Anthony York

So far, though, neither frontrunner Reno nor McBride, who will face off in a Sept. 10 primary for the right to challenge Bush, has been able to use the bad news to gain traction against Bush. A recent Florida television station poll showed Reno trailing Bush by 15 points. (The same poll shows Reno with a 55-22 lead over McBride.) Florida Democrats say they’ve been frustrated by the lack of national media attention to the governor’s business scandal. And they haven’t been able to convince national Democrats that the scandal, or any of Jeb Bush’s other political problems, justifies a major national investment of time and money in the Florida governor’s race. That could change, they insist, if this latest Bush business scandal develops legs.

Jeb Bush’s path to fortune and fame follows a familiar Bush family trajectory — use family connections to help make a quick killing in the private sector, and use that money and business experience to launch a political career. It’s a story that’s been well documented since the media began asking questions about President Bush’s past business deals with Harken Energy Corp. and the Texas Rangers. But just like his older brother the president, now that he is a powerful elected official, Jeb Bush can’t seem to escape nagging questions about his time in the private sector.

The focus of the renewed scrutiny is Jeb’s partnership with David Eller, president and CEO of MWI Corp., a Florida-based water pump company. The Department of Justice is now accusing MWI of using millions in U.S. government loans, obtained from the Export-Import Bank, to bribe Nigerian officials to buy MWI pumps. The suit was originally filed by a former MWI employee in 1998. The government decided to intervene on the employee’s behalf earlier this year.

Eller, a major Republican donor and activist, formed a partnership with Bush in 1989 called Bush-El. The business was established to sell MWI pumps and other equipment in other countries. During his father’s presidency, Bush visited Nigeria twice as an MWI advocate. The visits from the first son were major events in Nigeria, according to media reports. There was even a parade, complete with 1,300 horses, in Bush’s honor. The St. Petersburg Times reported that “tens of thousands of people lined the road to welcome the American president’s son.”

Bush was in Nigeria to help sell millions of dollars worth of MWI products to the Nigerian government. According to a 1992 Wall Street Journal article, Bush was simultaneously working to arrange a visit to the White House by Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida. “Jeb Bush’s experiences in the pump business provide a case study in how to profit from a Presidential name — perfectly legally, by all appearances,” the Journal wrote.

But the financing of the deal that came out of those visits was less than perfectly legal, the Department of Justice now claims. A government complaint seeking millions in damages against MWI suggests political influence played a large role in MWI obtaining the multimillion dollar Export-Import loans in the first place. In fact, the government suggests that Eller’s political connections were the primary reason MWI was able to secure government loans at all. Although the suit suggests the company cashed in on its political connections to help secure the government loans, it seems to go out of its way not to mention Jeb Bush by name. The suit notes that Eller did business with “a member of a prominent national political family in an attempt to bolster MWI’s sales abroad” — an obvious reference to Jeb Bush.

“MWI’s overt political activism and influence created both sales opportunities in Nigeria and ready access to [Export-Import] Bank loan support for those sales back in the United States,” the complaint says. “The fact that MWI was able to obtain Exim Bank Financing at all is surprising given the Nigerian Federal Government’s traditionally poor credit history.”

Bush spokesman Todd Harris denies any wrongdoing on the part of the governor, and points out that Bush’s opponents have tried unsuccessfully for more than a decade to use MWI as a way to attack Bush politically and it hasn’t worked. When the case was first filed back in 1998, Democrat Buddy MacKay tried to raise the issue in his run against Bush. “That was the only issue that they ran on,” says Harris. “They pushed and pushed on that issue, and Buddy MacKay got his butt kicked. But Democrats keep trying to bring it up.”

This time, however, it’s the Justice Department that’s bringing it up. And while the suit doesn’t target Bush, and Bush says he never profited directly from MWI’s dealings in Nigeria, it certainly raises questions about the business that made him his fortune.

The suit suggests that MWI and the Nigerian government manufactured the need for MWI equipment in Nigeria. The complaint consistently puts the word “need” in quotation marks when discussing the necessity of pumping equipment in the African nation. As the complaint points out, “MWI was not required to bid or otherwise compete with any other manufacturers to obtain any of its Exim-financed contracts,” effectively allowing MWI to set the price without any competition.

Obviously, such a deal would be beneficial for MWI. But why would the Nigerian government want to enter into this deal? The answer is at the heart of the government’s case. It claims these loans were improperly used to pay off Nigerian officials to the tune of $28 million. The government charges the bribes were delivered by a Nigerian MWI employee named Alhaji Indimi. According to the government, Indimi “has well-established relationships with high-ranking Nigerian state and federal officials which have provided MWI with the necessary access and opportunity to consummate Exim-supported sales in Nigeria.”

The government case cites one occasion when Indimi “carried large quantities of [cash]” to a meeting with Nigerian government officials. “Indimi and the other MWI officers and employees returned to the airport following the meeting without the currency … MWI officers and employees knew that Indimi was traveling with large quantities of cash, and believed that Indimi intended to and did use the cash to make payments to Nigerian State officials in connection with the MWI Sales to Nigeria,” the complaint states.

The complaint calls MWI’s payment to Indimi “excessive and highly irregular as to MWI’s own commission practices, as well as to normal and customary commissions.”

Eller’s attorney, William Scherer, has openly admitted that Indimi was paid nearly $28 million from the sale, but denied that money was used to bribe government officials. And he took umbrage with the government’s characterization of that payment — more than 37 percent of the entire $74.3 million deal– as excessive. “Who says that 30 percent is high (for commissions), especially when you’re talking about sales that took a decade to make?” Scherer told the St. Petersburg Times. “That’s absolutely and completely defensible.”

Bush himself is not implicated in the case. As a partner of Bush-El, he was just the salesman for MWI, and was not directly involved in the alleged fraud of the Exim Bank. And Bush has said repeatedly that he and Eller structured their partnership so that Bush would not profit off of any deals involving funding from U.S. government institutions. Since Bush’s father was president at the time, he says he was careful to avoid the appearance of cashing in on government contracts.

What became the government’s case against Eller and MWI was a lawsuit originally filed by Robert Purcell, a former vice president of sales for MWI. Purcell filed a separate suit in 1996 claiming MWI and Bush-El cheated him out of promised payments. In that suit, Purcell sought to depose Bush, but Bush’s lawyers were able to quash the subpoena because Bush was in the final days of his successful run for governor. As Bush’s lawyers pointed out in their successful motion to evade deposition, “whether by mere coincidence or by a tactical legal maneuver, the date on which Mr. Bush is to be deposed falls only 35 days prior to the November election.”

Soon after the election, the case was settled out of court. In this latest suit, Purcell stands to make a tidy sum if the government wins its case. The case indicates that the government may seek to recover as much as $220 million from MWI in damages. Under federal whistleblower laws, Purcell stands to gain 25 percent of whatever judgment the government received.

Though Purcell’s attorneys have included Bush on the possible list of witnesses to be called in the case, Eller’s attorneys maintain that Bush is irrelevant to the case and should not be called to testify. The Bush campaign says it has no reason to believe the governor will be dragged back into the case against MWI.

Jeb Bush insists he did not know of any bribes of Nigerian officials, and that he did not personally profit off any piece of the Nigerian deal. But the governor’s political opponents say Bush has failed to answer questions about what he did for Bush-El to merit nearly $650,000 he received from Eller when he ended the partnership in 1994. Bush has said that his Bush-El profits came from deals the company made in other countries, such as Mexico, that did not involve financing from any U.S. government institution.

Bush’s answer to the charges, the first time around, was a simple one. “Either you trust me or you don’t,” he told the Miami Herald in 1998. Harris says Florida voters are satisfied that Bush did nothing wrong, and said Bush has no intention of documenting his past business dealings with Eller.

Now that the Justice Department is involved in the case, Democrats are trying to use the lawsuit to score political points, once again calling on Bush to fully disclose what he did to earn the $648,250 Eller paid him. But while Bush has been candid about certain aspects of his financial past — he has, for example, released two decades worth of personal income tax records — he still has not answered reporters’ questions about the work he did for Bush-El. And, Democrats point out, Eller “hosted” a June fundraiser for Bush’s reelection campaign. Harris says Eller was simply one of more than 100 Bush donors who were listed as co-sponsors of the event.

Much the way his brother has evaded pointed questions surrounding his own business dealings during the 1998 Texas governor’s race, Jeb Bush has so far been able to duck tough queries about his association with Eller and the lawsuit against Eller’s company. And state Democrats’ inability to sell this story has become a symbol of how a race that was supposed to be one of the most competitive in the country has fizzled, leaving many national Democrats looking for other places to spend their time and money. Although Bush’s personal approval ratings have dropped since earlier in the year, he has maintained comfortable leads against both of his potential Democratic challengers.

Part of the problem is the state’s own Democratic Party, which is bitterly divided, with most party regulars lined up behind McBride. Polls show Reno is popular with Democratic primary voters, so she looks unstoppable in the Sept. 10 primary, but many Democrats fear she is unelectable statewide.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Democrats were hoping to harness lingering resentment from the 2000 presidential election, as well as blacks’ anger about Bush’s moves against affirmative action, into a crusade to dump Bush from the Statehouse in 2002. While early predictions had Florida one of the most contested gubernatorial races in the country this year, recent polling still shows Bush with double-digit leads over both McBride and Reno.

But any lingering Democratic anger from Election 2000 may be offset by tepid reaction to the party’s candidates. The party favorite, former ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson, took a pass on the race when Reno danced her way in. Democratic insiders, both in Florida and Washington, worry that Janet Reno is the Democrats’ Bill Simon — the wrong candidate in the wrong place at the wrong time, who is running a terrible campaign against an opponent — in Simon’s case California Gov. Gray Davis — who should be vulnerable. Still, some Florida political observers warn against labeling Bush a shoo-in. “I expect the race will be quite close,” says Darryl Paulson, a professor at the University of South Florida who expects Reno to win the primary easily. “I would be surprised if it’s more than 53-47 in the general. I think she has the potential to pull an upset. The most effective rallying cry for the partisans is some reference to the 2000 campaign, the stolen election.”

Paulson insists Reno or McBride have at least a fighting chance against Bush, because the 1990s changed the political makeup of the state dramatically. More than 1 million African-Americans moved to Florida during that decade, and the state’s non-Cuban Hispanic population continues to boom. Cubans, too, have begun to liberalize, a little, with younger voters less likely than their elders to demand hard-line anti-Castro stands. And Paulson says Republicans did not pay close enough attention to how Florida had changed when they made their calculations about the last presidential race, in which the governor’s brother required Supreme Court assistance to win a state he was supposed to carry by a landslide.

“The 2000 Election was a good example of Republicans being caught by surprise,” he says.

In the meantime, local Democrats are doing everything they can — including trying to tarnish the governor with the Justice Department’s suit against his former partner — to try to convince national Democrats that the race is in play.

“It’s the thing he just refuses to answer any questions on,” says Florida Democratic chairman Bob Poe. “He says he’s got nothing to hide, but yet he won’t tell us anything about it. That inconsistency is very troubling.” Like a lot of Florida Democrats, Poe links Jeb’s handling of his business past with the way his brother handled questions about his own questionable business deals. “He’s been hoping for a long time that people would forget and this would just go away, that if he just kept not answering, people would get tired of asking. That seems to be a trait in the Bush family.”

A Florida Republican Party spokesman accused Democrats of trying to drudge up phantom scandals from Bush’s past in an effort to tar the governor. And he said most Florida voters will ignore them. “They’re like the chatty bird up in the tree — people eventually start to ignore it,” said Florida GOP spokesman Towson Fraser. “Whether it’s true or not, or whether it means anything or not, people will eventually kind of tune you out.”

Not only have Florida voters tuned out the MWI story, but so have many national Democratic leaders. Several contacted by Salon admitted on background that they had never heard of the MWI story, and expressed doubts the story was the kind that could turn the Florida governor’s race around. The problem, they insist, is with their own candidates, and the lackluster campaigns they have run thus far.

“After 2000, everyone thought this would be a race we would be focusing on [in 2002],” said one Washington Democrat. “Now, it’s like, ‘There’s one less race we have to worry about.’”

The rush to get Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Iraqi airwaves underscores the important role media will play as efforts to rebuild Iraq get underway. Efforts to reprogram Iraqi television are part of a larger project of changing attitudes about America, both in Iraq and around the Arab world — a project in which media will play a central role.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says U.S. military control of Iraqi state television is temporary. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. government is getting out of the media business in the Middle East. On the contrary. Soon, the rest of the Arab world may have access to the kinds of programming currently seen on what once was Iraqi state-run television. Congress has approved $32 million in seed money, and another $30 million set to be passed in this year’s budget package — for the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to launch a satellite station to compete with stations such as Al-Jazeera in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab street. Those involved with the station hope to have it on the air before the end of the year.

The television station, which has widespread bipartisan support in Congress, has emerged as the centerpiece in the Bush administration’s public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East. In fact, money for the station is the only piece of the president’s public diplomacy budget that is slated for increased funding.

Creators of the new network, including Norman Pattiz, chairman of radio powerhouse Westwood One, BBG member and major donor to the Democratic Party, point to the success of Radio Sawa, the new radio voice of America in the Middle East, as a promising sign for the new television venture. Radio Sawa has replaced Voice of America Arabic, and according to BBG surveys, is winning over large portions of radio listeners in countries like Jordan and Egypt. Pattiz was one of the major forces behind Radio Sawa, advocating a move away from news-only content, and he hopes to incorporate some of the successes the Sawa stations have had across the region into this new television venture.

Instead of the policy-heavy programming of VOA, Radio Sawa offers blocks of American music, including pop, hip-hop and techno mixed with local popular music. The broadcasts are in both English and Arabic, punctuated with two, 10-minute newscasts per hour.

According to surveys commissioned by the BBG, which oversees American government and government-sponsored international broadcasting services, Radio Sawa is the most popular station in Amman, Jordan, particularly among young listeners. According to the survey, the station pulls 43 percent of the young Jordanian audience.

The focus on attracting younger listeners through music is no substitute for the old VOA message, says David Ransom, former ambassador to Bahrain. “This marks a shift from our attempt to reach elites who make decisions, to a youth cohort that is lacking in power, but has large numbers,” he says, and he questions whether that shift can bring about the change in hearts and minds the new media strategy is designed to accomplish.

Pattiz insists that unlike the Sawa stations, the new television network will not be specifically targeted toward younger audiences. The new government-sponsored television station will have different kinds of programming, he says, to attract the widest possible audience.

Though the final mix has not been determined, Pattiz envisions a “Today”-style morning news and fluff show, sports programming, children’s shows and other types of soft programming to balance out the station’s heavy dose of news and public affairs shows — some of them, at least initially, American shows translated into Arabic, and gradually more original programming.

“Unlike Radio Sawa, this is going to be news and information driven,” Pattiz says. “A lot of it will have the look of a CNN or MSNBC or a Fox.”

But unlike those other networks, this station will be run solely on funding from the U.S. government. And while journalistic independence from funders is always an issue, even for private sector news outlets — pressures from advertisers or financial supporters often influence content in both subtle and obvious ways — those questions will be more acute for this network, because its sole funder, the U.S. government, is creating the network itself as part of a larger political and public relations strategy. There’s a paradox in its founding: Just as viewers in Arab countries are turning away from state-run programming and embracing independent networks like Al-Jazeera, the U.S. is trying to compete with what is essentially state-run programming, only run by the U.S., not an Arab government.

Pattiz concedes there is an apparent conflict between government funding and journalistic independence. But he says over the BBG’s 60-year history with Radio Free Europe, VOA and other ventures, it has learned how to maintain journalistic independence while being funded by the U.S. government. In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, VOA aired an interview with Taliban leader Mullah Omar to the chagrin of U.S. government officials. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher criticized the interview, saying, “We didn’t think it was right. We didn’t think that the American taxpayer, the Voice of America, should be broadcasting the voice of the Taliban.”

It is difficult to imagine that sort government pressure won’t influence the network’s programming, and even Pattiz concedes there are some inherent restraints on what they can and will do. But, he says, they are the same limits that constrain other American journalists.

“We’re clearly limited by our principles and taste,” he says. “We’re not going to start calling for jihad just because we think it might get us viewers. We can’t engage in the same kind of radical techniques that these other stations do. But just like CNN or anyone else, we will not be shy about criticizing the government when that criticism is warranted.”

Airing an interview with Mullah Omar is one thing, but what about more subtle pressures the network might be under to influence its coverage of, say, Syrian government criticism of the United States, or Israeli crackdowns in the occupied territories? Anyone watching the news of the Iraq war on Al-Jazeera, for example, has gotten a very different view of the war than a CNN viewer. Al-Jazeera’s coverage has been much more focused on Iraqi casualties, showing images that American viewers have not seen.

Pattiz admits the programming on the network will look different than what you’d find on CNN or Fox, saying the network must “show great cultural sensitivities” to the region.

But it is still unclear exactly what that means. Perhaps it would translate into something like MTV Indonesia agreeing to air a call to prayer on its network five times a day. Or maybe there would be more images of suffering Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, images which are mainstays of existing Arab network stations but virtually absent from American television screens. However this “cultural sensitivity” manifests, Pattiz maintains that these decisions will be made from marketing and journalistic perspectives, not taking into account the government’s desire to promote a specific policy agenda.

While final programming decisions are yet to be decided, some key decisions have been made. The first is the selection of a news director, Mouafac Harb, the current news director at Radio Sawa. Harb is the former head of a Lebanese television station and a veteran of ABC’s “Nightline.” Much of the programming for the station will originate in Washington, but the station itself will most likely be based in Dubai, with news bureaus in Amman, Cairo, Kuwait and Baghdad.

Initially, at least, it will include a lot of American English-language network programming translated into Arabic. Pattiz says he has met with television and film producers about contributing content to the network, and that all of the major American news networks except CNN will be contributing programs to air on the station early on. Pattiz eventually hopes to run predominantly original programs, and from Day One will include original reporting by Arabic-speaking reporters and newscasters on the station. But like Radio Sawa, the station will be more than just news.

This will be the first time the U.S. government has funded and operated a 24-hour news station anywhere in the world. But support for the project underscores the priority the administration has placed on trying to communicate with the Arab world since Sept. 11. U.S. government representatives like Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Chris Ross, the State Department’s special coordinator for public diplomacy, have appeared on Al-Jazeera and other Arabic-language satellite networks in an attempt to explain the administration’s positions on everything from the bombing in Afghanistan to U.S. views on the Palestinian question to the invasion of Iraq, in hopes of changing America’s image as the Great Satan on the Arab street.

The United States is not alone in its efforts to influence Arab minds through the media. In June, 2002, the Israel Broadcasting Authority created the Arabic-language Middle East Channel, hoping to compete against the more that 140 Arab satellite channels that the Israeli government fears is promoting violence against Israeli civilians.

But Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says the new Israeli station is having virtually no impact on Arab public opinion toward Israel, and he is skeptical about the potential success of the new American-sponsored network.

“It would be sadly ironic at a moment when Arabs are turning away from state-run television networks because they find them less interesting, if the United States government decides to compete in this arena with its own state-run network,” he says.

Pattiz contends that American state-run television will be nothing like the stations run by Middle Eastern governments, who generally use their state-sponsored programming for propaganda.

“We know what doesn’t exist over there now is a voice that presents the United States, its policies and its people in a way that we would be comfortable with. We can’t just continue to let the characterization of America and its policies and people to go unchallenged.” He insists the new station will adhere to a code of American journalistic ethics that other state-run stations, and even the satellite stations in the region do not. “There certainly are parts of the United States government that engage in PsyOps and propaganda. It’s not the BBG,” he says. “We’re not a propaganda organization, we’re a journalistic organization.” Advocates of the new network say it is crucial to combat the image of America portrayed on Arabic-language news stations. The popularity of Arabic satellite networks comes from their sensationalist programming and their relative independence from regional governments, most of which are dictatorships that exercise extremely tight controls on information. The best-known Arabic satellite network, Al-Jazeera, has been known to most Americans for less than two years, primarily as a mouthpiece for al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But long before the network was causing waves in Washington, Al-Jazeera was making enemies closer to home. Born with the aid of $140 in seed money from the emir of Qatar in 1996, the network quickly made enemies across the Arab world. Moammar Khadafi pulled the Libyan ambassador from Qatar after the station ran an interview with a Khadafi foe. Algerian leaders went so far as to cut the electricity in many Algerian cities to keep residents from watching a program that implicated the Algerian military in a series of massacres. The birth of Al-Jazeera was seen as the beginning of journalistic independence in the region, and it was generally welcomed by the West and embraced by television viewers across the Middle East.

Yet while Al-Jazeera may offer a respite from state-controlled propaganda, Satloff says it is by no means balanced journalism. He says the handful of Arabic satellite stations — like Al-Jazeera or Al Manar, a Hezbollah-run station out of Lebanon — make allegations of bias at CNN or even Fox seem trivial.

“Those stations do things no American station can do, and certainly that no American government-run station can do,” he says of Al-Jazeera and other Arabic news stations. “They put on crazies and let them argue back and forth. They show more blood and guts than a Terminator movie.”

The anti-American bias on Arabic-language stations has led many government leaders and diplomats looking for an alternative. They say an American-run station in the region will help dispel some of the misinformation many Arabs are getting about Americans and American foreign policy.

“The need for this is obvious,” said Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif. “We’re waging a battle on a number of different battlefields, and the battle for hearts and minds is every bit as important as the battle being fought with bombs and bullets.”

But Arab experts fear the station may be the latest well-intentioned but often ham-handed attempts at government-supported public diplomacy. The new money for the network — which is expected to cost about $45 million a year to keep running — is the only piece of the president’s proposed public diplomacy budget that has been expanded. After Sept. 11, these efforts at diplomacy were a high priority for the administration. Madison Ave. marketing executive Charlotte Beers, former head of advertising giants J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, was brought on as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs to help guide the effort to explain America to the rest of the world. But in March, Beers left the State Department for “health reasons,” and was replaced by a political insider, Tucker Eskew, who served as director of the White House Office of Media Affairs.

So is a new satellite network just another expensive project destined to fail, or an essential piece of the puzzle that will help transform attitudes toward Americans on the Arab street?

Supporters of the station say it is vital to get something on the air to counter Al-Jazeera. To American cable news junkies, Satloff’s description of “crazies” running the political debate on Al-Jazeera may not sound entirely foreign — some nights Fox, MSNBC or CNN shows could be described that way. But Pattiz says what Al-Jazeera calls news would pass for entertainment in the U.S. “Al-Jazeera likes to say they’re the Arabic CNN. I like to say it’s CNN meets Jerry Springer,” he says. “Here, Jerry Springer gets laughs. There, that programming incites violence.”

But that speaks to a larger problem for the new television product. Al-Jazeera, like Jerry Springer, is able to pander to a base element — angry Arabs who are already predisposed to demonize the United States and Israel. It is far easier to indulge that element through television than it is to try to use the medium to alter long-held notions of what America stands for. For this new network to succeed, they will have to build an audience, and will not be able to use the techniques and stunts Arab networks use to lure viewers.

In a recent speech to House Democrats, Samer Shehata, a professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, criticized the nascent network, saying “the venture reflects an obsession with Al-Jazeera,” that as Americans struggled with the question “Why do they hate us?” after Sept. 11, the power of Al-Jazeera has been overestimated. Shehata argues the money for the new American television station would be better spent on other forms of public diplomacy, such as more money for student and professional exchange programs, and money for education in the Middle East. “U.S.-funded classrooms in the Middle East and the Islamic world would be a highly visible and effective form of public diplomacy,” Shehata said.

But advocates for the station say it would be foolish to ignore the power of television as part of a larger effort to educate 300 million people in the Middle East about American culture, values and politics. “Exchange programs are great, but when Coca-Cola wants to sell their product in a country, they don’t invite professionals over to come look at the plant. They go on television,” says Sherman. “That’s essentially what we’re doing here — selling America.”

But the details of just what that sales pitch will look like, and how it will manifest itself in terms of programming on the station, are still being worked out. Pattiz says cultural programming will be a key component of the network’s initial format. Pattiz even suggests that with the proliferation of tabloid-like news on other Arabic networks, the new American venture may be able to distinguish itself with thoughtful, in-depth reporting like what is found on American public television.

But Satloff is skeptical. He points out that when American media consumers are given the choice between the thoughtful programming of public television and a more sensationalist cable news format, the latter usually wins out. “With this television network, they say we’re going to attract different audiences with sports and children’s shows and documentaries to which I reply, ‘Have you ever watched Arabic satellite TV? Can we produce more soccer games? Can we compete with soap operas? With documentaries?’ These things already exist. That’s not what’s going to draw people into our network.

“Sure, on the surface, you can understand it. These guys are winning the hearts and minds [of Arabs] with these crazy stations, let’s put up our own and compete,” he says. “There’s a certain superficial logic to it, but it doesn’t stand up under closer inspection.”

Ransom says while access to the airwaves is important, the voices in the Arab media are at least in part a reflection of the attitudes of the Arab street. Simply changing the message is not enough, he says. American policy in the region must also change.

“We now have policies which are essentially unsellable, and there’s really nothing we can do to make them more acceptable,” he says. “The decision to invade Iraq without U.N. support raised an issue at the center of Arab politics — this anti-imperialist, colonialist strain,” he says. “They’ve only been out from under this yoke for 50 years or so, and many people think independent Arab states were the greatest advent in their lifetime. They are prepared to let those states do all sorts of dumb things under the auspices of sovereignty and independence. We violated all of that by invading and occupying Iraq.”

Pattiz says that is not the mission of the new television venture, and that critics of the new program unfairly conflate the two. “As a private citizen, not as part of the administration, I can say that I think the amount of money that is spent on public diplomacy is in some ways disgraceful,” he says. And though the approach of the new station will be different than that of Radio Sawa, Pattiz remains committed to the idea of the soft sell of America overseas.

“It’s not [the television network's] job to win support for U.S. policy. It’s our job to promote freedom and democracy, to be an example of a free press in the American tradition. I think people will be more favorably disposed toward the American form of democracy if they’re exposed to a free press that covers the news fairly.”

But Corrie’s death beneath the blade of an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to stop the Israeli military’s demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza town of Rafah has left local activists here struggling to keep her memory alive as the nation prepares for war, and doing all they can to ensure that the Bush administration pushes Israel for a full investigation into her death. Wednesday, Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, flew to Washington to join Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash., at a Capitol Hill press conference, where the parents called on the U.S. to reassess its support of Israel.

“We are asking members of Congress to bring the U.S. government’s attention back to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and to recognize that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is an overwhelming and continuous act of collective violence against the Palestinian people,” they said.

Baird stopped well short of the Corries’ call to suspend aid to Israel, but did call on the Bush administration to push Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for answers. Baird introduced a resolution asking the State Department to conduct its own investigation of Corrie’s death.

“It certainly appears that bulldozer operator had to know Rachel and other peaceful protesters were in his way,” Baird said. “We should conduct our own investigation, and the Israelis should too.”

The Israeli army maintains that Corrie’s death was a “regrettable accident.” Blaming her for recklessly interfering with a military operation, the IDF claimed she fell in front of the Israeli bulldozer, whose operator was not able to see her because of the bulldozer’s small window. That version of events has been disputed by witnesses, including Joe Smith, an activist who was with Corrie in Rafah when she was killed, and has vowed to stay.

“[The driver of the bulldozer] clearly saw her, and continued to drive until she was forced onto the top of the dirt he was pushing, elevating her so much that she was at eye level with the bulldozer’s cab, he could see right into her eyes,” Smith wrote in an e-mail account of what he saw. “He continued forward, pulling her underneath the dirt, and out of his vision. He continued forward, crushing her underneath the weight of the blade. He continued forward, until she was well underneath the bulldozer. It was then quite clear that she was nowhere but underneath him, but he proceeded to back up, without lifting the blade, crushing her again.”

A horrifying sequence of photographs also casts doubt on the Israeli version of events. One of the photographs shows Corrie, megaphone in hand, confronting the bulldozer; the perspective of the photograph seems to place her well within the operator’s line of sight.

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian director of Medical Relief Committees in the occupied territories, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he thought Corrie’s death was no accident. “In his opinion, it was aimed at frightening the hundreds of young foreign citizens who are spread out throughout the Palestinian villages, refugee camps, and cities trying to serve as a buffer, or at least to report on what is going on,” Ha’aretz reported.

Corrie had been engaged in various types of human shield work in the occupied territories, including walking with schoolchildren to protect them from Israeli fire, trying to save Palestinian wells from demolition, and the risky practice that resulted in her death, standing in front of massive bulldozers about to demolish Palestinian houses. (In an e-mail, she described an earlier close call with a bulldozer.)

House demolitions are one of the most controversial practices engaged in by the IDF in the occupied territories. Israeli authorities say the demolitions are necessary to remove Palestinian homes built without permits, for security reasons and to punish the families of militants. Palestinians and Israeli human rights groups, like B’Tselem, say Israeli housing policies make it impossible for Palestinians to get housing permits, and charge that demolishing houses owned by relatives of militants is an illegal form of collective punishment under international law.

The reasons for the demolition of the house in Rafah are disputed. According to Ha’aretz, the house was being destroyed to stop sabotage and/or smuggling along a road near the Egyptian border. Palestinians claim that Israeli forces were destroying the house to make room for a new security wall.

Some critics have tried to dismiss Corrie as a flaky protester embracing a flavor-of-the-month-cause. Evergreen College certainly fits the stereotype of an institution that would produce such activists. It is a small liberal arts college where teachers and students write written evaluations of one another’s performance in class, and discuss those evaluations in one-on-one meetings. Many of the cars on campus are collages of bumper stickers, calling for everything from an end to meat-eating to freedom for Leonard Peltier. As if to drive the point home, the quad outside the campus library is called Red Square. The image of Evergreen’s campus activists is not helped by people like Jody Mason, who spent hours chained to the wrong government building after President Bush delivered his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.

But talking to the people who knew her makes it clear that Rachel Corrie was the real deal. Regardless of what one might think of her political views, she was a dedicated activist, passionately committed not just to the Palestinian cause but to a wide variety of human rights issues.

“She is seen by many as simply the first international [International Solidarity Movement] volunteer to be killed by the Israeli military,” says Phan Nguyen, an Evergreen student who spent time in the West Bank last year with the ISM, which sponsors Palestinian and international human shields in Israel’s occupied territories. “She was so much more than that. Without that added context, a lot of these news sources seem to be portraying her as a thrill seeker, which is totally not her.”

Her friends say Corrie was an activist dedicated to her vision of social justice in a variety of different causes. In fact, Corrie’s list of activities and causes read like the C.V. of a zealous high school student trying to pad her résuméfor her college entrance applications.

Evergreen professor Peter Bohmer, who had known Corrie since she attended elementary school with his children, says above all else “she loved life. She had a license to fight forest fires. She was very involved with labor in the living wage campaign. She went back to her elementary school and worked with kids on gardening — just to give you a sense of the kinds of things she was involved in.”

Corrie was also active in a variety of antiwar groups and environmental causes, and spent some of her time at Behavioral Health Resources, working with people who suffer from mental illness. Bohmer knew Corrie not just as a friend of his own children, but also as a fellow member of the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace,an antiwar and social-justice group that came into existence after Sept. 11.

Bohmer says Corrie’s work organizing an OMJP event on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks underscored her dedication to the causes she believed in. “She was the heart and soul of the group; she was the doer,” he says. “She wasn’t the public spokesperson, she was the person who would make the fliers, get the materials together.”

But now, Rachel Corrie will forever be identified with the Palestinian cause — either as a martyr who gave her life fighting for the oppressed, or as a misguided young woman who was overwhelmed by political realities she didn’t understand.

In an e-mail she sent home six weeks before she died, posted on the Web site ZNet, Corrie reflected on the difference between the reality known by children in Gaza and children in Olympia. “They [Palestinian children] know that children in the United States don’t usually have their parents shot and they know they sometimes get to see the ocean. But once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place, where water is taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers, and once you have spent an evening when you haven’t wondered if the walls of your home might suddenly fall inward waking you from your sleep, and once you’ve met people who have never lost anyone — once you have experienced the reality of a world that isn’t surrounded by murderous towers, tanks, armed ‘settlements’ and now a giant metal wall, I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years of your childhood spent existing — just existing — in resistance to the constant stranglehold of the world’s fourth largest military — backed by the world’s only superpower–in it’s [sic] attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew.”

Corrie’s death is the latest chapter in a long history of American radicalism on both sides of the Middle East conflict. Many of the most radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are, in fact, American. In 1994, Brooklyn-born doctor Baruch Goldstein walked into a Hebron mosque and gunned down dozens of Palestinians as they knelt in prayer, killing 29 people. And though Corrie was the first American member of the International Solidarity Movement to be killed in the Middle East, dozens of Americans are in the West Bank and Gaza acting as human shields. During the recent standoff in a Church of the Nativity, ISM volunteers ran into the church, defying the orders of the surrounding Israeli army.

Corrie’s death set off a predictable set of reactions, even from those who didn’t know her. Many on the left turned her into a martyr for the Palestinian cause. Among conservatives, she became another flaky rabble-rouser who died as she lived — as a troublemaker or pawn of terrorists. Images of Corrie burning a picture of an American flag while in Gaza, and entries expressing apparent sympathy with Palestinian suicide bombers didn’t help win her any sympathy outside of pro-Palestinian circles. As Olympia-area resident Leonard Garrett said, Corrie’s death “should be a lesson for other students thinking about following her example — If you mess with the bull, you get stuck with the horns.” And there was this cartoon in a University of Maryland student newspaper, citing Corrie’s support of “terrorists” as the very definition of stupidity.

But even among the members of the American left, and even those in Corrie’s own community, her death has sparked mixed reactions. There is no issue within the left more divisive than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a fact that has been highlighted by the controversy over the tone and content of many antiwar rallies, which feature vituperative attacks on Israel. And in the hours following Rachel’s death, some of that tension could be seen back in her hometown.

On Sunday, just hours after news of Corrie’s death spread, a previously scheduled antiwar demonstration at Olympia’s Percival Landing turned into a makeshift memorial for the fallen Corrie. Those who knew Rachel said that this was only fitting.

But others were unhappy with the change in focus of Sunday’s rally. In a letter to the local daily paper, area residents Lisa Brodoff and Lynn Grotsky wrote: “We felt violated and tricked when the rally began to turn into an anti-Israel focus. How divisive … It was disrespectful to the organizers and the attendees to change the rally’s focus.”

While Nguyen takes issue with the characterization of Sunday’s rally as “anti-Israel,” he says most antiwar activists he knows are also in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. “I think the majority of people there were in with it. But when you invite people for an antiwar vigil, I can understand why some people were upset, especially if they misinterpret what she was doing as some anti-Israel sentiment. It wasn’t that at all. We want justice for Palestinians and Israelis.”

Corrie’s parents said that for their daughter, there was a link between the Palestinian cause and the war in Iraq. They say they came forward to share Rachel’s fears that a war in Iraq would distract the world’s attention, and lead to a harsh Israeli crackdown in the occupied territories without any scrutiny from the media, which would be preoccupied with the war in Iraq.

“We are speaking out today because of Rachel’s fears about the impact of a war with Iraq on the people in the occupied territories,” they said. “She reported to us that her Palestinian friends were afraid that with all eyes on Iraq, the Israeli Defense Forces would escalate activity in the occupied territories. Rachel wanted to be in Gaza if that happened.”

Nguyen says many pro-Palestinian activists are worried that war in Iraq will amount to an invitation for an Israeli crackdown. “We’re all afraid of that right now,” he says. “But since Rachel’s death, the people I’ve talked to who are there are more committed to staying, in part to honor her memory. The idea of abandoning them at this moment is unthinkable.”

In Olympia, there is now much debate over how best to honor the memory of Rachel Corrie, both short- and long-term. There is some talk of starting a scholarship program to send future activists to the occupied territories. Others are dedicated to continuing Corrie’s efforts to establish a sister city relationship between Olympia and Rafah.

“Because we live in Olympia, we need to make her case, and the whole issue of Palestine a part of what we do,” Bohmer says. “We need to have the antiwar movement here really have two foci — one is against the war in Iraq, and the second one is honoring her, calling for stopping U.S. aid to Israel, or something.”

At the same time, Bohmer expressed some concern that Corrie’s death might dwarf the cause she died fighting for. “I think she was a really great person, but I’m not into deifying her,” he says. “Her death is really important, but it happens to Palestinians all the time. It’s just that most of the Palestinians are invisible.”

The president’s economic proposal met bipartisan opposition in the Senate almost as soon as it was announced. The story landed above the fold in Saturday’s Washington Post, where even champions of the president’s plan said it would have to be changed to pass; and the plan was met with GOP skepticism on many weekend talk shows, where the list of senators with reservations about the tax cuts continued to grow. By the time Senate Republicans reconvened Tuesday, many were openly calling for big changes to the president’s plan.

It’s not just economics that has Republicans bristling. Conservative columnist Robert Novak reported Monday that Republican senators “complained bitterly of arrogance by the Bush administration … in treatment of Congress along the road to war” with Iraq. Republicans vented their frustrations in a closed-door session with White House chief of staff Andy Card last week.

Discontent reached fever pitch this week, so when Vice President Dick Cheney was spotted going into a lunchtime meeting with Senate Republicans, speculation swirled that he was there in part to help allay concerns that the White House was not listening to Republicans in Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said afterwards that Cheney was there mostly to listen, and did not speak directly about the president’s economic package or the concerns mentioned in the Novak article.

But Cheney’s visit did not silence frustrated moderates, like Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Moderate Republicans like Snowe, who will be key to getting any new tax-cut package through the closely divided Senate, are particularly critical of Bush’s $364 billion dividend tax cut. Snowe, a member of the Senate Finance and Budget committees, said the president’s proposal is in need of some major changes.

“The dividend component is one that needs to be substantially overhauled and potentially eliminated from the plan,” she said. “The president’s plan may be a plan for long-term growth, but it’s certainly not going to affect short-term behavior. I think it’s important to look more on the short term.”

Snowe said she and Sen. John Breaux, D-La., and other moderates in both parties would meet this week to try to agree on a proposal that Republicans and Democrats may be able to support. “Many of us will be getting together to see what we can agree on, just as a preliminary, just to get a sense of seeing where people are on this whole issue.”

Snowe’s criticisms echoed those of Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich, who said over the weekend that the president’s tax package was short on economic stimulus. “I don’t think [the White House plan] will give us the shot in the arm or rev us up like I think we need to be revved up,” he said.

And indeed, that sounds a lot like what Democrats are saying. Though moderates in both parties differ with liberal Democrats about the form an immediate economic stimulus should take — liberal Democrats are calling for a smaller tax cut that would benefit all American workers, not just stockholders, as well as help for states — some kind of plan emphasizing a short-term jolt to the economy is likely to emerge from the bipartisan meeting of the moderates, according to Snowe.

The tax-cut proposal also seems to have reopened a dormant intra-party rift within the GOP between moderate deficit hawks and tax-slashing supply-side-economics advocates. Snowe sounded some populist notes in objecting to the president’s proposal. “I’m concerned about the deficit, but I think we also have to look at the distribution, and who do we want to benefit at this point in time.”

Other moderate senators like Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., and John McCain, R-Ariz., have balked at the White House plan, and no Democrat has come out in favor of it. In 2001, Bush received support from 48 Republicans and 12 Democrats for his tax cut.

The administration has dispatched Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to try to sell the plan. The White House insists that once the pressure to pass the plan begins, the president will get most if not all of what he is asking for.

“Vis-à-vis the Hill, it remains very, very early,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer Tuesday. “Typically, it’s a process that takes many months.” Fleischer said the president would take his tax-cutting message on the road later this year, sometime after the Jan. 28 State of the Union address.

Where Republicans tend to attack the deficit-inflating element of the president’s tax proposal, Democrats tend to emphasize the populist critique of the tax package. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., seemingly invigorated by his decision to forego a run for president, blasts Bush’s proposal as a “Leave no millionaire behind” plan — playing off the president’s “Leave no child behind” education-reform slogan.

“It’s a cockamamie scheme,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate’s most liberal members. “It makes no sense. As I read more and more of the analysis of the doing-away of the tax on dividends, this just makes no sense in any way — economically, financially, tax-wise. It just makes no sense.”

Incoming Senate Finance Committee chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, admitted the Bush tax-cut package would be “a tough sell,” and suggested that an alternative to the dividend cut may be introduced in the Senate — perhaps a cut in the capital gains tax. But Grassley angrily criticized Democrats for simply attacking the White House plan without putting an alternative proposal forward.

“Where’s the Democrats’ plan?” he asked. “I still haven’t seen anything come from my colleagues on the other side.”

In reality, there are many Democratic proposals. All the declared presidential candidates in the Senate have their own economic plans, which will soon be making their way into bill form. Daschle said he has discussed plans for an alternative proposal with Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

“It ought to have four components,” Daschle said. “It ought to be immediate. It ought to be targeted to the middle class. It ought to be fiscally responsible, and we ought to provide money and help for the states.”

In a plan introduced late last year, Baucus called for a $160 billion stimulus package that includes turning over $75 billion to states to spend as they wish.

“States across the nation are facing large budget deficits this year,” Baucus said. “My bill would provide immediate stimulus that would help states balance their budgets, rehire laid-off workers and provide assistance to critical state programs.”

But discussion of this year’s budget must wait until last year’s appropriations bills are passed. And reaching a deal on those bills may take a while, as Democrats seem to have returned to the new Congress friskier and feistier than before. Currently, all Senate business is on hold as Democrats fight for resources in their new minority status. Until a deal over staffing levels and internal budgets is reached, Democrats have refused to hand over control of Senate committees, which has forced a number of key hearings — including the nomination of Tom Ridge as homeland security director — to be put on hold.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., accused Democrats of creating a hostile, partisan environment in the Senate, saying, “The Democrats are doing something that is unprecedented in the history of the United States of America.” Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., went further, saying Democrats’ refusal to hand over the reins amounted to “a coup” in the Senate.

Partisan bluster aside, resolution on those matters is expected this week. But even then, last year’s policy fights will take precedence over this year’s battles. At issue are 11 bills that make up the majority of the more than $750 billion in federal spending for the 2002-03 fiscal year, which is already more than three months old.

Now that control of the Senate has changed, Republicans want to trim about $10 billion in spending from the Democrats’ proposals. Daschle says those cuts include eliminating $1 billion in homeland security spending and $1.7 billion in education spending. Daschle promised to introduce amendments on the Senate floor trying to reinstate the homeland security and education money.

But a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget says that even under the GOP plan, federal spending will increase 33 percent over last year’s levels.

“We want to spend less than what Senate Democrats want to spend, but it’s certainly not a cut,” said OMB spokeswoman Amy Call. “Even by Washington standards, that’s preposterous.”

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said she was pleased with some of the smaller-ticket items in the Bush plan, like the acceleration of the child-care tax credit and some targeted business cuts. But she balked at the $364 billion centerpiece of Bush’s plan — the elimination of the tax on corporate dividends — citing the worrisome federal deficit.

“We must seek the balance needed to build bipartisan support on a stimulus plan that will stimulate the economy while also remaining fiscally responsible,” she said. “At a time of growing federal deficits, it is especially important that this plan be right-sized without putting our future at risk.”

Snowe was among the 60 senators who supported Bush’s $1.3 trillion tax cut in May 2001, handing the president one of his first major legislative victories. That cut sailed through Congress, with 12 Democrats joining 48 Republicans in voting for the bill. But the initial resistance on Capitol Hill to Bush’s new stimulus package may be the best measure of just how dramatically the country’s economic and political landscapes have changed in two years.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, triggered enormous spikes in defense spending and the largest reorganization of the federal government since the New Deal. Though the nation had enjoyed a $127 billion budget surplus in 2001, expenses shot past revenues to create an expected deficit of $165 billion in the current budget year. And many moderate Democrats who last fall seemed cowed by the threat of tough election battles now seem to be liberated and willing to criticize the president’s new tax-cut package openly. Self-inflicted wounds from the 2002 midterm elections also remain fresh, and Senate Democrats seem more eager to draw sharp differences between themselves and the White House, particularly on domestic policy.

One influential Bush critic — this one a Republican — appeared ready to vote against another Bush tax-cut plan. “It is middle-income Americans that have kept our economy afloat by buying houses and automobiles,” said Sen. John McCain of Arizona on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “I believe that they deserve the majority of the break, not the higher-income level of Americans.”

Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., has scheduled a press conference Thursday to announce his opposition to the president’s proposal to accelerate the 2001 tax cuts. That may not come as a huge surprise since Chafee and McCain were the only two Republicans to vote against the 2001 Bush tax cut.

“I would like to see a more balanced approach than the plan laid out by the president today,” said Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., who voted for the 2001 tax cut, his last vote before bolting the GOP. “We need a plan that focuses more on the needs of people on Main Street rather than the needs of Wall Street.”

Similar concerns were voiced by Sen. John Breaux, D-La., who also supported the 2001 cuts. Breaux cited the effect the new tax cuts would have on the federal deficit as his reason for balking at the new proposal.

“Bear in mind tax cuts are not free,” Breaux told the Los Angeles Times. “We have to pay for them by increasing the size of the deficit. And we have a lot of other competing demands for dollars this year. Who knows what Iraq is going to cost? Who knows what Medicare reform and prescription drugs are going to cost?”

In reality, Bush has a little cushion to work with. The tax-cut bill will only need 50 votes to pass, and with 51 Republicans in the Senate, he can afford to lose some of the Democrats who voted for the 2001 tax cut. But opposition from Snowe and other Republicans is a more pressing problem for the White House.

“The president understands that we have a system in our country — the president proposes, and it’s Congress’s responsibility to the American people to discuss it, to hold hearings and to exercise its judgment on the president’s package,” Fleischer said Wednesday. “I think he has shown over the last two years a very successful track record of fighting for what he believes in and working well with Congress to get it enacted. And that’s exactly what he intends to do this time.”

With bipartisan opposition to the plan already evident, there is some question about how much of this proposal will actually survive the legislative centrifuge. For now, though, the die-hard supply-siders are thrilled. One of those happy tax cutters is Veronique De Rugy, an analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute based in Washington. She says she has been critical of administration proposals in the past — such as bills to boost education spending and federal farm subsidies — but she couldn’t be happier with the latest White House proposal.

“I wasn’t expecting something so bold,” she says. “No one was expecting them to come with such a big cut in the tax on dividends.” Early speculation was that the administration would propose cutting the dividend tax to 20 percent.

But the very boldness of the White House proposal has led others to speculate that Bush is simply staking out ground to begin the stimulus package negotiations. By starting big, the argument goes, any future “compromise” will provide a bigger tax cut in the end.

“That’s very often the case,” De Rugy says. “When you think about Reagan and the original tax reform act of ’86, there was a huge gap between what was initially proposed and what we ended up with.”

But Bush’s critics have made that claim before, and more often than not, the White House has been successful in getting most, if not all of what it asks for. One need look no further than the last Bush tax-cut plan for proof.

Bush will also have a tougher time rounding up bipartisan support this time around. Bipartisan support has always been aggressively sought by the administration, but some of the Democratic senators who supported Bush’s first cut, like Sens. Jean Carnahan of Missouri, Robert Torricelli of New Jersey and Max Cleland of Georgia, are gone. Other Democratic supporters, like Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Louisiana’s two Democratic senators, have already expressed their displeasure with the president’s initial proposal. A spokeswoman for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said he is still reviewing the president’s plan, but that “clearly, he thinks it’s too big.”

Facing what promised to be a tough reelection fight, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., supported the first Bush tax cut. But with her political future secure for another six years, she is now openly calling for radical changes to the president’s plan.

“Unfortunately, the president’s package is very short on stimulus,” Landrieu said. “The only stimulus I can see in it is actually stimulating some of his special-interest groups that are going to help fund his campaign … To claim that is a stimulus package is really being much less than genuine.”

Landrieu said she would support a “payroll tax holiday” — a cut championed by many Democrats as an alternative to the Bush proposal — which she says would provide a more immediate spike to the economy. A cut in the payroll tax — the tax used to fund Social Security and Medicare — is aimed at providing relief for all workers, including low-wage earners who may not make enough money to pay federal income taxes. Many Democrats have proposed payroll tax cuts that would be paid for out of general revenues, so that Social Security funding would not be cut.

Landrieu’s comments underscore some of the new political realities in Republican-run Washington. On a personal level, Landrieu has survived her election challenge, and is less shy about criticizing a president who remains popular in her home state. But Landrieu was also precisely on message with her call for a reduction in payroll taxes.

While House Democrats presented a united alternative to the Bush stimulus plan, efforts to stay on message in the Senate are sure to be complicated by the fact that at least three Senate Democrats are running against each other for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. It may well be more, as Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., contemplate their political futures.

Three presidential wannabes — Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., John Edwards, D-N.C., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. — sent notice Tuesday that Bush’s plan is unacceptable, each touting their own economic alternative. Though he did not vote on the last tax cut — perhaps worried about being labeled a tax-and-spend liberal — a more emboldened Kerry said Tuesday that Bush’s plan “is just more evidence that he doesn’t understand what ails our slumping economy and refuses to do the things that will put Americans back to work. While largely ignoring the needs of the middle class, the president is practicing bad economics and even worse ideological class warfare.”

Kerry has put forth an economic plan that also calls for a cut in the payroll tax. Edwards touted his $120 billion stimulus package, which includes an energy tax credit of $500 per family, and provides block grants to states. Lieberman touted his $150 billion proposal, which he says “would give businesses an immediate incentive to invest in new information technology, rev up the burgeoning biotechnology and nanotechnology industries, [and] send a new rebate to the 34 million taxpayers who didn’t get one in 2001.”

So while the White House begins a full-frontal assault to sell its big-ticket stimulus package, a muddled list of Democratic counterproposals and their ambitious sponsors will all be vying for a little attention as the long debate over tax cuts begins again.

Today’s armed forces rely heavily on minorities, the working class and the poor, he says, who turn to the military because few other opportunities are available to them. Roughly 40 percent of the U.S. military is minority, compared to a quarter of the overall population. African-Americans are particularly likely to join: They make up 26 percent of the military, but only 12 percent of Americans.

Fairness dictates that the sons and daughters of the white middle and upper classes share the burden of war, Rangel argues. And if they did, he notes, there might be a larger movement for peace. “I believe that if those calling for war knew that their children were likely to be required to serve — and to be placed in harm’s way — there would be more caution and a greater willingness to work with the international community in dealing with Iraq,” Rangel wrote in a Dec. 31 New York Times Op-Ed. “A renewed draft will help bring a greater appreciation of the consequences of decisions to go to war.”

Republicans have dismissed Rangel’s proposal as a cheap political stunt. “A member introducing legislation that they don’t really support in order to play politics and embarrass the president is disingenuous,” said Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich.

But Rangel spokesman Emil Milne says his boss does in fact support reviving the draft, if the nation is headed to war with Iraq. But only one other member of Congress, Michigan Democrat John Conyers, has come out publicly in support of Rangel’s call. A spokeswoman for the Congressional Black Caucus said the group hadn’t formally discussed the issue, but pointed out that since members of the caucus were split over the war vote, the caucus was unlikely to take a position on the draft issue.

And many antiwar activists are critical, too. “My eyes kind of rolled when I saw it,” Mike Zmolek, spokesman for the National Network to End the War Against Iraq, said of Rangel’s draft proposal. “To me, it’s like, give the right what they want, so that they don’t do what they want? It doesn’t make any sense.”

But Zmolek says he is sensitive to some of the issues Rangel raised. He points to a Web site, called the Chicken Hawk Database, dedicated to many of the most strident administration and media hawks who never served in the military themselves. But he believes there’s enough administration hypocrisy on the issue without focusing on the contradictions of the all-volunteer military.

Some veterans groups who have come out against war in Iraq, though, are sympathetic to Rangel’s view. “I’ve been convinced for some time that we should bring back the draft,” says Charles Sheehan-Miles, spokesman for Veterans for Common Sense. Sheehan-Miles fought in a tank battalion in the Gulf War, he says, and later claimed conscientious objector status after a particularly bad incident at the front. “I know it may be an odd position for a conscientious objector to take, but I think the lack of a draft is the reason it’s so easy for us to get into so many conflicts nowadays.”

Sheehan-Miles says his position has not been officially endorsed by his organization, but that the subject of the draft is on the agenda for the group’s next meeting.

“Less than a majority of members of Congress have ever served in uniform,” he adds. “These are the folks who are making life and death decisions, and they’re not really bearing the costs of those decisions anymore except in strictly economic terms.”

Matthew Crenson, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and coauthor of “Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public,” agrees that if there were a draft, American leaders, and the American public, might think twice about sending troops into harm’s way.

“There is a rationale behind what Congressman Rangel has proposed,” Crenson says. “If you tie foreign policy to conscription, you make it much more susceptible to democratic influence. Support for war with Iraq is pretty weak, or at least nothing near unanimous. But that’s irrelevant as far as the administration is concerned.”

Crenson admits Rangel’s bill could be a ploy to drum up support against the war in Iraq on the American left. “It provides a platform for calling attention to the inequities that exist even in a volunteer army. It also may help to show what kind of support there is for the Iraqi war.”

Sheehan-Miles says he has not seen concerns about racial and class inequities at the forefront of the antiwar movement. “I haven’t had a sense from people on the political left that there’s a real concern about it,” he says. And, he adds, not many on the left share his views that restarting the draft may be a way to keep American troops out of all but the most critical conflicts.

“I’ve seen it more in circles in the veterans organizations, people involved in Gulf War issues in particular. But I haven’t seen it talked about among the antiwar folks that I know,” he says. “When I tell them I support the draft, I’ve always gotten nasty looks from people.”

Rangel spokesman Emil Milne says his boss is familiar with nasty looks when he raises his draft proposal, on both sides of the aisle. “We would be less likely to see Republicans supporting something like this, because they support the class of people who benefit the most from the current situation, who are least likely to serve,” Milne observes. “They represent the upper class, nobody argues with that. But it isn’t as if the Democrats are jumping up to support this.

“Mr. Rangel has really been baffled, and frankly disappointed, that in all of this talk about war, nobody seems to be asking, well who’s going to actually [fight]?”