take some hits as she prepares a budget with large cuts amid a dour economy.

And new North Carolina Rep. Larry Kissell, who for two election cycles criticized former Republican Rep. Robin Hayes, will have to do more than just talk about change now that he’s in office. Jackson said much of the party’s future success will depend on how Obama governs.

“If Obama governs from the middle and if Obama governs as pragmatic and as deliberative as he campaigned, that’s a guy that could absolutely be in a position to come here and push Democratic candidates over the line,” Jackson said. “Obama is a guy who could come down here and be extremely popular – 2010 could buck the history and it could be a Democratic year again.”

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. – A Fayetteville teacher whose classroom comments about John McCain drew the ire of viewers who saw the remarks on YouTube says she has received a disciplinary letter.

The Fayetteville Observer reports that Diatha Harris also said an internal investigation cleared her of violating state law or Cumberland County Board of Education policy.

A Scandinavian documentary crew filmed Harris last May leading a classroom discussion of the 2008 presidential election. In the video, Harris tries to generate a class conversation about the presidential election by asking students whom they support. She says supporting either candidate is fine. When one student says Obama advocates ending the Iraq war, Harris asks students what they know about the conflict, then calls it “a senseless war.”

Another girl says she backs McCain because that’s who her parents favor. Harris points out that the girl’s father is in the military, and cautions, “the person that you’re picking for president said that our troops could stay in Iraq for another hundred years if they need to. So that means that your daddy could stay in the military for another hundred years.”

The camera returns to the girl’s face to catch her reaction. She seems to tense her mouth, but doesn’t otherwise respond.

The video aired in a documentary on Finnish television in November, and parts of it were posted on YouTube. Cumberland County School Superintendent Bill Harrison was deluged with calls for Harris to be fired.

Harris has apologized to the pupil and her parents, Army Staff Sgt. Robert Thompson and Angela Moore. But the parents have said they didn’t object to how Harris handled herself in the classroom.

Harris downplayed the significance of the written reprimand from Harrison. She has not made the letter public, and remains a teacher at the school.

“But I do want it out there that I did not break any board policy,” Harris said. “I did not break any laws.”

Harrison declined comment Sunday night because it was a personnel matter.

In his first real news conference since the week following his defeat for the presidency, Senator John McCain emerged today in Phoenix to talk about his own future.

Republican L. Scott Lingamfelter, who represents the 31st District (Prince William and Fauquier) was elected to the House of Delegates in 2001.

WOODBRIDGE –  Sometimes politics can be parsed too much. Yet there is no end to the complex, pseudo-intellectual explanations by the liberal media for President-elect Barack H. Obama’s victory. They are besotted with joy and very satisfied with their role in boosting Obama’s electoral fortunes almost as much as their efforts to belittle and ridicule President George W. Bush, a man who has kept America safe from terror attacks for seven years. But I digress.

All of us — the liberal media in particular — should pause a moment and consider Occam’s Razor, a principle of logic developed by a 14th-century English Franciscan monk, William of Ockham. In short, Occam’s Razor asserts that all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. Put another way, the simplest explanation is the most likely one. So it is in this election.

We had a Republican president with one of the lowest approval ratings since Democrat Harry S. Truman left office in 1952. The economy tanked in October. Our Republican brand was devastated by congressional Republicans who spent like drunken sailors. And our chief opponent, Barack Obama, is the most gifted political preacher in recent memory. Simply put, Republicans abandoned conservative principles; Democrats started talking about them — and they won.

Consider the evidence.

First, under a Republican-controlled Congress, spending bourgeoned and government exploded. Programs like No Child Left Behind and the Prescription Medicare program added to the debt already strained by the war on terror (a war we did not begin, but must pursue and finish honorably).

Second, we nominated a presidential candidate who, while representing the highest traditions of patriotism, frequently sided with liberal Democrats. John McCain was the author of the McCain-Feingold bill that ties the hands of political parties engaging in free speech, a law that ironically contributed to McCain’s defeat by compelling him to rely on public financing while Obama, who pledged to take public money, went private in a big way and was awash in cash.

MCCAIN WAS at the center of the disastrous immigration reform bill that provoked a huge opposition by grassroots Republicans and conservative Democrats alike, a group once known as the “Reagan Coalition.” And his support for the infamous October bailout disappointed fiscal hawks. While an undisputed war hero, McCain was not distinguished as a conservative.

Third, recent polls suggest that up to 20 percent of the people who voted for Obama were self-identified “conservatives.” Other polling shows that despite all the empty platitudes about “change” and “hope,” America remains a center-right nation that lost confidence in national Republicans to govern conservatively.
In their place, Americans chose Obama, who spoke of tax cuts and spending reform, while avoiding any inflammatory rhetoric that would “scare” conservatives fed up with “Republicrats” and willing to take a chance with someone who  at least was talking about things important to them.

Obama’s almost fatal slip came following his comment to “Joe the Plumber” about “spreading the wealth around.” Even that gaffe wasn’t enough to make voters — frustrated with national Republican shortcomings — rethink their vote for a freshman senator with only four years of federal service.

IN SUM, when national Republicans walked away from the Reagan agenda and its underlying principles, the Reagan coalition walked away from them.

If there is a silver lining in all of this for Republicans, it’s that Obama vastly over-promised what he can deliver. He will find this out soon when his Democratic House and Senate “friends” take a moment to read the budget balance sheet and add to it the $800 billion bailout they just passed (not to mention one in the wings for the auto industry). Moreover, when Obama finishes reading the classified briefs, he will discover that pulling out of Iraq, working with the Pakistanis, and being harmonious with so-called European “allies” may be more difficult than previously advertised.

The result? Supporters who were mesmerized by Obama’s vacuous promises of hope, change, and “I’ll get you there!” will be very disappointed when they realize that the “there” Obama pointed to looks more like the “here and now,” which doesn’t comport to the “Otopia” he framed between well-situated teleprompters.

That said, we Republicans would be wise not to depend on Obama’s failures. People want leadership, not sideline sniping. They want a positive, can-do style of governance that looks for real solutions leading to lower taxes, more freedom, and greater opportunity. They are fed up, angry, and want a better place to raise a family, grow a business, and provide for a stable future. The nanny-state, big-government, high-tax solutions Democrats gravitate to will not answer their concerns. Reagan principles will. The question is will Republicans step up to answer the call?

Seems simple to me, but I wonder if William of Occam and the Gipper would agree.